Reason Foundation

New John Stossel Special: No They Can't! Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed

Posted on April 6, 2012, 2:12pm | Lisa Snell

I'll be on the new John Stossel documentary "No They Can't: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed." The program will air tonight at 10 PM EST & 7 PM PST and the same time Saturday night.  For more information go here and read on below:

Politicians say, "Yes, we can!" and claim that they solve our problems.

When the mortgage market crashed, the president said their new law, Dodd-Frank, would create a "new financial system" so such things would never happen again.

After 9/11, Senator Tom Daschle declared "you can't professionalize if you don't federalize!" The Senate voted 100-0 to create the TSA to run airport security.

Politicians' promises are endless. They say they'll: create jobs, "make college affordable for all," protect the disabled, give disadvantaged kids a head start and invest in "cutting-edge innovation."

But they can't achieve what they promise.

· Billionaire Mark Cuban and other job-creators explain why government's rules now prevent the job creation that was once America's hallmark

· Dodd-Frank, instead of stopping fraud, added layers to already incomprehensible banking laws. Stossel shows how simple rules in the Cayman Islands not only stop fraud, but they also create prosperity

· While the TSA creates long lines, misses actual terrorists and angers passengers, screeners working for a private company at one big airport work faster, more cheerfully and find more contraband. We show how the private company does it

· Did you know that the University of Missouri is proud to have a "leisure resort" on campus? Naomi Riley, author of "The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Pay For," explains how government aid led to massive tuition hikes

· Since the Americans With Disabilities Act took effect, fewer disabled people have been able to work

· Lisa Snell from the Reason Foundation explains how the government's own research found that Head Start did not help poor kids. Government's response? Spend even more

Government grows, despite its repeated failure.

NBC "Education Nation" Perpetuates Preschool Access Myth

Posted on September 27, 2010, 4:08pm | Lisa Snell

On the Today show as part of NBC's Education Nation Matt Lauer said that 75 percent of four year olds do not have access to preschool. Except THEY DO:

The Pew Charitable Trust offers the statistic that  "More than 75 percent of the nation’s four-year-olds and an even larger percentage of 3-year-olds still have no access to state-funded pre-k programs." What is lost in translation is the state-funded pre-k qualifier.

According the 2007 National Household Education Survey (NHES), total enrollment in a public or private program the year prior to kindergartenat age 4 is about 74 percent. This figure is reported in "The State of Preschool 2009" which is funded by PEW and published by the National Institute for Early Education Research. In addition, this number is close to the report by Census and National Center for Education Statistics. What the Pew figure is quoting is the percentage of children in state-funded public preschool which is at 25 percent. This does not count any children enrolled in Head Start which puts children in government programs at 40 percent. This also does not count children in state subsidized programs through welfare to work or any children that go to preschool at the YMCA or local church or Boys and Girls club. The more accurate statement is that 75 percent of children do not go to state-funded public preschools in public schools. The NIEER preschool yearbook with the correct figures is here: http://nieer.org/yearbook/pdf/yearbook_executive_summary.pdf.

Close to 75 percent of children go to either a private or a public program at 4 years old.

Head Start Fail: Enrollment Fraud Edition

Posted on May 21, 2010, 1:35pm | Lisa Snell

While Head Start employees get up to 8.5 percent salary increases this year thanks to the federal stimulus and a $1 billion increase in funding from the feds for  2011, a federal random assignment study of Head Start finds that Head Start offers almost zero advantage to disadvantaged children. However, it appears that Head Start employees do succeed at fraudulently enrolling children into the program by encouraging parents to lie about their income.

As Greg Toppo at USA Today reports:

In one instance, according to the investigators' report, a Head Start worker in New Jersey handed back one of two pay stubs and told an investigator posing as a parent, "Now you see it, now you don't."

