Freedom Line Blog

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (a.k.a. “the Nation’s Report Card”) is out this week, and the news “isn’t great.” For the first time in 25 years, fourth and eighth grade math scores have fallen and reading scores remained flat.

Specifically, 39 percent of fourth graders and 32 percent of eighth graders scored proficient or better in math, while only 35 percent of U.S. fourth graders and 33 percent of eighth graders scored at “proficient” or better in reading.

Seven years into an administration that has made unprecedented inroads into state and local educational policymaking decisions, it could be we’re starting to see the effects.

The NAEP is a good test. The National Center for Educational Statistics, which administers the program, takes samples from all 50 states and 20 major metros. Tests are quick — they only run about an hour. And students are anonymous. The idea is to get the most accurate picture possible of what students are or are not learning, with a special focus on the black-white achievement gap.

Gerard Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute notes the racial subgroup scores aren’t very good, either. “Math and reading scores for white and black fourth- and eighth-graders remained the same or dropped since 2013,” he writes. Meantime, “reading scores rose for Hispanic fourth graders but dropped in eighth grade; and eighth grade math and reading scores for Asian students, who are the top performers in the nation, dropped.”

Departing Education Secretary Arne Duncan this week surmised that disappointing results likely have something to do with states’ difficult transition into the Common Core State Standards.

“Big change never happens overnight,” Duncan said. “I’m confident that over the next decade, if we stay committed to this change, we will see historic improvements.”

Duncan’s critics on the left are having none of that. They believe the NAEP scores vindicate their long-held view that testing and accountability are ruining education.

“The news isn’t good for those who think standardized test scores tell us something significant about student achievement,” writes the Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss, who has rarely encountered a teachers’ union talking point she hasn’t parroted.

She even takes a swipe at the NAEP tests, which are nothing like the “high-stakes tests” left-liberal critics loathe. “It is seen by many as a high-quality test,” she writes, “though it has many critics, too, some of whom say that the NAEP definition of’ ‘proficiency’ is unnaturally high, and that the test cannot measure many of the qualities students must develop to be successful.”

Oh, please. NAEP is very good at testing knowledge. If you want to understand the depth of civic ignorance in our republic, for example, peruse the past 15 years of results from the NAEP civics and U.S. history tests.

In any event, the teachers union critics are happy to point out how Duncan just two years ago was crediting the Common Core for boosting NAEP scores in a handful of states. Now he’s saying, whoops, maybe not.

“Considering that the rationale for the Common Core State Standards initiative was low NAEP proficiency rates, it would appear that the solution of tough standards and tough tests is not the great path forward after all,” writes Carol Burris, who along with Diane Ravitch founded the pro-teachers union Network for Public Education.

It cannot be that simple — or so ideologically pat. As the Wall Street Journal editorializes:

Perhaps what’s most depressing about the latest results is that progress has ceased even in education reform leaders like Tennessee, Indiana and Florida that have loosened teacher tenure protections and expanded school choice. Yet this may be evidence that a falling tide can strand all boats.

One of the few exceptions this year was Chicago where eighth-grade proficiency in math increased to 25% from 20%. Over the last two years Chicago has closed its achievement gap with other large public city school districts. Mayor Rahm Emanuel deserves credit for expanding charter schools as well as imposing a longer school day and more rigorous teacher evaluations.

Cleveland’s school district has also made modest strides. In 2012 Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed a law allowing the district to base teacher layoffs on performance rather than seniority. The law also rewarded highly rated teachers with better pay.

Mr. Duncan, who is leaving in December, last week gave unions a parting gift by proposing to cap standardized testing at 2% of classroom time. Yet it’s possible that the anti-testing fever that has swept the nation in the last two years may have contributed to the lousy NAEP results. (Emphasis added.)

Michael Petrilli at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests the stagnant economy also may be playing a role in stagnating scores:

What might be going on? It could certainly be something happening inside our schools. Maybe the transition to the Common Core is causing disruption and growing pains (or worse), and those are reflected in these data. Maybe the political debate over standards, testing, and teacher evaluations has caused uncertainty in the classroom or discouraged kids from trying as hard. Maybe Arne Duncan’s waivers relieved the pressure on schools to boost achievement, and they consequently took their foot off the gas. Some states will explain that they altered the portions of English language learners and students with special needs who were excused from NAEP testing. All plausible.

