On Asses and Carts

Every once in a great while, the intuitively obvious answer is the correct one. For example, if you took two schoolchildren from the same race, and stipulated that one came from a home where the parents' educational attainment and household income were less than that of the other, you would predict that the child of the ill-starred family would have lower educational outcomes that his more fortunate peer.

We also assume that factors such as a stable home environment, minimal exposure to television and having a two-parent family can impact a student's educational outcomes. Furthermore, we can rightly presume that all of these things would impact cross-racial comparisons, particularly between African Americans and whites. And indeed, we see evidence of race-based educational disparities as evidenced by the much-vaunted "achievement gap."

It's a good thing (he says tongue grafted to cheek) that Rev. Al Sharpton has distracted himself from other matters such that he can turn his attention to the education of black pupils. Predictably, Rev. Sharpton has directed his preponderance to advocate for the one thing that has been repeatedly demonstrated to have zero impact on school performance: namely, per-pupil spending (PPS). Over the weekend, Sharpton added his voice to those calling for a boycott of Chicago public schools on the first day of class next month.

Sharpton's fulminations aside, PPS has exactly no bearing on children's school performance (as discussed ad infinitum elsewhere.) Even the definition thereof is sufficiently nebulous as to account for funding of activities that are well upstream of what goes on in the classroom. Everything from plush retirements for bootlicking bureaucrats to "educational" seminars for administrative pogues to filling the hog troughs of teacher's unions with the swill of new property tax dollars can be accounted for as per-pupil spending.

And as mentioned elsewhere, if PPS had a direct impact on education, we would see evidence of improvements in academic achievement.

While not entirely surprising, the most disturbing fact is that these sorts of abysmal performance outcomes come with an exorbitant cost. According to data from the website of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), over a relatively brief timescale - 1961 to 2003, to be precise - expenditures per pupil for primary and secondary education have more than tripled, from $2,507 to $8,468 in 2004-05 dollars. And according to the IES' Common Core of Data, for the 2004-05 fiscal year, per student expenditures ranged from $14,117 for students in New Jersey to $5,216 for Utah students, with absolutely no correlation between per pupil spending and educational outcomes.

Everywhere we look - from the Abbott districts in New Jersey, to the hardscrabble streets of South Central Los Angeles to the killing fields of Chicago - we have seen no return whatever for this level of investment in education.

I've also noted that what besets African Americans vis-a-vis education is only minimally about economics, and reflects more of a poverty of culture rather than material goods. (So as not to seem to self-obsessed, I am loathe to reference posts to that effect.) In reviewing the situation here in Chicago, a fellow blogger cites a Schott Foundation for Public Education study, and concludes that "African American males in Chicago's public schools are less than half as likely to graduate as their white peers." Dennis Byrne surmises that culture - particularly that embraced by young black males - is the predominant factor contributing to any observed gaps in achievement between the races.

[I]f resource inequities account for the poor performance, why don't their white male, Hispanic and black female counterparts do as badly? After all, they are going to the same public schools in Chicago... Is it part of the state funding formula to somehow apportion less funding to black males? Are black males forced to use 20-year-old textbooks, while everyone else gets new ones? What precisely is there about how money is spent that mainly leaves black males so dismally out of it?

Maybe a complex of factors, other than funding disparities, explains the troubling performance of black males, and thus, a large part of the schools' problems. Perhaps the same thing that accounts for the decay of neighborhoods at the hands of black male gangs, or for the absence of fathers in the unraveling African-American family. These are symptoms of a cultural climate—corrupted by loosening morals, radical individualism, materialism, Hollywood's adulation of violence and parental irresponsibility, among other strands—that converges on African-American males in particular with all the focused and destructive force of a tornado... What is needed is not so much a change in the school funding formula, but a fundamental change in attitudes about family and society.

Even as Al Sharpton and his confederates bray for more money for their student constituents, it is curious that they never specify a dollar amount that would bring black students up to par academically with whites and Asians. The cry is always for more, with PPS serving as the perfect bogeyman to explain black underachievement. More accurately, it is a tool with which to deflect attention away from the singular shame of African Americans. As long as other races outperform blacks academically, our innate equality remains an open question. In a convoluted sort of way, Sharpton is performing a service of sorts as a champion of the idea of black intellectualism. But his "good" intentions do not make up for the fact that the cart remains before the donkey.

Dum and Dumer

One of the transcendent ironies of our age is the fact that the very people who believe that one can discern "differences in general neurocognitive functioning" based on a person's political persuasion, and who are susceptible to the notion that preschool children who are "easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited and relatively over-controlled" tend to become conservatives as adults, have done their level best to raise a cohort of pupils who are equal parts poorly educated students and grossly uninformed citizens. Whether one looks at the elementary, secondary or higher education setting, the news from the leftist-dominated education plantations continues to disappoint.

For the bargain price of more than $10,000 per student for FY2006-07, Illinois parents were offered up a heaping helping of dismal results on this year's National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (according to the Chicago Tribune.) The scores for fourth- and eighth-graders were "lower than or equal to the national averages" and were out of sync with results from state exams which showed Illinois students making double-digit gains in most of the grade-level reading and math tests.

On the (NAEP) reading exam, for example, only 30 percent of the state's 8th-graders scored at or above the proficient level, a drop from 35 percent in 2003. But there has been an 18 percentage-point gain -- from 64 percent to 82 percent passing -- on the state 8th-grade reading exam in the same period.

Critics contend the wide disparity proves Illinois -- and other states -- is watering down state tests in an attempt to meet the demands under No Child Left Behind federal reforms. Illinois made dramatic changes to its state exams two years ago, giving students more time to complete tests and lowering the passing bar on the 8th-grade math exam.

Worse yet, while the so-called "achievement gap" between white students and minorities closed somewhat, this was as much due to "minimal" improvement on the part of white students as it was due to minority students making real gains in performance. (This phenomenon should not surprise, as it has been discussed exhaustively elsewhere.) It should also not surprise anyone that if students are unable to meet classroom expectations, they might well be expected to become disenchanted with the educational process altogether. Such is evidenced by a recent New York Times article about states lagging in high school graduation rates; under No Child Left Behind, individual states have been able to set their own graduation rate goals, with more than a few establishing the barest minimum possible as a goal. (See above graphic.)

