Great Moments in Human Rights: Mandated “Emotional Support” Animals in College Dorms

I was a bit of a juvenile delinquent.

• I semi-confessed that I may have set off fireworks in a stairwell at my high school.
• And I’ve already confessed my role in an “attack” on a float during a homecoming parade.
• So I may as well admit that I got in trouble during college for having a pet snake in my dorm room.

Given that last bullet point, you would think I would sympathize with people who want to bring pets to school.

And I do, but I don’t sympathize with the notion that the federal government should compel colleges to allow pets – even if they’re for “emotional support.”

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening, thanks to some bureaucrats at a Department that shouldn’t exist. Here are some blurbs from the Wall Street Journal about a new breakthrough in human rights.

College freshman suffering from separation anxiety, take heart: The federal government says universities have an obligation to admit “emotional support” animals into school housing. …emotional support animals (dogs, mostly) provide therapy through companionship and affection.

The pinheads at the Department of Housing and Urban Development say this is required by the Fair Housing Act.

Housing providers must offer people with disabilities a “reasonable accommodation” for emotional support animals under both the Fair Housing Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1974, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a notice to its regional offices late last month. …The April 25 notice was sent about a week after a federal judge ruled that student housing is covered by the Fair Housing Act, in a lawsuit filed by HUD against the University of Nebraska, on behalf of a student there.

Meet Fido, your new dorm neighbor

Best of all, you can bring any animal you want so long as it doesn’t have a track record of bad conduct.

Housing providers can’t exclude animals based on breed, size or weight. They can, however, refuse an animal that poses a direct threat to the health and safety of others or would wreck havoc on the property, but such refusals must be based on “objective evidence about the specific animal’s actual conduct – not on mere speculation or fear,” the notice says.

So that doberman pinscher is innocent until proven guilty!

Another great development in “human rights” around the world. Indeed, it belongs with these momentous breakthroughs.

• In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that your wife is fat.
• Across Europe, a satellite dish is now a human right.
• In Finland, broadband access is a basic right.
• There’s now an entitlement for free soccer broadcasts in Europe.
• In Italy, you have the right to…um…your testicles.
• Both the United Nations and the Obama Administration think there’s a right to taxpayer-financed birth control.

Speaking of subsidized birth control, you can enjoy some laughs at Sandra Fluke with this great Reason video, this funny cartoon, and four more jokes here.

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If You Outlaw Pencils, only Outlaws Will Have Pencils

I wouldn’t blame foreigners for thinking the United States is a bit schizophrenic.

This is a nation where you can own a tank or a machine gun, and it’s a country where there are probably more guns than people.

Yet it’s also a country where little kids get suspended for throwing imaginary grenades while playing alone on a playground. A country where cops arrest 10-year olds for having toy guns. And a country where small children get kicked out of school for pretending their hands are guns and saying “pow, pow.”

And now, apparently, it’s a country where kids can’t point a pencil at a buddy and make shooting noises.

Oh my God, It’s an assault pencil!

Here are some of the absurd details from a local CBS news report.

Two Suffolk second graders have been suspended for making shooting noises while pointing pencils at each other. Media outlets report the 7-year-old boys were suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. They were playing with one another in class Friday at Driver Elementary. “When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, one of the boys’ fathers. “It’s as simple as that.” Marshall, a former Marine, said he believes school officials overreacted. …Bradshaw said the policy has been in place for at least two decades. It also bans drawing a picture of a gun and pointing a finger in a threatening manner. Marshall said his son has good grades and no history of being disruptive in class. On the suspension note, the teacher noted that the boy stopped when she told him to do so. He said school administrators failed to use common sense.

I’m almost at a loss for words. This wasn’t just one brainless bureaucrat. At the very least, both a teacher and an administrator were involved in this farce.

These are the people we want educating our children?!?

At least the dad had the cojones to criticize the bureaucrats.

With apologies to Martin Niemöller, I can’t resist this bit of satire.

First they came for the pop tarts,
and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t care for breakfast pastries.

Then they came for the pink bubble blowers,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a bubble blower.

Then they came for the cupcakes,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a cupcake eater.

Then they came for pencils,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

By the way, the United States is not the only nation suffering from a pathetic and wimpy form of political correctness. Here are some examples of how our cousins across the ocean have gone bonkers about guns.

• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• Starting pistols have been banned from some school races.
• There have been calls for knife bans.
• A man was arrested for shooting a burglar who invaded his house.

These are all example from my series comparing brainless policies in the United States and United Kingdom. Though I’m ashamed to say that this latest story puts the United States in the lead in this government-stupidity contest.

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Powerful Evidence for School Choice

I expressed pessimism a few days ago about the possibility of replacing the corrupt internal revenue code with a flat tax. Either now or in the future.

But that’s an exception to my general feeling that we’re moving in the right direction on public policy. I’ve shared a list of reasons to be optimistic, even on issues such as  Obamacare and the Laffer Curve.

Education is another area where we should be hopeful. Simply stated, it’s increasingly difficult for defenders of the status quo to rationalize pouring more money into the failed government education monopoly. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never has so much been spent so recklessly with such meager results.

That’s true regardless of whether Democrats are throwing good money after bad or whether Republicans are throwing good money after bad.

Fortunately, a growing number of people are realizing that the answer is markets and competition. That’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing progress all over the country. Policy makers have implemented varying degrees of school choice in states such as Indiana, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Colorado, Florida, Arizona, and even California.

Is this having a positive impact on educational outcomes and other key variables? The answer, not surprisingly, is yes.

Here are some of the details from a new study published by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

This report surveys the empirical research on school choice. …the empirical evidence consistently shows that choice improves academic outcomes for participants and public schools, saves taxpayer money, moves students into more integrated classrooms, and strengthens the shared civic values and practices essential to American democracy.

The data on academic outcomes surely is the most important bit of information, so let’s specifically review those findings.

Twelve empirical studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the “gold standard” of social science. Of these, 11 find that choice improves student outcomes—six that all students benefit and five that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found a negative impact.

And since I want to reduce the burden of government spending, let’s see whether school choice is good news for taxpayers.

Six empirical studies have examined school choice’s fiscal impact on taxpayers. All six find that school choice saves money for taxpayers. No empirical study has found a negative fiscal impact.

Here’s the breakdown of the studies for all the variables.

As you can see, it’s a slam dunk, much as a survey of tax research found that nearly 90 percent of academic studies concluded that class-warfare tax policy is destructive.

Some of the tax research was inconclusive, but not a single study supported the notion that higher tax rates are good for growth, much as this new research from the Friedman Foundation didn’t uncover a single study that found negative results from school choice.

So with lots of positive research and no negative research, why would anybody oppose school choice? Unfortunately, politicians like Barack Obama and groups such as the NAACP side with teacher unions, putting political power ahead of progress and opportunity for kids.

P.S. Here’s a video explaining why school choice is better than a government-run monopoly.

P.P.S. There’s also strong evidence for school choice from nations such as Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.

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Political Correctness Run Amok in Massachusetts

This may be even worse than all the examples of anti-gun political correctness that I’ve shared.

Get a load of what some anti-achievement nutjobs in Taxachusetts have decided.

John Gillis has two students at the middle school who have worked hard to make the honor roll this year, but they won’t be able to attend the school’s annual honors night to celebrate their achievement. That’s because the school administration has decided to end the long-standing tradition… “We took it from an exclusive nighttime ceremony where only honors students were invited and rolled it into our end-of-the-year assembly,” Principal David Fabrizio said. “That way, everybody can celebrate their and their peers’ achievements.”

