Huckabee on School Choice

Huckabee's position on school choice appears to be the latest hot issue in the debate over whether Huckabee is "conservative" on anything other than moral issues. The anti-Huckabee right has taken to claiming that he "opposes school choice." Yet Huckabee has strong backing from homeschoolers and frequently says he strongly supports a parent's right to choose their child's education. So which is it?

Before I go any farther, a personal interest disclaimer: school choice is the main issue that first got me interested in politics. I am the product of 16 years of Christian education, and I have never been enrolled in a school financed by taxpayers. My parents sacrificed a lot to give us a faith-based education, even while living in a town with extraordinarily high property taxes to finance best-in-state, gold-plated local public schools. So naturally, they complained about paying twice for education, and I started following the school choice issue before I even entered high school. An essay I wrote in college on school choice landed me my first real job, and I've continued to be active on the issue ever since. So this means a lot to me.

On the other hand, my husband is the product of 20+ years of public education, and he feels it served him quite well, while enabling his parents to still retire early even while none of their four children who all have graduate degrees have ever incurred student loans. Today he is a public school teacher, though his main motivation for teaching in public school is that it pays nearly twice as much as private school would. But he's not a member of any teacher's union, and his experience teaching in the brave new world of "Standards of Learning"-focused education (i.e. the focus of teaching is now on getting the maximum number of students to pass a standardized test) has convinced him that's not what he wants for our children.

Clearly, public education serves some people very well, like my husband and his siblings. But it leaves a lot of families in the cold: residents of bad school districts, average students (nowadays) who slide by because they'll pass the test but there aren't any resources dedicated to challenging them to achieve their true potential, and families who believe that faith should be an integral part of the education experience... and numerous other categories.

So what's the solution? "School choice" is the obvious answer, which generically means allowing families to enroll their children in the school of their choice (or homeschooling) with some form of financial assistance to do so. But not all school choice programs are created equal.

Huckabee has been critical of certain voucher programs, which is the main reason his opponents have labeled him "anti-school choice." But consider why he doesn't support these voucher programs:

• Many voucher programs don't cover the full cost of educating a child, but they require participating schools to take the voucher as the only payment. What happens then? Just like hospitals: if the government (or insurance company) mandates you take certain customers and charge them less than your cost, you have to raise the prices for everyone else to recover your loss. That really hurts the middle class families who pay their own way and usually aren't eligible for the vouchers.
  
• Voucher dollars always come with significant government regulations attached. Many private schools, particularly Christian schools, do not want to participate because the voucher program would force them to water down their religious mission, conform their curriculum and hiring requirements to the state schools, and become more like the public schools they're trying to distinguish themselves from in a myriad of ways.
  
• Vouchers are perceived as undermining local public schools, largely because so far they're always enacted in limited districts with abysmal public schools. None of these programs are extensive enough to give every child in this bad district real choice, so they become a "lottery lifeboat" for some fortunate children while leaving the vast majority in horrible schools.
  
• Huckabee doesn't come out and say this, but vouchers have a terrible history in the South. They were used by many Southern states in the 1960s to defy racial integration orders from federal courts. Coming from Arkansas, the word "voucher" has the same kind of taint as "state's rights"--a potentially-good concept that was terribly misused not so long ago.

So what's a person to do who believes in school choice but takes off the rose-colored and sees some serious problems with vouchers? Exactly what Huckabee does: embrace tax credits as a "family-empowering" alternative to vouchers. When well-designed, tax credits can provide families at all income levels with school choice without the government regulations that accompany a check issued out of taxpayer funds.

And guess what? The Cato Institute, the very same free market think tank that slams Huckabee for raising taxes to build roads (because they think everything should be privatized) agrees that tax credits are much preferable over vouchers! One of their education analysts even published a 5-part series of articles on National Review Online a few months ago making this case (I highly recommend reading all of them: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). So, Rush Limbaugh, NRO, and all the rest, are you going to slam the Cato Institute as "liberal" or "in bed with the NEA" for being reticent about vouchers and preferring tax credits?

No, the real answer is this: Huckabee and Cato are wary of vouchers but support school choice, including private schools. These positions are not inherently contradictory. In fact, if you really want robust school choice and minimal government meddling in private schools, tax credits are the only way to go.

More on Bad Education Benchmarks

I heard the saddest story last night. My husband was talking with an old family friend who has been a middle school librarian for ~30 years. She told him that her job has recently become boring, because many of the teachers in her school have stopped doing research projects with the kids because they are so focused on the scores on the standardized reading tests. So the students don't come to the library anymore, and they don't learn how to do research (other than using Google) or write a report.

This tactic pays off - the bored librarian works in one of the only middle schools in the county that didn't "fail" adequate yearly progress this past year. But then, it also has one of the lowest immigrant populations in the county too, so they had an advantage to start with.

Yet this county is considered to have the finest schools in the state, and parents stretch their budgets beyond the limit to pay the mortgages that get their children into these schools, which have long produced very high rates of college attendance, high SAT scores, tons of honors and AP courses, etc. But now, just in the last year or two, they've stopped teaching middle school students how to research and write papers so they can make sure even the slowest, least interested students will pass the standardized exams. Guess what that is likely to do to the SAT scores and college success of county graduates in a few years?