While not entirely surprising, the most disturbing fact is that these sorts of abysmal performance outcomes come with an exorbitant cost. According to data from the website of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), over a relatively brief timescale - 1961 to 2003, to be precise - expenditures per pupil for primary and secondary education have more than tripled, from $2,507 to $8,468 in 2004-05 dollars. And according to the IES' Common Core of Data, for the 2004-05 fiscal year, per student expenditures ranged from $14,117 for students in New Jersey to $5,216 for Utah students, with absolutely no correlation between per pupil spending and educational outcomes.

What might come as a shock to many is the fact that - according to a report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institutes' American Civic Literacy Program entitled, "The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education's Failure to Teach History and Institutions" - a $40,000 price tag might not ensure that college students are getting basic knowledge about American history and government.

An Ivy League education contributes nothing to a student's civic learning. Indeed, there is no relationship between the cost of attending college and the mastery of America's history, politics, and economy. Moreover, of the 50 schools surveyed, including Brown Georgetown, and Yale, 16 showed negative learning - in other words, at 16 schools seniors scored lower than freshmen, suggesting that they will graduate with even less civic knowledge than what little they had as freshman.

As we look at the process of education in its totality, the poor outcomes manifested at all levels are of a piece with the prevalence of liberal dominance in every area of educational pursuit (as evidenced by the work product of progressive "researchers.") That a student could know less apres college than before only makes sense if one accepts the fact that - to the liberal way of thinking - the purpose of education is to further the inculcation of liberal ideals as opposed to the acquiring of skills and objective knowledge. As discussed elsewhere, liberalism "is still something that must be imposed; its adherents must be indoctrinated." To the extent that the Left has convinced Americans to accept poor educational performance at gold-plated prices, they have succeeded at indoctrinating both children and their parents.

"That's not what we meant!", pt. 2 - Today's SCOTUS decision in Parents v. Seattle (and Meredith v. Jefferson) did as was widely expected. As described by the New York Times, the decision "sharply limited the ability of school districts to manage the racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools."

The court voted, 5 to 4, to reject diversity plans from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., declaring that the districts had failed to meet "their heavy burden" of justifying "the extreme means they have chosen — discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments," as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court.

Today's decision, one of the most important in years on the issue of race and education, need not entirely eliminate race as a factor in assigning students to different schools, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in a separate opinion. But it will surely prompt many districts to review and perhaps revise programs they already have in place, or go back to the drawing boards in designing plans.

The opinion's rationale relied in part on the historic 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools — a factor that the dissenters on the court found to be a cruel irony, and which they objected to in emotional terms.

The majority's reliance on Brown is not entirely surprising in that, as discussed elsewhere, "the goal of Brown v. Board was achieving race neutrality in education. School assignment programs that consider race, much like affirmative action, do little to advance the goal of race-neutral education policies."

But beyond the legal mechanics of this decision, two recent trends have played themselves out to the effect that race-sensitive programs are difficult to defend. First, as the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination recedes further from our collective consciousness, it has become more difficult to make the case that present discrimination is necessary to make up for past unjustices. (And the current crop of civil rights leaders has been woefully inadequate in making a case for the former as redress for the latter, often reduced to camera-ready but otherwise ineffectual protests or loud "mau-mauing" on cable talk shows.)

But perhaps more importantly, as society has become more diverse in its preferences and more tolerant in its mores and attitudes, we have a generation of whites that is largely devoid of any collective guilt about race or racial privilege. They have come of age in what is for all practical purposes a post-affirmative action era. These 20- to 30-somethings lack any sense that opportunity is denied to anyone in any meaningful way; from their standpoint, the heavy lifting is done vis-a-vis race.

At most, society in general (and SCOTUS more specifically) seems willing to entertain race being used as one of several factors for consideration, with ethnicity not carrying more weight than any other circumstance. In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts makes as much of that very argument.

In the present cases, by contrast, race is not considered as part of a broader effort to achieve "exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints,"...race, for some students, is determinative standing alone. The districts argue that other factors, such as student preferences, affect assignment decisions under their plans, but under each plan when race comes into play, it is decisive by itself.

In the end, the Left's talk of educational diversity is as much of a diversion as are its obsessions with per-pupil spending, teacher salaries and the "achievement gap" between the races. All of these things are designed to obscure the fact that the educational system is woefully inadequate by any measure. We know that 12th graders are performing worse on the NAEP test than in 1992, and that schools have become more focused on indoctrination than instruction. One wonders whether the situation would improve if school districts spent less time "focusing on fads such as self-esteem, Afrocentrism or Heather's Two Mommies", and more attention on, well...education.

The only gap that matters, pt. 3.5 - Yesterday, this page published a post analyzing data comparing per pupil educational spending and educational outcomes between school districts in New Jersey. The post was based on reporting from the New York Times, which also printed a graphic listing the districts that spent the most and the least per student. As stated repeatedly on this blog - despite educator protests to the contrary - there has been no demonstrated link between classroom spending and classroom performance. At the time of publication, the post correlated per pupil spending (PPS) and student performance on the New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge (NJ ASK) to make that point. Unfortunately, the comparison was at best an inference, as the spending data was from 2006-7, while the NJ ASK data was from 2004-5.

In order to establish an "apples-to-apples" comparison, it is important to take a look at data from the same year. (To make the comparison even more meaningful, we will look at percentages of students achieving proficiency or better on the 2003-4 NJ ASK.) If we take a look at Census Bureau PPS data for 2003-4, we can go back and look at PPS for specific districts with more than 10,000 students. For example, New Jersey's Brick Township and Toms River districts had PPS of $9,472 and $9,828 respectively, considerably less than the $12,981 spent on average in the Garden State for that year. However, 88.9 percent of Brick Township students and 88.5 percent of Toms River students scored "proficient" or better on the NJ ASK in reading, and 76.8 percent of Brick students and 76.1 percent of Toms River students were proficient or better in math.