Yes, let’s all get participation medals simply for breathing. But it gets worse.

Fabrizio said that it is the school’s job to monitor both academic and social emotional growth. Concentrating on grades, “as strange as it sounds, can impinge upon the learning process,” he wrote. “The honors night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade point average,” Fabrizio wrote.

Too bad this didn’t exist when I was in school. I never once made the Honor Roll when I was a young slacker. Too bad political correctness hadn’t taken hold back then. I could have been taught that it was okay to never achieve anything.

But perhaps that would have made my life easier. Instead of engaging in the Sisyphean task of trying to roll back the welfare state, I could be doing something really productive…like being an overpaid bureaucrat making life harder for those who actually are trying to create wealth for the economy.

P.S. Take a wild guess whether Principal Fabrizio supports class-warfare tax rates as a way of mitigating the “devastating” differences between those that produce and those that don’t.

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Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, which State Has the Most Bureaucrats Compared to Teachers of Them All

I like rankings and maps because you get to see a lot of information in a single image.

I’ve shared some maps making very interesting international comparisons.

• Which nations have the most red ink.
• Which nations are money laundering centers (hint, not tax havens).
• A crazy left-wing “Happy Planet” map.
• Another silly map supposedly showing that America is one of the world’s most authoritarian nations.

Here are some good state maps with useful information.

• Which states have no income taxes.
• Which states give the highest welfare payments.
• Which states are in a “death spiral” because of too many takers and too few makers.

And I even have a local map.

• How many of the nation’s richest counties are in the D.C. metro region.

Now we have a map, based on some research from the Friedman Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, showing which states have the most education bureaucrats compared to actual educators.

I’m ashamed that my state of Virginia is the worst in the nation. Maybe paying for this bureaucratic bloat explains why our Governor recently broke his promise and imposed a huge tax increase.

I’m also shocked that Illinois is one of the best states in the nation, at least by this measure. Though I suspect this is the exception to the rule and the Prairie State will still be neck and neck with California in the race to bankruptcy.

Though Illinois is much closer to the bottom than to the top in the “Moocher Index,” so maybe it’s not as bad as we think.

P.S. If you like this “educrat” ranking, here’s a “Poverty Pimp” ranking of “public welfare” bureaucrats compared to state population. Ohio and Alaska do poorly in both, for what it’s worth.

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The Continuing Wimpification of America

I’ve reached the point where I can’t even get agitated any more.

The anti-gun ideology in government schools has led to so many stupid incidents that all I can do is shake my head and be thankful my kids somehow were spared this nonsense.

OH MY GOD!!! Call a SWAT team and child protective services!

Our latest story comes from Michigan, where a third grader brought some cupcakes to school for his birthday. That seems innocuous, but the boy’s mother (gasp!) decorated them with toy army men.

The school decided “to remove the Army soldiers from the cupcakes” and called the boy’s family to inform them that they had committed a thought crime.

Last week, Casey Fountain’s third-grade son had a birthday party at his school in Caro. His wife decided to whip up 30 cupcakes for the boy’s classmates. She topped the treats with plastic army guys like the ones countless boys and girls have played with for decades. Fountain says he never thought his innocent act of party planning would lead to controversy. Fountain says the principal of Schall Elementary School called him personally and told him that dressing the cupcakes with soldiers was, in the principal’s words, “insensitive” considering recent gun-related tragedies.

This definitely belongs in the Hall of Fame for brainless political correctness and hysterical overreaction. Other members of this distinguished Hall of Fame include:

• Bureaucrats suspended a little boy for taking bites out of a pop tart in such a way that it was shaped like a gun.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 7-year boy for pretending to throw a non-existent grenade on the playground.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• Bureaucrats busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• A teacher in Rhode Island caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• Bureaucrats evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• Bureaucrats in Florida kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.

At some point, you have to ask whether sending your kids to a government school not only puts them at risk of a substandard education, but also is a form of child abuse.

P.S. Actually, I am getting agitated the more I think about this. For all intents and purposes, the principal was equating soldiers with crazy mass killers. Why hasn’t this person been fired?

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More Insane Political Correctness and Absurd Anti-Gun Nonsense

I weep for my country. We are becoming pathetic fools and total wimps.

Consider these jaw-dropping examples of behavior by adults who work in government schools. I think they must be competing for the Stupid Official of the Year Award.

The contestants include:

• The bureaucrats who suspended a 7-year boy for pretending to throw a non-existent grenade on the playground.
• The bureaucrats who suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• The bureaucrats who busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• The teacher in Rhode Island who caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• The bureaucrats who evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• The bureaucrats in Florida who kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.

Here’s another example that belies belief. It starts innocently enough, as reported by a Baltimore news outlet.

Children at Park Elementary School went home with a letter today explaining there was a disruption in school.

A “disruption”? What, pray tell, happened. A fire? A theft? A gang fight?

Well, brace yourself lest you faint in fright at what you’re about to read.

At Park Elementary school, Josh was enjoying his breakfast pastry when he decided to try and shape it into a mountain. Josh said, “It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t.” Josh takes full responsibly for trying to shape his breakfast pastry, but admits it was in innocent fun. He told FOX45, “All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but, it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda.” When his teacher saw the strawberry tart he knew he was in trouble, he recalls, “She was pretty mad…and I think I was in big trouble.”

Oh, Heavens. Get the smelling salts!

What was the punishment for this thug?

Josh’s dad received a phone call from the school saying that Josh has been suspended for two days because he took his breakfast pastry and fashioned it into a gun. Josh’s dad was astounded to learn the school chose such a harsh punishment, even after no one was hurt.

But here’s the real kicker. The supposed adults who run the school (and are in charge of educating children) decided that an artfully chewed pastry was “an inappropriate gesture.”

Late Friday afternoon a letter went home with students explaining the incident saying, “A student used food to make an inappropriate gesture.” But Josh’s dad is not happy saying, “I would almost call it insanity. I mean with all the potential issues that could be dealt with at school, real threats, bullies, whatever the real issue is, it’s a pastry.., Ya know?”

The dad had the right reaction.

And the real moral of the story is that we need to break up the government-run education monopoly and allow school choice.

P.S. Mindless political correctness is not limited to the United States. There are also unbelievable examples from the United Kingdom.

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Colorado School Official Courageously Rescues Community from Vicious 7-Year Old Terrorist

While writing yesterday about a bureaucrat who might need to give up doggie day care service for his pet because of make-believe “deep spending cuts,” I mentioned that we need something akin to a medal-of-honor award for bureaucrats who endure untold suffering.

In that same spirit, we need some sort of national award for school officials who engage is spectacular acts of heroism to save their communities from the youth brigade of al Qaeda.

If we had this kind of award, some of the past winners would include:

•  The bureaucrats who suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• The bureaucrats who busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• The teacher in Rhode Island who caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• The bureaucrats who evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• The bureaucrats in Florida who kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.

And if we had such an award, Valerie Lara-Black might have an early favorite for the 2013. What did Ms. Lara-Black do to put herself in position for such a high honor? Well, she went above and beyond the call of duty.

A 7-year-old Mary Blair Elementary School student says he’s confused about getting in trouble…Thompson School District officials contend that the boy broke one of the school’s “absolutes.” Parent Mandie Watkins said Mary Blair principal Valerie Lara-Black called her Friday afternoon to inform her that her second-grade son, Alex, had been suspended.

