Education reform is not a conservative idea

I see hyperbole.
In the Las Vegas Sun, Jon Ralston writes, "But both Rory Reid and [Brian] Sandoval have abandoned any pretense that they want to pay teachers more or infuse any money into one of — if not the — most pathetically funded states in the country."

Because Reid and Sandoval, the two major candidates for governor, want to hold teachers and administrators accountable (and make it easier to get rid of ineffective teachers and administrators) and give students a choice in where they are educated, Ralston believes that this election is really about "conservative vs. very conservative" ideas.

Although Ralston seems to be one of the few people who recognize the similarities between the candidates' plans, he misses the big picture. First, how much you spend matters less than how effectively you spend it. Second, our public education system is broke and it needs a major overhaul. Third, yes, there are such things as bad teachers; the sad thing is we can’t get rid of them. Finally, school choice works.

Let's begin.

Spending more money does not produce better student achievement 
1) Nevada's education spending ranks anywhere from 26th to 47th (using figures from the U.S. government) depending on which expenditures you include and how you calculate the numbers. But does this matter?

No. Between 1959 and 2007, Nevada increased public education spending by 180 percent per pupil – and yes, that is after adjusting for inflation (but doesn’t include capital costs and debt repayment). Even with this 180 percent more money per pupil, no one in his or her right mind would argue that the quality of education today is better than 50 years ago.

In fact, almost no respected researcher argues that spending more money improves student achievement.

The National Working Group on Funding Student Learning, an assembly of several education researchers including professors from Washington, Wisconsin, Vanderbilt, Penn State, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley (hardly a bastion of conservative thought) reached a consensus that "the connection between resources and learning has been growing weaker, not stronger,” and that “…the system itself is the problem … State education finance systems were not designed with student learning in mind …”

And much more evidence suggests that there is no correlation between spending more money and improving student achievement.

Don't forget, it is widely recognized that teachers in Nevada are paid quite well relative to other states (ranking anywere from 17th to 22nd highest). Not that paying teachers more helps. According to Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky, authors of "Teacher Quality and Teacher Pay," increasing the pay of teachers does not attract higher-quality teachers to the profession - school districts simply spent more money on the same pool of teachers.



Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. When it comes to education policy, doing the same thing over and over again is cruel and selfish because of the effects it has on entire generations of children.
2) Reid and Sandoval are right: Public education in Nevada is broken. We have dismal math and reading scores, rank fourth-worst in drop-out rate and are last in the nation in graduation rates. Fewer than half of low-income, black and Hispanic children can read at grade level, according to the NAEP fourth-grade reading exam. According to Education Week, fewer than one-third of African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans will graduate on time with a standard high school diploma in the Silver State.

Why are our results so bad? The major reason is that Nevada's public education system is an unaccountable, bureaucratic monopoly that focuses on jobs for adults, not education for students. I’m not alone in this judgment. The School Finance Redesign Project at the University of Washington, Bothel, concluded that public education is “focused on maintaining programs and paying adults, not on searching for the most effective way to educate our children.”

It's not fiction, bad teachers do exist.
3) Both candidates want to reform teacher evaluations, teacher seniority and teacher tenure. Doing so will help ensure we get bad teachers out of classrooms.

The National Council on Teacher Quality notes that Nevada is a state where earning tenure is “virtually automatic.” Few higher-ed teachers, by contrast, actually receive tenure, and even then it takes five or more years to earn the privilege. Tenure makes it hard to get rid of really bad teachers.

According to the Center for American Progress, a left-of-center think tank (read: NOT CONSERVATIVE), and the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, Nevada’s school districts terminated or failed to renew the contracts of just 0.2 percent of “untenured teachers” and 0.3 percent of “tenured teachers” in 2007-08. Overall, Nevada kept 99.4 percent of its teachers that year. Only Arkansas, Delaware and Pennsylvania fired fewer teachers.

If getting rid of bad teachers and implementing teacher evaluations, eliminating seniority privileges and tenure is such a conservative idea, then why would U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan say, “[w]hen inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules that we designed put adults ahead of children — then we are not only putting kids at risk, we are putting the entire education system at risk.” Yup, Arne Duncan: NOT A CONSERVATIVE.