But it’s also plausible that these trends reflect something going on outside of schools—namely, the economic condition of our country and our communities. As I argued the other day, the Great Recession and its aftermath could have acted as a stiff headwind. As schools face more challenging demographics—partly because of the decades-long surge in immigration, but also because of the economic dislocation facing many students and their families—they have to work harder just to stand still.

All possible! But it’s worth digging a little more deeply into the role Common Core may be playing in what students are learning and how. For the moment, however, Peggy Carr of the National Center for Education Statistics has offers a sound word of caution: “One downturn does not a trend make.” Let’s see what the scores look like in 2017.

This morning, The Wall Street Journal kindly included CFIF’s take on the ongoing compensation rate negotiations between music creators and digital broadcasters.  Simply put, our position is that the federal government shouldn’t be in the business of favoring one side or the other.  In an optimal world, the free market would dictate rates and the federal government would play no role.  Because current law mandates that federal regulators at the Library of Congress determine the rate that music creators receive when digital broadcasters play their songs, however, it is critical that regulators remain neutral rather than unfairly favoring one side or the other:

We agree with Bartlett Cleland that free-market negotiation between music creators and Internet broadcasters, not federal regulators, should optimally determine broadcast compensation rates.  Until that time, however, we respectfully disagree that regulators should artificially favor the streaming services industry.  Digital broadcasters possess no inherently superior right to their business model than do musicians, but Mr. Cleland’s suggested course unjustifiably favors the former over the latter.  If anything, artists possess the superior claim, since without their creations digital radio wouldn’t have that product to offer consumers.  And if streaming services consider payment requirements excessive, then they can adjust what they charge advertisers or subscribers to sustain their model.

The federal government should not be in the business of playing favorites.

Timothy Lee

Center for Individual Freedom, Alexandria, Va.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

The Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) this week submitted comments to the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) in response to a petition requesting the FEC establish a new rule requiring corporations and other organizations – specifically 501(c)(4) not-for-profit groups – that contribute to independent-expenditure-only committees (Super PACs) to do so through a separate segregated account subject to burdensome disclosure requirements.

CFIF opposes the proposed rule on grounds that it contradicts the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress and thereby exceeds the FEC’s statutory authority, that it would not serve the purposes ostensibly advanced by the petition, and that it would burden core First Amendment speech.

The petition for rulemaking was filed by Make Your Laws PAC, Inc. and Make Your Laws Advocacy, Inc.  CFIF’s comments were prepared by Wiley Rein, LLP.

Read CFIF’s comments here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Whereas the term “socialist” was once an epithet, among today’s political left it is a badge of honor, despite socialism’s uninterrupted record of failure across the globe and over an entire century of experimentation.  As we’ve observed, devotees typically offer Scandinavian nations like Denmark as exemplars, in violation of their professed fealty to “multiculturalism” and “diversity.”  But there’s another problem for Bernie Sanders and other leftists who constantly offer Denmark as a model for us to follow:  It’s not the socialist paradise that they imagine.

In a timely commentary this week entitled “Bernie Sanders’s Denmark Comments Show He Doesn’t Even Understand His Own ‘Socialism,'” National Review’s Kevin Williamson summarizes the flaws in their effort well:

[Y]ou probably missed the exchange between Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders at last night’s debate, when she lectured him that the United States isn’t Denmark and he responded with a rousing defense of the Danish model.  Never mind, for the moment, that neither of these batty old geezers has the foggiest idea of what’s going on in Denmark, or in the other Nordic countries.  Denmark, like Sweden before it, has been engaged in a long campaign of reforming its famously generous welfare state.  The country’s current prime minister is the leader of a center-right party, which, strangely enough, goes by the name ‘Left,’ Venstre.  (You might even call it libertarian:  it’s former longtime leader wrote a book bearing the positively Nozickian title ‘From Social State to Minimal State.’)  Denmark has been marching in the direction exactly opposite socialism for some time.  Our friends at the Heritage Foundation rank its economy the eleventh most free in the world, one place ahead of the United States, reflecting Denmark’s strong property rights, relative freedom from corruption, low public debt, freedom of trade and investment, etc.  Don’t tell Senator Sanders, but Denmark’s corporate tax rate is a heck of a lot lower than our own.”

More accurate examples of socialism at work include Venezuela, where consumers endure shortages of such things as toilet paper, or increasingly dystopic France.  Regardless, leftists’ image of a Danish socialist utopia simply isn’t accurate.

