U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been criticized, and rightly so, for encouraging his employees to attend a rally held by Al Sharpton. While the event was not, strictly speaking, partisan (it wasn’t a function of, say, the Democratic National Committee), it certainly had political overtones. Still, it’s time to give Duncan and his boss one cheer for their encouragement of some necessary school reforms.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama praised the idea of charter schools. His campaign “blueprint” (PDF) said “Obama and Biden will double funding for the Federal Charter School Program to support the creation of more successful charter schools.” Even though I think we need less rather than more federal funding for schools, such a call is a clear expression of support for an idea that, aside from homeschooling, is the most widely used form of school choice in use today.

The Race to the Top initiative (call it “slush fund” if you like) called for states with caps on charter schools to lift those caps. That’s to the good; caps – quotas on the number of charter schools – are a draconian limit that have no place in effective education policy. In a speech before the NEA, Duncan observed that tenure that protects ineffective teachers and spoke in favor of some form of merit pay. (Merit pay is good in the abstract, but there are many methodological problems to work on before it is widely implemented.)

So a cheer to Obama and Duncan. But of course the question in politics is “what have you done for me lately?”, and when it comes to Race to the Top, the answer might be, “not much.” Rick Hess, an education policy specialist with AEI, warned in a blog post at Education Week that most of the criteria used for Race to the Top applications avoid “mundane efforts to clear away anachronistic policies” and instead reward compliance with status-quo checklists of “best practices.”

So only a cheer and nothing more. Or perhaps even half a cheer. But education reformers should take courage in any case. The actions of Obama and Duncan, as tentative as they are, signal that even leaders in the party that is the natural home of the NEA recognize that things must improve. Then add in groups such as Democrats for Education Reform, The New Teacher Project, and the National Council on Teacher Quality, and we’re starting to see glimpses of support for important reforms in places where we might least expect it.

Case in point is the sobering announcement by Minnesota Education Commissioner Alice Seagren that Minnesota is joining the Common Core Standards Initiative, a state-led process to develop nationwide English-language arts and mathematics standards for K-12 education.

Led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Offices and subscribed to by 46 states and the District of Columbia, the Common Core Standards Initiative would create a framework of content and skills all children must master each year of K-12 education. The standards will be “research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, and aligned with college and work expectations,” according to the coalition press release.

Let the heralding begin.

“Common standards will provide educators clarity and direction about what all children need to succeed in college and the workplace and allow states to more readily share best practices that dramatically improve teaching and learning,” said CCSSO President-Elect and Maine Education Commissioner Sue Gendron.

“Common standards … have the potential to bring about a real and meaningful transformation of our education system to the benefit of all Americans,” echoed NGA Vice Chair Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas.

Indeed, who could possibly be opposed? While there is a range of opposition from skeptical to fierce for nationally mandated standards out of Washington, there is broad support for “state-led, voluntary common standards,” said CCSSO President and Arkansas Commissioner of Education Ken James. “This is an idea whose time has come.”

“Only when we agree about what all high school graduates need to be successful will we be able to tackle the most significant challenge ahead of us: transforming instruction for every child,” Gendron said.

Therein lies the rub.

“Many people think national standards would be great,” the Cato Institute’s Neal McClusky said. “But though people may love the idea of na-tional standards, when it comes to actually creating them, love quickly turns to anger.”

After attending a meeting on “International Evidence about National Standards,” McClusky observed, “If you can’t get people who really believe that we need national standards to agree on even their basic shape, why would anyone think that they could get a majority of Americans to agree on a single standard?”

No matter how intuitively it appears we ought to spend money and resources to implement some “awesome” public policy — “ought to” implies that we actually “can.”

Noting that ethicists can imagine all kinds of schemes to remedy perceived social ills, St. Lawrence University economics professor Steven Horowitz writes, “We always have to ask whether it’s humanly possible to do what the ethicists say we ought. To say we ought to do something we cannot do, in the sense that it won’t achieve our end, is to engage in a pointless exercise.”

Of course, it is quite possible to implement a set of rigorous standards as Minnesota has done. As Seagren trumpeted, less than humbly: “By participating in this effort, we will take an active role in helping other states create consistent academic standards that will be as rigorous as Minnesota’s current standards.”

Great. However, the actual objective is not creating standards, but improving student readiness for the serious business of living. High standards don’t necessarily indicate that children are receiving a quality education. Perhaps that’s why the Legislature waived Minnesota’s math test graduation requirement as too difficult for too many students. Education is an individual experience; the path to proficiency is an individual choice, not a national echo.