Perhaps this is one unintended consequence of too many government-funded preschool programs. The only way that Head Start can maintain their enrollment in competition with state-funded preschool programs and preschool vouchers funded through various welfare-to work programs is to enroll children who are not eligible for the program. Keep this fraudulent enrollment in mind the next time preschool advocates publish statistics on the number of children who supposedly are not served by the government preschool sector. These children are often double and triple counted on multiple eligibility lists for government-funded preschool.

Public Sector Employees are Killing the Economy: Head Start Edition

Posted on April 1, 2010, 5:19pm | Lisa Snell

In light of Reason.tv's feature on the cost of pubic sector employees to the rest of us, let's examine how the stimulus is giving existing Head Start teachers raises instead of creating new jobs. 

Reason.tv: 3 Reasons Why Public Sector Employees Are Killing The Economy

As the Atlantic-Journal Constitution reports:

Head Start preschool programs in Georgia and across the country are spending federal economic stimulus dollars on raises for their employees, some as high as 8.5 percent, public records show.

The raises come from $1 billion Congress set aside in the stimulus program last year to improve and expand Head Start, a federal program aimed at getting children from low-income families ready for school. Congress ordered the money to be spent in compliance with the Head Start Act, which requires some of the money to go toward pay increases.

Still, critics say the taxpayer money should not pay for raises, especially in the middle of a recession that has forced millions of people out of work. They also point out that none of the goals of the stimulus program mention raises and instead talk about saving or creating jobs.

And as we have reported previously at Out of Control, the just-released large-scale random assignment study of Head Start confirms once again that the $7 billion a year federal preschool program provides meager benefits to children at huge costs to taxpayers.

Oklahoma Universal Preschool Fail: 2009 NAEP Reading Edition

Posted on March 24, 2010, 1:46pm | Lisa Snell

Oklahoma has the highest quality universal preschool system in the nation. Yet, the NAEP State Profile of Oklahoma shows once again that the state's huge investment in universal preschool is not improving student achievement in 4th grade reading. It is still lower now than before universal preschool was implemented; Oklahoma scores are below the national average; and UPK in Oklahoma has not closed the achievement gap between groups of students.

• In 2009, the average score of fourth-grade students in Oklahoma was 217. This was lower than the average score of 220 for public school students in the nation. „
• The average score for students in Oklahoma in 2009 (217) was not significantly different from their average score in 2007 (217) and was lower than their average score in 1992 (220).
• In 2009, the score gap between students in Oklahoma at the 75th percentile and students at the 25th percentile was 42 points. This performance gap was not significantly different from that of 1992 (41 points).
• The percentage of students in Oklahoma who performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level was 28 percent in 2009. This percentage was not significantly different from that in 2007 (27 percent) and was not significantly different from that in 1992 (29 percent).

Universal preschool and early education have been sold as the best investment to improve public education. Yet, after more than a decade of universal preschool, Oklahoma still is below average in fourth grade reading.

What Universal Kindergarten Tells Us About Universal Preschool

Posted on March 3, 2010, 1:55pm | Lisa Snell

Elizabeth Cascio's excellent new study "What Happened When Kindergarten Went Universal?" finds few positive outcomes from universal kindergarten.

Via the study published at Education Next in a nutshell:

State funding of universal kindergarten had no discernible impact on many of the long-term outcomes desired by policymakers, including grade retention, public assistance receipt, employment, and earnings. White children were 2.5 percent less likely to be high school dropouts and 22 percent less likely to be incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized as adults following state funding initiatives, but no other effects could be discerned. Also, I find no positive effects for African Americans, despite comparable increases in their enrollment in public kindergartens after implementation of the initiatives. These findings suggest that even large investments in universal early-childhood education programs do not necessarily yield clear benefits, especially for more disadvantaged students.

As the Fordham Foundation's Checker Finn writes in his analyses of the study:

While universalizing kindergarten may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it turned out to do more good for white kids (but only a little good even for them) than for black kids (for whom it seems to have had no educational benefit at all). If the policy goal were to equalize educational opportunity and/or to narrow achievement gaps, in retrospect America would have been better served by intensive kindergarten targeted on particularly needy kids. And we probably could have managed that on the same budget.

