Penny Kotterman: Ideologue, Union Boss, Extremist, and wrong for Arizona

Makers of the "Airborne" patent medicine, before it was (even more thoroughly) discredited in a class-action lawsuit, promoted it by emphasizing that it was created by a schoolteacher. Apparently--and I do not understand the mentality--our memories of kindly old Miss So-and-So who taught us in 3rd grade were to cause us to trust it more than something created by scientists and put through clinical trials and for which we actually had some evidence of efficacy.

The Penny Kotterman campaign for Superintendent of Public Instruction has attempted a similar marketing strategy. The reason we are given to support Kotterman: she was a schoolteacher. That's it. Not her policy positions, not her values, simply her occupational history. Conveniently omitted before all audiences except those composed of committed anti-private-education ideologues are some inconvenient details: Penny Kotterman is not just any schoolteacher. She was and is one of the most committed opponents to education reform in Arizona.

If the name "Kotterman" sounds familiar it is because she was the lead plaintiff in Kotterman v. Killian, the Left's challenge to the then-new tuition tax credit program. In no uncertain terms, several years before the Supreme Court's decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the ultimate decision in Kotterman established the legality of the tuition tax credit program under Arizona law.

For those who may not have been paying attention, the tuition tax credit program gives a small dollar-for-dollar tax credit to people making donations to "school tuition organizations" which in turn must contribute all but a minuscule portion of what they take in to pay the private-school tuition fees for children. Compared to a direct parent tax credit the program is a kludge that only indirectly addresses the market failure caused by double-payments, but that's not the point here. The tax credit program allowed children at the margin to benefit from real school choice.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona (then AzCLU) claimed that this tax credit program violated the Arizona Constitution and brought on Kotterman as lead plaintiff. It's worth noting that they did not, and still do not in their follow-up Winn v. Garriott, claim that civil liberties are being violated. (A digression: The only difference between Winn and Zelman is between tax credits and vouchers; by continuing this case post-Zelman ACLU-AZ's board of directors is verging on a breach of its fiducial duty to its membership.) When I served on the ACLU-AZ board of directors whose civil liberties were being violated--who was less free because of tax credits--I'd get dodgy answers ("those who don't want people who give to private schools to get a tax break" or "I don't want 'my money' going to religious schools") combined with shamed aversion of eyes. The Kotterman case itself was based on the anachronistic claim that the Arizona Constitution contained a Blaine Amendment. Even more shameful: those familiar with Blaine Amendments know that they were supported and in some states passed as a means for Protestants to officially oppress Catholics: nothing that the ACLU should support! The AZ Constitution does contain Blaine Amendment-like language but even a genuine Blaine Amendment wouldn't rule out the tuition tax credit program. The AzCLU had to go one step further, in claiming that a tax credit for people saving the state an expense is the same thing as a state expenditure, therefore when donations end up paying for religious education because parents send their kids to religious schools, it is the same as the legislature making an expenditure on religious education.

The whole thing strained credulity--it was clearly a post-hoc dressing up of vulgar leftism in civil libertarian language--as does the 9th Circuit's ruling in still-pending Winn that tax credits violate the Establishment Clause because parents choose more often than not to send their kids to religious schools and STO donors choose to support these institutions. (This line of argument was knocked out of the park in Zelman in, as I recall, O'Connor's concurrence: a program cannot be constitutional in one state but unconstitutional in another because the citizens have different religious preferences.)

But what does this have to do with Penny Kotterman? She was no Schecter-like ingenue with no ideological commitments who had been personally wronged by a government policy. Indeed given that she had not been harmed it is difficult to determine why she had standing at all. She was at the time the head of the state's largest schoolteachers' union, the Arizona Education Association and was plaintiff--as is often the case in these sorts of challenges--because she was a True Believer that the policy passed by the legislature was wrong. There are no two ways about it: In the late 1990s, teachers' union boss Penny Kotterman attempted to smother school choice, the state's most significant education reform, in its crib. Far from backing away from this today, she stands by her position on her campaign website. (The dippy justification given: 90% of Arizona kids are still in the old public schools. In other words: change has not happened therefore change should not happen.)