Furthermore, Whitney Tilson of Democrats for Education Reform (read: NOT A CONSERVATIVE) identifies “three pillars of mediocrity” that must be eliminated: a) Lifetime tenure, b) lockstep pay and c) seniority (instead of merit).


Advocating education policies that actually work doesn't mean those ideas are conservative.

4) School choice isn’t a conservative issue, either. It's an education issue. Partisans have made it into an ideological issue solely because one major source of campaign funding – the teacher unions – hates school choice. More choice for parents and students means less opportunity for unions to control and manipulate education policy and, thus, fewer opportunities to fatten their own pockets.

Howard Fuller, a former Black Panther and current professor at Marquette University (read: NOT A CONSERVATIVE) has stated: "There is a fundamental issue confronting African Americans, and therefore all Americans. Parents without the power to make educational choices lack an indispensable tool for helping their children secure an effective education."

Anthony Colón, a former vice president of La Raza (read: NOT A CONSERVATIVE) has stated: "Vouchers are not a Republican idea. If your community is underperforming with low graduation rates and sits at the bottom of the barrel in math and science, you don't worry about vouchers being a Republican issue. You worry about what works for your community."

Senator James T. Meeks, a Democrat from inner-city Chicago (read: NOT A CONSERVATIVE), not only pushed for a voucher program for low-income children in Chicago, but when the union was angered by his efforts he wrote the union a check and returned its campaign donations.

And don’t forget the crowd that marched in Florida to expand the Step Up for Students program.



Or the diverse crowd that marched on D.C. to protest the Democrats' union-backed and ideologically driven attempt to kill a voucher program that works.



Note, Connecticut Independent Joe Lieberman and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Read: NOT CONSERVATIVES) have tried to bring back the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

Speaking of what works, how about the evidence that vouchers work? Nine out of 10 empirical studies find that students benefit from the use of vouchers to attend private schools. Eighteen out of 19 studies find that public schools improve when faced with voucher competition. In 2009, a U.S. Department of Education study found that students using the D.C. voucher to attend a private school over a three-year period saw an 18-month gain in reading skills, while a 2010 report found that students using the scholarship to attend a private school saw graduation rates that were 21 percentage points higher than the control group.

It is very, very clear that vouchers improve student achievement, graduation rates and public schools. It is also clear that competition between public schools as well as public school choice improve student achievement.

Researcher Carolyn Hoxby of Stanford University found that charter schools in New York improved student achievement in reading and mathematics, especially among low-income children. Importantly, Hoxby's research shows that the charter schools closed the achievement gap significantly. Additionally, Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, found that traditional public schools improved when faced with competition from charter schools.

Even the union-run but autonomous Pilot Schools in Boston outperformed the traditional government monopoly school. Choice and school decentralization work. Period.

If Jon Ralston really does believe we need to spend more money on education, then he is advocating what doesn't work. Ralston is wrong in his assessment of Reid vs. Sandoval. Painting empirically proven education policies as ideologically driven dogma is not only incorrect, it is a disservice to the students of Nevada who deserve a much better education. Reid vs. Sandoval on education policy isn’t “conservative vs. very conservative” ... it is “what works vs. what works.”

Vouchers improve student achievement and graduation rates

A new report just released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reveals that students receiving vouchers in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program saw graduation rates that were 12 points higher than students who applied but did not receive a voucher. Better yet, students who won a voucher and then used it to attend a private school saw graduation rates that were 21 points higher than the control group.

The treatment group (students who won a voucher) saw a graduation rate of 82 percent.
The control group (which did not win a voucher, but of which 47 percent attended a charter school or private school anyway) saw a graduation rate of 70 percent — much higher than the District's official graduation rate.

The D.C district's graduation rate, according to NCES, is 56 percent.
The graduation rate for students winning and then using the voucher to attend a private school was 91 percent.

This all means that the effects of vouchers in D.C. are substantially understated by the report because nearly half of the control group exercised school choice. Unfortunately, journalists are unlikely to uncover these nuances and will instead report that vouchers don't work, despite the considerable scientific evidence that finds vouchers improve student achievement.

Watch out for Facebook...and video games

A new study by researchers at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy suggests that having a computer at home may actually lower student test scores, especially for low-income students. The study reports, "increased availability of high speed internet is actually associated with less frequent self-reported computer use for homework."

So what do kids use computers for? Playing video games and socializing with friends, of course. On the bright side, the study does find that parental monitoring of a child's computer use can lead to more productive time on the computer.

