We lamented President Obama’s decision to swiftly end the D.C. voucher program, noting that his administration, which doles out billions of dollars for careless bankers and failed automakers, couldn’t find a trifling $15 million for poor children in the District of Columbia. The Post reports today that the president has yielded to his better judgment and is proposing a fairer method of ending a program, which ideally would not end.
The program provided school vouchers for low-income children in the District to attend private schools for two-year stints. Those in the program showed modest academic improvement and parents were much happier with their chosen schools. It’s no secret that teachers’ unions are hostile to school choice, since it risks diverting public funds from the failed schools they control to the private and parochial schools in which they have little clout. The unions pressured Congress, which is now majority Democrat, and Congress obliged by refusing to renew the voucher program.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan swiftly rescinded the vouchers for the upcoming year, pronouncing the program dead.
The president is now proposing a compromise: the children currently enrolled in the program will receive vouchers through their high school graduations, but no new students will be admitted to the program. This is an improvement over the previous plan, which would have kicked kids of modest means to the curb come September.
The president is right to strike a compromise— compromises are necessary in a democracy— but the president’s choice to compromise on this subject is worrying. On one side are children from low-income families that have few choices for quality education. On the other side are powerful, deep-pocketed teachers’ unions that oppose reform or real accountability measures that might inconvenience or shrink their membership.
Ideally, Mr. Obama would expand the program to afford more low-income District children the ability to escape the city’s schools, which are among the worst in the nation. Mr. and Mrs. Obama, upon moving to the White House, passed over the city’s public schools in favor of the private Sidwell Friends School. Why are the Obamas’ neighbors any less deserving?
Normally it is good for a president to compromise, and this compromise is likely the best he could achieve with this Congress. Nonetheless, this compromise suggests a moral equivalence between low-income children looking for a good education and powerful teachers’ unions looking to protect their privilege.
Update:
On a positive note, the president is proposing $517 million for merit-pay programs. Let us hope this is not window-dressing.
“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
So said Kanye West in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when hundreds of poor, mostly black, residents of New Orleans were stranded in the Superdome and atop flood houses in the Big Easy.
No matter, with the election of Barack Obama, surely the Federal government now attends to the best interests of disadvantaged minority populations, right? Not always.
In 2004 Congress passed the District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act, providing vouchers of up to $7,500 for low-income children in the District to attend private schools. Since the District’s public schools are among the worst in the nation and considering that poor parents love their children, too, it’s no surprise that parents jumped on the opportunity with such enthusiasm that the program developed a waiting list. A recent U.S. Department of Education study found that children in the program scored about the same in math and slightly more in reading. Nonetheless, voucher parents were much more satisfied with their chosen schools than public school parents were with their schools.*
The voucher program operated with the strong support of the mayor, the District’s “state” superintendent, and the low-income parents of the voucher recipients (90% black, 9% Latino), who finally got the chance to give their children what their neighbors Mr. & Mrs. Obama give to their children: a quality private education. The parents were happy and the kids’ performance improved modestly. In an era when the Treasury hands out hundreds of billions of dollars to shoddy banks and failed carmakers, certainly the voucher program’s modest success was worth the paltry $15 million annual cost.
Not so fast! Enter the teachers’ unions and their partner-in-disparity, Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s non-voting Delegate to the House of Representatives. She made clear her opposition to the program, telling the Post, “…the Democratic Congress is not about to extend this program.”
With Democratic majorities in both houses and at the behest of the teachers’ unions, Congress, fresh from passing $410 billion budget bill, callously failed to renew the voucher program.
If we ran our elections the way we run many of our public schools, there would be civil rights investigations and lawsuits to match. Instead, when public-sector mediocrity denies poor children their right to a decent education, thereby reducing their future life opportunities, the Right doesn’t much bother with an issue it never noticed anyway and the Left willfully averts its eyes toward its well-heeled funders. If voting patterns still hold true, the beneficiaries of these programs would vote overwhelmingly Democrat anyway; the G.O.P. has nothing to gain, the Democrats have nothing to lose. Sadly, the children have much to lose.
In noting the disparities in the quality of public education in America, Rev. Al Sharpton, in a rare moment of clarity, stated why public education continues to fail millions of Americans:
The people standing in the schoolhouse doorway now are people we thought were our friends, liberals wearing suits not bibb overalls, principals and teachers who want to uphold the status quo — condescending bigots who perpetuate a system we know is profoundly unequal.