By way of comparison, the Camden and Passaic school districts had PPS of $15,485 and $15,219 for 2003-4. Meanwhile, on the 2003-4 NJ ASK, only 58.5 percent of Camden students and 58.4 percent of Passaic students scored proficient or better in reading, while 53.7 percent of Camden students and a dismal 47.3 percent of Passaic students were found to be proficient in math.

As stated on multiple occasions, PPS is in no wise any sort of predictor of student achievement or educational outcomes. At best, it is a mechanism by which we may be able to enrich the educational experience for students, by way of extracurricular activities or after-school programs. But all of these things serve as no sort of substitute for prepared students, qualified teachers and involved parents. We are surely more likely to gain more of each by way of the use of vouchers for public education, as opposed to increasing funding for the status quo.

The only gap that matters, pt. 3 - There are few elements of education in this country that have been as extensively researched (all to no apparent gain in the view of this lowly scribbler) than per-pupil spending (PPS) and its impact on educational outcomes. An article presented in the New York Times last week highlighted the variances in per-pupil spending between New Jersey school districts. (A separate Times graphic noted the most significant disparities in state classroom expenditures.) In describing New Jersey's Sea Isle school district spending $33,805 per child versus the Guttenberg district spending $7,426 per child, the Times joined the education establishment on the mourner's bench as it waxed melodramatically about the differences in spending between districts.

The disparity in student spending has prompted renewed calls from school officials and parents for an overhaul of the school financing system, which critics say has shortchanged many districts while directing the bulk of state aid to 31 poor urban areas identified as Abbott districts under a landmark court case.

State legislators have been working on a new state aid formula, but their efforts appear to have stalled in recent weeks.

"That is a big spread, and equity is something that needs to be addressed in the anticipated new school funding formula," said Lynne Strickland, executive director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, which represents 150 suburban school districts.

As discussed elsewhere, New Jersey's Abbott districts came about as part a "remedy" for educational disparities that the New Jersey Supreme Court found to be inadequate and unconstitutional. Based on that 1990 ruling, 31 urban districts were slated to receive additional state monies to bring PPS up to, or in many cases above what is spent in other districts (as noted by the Times.)

Many of the state’s Abbott districts also spend much more than the state average. Asbury Park schools, for instance, are spending $19,102 per student this year, according to the survey, and Newark schools $17,974 per student.

The NYT greek chorus notwithstanding, for the most part, per-pupil spending is in and of itself is a useless metric, as it can include things as diverse as expenses for school construction, teacher's salaries, administration and nursing/guidance counselor services. And while educators bleat about the effects of variances in PPS on the quality of the educational experience, there is not a scintilla of data showing a direct link between PPS and educational outcomes. As discussed here and here, PPS is no more of a determinant of success in school than is the ratio of sunny school days to cloudy days per year.

The best proof of this underlies the very "disparities" that the Times purports to expose. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, schools are required to report on, among other things, their Adequate Yearly Progress in improving student achievement and test scores. If we look at New Jersey's NCLB reporting for test scores, particularly those of elementary school students taking the 2004-5 New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge (NJ ASK), many of the school districts spending the least per pupil outperformed districts that spent more than twice as much.

Although exact year-to-year comparisons are not available presently, the following may be informative as it pertains to PPS. According to the Times, New Jersey's Harrison Township district will spend $8,286 per student in the 2006-7 school year - well below the state average of $12,098 per pupil. Nevertheless, a higher percentage of Harrison Township students tested "proficient" in reading and math on the 2004-5 NJ ASK than did students in the Hoboken City district. This was in spite of the fact that the Hoboken City district spent $19,102 per child in the 2006-7 school year, and presumably spent more than Harrison Township in 2004-5. (86.8 percent of students were proficient in reading and 54.6 percent proficient in math for Harrison Township versus 69.3 percent of students displaying proficiency in reading and 48.6 percent in math for Hoboken City.)

Similarly, students in the Alpine Boro district were bested by their peers in the afore-mentioned Guttenberg Town district on the order of 73.4 percent proficiency in reading and 59.3 percent in math on the 2004-5 NJ ASK for the Guttenberg district versus 68.2 percent proficiency in reading and 26.1 percent math proficiency for Alpine Boro. (Never mind that Alpine Boro will spend nearly three times as much per student in 2006-7 as will Guttenberg Town, at $21,534 versus $7,426 for Alpine Boro and Guttenberg Town respectively.)

When all of this is taken in the broadest context, the Left's pining for more money for education is part and parcel of two longstanding trends of liberal behavior. First, progressives are enamored with simple-minded reductionism. Whether they are distilling multifactoral climate systems down to the impact of CO2 concentrations on weather, concluding that poverty is the sole cause of crime or overstating the case for increased spending as a means of improving educational outcomes, the Left is especially wont to provide dumbed-down answers to complex problems.

More significantly, no matter the concern, the Left proposes exactly the same solutions. Irrespective of the situation, the fix always involves increased spending and taxation, an expansion of government intervention and more onerous regulation. To be sure, "solving" the problem is a mere stop on the road (or perhaps more accurately, a bump in the road) to collectivism.

The Shadow of Death - Everyone say it with me...

"Bill Cosby was right."

Once more with feeling...

"Bill Cosby was right!"

Coming soon to a Watauga, TX courtroom will be a case that will bear out the veracity of that statement, as by now we all have the disturbing video of two children - babies really, at ages 2 and 5 - who were given marijuana to smoke by 18-year old Vanswan Polty, and 17-year old Demetris McCoy, the uncle of the two younger boys. According to the Houston Chronicle, the video was confiscated pursuant to an investigation of local robberies. Both Polty and McCoy were arrested and face charges of injury to a child.

Timing is everything, and history has an uncanny sense for timing. This video was discovered on February 22, 2007, the very same day that the National Center for Education Statistics published NAEP scores for 12th-graders; as has become commonplace, black 12th-graders lagged behind their peers in both reading and math, as discussed here. (Even within the same school, where per-pupil spending would be presumed to be the same, blacks underperform relative to their white and Asian classmates.) In observing this juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events, the only critique of Mr. Cosby's position that does not strain credulity is that he was too circumspect in placing blame solely on the black underclass. For it is not just poor blacks who have failed the race. Indeed, middle-class blacks, particularly those who are invested in the current government education system have also failed.

