Meanwhile, children have been falling behind academically, mentally, and physically — and their families have been scrambling to search for education alternatives because of the traditional public school system’s unwillingness, and in some cases inability, to adapt to change.

The past year has exposed one of the main problems with K-12 education in the United States: There is a long-existing massive power imbalance between the public school monopoly and individual families.

Residentially-assigned public schools receive large amounts of children’s education dollars regardless of how well they meet the needs of individual families, and as we’ve witnessed this past year, regardless of whether they even open their doors for business.

It’s one thing for a child’s residentially-assigned public school to continue receiving their education dollars year after year despite failing to meet their needs. But it’s another conversation altogether for that same school to continue to receive a child’s education dollars while their doors are closed. Parents across the country are waking up to the fact that they’re getting the short end of the stick when it comes to K-12 education.

If a grocery store doesn’t reopen, families can take their money elsewhere. Families are realizing that if their child’s school doesn’t reopen, they should similarly be able to take their education dollars elsewhere. In fact, families should be able to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere regardless of their school’s reopening decision. After all, education funding is supposed to be for educating children, not for protecting a particular institution.

There has been a recent surge in support for funding students instead of systems. The latest nationwide survey from RealClear Opinion Research found that support for funding students directly increased by 10 percentage points in just a few months — from 67 percent in April to 77 percent in August 2020 — among parents with children in public schools. Another national survey conducted by Ed Choice found that support for four types of school choice — education savings accounts, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers, and charter schools — all surged between the spring and fall of 2020.

The post The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Shown Why We Should Fund Students, Not Systems appeared first on Reason Foundation.

House Bill 2013 — which recently passed out of the House — would allow nearly all families in the state to take a portion of their children’s K-12 dollars to the public or private education provider of their choice. This would empower families to find the educational environment that works best for their students and not simply fund traditional institutions, as the state has done for years.

Funding students directly is nothing new for higher education and early childhood programs in West Virginia. Pell Grants, the GI Bill, the West Virginia Higher Education Grant and the West Virginia Promise Scholarship all provide funds to higher education students who can use them at the college of their choice. The same goes for early childhood programs such as Head Start programs and West Virginia Universal Pre-K, which grants funds to families.

Oddly enough, supporters of funding students directly when it comes to higher education and pre-K generally reject providing the same benefits to students while they attend K-12 schools. What is the reason behind this apparent logical inconsistency? The difference may well be one of power dynamics. School choice is the norm when it comes to higher education and pre-K. But that same choice can threaten special interests in traditional K-12 education spheres who have long gotten children’s education dollars regardless of how well they serve students’ needs.

Not surprisingly, defenders of the public school monopoly fiercely resist allowing families to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere. Unfortunately, they often repeatedly invoke untrue claims to do so, even though these claims fall apart under just modest scrutiny.

The number one argument from defenders of the status quo is that school choice “defunds” public schools. But the basic reality is that public school systems use families’ taxpayer dollars to begin with. Choice initiatives simply return funds to families and let the people the money is intended to serve make decisions for themselves. Allowing families to choose their school doesn’t defund public schools any more than allowing families to choose a different grocery store defunds Kroger. The goal should be to educate children, not prop up particular institutions.

And why would giving families a choice automatically defund public schools, anyway? The argument itself is a huge concession, assuming that lots of families would prefer something other than their assigned public schools. But that’s not all.

West Virginia’s public schools spend an average of $12,644 per child per year, while the estimated amount of funding that would follow the child under HB 2013 would be about $4,600. If the legislation becomes law, public schools would keep large amounts of funding for children even after they left, meaning they would end up with more money per child. Imagine if Kroger was able to keep a substantial portion of your grocery budget even after you started shopping at Wal-Mart. That would be a fantastic deal for Kroger.

This competition may be why 26 of 28 studies — and the most comprehensive peer-reviewed meta-analysis — find that school choice generally leads to better outcomes in nearby public schools. And five studies find that competition leads to higher salaries for public school teachers. School choice is that rising tide that lifts all boats.

Some choice opponents in the state also are claiming that $4,600 is too low to cover private school tuition. But do those same people oppose Pell Grants just because they don’t cover the full cost of attending many universities? Or food stamps just because they might not cover the full grocery bill? Of course not. Some assistance is better than none at all.

And $4,600 would actually go a long way in West Virginia as the average private school tuition in the state is just $6,068 and the average elementary school cost is $4,890. Of course, we could give families a larger portion of their children’s education dollars — let’s say half — but then those same opponents would almost certainly invoke the defunding myth even more loudly.

The worst thing about anti-school choice myths is that they disproportionately prevent the least advantaged from access to much-needed education options. Advantaged families can afford to live in the neighborhoods assigned to the best public schools, pay for private school tuition or cover the costs of home-based education.

Funding students directly allows far more families to access these alternatives.

Don’t let baseless claims block educational opportunities for West Virginia children. Fund students, not institutions.

A version of this column previously appeared in the Herald-Star.

The post West Virginia Looks to Expand Educational Freedom appeared first on Reason Foundation.

One key factor driving parental exasperation is the obvious contrast between what public schools have done during this period and what private schools have done. While public schools in many cities remain closed, private schools and daycare centers have been fighting to safely reopen their doors for months. In fact, private schools in Kentucky went all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for the right to provide in-person services to their customers. A private school in Sacramento County, Calif., even rebranded itself as a “daycare” by training its employees as child-care workers in an attempt to get around the government’s arbitrary closure rules. Nationwide and state-specific data confirm that private schools have been substantially more likely to reopen in-person than nearby public schools. And four rigorous studies have each found that public-school districts with stronger teachers’ unions have been significantly less likely to reopen in person.

Even more frustrating, there is no major medical reason for this disparity. In fact, keeping schools closed for in-person instruction flies in the face of the science. Last month, Center for Disease Control (CDC) researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that “the preponderance of available evidence from the fall school semester has been reassuring” and that “there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.” In New York City, for example, the latest positivity rate reported in schools was less than a tenth of the positivity rate in the overall community. Additional studies from other countries — including Sweden, Ireland, Norway, and Singapore — similarly suggest schools are not major contributors of community spread. UNICEF also reported that “data from 191 countries show no consistent association between school reopening status and COVID-19 infection rates.”

