The issue of bad teachers is the proverbial Gordian Knot, and pulling on a single thread won’t untie it. If we want to get serious about ridding our schools of bad teachers, we must attack many difficult issues all at once—including low teacher pay, collective bargaining agreements, pension systems, and teacher evaluations. Alternatively, we might just focus on weeding out ineffective rookies.
Tim Daly has done the field a great service with his walk down memory lane about the flawed Obama-era effort to reform teacher evaluations. It’s all the more impressive because Tim himself was a central figure in the movement (along with Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Tom Kane, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others). It’s never easy to acknowledge the failure of something you played a big role in creating. For instance, I still refuse to accept that Common Core was a failure. (Note: It wasn’t.)
As Tim explains, the impulse behind fixing teacher evaluations was a sound one. A key goal was to finally make it feasible to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom. Unfortunately, broken teacher evaluation systems were just one tiny part of the problem rather than the problem itself. The issue of bad teachers is the proverbial Gordian Knot, and pulling on a single thread won’t untie it.
Indeed, if we want to get serious about ridding our schools of bad teachers, we must attack many difficult issues all at once: low teacher pay, which creates the appearance, if not the reality, of teacher shortages; state laws and collective bargaining agreements that mandate extreme due-process rights for tenured teachers; pension systems that raise the stakes dramatically for the removal of teachers near the end of their careers; and yes, the teacher evaluations themselves.
In my view, we should have recognized early-on that reforming all of this was politically impossible, at least via federal policy. (Washington, D.C. and Dallas came closest—two exceptions out of 14,000 districts that prove the rule.) Therefore we should have focused on the much more achievable aim of improving the feedback teachers receive about their instructional practice, rather than trying to build high-stakes, formal evaluation systems that would inevitably do little good. After all, why would a principal give a negative review to a teacher she knew she was stuck with? It was no surprise, then, when after all the efforts and all the fights, almost every teacher in the country still receives positive evaluations from their principals. Little changed, except that attitudes against testing became even more negative and widespread.
So the bad-teacher problem hasn’t gone away. The question for today is whether that’s fated to be our permanent lot, or whether another run at the issue could be more successful. My view is that the Gordian Knot remains unbreakable, at least for experienced teachers. But I believe we could make significant progress on weeding out bad teachers in their first few years of service, before they get tenure protections or come anywhere close to a pension payout.
Are bad teachers really a problem?
Before proceeding further, it’s worth pausing to ponder whether bad teachers really are a problem. The unions would certainly argue that the vast majority of teachers are committed professionals who chose a public-spirited but poorly-paid career because of their interest in helping kids. I agree entirely! But any field is going to have high performers and low performers, probably in the rough shape of a bell curve. Any decent organization frets about how to move that curve to the right, including by asking the lowest-performers to find another line of work. It’s hardly teacher-bashing to try to do so in K–12 education.
Not that it’s easy in any sector. Few managers enjoy firing people, especially people they work alongside and have come to know well. In the for-profit world, there are strong organizational incentives not to let bad performance fester. But even then, managers need structures and nudges to get them to pull the trigger or an economic downturn to force the issue. Firing people is hard.
Yet it’s really important that we do so, especially in schools. Partly that’s because of the evidence demonstrating that our lowest-performing teachers cause significant deterioration for the students unlucky enough to be assigned to them. Especially since such students are more likely to be low-income kids and kids of color, given the inequitable distribution of effective teachers in many of our schools.
It’s also the case that low performers are a huge morale problem for high performers. That’s surely true in any line of work, but especially in schools. If I teach fourth grade, the quality of my school’s third-grade teachers has a direct impact on how well-prepared my students will be, and thus on what I can accomplish with them. So it is from K through 12.
Bad teachers with tenure: We’re pretty much stuck with them
The bad news about bad teachers is that it’s probably politically impossible to remove them from the profession, at least if they already have tenure and many years of experience. Here’s why.
First, it would mean rolling back due-process protections in place in all but a handful of states so that it does not take years and thousands of dollars to remove a teacher from the classroom. Needless to say, the unions are going to fight such changes tooth and nail. But perhaps in red states, and especially red districts within red states, progress on this front is doable.
But next on the list of challenges is the teacher pension system. Almost every teacher in America still participates in an old-fashioned defined benefit plan, meaning that they get a big payoff if they stick it out for twenty-five or thirty years, and almost nothing if they leave before retirement age. That creates a very strong incentive to be a lifer even if you are burned out and miserable. And for principals, that means knowing that, if you fire burned-out and miserable veteran teachers, not only must they find new livelihoods, but they will also lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in pension wealth.
Given that most principals are nice people who don’t like to fire colleagues they’ve worked with for years, you can imagine that this is going to be hard for them to do. You can also understand why the unions will protect these pension policies to the death. Indeed, Michigan was one of the few states that had switched a generation ago to a defined contribution plan, akin to a 401(k), and one of the first things the teachers unions fought for once the Democrats gained trifecta control in the state in 2022 was to go back to a defined benefit plan as the default. (They won that fight just a few months ago.)
Finally, there’s the challenge of teacher shortages or at least the perception thereof. Principals are loath to let go of bad teachers because they aren’t sure they’ll be able to replace them with someone better. A bird in the hand and all that.