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The usually good East Valley Tribune and many other press outlets, perhaps forgetting what kind of anti-reform extremist Penny Kotterman is, have been suckered like an Airborne purchaser into believing that Kotterman must be good for the state because she was a schoolteacher.

To quote the Trib:

Penny Kotterman is a former school teacher who has spent 33 years in education, including six years as the president of the state’s largest teacher’s union, the Arizona Education Association.

We like Kotterman for two reasons. First, she will be a stronger advocate for public schools, whose performance has declined sharply in the last decade. Beyond that, we think that — after 16 years of having politicians in the superintendent’s office — it’s time to turn that position over to a teacher who has been there and done that in Arizona’s school system.

As with electing an African-American President of the United States, in principle putting an educator in the Superintendent seat would be a welcome change. However, continuing the analogy with the Presidency: not this teacher. Penny Kotterman has too strong an ideological commitment to be counted on to serve the public interest. While I cannot give him the ringing all-out endorsement I gave Scott Stewart, there is no doubting that, when it comes to education, as a legislator John Huppenthal has been part of the solution. As the East Valley Tribune noted before denying him their endorsement, he's taken the issue quite seriously, researching the alternatives and only then backing the best. He can be counted on to support what is best for Arizona's schoolchildren, no matter what institution is educating them. He can be counted among the co-authors and co-sponsors of important education bills reducing from 18 months to 3 months the amount of time needed to dismiss poorly performing instructors from their jobs, eliminating the cap on charter school enrollment, and eliminating schoolteacher tenure in Arizona. Looking forward, he has been and remains a proponent of merit pay. Kotterman, on the other hand, we can expect to perform an inappropriate balancing of the interests of schoolchildren against the interests of unionized teachers and the public school establishment, and declares on her website that she remains 100% opposed to vouchers and tuition tax credits, which help make school choice a reality for many middle-class families.

I thus recommend that readers vote for John Huppenthal on 2 November 2010.

Vote "No" on Proposition 401 and all other school overrides

Tom Jenney of the Arizona Federation of Taxpayers has been a nearly lone voice recommending the defeat of school-district budget overrides. For what it's worth, I'll lend my voice to that effort and recommend the same, especially to those who, like me, reside in Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), which is not operating under an override.

There's plenty of money available per classroom full of students. Jenney puts the figure at $194,000 per 25-student classroom. That's not using the "fishy" figure whereby total spending is divided by total number of students (see David Safier's explanation; inclusion of construction costs is a bad idea); Jenney instead computed the average using Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne's annual report, excluding construction and land purchase costs.

Averages in the abstract might not reflect the condition in any particular district, but the $7,730 per pupil figure used by Jenney is a few hundred dollars less than spending in TUSD and almost a thousand more than Catalina Foothills. (I did not write that backwards, and you did not read it backwards.) Regardless, there's a lot of money in the districts. Spend $100,000 compensating a classroom teacher (salary plus lavish health insurance plus "employer contribution" to pensions, Social Security, and Medicare, and nearly that amount is left over to keep the lights on, purchase supplies, have art and music classes, pay administrators, etc. A lot is being spent on the public school system--Jenney says that the figure has doubled, in inflation-adjusted dollars, relative to 1970--and there is little to show for it. It's clear that the taxpayer's money is not being spent intelligently, that there is waste and systematic failure; it makes no sense to give more.

A "no" vote is not drastic. Override amounts vary by district, but 5-10% of the district budget is a usual amount. Moreover--and all of the publicity pamphlets mailed explain this--ARS 15-481 establishes a "phase-down" procedure. If an override election fails, a district's funding will not be cut all at once. If the cut was too drastic, the districts can ask for another override. (This could establish perverse incentives for administrators.)