We observe the effects of timing even as we note that this tape was uncovered just a day before AsianWeek published Kenneth Eng's "Why I Hate Blacks," as discussed elsewhere. It informs much that of the three events that have been referenced, the only one that warranted the attention of the now deposed ex-President of the NAACP was the publication of Mr. Eng's silly attempt at satire. That Bruce Gordon was able to sleep the sleep of the blissfully ignorant on the night of the 22nd, his slumber disturbed only by the brain droppings of a feckless hack, speaks volumes about the distorted priorities of the civil rights community at present.

In his exile to Patmos, Elbe (or perhaps Prince Georges County), Mr. Gordon spoke of the NAACP being at a crossroads. It is his sense that the NAACP must decide if it will be a organ of service (i.e., facing post-civil rights challenges within the black community) or advocacy (e.g., quixotically tilting at the windmills of heretofore unremediable external "obstacles" that hinder the progress of blacks.) Gordon seemed convinced that the path to the future relevance for the NAACP bent towards providing tangible service to the African American community. Evidently, Julian Bond and others on the 64-person Board of Directors disagreed.

Perhaps Messrs. Bond and Gordon have created for themselves a false choice by not considering the full scope of options. To be sure, Mr. Cosby has only spoken of the problem in half-measures. Thanks to the inopportune interventions of the countercultural Left in the 1960s, the black community has trembled in the shadow of death intellectually, physically and spiritually. And now there is little within black "culture" that commends it to the future. By my lights, nothing short of a cultural revolution within black America is in order, as the current mores of African American society must be overthrown and uprooted. To do this, the black community will require organizations that can provide service to those who have been failed and underserved by liberalism; one only hopes that a new NAACP will be part of these efforts. The new paradigm will emphasize more service to self and kind, and less "mau-mauing" to indifferent and/or ineffectual governments.

But something else will be required, something more like a period of reckoning - a "wandering in the wilderness" experience if you will. In as much as it has provided incentives for dysfunctional behavior, liberalism has made the African in America unfit to stand on his own. The race hangs precariously on the branch of self-indulgent progressive "largess," having neither legs to stand on the ground nor wings to take flight to the sky. It is evident that before we can stand, we must fall back to earth. And from that place of humility, we can better set ourselves to finishing the good and perfect work that was started for us the day the first African slaves landed at Jamestown, Virginia. This work has been abandoned too long, and the fields of uplift for African Americans are fallow. But if we survive the fall, we will soon be able to stand, and if we can stand we can stride to our rightful place among the the races.

All we have to lose is our useless pride. Wise men and ancient proverbs tell us that pride goeth before the fall.

The only gap that matters, pt. 2 - Last Thursday saw the release of more disheartening information on education in the United States. 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results for 12th-graders were presented for both reading and mathematics (along with a transcript analysis for 2005 high school graduates), and the data provide little cause for celebration on any front. In general, while high schoolers appear to be getting better grades (2.98 average GPA in 2005 vs. 2.68 in 1990), and are taking more college prep courses and earning more credits, 12th-grade NAEP reading scores have dropped since 1992.

Average scale scores for 12-grade reading went from 292 (on a 0-500 scale) in 1992 to 286 in 2005. (This is all the more remarkable given that in 1992 no accommodations were made for disabled or ESL students.) Worse yet, while scores stagnated for students in the 90th percentile, students in the 75th, 50th, 25th and 10th percentiles saw significant drops in their scores over time, with scores for students in the 10th percentile dropping from 249 to 235.

If there is any "good" news to be gleaned from this, it may be that gaps in achievement between white and black students remained unchanged, with scores for white students declining from 297 in 1992 to 293 in 2005, while black 12th-graders saw their scores go from 273 to 267. This result is evidenced by the fact that the percentages of students in both groups who performed at or above proficient declined between 1992 and 2005. In 1992, 46 percent of white 12-graders and 18 percent of blacks performed at or above proficient (which according to the National Center for Education Statistics, represents "solid academic performance") in reading, while in 2005 only 43 percent of white 12-graders and 16 percent of black students were deemed proficient.

As for NAEP scores in mathematics, comparisons between 2005 and previous years are impossible due to a recent change in the test itself. But even taking that into account, the news doesn't get better. White students scored 157 on the math test in 2005, with black students scoring an average of 127. Only 29 percent of white students (and an infinitesimal 6 percent of black 12-graders), performed well enough to be considered proficient on the test.

Couple all of the foregoing with the fact that, as reported in Newsweek, many students begin to show declining educational performance as early as fourth-grade.

Principals and teachers around the country are growing increasingly concerned with what they call the fourth-grade slump. The malaise, which can strike children any time between the end of the second and the middle of fifth grade, is marked by a declining interest in reading and a gradual disengagement from school.

This phenomenon is by no means confined to elementary school, as a similar effect has been seen among high-school students, many of whom drop out altogether - as often as not, out of boredom.

One would be hard-pressed to identify another line of work (with the possible exceptions of the legal profession and prostitution) that has such an inversely negative impact on its clients. What would be said of the medical profession if regular visits with a physician made a patient sicker? How scandalized would accountants be if their clients were poorer for their time and trouble? (Indeed, how is it that Arthur Anderson is out of business and the NEA is alive and well?) There is little doubt that the longer students are exposed to government-run education, the worse they perform educationally. Similarly, these NAEP results confirm that, even after the implementation of No Child Left Behind, the education system's failings are even more abundant now than in previous years.

All of this speaks to the topsy-turvy world created by teacher's unions and the education bureaucracy, both of whom have told the American people to "stay the course" for far longer than George Bush ever would have been allowed to vis-a-vis our war in Iraq. To be sure, by focusing on fads such as self-esteem, Afrocentrism and "Heather's Two Mommies," educators have advocated a failing strategy over the last 30 or more years. Depending on what's counted, overall education spending rivals or exceeds defense expenditures on a yearly basis, with annual increases that are as sure to come as the sunrise in the east.