Are vouchers constitutional in Nevada?

Nevada can avoid a constitutional challenge by either offering vouchers for secular education or implementing a tuition tax-credit program, as no parental choice opponent has beaten tuition-tax credits in court. The Institute for Justice, however, is confident that vouchers could pass constitutional muster in Nevada. Afterall, vouchers are aid to parents and students, not to churches.

The governor’s voucher proposal is a workable solution that promises to improve student achievement by empowering parents with real choices.

Read more about parental choice programs at the Foundation for Education Choice.

Teacher seniority rules have to go

I had the opportunity to discuss two dozen education-reform proposals at a meeting of the Legislative Committee on Education. One in particular dealt with the issue of teacher seniority. I suggested prohibiting the use of teacher seniority in determining teacher termination, job transfers and promotions – meaning: no special preferences given to teachers just because they've taught for more years than other teachers.

Nevada, like so many other states, practices “last hired, first fired,” which protects senior teachers over younger, less experienced and cheaper teachers. It is true that teachers continue to improve their skills over the first three to five years, but seniority also protects some older, more expensive but bad teachers from being fired.

Worse still, senior teachers are more likely to teach in higher-income schools. This means lower-income kids are more likely to be exposed to inexperienced teachers. Ironically, because of this system, low-income kids not only have the least experienced teachers, but they end up subsidizing the costs of higher-priced teachers at the schools for the wealthier kids (individual schools are "charged" for the average salary rather than the actual salary). Progressive public education, indeed.

Arizona banned the use of seniority in determining teacher terminations this month. But Nevada’s Legislative Committee on Education didn’t want to discuss the issue further. Meanwhile, civil rights groups in California successfully litigated a case where the judge ruled that firing teachers based on seniority violated low-income children’s right to a public education.

Seniority rules in California naturally resulted in younger teachers being fired instead of the older teachers. Consistent with the data from around the country, the younger teachers were far more likely to teach at the low-income schools. In L.A., a third of the teachers at the low-income schools had been dismissed. At the wealthier schools? Hardly a dent.

Maybe the Nevada ACLU will be brave enough to bring a suit against the Nevada Department of Education?

We shouldn’t wait around. If the Nevada Legislature truly cares about improving the quality of education – especially for low-income kids – it will eliminate the concept of teacher seniority.

Charter schools work

Dr. Paul Peterson of Harvard University and the Hoover Institution has a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal that you should read. Here are some select quotes from the article. Peterson on creative destruction in education:

Twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter saw it another way. In his view, it is in the nature of markets that middling firms are "creatively" destroyed by good firms, which are themselves eventually eliminated by still better competitors. Ignoring this basic economic principle, critics of charter schools and other forms of school choice see no hope for competition in education. These critics ask us to leave public schools alone apart from creating voluntary national standards—speed zones without traffic tickets, as it were.

Yet few doubt that public schools today are troubled, as the president noted on Saturday. What the president left out is that the performance of American high school students has hardly budged over the past 40 years, while the per-pupil cost of operating the schools they attend has increased threefold in real dollar terms. If school districts were firms operating in the market place, many would quickly fall victim to Schumpeter's law of creative destruction.

Peterson on charter schools:

To identify the effects of a charter education, a wide variety of studies have been conducted. The best studies are randomized experiments, the gold standard in both medical and educational research. Stanford University's Caroline Hoxby and Harvard University's Thomas Kane have conducted randomized experiments that compare students who win a charter lottery with those who applied but were not given a seat. Winners and losers can be assumed to be equally motivated because they both tried to go to a charter school. Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Kane have found that lottery winners subsequently scored considerably higher on math and reading tests than did applicants who remained in district schools.

In another good study, the RAND Corp. found that charter high school graduation rates and college attendance rates were better than regular district school rates by 15 percentage points and eight percentage points respectively.

Instead of taking seriously these high quality studies, charter critics rely heavily on a report released in 2004 by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is hardly a disinterested investigator, and its report makes inappropriate comparisons and pays insufficient attention to the fact that charters are serving an educationally deprived segment of the population. Others base their criticism of charters on a report from an ongoing study by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo), which found that there are more weak charter schools than strong ones. Though this report is superior to AFT's study, its results are dominated by a large number of students who are in their first year at a charter school and a large number of charter schools that are in their first year of operation.

