A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Vouchers don’t work. Copy the methods of school systems in other countries that are outperforming our own.

A post from Diane Ravitch’s blog on a study from Joseph Waddington and Mark Berends. The Study is called, “Impact of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program: Achievement Effects for Students in Upper Elementary and Middle School.”

Overall, voucher students experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 SDs in mathematics during their first year of attending a private school compared with matched students who remained in a public school. This loss persisted regardless of the length of time spent in a private school. In English/Language Arts, we did not observe statistically meaningful effects. Although school vouchers aim to provide greater educational opportunities for students, the goal of improving the academic performance of low?income students who use a voucher to move to a private school has not yet been realized in Indiana.

I do take issue with one of the study’s assumptions, however. The abstract says that improving the academic performance of low-income students is a goal. My contention has long been that this stated goal for Indiana’s voucher system is a pretext. My working theory is that the real goals are primarily: a) reduce the influence of teacher’s unions; b) redirect education money to friends and well-wishers of pro-voucher policymakers; and c) subsidize private, religious education.

A brief aside – I know that sounds cynical. And I’m not a fan of knee-jerk cynicism when it comes to politics. It’s too easy, corrosive to public discourse, and so often doesn’t capture what’s happening. Too many lawmakers and other policymakers — even those with whom I disagree — are subjected to being unfairly painted as these cartoonish supervillains by members of the public who can’t be bothered to deal with nuance. In my experience most public servants honestly have their hearts in the right place. So, I would be delighted to learn that my cynicism is misplaced. Maybe lawmakers will review these studies and reconsider the state voucher program. Maybe they’ll restructure their voucher initiatives in a way that’s contrary to the big three “real” reasons for vouchers I’ve listed above. If that happens, I’ll certainly reconsider my cynical take on the matter.

Ravitch also mentions a study by Robert Planta and Arya Ansari showing that apparent advantages of going to a private school disappear when one controls for socio-economic advantages of the kids going to those schools. In other words, the private school wasn’t particularly responsible for the high performance of the kids; the advantages the kids had outside the school were responsible.

[I]n unadjusted models, children with a history of enrollment in private schools performed better on nearly all outcomes assessed in adolescence. However, by simply controlling for the socio-demographic characteristics that selected children and families into these schools, all of the advantages of private school education were eliminated. There was also no evidence to suggest that low-income children, or children enrolled in urban schools, benefited more from private school enrollment.

So, we’re diverting funds from traditional public schools and adding administrative burdens for a voucher system that doesn’t help kids’ educational performance and might even hurt it. There are higher performing public school systems all over the world that we could be copying — but, doing so might not hurt teacher’s unions, might not redirect education funds to friends and well-wishers of voucher advocates, and might not provide a subsidy to private, religious education. The link in the previous system is to a blog post I did from 2016 on an National Conference of State Legislatures study that looked at Finland, Singapore, Ontario, Alberta, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, Shanghai, and Taiwan. My take aways from the report:

1. The U.S. is falling behind when compared to the rest of the world. This can’t be explained away by hand waving about apples-and-oranges.

2. The good news, of sorts, is that there are now lots of countries doing better than we are, so we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. We can see what works and copy it.

3. There needs to be a support structure in place so that kids come to school ready to learn. In other places, that can take the form of government support to families with young children or extended family structures or the community generally. The upshot is that the kids are healthy and the kids are being educated before they get to school. Extra resources are devoted to struggling kids once they get to school.

4. Access to elite teachers. The system recruits high quality educators; implements a rigorous system of preparation and licensure; pays them well; develops a mentor system; gives them a professional environment to work in; selects high quality administrators; and develop standards benchmarked to other countries.

5. Develop a Career and Technical Education path for those students preferring more of an applied education rather than a more academic approach. This shouldn’t be an educational backwater like so many vocational programs. It should be geared to boosting the national economy and providing a higher standard of living for a broader base of the population.

6. These reforms should be part of a comprehensive plan. It will probably be the case that not all problems can be tackled at once, but the plan implementation should not be erratic or arbitrary.