Any labor economist will tell you that the best way to address a shortage is to pay people more. And in a sane world, we would indeed have a system where we paid teachers dramatically higher salaries and found the money by dramatically reducing the number of non-instructional staff and administrators in our school systems. But that is another Gordian Knot of its own!
Briefly: One reason we have so many non-teaching adults in our schools is to compensate for the middling quality of our teachers. We have embraced a system whereby we pay teachers relatively low salaries, which attracts mediocre candidates (on average), and then we hire coaches, instructional aides, and myriad other personnel to try to help those mediocre teachers do a better job with their students.
A completely different approach, one that is more common overseas, is to pay teachers well but keep the rest of the staffing system lean and mean. That means larger class sizes, yes, but also fewer non-instructional personnel, fewer administrators, and in general fewer teacher-helpers.
So how do we get from here to there? Honestly, I have no idea.
Bad rookie teachers, on the other hand, are a solvable problem
So if it’s impossible to do much about ineffective teachers with tenure and lots of experience, what about weeding out bad teachers before they get such protections and come anywhere close to a pension payoff? Here is where there is some good news, which is that every school district in America could make good use of its tenure approval process today, and it would face far less opposition from the teachers unions or anyone else. After all, Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein were able to institute the practice of denying tenure to a majority of teachers on their first try, and that was in New York City with the United Federation of Teachers! If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.
I’m not saying it’s easy. Denying someone tenure still needs to be done fairly and objectively. That would be a good place to use the kind of teacher evaluation systems that we see in leading states and cities, such as Tennessee and the District of Columbia—the type that Tim Daly and his compatriots spent so many years building.
And you still must deal with the “nice principal” problem. Perhaps tenure approval should be something managed at the district level, with a committee of sorts, more like how it works in higher education.
Maybe it would also help if the number of tenured positions were limited. You make it so that principals or district administrators have no choice but to deny tenure to the least effective rookie teachers. Make it a forced choice. And perhaps you could then distribute tenured positions equitably to schools throughout a district, with high-poverty schools getting more than low-poverty ones. Make it an equity play, too.
Yes, we will still face the teacher shortage problem, though the end of ESSER funding—which temporarily allowed districts to hire lots more teachers—and the sharp decline in student enrollment in most districts will take care of that, at least in the short term. We won’t need, and won’t have the money for, as many teachers as we have in recent years.
No doubt, some teachers would receive tenure who would later become burned out and be relatively ineffective. But the research evidence indicates that we can usually tell within the first few years if someone is likely to be a strong teacher. We won’t get this perfect every time, but we should have many fewer ineffectual teachers if we take this approach.
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So there you have it. Unless you are willing to try unraveling the entire Gordian Knot—and have the political will and political strategy to succeed—forget about bad veteran teachers and focus on weeding out the bad rookie ones before they get too much experience in the classroom. It won’t solve everything, but it will make our schools better. Take the win!
It seems every day that yet another story hits the headlines about a school banning phones. Of course, the large majority of schools had nominal prohibitions previously, but they left enforcement up to teachers, which meant most students still slipped them out during class, at lunch, and in the halls. Now more schools are opting towards magnetically sealed bags or locking phones away in closets before the first bell rings.
Countless districts, states, and even entire countries have announced and tried to implement such bans. After a few semesters with these policies, researchers have had sufficient time to study their effects, and results from those studies are starting to roll in.
Most recently, researcher Sara Abrahamsson surveyed Norwegian schools to determine if and when they implemented a phone ban and linked that to Norwegian Registry data, which includes “information on each individual’s educational institution, health care take-up at specialist care, including psychologists, and general practitioners (GPs), middle-school grades set by students’ teachers and externally corrected exams, student’s overall GPA, and individuals’ choices of academic or vocational high schools.”
Schools implemented restrictions at different times, and Abrahamsson demonstrates that the implementation of smartphone bans was uncorrelated with either school characteristics such as teacher gender ratios or prior achievement, and uncorrelated with prior trends such as declining mental health or GPAs. These factors allowed for a quasi-experimental design, analyzing 477 middle schools between 2010 and 2018. From this analysis, she comes to five conclusions:
This study comes as researchers debate the broader effects of social media on teenagers. In previous years, it’s become more and more evident that social media is, in fact, a major cause of declining adolescent mental health. Even so, there’s still much debate over how significant of a driver they are and what’s to be done about them.
Just because something is bad doesn’t necessarily justify a strict prohibition. History is riddled with examples wherein prohibitions backfired (the temperance movement) or created unsustainable negative externalities (the war on drugs). Similarly, some school-level campaigns such as the D.A.R.E. program have only increased the rate of the behavior they tried to combat.
In the case of phone bans, however, this latest study is just one more entry to an expanding literature on the benefits of such policies. It’s worth noting that the p-values in this study are small—signifying a uncertainty in its conclusions—but as I’ve written about here before, several earlier analyses showed that limiting phone usage during class increases performance on both standardized test scores and end-of-course exams. As for non-academic benefits, researchers have found that, without phones, students exercise far more at recess, burning off energy, fostering physical health, and promoting later attention in class. In short, phone bans work.