Meanwhile, by every measure student performance continues to decline, and no one in the educational complex sees themselves as responsible. While President Bush has reshuffled his generals in Iraq, the educationistas have yet to so much as fire a corporal for cause; it is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that a teacher is more likely to leave the classroom as a result of a terrorist attack than due to poor performance. The pleadings of bureaucrats notwithstanding, per-pupil spending increases will have no impact on this crisis. As stated elsewhere, those who are concerned about the performance of our schools should focus less on educational content (i.e., more watered-down courses designed to provide the appearance of a rigorous curriculum) and more on contexts (i.e., social mores) that are reflected and supported by the local community. As long as the values of the education confederacy are apart from those of the greater society, there will be no solution to the problem of diminished educational returns.

The Last Civil Rights Movement, pt. 4 - The original sin of America's educational apartheid was not that it forced black children to go to school with other blacks. It was more fundamentally a sin of depriving some children the right attend a school that best met their educational needs and aspirations; most black schools were woefully equipped and poorly staffed relative to white schools. The Civil Rights Movement of that era was faced with two imperfect choices: either to encourage whites to fund majority-white and majority-black schools equally or to open white public schools to black students. Perhaps necessarily as a function of expedience, the conversation about educational options for black students became a discussion about desegregation of schools, as opposed to an argument for school choice more generally. (In retrospect, history seems to have confirmed the wisdom of the former.)

In any event, today's school voucher discussion naturally picks up where efforts at school desegregation left off. As it is, increasing per-pupil spending in most urban school districts would simply reinforce the sclerotic bureaucracy that has stifled all efforts at reform thus far. So it brings great pleasure to note that last week, legislature of Utah passed the most sweeping voucher plan of any state. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah will be the first state to grant "public education vouchers to families in all income brackets throughout the state," with the article going on to note, "programs in a handful of other states are limited to low-income students, city school districts or failing schools."

To underscore the need for some sort of education reform in Utah and nationally, one need only look at NAEP scores for Utah in comparison to the national average. In 2005, the average 4th-grade NAEP reading score for white children in Utah was 225.90, as compared with a 227.64 average score nationwide. Similarly, for Utah's Hispanic 4th-graders, the average score was 198.69 vs. 201.34 nationally. (Comparisons for African American 4th-graders are unavailable, as Utah did not meet the reporting standards for black students.)

As is to be expected, the opponents of school choice arrayed themselves against the legislation. (Of course, this does not surprise, as Democrats have recognized neither a child's right to life, nor a child's right to learn.)

"This is not about the children," said Sen. Gene Davis, D-Salt Lake City. "We've got it covered up real nice making it seem like it is. But the reality is, it's about taking tax dollars and giving them to private industry."

Sen. Patricia Jones, D-Salt Lake City, objected because the program could cost more than $40 million a year by the time it's fully implemented, according to the Legislative Fiscal Analyst's Office. It will take $9.3 million from general funds this year, and $12.4 million next year.

For the record, noted in the article, voucher supporters expect that this bill will actually increase overall education spending, as "parents of voucher students add money to state education funding when they make up tuition differences." Fortunately, HB148 passed the Utah Senate handily, with a 19-10 majority, although it squeaked through the House by a vote of 38-37. Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr. has indicated his inclination to sign the legislation into law fairly quickly, commenting that "it's hard to argue that it is deleterious to education long term." But it will surely have a negative effect on Utah's educational establishment. So as was noted in the February 11, 2007 Tribune, we can expect constitutional challenges from parents represented by organizations such as the ACLU.

The Last Civil Rights Movement, pt. 3 - As it is wont to do, the Left focuses much of its effort on achieving and maintaining "equality", even when such a state is impossible or impractical. This does not surprise, given liberalism's penchant towards equalism. Liberal equalism becomes self-evident when one examines the obsession of progressives with per-pupil spending (PPS) as a factor in K-12 educational outcomes. In spite of overwhelming empirical and anecdotal data to the contrary, liberal special interest groups like Educational Trust continue to aver that PPS is directly and inextricably linked to student performance.

As discussed previously, Education Trust recently presented a report that presents three analyses of educational spending within and between states. Their conclusions are straight from Liberalism 101, with the report commenting that, "low-income and minority students, in particular, get less of what matters most; these students get the fewest experienced and well-educated teachers, the least rigorous curriculum, and the lowest quality facilities." While in and of itself this is a demonstrably true statement, it is not clear how increased PPS would directly or necessarily remedy these shocking defects in the education process. Unfortunately, none of this deters Education Trust. Their study persists in proposing that deliberate, if not malicious actions on the part of federal, state and local governments create disparities in education spending that negatively impact those most at risk.

Of course, the fundamental issue is what constitutes sufficient PPS in the first place. For its part, the report sidesteps this question. Indeed, it goes on to say that the report itself, "does not examine whether funding in any particular state is adequate. Rather, taking current spending as it is, this analysis asks whether the districts with the highest concentrations of low-income students and students of color are getting their fair share of state money." (Emphasis added.) As one pores through each analysis, the futility of federal involvement in educational spending becomes patent. With each state haggling for a share of federal Title I funding for its poor children, it becomes difficult for the Feds to cut a pie into 50 representative pieces; disparity is built in from the outset, as low-poverty states like Wyoming and Vermont will not allow themselves to feel shortchanged in favor of states such as California or New York.

And on the score of PPS variances between "high-minority" and "low-minority" districts, the study's results are less than compelling. Across the board, minority students perform worse academically than whites, while differences in spending between high-minority and low-minority districts are less consistent. For the 10 Southern states that have 47% of the black population according to the 2000 Census, half of them (Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina and Mississippi) already provide more funding for districts with high numbers of minorities.

This roughly corresponds with the study's findings nationally; the report noted, "[i]n 26 of the 49 states studied, the highest poverty school districts receive fewer resources than the lowest poverty districts" - which is of course to say that 47% of high poverty school districts received more money than their low poverty counterparts. (The tragic irony is that most of the states with large black populations and glaring disparities between high- and low-minority districts are blue states, such as New York, and Illinois.)