This may be simplistic, but my current thinking is that our biggest obstacle to achieving a world-class education system (and a world-class health system for that matter) is the legacy of centuries of slavery in the U.S. It has left the civic equivalent of psychological scars that results in social dysfunction and seemingly insurmountable division. “We” are perfectly happy to spend huge amounts of Our money to help Us. But, We get really parsimonious when They might get some of Our money. Places where the public mostly regards everyone in the country as Us have any easier time providing for the welfare of the general public (as the preamble to the Constitution puts it) than places where the public has a significant division between Us and Them.

Brian Slodysko, writing for the Associated Press, reports that the State of Indiana has had to spend $21 million and counting on the cleanup of Kiel Bros. Oil Company sites. The company operated widely under the name “Tobacco Road.”

The collapse of Kiel Bros. Oil Co. in 2004 was widely publicized. Less known is that the state of Indiana — and, to a smaller extent, Kentucky and Illinois — are still on the hook for millions of dollars to clean up more than 85 contaminated sites across the three states, including underground tanks that leaked toxic chemicals into soil, streams and wells.

Indiana alone has spent at least $21 million on the cleanup thus far, or an average of about $500,000 per site, according to an analysis of records by The Associated Press. And the work is nowhere near complete.

The federal government, meanwhile, plans to clean up a plume of cancer-causing solvent discovered beneath a former Kiel Bros. station that threatens drinking water near the Pence family’s hometown.

Mike Pence is, of course, the Vice President and former governor of Indiana. His brother, Greg Pence, is the GOP candidate to take Mike’s former seat in Congress. Greg was running the company when it went bankrupt in 2004. According to the AP report, the company was founded by Carl Kiel in the 1960s. Pence father, Edward, became corporate vice-president. Mike and Greg worked for the company as well with Greg eventually became president of the company after Edward died in 1988.

The corporate bankruptcy filing and environmental damage in this story underlie a lot of what I find problematic about conservative and libertarian rhetoric about personal responsibility and small government. The rhetoric often involves a lot of talk about personal responsibility, the evils of government, and the wisdom of allowing people to keep their money away from the prying hands of the state. And, you know, that sounds great. Often there is truth to it. But it’s far too simplistic.

Let’s start with the corporation. It is a legal fiction created by and made available by the government and enforced by the government to shield individuals from personal responsibility. The individuals who owned Kiel Bros. were thereby allowed to cause damage to the environment, presumably pocket money from those activities, then retain the money after the bankruptcy was filed and the damage came to light. Bankruptcy is similar — a government created loophole to the enforceability of government created property rights that shields people from their obligations.

Then there is the environmental damage. Libertarians in particular, but often conservatives as well, have always been very weak in terms of their ability to reconcile their philosophy with an ability to deal with pollution. The general notion is that property owners should be allowed to do what they want with their own property without government interference (putting aside for a moment the fact that property is a legal creation that has no practical existence without the force of the government backing it up.) They might generally assert that if pollution caused by someone else’s property hurts you, you should be able to recover damages to compensate you. But, in practice, the culprits can be long gone before the damage comes to light, and the problems of proof and recovery can be immense. Meanwhile, pollution distorts the marketplace which is generally held in high regard by libertarians and conservatives. If you pollute, you are externalizing the costs of your operations. Operations cost more if they’re done in a way that doesn’t contaminate other people’s air and water. Because you’ve externalized that cost, the cost is not reflected in the price of your product. So, the market doesn’t get accurate information about the true cost of the service or product and money flows to people who are externalizing their costs. In this case, money is flowing to the Kiel and Pence families rather than to other oil companies or energy producers who create their product without surreptitiously harming others.

Which brings us to the last point about allowing people to keep what they’ve earned. If the State were to raise taxes on the Pence family to help mitigate these environmental costs, they would definitely moan about big government. I don’t know if they’d go so far as to say “taxation is theft,” but there is definitely a libertarian contingent who goes that far. Can the Pence family be said to have “earned” money that comes, in part, from offloading the environmental costs of their operation? They’ve earned some but not all of it. And I think that’s probably true of a lot of economic activity and its relationship to government and society at large. It’s complicated. You’ve earned some but not all of it. Sometimes you’ve offloaded costs. Sometimes you’ve skimmed off the value created by an employee. Sometimes you’re profiting from the infrastructure put in place by the government. So, sometimes taxes are too high. Sometimes, they’re too low. And, in any event, calling taxation theft just doesn’t capture the true dynamic.