In light of this lesson from universal kindergarten and other evidence that casts doubt on universal preschool as a silver bullet, the Obama Administration's $9.3 billion plan for Early Learning Challenge Grants to encourage states to invest in state-run universal preschool is an ongoing testament to the triumph of hope over experience.

Fake Spending Freeze: Head Start Edition

Posted on February 3, 2010, 1:05pm | Lisa Snell

President Obama has promised to show fiscal restraint and to reward “evidence-based” education programs. Yet, 2011 budget gives Head Start an increase of $989 million even after a January gold-standard study by the Department of Health and Human Services once again confirmed that Head Start does not offer disadvantaged students any advantage. The HHS study randomly assigned more than 5,000 preschoolers and found that by first grade not one of more than 114 academic and behavioral tests showed a reliable, statistically significant effect from participating in Head Start. Considering that a full-time, year-round, slot in Head Start costs about $22,600, as opposed to an average cost of $9,500 in a day care center; a fiscally restrained Obama could have redirected the Head Start funds to the more affordable child-care block grant. The block grant allows lower income parents to choose more cost-effective preschool providers. Instead President Obama increased Head Start funding and proposed a new $9.3 billion Early Learning Challenge Grant program to encourage states to invest in state-run universal preschool.

Head Start Fail: Federal Preschool Program Does Not Give Kids Leg Up

Posted on January 15, 2010, 2:58pm | Lisa Snell

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner concluded in their bestseller Freakonomics, based on an extensive regression anlysis, that the federal Head Start preschool program doesn't work. They write, “Instead of spending the day with his own undereducated, overworked mother, the typical Head Start child spends the day with someone else’s undereducated, overworked mother.”

What Freakonomics didn't mention, but Douglas Bresharov recently did in the New York Times, "to keep a child in Head Start full-time, year-round, costs about $22,600, as opposed to an average cost of $9,500 in a day care center."

The just-released large-scale random assignment study of Head Start confirms once again that the $7 billion a year federal preschool program provides meager benefits to children at huge costs to taxpayers.

As the Heritage Foundation's Lindsey Burke explains:

Taxpayers have been on the hook for more than $100 billion for the Head Start program since 1965. This federal evaluation, which effectively shows no lasting impact on children after first grade and no difference between those children who attended Head Start and those who did not, should call into question the merits of increasing funding for the program, which the Obama administration recently did as part of the so-called “stimulus” bill.

Education researcher Jay P. Greene offers an in-depth and useful analysis of the HHS study results:

The study used a gold-standard, random assignment design and had a very large nationally representative sample. This was a well done study.

For students who were randomly assigned to Head Start or not at the age of 4, the researchers collected 19 measures of cognitive impacts at the end of kindergarten and 22 measures when those students finished 1st grade. Of those 41 measures, only 1 was significant and positive. The remaining 40 showed no statistically significant difference. The one significant effect was for receptive vocabulary, which showed no significant advantage for Head Start students after kindergarten but somehow re-emerged at the end of 1st grade.

The study used the more relaxed p< .1 standard for statistical significance, so we could have seen about 4 significant differences by chance alone and only saw 1. That positive effect had an effect size of .09, which is relatively modest.

For students randomly assigned to Head Start or not at the age of 3, the researchers also collected 41 measures of lasting cognitive effects. This time they found 2 statistically significant positive effects and 1 statistically significant negative effect. For the students who began at age 3 they showed a .08 effect size benefit from Head Start in oral comprehension after first grade and a .26 effect size benefit in Spanish vocabulary after kindergarten but a .19 effect size decline in math ability at the end of kindergarten. Again, 38 of the 41 measures of lasting effects showed no difference and the few significant effects, which could be produced by chance, showed mixed results.

It is safe to say from this very rigorous evaluation that Head Start had no lasting effect on the academic preparation of students.

There are several significant issues this Head Start study brings up for the Obama Administration and for investments in early education more generally.