Call them "public schools", "government schools", or whatever you like; it's also quite clear that they're violating the social contract, and not just by failing to educate students to an eighth-grade level before sending them to high-school and to produce high-school graduates before handing out diplomas. (Geriatric libertarians: "social contract" is a well-understood metaphor; please Google it before ranting in the comments section.) When government agencies tell us how it's going to be, insist on doing things on their own terms, and insist that we pay no matter what, we don't ordinarily tolerate it. With schools, it's different. It's "for the kids", if not ours, then someone else's, possibly some disadvantaged household's. If that's the case, we should be even more intolerant--and we shouldn't let anyone try to cast us as immoral for our position. Failing us is one thing--we can vote, throw the bums out, and "shoot the bastards" if we need to. Failing children, who have no recourse at all is less tolerable, much less still if we consider that the product of an urban public school will often lack the literacy, the communication skills, or the understanding of government needed to ever have recourse. Not wanting to hand over more money to poorly-performing and wasteful government institutions does not reflect an antisocial tendency. Sometimes the opposite is true.

If the schools want more money, they should start doing things differently, demonstrating need first, by becoming more efficient and adopting internal reforms. We should also demand an end to the following:

1. Teachers are not paid according to merit. Schoolteachers should probably be paid more, to attract people to teaching who would instead go into other professions. Effective teachers should be paid more than ineffective teachers. Teaching is a highly individualized profession. It is not ditch-digging. It is not house-framing. Teachers are not fungible. The manner in which they are compensated should reflect that. Looking at this from the other side, taxpayers should be outraged that their involuntary contributions are being given as much to poor teachers as to good ones.
   
   
2. Public schools don't ask. They either demand, or they are silent. I am a graduate of a public/government K-8 system and a private high school, the former in the Chicago sububs and the latter in the city itself. The private school sends mailers, solicits me for funds, maintains personal ties, and seeks my help in other ways. The public school stopped keeping track virtually the day after graduation. It started again when I applied for a small college scholarship but stopped immediately after I graduated college, and even then the communication was limited to my receipt of their check. They didn't even ask me to come in to tell the kids that yes, someone from our neighborhood can go on to be a scientist or whatever else he'd like to be.
   
   I thought that perhaps this was a Cook County, IL problem, but I've asked around, and Arizona public schools are no better. There is no continued contact with alumni, no routine active solicitation of contributions from area businesses, no Mother's Clubs, Father's Clubs or associated boosterism, no real effort to create a learners' community. If the public schools and their supporters can't be bothered with establishing of foundations or asking those with close ties to the institutions--alumni, parents and families of current students--for voluntary contributions, they have no business demanding involuntary contributions from the taxpayer.
   
   
3. Nonparticipants are not treated equitably. A vote for an override is a vote to raise taxes not just on public school parents and families but also those homeschooling, sending their children to private schools, or sending their children to charter schools. None of these groups will benefit from the override.
   
   Charter school families receive a government subsidy just like public schoolers do. The other two groups do not receive so much as a tax credit. Homeschooling and private-schooling parents save the taxpayers the expense of educating their children. They've taken responsibility for their children. We shouldn't just admire them for it, we should treat them fairly. The least we can do is to not bill them for support of the public schools while their children are being privately educated. A tax credit for homeschoolers and tuition fee payers, up to the amount the district spends per pupil, would not only make private education in reach of more families; it would also constitute simple justice. Homeschoolers, private school parents, and those of us who support them should vote "no" on overrides until they are treated fairly and not made to pay double for education, at least while their children are of school age.
   
   
4. Student promotion is haphazard in the early grades. Arizona's high schoolers must pass the very basic "AIMS" test to graduate. Too little, too late. I'm no advocate of pervasive testing; the temptations to teach to the test and to treat the test as a target are both too great. But to require that students be reading with basic comprehension by the end of First Grade and read fluently (no more "sounding it out") and comprehend more advanced passages by the end of Third Grade would seem reasonable. Reading comfortably and with comprehension is the key to further education and good citizenship, too. What good is the high-school AIMS test if a student enters high school a functional illiterate?
   
   For those who fail, aggressive remediation is in order--and I'd happily support an override to fund it.
   
