Federal government funds nearly a third of OSDE salary expenditures

"A review of who is paying state education agency (SEA) salaries suggests that many employees within these bureaucracies have competing priorities," Jonathan Butcher writes, "and may have to spend more time meeting federal requirements than serving the students in their states."

Oklahoma’s ESSA plan is more of the same

It's all about "dumping truckloads of money into expensive programs with no proven or even probable relationship to education outcomes," Greg Forster writes.

OCPA praises DeVos, emphasizes federalism

Earlier this month, OCPA joined The Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and 10 other organizations in sending a letter to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos praising her commitment to educational choice and emphasizing the need to remain true to the tenets of federalism.

Will the IRS give us educational freedom?

[Guest post by Greg Forster, Ph.D.]

As more people in Washington, D.C. have come to see that there are good reasons not to enact a national school voucher program, attention is turning to another proposal for federal school choice. The idea is for D.C. to use an alternative kind of program, known as a tax-credit scholarship, to provide school choice nationwide. While this is less objectionable than a national voucher, it is vitally important for school choice advocates to consider the costs involved in such a scheme.

Some of my friends in the school choice movement—including others at EdChoice, where I am proud to serve as a Friedman Fellow—see this as an opportunity we should support. With respect, I disagree.

We have had enormous success building up school choice slowly but surely in the states, where there are now 61 private school choice programs in 30 states plus D.C., serving more than 400,000 students. Diverting our strength into a huge fight in D.C. for what would likely turn out to be a lousy program—assuming we win at all, rather than suffering a humiliating loss in the national spotlight—would probably cost us more than it would be worth.

Tax-credit scholarships work differently from vouchers and from vouchers’ young cousin, Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). Both vouchers and ESAs take government funding for education and put it under the direct control of parents. Tax-credit scholarships are indirect. They provide a tax credit that reimburses individual and/or corporate donors who give money to Scholarship-Granting Organizations (SGOs). The SGOs then take the money and use it to pay private-school tuition for students.

Overall, tax-credit scholarships are an inferior way to provide school choice. They put a gatekeeper—the SGO—between parents and choice. Every family should have a right to school choice. Vouchers and ESAs can provide that, while tax-credit scholarships always leave families dependent on SGO decisions. SGOs not only decide who gets to exercise choice; since they control the amount of the scholarship each student gets, they control who gets how much choice.

Tax-credit scholarships also have to place limits on how much funding is available, and therefore how many students can participate. That’s to control the amount of tax revenue diverted to the program. Vouchers and ESAs can always serve every student.

When these programs are designed poorly, as is usually the case, the problems of limited funding and arbitrary SGO control over families’ access to choice become serious. Good program design can mitigate these problems, although never entirely eliminate them. However, in the sausage grinder of D.C. education politics, the smart money will be on Congress producing a poorly designed program. Just look what a lousy job they did with their initial health-care bill.

So why do some prefer tax-credit scholarships? The main advantage is that the government never touches the money that pays for private-school tuition. Private donors give the money to SGOs, which use it to pay tuition bills. Government reimburses the donors by reducing their tax bills.

Usually this is considered an advantage because our court system is not, in general, smart enough to understand either that school choice is constitutional or that money is fungible. There are no serious constitutional objections to school choice. If religious schools can’t participate in government programs on the same terms as secular schools, how can we provide fire protection to churches? Or police protection to synagogues? Or municipal water lines to mosques?

Nonetheless, politicized judges are often looking for an excuse to strike down school choice. Keeping the government’s hands from directly touching the money does seem to help prevent them from doing so. That’s a bogus argument, because money is fungible. Treating tax credits as constitutionally different from ordinary spending is like treating the dollar bill in your left pocket as constitutionally different from the dollar bill in your right pocket. But since the argument against school choice is transparently bogus, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that what works is a bogus argument against it.

Today, though, this “Uncle Sam never touches the money” feature of tax-credit scholarships is taking on a new importance. School choice advocates, many of whom raised howls of protest against the federal push for Common Core on federalism grounds, are suddenly looking for a way to explain why D.C. can legitimately take charge of education policy. Doing it through the tax code seems to circumvent the federalism barrier.

There are a number of reasons not to go down this road. Let’s start with the wisdom of the founders.