But the salient weakness of this report, and most others that attempt to look at PPS is that it merely "examines school district revenues, not practices or policies in terms of how the money is spent." And there is the rub for most conservatives. Left unsaid is how more money spent in already dysfunctional system will do anything other than buy more dysfunction. (As documented elsewhere, past efforts to increase PPS certainly have not positively impacted test scores, graduation rates or post-graduation career prospects.) As we can fairly intuit, school districts are able to achieve disparate results with similar amounts of money. That organizations like Education Trust do not advocate allowing students - and their dollars - to move from low-performing districts in Illinois, Washington, D.C. or New York to high-achieving districts elsewhere speaks to their bias.

And so we can neatly and succinctly define the last civil right worth fighting for. Namely, the right of every student to sit in a classroom where he or she can get a high-quality education (as opposed to sitting in a classroom with an acceptable number of students from other races.) If such an education can be acquired outside of the government-dominated system, so much the better. The mission of any school reform agenda should neither be to fully fund a system that has so repeatedly and manifestly failed those most in need of its services, nor to relocate minority students to "white" schools simply for the sake of diversity. School districts must allow all students to move both their minds and their individual share of school funding monies to institutions that will best meet their educational needs.

More per-pupil spending allocated to support an uncaring and non-functioning bureaucracy will never be more than a placebo for what ails education in the U.S. Increased spending is doomed to fail from the outset, as it attempts to purchase that which cannot be manufactured for sale: engaged parents, motivated students and competent teachers and administrators. All of these enabling factors must spring from the milieu of the school itself. As the culture of the society that the school serves is debased, so will the school itself be.

The Last Civil Rights Movement, pt. 2 - Census Bureau statistics indicate that for the 2002-2003 school year, Illinois ranked 17th in per pupil public school spending ($8,409), well ahead of neighboring states such as Indiana ($7,948), Iowa ($7,534) and Missouri ($7,262) as well as perennial school spending also-rans as Arizona ($5,672) and Utah ($4,860), but trailing behind states such as Wisconsin ($8,993), Massachusetts ($10,223), New York ($12,202) and the District of Columbia ($13,328), whose student body is nearly 85 percent African American. (Comparable Department of Education figures for total median expenditures per student for the 2002-2003 school year were presented in "Revenues and Expenditures by Public School Districts: School Year 2002-2003," published in November 2005. In that report, total expenditures per student in Washington, D.C. were even higher than those noted by the Census Bureau, a whopping $16,344.) For its part, the Chicago Public School system reported spending $7,967 per pupil on average for the 2002-2003 school year, an amount that increased to $8,786 during the 2004-2005 school year.

Conventional wisdom says to us that the biggest disparities in per pupil spending exist between inner-city and suburban metropolitan schools. But data from a December 2002 General Accounting Office report (GAO-03-234) suggest that there is no consistent pattern of higher per pupil spending between inner-city and suburban schools. The inner city schools that the GAO reviewed generally spent more per pupil than suburban schools in Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. On the other hand, suburban schools in Fort Worth and New York spent more per pupil than the inner city schools. In Denver and Oakland, spending differences between urban and suburban schools were mixed.

Also, the available Census data seem to suggest that the biggest consistent disparities in per pupil spending are between metropolitan schools districts, which have greater racial heterogeneity and rural school districts, which are usually majority white. In any event, there seems to be little relationship between per pupil spending and academic performance, as evidenced by the amount of money spent in Washington, D.C. versus other areas, and the associated performance on standardized tests. The Goldwater Institute’s Vicki Murray, Ph.D., helps us get our heads on straight regarding per-pupil spending and student achievement, as taken from her op-ed piece in the March 27, 2005 Arizona Republic.

Spending rankings tell policymakers even less about what matters most: student performance. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, D.C. spends $15,000 per pupil, the most in the nation, but students there come in dead last on the [National Assessment of Educational Progress]. In 2003, 90 percent of fourth-and eighth-graders in D.C. failed reading proficiency.

This is not a fluke. In inflation-adjusted dollars, per-pupil spending in American public schools has more than tripled since 1959. During that period, standardized test scores have stagnated. If increased spending were a real measure of success, the states would have an "A." But test results indicate otherwise.

Empirical evidence notwithstanding, the good people at the Education Trust pipe up their siren song with a recently published report which hints that much of the oft-bemoaned "achievement gap" is directly related to per-pupil expenditures. The study, entitled "Funding Gaps 2006," graphs interstate disparities in federal per-pupil spending, particularly between rich and poor school districts. And in so doing, the Education Trust study proposes that the federal government should take a larger role in remediating these "inequities."

A more serious effort to narrow interstate inequality requires three main policy components. First, the federal role in school finance must be substantially increased; the federal government cannot buy much equality when it spends only nine cents of every education dollar. Second, because interstate differences in education funding primarily reflect differences in fiscal capacity, federal aid should compensate for differences across states in their ability to support education. Medicaid provides an example of federal aid distributed in inverse proportion to state fiscal capacity. Third, in aiding states with low education spending, federal policy should distinguish between low fiscal capacity and low effort. Where low spending is due to low effort, the primary federal role should be to spur states toward greater effort. Congress could require low-effort states to gradually increase their effort up to a minimum threshold as a condition of receiving significantly expanded federal aid.

More to come...

The following is a reprise of a post entitled, A Failure to Differentiate, which was originally published on November 19, 2006.

Liberal Equalism - As alluded to previously, one of the manifest failings of liberal reasoning is the notion of "equalism" which posits that by treating disparate persons, entities or situations equally, one is showing fairness to each. A prerequisite of successful implementation of equalism is the ability, entirely at the discretion of liberal thought leaders, to define equal treatment as equality of inputs (which mandates equalized per-pupil spending in primary and secondary education) or equality of outcomes (which necessitates affirmative action.) Rarely, if ever, do liberals submit that equality of results be related to either [e]quality of preparation or of effort.