Stand and deliver

Jaime Escalante, the public school teacher immortalized in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, died last week at the age of 79.

Andrew Coulson at the Cato Institute wrote an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about Escalante's life and struggles as a teacher. The highlight of the article is the realization that the status quo stands in the way of great teachers like Jaime Escalante, effectively preventing them from teaching students.

Coulson writes:

With the help of a few dedicated colleagues at Garfield High in East Los Angeles, he shattered the myth that poor inner-city kids couldn't handle advanced math. At the peak of its success, Garfield produced more students who passed Advanced Placement calculus than Beverly Hills High.

In any other field, his methods would have been widely copied. Instead, Escalante's success was resented. And while the teachers union contract limited class sizes to 35, Escalante could not bring himself to turn students away, packing 50 or more into a room and still helping them to excel. This weakened the union's bargaining position, so it complained.

By 1990, Escalante was stripped of his chairmanship of the math department he'd painstakingly built up over a decade. Exasperated, he left in 1991, eventually returning to his native Bolivia. Garfield's math program went into a decline from which it has never recovered. The best tribute America can offer Jaime Escalante is to understand why our education system destroyed rather than amplified his success — and then fix it.

Read the full article, "Escalante Stood and Delivered," at the Cato Institute's website. Reason Magazine has another article that highlights Escalante's struggles with the education establishment. Read "Stand and Deliver Revisited" at Reason.com

Reason saves education

Reason TV hits the road with Drew Carey to figure out what to do about Cleveland's poor-quality schools. Reason recommends school decentralization - something we've called empowerment schools here in Nevada. Under this model, school funds are given to a school once a parent chooses that school, and principals have greater autonomy over how to use those funds while teachers have more control over the classroom. The result is less micromanagement from the central office, less waste, more efficiency, happier teachers and better schools.

I made the same recommendations in a series of articles on empowerment schools.

Florida dramatically improved reading for African American students

*Florida's African American students tie the statewide average of all Nevada students.

Learn more about Florida's reform efforts in my report, "Failure Is No Longer an Option"

We could use more charter schools

Nevada needs more charter schools (privately operated public schools), whether they are brick-and-mortar schools or cyberschools. Beyond improving student achievement, graduation rates, and the performance of traditional public schools (through competition), charter schools are much cheaper to operate.

Unfortunately, Nevada is behind the curve. Arizona has 1,750 percent more charter schools than Nevada with a population that is just 149 percent larger. Utah, a state with a similar population size, has nearly three times as many charter schools. "Progressive" California leads the nation, with over 800 charter schools - many of which have set up in California's poorest neighborhoods, providing some greatly needed educational choice.

So how can charters lower education costs in Nevada? Nevada has the nation's third-highest level of capital expenditures and debt expenditures per pupil. Yes, we have been the fastest growing state in the nation, but Arizona has been right behind us, and Arizona's capital expenditures and debt are far lower than Nevada's.


*Source: U.S. Census Bureau
It's a good bet that charter schools play a big role in keeping costs down in Arizona. You see, charter schools don't recieve bond money to build their schools. They have to take the per-pupil funds they recieve and hire staff, buy supplies and build their schools.

For example, a charter school in Clark County will recieve about $6,386 per pupil, while the Clark County School District claims its operating budget is $7,617 per pupil. This operating budget doesn't even include capital expenditures and debt repayment, which drive Clark County's expenditures to over $10,000 per pupil.

A rapid expansion of Nevada's charter-school program could literally save us hundreds of millions of dollars in the future. In fact, the difference between Arizona's and Nevada's capital expenditures in FY 2006 (the latest data available) comes to over $300 million (and that is after adjusting for Nevada's lower student population).

Of course, for this to happen, Nevada would have to repeal some nasty anti-charter-school rules ...

Teacher pay in Nevada

Being a teacher isn't a half-bad job, I should know, I was a history teacher for a short time. The only problem is that you get paid based on how long you've worked, not how good you are at teaching.

Never the less, the average teacher in Nevada makes $53,547.

Don't forget about benefits

Retirement: $10,977
Workers comp: $403
Unemployment insurance: $43
Medicare: $712
Medical Insurance $6,707
Other: $286

That brings the grand total (salary plus benefits) to $72,675 for the average teacher.