• This Represents Another Blow to Transparency. In the past the Obama administration has been criticized for sitting on a study and releasing it on a Friday when it showed solid evidence that the DC Opportunity Scholarship program worked. The administration did not release a study that might have influenced policy decisions about reauthorizing and funding the DC school choice program. On the other hand, the Obama administration also sat on a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that showed meager impact for children in Head Start. The study was complete and the information was available, but the Obama Administration went ahead and significantly increased Head Start funding through the stimulus act to the tune of more than $2 billion. The hypocrisy cuts both ways.

Further, the HHS data was suppossed to be released so others could scrutinize the data. As Education Week reports: The federal government was supposed to have released data two years ago to scientists so they could analyze the information, but such data have not been released as part of the impact study. It is not possible to tell by the study whether Head Start students are “humming along at the national average” in terms of their cognitive learning, or if they are “at the 10th percentile” on standardized measures of cognitive learning.

• Ignores President Obama's Promise of Evidence-Based Education Policy. As Mathew Ladner points out on March 10, 2009, Pres. Barack Obama gave a major education speech before the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. In that speech, he declared that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.” Yet the economic stimulus in 2009 gave Head Start and Early Head Start a boost of $2.1 billion while the much more cost-effective DC Scholarship program that has evidence that it works was defunded and the Obama administration refused to stand up to the evidence or for the kids enrolled in the program.
• Preschool Advocates Remain Delusional. Preschool advocates continue to suffer from what Stanford's Caroline Hoxby calls "cardiac evidence." (We know in our hearts that this is right.) As the title of the Education Week article on the Head Start study demonstrates: "Head Start Study Finds Brief Learning Gains."

Um, Hello? until first grade...

In fact the two quotes in Education Week from the Obama Administration folks tell the rest of the deluded story.

Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. secretary of health and human services, which oversees the federal preschool program, said in a statement about the study that “for Head Start to achieve its full potential, we must improve its quality and promote high standards across all early-childhood programs.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seconded the need for improvement in the program. “These results make it clear that we need to build a more coordinated system of early care and education, and to focus on key improvements to teaching and learning in the early grades,” he said in a statement.

Please! $100 billion? Forty years? $22,000 a child? What else would it take?

• Moratorium on Early Education Spending from the Feds. We should not give early education any more federal dollars. If President Obama wants to fund different early education programs he should take the money from Head Start.
• Give the Head Start Money to the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. Let's just be clear, Head Start with zero evidence costs $7 billion a year. The DC Voucher program with gold standard evidence, that shows two-year growth in reading for voucher students cost $14 million a year.

As education researcher Mathew Ladner states: President Obama will surely be calling for the transfer of Head Start funding into the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program any second now.

Preschool Hype: National Security Edition

Posted on November 2, 2009, 2:05pm | Lisa Snell

Retired officers push early childhood benefits to help national security

A bipartisan group of retired military officers says without more educational and health investments in children the country will face a growing “national security threat.”

Now, the group is pushing for significant investments in early childhood education, parenting guidance as well as mental and nutrition services.
 
“The safety of our country demands urgent and intelligent action,” the group says in its mission statement. “We call on all policymakers to ensure America’s national security by supporting interventions that will prepare young people for a life of military service and productive citizenship.”
 
Congress is considering legislation for a new initiative called the “Early Learning Challenge Fund” designed to help states improve their early education programs and expand access to include more at-risk kids. The House already passed its version of the bill, which would fund $1 billion annually for eight years in competitive grants to states. The Senate has yet to vote on that bill.

Ayn Rand Preschool Action with Barack Obama, Preschool Advocates as Comprachicos, and "Maggie Roark" Standing Alone Against the Daycare Worker of Her Time...