   
5. Curriculum decisions are politicized. Ideally, the schools would be independent and any subsidy would follow the student. That's too great a paradigm shift for "this year" but we should insist that the schools act as though they are independent and allow teachers to choose textbooks. This is intimately related to the "merit pay" issue. Effective teachers don't do the same thing as lousy ones, but better. They do things differently, and as anyone who has ever taught understands, classroom materials are part of this. Arizona has a limited system of choice, enough to start de-politicizing the classroom.
   

What isn't going to happen?

Regular commenter Thane Eichenauer asks below:

I am curious as to what _isn't_ going to happen if the legislature refuses to pass the Brewer 18% sales tax hike.

From what I've read so far all the department budgets except for government education were signed. Government education might stop but if the rest of the Arizona state government rolls along like usual there will be nothing to notice.

Aside from framing problems, he has it correct. However, if this webpage's numbers are current, there are well over a million students in Arizona's public grade schools, middle schools, and high schools. That's hardly "nothing to notice".

Eichenauer, by the way, 'blogs at This, that, and the other thing, with a rather interesting choice of URL. It took me a while to figure that out. He'll be added to the 'blogroll soon. The 'blogosphere is at its best when it is conversational. We can thank, among others, Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, and Megan McArdle for greatly improving 'blogs of nationwide focus. Arizona's 'blogosphere lags behind. It's clear that people are reading each other, but posts about and trackbacks from others' content are in order. This is one more on the "radar screen". Look forward to a unilateral increase in cross-talk in the weeks to come.

School Choice in AZ: Where to go from here.

By now, readers have heard that Arizona's two school-choice voucher programs, for foster children and the disabled, were struck down by the Arizona Supreme Court in their Cain v. Horne decision for violating Article 9, Section 10 of the Arizona Constitution. As I hinted in my previous mention of the matter, that the voucher program violated the plain language of the AZ Constitution is obvious and the decision, however harmful, was not an injustice.

Robert Robb covered much of what I would have wrote in a guest opinion on the matter, albeit with different emphasis; you thus won't see anything in the newspapers from me. But what I'd have put in a guest opinion and what I have to say about the matter are not coextensive sets.

Whatever immediate harm it brings to foster and disabled children, the defeat in Cain v. Horne could be turned into victory by further action, much as the defeat in Kelo v. New London brought about the passage in forty-two states of laws prohibiting use of eminent domain takings to transfer from one private party to another, and enabled us, in Arizona, to additionally enact Epstein's doctrine of partial takings into law through passage of 2006's Proposition 207. Here we have two programs that harmed nobody, that didn't even constitute a token violation of Establishment Clause civil liberties (as the SCOTUS has definitively ruled and the ACLU-AZ will learn again soon when Hibbs v Winn is decided on its merits), and that helped to get disabled children the education the one-size-fits-all legacy public schools couldn't give them, and give disadvantaged foster kids some stability. The decision was just in a legalistic sense, but it was the equivalent of taking candy from babies. If the public were to be made aware of this--"An obsolete and gratuitous clause of our State Constitution harmed schoolchildren, and disadvantaged schoolchildren at that!"--we could effect change for the better.

Three non-mutually-exclusive options present themselves:

1. Amend the State Constitution. There are two ways to do this. The simplest in many respects is a legislatively referred constitutional amendment (LRCA), passed as a resolution by the legislature and sent to the voters for approval in the next general election. The other is by petition; in Arizona, constitutional amendments may be proposed as initiatives. This is expensive and somewhat difficult due to the high signature requirement.
   
   The fight we will have on our hands if we try this will be from opponents of private education, and the argument that they will make is that we are taking protections against public subsidy of religion out of the State Constitution. This is of dubious merit for reasons explained in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris: an accident of private choice doesn't constitute establishment or subsidy of religion. Dubious merit, however, doesn't mean much when the question is put in front of the voter. Only a naif would think that the majority of voters think things through, and as Bryan Caplan has remarked, the bozos don't cancel each other out, either.
   
