'Modesty is desirable in one’s approach to regulation'

Helpful insights here from Michael McShane

Stephen Breyer’s book Regulation and its Reform was published in 1982, more than a decade before Breyer would become a Supreme Court Justice, and was called at the time the “bible of regulatory reform.” ...

The key insights of Regulation and Its Reform are the questions it pushes policymakers to ask before drafting and imposing regulations. What is the problem we are trying to solve? Is regulation the best tool to solve it? Will the cost of regulations exceed their benefits?

Regulations work best with they are broad, simple, and clear. They are bad at fine-tuning and can become onerous very quickly.

Public school 'accountability' systems are in fact 'weapons of mass deception'

"The 'accountability' systems developed in the early 21st century may be worse than useless," writes Heritage Foundation scholar Matt Ladner. "They may, in fact, serve as weapons of mass deception." After all, these are "accountability" systems in which very few grown-ups are held responsible for academic failure.

A true lesson in accountability

"When the school proved unable to provide satisfactory services to students and families, parents took action—and held The Hive accountable more efficiently and effectively than any government accountability office could," Matt Frendewey writes.

With (or without) the shekels come the shackles

States already regulate private schools. They do so whether or not a state has a private-school choice program. The Council on American Private Education (CAPE) reported on Nov. 30:

The New York Board of Regents has proposed a rule that would subject religious and independent schools to “all statutory provisions, Rules of the Regents, and Regulations of the Commissioner.” The proposal would also give the State Education Department the authority to order the closure of any elementary or high school that it finds not in compliance with all statutory provisions, rules, and regulations of the commissioner. Private school advocates in New York, led by the state CAPE, have pushed back, arguing that the rule would fundamentally transform the relationship between private schools and the state. 

New York does not have a private-school choice program. 

State governments can try to pile on regulations whether or not school-choice programs are involved.

Hypervigilance is not the price of liberty

When it comes to resisting government encroachment, eternal vigilance is important. Hats off to the many libertarians, liberty-loving homeschoolers, and others who are always diligent about emphasizing this point.

But they can take it too far. Yesterday on The Tom Woods Show (at the 34:30 mark), Corey DeAngelis gave an answer to those on the right who oppose school choice out of fear that government strings will accompany government money.

My simple response to that is that we can’t make perfect the enemy of the good. … Because whether we like it or not, in the current situation we don't have utopia. We have 9 out of 10 kids stuck in government-run schools today that are totally controlled and operated by the government. And out of the 60 or 70 existing school choice programs in the nation, and throughout U.S. history, there’s never been a school choice program that forces any family to take the money. … 

If you were forced to take the money and the regulations, I’d be against it. But there is no program, from what I can tell, that has ever existed that has forced families to take the funding.

So it’s a cost-benefit decision that each individual family should be able to make for themselves. But at the same time, you shouldn't be able to tell another family that they can't make that cost-benefit decision for themselves.

And the other part of this is that, look, the government can regulate private and home education already.This is not a school choice issue; this is an issue of electing the politicians who are going to trample on your rights or not. I mean, look at Oregon in 1922: they outlawed private education in Oregon. Thankfully, three years later the U.S. Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters ruled that “the child is not the mere creature of the State” and thankfully overturned that authoritarian law. …

But there's another doomsday scenario that is I would say more likely than what is being argued by some libertarians who say that school choice could lead to government control of private education. And that scenario is that we have 9 out of 10 kids going to government schools today. They're being indoctrinated to grow up to vote like little socialists later on in life. And when they go through that process they're more likely to vote to regulate private and home education in the future. We should be more concerned about that than giving families the choice to accept the money or not today. And the benefit of doing that and having school choice and giving families that option is that you've built a broader coalition to fight back against those future calls for regulation: You get more people experiencing private education, you'll have a bigger “special interest,” if you will, to fight back against tyrants’ calls to regulate private and home education. And then the other benefit is if more people are using private and home education in the short run, then the idea will become more mainstream. If the concept is more mainstream, the rest of society should be less likely to call to regulate it. So both of those things work in our favor and those are arguments as to why we should support school choice and allowing families to have the choice to take the money or not.

Look, I’m with you. I’m an anarcho-capitalist. I don’t want any government involvement in anything, particularly in education. But if we’re going to spend the money, and if we're in a scenario where we already are spending the money, then we’ve got to make decisions about incremental reforms that are going to work in our favor to reduce government control of our lives. And a policy reform that's working right now that we're winning on is school choice. My takeaway is that we should take the W or else we're going to be stuck with the L.

And what's funny to me is, we've mentioned Randi Weingarten a couple of times already, is that she's repeated the same argument on Twitter: oh, you know, school choice is going to control private education. Do you think Randi Weingarten is some anarcho-capitalist libertarian who just hates government involvement in private education? No, absolutely not. Randi Weingarten loves big government. And she’s only repeating this argument because she knows that if it gets more traction and is successful in blocking school choice, well then she's going to keep her gravy train going and kids are going to continue to be stuck in government-run institutions that are controlled by her union. So when you're on the side of Randi Weingarten in this debate and the teachers union, you're probably on the wrong side and you’re probably overthinking things.