From a personal perspective, I’ve seen the benefits. For a number of years, I volunteered at a summer camp that confiscated phones on day one. Students grudgingly handed them over, complaining that they’d “lose their streaks” (it has something to do with Snapchat). But in short order they were voicing appreciation for the time they could spend sitting in circles chatting with friends, without all eyes staring down. Few had experienced the simple pleasure of getting lost in thought because boredom had always prompted them to grab their phone. By week’s end, every single student—every single one—expressed some hesitation to check their phones when we handed them back. They’d learned to love being phone free.
Something of a pessimist as I am, I find this turnaround on phones a heartening trend. We’ve seen society-wide transformations before, movements that greatly improved the lives of young people. Campaigns against smoking that spread the message of its negative health effects and prompted bans in countless public space, for example, have led to a drastic decrease in smoking rates. A similar decline happened for teen pregnancy after policy initiatives, public messaging campaigns, and rhetoric from various political bully pulpits sought to combat the societal malady.
We can and should see a similar shift for teens and social media. Amid debates about highly technocratic, complex ed-policy initiatives with unclear benefits—mass testing, curricular overhauls, and others—banning phones is a simple, easily implemented, and clear win-win for our students, teachers, and society writ large.
November’s all-but-settled presidential rematch bears many of the trappings of 2020, except that Donald Trump will pick a new running mate. Who will it be? There are dozens of possibilities, though he has sometimes signaled an interest in selecting a woman. Let’s take that as a given, then match it with the Washington Post’s top prospects, and look at five that might fit the bill to speculate on what each might mean for education.
Sure, it’s a parlor game, as policy comes from the Oval Office. But it’s never pointless to scrutinize the VP selection, as it can have considerable effects on the election (think Sarah Palin in 2008). Such scrutiny is further warranted because of both Trump’s and Biden’s ages (Trump will be seventy-eight years old on January 20, 2025). Now to the shortlist:
1. Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY): Few embody the complete transformation from moderate to MAGA as completely as Stefanik does. She went viral for her contentious exchanges with three prominent university presidents during December’s congressional hearings on campus antisemitism. On K–12, Stefanik takes credit for helping to get ESSA signed into law, and has been supportive of a parents’ bill of rights and critical of Democrats who oppose it, berating them as “domestic terrorists.” In her home state of New York, she sounded off on the decision to ban the use of Native American mascots or logos in schools, calling it the result of the state’s “woke” department of education.
2. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (AR): Of all the women in the GOP veepstakes, none has a more public—if recent—record on education. Trump’s former White House press secretary, Governor Sanders spearheaded the passage of the Arkansas LEARNS Act, an omnibus piece of legislation that covers everything from expanding school choice and improving literacy to using test scores to drive interventions and restructuring teacher compensation. Adjusted for cost of living, Arkansas now has the highest starting teacher salary in the nation. For her part, Sanders described the law as “the largest overhaul of the state's education system in Arkansas history.” At the same time, the act’s “indoctrination ban” continues to stir up litigation and controversy.
3. Former Gov. Nikki Haley (SC): Even after dropping out, Haley nonetheless won a decent chunk of the vote in the Pennsylvania primary last month. While she was in the race, her education platform called for shrinking (rather than eliminating) the U.S. Department of Education and establishing a national voucher program. Somewhat bizarrely, she also called for schools to be run more like airports. When she was governor of South Carolina, Haley was an outspoken opponent of the Common Core, while pushing through a reform package to improve reading and technology access.
Haley seems the least likely among this group to get The Donald’s nod, but adding her to the ticket could keep some of her voters from pulling the lever for Biden in an election that’s expected to be tight.
4. Gov. Kristi Noem (SD): If federal education policy is to undergo a MAGA makeover, the governor of the Mount Rushmore State would be right out of central casting. She has vowed to defeat “ascendant anti-Americanism” in schools and signed an executive order to restrict “political indoctrination” in classrooms. Noem has also won praise (and intense controversy) for revamping the state’s (previously very meager) social studies standards, and has reportedly increased K–12 funding by more than 26 percent since taking office in 2019.
5. Kari Lake (AZ): A native of Iowa, Lake is the youngest of nine children and daughter of a public school teacher. Arizona’s GOP senate candidate has an education platform with three planks: (1) eliminating annual state testing, (2) national vouchers for high school graduates to pursue CTE training, and (3) reducing federal bureaucracy. During her unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in 2022, Lake said she wanted to put cameras in classrooms to monitor teachers—likening the idea to police body cams—and for schools to adopt a “patriotic curriculum” consistent with Trump’s call for “patriotic education.”
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To the extent ed policy was even on his radar, the former president largely focused on school choice and some reining in of the federal Office for Civil Rights during his first term, but showed little interest in student achievement. The Heritage Foundation has provided a more detailed look at what the ed agenda might entail this time around. Predictably, this includes abolishing the U.S. Department of Education and creating multiple forms of school choice, but it also calls for new policy priorities like “prohibiting compelled speech” and adding “family structure” to the categories by which NAEP data are disaggregated. The question is if any of these women appears likely to do anything different if they were to find themselves in the hot seat.
There’s also the question of whether any of them adds to the ticket anything that is apt to appeal to voters on education grounds. Sanders might be suitable here, but it’s slim pickings. While she brings more to the table on schooling, everyone on this list is more motivated by politics than by pedagogy. What’s more, with obeisance as the primary selection criteria, Trump isn’t looking for a heady policy partner. Indeed, if he returns, Trump’s VP will be charged with genuflection, not education.
