Morning Shots

Getting Down to Facts, a report billed as the most extensive review to date of California public education, is scheduled for release this week, with results from public-school efficiency on Wednesday and funding adequacy on Thursday.  Already there is room for doubt whether the top-secret report does indeed get down to facts or merely recycles familiar political themes.

The report fulfills a bi-partisan request for research to inform education reform efforts.  Results were privately released in January to select political leaders and stakeholders.

Not surprisingly, the first rumored finding is that California schools are being short-changed to the tune of $1 trillion.  That amounts to an additional $160,000 in per-pupil funding, which already exceeds $11,600.  Findings like that aren’t likely to pass the straight-face test with most Californians or even late-night comedians.  The findings sound like the latest version of familiar spin from special interests and the education establishment, that more money means better education.  Here we have a problem.

Experts admit it’s impossible to define what an adequate education is, much less what it costs.  But that hasn’t stopped the steady stream of scientific-sounding “costing out studies,” or adequacy studies, purporting to do just that.

“‘Costing out studies’ should be interpreted as political documents, not as scientific studies,” according to Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek.  They are “political documents, almost always purchased by clients with an agenda.”  Hanushek, a Getting Down to Facts contributor and one of the country’s leading education economists, adds: “The important question for assessing costing out studies is whether they can describe policies and resources that will reliably lead to the new, higher achievement levels.  None can.”

He criticizes adequacy cost studies for their inherent tendency to inflate cost estimates and their susceptibility to political manipulation.  Hanushek has also examined every scientific study available on the effects

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South Carolina is poised to become a national model for school choice.  We have changed the debate, demanded reform and proposed a plan that would provide the only kind of school choice that will change our state – universal choice for all parents.

South Carolina’s debate is fairly black and white – it comes down to letting the government choose schools through political shell games such as public school choice, or giving parents real opportunities in schools they choose themselves.  

Frankly, for members of the education establishment to support even a flawed plan such as open enrollment represents progress in South Carolina.  For years, even that would have been resisted by every single lobbyist on the education payroll, and is still resisted by some.  The debate in our state is not whether we provide choice, but what kind and how much.  Right now, there are two approaches to choice.  One is for genuine reform that provides universal opportunity.  The other, supported by the education establishment, would only allow children to choose another public school.

School choice opponents in South Carolina are well organized.  Professional lobbyists for the education system are well compensated to fight reform, and they use public dollars to do it.  By advocating public school choice, they seek not to provide real opportunities, but to provide the appearance of supporting choice.  In truth, as research from the South Carolina Policy Council makes clear, public school choice is no choice at all for our children.  There are So few slots exist at the “successful” schools that only about three percent of children in the districts surveyed could take advantage of open enrollment.  The rest still have no choice.  Furthermore, our state’s public school system as a whole is simply not high performing – there is only one high school

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One claim of supporters of maintaining the government’s monopoly on public education is that our public schools teach our children common values. One would like to think that among those common values would be truthfulness. In fact, though, if we were to grade our public schools on the accuracy of what they tell the public, they’d get an F.

For example, until 1998, California’s public schools claimed a high school dropout rate of 3.2 percent. In 1999, a reform-minded California State Board of Education demanded truthful dropout numbers, and embarrassed officials at the California Department of Education had to admit that they were losing almost a third of our children before graduation. They had, somehow, put the decimal point in the wrong place and confused 3.2 percent with 32 percent.

That same Department of Education is still not being straight with us about how much money the state spends annually per public school student. The official figure, $7,600 per year per student, leaves out the cost of school construction, interest on school bonds and teacher retirement benefits.

The actual figure, available from the state Legislative Analyst and the Budget Office, is $11,800 per student.

The difference is important and not just to accountants. The most crucial crisis facing our state is the meltdown of our public schools.  Offering families scholarships, or tuition vouchers, to schools of their choice is the surest way to turn around that crisis, and we need truthful numbers to design such a program.

Defenders of the status quo counter that school choice "takes away vital resources from our public schools." Not exactly.

Private schools and charter schools in a given state always cost less than public schools per student. When a student transfers from a public school to a charter school or a voucher-accepting private school, under normal circumstances, the

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