   This could be mitigated somewhat if the amendment is kept conservative. Instead of striking all of Article 9, Section 10, merely strike "or private or sectarian school." This may be slightly problematic; I do not know if parochial schools are legally separate from the Church, and payments to churches would still be prohibited. If this is the case, then the parochial schools could legally separate from the Church. That's a nonideal situation, but if it helps the kids, it's probably worth it. Likewise a school could be a "public service corporation", but that schools were listed separately means it's likely that a court would find that they are not.
   
   
2. Expand the education tax credit. That Arizona's tax credit program runs afoul of neither the State nor the Federal Constitution is settled law. ACLU-AZ's frivolous Hibbs v Winn (against which I bucked hard after the Zelman decision came out) is still out there, awaiting the ruling of the Ninth Circuit, but it has no peculiar twist that prevents the reasoning in Zelman from being applied in toto. The tax credit program, in brief, provides a capped dollar-for-dollar credit for individual donors to "School Tuition Organizations", specially privileged and regulated charities which must contribute at least ninety percent of what they take in to pay tuition fees for schoolchildren. It's better than nothing, but it does nothing to address the market failure at hand. A dollar-for-dollar tax credit to parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors, or anyone else who pays all or part of the tuition fees of a particular child, capped per child at the state's per pupil expenditure on the legacy public schools, is in order. If it begins with a pilot program covering foster children and the disabled, that's a good start.
   
   Any tax relief, even this sort, which "pays for itself" will be a hard sell at the moment due to the State's current budget woes. Democrats are already targeting the existing ersatz tax credit. Their intentions aren't good, either. It's not as though they're out of other options; they're doing this because they oppose school choice for ideological reasons and because, being a relatively small and politically unorganized minority, private-school kids and their families are an easy mark.
   
   
3. Foster and disabled children could be served by tuition organizations. School tuition organizations (to those of us who know what "tuition" really means, that's a horrible term) of the type for which donors can receive the tax credit could be set up specifically to serve the populations directly harmed by this ruling. A campaign could start--and I suppose it just began with me--encouraging taxpayers to make the maximum donation to these charities. We could teach the anti-choice public a lesson and beat them over the head with our magnanimity for years to come. "We support school choice because we want to do better for the kids, not for teachers' unions and obsolete institutions for which empty-headed types feel nostalgia. And we stood up and helped the kids you condemned to an inferior education." I'd get the ball rolling on this myself, were it not for this PhD thing in the way! Take my idea as inspiration and run with it--and let me be the first to know if you do so.

This will be a difficult fight. If editorial writers at the Tucson Citizen still don't understand the rationale for school choice, it's a sign that the average Tucson citizen and the average Arizonan doesn't understand it, either. There's no excuse for that at this late date--the idea is at least forty years old--but such is the nature of ignorance. And there'll be a backlash against this from public school parents. We're already seeing this on the ever-ugly newspaper comment boards. Union sleaze at Arizona chapter of the NEA call the total amount of money disbursed by school tuition organizations "Loss of Funding for Public Schools and parents don't see the slight of hand. The average person with the 100 IQ doesn't see the slight of hand. The AEA can't point to any loss of funding at all, but parents and much of the public believes that those charitable disbursements were taken from the public schools that their kids attend. And on top of this we have the "Idiocracy Factor", a combination of faux nostalgia for mediocre institutions and aversion to difference. "Why can't they go to regular school like normal people?" Listen hard enough to opponents of school choice, and you'll hear all of the tics and tropes of oppressors of out-group minorities.

And we can't rely on success of choice programs elsewhere to make the merits of change obvious. Every time concealed carry was proposed, we heard the same things over and over. It didn't matter that Washington didn't see "blood on the streets" and "people just 'running around' everywhere with guns" and shootouts over parking-lot disputes. It didn't matter that Florida didn't see them. It didn't matter in the forty-eighth state to adopt concealed carry that it was successful in forty-seven states. And last year when we were trying to get a campus concealed-carry bill passed it didn't matter that concealed carry has been legal and unproblematic in Arizona for years. We still heard the same stale arguments against it, and the press took these people, however ridiculous, seriously. It's a wonder that the press doesn't seek out supporters of the Divine Right of Kings every time there's an election, to "balance" their stories. Intellectual credibility is not the same as credibility with the public and thus not the same as credibility with politicians and the press. The evidence in our favor will help, but however definitive, a great many people, on seeing the real world clash with ideology, will decide ideology is right and the world is wrong.