Los Angeles Unified School District’s Zones of Choice (ZOC) program began in 2010 as an effort to provide more high school options for a large swath of district eighth graders, combining historical catchment areas in lower-income and lower-performing neighborhoods into larger choice zones and eliminating the default feeder system from middle to high school. ZOC has proven to be an excellent model for researching the positive academic impact of choice. But as a new report published by MIT’s Blueprint Labs shows us, it is also good for examining how parental preferences are shaped.
University of Chicago researcher Christopher Campos conducts a detailed, multi-stage analysis to go beyond the simple “revealed preferences” model typical of school choice research and really tease out what—and who—parents are responding to when they rank their preferred schools. The initial data come from ZOC information and application periods in fall 2019 and fall 2021. (LAUSD spent most of the 2020–21 school year in either full or partial virtual learning; ZOC was functional but highly disrupted.) Approximately 13,000 eighth graders attended a ZOC middle school in each application year under study. Fully 90 percent of ZOC-eligible students were Hispanic (compared to 64 percent in the district as a whole), and 94 percent were classified as low income. The typical ZOC student was entering high school performing roughly 22 percent of a standard deviation behind their typical non-ZOC peer on both math and reading tests. In short, these are exactly the students who stand to benefit most from having access to better options through ZOC.
Campos’s methodology is dense and multi-faceted and defies easy summary. On the school side, he constructs measures of school quality (based on numerous academic factors) and peer quality (that is, the composition of students in receiving high schools according to their individual academic achievement). On the family side, he surveys parents of eighth grade ZOC students prior to them submitting their ranked choice lists for high school in order to determine their beliefs about school and peer quality compared to the actual rankings he devises. On the information side—the real innovation here—Campos constructs a protocol to vary the type and amount of direct information that families receive about school and peer quality for all the schools from which they can choose. This is compared to information received from other families and through other informal sources. Finally, he compares all that pre-choice information to the final options selected, the high schools ultimately attended, and (icing on the cake) the outcomes for ZOC students based on the new understanding of the choices and how they are made.
The results of all these layers of interrelated analyses are also very detailed. Pre-choice survey data show that families tended to underestimate schools’ academic quality, overestimate their peer quality, and that their estimates were least accurate regarding schools they preferred the least. All of these tendencies combined to induce what the report calls “mistakes” on ZOC applications. That is, in a scenario without these biases—pure information about school and peer quality—his models show that parents would rank schools differently. However, families are motivated to choose by the information they receive, right or wrong. Families who received more information, especially those who received it directly from Campos, chose higher-quality schools; those who did not receive direct information but heard about school quality from their Campos-informed neighbors also chose higher-quality schools. It’s not as simple as a quick summary makes it sound, but overall, Campos writes, “the experiment provides robust evidence that when properly informed, families make choices in a way that is consistent with rewarding effective schools and that social interactions are important mediators governing changes in demand.” In previous research, he has noted that ZOC is nearly ideal at offering enough options without overwhelming parents and at providing them with the highest-quality information possible.
While the ultimate aim of this research project is to determine whether ZOC students fare better in their chosen high school, outcome data are limited at this time. Only the 2019 cohort had reached eleventh grade state testing when this analysis was being done, and Campos believes pandemic-mitigation school closures “severely interfered with [their] educational experience.” As a result, no impact of ZOC choices on their test scores was observed. However, survey data showed significant improvements in students’ reported happiness in school, interpersonal skills, school connectedness, and academic effort for the 2019 cohort. Incidents of bullying were also down. These same improvements were reported—at even higher levels—for the 2021 cohort. Campos specifically notes that the academic effort index he constructed from survey responses is more than ten times higher for the 2021 ZOC cohort than the boost reported by the earlier group. He feels it bodes well for an observable test score increase when those students reach eleventh grade, but only time will tell for sure.
Overall, this research—as in-depth and pathbreaking as it is—is not conclusive except to say that parental school preferences are influenced by the information they receive, both from official and unofficial sources. Schools (and indeed policymakers) who are serious about helping families make the best possible educational choices must provide thorough, clear, and digestible information directly to families prior to any application or ranking of schools.
SOURCE: Christopher Campos, “Social Interactions, Information, and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los Angeles,” MIT Blueprint Labs (April 2024).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Marian Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, joins Mike and David to discuss the incredible progress that humanity has made over millennia, and what schools might do to better teach kids that our past, present, and future is not all doom and gloom. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber examines a new study investigating if education savings accounts increase tuition costs at private schools.
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This transcript was created using AI software.
Michael Petrilli:
Welcome to the Education Gadfly Show. I'm your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Today Marian Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, joins us to discuss why we should teach kids about the incredible progress that humanity has made over the millennia. Then on the research minute, Amber reports on a new study investigating if education saves accounts, increased tuition costs at private schools. All this on the Education Gadfly Show.
Marian Tupy:
Show, this notion that the life before Industrial Revolution was hunky dory. Everybody had a pet goat.
Michael Petrilli:
Hello. This is your host, Mike Petri of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at fordhaminstitute.org. And now please welcome our special guest for this week, Marian Tupy. Marian, welcome to the show.