Another thwarted terrorist!

What did this nascent young criminal do? What horrid offense against the community did he commit? Why was he suspended?

…for throwing an imaginary grenade during recess on the playground. Alex did not have anything in his hand at the time and made no threats toward other people, Watkins reportedly was told.

Thank goodness that Ms. Lara-Black was able to nip this crisis in the bud. Showing a mastery of bureaucracy, she quickly deployed her school’s policy against play weapons and she decided that an imaginary play weapon was just as dangerous as a real play weapon.

The rules are laid out by Mary Blair Elementary School in a list of “absolutes” that are posted on the school’s website and are aimed at making Mary Blair a safe environment. Included in those absolutes are no physical abuse or fighting – real or play – and the no-weapons absolute also covers real or play weapons.

I hope the school also has a policy against playing tag as well. After all, that’s a militaristic game that sometimes involves aggressive touching.

And if the kids play kickball during recess, I hope there’s a rule that all games end in ties so there are no winners and losers (or perhaps just require the kids to play soccer, where all games seem to end in scoreless ties anyway).

You can’t be too careful. It takes a lot of care and planning, after all, to raise the next generation of social workers!

Though I am a bit surprised that this happened in Colorado. The folks I’ve met at the High Lonesome Ranch, for instance, obviously were not lobotomized and emasculated while at school, so perhaps mind-numbing stupidity is a recent phenomenon in the state.

At least this type of thinking hasn’t spread to Texas, where policymakers are more likely to let teachers carry guns rather than turn them into enforcers of political correctness.

You can get a sense of how folks think in Texas from this coyote joke and this mock police exam.

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Private Schools in India Serve the Poor, but Can They Survive Attacks by Government?

I’m a libertarian because I believe in individual freedom and greater prosperity, but what really motivates me is the desire to protect people from predatory government.

So even though the economist in me wants to reduce the burden of government spending and implement a flat tax because such policies will boost growth and lead to higher living standards, I also want those policies because I don’t like it when interest groups use the coercive power of government to obtain unearned wealth.

And what gets me most upset is when those special interests use their corrupt connections with the political elite to screw the poor. That’s why I despise policies such as corporate subsidies, bailouts and minimum wage laws.

So you’ll understand why I’m particularly upset that the government of India is now trying to undermine opportunity for the poor by shutting down private schools

Here are some of the odious details.

Heera Ballabh walks his youngest son, Pankaj, to school through two kilometres of narrow lanes. He hopes a good eduction will propel the boy out of the cramped lower-class neighbourhood they call home and into middle-class life. But this aspiration hangs in the balance because legislation will force the privately run school Pankaj attends to close as it does not meet the requirements stipulated by the government.

The Ballabh family is not unusual. Because the government schools do a terrible job, there are millions of poor families who are sacrificing to send their kids to private schools.

…Pankaj attends the Pioneer Public School. It is among 2,000 low-fee private schools in Delhi facing closure, threatening to displace more than 500,000 pupils, most of them in primary school. Across India, about 300,000 schools, with an estimated 15 million pupils, may have to close, said Shantanu Gupta, the associate director of the School Choice Campaign with the Centre for Civil Society, a non-profit research and educational organisation.

Apparently embarrassed by the fact that so many millions of poor families would rather pay for good private schools than go to free state institutions, the government is  trying to regulate the private schools out of existence.

…The criteria for private schools to remain open include meeting a minimum requirement for the size of its premises, higher teacher salaries, and government certification. Mr Ballabh would rather pay several hundred rupees a month out of his meagre salary as a private tutor to send his son to Pioneer than to a government school. Although there are no tuition fees at state schools and textbooks and lunches are free, teachers are often absent and there can be up to 80 students per class, he said. Studies published by the Centre for Civil Society showed that schools such as Pioneer perform better than government schools.

Not surprisingly, the government doesn’t want to judge private schools on the basis of performance.

…Mr Gupta said…”The requirements should be performance-based instead of looking at how much land is available to build a school,” …One of the states that has managed to bridge the gap between the requirements of the act and the realities on the ground is Gujarat, said Mr Gupta, where the land requirement was done away with and schools are judged on pupils’ performance.

I’ve previously identified some truly despicable people on this blog (Robert Murphy, Michael Wolfensohn, Olga Stefou and the British moocher mom). Well, I think Ashok Agarwal may beat them in the contest to be the worst person in the world. He’s the one who launched the attack against so-called unauthorised schools.

…there are those who say such schools must be forced to close if the education system is to be improved in India. “We have an act that clearly defines what a school is and that must be respected,” said Ashok Agarwal, a lawyer and an education activist who filed a public interest litigation in 2006 seeking the closure of unauthorised schools.

Mr. Agarwal admits that the government schools don’t work, but he thinks he should have the right to decide what is best for other people’s children. What a disgusting human being.

“We admit our education system has been derailed but we are trying to fix it, and if you are unhappy with how government schools are run then pressure the government to make changes but don’t put your children in substandard schools,” he said.

The same issues exist in the United States. Children from poor families often are in neighborhoods where the government schools are a dismal failure.

Leftists want to use this horrible performance as an excuse to throw more tax dollars into a failing system, but this amazing chart shows that huge increases in staff and money have not helped the system.

School choice is one of the best ways of giving poor kids an opportunity for a brighter future. But the teacher unions are opposed, largely because they want to protect their privileged status.

That’s reprehensible, but understandable. What’s unforgivable, though, is when politicians like Barack Obama and groups such as the NAACP side with the unions, putting political power ahead of progress and opportunity for kids.

Shame of people in the United States who put government before kids. And shame on people in India who also put the interests of the state before the interests of children.

P.S. Here’s a video explaining why school choice is better than a government-run monopoly.

P.P.S. Read here how Chile has achieved great results with school choice.

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Head Start: Another Costly Government Failure

What’s more realistic: A unicorn, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or a successful government program?

This isn’t a trick question. Even though I’ve presented both theoretical and empirical arguments against government spending, that doesn’t mean every government program is a failure.

I suppose the answer depends on the definition of success.

Government roads do enable me to get from Virginia to Washington every day. And the Post Office usually gets mail from one side of the country to another. By that standard, many government programs and activities yield positive results.

But if the question is whether government achieves anything in a cost-efficient manner, you’re probably better off searching under your bed for unicorns.

If you pose this question to someone on the left, however, don’t be surprised if they point to Head Start. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that this program gives low-income kids a critical leg up before they start school.

I would like this to be true. I may not be fond of big and bloated government, but the best interests of these kids are more important than my desire for a talking point against the welfare state.

So what does the evidence say?

Here’s what the Washington Examiner wrote about the program, starting with an explanation of what the program is supposed to accomplish.

There are few institutions more sacrosanct in Washington than President Johnson’s Head Start program. The federal government spent more than $7.9 billion on the program in 2012 alone to provide preschool services for nearly 1 million low-income Americans. The program represents everything that is supposedly great about the liberal welfare state. It redistributes resources from wealthy to poor. It uses the power of the federal government to combat inequality by giving poor and minority students an educational boost before they fall behind their wealthier peers. There’s just one problem: It doesn’t work.

Is that an empty assertion? Nope, it’s the evidence from the government’s own research.