“People support national standards simply because they are easier to conceptualize than multiple standards,” McClusky said. “And they think they — not people they dislike — will get to write the new, inescapable standards for all.”

Far better for America’s kids if the great idea to implement common standards had come up somewhere between the third and fourth beer. On sober reflection, the idea will cost a lot of money, waste a lot of time and resources, reach consensus somewhere just south of mediocrity, and in the end prove to be an “ought” that simply cannot achieve its objective.

Craig Westover is a contributing columnist to the Pioneer Press Opinion Page and a senior policy fellow at the Minnesota Free Market Institute (mnfmi.org). His e-mail address is westover4@yahoo.com.

This commentary originally appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Tuesday June 9, 2009.

Mikhail Shifman is the kind of professor universities fight over. His discoveries, research and teachings are key reasons the University of Minnesota’s physics department is highly regarded.

So when Penn State tried to recruit him, the U countered with a bump in salary, a renovated office and $25,000 per year for five years to pay a research collaborator. In total, it was less than Penn State’s offer, Shifman said, but the U won out.

The article also notes the national and international competition for star-power professors.

In its effort to be among the top-three research universities, the U has focused on hiring superstar researchers who require “compensation, plus facilities, plus support staff, plus instruments,” said professor Judith Martin, chair of the University Senate Finance and Planning Committee.

“This isn’t a local market,” Martin said. “Particularly in the sciences, it’s an international market. That’s not always well-understood by students and, from my perspective, the public. People think anybody could teach a class.” …

Recently, the U has faced “a real escalation” in competition to keep the star professors, said Provost Thomas Sullivan. “The reputation of a university rests on the reputation of its faculty,” he said.

During the 2007-08 school year, the Twin Cities’ faculty of about 2,300 received 111 offers from other universities that the U countered. The year before, there were fewer than 100. The counter-offers usually include a mix of “additional salary, additional lab space and greater support for graduate students,” Sullivan said, and their cost is borne by individual colleges or departments.

An inference from the STrib story that will certainly be made by the tax increase crowd, is that the state needs to generate more tax dollars so it can spend more on higher education to keep the University of Minnesota competitive. The state needs to provide more tuition aid so that students aren’t faced with tuition increases. And of course, those tax increases must be paid for by “the rich” – you know, like those highly sought after college professors that the University is paying well over six figures to attract and keep.

So, when the University increases student tuition, not all of the increase goes to pay a highly skilled professor for the actual value delivered to the student and the University; the student also pays increased tuition to cover Minnesota’s higher individual income tax rate on high earners. Lab technicians, professors without tenure, cafeteria workers and other University employees with relatively interchangeable skills, receive lower wages than they otherwise might because the University is not just compensating the star-power professor for his value students and to the University; the University must overcompensate the professor for his actual value to compensate him for Minnesota’s tax code.

There’s an ironic circularity in all this: The state, we are told, needs to raise taxes on the state’s highest earners so the state has the money to invest in higher education and student tuition aid to compensate for increased costs of attracting star-power professors – who require salaries that put them among the state’s highest earners.

As I noted in a recent Pioneer Press column –

A uniquely skilled individual commanding a high salary can work just about anywhere he chooses. The mobile worker, the kind who pays the most taxes, will gravitate to where his net income, not gross income, is highest. To lure and keep highly productive individuals in Minnesota, Minnesota employers, including school districts looking for superintendents and universities seeking nationally known professors, must pay higher gross salaries to compete with low-tax states.

Higher salaries for those already earning top dollar don’t just increase the salary gap; they contribute to higher consumer prices and lower wages for non-mobile workers — the rest of us. When a company pays top-earners more to compensate for high tax rates, it means fewer dollars available to pay the rest of a company’s employees, further increasing the real wage gap irrespective of what the Tax Incidence percentages indicate.

Sensible, economics-based tax reform, “economics” being one of the subjects taught at those institutions of higher learning, might consider reducing income-taxes to make Minnesota more attractive to highly skilled and mobile individuals. Certainly we should not make it even more difficult and expensive for the University by raising taxes on the people it is trying to hire.

Minnesota was the first state to use charter schools as a way of bringing innovation to public education. While nine states have no legal provisions for charter schools, Minnesota has the strongest charter laws in the nation, according to the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter group based in Washington, D.C.

And if legislators act carefully, Minnesota could have an even better policy environment for charter schools at the end of the session.

