2020 Presidential Election

A Republic, if you can keep it

Matthew Ladner January 11, 2021

Preparing students for the successful exercise of citizenship – with a knowledge of history and civics and a commitment to the norms of democracy – has been one of the primary aims of taxpayer funding of K-12 education.

Investigations across decades, however, have revealed shallow knowledge of American history and government. The Annenburg Public Policy Center, for instance, found in 2019 that only 39% of Americans could successfully identify all three branches of government. It seems to be catching up with us.

While there is nothing new regarding civic ignorance, there is something new with on-demand confirmation bias of the sort seen on social media. This appears to be a dangerous and corrosive combination.

An old saying holds that things are never either as good or as bad as they seem. Let’s hope that is true, because they seem very bad now, especially regarding the public’s ability to exercise discernment when it comes to partisan narratives.

On the 2020 election, I think it’s clear that policymakers should act to increase public confidence (vote counts dragging on for days for instance is a bad look). The stunning scale of fraud necessary to have swung the electoral college vote and then navigate dozens of court cases is, however, profoundly implausible.

A multi-state conspiracy involving county and state officials from both parties, dozens of judges from both parties, including several appointed by Republican presidents and President Trump himself, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr and effectively all nine justices of the United States Supreme Court, would be necessary.

President Trump deserved access to the courts, but last I heard, the final tally on those cases was 59 losses and a single victory that did not change an outcome.

It also is worth recalling that Democratic officials can’t distribute vaccines without throwing them away and the Obama administration struggled for months to build a website. What are the chances they could pull off a multi-state conspiracy while co-opting hundreds of Republicans?

Before our left-of-center readers smirk too broadly, the years of news coverage questioning whether Donald Trump was a KGB agent, for example, never made much sense either. Donald Trump campaigned and governed as a “drill baby, drill” fracking enthusiast seeking “American energy dominance.” The Russian economy is grossly dependent upon the export of oil and natural gas and would be much better off without having the United States displace it as the world’s top producer.

While Russians do interfere in elections, their aim seems to be to sow chaos; they also helped Bernie Sanders in the primary. Even after the special counsel announced finding no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that half of respondents still believed it happened.

The special counsel spent $32-million without finding evidence of collusion, but why not go ahead and believe it anyway?

It is possible that Trump was a longtime KGB asset and it’s possible that the massive election conspiracy referenced above happened in 2020. They both seem about as likely as the existence of a population of aquatic dinosaurs swimming around in a lake in Scotland for eons without anyone ever coming across a carcass.

Far too many Americans are ignorant of their history and government, and demagogues find it all too easy to manipulate hyper-partisans. It’s hard to imagine improving matters without the contribution of a broad improvement in civic education.

January 11, 2021 0 comment

2020 Presidential Election Advocate Voices Bipartisanship Commentary and Opinion Common Ground Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Education Politics Featured

This Memphis mom has a Thanksgiving message for Joe Biden

Special to redefinED November 26, 2020

Special to redefinED

A recent initiative of the grassroots Powerful Parent Network was raising money to meet with all of the 2020 presidential nominees to lobby for parental empowerment and education choice.

Editor’s note: This post from former teacher, school board member and passionate education choice advocate Erika Sanzi features a powerful message from a fellow school choice advocate. The commentary appeared earlier this week on Education Post.

Sarah Carpenter, executive director of Memphis Lift, spent much of the 2020 primary season bringing her message—her plea—for liberation from failing schools to all who were in the fight to become the next president of the United States. Miss Sarah is a fierce advocate for children and parents—she doesn’t have any preferences when it comes to district schools, charter schools or private schools. She just wants the children of North Memphis—and all children—to have access to a good school.

Sarah appears in and narrates the video below on behalf of the Powerful Parent Movement and her message to president-elect Biden is clear.

She, and all the members of the Powerful Parent Movement, know that self-determination comes with having the freedom to choose the right school for your child. Let’s hope the president-elect is willing to listen.

https://educationpost.org/one-memphis-mom-and-grandma-has-a-thanksgiving-message-for-joe-biden/

November 26, 2020 0 comment

2020 Presidential Election Commentary and Opinion Coronavirus / COVID-19 Featured

If we try, sometimes we just might find we get what we need

Matthew Ladner November 9, 2020

Matthew Ladner

The American public has entrusted the White House to Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden.