The fight will thus be difficult, but I am confident that we, champions of markets, liberty, moral individualism, and the welfare of the individual child, are on the right side of history. This may not be our year, the moment may not be right, but education is too important for us to not fight over and too important to leave to anything but the market. Get to know each other, get organized, and get ready.

Why not Just Fix The Public Schools?

Your humble narrator is in Palo Alto this week, not for a postdoc search quite yet but instead to spend a week with the woman who'll be his wife as soon as he graduates. Such trips have side benefits; I've made several scientific contacts, sat in on concerts and lectures, and even get to see how local politics works elsewhere.

I am an advocate of the separation of school and state, and have been since long before I started this 'blog. Correspondents and left-leaning colleagues have often asked why I support a total change in the way education is provided in most of the U.S. instead of Just Fixing The Public Schools.

It's less dull a question than it seems on its face. That private schools of various sorts outperform traditional government-monopoly schools has gone from a speculation in Capitalism and Freedom to empirically established fact, incontrovertible except by the sort of study that "controls for" all of the private schools' usual advantages. Where I grew up--Cook County, IL, a stone's throw from Chicago--middle-class families in many neighborhoods, and especially middle-class Catholic families sent their children to private high school almost as a matter of course, to the point where attending the legacy public school was a matter of conscious choice. This was good for all: people with alternatives have high expectations. But in most places, most children are educated in the public school, and most of my highly educated colleagues are the products of public schools. (I attended a mediocre public grade school and junior high for eight years, followed by one of the area's more prestigious prep schools, where I had some major catching up to do in my first year.) Many of the legacy public schools are doing "good enough", and since most children are in public schools, the way to improve things for most children right away, without any switchover costs and without any late-adopters being left behind, is to Just Fix The Public Schools.

The problem is that the legacy public schools are tremendously difficult and in ways impossible to fix by their institutional nature. Democracy--a ten-dollar word for "majoritarian voting"--is a fine way to run a club whose members have common interest, a fairly good way to manufacture and maintain consent and legitimacy of a government acting within certain bounds, a somewhat poor way to determine public policy, and relative to how either for-profit or non-profit schools run, a downright wacky way of determining how a service such as education is to be provided.

In both the local Palo Alto paper and one of the area's larger news websites the hot topic for some time has been the mathematics curriculum in the Palo Alto Unified School District. The question raises itself, why not just let teachers teach math, but it's not that simple. The State of California allows districts only nine choices of mathematics textbook, and each district must seemingly choose but one of these. The committee tasked with this in Palo Alto, composed of forty-one teachers, three parents, two school principals, and a few administrators has nearly settled on the University of Chicago's Everyday Mathematics series, provoking strong objection from many parents concerned about the series's use of electronic calculators and de-emphasis of standard algorithms and problem solving in favor of constructivism and possibly confusing early presentation of multiple algorithms. (Arizona schools are not quite as micro-managed but still make curricular decisions by committee. I am participating as a consulting scientist in TUSD science curricular reform; the emphasis on buzzwords and abstraction and fad makes it as pleasant as pulling teeth.) One parent from nearby Menlo Park remarked that Everyday Math is one of the reasons her family moved from its previous place of residence, and quite a few others are sharing similar negative experiences.