Yet certain examples of public-school behavior are particularly egregious even by these standards. For instance, while some public K–12 providers insisted on keeping classrooms fully remote, they were opening the same school buildings for in-person childcare services and charging families hundreds of dollars per child per week out of pocket. If the schools could reopen for in-person childcare services, why couldn’t they open for in-person learning? And more recently, a Chicago Teachers Union board member was caught vacationing in Puerto Rico while rallying teachers on social media to not return to work in person. But if was safe enough to travel to another country and vacation in person, then why wasn’t it safe enough to return to work in person?

Of course, some high-risk teachers have real health concerns and are looking for good-faith ways to make schools safer for them to be in. Unfortunately, unions have largely taken an all-or-nothing approach to their demands for reopening. In fact, many teachers’ unions across the country have been fighting to remain closed since the start of the pandemic. The public-school monopoly sought to protect itself at the expense of families as soon as the lockdowns began last March. The Oregon Education Association successfully lobbied that same month to make it illegal for families to switch to virtual charter schools. The Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators lobbied for the same thing that month to prevent desperate families from taking their children’s education dollars to schools that had years of experience operating virtually. California took similar action by passing a bill that effectively prevented families from taking their children’s education dollars to public charter schools.

That’s not the only evidence that some teachers’ unions often prioritize politics and power over the needs of families. Take a look at some of their demands. In their report on safely reopening schools, the Los Angeles teachers’ union called for things unrelated to reopening schools, such as defunding the police, Medicare-for-All, a wealth tax, and a ban on charter schools. At least ten teachers’ unions joined with the Democratic Socialists of America to hold a “National Day of Resistance” to “Demand Safe Schools” on two occasions in less than a year. Included in their list of demands, in addition to more funding and staffing, were police-free schools, rent cancelation, unemployment benefits for all, and a ban on standardized tests and new charter schools.

Meanwhile, families have been left scrambling for nearly a year now and many children are falling behind academically, mentally, and physically. After all this, parents are beginning to realize that it is time for a change in the relationship between students and schools. They’ve recognized that it does not make any sense to fund closed school buildings when we can fund students directly instead. Think of it this way: If a grocery store doesn’t reopen, families can take their money elsewhere. If a school doesn’t reopen, families should similarly be able to take their children’s taxpayer-funded education dollars elsewhere. After all, education funding is supposed to be meant for educating children, not for protecting a particular institution.

Recent nationwide polling from RealClearOpinion Research found that support for the concept of school choice jumped ten percentage points in just a few months — from 67 percent in April to 77 percent in August 2020 — among families with children in the public-school system last year. Another national survey conducted by Morning Consult found that support for several types of school choice — education savings accounts, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and charter schools — all surged between the spring and fall of 2020. The same national poll found that 81 percent of the general public — and 86 percent of parents of school-aged children — now support funding students directly through education savings accounts.

These initiatives allow families to take a portion of their children’s K–12 education dollars, which would have otherwise automatically funneled to their residentially assigned public-school district, to cover the costs associated with any approved education provider, such as private schooling, tutoring, homeschooling, microschooling, and “pandemic pods.” And, of course, families would still be able to take all of their children’s education dollars to their residentially assigned public school if they prefer.

It isn’t just voters who are changing their minds. Legislators in at least 23 states have introduced bills in the past two months to fund students instead of systems. Five of these states — Arizona, Iowa, Indiana, West Virginia, and Kansas — have already passed school-choice bills out of a chamber, and three others — Florida, Missouri, and South Dakota — have passed bills out of committees.

Language in some of this new legislation also suggests that the push to fund students instead of systems is the direct result of the inability or unwillingness of some teachers’ unions and school systems to reopen in person. Legislators in states including Utah, Maryland, and Illinois introduced bills to allow families to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere if their public schools didn’t reopen in person. The proposal to fund students directly in Georgia includes several eligibility categories — one of which happens to be for students assigned to public schools without full-time in-person instruction. Congressman Dan Bishop also introduced federal legislation to allow families to take some of their children’s K–12 education dollars to private providers if their public schools don’t reopen in person.

Families are also fighting back in other ways. Parents are filing lawsuits against school districts over their inadequate reopening plans. Others are pushing to recall school-board members.

The good news is that teachers’ unions and others who oppose safe in-person instruction have done more to advance school choice in the past year than anyone could have ever imagined. The pandemic has revealed the main problem with K–12 education: There is a massive power imbalance between the public school system and individual families.

Families have always gotten the short end of the stick on K–12 education. But it’s more obvious now than ever, and families are figuring out they’re getting a bad deal. The only way that we’re ever going to fix that uneven power dynamic is to give families real options by funding students directly.

It’s about time we get our priorities right and fund students, not systems.

The post COVID-19 Pandemic Continues to Show the Need for Funding Students, Not Systems appeared first on Reason Foundation.

This is happening nowhere more prominently than Iowa, where a bill to enact an education savings account program has passed the State Senate and is being considered in the House. But the proposal has also sparked substantial debate, the kind that tends to feature a lot of anti-school choice myths. Iowans cannot afford to let these myths block better educational opportunities for their children.

At the heart of Senate File 159 is the creation of new “Student First Scholarship” education savings accounts, into which the state would deposit funds. Eligible families could use the funds for private school tuition, like a traditional voucher, but also for myriad other educational uses, including after-school tutoring, therapy for children with disabilities, and more. Students in public schools flagged for poor performance would qualify for the scholarship and have around $5,200 put into their education savings accounts each year.

A common concern is that such a program would “siphon” money from cash-strapped public schools, hurting the children left behind. As the Des Moines Register editorialized, calling for choice “is an attempt to put lipstick on the pig of siphoning taxpayer money from public schools to funnel to private schools.”

At first blush, that may seem like a reasonable concern: having state dollars following a child to another education provider could, indeed, leave a public school with fewer funds. But that is not siphoning. It is connecting the money to the people it is most supposed to serve — children — and the funds only leave if a family has found an education provider it prefers.

Look at it this way: A family taking money for their child’s education from a public to a private school no more siphons dollars from a public school than choosing to go to Price Chopper siphons from Hy-Vee. Pell Grants similarly do not “siphon” money from community colleges just because they can be used at private universities chosen by students.

Education funding should not belong to any particular institution. It is meant for educating children.

Moreover, since only state funding would follow a child, a lot of money would stay with the public school, increasing resources for each child remaining in the public school. With Iowa spending an estimated $13,774 per public-school student according to the Census Bureau, a $5,200 savings account deposit would leave money behind.

Imagine if Hy-Vee were able to keep most of your grocery budget after you started shopping at your preferred Price Chopper. That would be a fantastic deal for Hy-Vee. The public schools similarly get to keep large sums of money for children they are no longer educating.