Posted on November 2, 2009, 12:39pm | Lisa Snell

Perhaps the title of President Obama's  education agenda could have been pulled right out of an Ayn Rand novel: Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan for Lifetime Success through Education and perhaps Rand might see the President's objective for "a Preschool Agenda that Begins at Birth," as more evidence that the education establishment is made up of "Comprachicos" or individuals and entities who manipulate the minds and attitudes of children in a way that will permanently distort their beliefs or worldview. As Rand wrote in The New Left:

The production of monsters--helpless, twisted monsters whose normal development has been stunted--goes on all around us. But the modern heirs of the comprachicos are smarter and subtler. They do not hide, they practice their trade in the open, the results are invisible. In the past this horrible surgery left traces on a child's face, not in his mind. Today it leaves traces in his mind, not on his face. In both cases the child is not aware of the mutilation he has suffered. Today's comprachicos do not use narcotic powders. They take a child before he is fully aware of reality and never let him develop that awareness. Where nature put a normal brain, they put mental retardation. To make you unconscious for life by means of your own brain, nothing could be more ingenious. They are the comprachicos of the mind. They do not place a child into a vase to adjust his body to its contours. They place him into a school to adjust him to society.

See Reason.tv's Rand-O-Rama here including the bit from The Simpsons where "Maggie Roark" stands alone as an independent thinker against the daycare worker of her time. . .

Tennessee's Gold-Standard Preschool Not Effective After 2nd Grade

Posted on November 1, 2009, 11:44pm | Lisa Snell

Via Education WeeK:

A report released Thursday shows the effectiveness of Tennessee's pre-kindergarten program diminishes after the second grade, but supporters say it still provides a valuable foundation that will help at-risk children succeed.

The report commissioned by the state comptroller's office reveals kindergarten students who participated in the pre-K program performed better academically than a group of those who didn't.

However, it shows that there is "little evidence that the unique effects of pre-K" last beyond second grade.

Education Week also reports that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that Preschool is Key to Solving the Education Crisis. Who knew the education crisis was kindergarten readiness?

Lower Standards in Schools: Preschool Edition

Posted on October 30, 2009, 3:23pm | Lisa Snell

The new report from the National Center for Education Statistics calls into question whether we need a new $8 billion federal investment in early education challenge fund or whether we need to be spending scarce taxpayer resources on fixing the schools.

Today the New York Times reports on a new study from the National Center for Education Statistics that examines the rigor of proficiency standards from one state to another.

In the study, researchers compared the results of state tests and the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2005 and 2007, identifying a score on the national assessment that was equivalent to each state’s definition of proficiency.

The study found wide variation among states, with standards highest in Massachusetts and South Carolina. Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee had standards that were among the lowest.

What do Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee have in common besides setting a very low bar for proficiency for their kids? They all have what advocates consider to be gold-standard state-run preschool programs. Georgia and Oklahoma have universal programs.

There is a huge disconnect between these states spending billions in taxpayer funds on early education and then being in the very bottom for proficiency standards for 4th and 8th graders in math and reading in the nation. What's the point?

And it gets much worse! Not only do these states score very low when compared to federal benchmarks and other states, they have actually lowered their standards between 2005 and 2007.

Oklahoma is the poster child for high-quality universal preschool. Unfortunately, this supposed investment in high quality does not include having high standards for students once they enter elementary school. Oklahoma is perhaps the worst offender for gaming the state system and lowering proficiency rates for 4th and 8th graders so that more of them would appear proficient under the No Child Left Behind requirements for proficiency in reading and math. In fact, Oklahoma was one of three states that lowered the proficiency standards in all measured subjects and grade levels from 2005 to 2007. Georgia and Tennessee were among the 15 states that lowered proficiency standards for some of their tests in math and reading in fourth and eighth grade.

In addition, both Georgia and Oklahoma score below the national average on the just- released 2009 NAEP assessment for 4th and 8th grade math, which is considered the nation's benchmark for student achievement:

• The average scale score in the nation for 4th grade math on the 2009 NAEP was 239; Georgia scored 236 and Oklahoma scored 237.
• Similarly, the average scale score in the nation for 8th grade math was 282; Georgia scored 278 and Oklahoma scored 276.

The bottom line is that the two states in the nation with huge financial commitments to universal preschool for over a decade now have the lowest expectations for  K-12 students in terms of grade-level proficiency and they continue to score below average on the nation's benchmark for student achievement.