Marian Tupy:
Thank you for having me.
Michael Petrilli:
Marian is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and he is here to talk about a great topic: progress. We'll get to that in a moment. First, my co-host David Griffith.
David Griffith:
Hey, Mike, it's a pleasure.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah. Well, gang, this is going to be really fun today. It's a little bit of a different topic than we usually do. We're not walking out just on education policy. We are talking about, I would say, a much bigger issue, a bigger question, and that is about the progress that we humans have made over thousands of years, but also over decades, over recent years, and how we can do a better job making sure that young people are aware about all of that. Let's do that on Ed Reform update.
So I had the notion for this podcast, Marion, when I saw a Reason magazine article about this new movement, the Roots of Progress, I think it's called, or maybe goes by a couple different names. I understand that you're involved in it and basically trying to make sure that when we think about what's happening in our world, it's not all doom and gloom, but we tell the good story and we've had certainly debates in education about how to tell American history, including some of the terrible, despicable parts of our history. This is a little different though. We're talking about economics. We're talking about how our fellow humans live today and how that compares to how much suffering there was in the past. So first of all, we could spend hours on this, days on this, but in terms of the greatest hits, when you're talking to people about this topic, what are some of the key things that you want them to know in terms of the progress that we have made as a species?
Marian Tupy:
Let me first start with a little bit of correction. Jason Crawford is responsible for roots of Progress. I work at HumanProgress.org, but you're absolutely right. There is a movement going on with a lot of people beginning to work on progress. There's a think tank called the Institute for Progress, and many other people including independent scholars such as Stephen Pinker at Harvard University, Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine, Matt Ridley over in Britain, Jonah Norberg and so on. A lot of people are sort of wondering about it now. So what are the biggest hits? I mean, the important thing to understand is that for thousands of years, life was pretty stagnant. It didn't really change. So whether you are looking at 10,000 BC or 1000 ad things like life expectancy remain pretty much the same, which is to say about 25 to 30 years. So life expectancy between 25 to 30 years and between 1800 and today, we have managed to increase life expectancy to about 73 years globally, 76, 77 years in the United States.
So people live twice, sometimes three times as long as they used to, even 200 years ago. I think that's a very important sort of aspect of human wellbeing because it means that you get to enjoy friendships and family and this beautiful planet of ours for much longer than you used to before. Another thing which is very important is that people used to die by their millions due to famines world used to produce much less food, and the food supply was very insecure, which means that even a single failed crop meant that entire villages, towns, countries died because there was no food. Today, we produce enough food for everybody in the world. That doesn't mean that everybody gets enough to eat, but at least notionally we can feed everybody. But sometimes politics intervenes. You have wars and repression like in North Korea and people don't get enough to eat, but the world produces enough.
So food, life expectancy, education, again, whether you are looking at ancient Rome and ancient Greece, we are talking about maximum 10% of population who could read and write. Today, globally, it's about 80%, and it's obviously almost a hundred percent, if not a hundred percent in the advanced nations, we could be talking about even conflict. Conflict is much lesser than it used to be before. Now, I know that a lot of young people when they watch the news, they see the news from Israel, they see the news from Ukraine, and they think the world is on fire. But the reality is that 200, 300 years ago, countries used to be at war. A hundred percent of the time, all the major powers would be at war constantly. War was a constant. Whereas today, peace is really the norm, and when wars appear, everybody freaks out. But in the past when there was a period of peace, that was much more unusual.
And the final point I would make is that human progress is not just technological medical. It's not just that we are much richer than we used to be, moving from two or $3 per person per day, maybe $4 when America becomes independent to today, where our incomes per capita are about $70,000 adjusted for inflation. But also, I would argue that aside from this technological, medical and scientific progress, we are also more moral. Obviously, the most important thing is that slavery was the common practice throughout the world for most of recorded history. And over the last 200 years, all the countries in the world abolished slavery. Now, that doesn't mean, again, that some people aren't enslaved defacto today, but the ju as slavery has abolished everywhere, women didn't have a vote until the late 18 hundreds in New Zealand, I believe becomes the first country to give women vote in 1893 today, there is no country in the world where women don't have a vote. Gays and lesbians, again, who would've thought even 20 years ago that today gays and lesbians could marry all over the world, not all over the world, but in the advanced country. So the point is that there is a lot of progress, a lot of things to be grateful for,
Michael Petrilli:
And yet that message is not something that I sense we share with young people. Very often we hear in the news in fact, that there's a mental health crisis in the United States and in some of those other advanced nations. A lot of debate about why that is. Maybe it's the phones, but some people have said, look, it's also because of the world is on fire because of climate change. We've told our young people that we're facing this existential risk from climate change. I grew up in the eighties. We were certainly worried of the existential threat of nuclear war, which has come back to the headlines in some cases. So the question that I've got for you, Marion, is, and I know K 12 education is not your beat, but is this something our schools could do something about? Could we ask our schools through their curriculum to be less Debbie Downers about the challenges we face and to try to tell kids that, Hey, yeah, there's some real problems. We've got some real challenges, but guess what? We've had big problems and challenges in the past too, and we have overcome them. We need to keep working those problems in the same way we did in the past. I mean, what can our schools do, if anything?