Perhaps the per-pupil financial gain for public schools is one reason research has found that in regions where there is more private school choice, public schools perform better. Or perhaps public schools’ improvements have to do with competition — as schools have to up their game when someone else could get their funding. Regardless, 26 of 28 studies on the topic find that school choice leads to better outcomes for children who remain in public schools.

It is the proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats.

And let’s be clear: Anti-choice myths disproportionately prevent the least advantaged from having educational options. The most advantaged families already have school choice. They can afford to live in neighborhoods that are residentially assigned to the best public schools. They can afford to pay out of pocket for the costs of private education.

Funding students directly allows more families to access educational alternatives. School choice is an equalizer.

Ultimately, the need for choice is simple: It is unfair to have a child’s ZIP code determine their future. Iowa should fund students, not institutions.

This column was co-authored by Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute.

A version of this column first appeared in the Des Moines Register. 

The post School Choice Myths Should Not Block Educational Freedom appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Senate Bill 48 would further solidify Florida’s position as one of the leading states when it comes to providing school choice and an array of educational options to hundreds of thousands of families.

Education savings accounts expand families’ abilities to customize their children’s educational experiences by additionally allowing them to spend their education dollars on other approved education providers, including private tutoring, instructional and testing materials, special needs therapies, and home-based education. This flexibility is more important now than ever due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as families work around the shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all system and seek out individualized alternatives to the traditional educational system, such as microschooling and “pandemic pods.”

The latest polling conducted by Morning Consult, a survey of 810 parents with children in schools, found that 71 percent of adults residing in Florida support education savings accounts, which is 8 percentage points higher than the percentage of Floridians supporting private school vouchers. And nationwide polling from RealClear Opinion Research found that support for the concept of school choice jumped by 10 percentage points between April and August of 2020 among parents with children in public schools.

Although the Florida bill doesn’t expand income-based eligibility, it does increase the chances that the supply of funding would be able to cover demand from families by merging existing privately funded programs with the taxpayer-funded Family Empowerment Scholarship Program. This change means low-income families wouldn’t have to solely rely on the public relations-related decisions of corporate donors to access scholarship opportunities.

This legislation funds students directly and empowers their families to choose the educational opportunities that work best for them. This funding mechanism provides the strongest form of accountability that exists: direct accountability to students and their families. If a private education provider underperforms then families can take their children’s education dollars elsewhere. This provides real, bottom-up accountability.

Funding students directly through education savings accounts should not be a partisan issue. Financially-advantaged families already have school choice. They are more likely to be able to afford the costs associated with private education than the less fortunate.  We already fund students, rather than systems, when it comes to higher education—with Pell Grants and the GI Bill—and pre-K programs, including Head Start. This bill, SB 48, applies similar logic to K-12 education.

This bill does a lot to expand educational freedom in Florida. Every single family should be able to take their children’s education dollars to the education provider of their choosing. We can accomplish this by funding all students directly.

The post Testimony: Florida Should Expand Education Savings Accounts appeared first on Reason Foundation.

But the Sunshine State may not be done yet. The Florida Senate Education Committee recently passed a bill, introduced by State Sen. Manny Diaz, Jr. (R), to expand funding provided directly to students instead of systems. The committee voted along party lines to advance the bill. Senate Bill 48 would still need to pass the full State Senate and House and be signed by the governor to become law but it looks like another positive development for students and families.

The bill would merge Florida’s five existing private school choice programs in the state into two: the Family Empowerment Scholarship program and the McKay-Gardiner Scholarship program. Each of these programs would be modified into an education savings accounts.

Education savings accounts are similar to private school vouchers in that a portion of a child’s state-funded education dollars would be able to follow them to the private school of their family’s choosing. But education savings accounts also expand families’ abilities to customize their children’s educational experiences by additionally allowing them to spend these dollars on other approved education services, including private tutoring, instructional and testing materials, special needs therapies, and home-based education.

In this sense, the legislation would allow eligible Florida families to access “education choice” as opposed to just “school choice.”

The bill would also eliminate the requirement that students switch out of a public school to be eligible for the Family Empowerment Scholarship and McKay programs. This change makes sense: low-income families who sacrificed to pay for private education out of pocket before they had access to these programs shouldn’t be penalized. Families should be able to take their children’s education dollars to the education provider of their choosing regardless of the type of school their children attended in the past. And requiring students to switch out of public schools creates a perverse incentive for families to switch their children into public schools for a year just to gain eligibility, which could unnecessarily disruptive to a child’s educational experience.

The change would also additionally allow homeschooled students from low-income families to be eligible for the Family Empowerment Scholarship Program going forward.

SB 48 also increases the chances that funding will be able to cover demand from families. Because the existing privately funded tax-credit scholarship programs would be merged with the taxpayer-funded Family Empowerment Scholarship Program and families will be able to take a portion of their children’s taxpayer-funded K-12 education dollars to the education provider of their choosing without having to solely rely on private donations.

Additionally, the Family Empowerment Scholarship award would increase from 95 percent to 97.5 percent of the amount of operational funding public school students receive from the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP), which accounts for about three-quarters of total funding. This scholarship amount would be estimated to be around up to $7,600 per student in the 2020-21 school year.

Although the bill generally moves in the right direction towards expanding educational freedom for families, it also caps the McKay Scholarship Program for students with special needs to 50,000 students in the first year with a growth rate of 7 percent each following year. All students with an Individual Education Plan—over 300,000 students in the state—are currently eligible to receive McKay Scholarships. However, in no year since the inception of the program two decades ago has more than 32,000 students used the program, and program use has remained steady—about 30,000 students each year—in the last seven years. In other words, this change on paper appears to be a non-binding constraint in practice.

Senate Bill 48 is a step in the right direction and further expands educational freedom in Florida, but more needs to be done. Every single family should be able to take their children’s education dollars to the education provider of their choice, not just the families with children who meet certain state eligibility requirements.

Every single student has unique needs and every single family should have educational options. Let’s fund all students directly to give them better access to those options.

You can find an interview with author Corey DeAngelis and Senator Manny Diaz Jr, the sponsor of SB 48 here. 

The post Florida’s Latest Proposal to Expand Educational Freedom appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In 2019, public charter schools received about $10,824 per pupil compared to $11,637 for public school districts, a funding disadvantage of $813 per pupil. Over the last five years, the funding gap has grown by almost 36 percent- from $596 to $813.

To help illustrate these trends and their importance to students, Reason Foundation’s education policy team created an interactive dashboard that uses statewide and metro school district data to allow users to examine important revenue and student demographic trends.