In March of 2014, the Obama Administration foolishly announced its intent to relinquish oversight of Internet domain name functions to the so-called “global stakeholder community.”

That is a dangerous idea for innumerable reasons, as observers like L. Gordon Crovitz of The Wall Street Journal have chronicled well.  Among other risks, consider the piracy threat that surrendering U.S. oversight poses to critical American artistic industries like music and film.  Online piracy already constitutes an enormous problem to those world-leading industries, and allowing Internet governance to drift into a Hobbesian global abyss would only exacerbate that.  Or consider the censorship threat, as Crovitz recently referenced:

Since the launch of the commercial Internet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, has operated under a contract from the U.S. Commerce Department.  American oversight freed engineers and developers to run the networks without political pressure from other governments.  China and Russia can censor the Internet in their own countries, but not globally because Washington would block tampering with the “root zone” of Web addresses.”

Fortunately, some in Congress aren’t sitting passively as the Obama Administration attempt yet another international capitulation.  In a recent letter to U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, Senators Charles Grassley (R – Iowa) and Ted Cruz (R – Texas) and Congressmen Bob Goodlatte (R -Virginia) and Darrell Issa (R – California) remind the Administration that it cannot dispose of U.S. property without Congressional consent:

The Internet as we know it has evolved from a network infrastructure first created by Department of Defense researchers.  One key component of that infrastructure is the root zone file, which the federal government currently designates as ‘a national IT asset.’  Creation of the root zone file was funded by the American taxpayer and coordinated by the Department of Defense, and the file has remained under United States control ever since.  Under Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution, Congress has the exclusive power ‘to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States.'”

Surrender of Internet oversight to a “global community” increasingly dominated by the likes of China, Russia, Iran and other rogues poses a terrible risk.  Fortunately, our Constitution presents a roadblock to the Obama Administration’s latest folly.  Even more fortunately, we have people like Senator Grassley, Senator Cruz, Congressman Goodlatte and Congressman Issa ready and willing to defend it.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and Editor-in-Chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review: October 2015 Term;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: The Honorable Michael Warren, Oakland County (MI) Circuit Court Judge and co-creator of Patriot Week: Civics and Patriotism in America;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT: Professor Gail Heirot, Member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law: Immigrant Detention Centers;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Quin Hillyer, Political Expert and American Newspaper Columnist and Writer: Election 2016;

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: Doug Bronson, Member of the Florida House of Representatives: Looking Behind and Ahead; and

5:45 CDT/6:45 pm EDT: Marita Noon, Executive Director of Energy Makes America Great: House Votes to Lift Oil-Export Ban.

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330

So it turns out that Barack Obama is succeeding in his effort to become a transformative president in the manner of Ronald Reagan after all.  Unfortunately for him, that’s because his presidency has reinforced rather than reversed Reagan’s axiom that “government isn’t the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”  Think of him as a Midas in reverse.

This morning, Gallup released a new survey on the question that it has asked Americans every year since 2002:  “Do you think the federal government has too much power, has about the right amount of power or has too little power?”  Hardened by almost seven years under Obama, the number who say that it has too much power maintains its record high:

The 60% recorded in this survey ties the previous high from 2013 for the question, which Gallup has asked annually since 2002.  The solid majorities in 2013, 2014 and this year saying the federal government is too powerful differ significantly from the 51% Gallup measured in 2012.  That poll was conducted in the days after the Democratic National Convention that helped propel Barack Obama to a re-election win that year.  During President Obama’s first year in office in 2009, the percentage of Americans concerned with the power of the federal government was 51%.  By his second year in office, 2010, that percentage climbed to 59%, after the federal government passed the Affordable Care Act.”

Perhaps the worst news of all for Obama, his apologists and dead-end leftists is that the groups accounting for the record high are Democrats, moderates and liberals.  Conservatives, libertarians and Republicans have regularly responded that the federal government possesses too much power.  “But now,” Gallup reports, “a majority of moderates (57%), as well as independents (64%), share that view.”

To the extent that Bill Clinton’s presidency was successful, it was because of his famous admission after electoral defeats that “The era of big government is over.”  Obama attempted a more hardened course, but that has only made his own presidency less successful and proved the wisdom of Clinton’s reluctant observation.

Chairman Trey Gowdy’s blistering letter to Elijah Cummings.  Read it here.

Last night, like many nights, our family experienced what more and more American families experience when it comes to video entertainment at home:  option overload.  Not that this is a bad thing, of course.  Who wants to return to the days of three major networks dictating the limited number of things we can watch?  Today we enjoy a wealth of options unimaginable even five years ago.