Conservatives typically don’t make public education their issue, except when it comes to biology (evolution), health (sex), and school prayer. Liberals typically advocate the use of government power to equalize social opportunity and even equalize social outcomes. Even though one would normally expect the Left to advocate policies that best benefit marginalized populations, the Democratic party still knows that both money and ballots talk: the nation’s two big teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, support Democratic candidates with massive investments, volunteers, and votes. When the interests of the unions conflict with the interests of disadvantaged children of color, the former constituency holds the trump card.
Tellingly, Ms. Norton also told the Post several months ago, “We have to protect the children, who are the truly innocent victims here.” Indeed they are.
* In fairness, one might attribute this to the fact that people have a tendency to view the consequences of their own choices more positively than consequences imposed on them by others. Just as people exhibit a pride of ownership in homes, people exhibit a pride of ownership in their own choices. If “choice” can apply to abortions, it should certainly apply to schooling.
Topics: Civil Rights & Human Rights, Class, Education, Identity, Politics, Prejudice, Washington
During my four years at the University of Maryland, I was satisfied with the academic freedom afforded students. The university imposed no speech codes or speech zones on students and faculty and I even witnessed faculty publicly contradict and vehemently disagree with administrators.
As a public university, the University of Maryland’s budget is a matter of public record, thus limiting (though not eliminating) the shadowy policy-making that often plagues private universities.
During my four years, the Maryland General Assembly never intervened to impose politicized restrictions on academic freedom or speech. How times have changed.
Upon hearing that the student-run theater on campus was going to screen a pornographic film Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, one member of the Maryland Senate, Andy Harris (R-Baltimore County) introduced an amendment to cut all state funding from any state university that showed a hardcore pornographic film on campus.
Shamefully, under threat of the amendment’s passage, the university administration promptly put the kibosh on the screening, striking a blow to free speech on campus. Students are planning to screen the film elsewhere at an undisclosed lecture hall, but the prudish Senator’s threat still stands. Sadly, lest they be labeled soft on hardcore porn, a majority of Senators probably would have approved the measure.
Though threatening to withhold funding for the university, likely shutting it down, is a political stunt that we’re sure plays well with Mr. Harris’s constituents, it threatens the beginning of a slippery slope toward speech codes. What qualifies as pornographic? And why end there? Perhaps Mr. Harris would like the library to burn Peyton Place and the Canterbury Tales, and redact the cruder parts of Shakespeare.
Though the General Assembly has the right to review and determine the university’s budget, it is unwise for the General Assembly to politicize the university and it is likely illegal for the state to define content-based restrictions that do no serve any compelling state interest.
We predict that the movie will be shown elsewhere on campus and that the General Assembly will not follow through on its threat. Even still, this quarrel will have a chilling effect on speech. It is a sad day for the so-called Free State and its university.
Today The Post and the Gray Lady are publishing several good op-eds on Obama’s policies and methods.
Michael Gerson argues that Obama’s promise of change now rings hollow. While Gerson’s criticism of Obama’s governing style and the Limbaugh affair are largely irrelevant, he rightly notes that the President is continuing with business-as-usual, i.e. promising everything for the price of nothing:
The pledge of “honesty” and “sacrifice” has become the deceptive guarantee of apparently limitless public benefits at the expense of a very few…. None of this is new or exceptional — which is the point. It is exactly the way things have always been done.
Charles Krauthammer argues that Obama’s stem cell and science policy is unsophisticated and contains a significant logical contradiction:
[The President declared] that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.” Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the “use of cloning for human reproduction.”
Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.
Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science?
Eugene Robinson defends Obama’s method of confronting all challenges (i.e. banking, health care, entitlements, infrastructure, education, etc., etc.) all at once. He astutely dismisses the critics:
What these critics really want, though, is to delay or derail the progressive reforms that voters elected President Obama to carry out.
Judging by the scarcity of fiscal discipline over the past few years, it’s probably wise to characterize the opponents of the all-at-once agenda as really just opposing the agenda part, not the all-at-once part.
We, however, still hold by our belief that when governments rushes policy, the results are rarely wise (e.g.).
David Brooks (a conservative!) praises Obama’s nascent education policy as recognizing the importance of familial influence, teacher accountability, and charter school competition. He writes that the President “has broken with liberal orthodoxy on school reform more than any other policy”.
Conservatives love to accuse academia of a rampant liberal bias. While it is true that professors are overwhelmingly registered as Democrats and that college students and professors are the only people left in the free world who take Marxism seriously, academia’s actions tells a different story.
Yet another study, this one by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, has found that college tuition costs are outpacing income growth. America’s universities are increasingly closing themselves off from America’s poorest.
For all the high-minded rhetoric of “social justice” the tuition bills seem to tell a different story.