Marian Tupy:
Well, unquestionably you put your finger on it. I mean, basically, I think that we have downgraded the study of history very much. Ultimately, you cannot understand where we are today without understanding where we were a hundred or 200 years ago. It doesn't make, look, there are only two ways to look at the present. You either take the retrospective view or you take the futuristic view or idealistic view. So the idealistic view goes something like this. America today is deeply imperfect. The world is deeply imperfect, and consequently, everything is horrible because we are not an ideal state where we would like to be. So let's feel bad about today because it's not as good as it could be tomorrow if we changed X, Y, and Z. The alternative viewpoint is to look at history and realize that actually America today and the world today are in a much better place than they used to be.
But then the attitude that students have is no longer resentment, but it is one of gratitude. So if you take the futuristic, the idealistic view where everything is working out for everyone everywhere at all times, which by the way will never happen, that's always an idealistic utopian viewpoint. But if you take that view, then all you can have is resentment against the present. But if you take the historical view and realize that even Americans 200 years ago were extremely poor, let alone the rest of the world, then the outcome is gratitude that will live in a country as developed as it is. So I think that focus refocusing on history and hopefully a tiny bit of economic history. I know economic history, it sounds incredibly boring, but just explaining people that until two or 300 years ago, the household may have had one chair and one table, and people have one pair of clothes for six months of the year.
That could be very helpful. I totally understand why American education systems started to emphasize a lot the bad things that the United States has done in the past and other countries, other western countries, be it colonialism, be it racism, exploitation, et cetera. I know why it's necessary to teach that. But if you teach that to the exclusion of everything else, then you end up in a point where everybody feels bad about the present rather than also pointing out that we have penicillin, we have antibiotics, we sent a person to the moon, and we are getting ready to send a person to Mars. Again, people no longer dying. Very young child mortality in Europe was 50% as late as 200 years ago. So let's combine the necessary discussion of all the bad things that are happening in the world and the United States also with an appreciation for all the things that people have done. And I think that the reason why that's important is that if you tell young people only about bad things that happen, it can fill them with resentment and fatalism and depression. Whereas if you can tell them, if you can show them that humanity has overcome huge problems before, maybe it can inspire them to actually do something about the present imperfections and can inspire them to make the world a better place.
Michael Petrilli:
What do you think, David? Is this too rosy? Is this going to fly with people on the left who of course very much want to make changes and to address those imperfections?
David Griffith:
It's not too rosy. I mean, facts can never be too rosy. They're just facts. Everything that Marian has said is a fact, right? And so I agree. The point I liked most was the point about history. I never really thought about it that way before, but if you just ignore history, then you can't really grasp progress. And we tend to think of history as, oh, well, you need to study it so you don't repeat it, but also you need to study it so you understand that we're not repeating it really in any meaningful sense. We're sort of spiraling off into ever better futures. I would admit that along with a lot of other people. I think I sometimes struggle with this, particularly in recent years when it feels like there's a bit of a crisis of confidence in the West. But I think taking the long view almost always helps.
And I don't think it's just a privilege of folks who are doing comparatively well. I think we're all doing comparatively well compared to people 50 or a hundred years ago, and I think that's important to bear in mind. Lemme just say one more thing, Mike, which is I think about the protests and I think about not just about Palestine, but also things like climate change. And I think one thing that we have not done well enough is to help young people understand that politics is a lagging indicator. In other words, if you go looking for inspiration in congressional subcommittees, you're kind of doomed to be disappointed. And that there is a good reason for that, which is that our system is designed to require super majority support, which means that there will be millions of people who have come to a new moral consensus, right? Years, if possibly decades before there's actually legislative action in many cases. And that is almost inherently frustrating. But if you see it a few times, it also I think can help you understand that it's not hopeless, right? And that's the way the system works. And ultimately, I think a little bit of frustration is probably inevitable, but it should not sort of lapse over into cynicism and fatalism, even though it may seem like that's warranted the third or fourth or 50th time that a bill
Michael Petrilli:
Fails. Yeah, no, well said. So Marion, one last question. I mean, I can imagine somebody listening saying, okay, I understand this idea of teaching these young American students about gratitude, but what if you are teaching kids in America who themselves are very disadvantaged within America, these are the lowest income kids, they're living in our pockets of poverty in America. Is it still appropriate to try to teach them a sense of gratitude, to try to say, Hey, I mean, yes, you've got it tough here in America, but compared to people around the world or compared to people in the past, I mean, suddenly that feels, I don't know. I can imagine teachers having a hard time with figuring out what message to send on that front.
Marian Tupy:
I didn't say that we should teach them gratitude. I think that people will come to a sense of gratitude if you show them what history was real and how their ancestors have lived. Because I think that a lot of kids, partly based on movies, will get a sense that, and we get this a little bit from parts of the left, is this notion that, and I don't want to beat up on the left, but this notion that the life before industrial revolution was hunky dory. Everybody had a goat, a pet goat, and they brought in the strawberries in the morning and things like that. No, I mean before the industrial revolution out in the fields was extremely, extremely difficult. And so I think that a lot of young people as a result of movies had this notion of bucolic bucolic past living in one with nature where everything was working out.