Charter public schools not only have their own governing boards, but they also have sponsoring organizations (sometimes called authorizers) that are responsible for ensuring they meet the academic, fiscal and governance terms of their charter. Minnesota leads the nation in charter schools, in part, because it allows multiple types of organizations (colleges, nonprofits, the department of education, etc.) to serve as sponsors. In some states, by contrast, charter schools must be legally and financially part of school districts. By embedding charters within districts, those states weaken the power of charter schools to serve as laboratories of innovation.

A key question about charter schools is “Who oversees the overseers?” And what happens when some sponsors are not up to the job?

Several charter school-related bills have been introduced this session, including H.F. 935 (sponsored by Rep. Linda Slocum, DFL-Richfield) and S.F. 867 (sponsored by Sen. Kathy Saltzman, DFL-Woodbury). Those two bills aim to rework laws governing charter schools, and especially chartering authorities.

(Much of the Saltzman bill was rolled into the Senate omnibus bill that the Senate passed on Tuesday. The House K-12 Education Finance Committee on March 10 heard Slocum’s charter school legislation. The committee laid over an amended form of the bill for possible inclusion in the House education omnibus bill, which will be unveiled on Monday after the Easter recess as a delete-all amendment. Committee members plan to review the omnibus bill on Tuesday, and are expected to mark up the bill at a hearing on Wednesday.)

Though any law can have unforeseen consequences, some parts of these bills have reasonable and commonsense provisions that should, as some charter public school fans have told me, strengthen public confidence in these schools. Clarifying and strengthening conflict-of-interest regulations is one example. Requiring charter school boards to create a development plan for administrators is another.

Saltzman’s bill also allows for the creation of two organizations specifically designed to oversee charter schools. While many of the nonprofits that oversee charter schools have done a good job, there’s something to be said about having new organizations that work only on charter schools – Minnesota could benefit from having some.

These are a few of the good measures contained in the current form of the legislation. But other ideas (some of which were removed from earlier versions of the bills) threaten the vitality of charter schools.

For example, an early version of S.F. 867 imposed a numeric cap on charter schools. Even if some schools need better governance, a moratorium on new schools is a poor response, and a blunt instrument that shuts off new schools. Even a temporary cap sets a dangerous precedent. Fortunately, it has since been removed from the legislation.

Another regulation, still in play, would prohibit for three years the establishment or relocation of a charter school within one mile of a district school that had been closed. Saltzman tells me that the limit is a “placeholder,” a way to recognize a problem: A school district may have too much classroom space. It closes a school, bringing enrollment and capacity into balance, but upsetting parents. A charter school opens nearby, and students leave for the new charter in droves – and the lesser number of students in a school district classroom leaves the district once again with too much empty space. Though the latest version of the bill allows the education commissioner to waive the requirement, its presence in the legislation privileges school administrators at the expense of students. Eugene Piccolo, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools, tells me this one-mile, three-year provision is his organization’s primary concern with the bill.

Another risky proposition, discussed early on, was to require charter school leaders to have the same kind of licenses that school district leaders have. The Minnesota Association of Secondary School Principals, for example, has favored the idea. Fortunately, this provision is not in the current Senate legislation.

The thing is, many charter school leaders are effective despite – you might even say because of – their training and experience outside the usual career path for school administrators. One example is Paul Vallas, who was head of the Chicago Public Schools from 1995-2001 (he’s now head of the Recovery School District in New Orleans). Vallas had spent most of his career in finance, and was budget director for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. But when Daley appointed Vallas head of the school system, Vallas became instrumental in starting reforms in the schools there. To me, that shows you don’t need traditional certifications to make a positive impact on schools.

The current Senate bill does not require a charter school administer be certified in the same way that a school district administrator is. But it does say that charter school boards have to lay out a professional development plan for their school leaders. While that’s a step towards layering schools with red tape, it could be worse. Saltzman tells me the intent is not to require, beyond broad categories, the content of a development plan, but to make sure that schools have one.

Can charter schools be better governed? Certainly. Any type of organization can be. But as school districts demonstrate from time to time, a sheaf of regulations and laws cannot eliminate malpractice or malfeasance. Vigilant parents, who value the fact that charter schools offer their children different curricula or environments, are important watchdogs as well.

As they work through the education bills, Minnesota legislators need to tread lightly. When it comes to charter public schools, it’s the aspects that make them distinctive that make all the difference.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan may soon have $5 billion at his discretion that could go a long way toward making research-based strategies available to underperforming schools and students who desperately need help.