The ongoing randomized study of Head Start was based on a nationally representative sample of 5,000 children who applied for the program in 2002. Approximately half of the subjects received Head Start services, while the other half did not. The students were then tested on their language, literacy, math and school performance skills. …the 2010 Head Start Impact Study report notes, “the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole.” Specifically, the language, literacy, math and school performance skills of the Head Start children all failed to improve. …Now, the HHS has finally published a follow-up to its 2010 study that follows the same children through the end of third grade. And again, the HHS has concluded that Head Start is ineffective, concluding that Heat Start resulted in “very few impacts … in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices.” And those impacts that were found “did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.”

So what’s this costing the nation (above and beyond the failure to improve the lives of children)?

Since 1965, the federal government has spent $180 billion on Head Start. …Does that sound like a program you’d want to spend $8 billion on next year?

Now imagine the good things that would have happened if that money was left in the economy’s productive sector.

Or, if you like government, but at least want good results, imagine the good things that would have happened if state and local governments shifted $180 billion from the failed school monopoly into genuine school choice programs.

But let’s close on an optimistic note. As far as I know, there’s no evidence that Head Start actually damages children. It’s just wasted money.

That’s a much better track record than other welfare state programs.

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Courageous Pennsylvania School Officials Nab 5-Year Old Terrorist

It appears that my contest between the United States and United Kingdom for the most inane government policy how has to be augmented by a new contest between Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Just yesterday, I mocked Maryland officials for suspending two little boys for the horrific crime of playing cops and robbers (and noted that this is not the first time such stupidity has been displayed by Maryland school officials).

Preferred Weapon of al Qaeda

Apparently, the pencil-neck bureaucrats in Pennsylvania are jealous that their neighbors are getting a lot of attention, so they’ve branded a five-year old girl as a terrorist threat for talking about her pink toy gun that shoots bubbles.

Yes, bubbles.

Here are some of the absurd details from a local news report.

Talking with a friend about a pink toy bubble gun got a five-year-old kindergarten girl in the Mount Carmel Area School District labeled as a terrorist threat, according to an attorney.The incident occurred Jan. 10 while the girl was waiting in line for a school bus, said Robin Ficker, the Maryland lawyer retained by the girl’s family. …Talking with a friend, the girl said something to the effect “I’m going to shoot you and I will shoot myself” in reference to the device that shoots out bubbles. The girl did not have the bubble gun with her and has never shot a real gun in her life, Ficker said. Elementary school officials learned of the conversation and questioned the girls the next day, Fickler said. He said the girl did not have a parent present during the 30 minutes of questioning. The result, he said, was that the student was labeled a “terrorist threat” and suspended for 10 days, Ficker said. The school also required her to be evaluated by a psychologist, Ficker said. “This little girl is the least terroristic person in Pennsylvania,” he said.

In yesterday’s post, I speculated that it was a teacher who reported the little boys for playing cops and robbers and I said that teacher should be suspended.

I also said the principal should be fired for punishing the boys for acting like boys.

But after reading this story, I realize that I was being wimpy. These stories show that the time has come to end the government school monopoly.

We already know that government schools do a rotten job, consuming ever-larger amounts of our tax dollars for a system that produces very mediocre results (check out this chart if you don’t believe me).

But that’s just part of the argument for school choice.

We also need to protect our kids from being exposed to bureaucrats who are jaw-droppingly stupid.

“I want to work for the IRS when I grow up”

Actually, WordPress is telling me that “droppingly” isn’t a word. So maybe instead we should take Instapundit’s advice and reward these idiot officials with some tar and feathers.

And I hope the tattle-tale punk from the bus stop who ratted out the little girls is condemned to some sort of grade-school purgatory featuring never-ending wedgies.

On a more serious note, I hope the parents sue the you-know-what out of the school.

Then I hope Pennsylvania’s state legislature and Governor quit screwing around and implement a sweeping school choice plan, as they supposedly were going to do two years ago.

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Who Should Be Blamed for the Rising Cost of College?

Notwithstanding the title of this post, perhaps nobody deserves blame.

Sometimes, a good or service rises in price solely as a result of changes in supply and demand. And if the price of something climbs because of market forces, then it’s merely a reflection of unfettered exchanges between buyers and sellers.

But politicians and bureaucrats often distort market forces with subsidies. And even though consumers ostensibly benefit when government helps to pay for something, intervention can have very costly consequences.

I’ve already shared an amazing chart and a very powerful video to help explain how government subsidies in health care have created a third-party payer problem that has resulted in rapidly rising prices and considerable inefficiency in that sector.

Well, the good intentions of government also are causing problems for higher education.

Here’s a superb video from Learn Liberty, explaining why college expenses are skyrocketing.

The first part of the video shows that a college degree has become more valuable, so it’s understandable that the relative price of higher education has risen.

But then, beginning at about 1:55, the video discusses the role of subsidies. Echoing points I’ve made in the past, the professor explains how subsidies have simply generated higher prices. In other words, colleges have captured all the benefits, not students.

Business Week recently published a story that provides some glaring example of how universities have wasted all the additional money. Here are some remarkable excerpts.

“I have no idea what these people do,” says the biomedical engineering professor. Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000-a-year chief diversity officer. Among its 16 deans and 11 vice presidents are a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief. The average full professor at the public university in West Lafayette, Ind., makes $125,000. The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible,” says Robinson. “Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?” …Purdue is typical: At universities nationwide, employment of administrators jumped 60 percent from 1993 to 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured faculty. “Administrative bloat is clearly contributing to the overall cost of higher education,” says Jay Greene, an education professor at the University of Arkansas. In a 2010 study, Greene found that from 1993 to 2007, spending on administration rose almost twice as fast as funding for research and teaching at 198 leading U.S. universities. …Trustees at the University of Connecticut are reviewing administrative salaries at the school’s main campus in Storrs, following a controversy over the compensation of the school’s former police chief, who received $256,000 annually—more than New York City’s police commissioner. …Mitch Daniels, a fiscal hawk who will become [Purdue's] president when his term expires in January…says he wants to take a look at administrative costs that he suspects are “marbled” throughout the university—beginning with his office. In anticipation of his arrival in January, and without his knowledge, the school renovated the president’s 4,000-square-foot suite. The cost was $355,000, enough to send 15 Indiana residents to Purdue for a year.

Wow. Reminds me of this post about politically correct featherbedding at the University of California at San Diego. I can see why college administrators like this system. But it’s definitely bad news for students who get stuck on a treadmill of higher tuition and more debt.

P.S. At 2:18, the video has a discussion of how subsidies lead to higher costs, which then leads to more demands for additional subsidies. Hmmm…bad government policy leads to more bad government policy. Seems like there’s a term for that phenomenon.

P.P.S. I highly recommend the Learn Liberty videos. Here’s one on protectionism, one on the legality of Obamacare, and here’s another about how excessive federal spending is America’s real fiscal problem.

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Are there any Fact-Checkers at the New York Times?

On rare occasions, when I get really irked, I complain about media bias. Examples include this AP story on poverty, the Brian Ross Tea Party slur, this example of implicit bias by USA Today, and a Reuters report on job creation and so-called stimulus.

On other occasions, though, you stumble upon a news report or column that is ignorant beyond belief and you have to assume that the person has transcended ordinary bias and belongs in a special category.

The Washington Post seems to specialize in this kind of über-mistake. It was a Post reporter, after all, who wrote last year about a GOP plan to “slash” spending when timid GOPers were merely trying to trim 0.15 percent from the growth of federal spending. Not 15 percent. Not 1.5 percent. A mere $6 billion out of a bloated federal budget of $3,800,000,000,000.

