The Arizona Daily Wildcat recently printed a Laura Donovan column about bullying in schools. (The original is superior to the version that made it to print.) "Where were the teachers?" is the million-dollar question.
But where are the rest of us, too?
It's a narrative I hear over and over: A student, usually but not always of above-average academic ability, having difficulty at government-run public school moves to a private school to escape cliqueish social nastiness and daily abuse, the "Lord of the Flies" culture that constitutes the "unifying experience" some on the Left use to justify the continuation of the one-size-fits-all model for education. Sometimes the change happens between middle school and high school, and sometimes it is a change of middle schools, high schools, or even grade schools that does it.
Stress levels drop, social life improves by leaps, and very often the student's grades improve as a result. It is simply unjust to expect such students' parents to make a double-payment for their child's dignity to be respected. Should Phoebe Prince's parents have had to pay double so their daughter wouldn't be driven to suicide?
Showing posts with label school choice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school choice. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Thursday, August 20, 2009
That's not a bug, that's a feature.
The East Valley Tribune recently concluded a reasonably good three-part investigative feature on Arizona's tuition tax credit scheme.
For those who don't remember, Arizona doesn't give a parent tax credit for those sending their kids to private school. But it does give tax credits to donors to "School Tuition Organizations" which then give "scholarships" to students attending private school. It actually forbids parents to make "donations" to their own children or any specific children.
The Trib's findings: Schools "highly encouraged" parents of enrolled children to make contributions restricted to benefiting their school and to recruit others to do the same.
Did anyone not see that coming? Parents, faced with having to make double payments for education (one for their kids via tuition fees and another for everyone else's via taxes) work with schools and STOs to find a way to some temporary and incomplete relief, and it's treated as a surprise? Come on, quit being so naive. And quit treating this behavior as corruption--that's as ridiculous as complaining about illegal aliens giving fake SSNs to employers. The law forces people to act like schemers in their search for simple fair treatment.
My recommendation is the same as it has been since I launched this 'blog: eliminate the STO program and establish an individual tax credit, which provides dollar-for-dollar tax relief, capped per child at the amount the State spends per pupil, for parents, grandparents, godparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, or anyone else who pays the private-school expenses for a particular child.
For those who don't remember, Arizona doesn't give a parent tax credit for those sending their kids to private school. But it does give tax credits to donors to "School Tuition Organizations" which then give "scholarships" to students attending private school. It actually forbids parents to make "donations" to their own children or any specific children.
The Trib's findings: Schools "highly encouraged" parents of enrolled children to make contributions restricted to benefiting their school and to recruit others to do the same.
Did anyone not see that coming? Parents, faced with having to make double payments for education (one for their kids via tuition fees and another for everyone else's via taxes) work with schools and STOs to find a way to some temporary and incomplete relief, and it's treated as a surprise? Come on, quit being so naive. And quit treating this behavior as corruption--that's as ridiculous as complaining about illegal aliens giving fake SSNs to employers. The law forces people to act like schemers in their search for simple fair treatment.
My recommendation is the same as it has been since I launched this 'blog: eliminate the STO program and establish an individual tax credit, which provides dollar-for-dollar tax relief, capped per child at the amount the State spends per pupil, for parents, grandparents, godparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, or anyone else who pays the private-school expenses for a particular child.
Monday, June 08, 2009
School choice update: Winn v Hibbs, now Winn v Garriott, remanded to district court.
I'm a few months late in reporting this one, but as the matter has been proceeding at a snail's pace, it doesn't matter.
The case formerly known as Winn et al v Hibbs et al, now known as Winn et al v Garriott et al, a challenge to Arizona's dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to school tuition organizations (STOs), charities that pay some or all of multiple students' private school tuition fees, has taken quite the roundabout path through the courts. Back in 2004 it was before the (U.S.) Supreme Court, not (yet) to address the First Amendment concern, but rather to decide whether or not the Tax Injunction Act precludes Federal jurisdiction in the matter.
It was subsequently dismissed by the district court for failure to state a claim de novo, taken to the appeals court again, and has now been remanded to the district court. The Ninth Circuit panel ruled that the Zelman v Simmons-Harris decision does not preclude a First Amendment challenge to the STO scheme because the nature of the private choice involved is different than that of the programs upheld in Zelman.
