Freedom Line Blog

Of the 18 bills proposed by Britain’s Coalition Government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats none may be as immediately consequential as the Academies Bill.  Filed in May just days after the Coalition took power, the Academies Bill allows any public school rated as “outstanding” by the central government to be approved automatically for privatization.  The stated goal is to move authority for running the school from local bureaucrats to private individuals; be they groups of parents, charities, or religious institutions.

The schools are allowed to use whatever methods necessary to meet the national testing requirements, but they can only charge the amount of the voucher each student gets from the central government.  If the school can deliver the desired results for less than the voucher, they get to keep the money left over.  Oh, by the way; this nationwide program starts this September.

The Coalition’s motivation for this and other decentralizing initiatives results from two realities: cutting spending to reduce the deficit, and giving more power to everyday citizens.

As conservative presidential contenders start to ramp-up their 2012 campaigns, I hope they are paying close attention to these striking policy developments.  The economic crisis coupled with the incompetency of our own overgrown governments may be just the combination necessary to mark a new birth of freedom in America.

A few months ago, I noted how Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is shaping up to be one of the most impressive stars in the GOP’s 2012 firmament. Though Daniels has gotten some literary love from a wonky contigent of Washington’s columnist corps, he’s never received quite as extensive a profile as in Andrew Ferguson’s cover story in the new Weekly Standard.

The whole (very lengthy) piece is worth reading for its portrait of Daniels as an unpretentious midwesterner, aggresive manager, and possible antidote to the Age of Obama (the piece — coming close on the heels of his PAC’s first high-profile Washington fundraiser — is an obvious attempt to rollout a campaign narrative). Among the nuggets that make a Daniel’s candidacy worth consideration:

He’s quicker on his feet than a garden-variety pol:

We were having lunch one day at a favorite spot, the St. Louis Street Soda Shop in Vincennes, on the Wabash River. Having resisted the Fried Bologna Sandwich ($3.49, with chips, pickle extra), Daniels was washing down a quarter-pound Coney Island dog with a large butterscotch milkshake—“the best in the state,” he assured Dolly, the delighted owner—when a reporter from the local radio station appeared. She pressed him on the education budget cuts too. She told him the local school board had just laid off nine teachers and an administrator.

“What would you say to those people?” she asked.

He visibly flinched, just as he had on MitchTV.

“I’d say it should have been nine administrators and one teacher. There are 20 things that school board could do before it had to lay off one teacher.”

He has an economic record about as sharply in contrast to Obama’s as is imaginable:

When Daniels took office, in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn’t balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession. “That’s what saved us when the recession hit,” one official said. “If we didn’t have the cash reserves and the debts paid off, we would have been toast.” The state today is spending roughly the same amount that it was when Daniels took office, largely because he resisted the budget increases other states were indulging in the past decade.

No other state in the Midwest—all of them, like Indiana, dependent on a declining manufacturing sector—can match this record. Venture capital investment in Indiana had lagged at $39 million annually in the first years of this decade. By 2009 it was averaging $94 million. Even now the state has continued to add jobs—7 percent of new U.S. employment has been in Indiana this year, a state with 2 percent of the country’s population. For the first time in 40 years more people are moving into the state than leaving it. Indiana earned its first triple-A bond rating from Standard and Poor’s in 2008; the other two major bond rating agencies concurred in April 2010, making it one of only nine states with this distinction, and one of only two in the Midwest.

And — most astonishingly — he’s such an effective governor that he even got the DMV (actually BMV in the Hoosier State) transformed into a customer-centered operation:

The state Bureau of Motor Vehicles, another patronage sump that was routinely ranked one of the worst in the country, was drastically reorganized. “He likes metrics,” [Indiana OMB Director Ryan] Kitchell said. “He likes to measure outcomes.” Every line item in the state budget has at least one objective formula attached to it to indicate how well each service is being delivered. Regulatory agencies track the speed with which permits and variances are granted. The economic development agency has to compare the hourly wage of each new job brought to the state with the average hourly wage of existing jobs. In the case of the BMV, the two most important metrics were wait times and customer satisfaction. Now each receipt is stamped with the time the customer arrives and the time his transaction is completed. Wait times have dropped from over 40 minutes to under 10 minutes. Surveys put customer satisfaction at 97 percent.