A corollary to the equalist's proposition is that differentiations between unduly juxtaposed comparators are entirely subjective and in the eye of the liberal observing them. A failure to differentiate is therefore a symptom of equalism. Because of their bent towards equalism, liberals are loath to create or acknowledge distinctions between ideas and belief systems. Today’s Left finds itself adrift in a sea of relativism, moral and otherwise. They make no meaningful differentiations between genders (or for that matter, sexual orientations), races, religions or cultures.

The Left also makes no attempt to distinguish between the roles and responsibilities of individuals and private organizations in society versus those of government. These habits feed into the Left’s desire to appear even-handed and egalitarian in all things. In the end however, liberals simply appear to be unable to comprehend the difference between differentiation, which is (almost) always benign, and discrimination, which is only sometimes bad. The Left is fully subscribed to the “where you stand depends upon where you sit” school of thought, and believes that human judgment is handicapped both by paradigm and by parallax.

In not acknowledging differences between things, progressives fail to acknowledge the true nature of anything. All of this is that much more complicated by the Left’s professed esteem of diversity. (Of course, when the Left claims that it celebrates “diversity,” what is meant is that it fetishizes tribalism.) While paying lip service to desiring a more diverse society, the Left diminishes and undermines true diversity by attempting to disconnect diversity of behavior, attitude and effort from any risk of failure or negative consequences.

Indeed, equalism necessarily negates diversity, as true diversity is never apart from disparity. In the ideal liberal world, there would be full diversity of lifestyles and behaviors (read more space for deviancy from established societal patterns of behavior) minus any differences in real-world outcomes. As is typically the case, the Left wants to say one thing and behave in a way that is not consonant with their public pronouncements.

That the Left is unable to differentiate is evidenced quite sufficiently by the comments of prominent leftists regarding our adversaries in the War on Terror. To liberals like Bill Maher, the September 11, 2001 hijackers were “brave,” Mr. Maher apparently not recognizing that it takes no particular courage to overwhelm a plane full of unarmed and unsuspecting passengers. Maher appears to display no desire to recognize the difference between trained, disciplined and uniformed soldiers who target the enemy on the battlefield, and the shadowy figures that populate al-Qaeda, who wage their attacks almost exclusively on civilian populations.

Bill Maher's inexplicable comparison is matched by the willingness of so many on the Left to refer to Iraqi insurgents as “freedom fighters” who are simply defending their land against the aggressive acts of American occupiers. The fact that the Left is unwilling to recognize these people as terrorists who are simply desirous of mayhem, destruction and bloodshed on a mass scale is perhaps more confounding. Given what we now know about the defunct regime of Saddam Hussein, there was more than ample cause to overthrow his government in Baghdad, and give Iraqis a chance at forming a legitimate democratic government in the long-troubled Middle East.

Of course, like much of liberalism, equalism collapses under the weight of it's own absurdity. The Left would have us believe that equalism is part of the legacy of the civil rights struggles against racism and sexism. In fact, the foundations of equalism are more rightly seen as flowing from Marxist ideology than anything rooted in any sort of movement towards civil empowerment. The idea that we should regard a black high school dropout and an Asian Ph.D. as similar in anything other than their humanity is ridiculous on it's face, and a special sort of diminished capacity would be required to accept such a premise.

The only gap that matters - I suspect that the phrase "achievement gap" will ring in my ears periodically until every itinerant bovine has returned to his pasture. The phrase, or some variant, has come up in posts on this blog, and it has shown up again in a report prepared this fall by the Education Trust. (Education Trust comes to our attention as they released a study this week that purports to show how education funding decisions at the local, state and federal levels ensure that disadvantaged students receive "the fewest experienced and well educated teachers, the least rigorous curriculum, and the lowest quality facilities.")

Discussions of both performance gaps between white and minority students and funding gaps between urban and suburban schools are cut from the same cloth of the Let's doctrine of "equalism." But they are also counterproductive distractions as it pertains to what is going on in primary and secondary education today. Indeed, the greatest and most enduring performance gap is the gap between the educational competencies exhibited by today's students versus students from 100, 50 or just 20 years ago. And as whites have historically had the most continuous opportunity to receive a "quality" education, today's white students would seem to have been most shortchanged by the overall decline in educational outcomes in recent decades.

To get a full sense of the dimensions of the problem, one need only look at a current sixth-grade text and compare the subject matter to what was taught in the early 20th Century. I recently did exactly that, and was struck by how few graphs and pictures were required to teach basic math and reading. I quickly concluded that no sixth-grader would be able to comprehend, let alone complete math problems that were taught in a typical elementary school class of 1914; students using Milne's New York State Arithmetic, Second Book (how many sixth-graders could spell arithmetic?) were calculating profit and loss on business transactions, commercial discounts on list prices and commissions on sales.

There are many factors contributing to the precipitous decline in educational outcomes. The fact that we are a more transient and mobile society contributes tremendously. Americans are also part of a more fragmented, disconnected culture; we revere our iPods, cell phones and video games as totems of our individuality. We are also more likely to place less emphasis on academic achievement and focus on more dubious qualities, such as physical appearance and celebrity.

But the most salient factor would seem to be the fact that schools themselves provide more "content" (i.e.: safe sex and/or abstinence education, multiculturalism and learning about "Heather's Two Mommies"), and less social context in the way of cultural values and mores. In as much as schools are middle class institutions, they work best when they affirm and are affirmed by the middle class aspirations of the surrounding community. As our society recognizes too few "givens" of behavior and socialization, too much ends up in the laps of teachers.

Our conversations about education should not revolve around per-pupil spending. As discussed elsewhere, that is hardly the determining factor in educational outcomes. If it were, Washington D.C.'s schoolchildren would be head and shoulders above students in virtually every other school system in the nation. Nor should we focus on any perceived "performance gaps" between whites and blacks, as such gaps have existed throughout our nation's history and they will hardly be remediated by doing more of what has perpetuated them. Sadly, replacing public schools with private or charter schools is also an incomplete solution.

Instead, we all must make a commitment to creating an environment where communities inculcate their values into their children, and in turn, where teachers and schools can educate them. It may not take a village to raise a child, but it does take a society to socialize them.