And it was the Washington Post that decided to refer to a certain country as fiscally conservative. Was the reporter writing about Hong Kong or Singapore, the two jurisdictions with the smallest government and freest markets? Nope. Was the reporter referring to Switzerland, with its strong human rights policy on financial privacy, or Australia, with its personal retirement accounts? Nope, the reporter wrote about “fiscally conservative Germany.”

I guess the folks at the New York Times were feeling left out, because our latest example comes from that newspaper. Someone named Chrystia Freeland wrote an article about income inequality, making some decent points about cronyism, but also reflexively regurgitating talking points on class-warfare tax policy. What caught my eye, though, was this incredible assertion about government funding of education.

Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. …elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine.

So “public schools are starved of funding”? That’s a strong statement. It implies very deep reductions in the amount of money being diverted from taxpayers to the government schools. So where are the numbers?

You won’t be surprised to learn that Ms. Freeland doesn’t offer any evidence. And there’s a good reason for that. As show in this chart, government spending on education has skyrocketed in recent years.

This data isn’t adjusted for inflation or population, but you can peruse this amazing chart put together by one of Cato’s education experts to see that per-pupil spending has skyrocketed even after adjusting for inflation.

In other words, Ms. Freeland has no clue what she’s talking about. Or, to be fair, she made a giant-sized mistake, perhaps because she’s lives in a statist bubble and blindly assumes that left-wing politicians tell the truth.

Though I do want to giver her credit. She acknowledges that Obama and Clinton both decided to save their kids from a failed government-run school system, thus exposing some hypocrisy on the left. So it’s quite possible that she wanted to write a fair piece, but simply had a few major blind spots.

And it goes without saying that none of the editors or (non-existent?) fact checkers at the New York Times knew enough or cared enough to catch a huge blunder.

P.S. You can enjoy some cartoons about media bias here, here, and here, with the last one being my favorite.

P.P.S. Yes, I know Paul Krugman writes at the New York Times and sometimes seems to specialize in big mistakes. But he’s explicitly an opinion writer, so readers are forewarned to expect a certain point of view.

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The Higher-Education Version of the Government-Screws-Up-Everything Chronicles

I’ve previously shared an amazing chart that shows how more government spending on public schools has yielded zero positive results.

Well, it seems that government spending on colleges and universities also leaves a lot to be desired.

Three academics investigated the relationship between higher-education spending and economic performance and it turns out that this perverse form of redistribution from poor to rich is counterproductive. Here’s the key sentence from the abstract.

Results from a series of fixed-effects regressions using a 1992-2002 panel of state-level data indicate that increased spending on higher education generally exhibits a relatively large negative effect on private sector employment or gross state product growth when the increase in education spending is financed through own-source revenue.

Yet Obama and most of the other politicians in Washington want to increase the subsidies for colleges and universities – even though the macroeconomic effects are dismal.

But I guess that doesn’t matter since politicians seem more concerned about creating more comfortable lives for unproductive professors and bloated school bureaucracies.

By the way, let’s not forget that students also suffer. As the federal government has squandered more money on higher education, colleges and universities have responded by jacking up tuition and fees, leaving more and more students deeply in debt.

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Chile’s Amazing School Choice Revolution

I wrote back in July about the remarkable transformation of Chile into a prosperous market economy.

In that post, I noted that Chile was a pioneer in the shift from unsustainable tax-and-transfer entitlement schemes to savings-based personal retirement accounts. And with good reason. That system, which has been in place for more than three decades, is hugely successful.

We should do the same thing in America, and we should do it yesterday, if not sooner.

But Chile’s success is driven by more than just pension reform. And I want to mention something remarkable about what’s happening with school choice in that country.

Jose Pinera – Freedom Fighter

First, some background. I’m currently at a Cato Institute donor retreat, where I had the chance to talk to Jose Pinera, who is now the Co-chairman of Cato’s Project on Social Security Choice, but who also was the person who implemented the pension reforms in his home country of Chile.

I knew Chile had a school choice program, and I wrote a brief post about those reforms back in 2010.

But I was stunned when Jose told me yesterday that about 60 percent of Chilean kids – of all ages – now attend private schools.

That’s far better than Sweden, which also has nationwide school choice, but has only about 20 percent of high school-age kids in private schools.

Jose thinks that it is just a matter of time before more than 80 percent of Chilean kids are in private schools. Why? Because people like freedom and choice.

He often brags – and rightly so – that more than 95 percent of workers chose personal retirement accounts when given the option of staying with the old government-run pension system. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that parents also choose wisely when deciding how to get the best possible education option for their kids.

Now, if we can just figure out how to expand school choice in America…

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Very Good Cartoons about the Striking Teachers in Chicago

As a general rule, I’m completely neutral about private-sector unions. As I argued in this interview, the federal government should not take sides or tilt the playing field when unions and management squabble.

I have a more skeptical view of unionized bureaucrats, though, because politicians (acting as “management”) have no incentive to be frugal since they’re spending our money and there’s no competitive pressure to be efficient.

Which is why this cartoon is the best summary of “negotiations” between politicians and union bosses, and this video is damning proof that bureaucrats are wildly over-compensated.

So it’s no surprise that I’m unsympathetic to the striking teachers in Chicago. They earn more money than the taxpayers of the city, yet they do a terrible job of educating students.

Here are some good cartoons, beginning with a gem from Michael Ramirez.

You can see some of my favorite Ramirez cartoons here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Here’s another cartoon. Instead of mocking teachers for doing a crummy job, it zings them for insatiable greed (similar to this cartoon).

Lisa Benson did this cartoon, and you can review some of her best work here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, and here.

Last but not least, I’m not even sure what we’re supposed to learn from this cartoon. But it implies thuggish tactics in Chicago, so let’s add it to the list.

Sort of reminds me of this cartoon about Wisconsin.

The best outcome of the strike, by the way, is to junk the government education monopoly and implement a sweeping school choice program.  Chile has reformed its education system with vouchers, as have Sweden and the Netherlands. So why shouldn’t kids in Chicago get the same opportunity?

The answer, of course, is that there’s a corrupt and symbiotic relationship between unions and local politicians. The kids are nothing more than collateral damage.

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What’s More Important, Monopoly Privileges for Union Bosses or Educational Opportunity for Minority Children?

I’ve criticized union bosses for fighting school reform, and I’ve condemned the so-called civil rights establishment for opposing school choice.

And here’s a powerful video from Reason TV that combines those themes, noting the unholy alliance of teacher unions and the NAACP.

The spiritual leader of the teacher unions?

Fortunately, the statists seem to be losing this issue. Louisiana recently adopted school choice legislation that will give poor children an opportunity to escape failing government schools.

But the left isn’t losing gracefully. In a move that would make George Wallace proud, they are threatening schools that will participate in the new program.

Here’s some powerful criticism of their sleazy tactics from today’s Wall Street Journal.

