Life, Liberty, Property #39: The perverse incentives in American education lead to more spending and less performance.
IN THIS ISSUE:
- The Perverse Incentives in American Education
- Left Makes Headway on School Boards
- Texas House Committee Passes Choice Bill
- Hawley Crusades Against Corporate Influence
- Cartoon
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The Perverse Incentives in American Education
“Looking through a long lens, government-run education has been an enterprise rife with failure,” writes education analyst and reformer Larry Sand, a former teacher and current president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network. Sand continues,
The National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report in 1983 titled “A Nation at Risk,” which used dire language, asserting that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”
The report also stated: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
Well, that war is still on, and it has been a massacre. A Gallup poll from earlier this year revealed that just 26% of Americans have a “great deal/fair amount” of confidence in public schools.
Sand goes on to cite numerous statistics proving his point. You have seen those stats both here and elsewhere. Noting that “when the government runs something, there’s an endless supply of taxpayer money for them to use and abuse,” Sand concludes by stating, “We need to get the government out of the ed biz ASAP.”
I am sure that teachers generally perceive themselves as doing their very best to educate the children in their charge. I am not at all confident that the administrators of government-run schools are quite so altruistic, and I am convinced that the education-system bureaucrats and teachers union leaders have only their own interests in mind.
The interest of the unions is to increase the number of individuals paying dues to them. Albert Shanker, the longtime head of the American Federation of Teachers, famously said he represented teachers and not students. Such an attitude could lead to indifference to what children are taught, but it is hard to see how the unions would benefit from active opposition to learning.
The interests of the education-system bureaucrats may be the most complex of all. Expanding spending increases their power. Interestingly, the decline in academic achievement over the past few decades has been accompanied by rapid increases in funding. The argument was very simple: teachers are underpaid, and we must compensate them more generously to get the best people into the field. The public responded as desired: inflation-adjusted K-12 education spending per student increased by 280 percent between 1960 and 2020 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars.
Meanwhile, the United States has been falling behind its peers in academic achievement. As Education Week reported in 2021,
Thirty countries now outperform the United States in mathematics at the high school level. Many are ahead in science, too. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the millennials in our workforce tied for last on tests of mathematics and problem solving among the millennials in the workforces of all the industrial countries tested. We now have the worst-educated workforce in the industrialized world. Because our workers are among the most highly paid in the world, that makes a lot of Americans uncompetitive in the global economy. And uncompetitive against increasingly smart machines. It is a formula for a grim future.
U.S. academic achievement has worsened since then:
Source: The Nation’s Report Card
As our students continually sank in international comparisons and U.S. employers noted that young Americans were poorly prepared for the workforce, the education establishment benefited from the public’s concern for children: perversely, more failure brought more money into the system.
The system benefited from failure. Year after year.
Meanwhile, educators, prompted by pedagogical theorists at college and university education departments, experimented with new ways of teaching. They replaced tried-and-true methods such as phonics-based reading instruction, memorization, and traditional mathematics instruction with a dizzying variety of expert-recommended innovations that resulted in worse academic achievement and even more money.
For several decades, the United States suffered a perverse system in which education failure brought more money into the very system that was failing the nation’s children, families, and taxpayers.
That changed in 2020, when the pandemic lockdowns resulted in students across the country doing remote learning by computer, which allowed parents to see what their children were spending their days doing. The widespread revelation of the decline in academic rigor and increase in political and sexual indoctrination created much anger among parents, taxpayers, and some lawmakers.
That ire has not yet resulted in wholesale change. Bureaucrats are notoriously difficult to dislodge, and state governments that implement private-school choice programs have been very careful to sustain the funding of the government schools, lest the teachers unions come after them.
The weird disconnect between inputs and outputs in the nation’s education system has been revealed, however, and the public is finally demanding change.
Source: For Kids & Country
Left Makes Headway on School Boards
Education reform is going to take some time, however. Local school board races did not go as well for conservatives this past week as they had in the past couple of years.
Leftists mobilized against the reformers and achieved notable successes. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Conservative activists seeking to take over school boards around the country saw their momentum slow in this week’s elections after progressive groups organized rival campaigns targeting the normally sleepy local races.