I have no idea what that educationspeak means, but I hope one of those strategies is teaching economics. Do these folks teaching our children really believe that Ducan, even with the bureacratic brainpower of the Department of Education behind him, can effectively allocate $5 billion dollars? Better than, say, a million families with kids in underperforming schools each with a $5,000 education voucher and the freedom to spend it at the public or private school of its choice?

While a mandate from Saint Paul may not be desirable, that doesn’t negate the fact that shared purchases of supplies and services can be a winner for taxpayers.

Four scholars with the Reason Foundation, a California-based think tank that focuses on making governments more efficient, explain why and how school districts can save money and improve their effectiveness by cooperating.

School districts might be able to share a large number of non-instructional services. Here’s a partial list: administrative computing and information technology systems; payroll and auditing; legal services; grant management; and staff training and development.

A district that shares services with other units of government (or even, in some cases, a private company) can get many benefits. Instead of having one person on staff who tries to wear three hats, a district can draw on an outside organization that has a full-time specialist.

Mr. Duncan is currently the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools. With roughly 410,000 students, it is the third-largest district in the country. By comparison, you’d have to combine the enrollment in the 30-largest districts in Minnesota to approach that number.

What does the new secretary think about some of the key issues in education?

The biggest issue facing federal lawmakers is No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Duncan has taken all sides of the issue. He supports the concept of the law, which appeals to the law’s backers. But he also favors giving states more flexibility in how they comply with it, which appeals to school district managers as some political conservatives. He also favors doubling the money (currently $28 billion) that the federal government spends on the law. That appeals to teacher unions.

NCLB requires schools to make progress towards universal proficiency by 2014, but states have the power to create their own proficiency standards. Some have dumbed-down the standards, which has helped more schools comply with the law. Duncan advocates a national standard, but that would take the federal government further into the education business, which is not a wise idea.

To his credit, Duncan has been a reformer in teacher pay and recruitment. Some Chicago schools participate in a pilot program to give teachers bonuses tied to student performance. That’s the good news. He also has, however, pushed Chicago teachers to get certificated by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Teachers who go through that program get a pay increase, but whether it actually increases their effectiveness is an open question.

Duncan has also been a fan of Teach for America, a national program that places liberal arts graduates in urban schools. Over 300 of its graduates, whose training is a refreshing alternative to the often stultifying schools of education, have taught in Chicago Public Schools.

Duncan has also managed to close some failing schools, sometimes reopening them as magnet or charter schools. He is also a fan of charter schools generally,  which is another bright spot in his resume.

Duncan favors two other reforms that could pay dividends down the road. The first is to create smaller schools, which have been shown to boost student achievement.

The second reform is “weighted student funding,” a method of budgeting that cuts out some school district overhead by giving more responsibility to school principals.

Duncan seems to be a person who tries to appeal to each party by giving them something they want. That’s an expensive approach to making headway in education reform, but if we’re lucky, he may, in a Democratic administration, be able to pull of something along the lines of a “Nixon to China” experience.

Still, his influence, for good or ill, will be limited by the permanent bureaucracy in the department, the Congress, his boss, and the various other players in education.

I’m worried about this trend.

Several states, including Georgia and Oklahoma, have “universal” preschool programs, and advocates across the country are calling for it as well—including some Republicans. Democratic presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, has said that, if elected, he’d propose a $10 billion universal preschool program.

Advocates of universal preschool say that it can close the achievement gap between races and income levels. Another argument is that spending money on preschool now can save money down the road—$4, 7, or $14 for each dollar spent, depending on whom you listen to—through reduced rates of high school drop-outs, welfare use, or incarceration.

But the case for universal preschool is oversold—the glowing numbers won’t hold up.

In the fall 2008 edition of Education Next, Craig Ramey, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., says that the evidence these programs benefit some children is “quite strong.” But he also says that the benefits of preschool exist “particularly for children from low-resource families.”

Who are these families? They are ones who have “limited parental education, very low family incomes, and/or parents unable to consistently provide high-quality learning opportunities” for preschool children. Ramey’s emphasis on the neediest families is echoed by other experts, such as Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.

They’re simply being smart with the public’s money, for it’s unlikely that the lofty numbers of a few programs can be maintained. Ramey says that’s “because many of the children being served [in today’s expanded programs] have relatively low levels of risk for school failure.”