Yes, unless you got an infected blister and died because there was no antibiotics. Or alternatively, people get a sense that if I was born 200 years ago, years ago, I would be a princess. No, the chances are 99% that you would be in the fields bent over picking up potatoes. And by the time that you were 35, you looked like a 75-year-old man today, and life was just extremely difficult. Now, when it comes to people, as you said, obviously there are pockets of poverty in the United States. What I would say to that is that the key, of course, is a society that is dynamic that retains a very high degree of social mobility. And again, you can spin it into a positive story that in the United States, this was the first country really that became heavily meritocratic with the exception of course, Jim Crow and the inability of black people who were prevented from participating in the American dream.
But the reality is that this has always been a highly meritocratic and highly mobile country, precisely because you never had aristocracy, you never had different social ranks. And so at least ostensibly it should be possible for a young man or a woman who come from very poor backgrounds in the United States to make it big, to make a lot of money, to have a happy life, or to change the world for the better. So I think that, well, this leads me to another point, is that it is very important from the study of history to identify the reasons why today is as prosperous as it is, and obviously whether you share my ideological proclivities and my biases or not. But my view is that it is the open, free market competitive system that allows people to rise no matter who they are. In other words, it doesn't matter whether you are a black girl or an Asian boy. Doesn't matter whether you are gay or straight, it doesn't matter where you come from money or from poverty. If you have a good idea, you can make a ton of money in the United States and have everything that you always dreamed about. So it's very important not to focus on the facts of the past, but also try to discern from them the reasons why America today is no longer as poor as it was 200 years ago.
Michael Petrilli:
So well said. Really enjoyed talking with you, Marianne. That unfortunately is all the time that we've got, but I'm so glad we did this again. Marion Tupe is the founder and editor of human progress.org and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. Marianne, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Marian Tupy:
My absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Michael Petrilli:
Alright, now it's time for everyone's favorite Amber's research minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern:
Thanks, Mike.
Michael Petrilli:
So that was like my greatest glass is half full segment ever. I love it.
Amber Northern:
Say more. Sorry, but I happened to miss it. Well,
Michael Petrilli:
As we were telling you, Amber, this is about how can we tell young people that the world has gotten way better over time and therefore we can meet the challenges today rather than to try to give them this impression that the world is on fire and this is a new thing. Woe is them for having to live through the challenges they're living through. I mean, again, I don't mean to be petty, but climate change a big challenge. The war is raging in Ukraine and Israel, these are big challenges, but previous generations have faced big challenges and before that, almost everybody had to toil all day long in fields.
Amber Northern:
And how did out outhouse, as my great grandparents did.
David Griffith:
We talked a lot about fields, Amber.
Michael Petrilli:
I remember a great New Yorker cartoon where it's like a caveman talking to his son and he said, son, back in my day, things were exactly the same as they are today.
David Griffith:
I think what Mike's saying is our next standards review should be world history.
Michael Petrilli:
Ooh, I like that. I like it too. Alright, Amber, so what you got for us today,
Amber Northern:
We have a new report out. Always new analyst at Princeton have addressed a simple question we've asked at Fordham on somebody's now answered it. Do education savings accounts increase tuition prices?
As a reminder, ESAs, as they are known, are voucher like taxpayer funded savings accounts with multiple, but sometimes restricted uses for educational purposes, depending on the state. The state says how you can use the money. In some states they can only be used for private school tuition, but in others they can also be used for things like tutoring, online education programs, therapies for students with special needs textbooks, and so on. 12 states now have ESAs. Alright, so we've got a difference in difference in study design to estimate the causal effect of Iowa's ESA program on private school tuition. Iowa's ESA allows people to receive the per pupil funding already set aside for their child's education, couldn't find that exact amount into an account that must first be used on tuition and fees at an accredited private school before they can begin using it on other things.
Neighboring states, Iowa and Nebraska passed universal ESA legislation in the same 2023 session. So Iowa passed the bill in January and they started implementing the ESAs in 2324. So brand new Nebraska passed its bill in May, and they're set to begin in the 24 25 school year. So they build this original data set. They gathered the tuition data in both states by grade level in the summer of 2023 for non parishioners from private school websites. That's a lot of work. And then they emailed schools that had missing tuition data on their websites, and then they gathered historical tuition data from all these schools from some digital archive that I'd never heard of, but it's there. Apparently they pulled enrollment grade level and other school level data from the Iowa and Nebraska DOE and from NCES. Their final sample includes 51% of Iowa private schools that educate 62% of Iowa private school students.
And then they have 44% of Nebraska private schools that educate 51% of Nebraska private school students. All right. Now they're making use of the grade and state variation and the ESA eligibility. So this is kind of where it gets interesting. So all kindergartners are university universally eligible for the ESA money? No students are eligible in pre-K, and some students are eligible in grades one through 12, and that's based on students and families of four making up to 300% of the federal poverty level, which is about $90,000. So they're comparing how the distribution of changes in tuition prices vary between those three eligibility types in the first year of implementation in Iowa as compared to in Nebraska, which is the comparison state, which had no differences in the pre-treatment years from Iowa, which is important in a diff and D, they wait enrollment data. I mean they weight data by enrollment in grade level such that their results represent tuition changes for the average student in a given grade level.