It appears that the Republicans will at least be favored to retain a slim Senate majority. Republicans gained an estimated 8-13 seats in the House, which will retain a Democratic majority.

The turnout rate was the highest since 1900, meaning that President-elect Biden received the largest number of votes in American history. Voters, however, obviously engaged in a great deal of ticket-splitting.

Biden, for instance, walloped President Trump in Maine, but Republican Sen. Susan Collins cruised to an easy reelection. Biden prevailed comfortably in New Hampshire, but the incumbent Republican governor won reelection by 30 points and Republicans gained legislative majorities.

Partisans of both parties have plenty of things to lament.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against hyper-partisans. Some of my best friends are hyper-partisans of one party or the other.

The Founders, however, wisely foresaw the danger of faction and created a system of separation of powers and checks and balances.

The American public collectively decided to move on from the Trump administration, but through ticket-splitting decided against turning the entire power of the federal government over to a single party. The people have spoken, and their voice is imperial. Now, on to our very pressing concerns.

The pandemic continues, but thankfully, our medical professionals have become far more adept at treating the disease. We had huge problems before COVID-19 and many of them have been worsened by the pandemic, including but hardly limited to K-12 education.

Evidence regarding the academic harm of the shutdowns continues to trickle in, and the news is very bad. What many of us want is a decisive and crushing victory in our political forever war, but you can’t always get what you want.

What we need are creative solutions. For these, we need to look to the state and local leaders. Washington, D.C., to put things mildly, is not a font of productive policy innovation and has a terrible tendency to do more harm than good.

If we were to get a viable vaccine and successfully gridlock induced benign neglect out of Washington over the next few years, we would have cause for great thankfulness. When our state leaders manage to begin updating antiquated public policies for the needs of the 21^st century, we will have cause for celebration.

November 9, 2020 0 comment

2020 Presidential Election Commentary and Opinion Coronavirus / COVID-19 Education and Public Policy Education Politics Featured

Go vote: The winners get a giant mess!

Matthew Ladner November 2, 2020

Matthew Ladner

There is an election tomorrow, so go out and vote. But note that these elections were once far less apocalyptic in tone.

The 1920 presidential election, for instance, featured Warren Harding versus James M. Cox for all the presidential marbles, such as they were in those days. Cox survived a grueling contest against William Gibbs McAdoo and A. Mitchell Palmer to win the nomination of the Democratic Party on the 44^th ballot.

If you haven’t heard of most of these people, don’t feel bad; you simply are engaging in rational ignorance. Harding defeated Cox and then died. He was succeeded by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge famously did and said very little as the nation’s economy boomed.

Presidential races were delightfully inconsequential back then compared to the modern end-of-days version where both major parties urgently assure us that tout est perdu if the other side wins. In reality, life goes on until the next Ragnarök election, and then the next. Some catastrophic policy mistakes made starting with Coolidge’s successor, however, are eerily reminiscent of the current K-12 calamity.

On the one hand, modern elections seem overblown. Matthew Ridley made the case in the Rational Optimist that one struggles to find a 10-year period of American life in which material conditions failed to improve despite our political follies. Take, for instance, the Great Depression, an era in which a bipartisan group of federally alleged Olympians made a whole series of catastrophic policy mistakes, including but not limited to the Republican Hoover Administration starting a global trade war.

The Federal Reserve tightened the money supply during the early years of the downturn. In addition, the non-stop administrative antics of the Democratic Roosevelt administration created enormous political and economic uncertainty. The country had experienced plenty of stock market crashes and downturns, but a decade-plus long depression? That took some truly misguided effort.

Sometimes the words “we’ve got to do something” can be the most dangerous phrase in the English language.

There was a lot of suffering due to these mistakes. Nevertheless, due to the normal improvement process of people grinding on problems and tinkering with products/services the average American was wealthier at the end of the 1930s than the beginning. Today, the average American lives far better than the richest person on the planet in 1920 in many aspects.

Education, however, has lacked a decentralized process whereby results continually improve, and thus stands out as a sore thumb against an overall trend of societal improvement. A tangled web of federal, state and local rules governs educators in an effort to standardize schools and outcomes. School district democracy is marked by low voter turnout, and thus high vulnerability to regulatory capture.

Spending was going up and scores down before the pandemic, and the pandemic has introduced a whole host of new problems.