Compare today’s programs with the Perry Preschool Program, for example. All the children in that program were developmentally or cognitively delayed—certainly not representative of children as a whole. Meanwhile, Head Start, the single-largest preschool program, has been a disappointment.
On the other hand, the advocacy group Pre-K Now favors pre-K programs “for all children.” Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois is one politician who has led the push for a “preschool for all” program that includes three and four-year old children—even those of parents who could pay their own way.
Calling for universal rather than targeted preschool programs is a smart political tactic. That’s because public programs that are tailored to the poor don’t have the same political power. Over time, they don’t expand as rapidly as middle-class entitlements do.
Universal programs disappoint, though, since preschool is subject to the “fade-out” effect. That is, many programs have produced benefits that are observed one or two years but disappear in time. The research on the question of the permanence of gains is mixed. Some research says that preschool gives children cognitive gains, but causes them to regress socially.

The ultimate “fade out,” though comes in the K-12 system itself. Student performance generally declines as a class moves from elementary to middle to high school, suggesting that academic problems lie not in the early years of a child’s school career, but later on.

A universal preschool program is financially foolish and regressive. It consumes funds that could be used to reward teachers who achieve great results with students in the most challenging neighborhoods, and spends it on programs for middle-class. That’s the first way that it’s regressive. The second way is that it depends in part on taxes from the very poor. Though they may not pay much if anything in income taxes, they do pay sales and other taxes.

A universal program could strangle existing preschool and daycare providers. Today, families find a variety of options in daycare and preschool, including family care and centered-based care. A universal system could drive a number of those options out of business, by imposing an expensive regulatory scheme and favoring some providers over others.

But the most serious problem with universal preschool is that it is based in a flawed moral vision that does not respect the boundary between family and politics.

In a healthy society, a number of different institutions address the many different needs that we have as individuals, families and communities. Commercial businesses determine what’s appropriate behavior on the job, but we don’t expect them to set the rules for all of life. Religious institutions help us think about life’s ultimate meaning, but they don’t set interest rates.

Government has its place, too. But setting it up as a major player in determining what a successful childhood is like—something envisioned by the preschool advocates who call on government to organize stakeholders and then fund preschool enrollments—puts today’s public officials in the place of Plato’s philosopher-king, molding the next generation. Anyone who values freedom of conscience and religion, not to mention a civil society distinct from the political world, should be horrified.

In some limited circumstances, we might be served by limited, targeted, voluntary preschool programs. But a universal program is a classic case of the perils of good intentions.

Is the problem that these parents are uncaring, or that our laws encourage them to feel hopeless?

Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy options. If you don’t have much money, you don’t have many options, and perhaps not much hope, either. That’s a recipe for educational disaster.

Too many low-income families face this scenario. If they don’t like the nearest grocery store, they can always go to one a little further away. But if their children’s school is abysmal, they’re stuck. Oh, they might know of a school with excellent teachers and a disciplined learning environment. But it’s in another neighborhood, where the rent, let alone a house payment, is out of reach.

So the family must resort to cajoling, pleading, and making threats. In another word: politics. But the poor are not a strong political force. Money always gets the attention of a politician, and they don’t have any. A poor person may have never learned how to be politically savvy. So “the powers that be”—the politicians, the administrators, the teachers union—run the show, and the parents know it.

Is it any wonder that some of them stop caring?

Civic-minded citizens must do something. So some people donate to private scholarship foundations, which help such parents put their children in a better school. Sometimes, a $1,000 scholarship makes all the difference between a child’s bleak future in a bad school and achieving in a strong one. Twelve states even have voucher or tax-credit laws to make this happen.

There are several benefits to schools of choice, whether they are charter schools or private schools. Often, the students who attend these schools start to improve. One reason, to go back to my friend’s complaint, is that parents start to care.

Why? First of all, they’re no longer hopeless, since they’ve been able to make a choice. And since these schools depend on enrollment to survive—parents can always return their children to district schools, after all—they have an incentive to listen to parents. This consumer-friendly attitude encourages parents to care.

Next, schools of choice often develop a culture of success. I’ve toured one charter school, for example, where teachers ask students not “Will you graduate from high school?”, but “What college will you attend?” Nearly all of this school’s families are poor, and most have never sent a child to college.

Finally, schools of choice often establish expectations for parents, too. Though charter public schools must take all comers, for example, some create a “contract,” or set of expectations, between the teachers and the parents. A contract is possible because the parents actively choose the school.

Nobody, especially a government official, can make parents care. But if our laws expand the choices available to parents, more of them will.