The excuse commonly made for Arizona's public schools, especially urban districts like TUSD, is that their problems stem from poverty, parental illiteracy, lack of positive parental engagement, and anti-intellectual family culture. Speaking as someone who's had contact with TUSD teachers as a speaker, I can say that there's some truth to that, but it isn't the whole story. The trouble is in part simply that public schools are public schools. As the people of Silicon Valley are on average considerably more affluent and educated than Arizonans--Silicon Valley is one of the most highly educated areas in the world--the usual excuses don't apply here. Parents are demanding excellence, and there is considerable popular sentiment in favor of the adoption of "Singapore Math" texts based on that small country's rather successful curriculum. The nearby Las Lomitas School District, Palo Alto's private Keys School, and many homeschoolers have successfully adopted this program.

Excellence, however, is not what public schools are about. The public schools do not have as their mission to educate to a very high standard or even to tailor education to the individual child so as to help each one achieve his potential. The governing principle of public schools is, at best, "One Size Fits All" and, at worst, if one takes the radical egalitarian rhetoric of opponents of vouchers and tax credits seriously, "Cut the Tall Trees Down." The committee was apparently hamstrung by its decision early on to require that the text adopted be suited to teaching struggling students and fast learners concurrently. Apparently selecting one text for average and excellent students and an alternative for the strugglers was out of the question, as was bringing the strugglers up to speed by intensive KIPP Academy-style intervention. As a result, unless Palo Alto's school board reverses the committee decision next month, local public school students will be taught mathematics in a way that shortchanges talented and average students and possibly the difficult ones, too.

It's worth emphasizing again, that neither poverty nor parental ignorance are at work here. Opponents of private education like to speak of private school and homeschool parents as failing in civic duty by doing better for their children and therefore not being there to complain at PTA meetings and the like, but presuming for the sake of argument that that's a just complaint, flight is certainly not at work here, either: the parents who are speaking out are highly educated and relatively affluent--engineers, computer programmers, scientists. The trouble is that public schools are public schools. The best parents can do is to complain at meetings. If they pull their kids out, the schools are guaranteed funding by law. They can try to effect change through the democratic process, but school board elections are usually more about party affiliations, loyalties, and slogans than about the issues, and by the time proponents of more sound curricular ideas have a majority, children have already had several years of substandard education and may be permanently behind their peers in prep school or college.

It is simply not just to ask parents to sacrifice their children's education to preserve a clumsy institution. The trouble with public schools--besides their being run by electoral democracy--is that there is no meaningful right of exit. Parents can't say "I'll educate my kid myself" and get their taxes back, meaning parents who want to leave must pay twice for education. The result is that, except in places like Cook County where it is the (sub)cultural norm to send children to private school, most parents, not wanting to pay twice, keep their kids in the public school unless it gets very bad. Many parents can't afford to pay twice. Not only do the kids not leave, if they do, it doesn't matter. The public schools are guaranteed funding, and both school board re-elections and administrator contract renewals are hit-or-miss. Individual teachers--the good ones, anyway--are motivated by their convictions and pride, but structurally, for administrators, school boards, committees, the teachers' union, and everyone else making decisions about how to hire and fire teachers, purchase books, and (often needlessly) constrain what the teachers do in the classroom, the incentives make no sense. On the other hand, both traditional private schools and charter schools, which receive funding from the government but operate as contractors, must succeed or shut their doors.

Do poverty, parental ignorance, and the like negatively affect the performance of the public schools? Probably. Does low funding? Under certain circumstances--we must avoid considering it underfunding every time the dollar amount is too low for the legacy public schools' somewhat ideological supporters. But care must be taken to recognize that much of the trouble with public schools comes from their being public--run by democracy, funded by the State, and not allowing meaningful exit. Some very serious troubles concerning curriculum and exit are invariant, whether one is in Tucson or Silicon Valley. Replacement of the legacy state-run school system with a market driven by parental choice--the development of which can be jumpstarted by a high-cap dollar for dollar individual use tax credit--would provide instant mitigation.

Two school choice bills in the Arizona House.

So far I haven't seen any bills for this session establishing a dollar-for-dollar use tax credit for parents, legal guardians, or others who directly pay a particular child's tuition fees or any other truly exciting school choice measures, but there are two bills that will expand the current, ersatz system of credits for donations to scholarship-granting school tuition organizatons (STOs).