Bashing the SAT is a national tradition, but fewer and fewer critics acknowledge its virtues: it is a reliable empirical tool for comparing academic abilities in reading, writing and math. The test produces consistent results for students no matter how many times they retake the test. While it is true that one test should not be the sole arbiter of admissions decisions, it is still one important consideration.
Brent Staples’s op-ed in the New York Times lists a bevy on grievances against America’s dreaded test. Among other culprits, he blames the financial system (a favorite target these days) for issuing lower credit rating to schools with lower average SAT scores. Bond-rating agencies can hardly be blamed for the fact that high scores probably correlate with higher endowments, but it is unseemly for admissions counselors to worry about the interest rate consequences of their admissions decisions.
Though the SAT is not a perfect predictor of collegiate success, that does not mean the test should be junked. In fact, the test is one of the few objective measures by which counselors may compare applicants. It also provides a quick way to eliminate applicants who are clearly unqualified.
Furthermore, it must be said that the op-ed’s quotation of a daming report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling is suspicious: the association has a financial interest in the test’s elimination since it would require universities to hire more admissions counselors to wade through ever-more subjective applications.
Staples’s lament that children whose families can afford pricey test preparation courses are “gaming” the test is nonsense. America’s high schools should be providing sufficient preparation for the SAT as its subjects should be incorporated into any serious high school curriculum. Students who study for the test outside of school are earning merit they deserve; if they have learned more as a result of their studies in and out of school, of course they will have higher scores! The SAT was not meant to score intention or effort, it was meant to score a set of basic academics To move away from a merit system in scoring academic ability risks replacing a merit system with a system in which admission is granted on favors and prejudices even more egregious than those in today’s sytem.
Cultivating One's Mind. Source: New York Times.
Berea College in Kentucky doesn’t charge its students tuition. This contrasts sharply with many of the nation’s most prestigious schools, which charge hefty sums for tuition despite their astounding endowments. Are the Ivies just become havens of America’s intellectual and economic elite? The New York Times thinks so:
[A]ccording to 2002 data, only one in 10 of the students at the nation’s most selective institutions come from the bottom 40 percent of the income scale. And the proportion of low-income undergraduates at the nation’s wealthiest colleges has been declining, as measured by the percentage receiving federal Pell Grants, for families with income under about $40,000. At most top colleges, only 8 to 15 percent of students receive Pell grants.
The Senate and IRS are now investigating whether universities should be required to spend 5% of their endowments on education annually in order to maintain their tax exempt status. The IRS and Congress tend to prefer that tax exemptions apply only on income that suits the public good. If hefty endowments aren’t being used to broaden access to higher education, what public good do they serve?
Several of the Ivies have stepped up tuition assistance for students from low-income families, but, as the Times points out, the student bodies are becoming ever more priviledged. Harvard, Yale, et al., beware: continue to lock out the poor and you may have to hire more accountants.
IT jobs are still in high demand and will continue to be highly desired in the coming decades, despite the fact that enrollment in undergraduate computer degree programs has dropped. Even all the Indians finishing technical trade schools every year will not be able to fill the worldwide demand for IT skills.
Microsoft has tried to counter this by lobbying the state of Washington to require more rigorous math standards for high schools. Though increasing educational standards is a laudable goal, it is unlikely that math standards will overcome the various factors that dissuade undergraduates from pursuing the computer field.
In fact, math requirements may be one of the main factors that turn students off from the field. Having worked in the tech industry for several years, I have seen little relationship between math and programming beyond arithmetic and exponents, which are useful in calculating the efficiency of recursions. Despite that, most degree programs in computer science require intolerable levels of math education even though there are many computer jobs that require nothing beyond algebra.
The Post writes today about accelerated math education curricula in local public schools. Though algebra is typically considered to be a ninth-grade math subject, many schools particularly in affluent suburbs are teaching the subject to their students in seventh grade.
The idea is not without controversy, of course, as some parents believe their children are being pushed too hard. While it’s understandable that parents wouldn’t want their 10-year-olds struggling nightly with three-hour homework assignments, this policy shift is what America needs to improve the math performance of American children. American children typically score well below their counterparts in Japan and Singapore and many other country when it comes to math achievement tests. Raising expectations for American students will probably raise results, too.
Furthermore, the nation lacks professionals with advanced math skills, thus requiring the import of talent or the export of math-heavy jobs to wherever the talent resides.
Parents in the affluent neighborhoods found out long ago that higher math achievement levels boost a student’s chance for being accepted into the nation’s choice colleges. Expanding these standards for all children will help poorer children, in particular, remain competitive with their wealthier peers when applying to colleges.
Washington's Security Theater
How the fear of terrorism limits public access and wrecks Washington's elegance.