Supposing that the district court, or the 9th Circuit again, or SCOTUS finds for the plaintiffs, the 9th circuit's remand order points the way to a solution: replace the STO scheme with an individual tax credit for anyone who pays any portion of a particular child's tuition fee. That would be a better solution, too, addressing the double-payments market failure per se.
I still doubt the bona fides of the First Amendment claim. The notion that a tax relief program with clear secular purpose and violates the Establishment Clause because donors receiving tax relief chose too often to donate to organizations with religious organizations is absurd. Establishment is an act of government, not of the people.
The case formerly known as Winn et al v Hibbs et al, now known as Winn et al v Garriott et al, a challenge to Arizona's dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to school tuition organizations (STOs), charities that pay some or all of multiple students' private school tuition fees, has taken quite the roundabout path through the courts. Back in 2004 it was before the (U.S.) Supreme Court, not (yet) to address the First Amendment concern, but rather to decide whether or not the Tax Injunction Act precludes Federal jurisdiction in the matter.
It was subsequently dismissed by the district court for failure to state a claim de novo, taken to the appeals court again, and has now been remanded to the district court. The Ninth Circuit panel ruled that the Zelman v Simmons-Harris decision does not preclude a First Amendment challenge to the STO scheme because the nature of the private choice involved is different than that of the programs upheld in Zelman.
Supposing that the district court, or the 9th Circuit again, or SCOTUS finds for the plaintiffs, the 9th circuit's remand order points the way to a solution: replace the STO scheme with an individual tax credit for anyone who pays any portion of a particular child's tuition fee. That would be a better solution, too, addressing the double-payments market failure per se.
I still doubt the bona fides of the First Amendment claim. The notion that a tax relief program with clear secular purpose and violates the Establishment Clause because donors receiving tax relief chose too often to donate to organizations with religious organizations is absurd. Establishment is an act of government, not of the people.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
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:
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.
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:
- 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. - 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. - 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.
Vouchers hurt public school kids? Then so do prisons, roads, AHCCCS, and bureaucrats!
I wouldn't know how to set up such a study, but I'd love to see how ideas that are simple, catchy, and wrong fare in the meme pool relative to others of slightly more complexity but also of more merit. On occasion something tremendously stupid just seems to stick. Usually the best place to see this is in the faux "debate" over global warming, but of late we've been hearing something especially silly about school choice programs such as vouchers and tuition tax credits.
The claim is that vouchers and the like are harmful to kids stuck in the legacy public schools (my words, not theirs!) because they result in a de-funding of the public schools. That's total nonsense: the amount allocated to the public schools is set independently. No state, including Arizona, has a law saying "We start with X, and then subtract what is spent on vouchers or the revenue lost to directed tax credits." The programs are decoupled. Vouchers and tax credits mean the state can spend less on public schools because fewer pupils will attend. They do not mean that the state will underfund the public schools. They are merely another expenditure. One could say, of course, that this means that less is left in the budget to spend on the legacy institutions, but to be honest about this one must also rail against roads, prisons, AHCCCS, and every other state expenditure as resulting in the public school kids being short-changed.
School choice does, of course, have public choice implications. I'll leave details to real economists but will sketch an argument for you. When some critical portion of children are being educated by private for-profit and nonprofit institutions in the marketplace, their parents, grandparents, relatives, neighbors, and communities in general will start treating keeping the legacy public schools afloat as being of dubious merit, and will punish legislators at the polls accordingly. "Why are you spending on that old-fashioned horse-and-buggy stuff? What a waste! Send the kids to private school like everyone else!" But when that point is reached, it'll be because we replaced the legacy system with something superior: a market in education, a system of schools in place of a school system, and private choice in place of democracy.
The claim is that vouchers and the like are harmful to kids stuck in the legacy public schools (my words, not theirs!) because they result in a de-funding of the public schools. That's total nonsense: the amount allocated to the public schools is set independently. No state, including Arizona, has a law saying "We start with X, and then subtract what is spent on vouchers or the revenue lost to directed tax credits." The programs are decoupled. Vouchers and tax credits mean the state can spend less on public schools because fewer pupils will attend. They do not mean that the state will underfund the public schools. They are merely another expenditure. One could say, of course, that this means that less is left in the budget to spend on the legacy institutions, but to be honest about this one must also rail against roads, prisons, AHCCCS, and every other state expenditure as resulting in the public school kids being short-changed.