NSHE struggles to graduate students

Higher education in Nevada does not do a good job graduating students.

But isn’t graduating on time the student’s responsibility? Yes and no. The problem is that NSHE is trying to sell itself as an institution of learning that is not only in high demand, but adds value to Nevada's economy. Because of this, NSHE argues that they need more money.

But why should the state give more support when it is already hard enough to determine the value of an undergraduate degree today? Furthermore, what is the value of the majority of students attending college but not graduating? Until this is resolved, we can’t say with any certainty that NSHE adds more value than it consumes in resources.

Here is a list of the 2008 graduation, retention and transfer-out rates for Nevada’s public colleges and universities. The data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education. In the data provided, we are only looking at the graduation, retention and transfer-out rates of first-time, full-time students.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas
UNLV retains 76 percent of its full-time students after the first year, yet just 41 percent of full-time students will graduate after six years of college.

*UNLV graduation rates

*UNLV graduation rates by race

University of Nevada, Reno
UNR retains 75 percent of its full-time students after the first year yet graduates just 48 percent of its students within six years.

*UNR graduation rates

UNR graduation rates by race

College of Southern Nevada:

Retention rate: Unknown
Graduation rate: 4 percent
Transfer-out rate: 37 percent

Great Basin College

Retention rate: 57 percent
Graduation rate: 20 percent
Transfer-out rate: Unknown

Nevada State College
Retention rate: 54 percent
Graduation rate: 13 percent
Transfer-out rate: Unknown

Truckee Meadows

Retention rate: 61 percent
Graduation rate: 11 percent
Transfer-out rate: 18 percent

Western Nevada

Retention rate: Unknown
Graduation rate: 20 percent
Transfer-out rate: 25 percent

Debunking voucher myths

During the 2010 special session, Nevada’s lawmakers were subjected to a few half-truths about vouchers from school superintendents and the ACLU of Nevada. Vouchers are tax dollars that are given to parents so they can send their child to any public or private school they choose. School funding is thus directed by parents rather than central bureaucrats.

Vouchers do not result in discrimination as the ACLU claimed. In fact, private schools are better at serving low-income students, teaching mentally handicapped students, increasing racial diversity, and teaching tolerance and civility:

• One and a half percent of special-needs students are placed in private schools by public schools that cannot meet their needs.
  
• Public schools do not have to teach every child. Public schools expel 1 percent of their students every year and send another 0.6 percent to special schools for troubled kids.
  
• Seven respected academic studies have found that vouchers increase racial diversity.
  
• Thirty-three studies found that private-school students possessed more “democratic values” like tolerance, civic knowledge, political participation and volunteerism.

The ACLU misrepresented vouchers by claiming that the program would only help the wealthy because the voucher is not enough to cover private-school tuition. This is intellectually equivalent to claiming food stamps don’t help the poor because they don’t cover the full cost of food. It is true that vouchers are set below the cost of traditional public schools, but most voucher programs require that private schools do not charge additional tuition. Nevertheless, in 2004 the U.S. Department of Education actually estimated that the average private school cost $3,300 less per pupil than traditional public schools. Furthermore, 15 states plus Washington, D.C., offer voucher/tax-credit programs that are designed specifically to serve special-needs students, foster-care students, autistic students and low-income students.

• The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program offers scholarships of up to $7,500, while D.C. public schools spend over $20,000 per pupil. Only low-income students are given access to the vouchers.
  
• Florida and Arizona offer special-needs scholarships. The average scholarship in Florida is just $6,500 — $3,000 less than the cost of a public school. The average scholarship in Arizona is $8,100 — roughly the same amount a public school receives per pupil.
  
• Florida and Arizona also offer low-income scholarships financed through corporate and personal donations. The scholarships average just $3,900 and $2,500, respectively — far less than what the public schools receive.

Furthermore, nine out of 10 random assignment studies have shown that vouchers improve student achievement. Studies also show that vouchers improve graduation rates and improve a student’s chance of attending college. Sixteen out of 17 studies even show that public schools improve when faced with competition from vouchers.

Debunking charter school myths

A new report by the Pioneer Institute highlights several popular myths about charter schools (privately run public schools). Some of these myths state that charter schools drain resources from traditional public schools, that they are more expensive and less effective. Read “Debunking Myths About Charter Public Schools” to learn more about these myths.