In some parts of the antebellum South, it was illegal to teach blacks how to read. Are teachers unions in Louisiana trying to turn back the clock? Last week, lawyers for the Louisiana Association of Educators, one of the state’s two major teachers unions, threatened private and parochial schools with lawsuits if the schools accept students participating in a new school choice initiative that starts this year. Education reforms signed into law in April by Governor Bobby Jindal include a publicly funded voucher program that allows low-income families to send their children to private or parochial schools. …lawyers representing the unions faxed letters to about 100 of the 119 schools that are participating in the voucher program. “Our clients have directed us to take whatever means necessary,” the letter reads. Unless the school agrees to turn away voucher students, “we will have no alternative other than to institute litigation.” The letter demanded an answer in writing by the next day. Louisiana’s voucher program is adjusted for family income and is intended above all to give a shot at a decent education to underprivileged minorities, who are more likely to be relegated to the worst public schools. …Demand for vouchers has been overwhelming: There were 10,300 applications for 5,600 slots. Despite claims to the contrary by school-choice opponents, low-income parents can and do act rationally when it comes to the education of their children. State officials have rightly slammed the union’s tactics. A spokesman for the Governor said in a statement that union leaders are “stooping to new lows and trying to strong-arm schools to keep our kids from getting a quality education.” State Superintendent John White said it was “shameful” that the unions were “trying to prevent people from doing what’s right for their children.” The unions claim that vouchers don’t benefit students, but we know from school-choice programs in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere that voucher recipients attend safer schools and enjoy higher graduation rates than their peers in public schools.

As I note in this post (featuring a great column by Jeff Jacoby), I’ve always believed that the school choice issue exposes the dividing line between honest liberals and power-hungry liberals.

Regardless of ideology, any decent person will favor reforms that enable poor kids to escape horrible government schools. Lots of liberals are decent people. The ones who oppose school choice, by contrast, are…well, you can fill in the blank.

P.S. Here’s some wisdom on the issue of school choice from a former University of Georgia quarterback.

P.P.S. Not surprisingly, Thomas Sowell nails the issue, as does Walter Williams, with both criticizing the President for sacrificing the interests of minority children to protect the monopoly privileges of teacher unions.

P.P.P.S. Chile has reformed its education system with vouchers, as have Sweden and the Netherlands, and all those nations are getting good results.

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Contract for Buffalo Teachers Shows the Wrong Way of Cutting Excess Bureaucratic Blubber

Government bureaucrats are significantly overpaid compared to folks in the productive sector of the economy.

So you would think I’d support cuts, especially the kind that get rid of excess blubber in the government workforce.

But not when it means higher costs for taxpayers, and that’s exactly what’s happening in New York, where Buffalo taxpayers cough up more money every time some bureaucrat goes under the knife for cosmetic procedures such as liposuction.

Here are some excerpts from a report in the UK-based Daily Mail.

Teachers in Buffalo are getting plastic surgery on the tax payer’s buck, it has been revealed. Tummy tucks, liposuction and Botox are all part of the controversial one of a kind health plan. …it is a perk that comes with a price tag. Last year Buffalo schools paid $5.9 million for its teachers to have plastic surgery. In 2010 the figure was up at $9 million. …60 teachers spent $30,000 each on procedures in 2011, an investigation by the school board revealed, and because the schools are self-insured, tax payers foot the bill. …The policy to pay for teachers to have surgery started out innocently enough – it was intended for accident and burns victims in need of reconstructive surgery. But in the age of cosmetic surgery the rider extends to arm lifts, face lifts and breast enhancements, with surgeons advertising their services in the teacher’s union newsletter.

Wow. It’s bad enough that government workers get excessive salaries and gold-plated benefits. But this takes it to a new level.

At least we see an example of economics in action. How likely is it that plastic surgeons would be advertising in the union’s newsletter in the absence of taxpayer financing?

P.S. Here’s David Letterman’s top-10 list of how to tell you’re a unionized government bureaucrat. Liposuction isn’t on the list, but wait ’til next year.

P.P.S. Just in case you think I’m exaggerating about overpaid government employees, take a look at this map showing 10 of the 15 richest counties in America.

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Taxpayers get Screwed to Finance a $537,767-Per-Year Bureaucrat

I’ve reported some horror stories about bureaucrats ripping off taxpayers with lavish compensation packages, including:

• The chief bureaucrat of a low-income California city getting almost $800,000 per year.
• Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000.
• A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only 2-1/2 years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year.
• A New York school bureaucrat simultaneously getting a $225,000 salary and $300,000 pension.
• California taxpayers being forced to pay a fired bureaucrat $550,000 for unused vacation time.
• An employee of the New Jersey Turnpike system raking in annual compensation of $320,000.

We now have another über-bureaucrat to add to our list.

Here are the key details from the New York Post.

Take your salary cap and shove it. While Gov. Cuomo continues to push a bill that would limit New York school superintendents’ annual salaries to $175,000, Syosset, LI, Superintendent Carole Hankin — the highest paid in the state —has already circumvented the proposed ceiling. Last June, four months after Cuomo first proposed the salary cap, Hankin, 69, quietly inked a five-year contract that guarantees she will receive no less than her current salary— $405,244, The Post has learned. …“This is despicable and gives new meaning to the word ‘chutzpah,’ ” said Desmond Ryan, executive director of the Association for a Better Long Island, a developer’s lobby. “In these difficult economic times, that the school board would even consider this is a disgrace.” …Hankin’s total annual compensation comes to $537,767, including retirement funds and fringe benefits. Expenses include use of a “late-model car” and gas. She can also do outside consulting on her time off. She oversees about 6,600 students in 10 schools, yet her salary is nearly double that of New York City Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who gets $212,614, to watch over 1.1 million kids in 1,700 schools. Hankin’s first deputy, Jeffrey Streitman, rakes in $419,033 in salary and other benefits, but Cuomo’s bill would not apply to underlings. …Joshua Lafazan, an 18-year-old Syosset HS senior running for a seat on the school board, blasts Hankin’s cushy deal and the nine board members he calls her “puppets.”

Ms. Hankin and the other bureaucrats mentioned above are extreme examples, but they help underscore the problem that exists when politicians and bureaucrat unions make insider deals, swapping political support for lavish compensation levels.

Taxpayers, meanwhile, get screwed. This video explains why this is a problem at all levels of government.

What makes this so outrageous is that most bureaucrats get overpaid for position that shouldn’t even exist. If we shrink government to its proper size, the problem is mostly resolved.

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Shame on the Teachers’ Union and Double-Shame on the NAACP

Utterly despicable.

But this is an understatement, an entirely inadequate phrase to capture my feelings about how the NAACP and the teachers’ union have joined forces to undermine educational opportunities for minority children.

There are honest left-wingers, who are misguided but genuinely wish to make America a better place. But that’s definitely not the right way to describe people who put the narrow interests of teacher unions ahead of helping disadvantaged kids.

This new video from Reason TV has the sordid details.

Both Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have very appropriate comments on this issue.

And this video looks at the broader issue of school choice.

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Thomas Sowell Wonders Why the Obama Administration Is Trying to Undermine Educational Opportunities for Black Children

Welcome, Instapundit readers. This school choice video shows the best way of dealing with the problems described in this post (though, as Walter Williams explains, that’s only part of the answer).

=======================================================

If you care about helping the less fortunate succeed, I’m commenting today on a Thomas Sowell column that will make you sad and angry. It is a story about how powerless and disadvantaged people are being hurt to advance the political interests of some elitists.

Here is the clever way he starts the column. I particularly like the reference to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, which reminds me of this cartoon.

There have been many frauds of historic proportions — for example, the financial pyramid scheme for which Charles Ponzi was sent to prison in the 1920s, and for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was praised in the 1930s, when he called it Social Security. In our own times, Bernie Madoff’s hoax has made headlines. But the biggest hoax of the past two generations is still going strong — namely, the hoax that statistical differences in outcomes for different groups are due to the way other people treat those groups.

Then he gets to the meat of his topic.