The new, interactive data dashboard is available here: Texas Charter School Funding Analysis. And you can also find a mobile-friendly version of the dashboard here: Texas Charter School Funding Analysis (mobile).

It is important to account for student demographics when evaluating how education dollars are allocated to Texas schools. Thus, the dashboard looks at important trends in student demographics, such as special education needs, low-income status, and limited English proficiency, which all have varying degrees of added educational costs.

The data show that statewide, public charter schools serve greater proportions of economically-disadvantaged and limited English proficiency students but a smaller proportion of special education students than public school districts.

Despite public charter students now accounting for about 5.8 percent of all Texas public school students in average daily attendance, they receive only 5.4 percent of all statewide education revenue.

You can find more information on Texas charter school funding, including revenue comparisons that control for cost factors such as location and student demographics here: Fiscal Explainer – Texas Charter School Funding Analysis 

You can also find an infographic on Texas charter school funding here: Infographic – The Texas Charter Funding Gap

The post Examining Student Funding in Texas Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools appeared first on Reason Foundation.

• Public charters receive about $813 less state and local funding per pupil than public school districts, on average, representing a per-pupil funding disparity of 7 percent.
• The primary driver of this overall disparity is facilities revenue. On average, public school districts raise $1,505 per pupil from local I&S (interest and sinking) dollars and also receive $105 per pupil in state debt funding. In comparison, public charters aren’t eligible for I&S dollars and receive an average of $196 per pupil in facilities support from the state.
• On average, public charters generate about $692 per pupil more in M&O
  (maintenance and operations) dollars, which is likely driven by differences in how the small and mid-sized district allotment is calculated. However, this amount falls well short of bridging the revenue gap caused by facilities funding.
• Between 2015 and 2019 the inflation-adjusted funding gap grew by about 36 percent—from $596 per pupil to $813 per pupil.
• Regression analyses indicate that differences in several cost factors, including student demographics, do not explain the difference in funding between public charters and public school districts.
• On average, public charters operating in Texas’ metro areas receive fewer dollars per pupil than public school districts operating in metro areas.
• Public charters serve about 5.8 percent of Texas’ public education students in ADA (average daily attendance) and receive about 5.4 percent of state and local education dollars— $3.138 billion out of about $58.156 billion.

Reason Foundation’s data dashboard allows users to evaluate these trends, including statewide and local comparisons for several public school districts.

Full Fiscal Explainer: Texas Charter School Funding Analysis  

The interactive data dashboard is available here: Texas Charter School Funding Analysis

You can also find an infographic on Texas charter school funding here: Infographic – The Texas Charter Funding Gap

The post Fiscal Explainer: Texas Charter School Funding Analysis appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The only way to truly address the diverse needs of families during the pandemic — and beyond — is for Pennsylvania to fund students, rather than school districts, directly.

This is exactly how we fund many other taxpayer-funded initiatives, including Pell Grants for higher education and prekindergarten programs. For these programs, funding goes to families who can then choose from a wide array of public or private providers of the service. The same goes for food stamps. In these scenarios, the power is rightly in the hands of families rather than institutions.

The current public health crisis has produced countless examples of special interests pushing to prevent families from having educational options. Pennsylvania is no exception. In March, the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators lobbied to make it illegal for families to enroll in virtual charter schools during the lockdown because they were concerned about school districts losing money.

Earlier this spring, the state legislature passed a bill preventing state education dollars from following additional students to charter schools, which protected traditional public schools at the expense of families who might need other options. Now, State Rep. Steve McCarter (D., Montgomery) is planning to introduce a bill that would freeze enrollment at virtual charter schools.

Pennsylvania could decide to instead put families first by allowing education dollars to follow children to the school that works best for them — whether that be a traditional district-run public school, charter school, or private school. One way to do so would be to expand access to the state’s two private school choice programs.

Expanding families’ educational options would not only benefit children but would also have a positive impact on the rest of society. My recently-released study suggests that giving Pennsylvania’s families more options could produce substantial economic and societal benefits through higher lifetime earnings and reductions in crime. The study’s model estimates that doubling current tax-credit scholarship funding in Pennsylvania could produce around $3 billion in additional lifetime earnings associated with improved academic achievement, and save $115 million via reductions in the social costs related to crime.

A timely solution to providing families with more educational options was introduced in the Pennsylvania legislature last month. The proposal would provide federal education dollars from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act directly to students to help families offset the costs of homeschooling and private education. These scholarships would be available to help 500,000 K-12 students in Pennsylvania get back on track this fall.

Other states like Oklahoma and South Carolina have already taken advantage of this idea by reallocating much of their federal stimulus dollars directly to families to help them adapt to the current situation as the country deals with the coronavirus pandemic this school year.

Funding students directly would also reduce inequities in school systems by allowing all students to have access to alternative education options. Wealthier families are already accessing “pandemic pods” and micro-schools. Families without the funds for these models risk seeing their students fall further behind.

Allowing just two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s currently allocated K-12 education dollars to follow students to their school of choice would provide each child with $12,500 per year. That’s well over the average private school tuition in the state, and would be more than enough to cover the costs of pandemic pods and micro-schools.

If a business like Walmart chooses not to reopen, families can take their money elsewhere. Shouldn’t families similarly be empowered to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere if schools don’t reopen in ways that fit the individual needs of students and parents? Education funding is intended to help children learn, not to protect a government monopoly.

A version of this column first appeared in the Philidelphia Inquirer. 

The post Pennsylvania Should Fund Students, Not School Districts appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In New York City, the Department of Education’s proposal to offer families a hybrid of part-time in-person instruction and remote learning starting Sept. 10 met with fierce opposition. Teachers’ groups poured into the streets to protest the plan, including with props such as fake body bags. Mayor de Blasio pushed back the opening after threatened strikes.

It’s happening nationwide. New data published at Education Week indicate that 78 percent of the nation’s 50 largest public districts aren’t planning to reopen with any in-person instruction.

Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public districts covering about 38 percent of all students enrolled in K-12 public schools in the country, our study finds that school districts in places with stronger teachers’ unions are much less likely to offer full-time, in-person instruction this fall.

For example, our models indicate that school districts in states without right-to-work laws are 14 percentage points less likely to reopen in person than those in states with such laws, which prevent unions from requiring membership.