Competition is good for public education

Head Start creates no real head start

*The U.S. government has spent about $100 billion on Head Start since 1965. The results could have been duplicated by simply burning $100 billion in cash.


Health and Human Services finally released the report on Head Start, the pre-school program for low-income students. The report shows, as many predicted, that Head Start has no lasting benefits on students' learning abilities.

Dr. Jay P. Greene states,

The study used a gold-standard, random assignment design and had a very large nationally representative sample. This was a well done study (even if it mysteriously took more than 3 years after data collection was complete to release the results).

For students who were randomly assigned to Head Start or not at the age of 4, the researchers collected 19 measures of cognitive impacts at the end of kindergarten and 22 measures when those students finished 1st grade. Of those 41 measures only 1 was significant and positive. The remaining 40 showed no statistically significant difference. The one significant effect was for receptive vocabulary, which showed no significant advantage for Head Start students after kindergarten but somehow re-emerged at the end of 1st grade.

Dr. Greene concludes that "The long and short of it is that the government has a giant and enormously expensive pre-school program that has made basically no difference for the students who participate in it."

Virtual schools

Virtual schools allow greater flexibility for student athletes. Watch this three minute video from Education Next to learn more.

Muy bien Florida

Nevada should copy Florida's education reforms ASAP.

Teach for America

Great teachers matter - Teach for America knows this, and that is why they carefully sort all the data they collect on their teachers. They use the data to recruit and train the next batch of teachers. If the non-profit Teach for America can do this, why can't Nevada?

Read this great article in the Atlantic, "What Makes a Great Teacher?"

Jobs for adults, or education for students?

Public education — where all is supposedly "for the children" — has a dirty secret: Its real organizing principle is jobs for adults.

The Clark County School District employs one adult for every eight students. In Washoe County, it's one adult for every 7.2 students. And don't assume those adults are teachers: Fewer than one of three Clark County School District employees are classroom teachers.

No, district administrators always like to hire ... more administrators. That's one of the reasons why — absent fundamental reform — public education continues putting adults ahead of students

Read my article on empowerment schools here "Financing Entrepreneurial Education: Part III"

The commanding heights...of public education

The Clark County School District also rations school supplies from the central office. Approval for a needed resource to be allocated requires the authorization of up to six different central-office administrators.

In one instance, a district principal sought permission to acquire new computers that had large 22-inch monitors. District regulations, however, prohibited monitors larger than 19 inches. Yet the systems with 22-inch monitors were on sale for less than systems with the 19-inch monitors. Because of the inflexible regulations, the purchase request was initially denied.

In another case, CCSD paid $1.4 million above the lowest bid to remodel a school and an extra $170,000 for landscaping at another school. The central office also rejected a printing job that FedEx Kinkos would have done for $1,800, requiring the school instead to purchase the same service from the central office for $4,000. Although the school district is not required by law to accept the lowest bid, these practices add up and leave fewer dollars for the classroom.

When a central office directs the use of scarce resources, no one knows the real value of the resources being provided. What would benefit a school most — an assistant principal, a new English teacher or new computers for every classroom? Only the local school, intimately aware of the needs of its students, is in the best position to answer that question.

Read my full article, Financing entrepreneurial education: Part II, here.

More charter school myths

The Los Angeles Times writes an editorial attacking charter schools, and Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute takes the paper to task:

“With print media players disappearing faster than mosasaurs in the late Cretaceous, one would expect the last papers standing to be extra careful with their fact checking for fear of being blogged into extinction. One’s expectations would be mistaken.

Yesterday’s LA Times editorial on charter schools combined errors of fact and omission with a misrepresentation of the economic research on public school spending. First, the Times claims that KIPP charter public schools spend “significantly more per student than the public school system.” Not so, says the KIPP website. But why rely on KIPP’s testimony, when we can look at the raw data? LA’s KIPP Academy of Opportunity, for instance, spent just over $3 million in 2007-08, for 345 students, for a total per pupil expenditure of $8,917. The most recent Dept. of Ed. data for LAUSD(2006-07) put that district’s comparable figure at $13,481 (which, as Cato’s Adam Schaeffer will show in a forthcoming paper, is far below what it currently spends). Nationwide, the median school district spends 24 percent more than the median charter school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.”

Read the rest of his blog post at the Cato Institute.