There used to be an ad campaign declaring that driving at the speed limit “is not just a good idea, it’s the law.” Turning that around, I think my friends in the school choice movement need to realize that federalism is not just the law. It’s a good idea!

Yes, we can probably circumvent the legal barriers to federal control of education by going through the tax code. But is it a good idea to have D.C. control education policy—even if the policy it sets is a good one?

The idea behind federalism is that governance should be kept as close as possible to local communities. That is partly because big, distant legislatures and bureaucracies are not likely to serve people well if they’re not directly connected to them. And that’s still going to be a problem even if you do find a clever way to circumvent the Constitution’s legal barriers to national education policy.

Will the IRS give us freedom? Let’s be clear: Any federal tax-credit scholarship program will be administered by the same IRS that illegally tried to shut down conservative activists not long ago. It will be the IRS deciding which SGOs are worthy of funding and which aren’t. It will be the IRS that audits compliance and sets the terms of participation.

I never thought I’d live to see freedom-loving activists demanding to have the future of school choice put into the hands of the IRS. I feel like Rip Van Winkle. What did I miss here?

Another reason to keep governance local is that imposing a policy upon a community by force if that community doesn’t regard the policy as just is, in general, a tyrannical thing to do. There are exceptions (you may recall we had a little trouble from 1861 to 1865). But usually, if you can’t persuade New York City to adopt the policies that the people in Oklahoma City want, or vice versa, then they should each be allowed to go their own way. Neither one should be enslaved to the will of the other.

I sympathize with educators and activists in states that are unlikely to adopt school choice. A federal tax-credit scholarship program would deliver school choice to them. That’s not a small consideration.

But it would also teach everyone around them to view them as enemies and redouble their efforts to shut them down. School-choice advocates in these states would go from being viewed as misguided to being viewed as devious, backstabbing enemies of the public. In the long term, that wouldn’t be good for school choice.

Lately I’ve heard a lot of talk from my conservative friends about how wrong it is when distant, powerful elites who are culturally alienated from the population at large shove laws down our throats that we regard as unjust. The question is, do we dislike that because we would rather it was our distant, powerful elites imposing our preferred laws upon populations from whom we are culturally alienated, and who view those laws as unjust? Or because elites shoving things down people’s throats is inherently wrong, whoever does it?

Keeping school choice in the states is the wise course. If we fight in a state and lose, as we have before and will again, we can always fight on in other states. In fact, when we’re losing in one state we’re usually winning in several others! However, if we fight a big national battle and lose, which is always a serious possibility, the movement could be set back for a generation.

But will it be much better if we fight a big national battle and win? We’ll get a program widely viewed as unjust and illegitimately imposed on the states, one that will be sabotaged both by its own lousy program design and by the deliberate efforts of the IRS bureaucracy to undermine it.

The failure of a poorly designed voucher program in Louisiana is now causing the movement some headaches—bad headlines and talking points from opponents. That pain is mitigated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of state programs do work. How much pain would the failure of a national school choice program cause? The big national lesson would be: “See? School choice doesn’t work.”

If D.C. wants to clean up the mess in education, it should clean up its own mess—the mess in D.C. The schools in our nation’s capital remain among the worst in the nation despite decades of increased spending and crusading reformers. The only serious glimmer of hope that has actually done some good has been the growth of charter schools and private school choice. Expanding the federal voucher program in D.C. to allow all students and all schools to participate would be an ideal way for D.C. to set a standard for the nation. Imposing school choice on the states, even by the back door of the tax code, is not the way to go.

Keep education—and choice—in the states

"Education reformers face an enormous temptation to use federal power to foist choice upon the states," Greg Forster writes for OCPA. This would be a bad idea, he says, whether the policy is Title I portability or a federal tax credit.

Obama's colossal education policy failure

"On its way out the door," journalist Mark Hemingway writes, "the Obama Education Department quietly released the results of its $7 billion investment in the School Improvement Grants program, 'the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools,' according to the Washington Post. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had promised the program would turn around 5,000 failing schools.

"The results are nothing short of a colossal failure. Test scores, graduation rates, and college enrollment were no different in schools that received School Improvement Grants than schools that did not."