A 10 percent increase in union power is associated with a 1.3 percentage-point lower probability of reopening in person. In Florida, for example, 79 percent of 38 school districts in the Education Week dataset are planning to offer full-time in-person instruction to all students. However, in New York, a state with much stronger teachers’ unions, none of the 21 school districts included in the dataset are planning to do the same.

We also find that a one percentage point increase in union membership at the state level is associated with a 1.5 percentage point lower probability of reopening in person. Then, too, a 10 percent rise in union workers at the county level is associated with around a one percentage point decline in the probability of reopening in person in the fall.

These results are remarkably consistent across various analytic models and even after controlling for differences in county demographics, including age, gender, marital status, race, population, education, political affiliation, household income, and COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita.

By contrast, reopening decisions are unrelated to COVID-19 risk as measured by recent cases per capita and deaths per capita in the county. That is also consistent with recent evidence that the biggest factor in what people believe about the pandemic is political affiliation — not COVID-19 risk or even demographic factors, such as age and race.

None of this means that teachers’ unions have bad intentions. Pushing against reopening schools in person could make sense from a cost-benefit analysis if it minimizes health risks for union members while maintaining about the same level of benefits in terms of job security and wages. In fact, virtual instruction can mean more benefits for union members: It can reduce their child-care responsibilities, hours of direct instruction and commute times.

The problem is that teachers aren’t the only stakeholders in the reopening debate. Keeping schools closed hurts families that need in-person options. Plus, remote learning provided by public districts may turn out to be a disaster for many students already falling behind.

A better solution: Governments should fund students directly, so they can take their education dollars to the schools of their choice. After all, education funding is supposed to be for educating students, not protecting traditional public schools when other options are available. School districts have the power to choose their own reopening plans. Let’s give families a choice, too.

This piece is co-authored by Christos A. Makridis, an assistant research professor at Arizona State University and a senior adviser at Gallup.

A version of this column first appeared in the New York Post. 

The post How Union Power Impacted School Districts’ COVID-19 Reopening Plans appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Some schools won’t reopen for in-person learning to start the school year, some might only partly do so, and some might open and then have to close if there is an outbreak of COVID-19. And some parents might just want to keep their children out of schools and avoid the risk of infection.

Over the past several months, traditional public schools have experienced major difficulties adjusting to remote learning. The failure of many district-run schools to make the digital leap pushed families to desperately seek education alternatives for their children.

Families saw virtual charter schools as a viable alternative because these schools were already providing adequate learning online for years before the pandemic. So many families in North Carolina committed to homeschooling in July that it overloaded the state’s website handling notices of intent to home-school. Nebraska’s homeschool filings are already up 21% from the same time last year. And multiple national surveys over the past few months have consistently indicated that 40%-60% of families are “likely” to use home-based education for their children this fall.

A preliminary, non-scientific Reason Foundation Twitter survey from May, which was not representative of all American families, suggested that 15% of respondents with children who attended traditional public schools before the lockdown would choose to home-school in the fall.

More recently, a nationally representative survey of 805 parents of school-aged parents conducted by Braun Research for EdChoice similarly found that 15% of families who were not homeschooling before the pandemic reported that they were “very likely” to do so full time this upcoming school year.

Given that around 50 million children attended traditional public schools before the lockdown, a 15% switch would imply 7.5 million more homeschoolers. This change would be around a 441% increase in the homeschool population since there were about 1.7 million children homeschooling before the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 32,000 parents have joined a private Facebook group called “pandemic pods” in just a few weeks. Families are coming together using these social media groups to form miniature private, school alternatives of around five to 10 students in households, or micro-schools, for their children in the fall. Another 14,000 parents joined a Facebook group called “Learn Everywhere” for resources and advice on homeschooling and remote learning.

Many have pointed out that inequities could result from “pandemic pods” because well-off families are in better financial positions to afford these educational alternatives during the recession. But that misses the obvious solution: Give education funding to students directly so that less advantaged families can seek out and afford these options as well.

Florida has been a national leader in school choice programs, with an emphasis on serving low-income and disadvantaged children. This pandemic makes it clear similar choice would be invaluable to countless families statewide.

The U.S. spends $15,424 per child per year in the public school system. Just imagine if a substantial portion of those dollars followed the child to the school of his or her choice. Families would be able to afford tuition and fees at many private schools — or they could use those dollars to offset the costs of home-based education of various types ranging from virtual charter schools to micro-schools to homeschooling.

If a grocery store does not reopen or offer what customers need, families are able to take their money elsewhere. If a school does not reopen or meet students’ needs, families should similarly be able to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere.

As a matter of fact, a family should be able to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere even if their school does reopen. Education funding is supposed to be for educating children—not funding a particular institution.

Unfortunately, our current school funding system of funding schools rather than students encourages resistance by the school system to fight changes that give parents choices. For example, the teachers union in Oregon successfully prevented any new families from being able to switch to virtual charter schools — with one such school reporting back in March that at least 1,600 students were blocked from enrolling.

The Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators similarly lobbied to make it illegal for families to switch to virtual charter schools. More recently, in California, the legislature passed a bill preventing education dollars from following children to the public school of their choosing — a move that has already forced one charter school to put 500 already-admitted students back on a waitlist. Teachers unions in North Carolina filed a lawsuit to end a private school choice program for children from low-income families in the state. The teachers union in Alaska similarly opposed a partnership with Florida Virtual School — a school that has been providing remote learning for decades — that would give families more educational options.

A massive crisis like the coronavirus pandemic is not the time to limit options for families struggling to find a way to balance their health, kids’ educations, and parents’ careers. They need flexibility and options.

We should change the school finance system so that families can choose to educate their children away from crowded schools if they want without sacrificing the resources commensurate with their children’s education needs.

Most families will likely choose their local district-run public schools, especially the ones that effectively adapt to families’ needs—and online education options may be part of that. But the real crux will be school funding that follows the child to whatever appropriate educational option the family chooses.

A version of this column first appeared in the Sarasota Observer.

The post It’s More Important Than Ever to Let Education Funding Follow Kids appeared first on Reason Foundation.

With so much uncertainty surrounding schools, we also discuss how families are searching for alternatives to the traditional K-12 public school system, such as micro-schools and homeschool co-ops. More families would have access to these alternatives if education funding followed children to wherever they receive their educations. Teachers could also benefit from such a system, which would likely offer them smaller class sizes, more autonomy, and higher salaries.

The post Video: The Coronavirus Pandemic, Reopening Schools, and Fixing School Finance Systems appeared first on Reason Foundation.