The latest example of this hoax is the joint crusade of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against schools that discipline black males more often than other students. According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, this disparity in punishment violates the “promise” of “equity.” Just who made this promise remains unclear, and why equity should mean equal outcomes despite differences in behavior is even more unclear. This crusade by Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is only the latest in a long line of fraudulent arguments based on statistics. If black males get punished more often than Asian American females, does that mean that it is somebody else’s fault? That it is impossible that black males are behaving differently from Asian American females? Nobody in his right mind believes that. But that is the unspoken premise, without which the punishment statistics prove nothing about “equity.”

Professor Sowell contemplates the motive for this Obama Administration initiative.

What is the purpose or effect of this whole exercise by the Department of Education and the Department of Justice? To help black students or to secure the black vote in an election year by seeming to be coming to the rescue of blacks from white oppression? Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students — and with it destroy their chances for a better life.

Sowell elaborates further, pulling no punches.

Secretary Duncan and Attorney General Holder want to play the race card in an election year, at the expense of the education of black students. Make no mistake about it, the black students who go to school to get an education are the main victims of the classroom disrupters whom Duncan and Holder are trying to protect. What they are more fundamentally trying to protect are the black votes which are essential for Democrats. For that, blacks must be constantly depicted as under siege from whites, so that Democrats can be seen as their rescuers. Promoting paranoia translates into votes. It is a very cynical political game, despite all the lofty rhetoric used to disguise it. Whether the current generation of black students get a decent education is infinitely more important than whether the current generation of Democratic politicians hang on to their jobs.

Very powerful stuff. And it should be disturbing as well.

I’ve already commented on the implicit racism in the minimum wage law and the reprehensible decision by leftists to put the interests of teacher unions ahead of the interests of black students.

Now we can add something else to the list.

If you like Professor Sowell’s insights, I’ve highlighted more of his work here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And you can see him in action here. A truly gifted public intellectual and a (thankfully) prolific writer.

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The Higher-Education Bubble and Third-Party Payer

Taxes and spending are two of the most obvious burdens imposed by government, and I’m glad that many people are fighting against a political class that seems to have a limitless appetite for a bigger public sector.

But politicians also can do great damage to an economy with mandates, regulations, and other forms of intervention. And because they are indirect and somewhat hidden, these costs are poorly understood by most voters even though the burdens can be enormous.

Interfering with the price system is an especially pernicious form of intervention.

When functioning properly, prices enable the wants and needs of consumers to be properly channeled to producers and suppliers in a way that promotes prosperity and efficiency.

Unfortunately, governments hinder this system with all sorts of misguided policies such as subsidies and price controls.

One of the worst manifestations of this type of intervention is the system of third-party payer, which occurs when government policies artificially reduce the perceived prices of goods and services.

In this post, let’s look at markets for higher education, housing, and health care to get a better understand of how third-party payer leads to rising prices and damaging bubbles.

Let’s start with the market for college education. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has been promoting the idea of a higher-education bubble for years. His theory, as he explained in the Washington Examiner, makes a lot of sense.

A couple of years back, I suggested in these pages that higher education was facing a bubble much like the housing bubble: An overpriced good, propped up by cheap government-subsidized credit, luring borrowers and lenders alike into a potentially disastrous mess. …This is a simple case of inflation: When you artificially pump up the supply of something (whether it’s currency or diplomas), the value drops. The reason why a bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability is that the government decided that as many people as possible should have bachelor’s degrees. There’s something of a pattern here. The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay in, the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. One might as well try to promote basketball skills by distributing expensive sneakers.

I hope he’s right, and I also hope the bubble bursts quickly. The last of my three kids is a senior in high school, so anything that lowers tuition and fees would be most welcome.

But let’s look at some data and think about whether this will happen.

This first chart, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on college tuition and fees, certainly shows a big jump in the cost of higher education. Indeed, tuition and fees have climbed more than twice as fast as the overall consumer price index.

Now let’s look at the Case-Schiller data on housing prices in the second chart. While the lines aren’t identical, it certainly seems like Instapundit is on to something. When the government intervenes in a sector of the economy with lots of subsidies, prices climb rapidly.

The key question, of course, is whether the market for higher education will behave the same way as the market for housing. In other words, has the government created a house of cards that inevitably will collapse?

As noted above, I hope there’s a bubble that’s on the verge of bursting. But since I tend to be a pessimist, I’m worried that the education market may be more similar to the healthcare market rather than the housing market. Take a look at this final chart, showing what seems to be endlessly rising prices for medical care.

So why do I worry that higher education may be more like healthcare? Because both benefit from third-party payer, which happens when someone other than the consumer pays a significant share of the cost of a product. For instance, consumers directly pay for only 12 cents of every dollar of healthcare they consume. So why care about rising prices when somebody else is picking up the tab?

Indeed, in the few areas where out-of-pocket expenditures dominate, such as cosmetic surgery and abortion, we find that prices are stable or even falling.

In the case of higher education, there is substantial third-party payer because of money funneled to students in the form of grants and loans, as well as funds channeled directly to colleges and universities.

There is some third-party payer in the housing market, but the bubble that recently popped was more the result of (hopefully) one-time factors such as the Fed’s easy-money policy and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac subsidies that caused reckless lending and foolish speculation.

So what does all this mean? The honest answer is that I don’t know, but I fear that there is no looming collapse in the price of higher education. At best, we have probably reached a point where prices have leveled off, but that’s more a function of a glut in certain fields such as law.

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Richard Vedder on the Failings of Higher Education

Other than my affection for the Georgia Bulldogs, I’m not a big fan of higher education.

Colleges and universities are hotbeds of political correctness, but that’s actually a minor issue.

The big problem is that higher education consumes a huge amount of resources and provides inadequate value.

In these two videos, Richard Vedder documents staggering levels of inefficiency.

And here’s another portion of Rich’s remarks, given at the Pope Center in North Carolina.

A big problem in higher education is the existence of third-party payer, which is also what’s screwing up the healthcare system. More on that issue – as it relates to higher education – later this week.

P.S. Rich also is a co-author of an article for the Cato Policy Report documenting how spending cuts helped restore growth after World War II.

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The Complete Failure of Bush’s No-Bureaucrat-Left-Behind Education Scheme

The education people at Cato do remarkable work. They put together one of the best charts I’ve ever seen, and they are leading the fight for school choice and against any federal government role in education.

This new video, showing the failure of Bush’s main education initiative, is one example of their great work.

The right approach, of course, is to get the federal government out of the education business completely, and then disband government-imposed school monopolies at the state and local level – as explained in this video.

School choice doesn’t automatically mean every child will be an educational success, but evidence from Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands shows good results after breaking up state-run education monopolies.

And there’s growing evidence that it also works in the limited cases where it exists in the United States.

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I’m Thankful…that I’m Not an Idiot Education Bureaucrat from Florida

I’m thankful for the usual things, such as my kids and being an American.

But I’m also thankful I’m not a blithering idiot like the bureaucrats at a Florida school. Here are a few details of this astounding example of utter stupidity.

A sheriff’s deputy was dispatched last week to a Florida elementary school after a girl kissed a boy during a physical education class. School brass actually reported the impromptu buss as a possible sex crime, according to the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. …The kiss apparently occurred after two girls debated over whom the boy liked more. That’s when one of the girls “went over and kissed” the boy. The redacted sheriff’s report notes that Haring “stated there were no new allegations of sexual abuse as far as she knew.”

Above and beyond the jaw-dropping idiocy of the education bureaucrats, I have two additional reactions to this story.

1. Why didn’t any girls try to kiss me in PE class? This isn’t right. There should have been redistribution so I got my fair share.