All right. Key results, ESA implementation had varying effects as we might expect depending on whether a grade level was eligible for the subsidy. So there was no effect on tuition for ineligible grades, but for grades, with this partial eligibility that I had told you about relative to this poverty cutoff, tuition increased and it ranged from 10 to 16% of an increase depending on whether school fixed effects were added. So if you controlled for the school, that 10% equated to about $830. And then the largest effect was on universally eligible grades, which was just kindergarten, and they saw increases of almost 25%. So 21 to 25%, 21% amounts to about $1,300 of an increase. So one of their takeaways is if the tuition and the cost or the tuition increases outpace the amount of the ESA, then you're sort of defeating the purpose of opening access to a wider swath of needy families.
Michael Petrilli:
There we go. First of all, I think we should point out the authors, I'm not sure if you mentioned them, Jason Fontana and Jennifer Jennings at Princeton University. I did. And let's shout out to Jennifer the original edgy Wonka.
Amber Northern:
Yes, she is here. I failed to mention that, but that is she the same
Michael Petrilli:
Princeton? I don't think I had realized she landed at Princeton. That is awesome. So yeah, I think this is pretty compelling and disappointing in that one hope of going the education savings account route rather than just a straight up voucher was that there could be some incentives for the schools to not raise their tuition because the parents could use the education savings accounts for something other than tuition. You could say, well, if you find a bargain, then you could use a couple thousand of that for buying a computer for your kid. So they can do Khan Academy or something like that.
Amber Northern:
But they made it, and I dunno if you caught that, but in Iowa it has to be first applied to tuition before anything else.
Michael Petrilli:
But again, but with the hope that would help to constrain the cost. So the policymakers were trying to think about this problem. They wanted to get the incentives for whatever reason, that was not a strong enough inces.
David Griffith:
Yeah, I'm trying to think about, I guess I'm a little surprised. I'm not surprised by the direction of the facts, but I'm a little surprised by the magnitude. It just that so much is being passed through, I guess, I don't know. Was there a percentage that you needed to apply to this or was it just like it wasn't all of it, right?
Amber Northern:
It wasn't all of it. What do mean, Dave? I'm
David Griffith:
Sorry. Was it the entire ESA that needed to be applied to schooling or
Amber Northern:
Oh, it actually didn't say that. It just said that you had to first use it for that, but it didn't say it had to be the entire amount.
David Griffith:
Yeah, I'm just surprised that, I guess I assume that some of it would not have been passed through to tuition. Right, but you're saying it's basically one-to-one, right?
Michael Petrilli:
The schools decided, hey, we might as well raise our tuition to capture the full amount of the voucher, especially if these were schools that were subsidizing tuition before, if they weren't actually charging what it cost educated kid and now they've decided what the heck, let's do it.
David Griffith:
Right. But the schools, I mean, they didn't do that in a vacuum. People had to be willing to pay and clearly they are. I mean, it seems like it's falling almost entirely on the consumer rather than the producer. I'm out of my depth here. But
Michael Petrilli:
You mean because they're going to use the full voucher or the full ESA on tuition and not get to use any of it on something else?
David Griffith:
Right? I mean, if you are using a hundred percent of it on it, that's essentially saying that schools can charge whatever they want to get. I don't know, to just create a private environment for kids that I don't know it. It's saying that there's no responsiveness to price whatsoever. Sorry, we can cut this, but I mean, am I off base here?
Michael Petrilli:
Right. I mean the hope is that the policymakers, were trying to get these consumers to be price sensitive even though it's not their money by saying that if you could find a low cost school, you get to keep some of this money for yourself for these other educational purposes.
David Griffith:
Yes. Right. But it didn't work, right? It
Michael Petrilli:
Seems like that did not work, at least so far
Amber Northern:
Because, and I did look it up, I mean their ESA is the per pupil state funding, whatever it is already set aside. So they do get the whole amount of whatever's set aside already. So it's not like they're getting a partial amount. So
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah. Now, here, let me be a little bit contrarian though, gang. Is that okay? It sounds bad. They raise their tuition. We don't like that. On the other hand, if by raising their tuition it means they can provide a higher quality education, including by paying teachers better and getting higher quality teachers, then look, maybe that's not so bad. I mean, the whole point of this is to get kids into not only schools that their parents have chosen but to get a good education. So maybe this makes it more likely that that's going to be the outcome. Way
Amber Northern:
To turn it on. David, Mike. Yes,
Michael Petrilli:
Exactly. David, what do you want these kids not to learn how to read? David?
Amber Northern:
That's money. I
David Griffith:
Made that point myself. Mike, I'm not sure. Am I supposed to think this is a bad thing? I think I am. If the point is to expand access, but I don't think it's as unambiguously bad as all that if point is to invest in the next generation. So I don't know.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah, so there we go. Maybe it's to ette. Ette, come on. Aren't you in favor of spending more money on schools? Here we go. This is a win. I'm just mad because she called us Fordham people a boy band way back in the day.
Amber Northern:
Wow, I forgot about that.
Michael Petrilli:
Look it up. It's pretty funny image. Alright, well we should probably stop there before we get ourselves in further hot water. But that was good. That was interesting and on point and did sound like a lot of work. So way to go out there to our Princeton scholars, but as all the time we've got for this week. And so until next week,
David Griffith:
I'm David Griffith.
Michael Petrilli:
And I'm Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Signing off.
Cheers
Jeers