We also discussed the possibility of allowing existing federal funding to flow to individual families instead of school systems, the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Espinoza v. Montana in favor of school choice, and how some school districts were trying to use a federal education law as an excuse to not provide online or distance learning programs to their students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The post Podcast: The Ins and Outs of Education Freedom Scholarships appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Back in 2018, the Montana ­Supreme Court ruled that the state’s only private-school choice program was unconstitutional, ­because families could use tax-credit scholarship dollars to send their children to religious schools. The Supremes reversed that decision in a 5-4 ruling.

The Montana ruling, they held, unconstitutionally prevented families from using program funding to choose religious schools for their kids — a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Excluding families from using program funding at religious schools, the majority argued, is discrimination by the government on the basis of religion.

The ruling built on precedent. In a 2002 case, the Supreme Court held that voucher programs can be ­legally used to pay for religious schools. That’s because the funding goes to families, which can then choose to send their kids to religious or non-religious private schools. It’s the same reason why publicly funded Pell Grants can be used at private universities with religious affiliations without violating the Establishment Clause.

Then, too, Montana’s private-school choice program is privately funded: Tax-credit scholarship funding never ends up in the tax collector’s hands — which means the money headed to religious organizations never crossed the government’s palm in the first place.

So much for the (sound) reasoning. The Supreme Court’s decision means that private-school choice programs are forbidden from discriminating against religious families by ­excluding religious schools from participation. This has a few ­important implications.

First, Montana’s tax-credit scholarship program will resume operation. This also means that states like Maine and New Hampshire — which have private-school choice programs that prohibit families from using funding at religious ­institutions — will now have to ­allow participating families the choice of sending their children to religious private schools.

This decision also strikes a blow to the discriminatory “Blaine Amendments” found in 37 state constitutions. These amendments, which have often blocked families from using school-choice program funding to send their children to private schools, are rooted in the anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Catholic bigotry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As education scholar Matthew Ladner recently pointed out, “public schools in those days were pervasively religious, but ‘non-sectarian,’ meaning vaguely Protestant.” The Blaine Amendments were therefore used to favor the majority religious group, Protestants, over religious minorities such as Catholics (and Jews), by barring funding to their “sectarian” schools.

Some of American history’s most odious groups, including the Know-Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan, warned of a “Catholic Menace” and even fought to outlaw private schooling altogether in states like Oregon. The Klan, says Ladner, ­“approved of the curriculum in the public schools and wanted to make sure those Catholic kids became ‘real Americans,’ or in any case, what early 20th-century Klansmen viewed as ‘real Americans.’  ”

Although these groups succeeded in banning private schooling in 1922 in Oregon, the Supreme Court thankfully struck down that discriminatory law in Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925, when Associate Justice James McReynolds famously stated that “the child is not the mere creature of the state.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Montana case marks another step toward erasing the stain of anti-Catholic hatred written into the laws of many states. Religious liberty, parental rights and educational freedom all won at the court. But the real winners are America’s children.

A version of this column previously appeared in the New York Post.

The post The Supreme Court’s Espinoza v. Montana Decision Is A Huge Win For School Choice appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Several viral social media posts claim legislators have been draining education funding for years. A tweet from a high school football coach asserting that “they’ve been defunding education for years” has garnered over a half-million likes in just a few days.

The problem is that we haven’t actually defunded education. We’ve done the opposite.

On average, the United States currently spends over $15,000 per student each year, and inflation-adjusted K-12 education spending per student has increased by 280 percent since 1960. In California, where the previously mentioned football coach resides, inflation-adjusted spending on K-12 education has increased by 129 percent since 1970. Furthermore, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that nearly a third of all state budget expenditures go toward education.

This is a particularly pernicious myth in the education debate because increased education spending generally isn’t associated with better results. Stanford University economist Eric Hanushek reviewed nearly 400 studies on the topic and concluded that “there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources.”

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Pouring more money into the same broken system won’t fix the deeper problem — government monopolies have weak incentives to cater to the needs of their customers by spending money wisely.

Why won’t this myth ever die? And why do defenders of the government schooling monopoly fight so hard against legitimate data showing that we’ve clearly increased education funding substantially over time?

Part of the problem might have to do with media outlets often getting the basic facts wrong. False claims around education spending often go uncorrected, and corrections are likely to go unnoticed, especially when outlets drag their feet or make stealth edits.

For example, Robert Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, authored a piece for the Washington Post falsely claiming that “public funding for schools has actually decreased since the late 1980s.” With prodding and evidence to the contrary, a correction was made to the article — but it was eight days after the article was published.

A couple of months later, the Philadelphia Inquirer similarly claimed that there have been “drastic cuts to funding over the last few decades” in education. That’s not true in the U.S. It’s not true in Pennsylvania either. The outlet eventually corrected the statement to say funding has actually increased, but that didn’t stop them from sticking to the same narrative.

In April, an article in the Washington Post falsely claimed that “education funding remained below pre-recession levels in real dollar terms in most states — sometimes up to 30 percent.” Its own source even showed that the claim was false on two counts: Real education spending actually increased in most states, and no state decreased funding by 30%.

In May, an article in the New York Times falsely claimed that “a year of U.S. public education costs about $400 billion.” Its own source showed they were off by a long shot. The U.S. spends about $739 billion each year on K-12 education, about 85% higher than the original false claim.

Also last month, the Washington Post claimed that D.C. schools spend “$11,310 in base spending” per student. That’s extremely misleading. The most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the district spends over $31,000 per student each year. The city’s mayor also just proposed to further increase the district’s education spending despite the expected economic downturn.

The false claims consistently purport that we spend less than we actually do. In that sense, it shouldn’t surprise us that so many people believe that we have “been defunding education for years.” And if the public believes America spends less on education, they will be misled to push policymakers to throw more money at the problem without fixing real systemic issues.

One of the main issues with this approach is that too few dollars actually make it into the classroom.

Benjamin Scafidi’s seminal report, Back to the Staffing Surge, outlines that the problem with K-12 education funding in America today isn’t the overall amount of dollars going into government schools, but how those dollars are allocated by school districts. Surges in staffing and administrative bloat have become the norm across the country. From 1950 to 2009, student populations increased by 96%, while non-teaching staff increased by a whopping 702%.

More recently, Scafidi observed that between 1992 and 2014, real education spending per pupil increased by 27 percent, whereas real teacher salaries dropped by 2 percent.

What makes defenders of the government schooling monopoly think that the money will actually make it into the classroom this time around? How can we change the system so that education dollars are spent wisely? How can we ensure that the money will be used to help students?