I'm going to have to differ with Huckabee a little bit here. He says the states should set the testing benchmarks, but the more I think about it, the more I question the utility of standardized testing for accountability. Saying that standardized tests are needed to keep educators accountable is a lot like saying standardized restaurant reviews are needed to keep restaurants accountable. True, the health inspector should ensure the food is safe, and restaurant reviews can help people pick a new one to try, but primarily the public holds them accountable by voting with their feet. Maybe the bureaucrats decide the quality of a steak is an important benchmark for a restaurant and a reviewer pans the steak at a particular establishment, but what about people who prefer salad and find their salads to be great? Should the government (whether federal, state or even local) be "failing" restaurants on the basis of non-hygiene criteria set by bureaucrats? Likewise, should the government be "failing" educators who teach students how to write a really good essay without making sure they can define the word "gerund"? Or educators that spend a lot of time making sure students understand and can use the scientific method but their students haven't memorized many random science facts they'll never need to know again?

If you want accountability, make the schools accountable to parents by giving them choices. I agree with Huckabee that private school vouchers may not be the best way to do this. Public school choice plus private school tax credits are much better, because then parents and the public get to choose whether public schools or private schools (or both) are more worthy of educational spending.

Back to School Day

NRO's Campaign Spot has taken notice of K Street Mole and acknowledged that a workplace smoking ban is consistently pro-life, but then suggests that Huckabee's priorities are misplaced, citing a litany of challenges our nation faces right now. Hold it right there. Huckabee was asked whether he would sign nationwide ban on workplace smoking into law if Congress sent one across his desk. This is hardly a pillar of his platform. You will search in vain for any mention of smoking policy in Huckabee's priorities for health care reform.

So let's move on to one of the serious issues Geraghty mentioned: "few feel like our schools are preparing our young people to work in an era of globalization." Perfect issue to address on the first day of school for many students and teachers, including my husband.

Mike Huckabee has more to say about education than any of the other leading candidates.

• Kudos to Giuliani for supporting school choice, but knowing the nation isn't ready for that yet, what can the President do in the near term? (And note to Giuliani and Romney - please put your policies in writing, not just video. I can't even access the longer explanation of Giuliani's education platform because the video feed isn't working.)
  
• Fred Thompson only says the federal government intervenes in state education policymaking too much. Fine, Huckabee agrees. But Thompson says "it is appropriate for the federal government to provide funding and set goals for the state to meet in exchange for that funding" but says nothing about what those goals should be. A key point that needs to be addressed.
  
• Mitt Romney also gets kudos for mentioning school choice and English-only classrooms, but a big jeer for saying anyone in the top quarter of their high school class should get a free ride for state university - a massive tax dollar giveaway. He also supports the testing requirements of No Child Left Behind without addressing any of the problems.
  
• John McCain doesn't even mention education on his issues list. (Honestly, why am I even mentioning this guy?)

Let's talk about what's wrong with No Child Left Behind. Not just the funding issues that Democrats harp on. The testing regime itself is terribly flawed because (1) it is myopically focused on certain subjects, causing education in other important subjects to be neglected, and (2) it sets up the impossible target that 100% of students will be proficient in these subjects by 2014.

Working backwards: 100% proficient? Anyone who has ever taught at the pre-college level knows this is impossible. You can lead students to water but you can't make them drink. There will always be some students who simply don't care and won't do any work, no matter how easy the teacher makes the subject or how much he or she tries to motivate them. The only way you get these students to pass a standardized exam is to take it for them. (The extreme focus on passage rates for end-of-year exams also strips teachers of time for creativity, part of the reason it is so hard to motivate the students.) And while teachers do cartwheels to try to prod and push recalcitrant learners into minimal proficiency, all the kids who really do want to learn get - you guessed it - left behind (in the sense that they get little attention and don't reach their potential).

Moreover, NCLB labels a school system as "failing" even if test scores are increasing overall, if some demographic groups do not improve as much as others. You end up with ridiculous results, like high schools listed among Newsweek's 100 best schools in the nation (on the basis of proportion of students taking AP and IB courses) that fail to make "adequate yearly progress" under NCLB. Talk about an incentive to hold back the bright students!

As for the myopic focus on reading and math: yes, reading is fundamental to everything else. But with so much pressure on grade schools to achieve universal proficiency in just these two subjects, other subjects are being jettisoned. My husband, who went to public school not so terribly long ago in the same system where he now teaches science, finds that students are now less prepared for high school science, and concern over passage rates for statewide tests (implemented after he graduated) has led some area high schools to drop their science fairs so they have more time to drill the standardized curriculum. In the NCLB era students are also spending less time learning about our government, an essential element of becoming a good citizen. And as Huckabee points out, many students are losing education in the creative subjects altogether.

Our students are learning how to take tests, but that is not a fundamental skill for competing in the global economy. Too many students are coming out of high school and college now with no ability to think, to communicate clearly, or to be creative. Huckabee understands the real reason we're falling behind other first world countries (where, incidentally, secondary students score higher on standardized tests because the students with less academic aptitude have already been culled out of the testing pool and placed in vocational education that can actually interest and benefit them, not because these countries are better at creating Lake Woebegone): "Our future economy depends on a creative generation," he says. NCLB needs a radical overhaul. "While there is value in the 'No Child Left Behind' law's effort to set high national standards, states must be allowed to develop their own benchmarks," Huckabee notes, unlike the other Republican front-runners who don't seem to see any problem with the current federal benchmarks.