Over the past two years, conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty have flipped control of some school boards nationwide by critiquing what they saw as excessive Covid-19 precautions and left-wing teaching about race and gender. Rallying around the banner of parental rights, the groups have called for limits on what is taught in classrooms or offered in libraries and parental notification of students’ gender transitions among other changes.
The education establishment increased its efforts to fend off the reformers:
Their success sparked a counter-response this election season by progressive groups and candidates who criticized library restrictions as book bans and demanded protections for gay, lesbian and transgender students. Those messages appeared to resonate in some communities on Election Day. …
Newer progressive groups endorsed school board candidates this year, mobilizing in an effort to combat what they see as the overreach by conservatives.
The Campaign for Our Shared Future, which formed in fall 2021, endorsed 23 school-board candidates in races in Philadelphia, Virginia and Ohio and 19 of them won, said executive director Heather Harding. The results, she said, send a message that “the extremist threat did not represent what people believe in public education.”
The establishment’s renewed efforts paid off:
Roughly a third of candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won Tuesday or were leading in contested races, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. This was down from 45% in prior races. …
The 1776 Project, a political-action committee that says it spent over $700,000 this election backing conservatives school board candidates, touted a 59% win rate. The group had success in more right-leaning parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The 1776 Project’s win rate was down from 76% when it first launched in 2021, but up from 43% in school board elections earlier this year, said Ryan Girdusky, who runs the 1776 Project PAC.
The reformers intend to redouble their efforts in response:
Undeterred by Tuesday’s setbacks, Moms for Liberty will increase training for school board candidates moving forward and try to rally more donors to support them. “We’re just getting started,” Justice said.
The parents’ rights movement is most concerned about schools’ political and sexual indoctrination of students, and that issue will intensify further as long as the government-run education system continues to benefit from academic failure, as noted in the item above.
The American people and our lawmakers have for too long placed excessive trust in the nation’s educators without doing the hard work of verifying that the results warrant it. That has created a thoroughly diseased system resulting in poor academic performance and open indoctrination in values abhorrent to parents and taxpayers. The appalling failures and malfeasance of the nation’s education complex are setting the stage for a reform revolution.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Texas House Committee Passes Choice Bill
The Texas House education committee passed a bill for universal school choice on Friday. That is big news.
The Select Committee on Educational Enrichment and Opportunity voted 10-4 to send the bill for a vote of the full House. All the Republicans voted yes, and all the Democrats voted no, except for one who was absent.
As I noted in Life, Liberty, Property #36, Texas has been a wasteland for school choice because rural Republicans have sided with Democrats to oppose choice. It was easier for legislators to punt and not have to fight the education lobby and, perhaps equally important, possible opposition from local high school football fans.
Gov. Greg Abbott has pushed aggressively for school choice, however, calling a special session of the legislature to pass a bill and promising that he would keep calling the lawmakers back into session if they failed to do so.
With the converging of Abbott’s insistence, woeful education achievement scores in rural Texas schools, and a rising tide of Texas parent protests and complaints at school board meetings, the Republicans on the committee stuck together to forward a bill to establish universal education savings accounts for Texas children.
If this bill passes through the House, it will be a historic victory for school choice. Texas is the nation’s second-most-populous state, and its actions are highly influential in the area of education. The fact that the committee’s Republicans were unanimous in support of the bill is a good sign.
Source: Austin American-Statesman
Hawley Crusades Against Corporate Influence
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has introduced a bill to reverse a central provision of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which found that the First Amendment gives corporations the right to contribute to political campaigns.
The Court’s decision was based on the premise that corporations are made up of people, and those people have speech and association rights codified in the First Amendment.
Hawley’s Ending Corporate Influence on Elections Act would ban both financial and in-kind political contributions from for-profit corporations. RealClearPolitics reports,
The Hawley legislation would ban publicly traded corporations from making independent expenditures and giving to Super PACs while prohibiting them from cutting political ads or engaging in “other electioneering communications.” Ironically, however, it would not stop the conservative group that upended modern election law. Citizens United is itself a non-profit and, therefore, wouldn’t be affected.
Democrats have long decried the Citizens United decision, with President Joe Biden having said he would work to overturn it.