Should the federal government really be investing more money to scale-up Oklahoma-style preschool programs that have not improved big-picture outcomes for the states that have already made these types of investments? Fix the schools, rather than spending billions more on the hope that early education can somehow compensate for low expectations in K-12 schools.

Slow the Preschool Bandwagon

Posted on May 15, 2009, 3:31pm | Lisa Snell

In today's Washington Post, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, Chester E. Finn Jr., makes the case against universal preschool:

For all its surface appeal, universal preschool is an unwise use of tax dollars. In a time of ballooning deficits, expansion of preschool programs would use large sums on behalf of families that don't need this subsidy while not providing nearly enough help to the smaller number of children who need it most. It fails to overhaul expensive but woefully ineffectual efforts such as Head Start. And it dumps 5-year-olds, ready or not, into public-school classrooms that today are unable even to make and sustain their own achievement gains, much less to capitalize on any advances these youngsters bring from preschool. (Part of the energy behind universal pre-K is school systems -- and teachers unions -- maneuvering to expand their own mandates, revenue and membership rolls.)

In a new May 2009 backgrounder, the Heritage Foundation's Lindsey Burke asks Does Universal Preschool Improve Learning? Lessons from Georgia and Oklahoma. For example, in examining Georgia's universal program that spent $325 million on preschool in 2008, she reports on the typical "fade out" problem for universal preschool programs:

 From 2001 to 2004, Georgia State University conducted a study of the effects of Georgia's pre-kindergarten program on four-year-olds. While positive gains were reported for children enrolled in the state preschool program on overall math skills and letter and word recognition, many of these gains had dissipated by the end of first grade. Georgia preschoolers, who participated in the study from 2001 to 2004, were above the national norm in letter and word recognition upon preschool entry, but their scores declined by the end of first grade. While the study reported that children showed significant gains over the national norm in terms of problem-solving skills, the gains applied "to the entire sample, including students who did not attend a formal preschool."

The study also stated, "It is important to note that Georgia's preschoolers, including those who had been enrolled in Georgia Pre-K, lost ground against the national norms between the end of kin­dergarten and the end of first grade on two mea­sures of language skills, although their scores remained well above those achieved at the begin­ning of preschool." Furthermore, the report notes, "by the end of first grade, children who did not attend preschool had skills similar to those of Georgia's preschoolers."

Reason.tv on how Universal Preschool is Not a Silver Bullet here. Reason's universal preschool research is here.

Recession Stalls State-Funded Pre-kindergarten

Posted on April 8, 2009, 12:22pm | Lisa Snell

The New York Times reports that the recession is slowing state-level investments in state-funded free preschool in the public schools.

One of the most drastic expansions of public education in recent American history unfolded quietly in this decade, as dozens of states added free pre-kindergarten classes to their traditional kindergarten to high school offerings....

From 2002 to 2008, spending on pre-kindergarten by states nearly doubled, to $4.6 billion from $2.4 billion, enabling states to increase enrollment to 1.1 million preschoolers from about 700,000.

But given the economic decline, nine states — Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina and South Carolina — have already announced cuts to state-run pre-kindergarten programs.

On the other hand, the federal government is expanding their investment in early education.

Congress has significantly raised federal financing for preschool education. Mr. Obama promised during the campaign to make large new investments in early childhood education, and in the economic stimulus package, Congress appropriated more than $4 billion for Head Start and Early Head Start programs and for grants to states to support child care for low-income families.

For those who are skeptical that universal preschool and state-run preschool programs, provided by the public schools, are the next silver bullet for education reform this is a marginal but positive turn of events.

The federal grants that support low-income families are usually offerred as voucher-like subsidies that allow low-income families to choose between a variety of public, private, and nonprofit community providers. The increased support for Head Start supports a disadvantaged population and is less likely to take away market share from community-based preschool providers.

In other words, preschool expansion at the federal level, while not a silver bullet, is less likely to destroy the current mixed market for preschool in the United States and replace it with a monopoly public schol provider.