Despite our ever-increasing wealth of options, some continue to ignore reality and push for government-imposed regulations that will only interrupt continued innovation and future choice for consumers.

These parties are urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revisit an embarrassing chapter in its regulatory past to force a government-approved design for the set-top boxes that allow cable and satellite TV customers to view programming.  The FCC’s previous regulation of these devices cost consumers tens of millions of dollars, and never created the market in alternative set-top boxes envisioned by regulators.  Specifically, some companies who would like to see the FCC engage in another attempt to “create” a market for their set-top products – products consumers stubbornly refuse to demand — are pushing for FCC regulations that would define the technologies cable and satellite companies use in manufacturing their set-top boxes.

The video marketplace has never had more choices in the number of devices and the number of platforms over which consumers can view video products.  There are gadgets and apps available for any number of devices to view any number of offerings, and yet there are those who would lock in the very set-top boxes that may be on their way out if the government would only leave the market to its own devices.

The FCC’s Downloadable Security Technology Advisory Committee (DSTAC, pronounced “DEE-stack”) issued a report in August which made no collective recommendation for any new FCC technology mandate on set-top boxes.  The panel reported what most younger video viewers have known for some time, namely, that there is “wide diversity” in networks, security, and communication technology choices across all pay TV platforms.

Although there is no doubt that interested parties will call for the government to regulate technology for set-top boxes, we urge the Commission to let consumers in the thriving market for video services sort out what devices and what technologies best serve their budgets, tastes, and viewing preferences.  To have the government lock in any present technology means cutting off future innovations.

We also need to respect the interests of content providers who have a right to negotiate the terms under which their content can be viewed.  And here again, apps can serve an important advancement for consumers and content providers, as the services provided by apps have exploded over the past few years as rights become available from content providers.

Simply put, consumers today are viewing video content using Amazon, Apple TV, Netflix, Roku, Cable and Satellite Apps, smartphones, tablets and web browsers.  The video market is thriving without government regulation and intervention.

Let’s hope the FCC can help video consumers by resisting the temptation to regulate in this exciting and rapidly changing world.

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has a enlightening critical essay on Barack Obama’s “real education legacy” in the latest issue of National Affairs. The essay couldn’t be more timely, coming on the heels of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement last week that he plans to leave his post at the end of the year.

Hess writes:

Despite the soaring rhetoric and heady promises . . .  education reform during Obama’s tenure has disappointed in practice. Oddly enough, some of the president’s critics on the right have missed this and have maintained that, on education, his policy has been uniquely sound. New York Times columnist David Brooks declared that “Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency,” and suggested that Obama’s approach to education reform constituted a model for “health care, transportation, energy [and] environmental policy.”

In fact, Obama’s presidency has proven deeply divisive in nearly every area of policy, from health care to government spending to the environment. And those who have been disconcerted by the Obama administration’s faults in other areas — its abuse of executive discretion, its dramatic expansion of the federal government, and its exacerbation of identity politics and the culture wars — will find that education has not been spared. Despite all the promises of a “post-partisan” presidency, Obama has pursued a polarizing, bureaucratized, and Washington-centric education agenda while exploiting and then draining a substantial reservoir of bipartisan goodwill.

While it does little good to merely gripe about bad policies and squandered opportunities for reform, setting the record straight is crucial. Our understanding of the Obama era in education will color how we regard the promises of presidential candidates and inform our expectations for future Congressional and executive policymaking. Accounting for the lessons of the last seven years is especially vital given education’s substantive and symbolic import and its centrality for any national figure intent on promoting opportunity. Ultimately, the Obama years have illustrated that how presidents tackle education may matter as much as whether they do.

In particular, Hess looks at how the Education Department bungled Race to the Top and the ham-handed rollout of the Common Core standards. Do read the whole thing.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Friday announced he would be stepping down after seven years of service to the Obama administration. In a letter to department employees, Duncan said he wished to return to Chicago to be with his family. Duncan’s wife and two children moved back to their hometown earlier this year. He plans to leave by the end of the year.

President Obama has already selected John B. King, Jr., the current deputy secretary of education, to replace Duncan.

Duncan’s announcement is a bit out of the blue. From the Washington Post:

Even after Duncan’s family relocated to Chicago at the end of the summer, and their home in Arlington was put up for sale, Duncan insisted that he would stay until the end of the Obama administration.