These are the kinds of discussions we should be having. There’s a lot of room to debate the costs and benefits of pouring more money into the current education system. But these discussions must be based on an agreed-upon set of basic facts rather than emotions.

A version of this column originally appeared in the Washington Examiner. 

The post Inflation-Adjusted K-12 Education Spending Per Student Has Increased By 280 Percent Since 1960 appeared first on Reason Foundation.

What effects could a shift toward mass homeschooling have on society? Existing studies suggest homeschoolers generally fare better academically and socially than their peers in conventional schools. But new data suggest breaking away from the factory-model school system could also lead to more technological innovation. Here’s how.

Our first-of-its-kind study, published recently as a working paper, uses publicly-available data from a half-century to examine the effects of state-level compulsory schooling laws on innovation in the United States as measured by patents per capita and worker productivity.

Between 1852 and 1929, all 50 states and Washington, D.C., passed compulsory schooling laws. The staggered timing of these compulsory schooling laws set up a natural experiment for researchers to explore the effects of structured schooling on outcomes such as innovation over time.

We found significant reductions in patents per capita starting three decades after states passed compulsory schooling laws, which is when students affected by the policies would have been in their mid-40s, about the prime age for patenting activity. We also found some evidence to suggest that compulsory schooling laws reduced worker productivity over time. But why?

Compulsory schooling laws could have changed the nature and structure of U.S. education by pressuring many families to transition from unstructured and home-based education to factory-model schooling.

As John Taylor Gatto, an author and teacher, has argued, the structured and compulsory school system in the U.S. was adopted from the Prussian school system, which was created for the explicit purpose of delivering “obedient soldiers to the army” and “well-subordinated clerks to industry.” Capturing the sentiment that would later be described by Gatto, a German philosopher by the name of Johann Gottlieb Fichte famously said in 1807 that “schools must fashion the person and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”

Echoing the idea of the factory model of schooling, education historian Kevin Currie-Knight explained that schools historically “inculcated students with habits that would fit them for industrial wage work,” which may inhibit creative pursuits. Economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis similarly argued that the father of American public education, Horace Mann, “was a supporter of the industrial system” and that public schools were meant to train students to take “on as their own the values and objectives of those in authority.”

Relative to self-directed and child-centered home education, compulsory government schooling could theoretically crush creativity and stifle innovation. The highly structured nature of formal schooling could inhibit creative thinking through the use of uniform curriculum, teaching to standardized tests, and policies that discipline even minor forms of disobedience.

In formal school settings, children are often pressured to believe that good grades, a clean disciplinary record, and favor by authority figures is the key to long-term success. Because grades reflect a student’s ability to regurgitate material presented by teachers, students are incentivized to memorize the information that is deemed important by the adults. Standardized testing further discourages creative thinking by forcing children to hyperfocus on tested material and choose the “right” answer.

This focus on uniform curriculum and pleasing authority figures hinders children’s abilities to direct their own educational pursuits. The system of formal schooling could, therefore, stifle innovative thinking in both the short and long-run relative to a system of unstructured or home-based education.

Although more empirical evidence is needed on the topic, it is theoretically plausible that mass homeschooling could unlock creative thinking and technological innovation. Allowing all students to pursue their passions may not create obedient factory workers, but that is okay. The industrial era is long gone. Maybe we should put the factory model school system behind us too.

This column was co-authored by Angela Dills, professor of economics and the Gimelstob-Landry Distinguished Professor for Regional Economic Development at Western Carolina University. It originally was published in the Washington Examiner.

The post A Major Shift to Homeschooling Could Help Unleash Innovation appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The post Podcast: Are We in the Midst of a Quiet Education Revolution? appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Professor Bartholet argues a presumptive ban is warranted because homeschooling supposedly “violates children’s right to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse.” Bartholet had also organized a now-canceled anti-homeschooling conference to be held at Harvard Law School next month. The official description of the invite-only event said that “the focus will be on problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling.”

But that was only the beginning. Just last week, a Harvard University employee wrote an anti-homeschooling article, “In Defense of Elizabeth Bartholet,” in the Harvard Crimson. Bartholet also came out swinging. The Harvard Gazette just ran an interview with her titled “A warning on homeschooling.” They should have saved the characters and called it what it really is: a war on homeschooling.

Echoing her previous work, the Harvard Law School professor started her anti-homeschooling interview with anti-conservative and anti-Christian fearmongering. Without evidence, Bartholet claimed that “many homeschooling parents are extreme ideologues, committed to raising their children within their belief systems isolated from any societal influence.” She said homeschoolers might not be taught democratic principles, “such as tolerance of other people’s views and values,” which is ironic, seeing as she doesn’t seem very tolerant of conservatives and Christians. And we already live in a highly polarized society. Does she really think the 3 percent of children who were homeschooled before the lockdown are the root of our problems?

Bartholet also argued that “there is a strong connection between homeschooling and maltreatment” and that some homeschooled “children are simply not learning basic skills or learning about the most basic democratic values of our society.” She doesn’t have any legitimate evidence for these claims.

But we do have hard evidence of widespread educational failures and abuse in public schools. The Nation’s Report Card just came out last month, and the results aren’t pretty. Only 15 percent of students were proficient in U.S. history, and 3 out of 4 students were not proficient in civics or geography. The most recent report on the subject from the U.S. Department of Education estimated that 1 in 10 children in government schools will experience educator sexual misconduct by the time they graduate from high school. A 2018 report from the Department of Education also found that 79 percent of government schools recorded that a violent incident or crime occurred on their campuses and that about 20 percent of students were bullied in the most recent school year. Based on her own logic, perhaps Bartholet should be calling for a presumptive ban on government schooling.

Indeed, Bartholet accidentally made an argument for homeschooling when she said “the biggest teachers’ unions in the country have found homeschooling deeply problematic.” The teachers union isn’t in the business of helping students; it’s in the business of protecting a monopoly. In fact, the nation’s largest teachers union recently rejected an initiative to “dedicate itself to the pursuit of increased student learning” and not to waver “in its commitment to student learning.” And a 2019 publication in the American Economic Journal found that teacher collective bargaining harms students by reducing their earnings later on in life.

The main logic behind Bartholet’s proposed “presumptive” ban is that “if parents have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about.” If that logic is justified, shouldn’t we all be forced to send our children to the government before the age of 5 because of the “potential” for abuse? And if we all want children to eat healthy food, shouldn’t we all be forced to pay for government employees to sit at our dinner tables each night because of the “potential” for malnourishment? And why stop at the age of 18? Shouldn’t 100 percent of adult couples be forced to attend government counseling sessions because of the “potential” for abuse? Of course not. We shouldn’t punish all families for the actions of a few bad actors.