The bad news is that when President Obama gets around to it, he plans to offer states billions in additional federal money to incentivize funding at the state level on state-run public school preschool programs.

Reason.tv on universal preschool here.

Reason on the effectiveness of universal preschool and early education here and here.

Differences Between Obama's Education Speech And His Adminstration's Actions

Posted on March 18, 2009, 6:30pm | Lisa Snell

My new column looks at President Obama's recent education speech, which had some good rhetoric that would appeal to those of us interested in seeing some real education reforms. The president endorsed the expansion of innovative charter schools, performance pay for teachers, and the elimination of ineffective teachers. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any real legislative action planned on any of those items:

Most of the reform policies that Obama mentions, from charter schools to performance pay, are completely missing from the actual legislative agenda.

Charter schools received almost no funding from the stimulus package and there was no requirement for states to remove destructive charter school caps in exchange for billions. Similarly, while he plans to fund a few teacher incentive pilot programs, President Obama missed the opportunity to tie the billions in new federal education dollars to outcomes that could result in serious personnel reform.

Mr. Obama has also remained silent about the children who have escaped Washington, DC,’s failing public schools and used vouchers to attend higher performing private schools. At the very moment, he was giving his speech on how to fix America’s schools, Senate Democrats voted to effectively kill the DC voucher program and prevent more poor kids from fleeing failing schools.

Obama’s staff has hinted they’ll try to preserve the voucher program, at least for the kids already in it.

"I don't think it makes sense to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. "I think those kids need to stay in their school."

And Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that “it wouldn't make sense to disrupt the education of those that are in that system, and I think we'll work with Congress to ensure that a disruption like that doesn't take place.”

We’ll see if the administration follows through. Right now the president’s education plan is rife with inconsistencies. He is willing to spend more on Pell Grants (vouchers) for adults to attend college, but opposes them for children. He calls for professionalizing the teaching profession, yet effectively gives the unions huge amounts of new money to preserve the current rigid staffing models. He says the education system is failing, but wants that failing education system expanded to include universal preschool.

President Obama often talks about challenging the status quo. Education offers him the chance to do just that. Unfortunately, right now it looks like we’re just throwing more money at that status quo.

Full Column
Obama Can Help Michelle Rhee Fix DC's Schools

House Democrats Seek to End DC Voucher Program

Posted on March 3, 2009, 9:11am | Lisa Snell

Last week the House Democrats passed a spending bill that would end the DC Scholarship program after the 2009-2010 school year. The Washington Post examines the Democrats real motives in defunding a tiny program that provides higher quality education choice for students in low-performing public schools during a time when spending billions is almost passe:

But the debate unfolding on Capitol Hill isn't about facts. It's about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program? Why wouldn't Congress want to get the results of a carefully calibrated scientific study before pulling the plug on a program that has proved to be enormously popular? Could the real fear be that school vouchers might actually be shown to be effective in leveling the academic playing field?

The bottom line is that this is a purely political. There is no solid academic or economic reason to kill the tiny school voucher program. The Democrats could easily leave those families alone. The only thing they have to lose is that the voucher program might actually provide the kids with a better education. The irony continues to be that none of those House Democrats or Obama would sacrifice their child's education to the future of the DC public school system.

As Alexander Russo reports at This Week in Education, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who oversees schools that are directley competing with the school voucher program, was the one Democrat still willing to stand up for parental choice.

“I don’t think vouchers are going to solve all the ills of public education, but parents who are zoned to schools that are failing kids should have options to do better by their kids.”

I wrote about the olden days when some Democrats were for Education Reform here.

Finally, I have to agree with Jay P. Greene today:

Vouchers have made the world safe for charters. And the moment that vouchers really do stall, the enemies of school choice will redirect their fire at charters, strangling them with regulation and repealing charter gains. To say that vouchers haven’t really done much of anything politically because charters are really where the action is to ignore how much charters owe their political strength to the credible threat of new and expanded voucher programs.