Hawley, a Republican, is using rhetoric Democrats have long deployed, while focusing his ire on companies that support the Democrat Party. RealClearPolitics reports,
Hawley blames Citizens United for giving corporations free rein to “sink their teeth” into the American political process. …
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Hawley bellowed this summer, “Corporations are not people.” The crowd, this one gathered in Washington for the social conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition summit, barely stirred. But then they erupted when the populist senator continued, “I’ve got news for these woke corporations: We are not going to surrender this nation to the cultural Marxists in the C-suite.”
Hawley’s proposal has sparked pushback from his fellow Republicans, who argue instead for lifting the caps on individuals’ donations to political candidates, combined with rules for greater transparency. That approach would maximize freedom to participate in the election process while ensuring that the public knows who is paying for political campaigns.
I agree. The right approach to citizen participation in election campaigns is complete freedom and complete transparency.
Hawley’s GOP colleagues also express doubt that his proposal would pass muster as constitutional. It is in fact hard to see how it could be squared with the Court’s decision in Citizens United.
Hawley does have a legitimate complaint about cronyism and the corruption of government it represents, however, as the RealClearPolitics story notes:
The Hawley project then can perhaps be best described as an effort to export traditional conservative skepticism of big government to the realm of big corporations. “What we find, and what lawsuits like the Missouri v. Biden case exposed, is that big corporations and big government work hand in hand,” he said referencing the federal case that found the White House lobbied social media companies to remove content critical of the administration.
Crony capitalism is an enormous problem in America today, but it is caused by a profusion of laws, and additional restrictions on public involvement in the election process will only make it worse. That includes Hawley’s proposal. Crony capitalism thrives on the ability of governments to grant favors. The only sure way to cut cronyism is to reduce, radically, what we allow the government to do. Less power means politicians have less to sell.
Although I do not agree with Hawley’s proposal, I think that he does have a case to make that corporations should not be granted the same legal status as people. Corporations are a creation of government, in which the authorities grant these entities a very valuable gift: limited liability. The directors and shareholders of a corporation generally do not have to pay out of their own assets if the company goes insolvent and owes more than it can pay because of a tort liability.
That arrangement has obvious advantages for investors, and governments have implemented it to increase private investment.
There is another side to the matter, however, and that is the element of personal responsibility. Limiting the liability of those who invest in corporations creates the moral hazard that corporations will act less responsibly than they would if all the assets of their owners (the shareholders) were potentially at stake. Those who complain of corporate irresponsibility are on to something: the grant of limited liability reduces the incentive to be conscientious.
Limited liability also reduces the amount that creditors will receive in the event of a corporation’s liquidation. Limited liability thus transfers risk from investors to creditors. In essence, the government is forcibly altering contracts in favor of some parties and to the disadvantage of others. These arrangements would not arise without government imposing them, the UK libertarian thinker Sean Gabb argues.
Typically, governments do not ask corporations for much in return for this, apparently assuming that the increase in investment is a sufficient payoff to the public weal. It is a question worth asking, however, whether this is true. And it is plausible for Hawley or others to argue that the gift of limited liability could justify a quid pro quo preventing corporations from doing certain kinds of social harm, in this case to the election process.
It would be incumbent on advocates of this position to show that corporations’ involvement in the election process does significantly more harm than good. I rather doubt that it could be established satisfactorily, but they are welcome to try.
There is, however, a possible area in which such an argument could clearly apply: foreign money. It stands to reason that elections in the United States should be all about the interests of the citizens and other legal residents of this nation, and that the influence of others should therefore be kept to a minimum.
Money from overseas could indeed influence corporations’ political attitudes and thus their contributions to political campaigns. Corporations that receive large amounts of investment (i.e., stock ownership) from outside the United States might have somewhat divided loyalties. Legislation could be finely tailored to reduce the influence of foreign money in American elections by banning donations from corporations with more than a specified percentage of stock owned by non-U.S. residents.
If Hawley were to introduce such a bill—and include a provision removing all federal government limitations on contributions by individual American citizens to political campaigns—it would be much better than his current one.
Source: RealClearPolitics
Cartoon