A new generation of reformers is beginning to develop outside of Washington. Dare we hope for a Mitch Daniels/Chris Christie ticket in 2012 (in either order)?

How about “The Cartel”? That’s the title of what looks to be a fantastic documentary put together by the good (and talented) folks at the Moving Picture Institute. View the trailer below … then buy tickets for yourself and all your friends:

In these week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the Obama Administration’s education policy.  While the president has taken some steps in the right direction, there are still other, more troubling aspects of the policy that need to be addressed.

At a time when governments at every level are confronted with the need to deliver services with less money, one Utah legislator is proposing a novel idea: encourage high school kids to graduate early.  The logic is simple enough: if students complete their graduation requirements a year early, they should have the option to graduate.  While the solution makes sense, it should require a broader rethinking of how education is structured.

Currently, most school districts receive funding based on the number of students in average daily attendance.  Thus, the way to get the most money is to have the most students on campus.  Unfortunately, that can create a perverse incentive to make it difficult for students who would otherwise graduate early, or leave campus during the day to take college courses.  While it makes sense to fund schools in proportion to the numbers in their student body, it is ridiculous to penalize schools when students want to accelerate their education.  Instead, schools should be rewarded for helping students graduate early.  Not only would the graduation of the 11^th grade “senior” free up a seat, it would help to reorient the educational system back to its primary goal: educating the individual student.

You are forgiven if you didn’t hear or read California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “state of the state” address recently. The Governator’s halting speaking style and usual lack of substance typically attracts neither attention nor interest. But one section of his speech bears scrutiny. Buried towards the end he compared the change in state spending on prisons and higher education. Thirty years ago 10 percent of the budget went to colleges and universities while 3 percent went to prisons. Today, “almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only 7.5 percent goes to higher education.”

Okay, so Californians passed the three strikes law and reinstated the death penalty.  Now they are paying the costs of locking up serious criminals for the rest of their lives. But Schwarzenegger didn’t advocate for eliminating the laws that drive up incarceration rates. Instead, he did what almost every California politician does: call for a constitutional amendment. In this case, one that would require the state to spend more money on higher education than prisons. Presumably, this Austrian “economist” would be satisfied so long as higher education gets one dollar more than the prison system.

And yet the truly remarkable thing is that he then advocated for privatizing the prison system. Why; because privately run prisons would save “billions a year.” True, but why not apply the same logic to other side of the ledger and privatize state-funded education? If competition is good in the housing of California’s worst residents, why not in the education of its youngest and brightest? Imagine if instead of proposing yet another arbitrary budget constraint the governor had announced a plan to expand the logic of the higher education Cal-Grant program into a statewide K-12 voucher program. Or maybe he could announce a district wide sale of LAUSD to a charter school outfit like KIPP. After all, if the prison guard unions can be sacrificed for the good of the taxpayer, why not the teachers unions too?

Despite the uproar, President Obama today is delivering his much-anticipated speech to the nation’s school children from Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia.  But as pointed out by Byron York today in the Washington Examiner:

[W]hen President George H.W. Bush delivered a similar speech on October 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC, the controversy was just beginning. Democrats, then the majority party in Congress, not only denounced Bush’s speech — they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue.

Then House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt complained at the time that “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president.”

And, according to Mr. York:

Rep. William Ford, then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush’s appearance. On October 17, 1991, Ford summoned then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander and other top Bush administration officials to testify at a hearing devoted to the speech.

Read Byron York’s entire article here.

According to the WSJ, SAT scores dropped this year.  From the story:

“Many observers Tuesday viewed the flat results of recent years as discouraging in light of a more than 25-year effort to improve U.S. education. ‘This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment,’ said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. ‘If there’s any good news here, I can’t find it.'”

Perhaps that’s because there is absolutely no correlation between spending more money on public education and output.  The public school system, like any other monopoly, operates at a high cost and typically produces mediocre results.