And by the way, every single policy reform (and so does the status quo) has a set of costs and benefits associated with it. As Thomas Sowell once said, “there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.” And there are trade-offs with every policy solution that's proposed and the status quo has trade-offs as well. And what people are doing when they're fearmongering about school choice policies is they are focusing on potential future costs of the school choice policy while ignoring all of the huge guaranteed costs that already exist today of cementing the teachers union monopoly. We’ve got to make these types of decisions and I think parents are in the best position to make these decisions for their own kids. And because they're not forced to take the money and families can make the cost-benefit decision to accept the funding or not, I think we should allow them to have that choice.

Vigilance is healthy and reasonable. Hypervigilance, not so much.

Eternal vigilance needed—with or without school choice

"Private school advocates were shocked by two federal court decisions this summer declaring that private schools with tax-exempt status must comply with federal Title IX regulations," the Council for American Private Education reports.

These entirely unexpected rulings—one from Maryland and one from California—represent a stark departure from the previous understanding of the situation. Until now, it was widely understood that private schools were only subject to Title IX if they accepted federal funds. In order to be free of such federal obligations, many private schools have long declined to accept federal funds. Under these new rulings, however, private schools that claim tax-exempt status would have to comply with Title IX even if they do not take federal funds. Such a state of affairs would have enormous implications for private schools, and indeed all nonprofit organizations.

As I never tire of repeating to school choice foes on the right, the government can and does pile on regulations whether or not school choice programs are involved. 

The effect of private school choice regulations on school participation

"Private school choice programs’ success depends partly on the supply of private schools," a new paper reminds us.

Eternal vigilance needed

Private schools are already subject to all manner of state and federal requirements. And as recent news from famously-school-choiceless Texas and New York reminds us, the government can try to pile on more regulations whether or not a state has school choice programs. "States already can and do regulate private schools," Matt Ladner and Ginny Gentles remind us. New York's proposed new regulations come "despite the absence of any choice program in New York."

Oklahoma’s unaccountable public schools

It's not accountability if no one is held accountable.

School choice makes homeschoolers and private schools more safe from government — not less

Yes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. It's important to be vigilant, Greg Forster reminds us, but it's also important not to see a monster under every bed.

Parent empowerment — not regulatory overreach — key to private school choice accountability

"Parent empowerment — not regulatory overreach — should drive accountability for publicly funded school choice programs."

Public school accountability is a myth

"Public schools are not held accountable either democratically, financially, or educationally," Michael McShane writes.

Real accountability to parents trumps fake accountability to government

"Oklahoma passed a major expansion of one of its school choice programs this year, and the education special interests aren’t happy," Greg Forster writes. "They’re signaling that they’re about to try the same futile gambit they usually try after this kind of major legislative defeat: fake 'accountability' that takes away parental control."

How big a Department of Education does Oklahoma need?

"From curriculum to nutrition to family engagement to technology," Greg Forster writes, "the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s interference in your local school never rests. And when the state isn’t overregulating schools, it’s promoting the indoctrination of students into a progressive political agenda."

Parents justified in student privacy concerns

[Guest post by Jonathan Small]

Recently, thousands of Oklahoma students’ names and home addresses were obtained from the Oklahoma State Department of Education and used for mailers. Parents were understandably upset.

In Arizona, the state Department of Education released parent names and individual account information for more than 7,000 student-beneficiaries of a school-choice program. Parents were understandably upset.

But now Oklahoma lawmakers are telling parents not to worry about student privacy, even though newly passed legislation mandates reporting requirements that experts believe could allow identification of individual students.

House Bill 1230 imposes new regulations for the Lindsey Nicole Henry (LNH) Scholarship Program that include releasing LNH data by school site and recipient demographics including race, income, and disability. Families are rightfully concerned by those requirements because the legislation did not include student-privacy safeguards typically included in other reporting mandates.

It’s not unreasonable for parents to worry that it won’t take long for people to identify students by name if a report shows a private school has just a handful of LNH recipients and one is a low-income black child with autism.

Children served by LNH private-school scholarships either have special needs, such as autism, or are foster and adopted children. Many are survivors of abuse—including, at times, severe bullying in public schools that prompted suicide attempts before the LNH program provided an alternative. Why should the state make it possible for those children’s former tormentors to identify them and their new school? And why should the state allow anti-school-choice radicals to identify specific families? If you don’t think there’s reason for concern on that front, you have not seen the vitriol school-choice opponents aim at low-income families online.

LNH recipients are not unreasonable in expecting privacy to be safeguarded because those protections are given elsewhere to other students. For example, when state testing results are released by school district, the data is withheld in instances where the number of test-taking students is so low that reporting on results could allow identification by inference.