In an interview with The Washington Post in June, Duncan said he planned to stay put because he felt he had a long list of unfinished business and felt an urgency to keep pushing toward unmet goals. He called his job the dream of a lifetime. “I still pinch myself some days,” he said.

Duncan’s announcement came as a surprise, even to some people who are close to him. Just two days ago, after a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, Duncan artfully declined to answer when he was asked whether he planned to stay until the end of the administration’s second term.

Duncan’s tenure at the Education Department was a curious one. Conservatives in Congress weren’t fans, which could be expected. But the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers denounced him regularly, as well. Last year, he rejected calls by the NEA and AFT to resign. The NEA’s resolution blamed Duncan for a “failed education agenda” of policies that “undermine public schools and colleges, the teaching education professionals, and education unions.” The AFT, meantime, demanded — among other things — that Duncan do away with the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top “test and punish” model, and replace it with a “support and improve” system.

Yet in most respects, Duncan has acted as any down-the-line Democrat would. He has opposed every meaningful effort to rein in federal education spending. He opposed Congress’s reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, for all the wrong reasons.

Along with President Obama, Duncan used Race to the Top — a $4.35 billion grant competition that was included as part of the $787 billion stimulus in 2009 — as a way to strong-arm states into adopting the Common Core standards.

And, of course, he opposes school choice. As I wrote in July:

Although it’s true that Duncan has supported charter schools throughout his tenure at CPS and the U.S. Department of Education, he is no friend of public school choice.

Last week, when the House of Representatives passed HR 5 to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, Duncan made a point of denouncing the bill’s “Title I portability,” which would allow a portion of federal dollars to follow low-income students to the public school of their choice.

Again, this isn’t even a question of sending tax dollars to private schools, which most Democrats and a fair number of libertarian-leaning Republicans oppose. Duncan labors under the widespread misapprehension, born of a career spent toiling in the government-school bureaucracy, that tax dollars are best distributed to institutions. Institutions are wise. Individuals are not. (Never mind individuals run those institutions.)

To change the way the federal government funds school districts would mean to deny special interests their due. But Duncan says Title I funding portability would be “devastating” to poor children—as if poor children and poor school districts are synonymous.

Duncan will leave office with “a long list” of items left undone. But insofar as the federal education apparatus has expanded to heretofore unimagined powers, Arne Duncan has been a smashing success. And the republic is much poorer for it.

Is the U.S. a particularly violent nation, one that stands as an outlier in terms of murder rates or gun violence?  No.  Unfortunately, Second Amendment restrictionists like Barack Obama hastily trot out that tired claim whenever they attempt to politicize the latest highly-publicized crime to advance their agenda.

The actual numbers tell a far different story.

The U.S. is by far the world’s leader in terms of firearms per capita, but its murder and violent crime rates aren’t particular outliers.  Fortunately, the Crime Prevention Research Center provides a helpful set of five data graphs illustrating these facts in vivid terms that even the most hardened Second Amendment opponents can understand (even if they won’t admit it).  It provides an invaluable and instant rebuttal to their attempts to spread misinformation and cliches, so please share it far and wide.

Leftists constantly claim fealty to “science,” except on issues like Second Amendment rights and U.S. crime rates when the data completely undermines their agenda.  Fortunately, groups like the CPRC help set the record straight.

In a letter addressed to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, the Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) this week led a coalition of a half dozen prominent free-market organizations urging opposition to any legislation that grants Puerto Rico “Super Chapter 9” status. 

“‘Super Chapter 9’ would give Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla a free pass to violate Puerto Rico’s constitution, but would do nothing to bring about meaningful fiscal reform,” the letter reads.

“It is our hope that Congress will instead take the lead on this tough issue by urging the Garcia Padilla Administration to implement real fiscal reform and uphold the constitution before any consideration of restructuring the non-constitutional debt,” the letter continues.  “If necessary, Congress has the legal authority to consider measures such as a federal control board to oversee financial reform.  When, and only when, reform is enacted, Congress can then consider a process that encourages an orderly restructuring of Puerto Rico’s debts that respects the constitutionally-protected bonds and the rule of law.”

In addition to CFIF, the letter was signed by the leaders of Frontiers of Freedom, Hispanic Leadership Fund,  Institute for Liberty, National Taxpayers Union and Taxpayers Protection Alliance.   

Read the letter by clicking here (PDF).