School choice does, of course, have public choice implications. I'll leave details to real economists but will sketch an argument for you. When some critical portion of children are being educated by private for-profit and nonprofit institutions in the marketplace, their parents, grandparents, relatives, neighbors, and communities in general will start treating keeping the legacy public schools afloat as being of dubious merit, and will punish legislators at the polls accordingly. "Why are you spending on that old-fashioned horse-and-buggy stuff? What a waste! Send the kids to private school like everyone else!" But when that point is reached, it'll be because we replaced the legacy system with something superior: a market in education, a system of schools in place of a school system, and private choice in place of democracy.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Eegee's, Desert Museum, Tucson Citizen are undemocratic!
Going past Eegee's this morning, I saw that the flavor of the month is "Lucky Lime." Yuck! Bright slime-green--the color of Ecto Cooler--artificial citrusesque sugar water. Not nearly as good as their natural flavors. Don't those of us who occasionally depend on these chilly colloidal empty calories to prevent sublimation deserve a vote in the matter? Eegee's is un-democratic!
And I have a gripe with the Desert Museum, too. Their cougar exhibit is totally unrealistic. Their natural habitat--Scottsdale--has palm trees, wisteria, and In-and-Out Burger. And I think that the museum could make more money from ticket sales if the javelina pen were to be combined with the snake, cat, and wolf exhibits. And I'm sure I can find a few thousand Fox Network watchers who agree. Why can't we put it to a vote? The Desert Museum is undemocratic!
And the Tucson Citizen is undemocratic. They don't call me when they're getting ready to write an editorial, nor do they put their contents to a vote. Chrissakes, they're the Tucson Citizen, just like me!--I deserve a vote in the matter. Thoroughly undemocratic, that I can't get together a petition to fire whoever wrote Monday's editorial. Whoever it was doesn't seem to even understand the rationale behind vouchers. "Market failure?"--what's that. And he calls them "undemocratic" as though that's an insight. Criticizing something by calling it undemocratic is a sure sign of thoughtlessness, and possibly of ignorance or low intelligence. That private schools are undemocratic is the point of the program! The idea is to allow parents who are being poorly served by democratically run schools to put them in schools run by self-perpetuating boards of directors or trustees, and to mitigate the crowd-out and double-payments problem by which the mere existence of public schools causes the education market to fail. The writer didn't research the matter enough to learn why proponents support what they do, and ought be cut from the payroll. Let's get together and vote on it.
We can't do that? Then you're undemocratic! Someone do something! Teacher! Mommy!
And I have a gripe with the Desert Museum, too. Their cougar exhibit is totally unrealistic. Their natural habitat--Scottsdale--has palm trees, wisteria, and In-and-Out Burger. And I think that the museum could make more money from ticket sales if the javelina pen were to be combined with the snake, cat, and wolf exhibits. And I'm sure I can find a few thousand Fox Network watchers who agree. Why can't we put it to a vote? The Desert Museum is undemocratic!
And the Tucson Citizen is undemocratic. They don't call me when they're getting ready to write an editorial, nor do they put their contents to a vote. Chrissakes, they're the Tucson Citizen, just like me!--I deserve a vote in the matter. Thoroughly undemocratic, that I can't get together a petition to fire whoever wrote Monday's editorial. Whoever it was doesn't seem to even understand the rationale behind vouchers. "Market failure?"--what's that. And he calls them "undemocratic" as though that's an insight. Criticizing something by calling it undemocratic is a sure sign of thoughtlessness, and possibly of ignorance or low intelligence. That private schools are undemocratic is the point of the program! The idea is to allow parents who are being poorly served by democratically run schools to put them in schools run by self-perpetuating boards of directors or trustees, and to mitigate the crowd-out and double-payments problem by which the mere existence of public schools causes the education market to fail. The writer didn't research the matter enough to learn why proponents support what they do, and ought be cut from the payroll. Let's get together and vote on it.
We can't do that? Then you're undemocratic! Someone do something! Teacher! Mommy!
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