Federal officials won’t be able to fix much of this regardless of who wins. The states face an enormous revenue shortfall, students have acquired learning gaps we are only beginning to measure, and an estimated 6% of students have received no instruction since the spring shutdowns. Women are leaving the workforce in unprecedented numbers which is going to hurt both family and government finances. White students currently have twice as much access to in-person instruction as students of color.

Never mind Baby Boomer teacher retirement; under typical state retirement rules, many Gen-X teachers are eligible to retire. Take, for instance, a teacher born in 1967 who began teaching in 1990. Under a “rule of 80” this now 53-year-old teacher with 30 years of experience became eligible for the typical state pension years ago. This wouldn’t be as much as a problem if college students were flocking into education training, but they have been shunning it.

This also would be less of a problem if the typical state retirement system had been properly capitalized, but it hasn’t.

A grand mess awaits whoever wins tomorrow, so good luck to them. The task of recovering from our education troubles and leading a broad reimagining of an antiquated K-12 system will primarily fall on our state and local leaders.

Keep them in your prayers, and God bless America.

November 2, 2020 2 comments

2020 Presidential Election Analysis Commentary and Opinion Coronavirus / COVID-19 Demographic Research Education Spending Featured Testing and Accountability

NAEP scores: American public schools spend more but deliver less for students, families, taxpayers

Matthew Ladner October 29, 2020

Matthew Ladner

The performance of American public schools was in decline before the pandemic struck; based on the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress released Wednesday by the National Center for Education Statistics, things are likely to only get worse from here.

The data show the average reading score for the nation’s 12^th-graders declined between 2015 and 2019. Meanwhile, there was no statistically significant change in 12^th-graders’ average mathematics score for the same time period.

Bottom line: considerably more money per pupil was spent to get the same not-so-great results.

The tests upon which the data is based were given in spring 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The indications are now worse: Inflation-adjusted spending per pupil is up, childhood poverty is down, and scores are down rather than flat.

The earliest 12^th-grade reading score in this series comes from 1992. The Class of 1992 benefited from a nationwide average of $105,560 in 2018 constant dollars spent on their K-12 education. The Class of 2017, the cohort from which we have the most recently available data, had a nationwide average of $158,431 in constant dollars spent on their education – approximately 50% more. The figure for the Class of 2019 will be even higher.

Which class, 1992 or 2017, demonstrated better reading ability? Let’s break down the results by parental education.

Regardless of the level of a parent’s education, reading scores were lower for the Class of 2019 than the Class of 1992. All of the above differences are statistically significant.

Now take a look at the chart below, provided by Michael J. Petrilli from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, showing the decline in childhood poverty rates from the 1980s and 1990s.

What the chart shows: higher spending, less poverty and lower national achievement.

Mind you, this was the trend before the current massive decline in instruction time due to the pandemic. I’ll dare to predict that if the NCES manages to conduct the scheduled 2021 NAEP, exams scores will decline across the board and achievement gaps will grow. K-3 kids who are in their literacy acquisition windows, for instance, in districts like Los Angeles Unified, Clark County Nevada and New York have been receiving less than half the amount of instruction time delivered during a normal school year.

And finally, special education trends were a disaster in many states before the pandemic, as detailed in this chart.

It’s difficult to imagine that this already dismal chart won’t look even worse with 2021 data, coming in the aftermath of generally reduced instruction time and special education being attempted using the Zoom platform. We are not out of the pandemic yet, but the academic damage seems likely to greatly outlive the virus.

These most recent data came among favorable conditions of declining poverty and increased spending. Very soon, we’ll be forced to face what happens when you reverse these favorable trends and we end up with a large percentage of students with huge academic deficits.

Buckle up.

October 29, 2020 0 comment

2020 Presidential Election Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Featured Jack Coons School Choice

DeVos pathos

John E. Coons June 19, 2020

John E. Coons

The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government.”

— G.K. Chesterton, “The Man Who Was Thursday”

Our media rightly portray Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as enemy to our ancient order of officially branded “public” schools. She appears to feel a vocation to effect certain substantial changes that might prosper in our looming new society. In any case, for the moment I will assume so and agree that, to a point, if properly designed and focused, change in the system could be a blessing for many families and their children.