The Last Civil Rights Movement - A useful definition of news is anything that occurs that is truly unexpected. That’s why readers of the February 8, 2006 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times were treated to the headline, “Morgan Park Blacks Tops in AP Test,” with the subhead of “More African Americans pass tough exams there than at any other school in the country.” The performance of Chicago Public School (CPS) students always attracts my attention, as I consider myself to be a victim of the notoriously poor CPS system of the 1970s and early 1980s. The story by the Sun-Times’ education reporter Rosalind Rossi reported that Chicago’s Morgan Park High School had the highest number of black students to pass an Advanced Placement exam in 2005 of any U.S. high school. (According to the story, Morgan Park’s student body is 93 percent African American.)

In all, 32 Morgan Park students passed AP exams in English language/composition and 26 students passed the European history exam. The article also cited specific factors that the students’ success was attributed to, such as the fact that students complete “lots of writing assignments – many of them timed, just like on the AP tests” as well as, “an emphasis on analyzing a wide variety of texts, from the classic Shakespeare and the letters of Lord Chesterfield to the more contemporary Amy Chan and Richard Rodriguez.”

This level of success on the part of African American high school students runs counter to much of what is more typically observed as it pertains to the educational performance of blacks. For instance, African-American students taking the ACT test in 2006 had an average composite score of 17.1, versus 22.0 for whites and 22.3 for Asian students. Even controlling for high school G.P.A., black students tend to perform worse on the ACT than other ethnic groups; in 2004, blacks students with G.P.A.s between 3.50 and 4.00 scored 20.3 on the ACT versus scores of 24.5 and 24.3 respectively for whites and Asians with similar G.P.A.s.

And for CPS students in particular, data from a 2005 report presented by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCRS) indicate that while high school graduation rates have been improving throughout the late 1990s, African American students showed less improvement in both graduation rates and dropout rates than students from other racial groups. In 1998, among male CPS students, only 38.5 percent of African Americans graduated by age 19, compared with 76.2 percent of Asians, 57.5 percent of whites and 51.2 percent of Latinos. And an April 2006 report by the CCRS suggests that of every 100 African American freshmen entering a CPS high school, only 3 will get a bachelor’s degree by the time they are 25.

Most Americans are aware of the liberal canon regarding the obstacles that black students face in terms of classroom achievement, not the least of which are, in the Left’s view, low teacher expectations, high class sizes, a disparity in per pupil spending between inner city and suburban school districts, a lack of a culturally relevant curriculum and apathy on the part of parents in black communities. The circumstances surrounding the success of these particular students both confirm and defy conventional wisdom. Based on information provided by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) in 2005, Morgan Park’s average class size was 24.2 students versus an average of 19.7 students throughout the state of Illinois. 48.8 percent of Morgan Park students were low income versus 40 percent statewide.

In Morgan Park’s favor is the fact that according to ISBE, the Morgan Park student body, which includes nearly 2,300 students in grades 7-12, had 100 percent of its eighth graders meeting or exceeding the standards for reading, and 97 percent meeting the standards for math, as measured by the Illinois Standards Achievement Test for the 2004-2005 academic year. The performance of the high school students was much more problematic. When 11th graders at Morgan Park were given the Prairie State Achievement Examination, only 61 percent of students meet or exceeded standards in reading , 47 percent met or exceeded the math standard and 43 percent met or exceeded standards in science (versus 59 percent, 53 percent and 52 percent for overall reading, math and performance respectively for the state.) Morgan Park was deemed not to be making Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.

More to come...

The Blackboard Hustle - Periodically we are treated to the spectacle of jurists attempting to act as legislators in deciding exactly how much a municipality should spend to educate it's students. Today's exhibit "A" comes from the NYT. In a 4-2 decision, the New York state Court of Appeals ruled that an additional $1.93 billion must be spent annually on the education of New York City school children. According to the story, the amount specified in the ruling was less than the $4.7 billion mandated by lower courts.

But again, we have seen this movie before. Most of these efforts to increase per-pupil spending are at least well-intentioned, if not misguided; they all appear focused on closing the "performance gap" between urban and suburban school districts. Most Americans are aware of the liberal canon regarding the obstacles that black students face in terms of classroom achievement, not the least of which are, in the Left’s view, low teacher expectations, high class sizes, a disparity in per pupil spending between inner city and suburban schools, and a lack of a culturally relevant curriculum.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the biggest disparities in per pupil spending exist between majority black inner-city and mostly white suburban metropolitan schools. But data from a December 2002 General Accounting Office report suggest that there is no consistent pattern of higher per-pupil spending between inner-city and suburban schools. The inner-city schools that the GAO reviewed generally spent more per pupil than suburban schools in Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. On the other hand, suburban schools in Fort Worth and New York spent more per pupil than the inner city schools. In Denver and Oakland, spending differences between urban and suburban schools were mixed.

Also, the available Census data seem to suggest that the biggest consistent disparities in per-pupil spending are between metropolitan school districts and rural school districts (which are usually majority white.) In any event, there seems to be little relationship between per-pupil spending and academic performance, as evidenced by the amount of money spent in Washington, D.C. versus other areas, and the associated performance on standardized tests. The fact of the matter is that whatever the factors are that impact student performance, per-pupil spending is not among them. Were there any sort of linkage, most black students would outperform a sizable plurality of white students, based upon nationwide differences in education spending between urban and rural areas.

In every instance where increased per-pupil spending has been mandated, particularly by judicial fiat, there has been no observable increase in student performance. Whether it's been the Kansas City, Missouri school system or New Jersey's Abbott Districts, no improvement in educational outcomes has manifested itself. But even if such improvements were evident, it still seems that educators have no idea how much improvement might accrue from a specific increase in expenditures. Legislators and school administrators also seem to have no idea of where best to deploy education dollars. Do we stand to reap our greatest reward by spending on new textbooks or new buildings, better trained teachers or more competent principals? Are we best served by spending monies on universal pre-school programs, K-8 education or on more academic rigor in high schools?

To be sure, these are not merely theoretical concerns, as, at least for African Americans, the opportunity to receive a high-quality education is the last civil right yet to be won. The fact that the educationistas do not have good answers to these questions undercuts the Left’s arguments for unchecked increased in education spending.