We The People of Longview, TX

The price of public universities is underwritten by subsidies received through direct government appropriations, but information on the distribution of those subsidies across schools is usually buried in obscure reports. A new study by Mark Schneider, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Jorge Klor de Alva, president of the Nexus Research and Policy Center, approximates the taxpayer subsidy for any given school, correlating this amount with the selectivity of the institution and its classification as public, for-profit private or not-for-profit private. Finally, the study compares these subsidy amounts, what might be called public cost, with the expected return in higher income taxes paid by diploma-earning students. This two-step approach allows for comprehensive analysis of the types of schools that create a net financial benefit or loss to the public.

Continue reading from NCPA…

It’s a story we’ve heard before. Where President Obama can’t legislate, he will use executive branch action to accomplish his agenda. In the past, he has applied that tactic in the auto bailout, EPA regulations, and Obamacare. Now he’s using this approach to remake No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—the most significant K-12 education law—by granting states conditional waivers from the onerous provisions of NCLB in exchange for adopting a yet-to-be-specified set of executive branch education policy priorities. The news came in an announcement from the Department of Education: Continue reading from The Heritage

While students in many developed nations have been learning more and more over time, American 15-year-olds are stuck in the middle of the pack in many fundamental areas, including reading and math.

This is according to the recently released Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment scores that measures educational achievement in 65 countries.  This is despite the fact that the United States is near the top in education spending, says Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

• With the exception of Switzerland, the United States spends the most in the world on education, an average of $91,700 per student in the nine years between the ages of six and 15.
• But the results do not correlate: For instance, we spend one-third more per student than Finland, which consistently ranks near the top in science, reading and math.

Naturally, the OECD’s report has sparked calls for more spending.  But throwing more money at poorly performing schools has not moved the needle on performance, says de Rugy. Continue reading from NCPA.

The federal government has ballooned into the all-powerful education behemoth that the GOP long feared, says Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University.

The trouble started with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which decreed that all students, in all states, must be proficient on state tests in reading and mathematics by 2014 — a goal no state is even close to meeting.  President Obama’s Race to the Top fund extends federal control well beyond NCLB.  Last year, as part of the economic stimulus plan, Congress gave the Department of Education an unprecedented $5 billion in discretionary funds to promote educational reform.  The Obama administration used the money to promote unproven strategies.

• To qualify for Race to the Top money, states and districts were expected to evaluate their teachers by using student test scores, even though research consistently warns of the flaws of this method.
• Similarly, the Obama administration is pressing states and districts to replace low-performing regular public schools with privately managed charter schools, even though research demonstrates that charters don’t, on average, get better academic results than regular public schools.  Continue reading from NCPA.