HB 2287 would require employers to, on employee request, withhold STO contributions from paychecks and accordingly reduce the amount of state tax withheld. This is more convenient by far than saving and contributing a lump sum each year and will likely lead to greater participation in the system.

HB 2288 would allow insurers who make contributions to STOs to claim a similar credit against their premium taxes. More importantly, it would remove the 2011 sunset date for the individual tax credit.

Neither will bring about the program we need to eliminate double payments and thus address the heart of the market failure that keeps private K-12 education out of the reach of so many, but the STO program at least mitigates charity crowd-out and helps to put private education within more families' reach. Consequently both of these bills, especially HB 2288 with its very important elimination of the 2011 sunset, are worthy of your support.

If you will be in the Phoenix area on Monday the 26th and have time to spare around 2 PM, consider testifying on these bills before the Ways and Means committee, especially if you are a private school parent, a prospective private school parent, or an educator.

A real tax credit is the way to cure the fake one's ills.

Last week, the Tucson Citizen reported on use of Arizona's tuition tax-credit program to fund K-12 level education at Rainbow Acres, an adult group home. While this use falls outside the intent of the 2002 law, it's in accord with its letter.

We should consider the benefit to retarded adults a positive side effect, not a sign of fraud or a reason to scrap the tuition tax-credit program. One can expect, when a complicated system that adds a layer of institutions--school tuition organizations in this case--to the mix is created, that there will be unintended consequences, positive, negative, or both. If Arizonans want to get serious about reforming education for the state's children, a simpler solution will do.

In what has become the most-viewed post on the Pima County Libertarian Party's weblog, I proposed that Arizona's legislature take steps to remedy the market failure keeping private education beyond the means of too many families: the double-payments problem. Offer a dollar-for-dollar tax credit, with a cap much higher that Iowa's or Illinois's paltry $500, to parents, grandparents, godparents, neighbors, or anyone else who pays the private education expenses of a particular minor child.

This does away with the money-laundering system of tuition organizations, and it's fair: parents should not have to pay both for their children's education and for that of the children of the less responsible or less well-off.

Relief for home schoolers

By now it's well-understood, despite the best efforts by rent-seekers and left-wing ideologues (who've even duped the ACLU--more on this at a later date,) that education is not only not a public good in the proper sense of the term, but that government provision of education causes market failure. Simply put, not only is there no strong rationale for government provision of education, other than inertia, but the practice is harmful, preventing the development of more desirable alternatives.

To a large extent this is the fault of a double-payments problem. Parents who, all things being equal, would send their children to private school X, will instead, having already paid taxes that fund the local public school, decide to send them there, either because the perceived difference in quality isn't high enough to merit paying twice for education, or because they simply can't afford both the tax and tuition.

The solution--and the just thing to do--would be to provide dollar-for-dollar tax relief, up to the amount spent per pupil at the local public school or the payer's total tax burden (whichever is less), to parents, grandparents, godparents, neighbors, strangers, or whoever else will pay for all or some of the private education of an individual child. In one of its more bizzare moments, however, the legislature instead decided to offer a tax credit, with an arbitrary cap, for contributors to charitable scholarship-providing organizations.

While, for its day, it was a groundbreaking measure, the tax credit program didn't come anywhere near the heart of the issue; it didn't provide tax relief to actors in the education market removing the State's, and by extension the taxpayers' responsibility for the schooling of a particular child.

HB2218 provides direct tax relief to homeschoolers, whose role in the still-stunted education market wasn't even taken into account when the original tax credit bill was passed. Parents relieving the State of its burden by taking their children's education into their own hands will in turn be relieved of some of their tax burden. That's called justice, and it makes economic sense.

Call or write your representative and ask him to support HB2218. While you're at it, call the bill's sponsors and ask them to extend its scope to parents paying someone else to teach their children. With the legislature taking steps to at least partially fix the education market and the public now comfortable enough with choice that 62% support vouchers and 55% say all students deserve private-school scholarships, the time is right for Arizona to fix the double-payments failure for good and reclaim its position as a trailblazer for education reform.