The children with special needs targeted by HB 1230 deserve comparable protections.

The Republican Party often presents itself as a champion of deregulation in the name of individual liberty and job creation. President Trump has slashed regulations at the federal level, which experts agree has contributed to strong economic growth. At the state level, Gov. Kevin Stitt wants to cut regulations by 25 percent. So why has a GOP-controlled Legislature chosen to head the opposite direction when it comes to a program that serves needy children?

The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs believes in accountability. But the troubling provisions of HB 1230 do nothing to deter or identify potential fraud. They only create potential hardship for families that already face more than their fair share of challenges. To make Oklahoma a place where more families can thrive, Oklahoma policymakers should stand up for those families, not add to their burdens.

Unnecessary and burdensome, HB 1230 raises privacy concerns

Some thoughts on HB 1230, which places more strings on the Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship program.

• Accountability is vitally important, but it makes no sense to impose upon a market an accountability system designed to regulate a monopoly. Government regulations are a pale imitation of the true accountability system—accountability to parents. As political scientist Greg Foster says, "there is no real need to regulate private schools, in choice programs or otherwise, for anything other than health and safety."
• This is especially true when one realizes that public schools are not accountable. Indeed, as one retired public school teacher puts it, "there is no entity in America that is less accountable than a government-run school system."
• Republicans believe in reducing, not increasing, red tape. President Donald Trump boasts of a “record number of regulations eliminated” while Gov. Kevin Stitt is aiming for a 25 percent reduction in regulations by the end of his term.
• Submitting extensive data to government officials to publish online raises serious privacy concerns:

• Just last month, for example, we learned that the Arizona Department of Education handed over a spreadsheet containing private data on participating school-choice families to a group that wants to shut down school-choice programs. "The sheet gave the names and email addresses of more than 7,000 parents, the grades their children are in, and the children’s disabilities (if any)," Dr. Forster writes. "While the private data had been superficially covered, mandatory steps to prevent the process from being reversed—revealing the data—had not been taken."
• The Oklahoma Department of Education (OSDE), similarly no fan of school choice, has also demonstrated a recent willingness to cooperate with the organized left.
• Oklahoma Watch reported on Feb. 14 that thousands of Oklahoma students received recruitment flyers in the mail from a virtual charter school and that "parents are furious about the school’s access to children’s names and home addresses." The school’s attorney, Drew Edmondson, said the school got the information from the OSDE website. "This is a violation of privacy and safety," says one Noble Public Schools board member. "We have received alarming complaints," says state Superintendent Joy Hofmeister.

• The only failed example of private-school choice in U.S. history is school vouchers in Louisiana, Dr. Forster writes, where, because of overregulation, participation rates by private schools were catastrophically low. "The problem was not any one obviously bad regulation. There was no 'poison pill.' Each individual regulation, by itself, was not a dealbreaker. The problem was the accumulated weight of many intrusive regulations, whose combined burden was far greater than expected. One important aspect of that was the clear signals that the schools got from the government that more regulations would be coming in the future. Private schools told the program’s evaluators that they didn’t want to sign up to be subject to unpredictable future creation of regulatory liabilities."
• Dr. Donnie Peal, executive director of the Oklahoma Private School Accreditation Commission (OPSAC), reminds us that Oklahoma private schools are already accountable to state and federal governmental entities as well as to OPSAC, which works in collaboration with and on behalf of the Oklahoma State Department of Education. Dr. Peal says HB 1230 is unnecessary.

UPDATES:

• "Legislation imposing new reporting mandates on a school-choice program has passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives," Ray Carter reported Feb. 19, "even though the legislation does not include specific student-privacy protections that ensure compliance with federal law."
• The day after HB1230 passed the House, the bill's author, state Rep. Mark McBride, flipped off and verbally attacked OCPA president Jonathan Small in the state Capitol building. As Small recounts the incident, McBride's words "included saying I was the 'f' word at least twice, calling me a piece of 's----' twice, saying I was worthless twice, twice referring to me as a derogatory word for male genitalia, and twice telling me to 'scat' like I was some sort of animal."
• Gov. Kevin Stitt signed HB 1230 into law.

Seemingly harmless choice regulations compromise families' privacy

"The more private, personal data the state collects—or requires schools to collect and send it—the less privacy we all have," Greg Forster writes.

Don’t overregulate choice

"There is no real need to regulate private schools, in choice programs or otherwise, for anything other than health and safety," Greg Forster writes. "Parents are the real accountability system."

Parental choice is an effective form of accountability

Longtime Democratic activist Catherine Durkin Robinson explains.

A bridge too far

"But even if the general appetite for [virtual charter school] regulation increases, closing Oklahoma’s enrollment loophole by creating a roster of homeschool and private school students may not be politically feasible," Caroline Halter reports.

“Our state is not one that wants to intrude on personal information of family members who are choosing not to be a part of public schools,” Hofmeister said.  

Even Sen. Sharp admitted he could not support such a law and survive reelection.