Paradoxically, I fear that, quite inadvertently, she has made herself an effective weapon for the defense and continuation of that relic system born of 19^th century religious prejudice but today become the enemy of the poor and of any change that could empower such parents.

Ms. DeVos has been and appears yet to be a fervent apostle of the late Milton Friedman, sharing his free enterprise ideal for schooling as, in essence, just another arena of business, even if one of a unique sort.

I had the good fortune to meet Ms. DeVos in Michigan, probably in the late 1980s. The occasion for my visit was the organization of the campaign for her own designed and planned popular initiative for statewide school reform via vouchers for parents; someone had assumed that I would be a supporter. Sadly, the draft initiative was quite unsuited to the mission as I understood it – and would not be changed.

Before leaving for home, I explained my doubts to the good people who had invited me, drawing mixed reaction. I recall an elderly nun scolding me with the words of Pontius Pilate: “Quod scripsi, scripsi.” And she was right. What I had written I had written, and believed.

I still do.

The central problem with that first (then a successor) Michigan initiative was simply that Ms. DeVos had taken seriously the gospel of our mutual friend, Friedman, whom I had first known in Chicago as a repeat guest on my radio talk show. In his confident mind, both the end and means of any ideal system were to be settled, for schools as for any other salable good, with a virtually unregulated market, and, for reasons still unclear to me, he concluded that subsidies of equal value should go to all parents who applied regardless of their capacity to pay tuition.

With my wise collaborator (then and yet), Stephen Sugarman, I had always valued the efficiencies of markets, and, in the case of school, as a tool to rescue and empower poor and near-poor parents from futility and extend to them the experience of authority and responsibility already enjoyed in varying degrees by better-off families.

Any needs of the latter could be satisfied by graduated grants tending to zero at the high end of the income ladder. An ancillary hope was to diminish segregation by race as by wealth. Both purposes, we supposed, would be served if some modest fraction of every participating school’s admission decisions were to be made at random among all those applicants who had been rejected.

The DeVos Michigan-type initiative quickly became the model for free-marketeers in a dozen states, giving opponents the invitation to portray choice as a device for well-off parents to secure yet another free ride. Nor did it help then (or now) that such well-intended efforts for a wholly unregulated market secured most of the financial support for choice that came (and still does) from a relatively few wealthy sources.

Today’s activist centers promoting unregulated systems still label activists like ourselves “voucher left;” we, of course respond with “voucher right” while feeling truly entitled to claim “the middle.” By the way, all those Michigan-style initiatives were smashed at the polls.

That original DeVos choice has remained, for too many minds, the image of school choice as a right-wing threat to democracy, intended not for but against the poor. This calculated confusion has stayed well-financed by government unions, and, for a quarter-century, has remained an effective tranquilizer for the conscience of the open-minded but confused suburban voter who cherishes choice for his and her own and might otherwise be moved politically to take an interest in aiding the less lucky family.

Of course, I should and do applaud exceptions such as the schools of Milwaukee (per the great Howard Fuller) and those states, such as Florida which have painfully begun the rescue of the conscript family despite constant assault upon their efforts by the media at the coaxing of unions and pliant legislators.

For his own political reasons, Joe Biden – the could-be hero of the low-income family – has instead made clear his intention to avoid his chance to move the media debate over choice into the light of day. The opportunity for a federal clarification of the purpose and effective design of the necessary instruments of reform that can bring about the liberation of the family will be ignored. The fate of school choice will be left to the hero states.

Unless legislative leaders and governors receive some urgent vision, the poor family will unnecessarily remain an impotent institution. With the current population demand that we recognize the poor to be as human as the rest of us, might we instead begin to honor all parents as dignified fellow creatures?

June 19, 2020 0 comment

2020 Presidential Election Blog Guest Charter Schools Chris Stewart Commentary and Opinion Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Featured Funding Opinion School Choice

Presidential candidates do not think all children are created equal

Chris Stewart February 28, 2020

Chris Stewart

Editor’s note: This column from redefinED guest blogger Chris Stewart first appeared Feb. 25 on Education Post.

I’m starting to notice a trend among the presidential candidates. I don’t think they’re vying to be a president who represents all Americans, just some. It sounds crazy but hear me out.

When Democratic frontrunners lavish attention on traditional public schools to the exclusion of charters, privates, and homeschoolers, it’s as if the worth of a child instantly plummets the moment they are enrolled in a disfavored school. As if their families don’t pay taxes and aren’t worthy as voters. Never mind the fact that many of the candidates have taken advantage of these same options.