Trump runs the risk of destroying school choice

"If DeVos and Trump love school choice and the children it benefits, they will keep the federal government far, far away from them," Joy Pullmann writes. "Trump should not destroy school choice in the name of expanding it."

A word of caution to the Trump administration on school choice

Good advice from Will Flanders and Jake Curtis.

'Oklahoma school voucher advocates see a political opening'

Informative front-page story today by Ben Felder in The Oklahoman. But it's worth pointing out again, as Jason L. Riley did in The Wall Street Journal, that federal vouchers are problematic.

Federal vouchers present hazards

"Mr. Trump has proposed a $20 billion federal voucher program that students could use to attend public or private schools," Jason L. Riley writes today in The Wall Street Journal ("Why Trump’s Education Pick Scares Unions").

But this idea presents similar hazards. Federal dollars will bring federal regulations, and reform-minded individuals like Betsy DeVos won’t forever be in charge of implementing them. Better to let the states lead on school choice. Now that Republicans control 33 governorships and both legislative chambers in 32 states, what’s stopping them?

Federal-voucher opponents are right (for the wrong reasons)

"A federal voucher program poses a danger to school choice efforts nationwide," Jason Bedrick writes.

Fed Ed failure

Federal involvement in education has been a multi-faceted failure. It’s time to devolve power to state and local governments and, better still, to take “local control” all the way to the kitchen table by giving more choices to parents. Dr. Vicki Alger, author of the new book Failure: The Federal Miseducation of America's Children, discussed the matter this morning on The Trent England Show.

Commode Core shows why we need school choice

The Obama administration’s bathroom bullying, Greg Forster writes in Perspective, demonstrates the conflict between America’s commitment to a pluralistic society and its policy of maintaining a government school monopoly.

Other than that ...

"Common Core supporters know many voters and politicians dislike federal meddling with education," Joy Pullmann writes, "because it is not authorized by the Constitution, is utterly ineffective, and destroys the right of parents to bring up their children as they see fit."

'Common Core fundamentally alters the relationship between the federal government and the states'

A new Pioneer Institute study is here.

OKC school district to seek federal money (and strings)

The Oklahoma City school district is set to vie for "Race to the Top" money. As Heritage Foundation analyst Lindsey Burke correctly says, it's just "another step in centralizing education control and a continuance of Washington-centric education policy that has burdened taxpayers, encumbered states, and failed students for the last half-century."

Obama's education takeover

Common Core exit strategy

Heritage Foundation analyst Lindsey Burke charts the course Oklahoma should follow.

Obama rules by fiat, Oklahoma plays along

"Whether it is in the area of environmental regulations, labor and immigration law, No Child Left Behind, the auto bailout, the selective enforcement of other federal laws, and the regulation of the Internet (among others), the Obama Administration has in fact enacted its agenda via legislative fiat," attorney Mike Brownfield writes over at The Heritage Foundation blog. "So what’s the problem? A big thing called the U.S. Constitution and the separation of powers."

It's disappointing to see Oklahoma apply for a No Child Left Behind "waiver." As former deputy secretary of education Eugene Hickok says, these waivers are "unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral."

ALEC pushes back against federal overreach

I'm a member of the education task force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and last week's meeting in Phoenix was a lively one. The Heritage Foundation's Lindsey Burke was there, and writes:

American taxpayers, businesses, and families are outraged by the nationalization of health care through Obamacare. They’re upset by the federal overreach, the loss of health care choices they'll soon face, Obamacare's astounding price tag, and the opaque process by which this massive legislation was enacted.

If they found Obamacare upsetting, then Americans should take a look at the Obama Administration’s overreach in education. Last week, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) did just that, examining the push for national standards during a meeting of its Education Task Force. ...

Conservatives are concerned about this fast-moving effort to nationalize standards and tests. And last week, state leaders amped up the fight against more federal control of education.

At the ALEC meeting, model legislation was passed out of the Education Task Force that provides a blueprint for states that want to exit the national standards project and regain control over what is taught in local schools. ...

It’s time for state leaders to stand up to strong-arming from Washington, instead of faulting conservative organizations for pushing back on this latest federal overreach. A nationalization of education is underway, and unless conservatives work to fight Washington’s power grab, Obamacare won’t be the only overreach we’ll have to live under.