We would also have to get rid of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures and our Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, because “if you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.” The same logic can be used to justify stop-and-frisk policies, which can come along with all sorts of unintended consequences such as racial discrimination and accidental deaths. A presumptive ban assumes we are all guilty until proven innocent, which cuts against the very core of America’s understanding of justice.

Bartholet argues that “our federal Constitution provides parents with powerful constitutional rights to raise their children.” But the Constitution doesn’t grant us our rights. Instead, it is a check on government abuse of power against our rights. Our rights preexist the government.

The Harvard professor has also said that “effectively, there’s a right to abuse your child and to not educate your child, so long as you homeschool.” This is absurd. Abusing children is illegal — and rightly so. Of course, no serious advocates of homeschooling are arguing that anyone should be able to abuse children.

In her most recent interview, Bartholet says that even for “parents granted permission to homeschool,” she would “still require that their kids participate in at least some school courses and extracurricular activities.” This is a further argument for state-compelled schooling. What Bartholet is describing is a ban on homeschooling altogether, even for the parents she deems worthy of educating their own children at home.

But this is all window dressing for her true goal. In her Arizona Law Review article calling for a ban on homeschooling, Bartholet alludes to a prohibition on private education altogether. She contends that “some private schools pose problems of the same nature as homeschooling” and that “it would be deeply unfair to allow those who can afford private schools to isolate their children from public values in private schools reflecting the parents’ values, while denying this possibility to those unable to afford such schools.”

Both bans are obviously unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court held that parents have the right to “establish a home and bring up children” and “to control the education of their own” in Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923. Two years later, the court held that parents have the right “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control” and that “the child is not the mere creature of the State” in Pierce v. Society of Sisters.

Luckily, both sound logic and evidence are on the side of freedom in education. But the Harvard professor’s relentless attacks on homeschooling during a pandemic prove that the fight for liberty never ends. Based on the public backlash to the proposed ban, I am confident that families will continue to fight to prevent the government from taking away their right to educate their own children at home.

In just a few days, more than 1,000 people signed a petition for Harvard Law School to host a debate on homeschooling featuring Bartholet. As an elite academic institution, Harvard should be more than happy to set it up for the sake of civil discourse and ideological diversity. And Elizabeth Bartholet should be more than happy to debate her ideas in public if she is confident in them.

A version of this column first appeared in the Washington Examiner.

The post The Attacks on Homeschooling Continue appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Education advocacy groups are lobbying for a $250 billion bailout for K-12 schools and higher education. But Congress and the Trump administration should take a careful look at the research before they decide whether to cut another coronavirus stimulus check.

There’s little doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic will harm learning for many students. A third of a school year was effectively canceled. The massive spike in unemployment and the economic fallout will pose significant stress on families and government budgets. But would school budget cuts harm student outcomes?

A 2018 working paper by Northwestern University professor Kirabo Jackson and his colleagues claimed to find clear evidence of harm caused by budget cuts from the Great Recession. Their first draft, which was covered in places like the Economist, Vox, Chalkbeat, FutureEd, and Education Next found that a 10 percent cut in education spending yielded a 7 percent of a standard deviation decrease in academic achievement, and, over four years, decreased graduation rates by nearly 3 percentage points. A revised draft (featuring a substantially smaller effect on achievement and examining college-going rather than graduation) was recently accepted for publication at American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, where Jackson serves as an editor.

Fortunately for America’s students and taxpayers, the results are largely an artifact of a flawed methodology. The researchers believed that they could isolate the effects of spending cuts by looking at the share of school revenue that came from the state. Some states provide a higher share of revenue to local school districts than others, where schools rely more heavily on local property taxes. Because state revenues are more vulnerable to economic downturns than local revenues, they argued that we could view the Great Recession as a sort of natural experiment: Schools in some states will lose more money than schools in others.

The problem is that the share of funding provided by the state is not a matter of chance. States that agreed to pick up a greater share of the tab did so because of demographic, economic, and political factors, all of which may be related to how students are likely to fare academically. Pretending that this is a random variable when it is actually systematically related to student performance distorts their results and likely yields false findings.

The authors’ data show that reliance on state revenue is negatively correlated with achievement. And research that Jackson has deemed methodologically rigorous suggests that a greater reliance on state revenue independently and directly harms academic achievement, concluding that “a growing state share [of revenue] generally is accompanied by falling average SAT scores.” To explain this, they “hypothesize that the state share in public school revenue captures another dimension of state involvement,” such as regulation.

Given that the researchers knew that this variable could directly affect the outcome, it would have made more sense to incorporate it as a control. The observed relationships in the data, and a simple regression analysis, suggest that doing so would have reduced their estimate of the effect of spending on student achievement. In fact, because the study’s regression results were already so close to zero, it’s plausible that correctly incorporating this variable as a control instead of an instrument could have produced a finding that spending cuts actually improve educational outcomes.

The researchers claim to have found evidence that spending cuts harm students. But perhaps what they actually found was that state regulations harm students. Jackson has argued that “the question of whether money matters is essentially settled.” While most older studies found no correlation between spending and outcomes, he has argued that more rigorous methodologies have provided academics with greater power to reduce bias in causal estimates. That is true. But it is also true that they have provided academics with greater power to increase bias in causal estimates in ways that will be obscure to most readers, even to the editors of influential academic journals.

The broader debate about the effect of spending on student outcomes should and will continue. The new consensus that “money matters after all” is far weaker than advertised.

Congress is now considering its next steps for supporting a flailing economy after an unprecedented $2 trillion in stimulus spending has brought our national debt-to-gross domestic product ratio to the highest level since World War II. We are already borrowing heavily from the next generation. We owe it to them to spend their money wisely, in ways that are most likely to benefit them.

The post Reviewing the Impact of Budget Cuts on Student Outcomes appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In a sense, the exposure to homeschooling may be a blessing in disguise for many families because they are discovering that homeschooling can work better for them than government schooling. In fact, a new nationally representative survey by EdChoice found that 52 percent of families now have a more favorable view of homeschooling as the coronavirus pandemic has caused schools to shift to online learning.  Similarly, the American Federation for Children found that 40 percent of parents say they are more likely to homeschool their children when the coronavirus school shutdowns are over. My limited survey on the topic found that 15 percent of the respondents who had children in government schools say they plan to homeschool their children after the lockdowns are over.

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