Not to be outdone, President Trump got in on the action when he released a budget that cut funding for charter schools but increased funding for privates. Some of his supporters have told me not to worry because one, a president’s budget is a fictional thing, and two, the funding for charter schools is just being bundled together with other programs. It’s called “block granting” and that’s a good thing because it can give states the flexibility to use the money in a way that makes sense for their local context.

That sounds great in theory until you consider the fact that flexibility in a state like California, the largest charter system in America, could easily fall victim to union politics. Handing over charter school money would be a financial love letter to a fickle governor, one that would give him Thanos-like powers to snap his fingers and freeze charters startups.

But maybe I’m making too much of this.

The candidates would respond to me by saying they aren’t proposing the elimination of charter schools. They just want to slow their growth. And, the block-granting of federal funds isn’t the end-all of charter funding. And, after all, maybe there is more to life than charters. Most of the candidates are proposing enormous new investments that will grow school staff and provide more services to kids.

Who can complain about that? I can.

Yes, research shows that money matters in public education, but some of the nation’s biggest spenders are still hot zones of poor achievement and unacceptable results. Teachers unions and their allies have cleverly called for things like “community schools” as a main investment. It sounds good until you consider the fact that many of the existing community schools need help. Lots of it.

And no matter how much you wrap kids in services, it will still be a problem that our nation’s teachers aren’t recruited from the top of the class, their preparation is trash, and the support of many of those who teach in the toughest schools is nonexistent. To cover this with “I-stand-with-teachers” happy talk is to prove oneself incapable of true leadership.

We need a leader who will stand up for all families. We need someone who will fight for every American child equally. Today, parents from around the country are headed to South Carolina in hopes of meeting with presidential candidates to urge them to bring about “big, bold changes.” Because the fact is, every child deserves a better education, and our current system isn’t offering that.

We need people who can bring us together rather than continuing the bad practice of pitting parents against each other, then siding with the groups that want one form of schooling to be the only form of schooling.

Which leader is that?

I’m looking.

February 28, 2020 0 comment

2020 Presidential Election Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Education Politics Featured Jack Coons School Choice Vouchers

The state of the (teachers) union

John E. Coons February 14, 2020

John E. Coons

Somebody in the White House has been thinking. President Trump’s recent State of the Union address, while wanting perhaps in style, included a truly clever turn of the screw.

Trump stole an issue only Cory Booker among the Democrats dared to touch – school choice for low income families. Booker was ready to face the teachers union; the other candidates for the Democratic nomination were not, and now really cannot.

Trump now owns the issue, and it connects him to those individuals who are sick of having their kids conscripted for a school the child and family despise. Those persons had found the president wanting in this area, but he now will be a hero to thousands who have been crying for so long for an end to compulsion.

The details of any specific proposal will, of course, be crucial to its actual success. I trust this proposal will not be the sort of small and uniform voucher for rich and poor alike, the sort one associates with the late Milton Friedman. The rich do not need the help, and at most should qualify for a token subsidy. The need is centered on low and lower-middle income families who are simply stuck.

Could the federal government by itself afford to provide the necessary dollars for an authentic and sufficient subsidy for all the poor to have their choice of school? Of course not. But, properly designed, it could intensify popular awareness of the potential of reform at the state level.

One great stumbling block for school choice subsidies has been the 19^th century adoption by most states of so-called Blaine amendments to their constitutions. These raised legal barriers to all financial aid to religious institutions. Such laws greatly limit the states’ ability to aid the parents’ choice of religious schools which make up most of the private sector. Happily, the Supreme Court has before it litigation which could well eliminate the problem by holding these 19^th century relics of prejudice unconstitutional.

What will be the response of Democratic candidates to the dilemma Trump has posed for them? If they continue their hostility to forms of aid that allow the poor parent to choose, they will maintain the support of the teachers union but risk that of those low-income fathers and mothers who have enthusiastically stood for subsidies spendable in private school.

Trump now has in hand the sort of weapon he obviously prizes and perhaps should. He has his opponents clearly in his sights as hypocrites, the kind of slam they have so frequently given him. The Dems have made their careers as heroes of the poor. For whom will they be heroes now?

February 14, 2020 4 comments