2. What on earth is wrong with Florida. Yes, they have the shame of being the home of the Florida Gators, but I’m talking about more fundamental weirdness. Many posts about government stupidity originate in the Sunshine State, including jack-booted speed trap policy, horrific stories about welfare abuse, and a kid getting suspended from school for having a toy gun.

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What if the NFL Was Run Like the Government School System?

Regular readers know that the two things that get me most excited are the Georgia Bulldogs and the fight against a bloated public sector that is ineffective in the best of circumstances and more often than not is a threat to our freedoms.

So you will not be surprised to know that I am delighted that former Georgia Bulldog star Fran Tarkenton (who also happened to play in the NFL) has a superb piece in the Wall Street Journal ripping apart the inherent inefficiency of government-run monopoly schools.

Here is the key passage.

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct. Let’s face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt? No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn’t get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money. Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: “They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans.” The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn’t help.

This sounds absurd, of course, but Mr. Tarkenton goes on to explain that this is precisely how government schools operate.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real-life American public education system. Teachers’ salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn’t rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they’ve been teaching. That’s it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you’re demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation’s children. Inflation-adjusted spending per student in the United States has nearly tripled since 1970. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we spend more per student than any nation except Switzerland, with only middling results to show for it.

Actually, I will disagree with the last sentence of this excerpt. We’re not even getting “middling results.” Here’s a chart from an earlier post showing that we’ve gotten more bureaucracy and more spending but no improvement over the past 40 years.

So what’s the solution to this mess? Well, since government is the problem, it stands to reason that competition and markets are the answer.

Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands are just some of the countries that have seen good results after breaking up state-run education monopolies.

Watch this video to get more details.

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More Evidence for School Choice

School choice doesn’t automatically mean every child will be an educational success, but evidence from other nations certainly suggests it means better overall performance. Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands are just some of the countries that have seen good results after breaking up state-run education monopolies.

The same is true in the United States. When parents have some ability to select schools, this generates competitive pressure for better results. This is true even in sub-optimal instances where the choice is merely among different government-run schools. as illustrated by the abstract of a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

We study the impact of a public school choice lottery in Charlotte-Mecklenburg (CMS) on postsecondary attainment. We match CMS administrative records to the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a nationwide database of college enrollment. Among applicants with low-quality neighborhood schools, lottery winners are more likely than lottery losers to graduate from high school, attend a four-year college, and earn a bachelor’s degree. They are twice as likely to earn a degree from an elite university. The results suggest that school choice can improve students’ longer-term life chances when they gain access to schools that are better on observed dimensions of quality.

But real competition should involve private schools. Here’s the video from last year about why comprehensive school choice is good news for education.

School choice is one of the few issues where I’m optimistic. If we’re beginning to make progress even in places such as California and New Orleans, we’re obviously winning. No wonder the teacher unions are sounding so shrill.

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The Diversity Racket in California: Good for Bureaucrats, Bad for Education

Walter Williams has pointed out on many occasions that many government programs and initiatives exist primarily for the benefit of the bureaucracy, and he coined the phrase “poverty pimps” to describe the folks who get comfortable government jobs to operate programs that don’t help – and often hurt – disadvantaged populations.

We may need a new term, “diversity pimps,” to describe the people who get plush appointments to oversee the array of government-imposed racial and sexual preferences. Heather McDonald has a story at the City Journal that exposes how this absurd scam is undermining college education in California.

Even as UC campuses jettison entire degree programs and lose faculty to competing universities, one fiefdom has remained virtually sacrosanct: the diversity machine. Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.”

But what’s really remarkable is how this new office will be just one of many that exist to provide jobs for the diversity pimps.

This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.

Not surprisingly, since resources are finite, all this fluff is causing collateral damage.

UC San Diego is adding diversity fat even as it snuffs out substantive academic programs. In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering… At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. …This week, in light of a possible cut of $650 million in state financing, the University of California’s regents will likely raise tuition rates to $12,192. Though tuition at UC will remain a bargain compared with what you would pay at private colleges, the regents won’t be meeting their responsibility to California’s taxpayers if they pass over in silence the useless diversity infrastructure that sucks money away from the university’s real function: teaching students about the world outside their own limited selves. California’s budget crisis could have had a silver lining if it had resulted in the dismantling of that infrastructure—but the power of the diversity complex makes such an outcome unthinkable.

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Shame on the NAACP for Putting Big Government Ahead of Black Children

I’ve written before about how I get especially upset when rich people use the coercive power of government to screw poor people. There’s an equally offensive corollary to this principle, and that’s when powerful people use big government to impose hardship on helpless people.

And that’s exactly what’s happening in New York City, where the NAACP is siding with the teachers union to deny black children a chance to escape failing government schools. I genuinely wonder how people like that live with themselves. Do they ever feel shame or guilt? Do they have trouble sleeping at night? When they use their comfortable incomes to buy luxuries, do they feel a twinge of unease that they support policies that will make it much harder for others to enjoy a better life?

Here are the key passages from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial on the issue.

Thousands of American blacks held a rally in Harlem last week to protest . . . the NAACP. The New York state chapter of the civil rights organization and the United Federation of Teachers, the local teachers union, have filed a lawsuit to stop the city from closing 22 of Gotham’s worst schools. The lawsuit also aims to block the city from giving charter schools space to operate in buildings occupied by traditional public schools. Protesters at the rally, which included parents and charter school operators like Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone, urged the NAACP to withdraw from the suit. …The teachers union wants to keep these abysmal schools open to preserve jobs for their members. This is bad enough. But the union and NAACP also want to limit better educational options for low-income families who can’t afford private schools and can’t afford to move to an affluent neighborhood with decent public schools. The union knows that in a place like New York City, where space is at a premium, blocking charters from operating in public buildings will hamper charter growth. If the lawsuit succeeds, the awful schools will remain open to damage another generation of children. If you want to know why the NAACP has become irrelevant to the lives of African-Americans, this typical display of moral indifference to the plight of minority children is Exhibit A.

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It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…No, It’s Super-Bureaucrat

I’ve had dozens of posts about overpaid bureaucrats. Indeed, I’ve largely stopped blogging about the topic because it is so depressing to constantly be reminded about how a privileged class of people is manipulating the system to coercively obtain undeserved compensation from their less-fortunate neighbors.

But every so often I see a story which cries out for attention. Bloomberg has a report about a double-dipping bureaucrat who has managed to snag a position providing more than $200K per year while simultaneously ripping off taxpayers for a pension of more than $300K per year.

In a perverse way, I admire Mr. Hunderfund. I never would have thought a bureaucrat could figure out how to scam taxpayers for more than half a million dollars in one year. And for a job that probably shouldn’t even exist.

James Hunderfund, who earns at least $225,000 a year as a school superintendent on Long Island, is also entitled to a $316,245 annual pension from a previous administrative post, according to a compilation of pension data by the Empire Center for New York State Policy. Hunderfund retired in 2006 as superintendent of the Commack school district, also on Long Island. His current contract with Malverne stipulates that he receive an annual salary of no less than $225,000 through June 30, according to Empire’s report, which used a database from the New York State Teachers Retirement System.

The story also notes that there are more than 1,000 other edu-crats who are getting six-figure retirement packages.

The only other issue to address is whether we should be more upset by Mr. Hunderfund’s bloated salary of his obscene pension.

I think the pension is more outrageous, but I’m open to other opinions. Any thoughts?

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