Perspective - August 2015

August 2015

OKLAHOMA COUNCIL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Why Federal-Funds Transparency Is a Must

In Case You Missed It Economist Jayson Lusk, who serves as OCPA’s Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow, was recently profiled in The New York Times.

ocpa.us/1CwOkWz

Oklahoma lawmakers often have no input—or, worse yet, are completely unaware—when a state agency expands an existing program or creates a new one using federal funds.

ocpa.us/1GCmBEC

One Oklahoma teacher says some of her colleagues are “slackers who are just phoning it in.”

ocpa.us/1RE6wED

Despite a $611 million “shortfall,” OCPA’s Jonathan Small told The Oklahoman that this year’s state budget is in fact bigger (not smaller) than last year’s.

ocpa.us/1fKfSmp

And if it weren’t for State Question 640, says OCPA president Michael Carnuccio, government spending would have been higher still.

ocpa.us/1Jok6gg

OSU professor Vance Fried says Oklahoma should enact education savings accounts.

ocpa.us/1FgD9T0

The legacy foundation of Milton and Rose Friedman has filed an amicus brief with the Oklahoma Supreme Court urging the justices to uphold the constitutionality of the Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship program.

ocpa.us/1Nka7GK

A longtime Oklahoma educator paints a troubling picture of “daily life as a student in a typical middle or high school classroom in America today.”

ocpa.us/1dJKDaC

An honest leftist admits his desire for spite-driven tax policy.

ocpa.us/1Kil11T

PERSPECTIVE OCPA Staff

OCPA Trustees

Brandon Dutcher ...........................................Editor

Blake Arnold • Oklahoma City

David McLaughlin • Enid

Glenn Ashmore • Oklahoma City

Lew Meibergen • Enid

Robert D. Avery • Pawhuska

Ronald L. Mercer • Bethany

Alex Jones .............................................Art Director

OCPA Researchers

Lee J. Baxter • Lawton

Lloyd Noble II • Tulsa

Michael Carnuccio ...................................................President

Steve W. Beebe • Duncan

Mike O’Neal • Edmond

Brandon Dutcher .................................Senior Vice President

G.T. Blankenship • Oklahoma City

Bill Price • Oklahoma City

Trent England ..........Vice President for Strategic Initiatives

John A. Brock • Tulsa

Patrick T. Rooney • Oklahoma City

Dacia Harris .........................Development Projects Manager

David R. Brown, M.D. • Oklahoma City

Melissa Sandefer • Norman

Rachel Hays .........................................Development Director

Paul A. Cox • Oklahoma City

Thomas Schroedter • Tulsa

Alex Jones ......................................Communications Director

William Flanagan • Claremore

Richard L. Sias • Oklahoma City

Josephine Freede • Oklahoma City

Greg Slavonic • Oklahoma City

Ann Felton Gilliland • Oklahoma City

Charles M. Sublett • Tulsa

John T. Hanes • Oklahoma City

Robert Sullivan • Tulsa

Ralph Harvey • Oklahoma City

Lew Ward • Enid

John A. Henry III • Oklahoma City

William E. Warnock, Jr. • Tulsa

Henry F. Kane • Bartlesville

Dana Weber • Tulsa

Robert Kane • Tulsa

Daryl Woodard • Tulsa

Gene Love • Lawton

Daniel J. Zaloudek • Tulsa

Trey Malone ....................................... Research Assistant Renae Page ................................................Executive Assistant Jonathan Small ................................Executive Vice President Hannah Wallis ............................Communications Associate Kenny Yoder ................................... Operations Associate Teresa Yoder ........................................Director of Operations

Steven J. Anderson, MBA, CPA Research Fellow Tina Dzurisin Research Associate Trent England, J.D. Dr. David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty Adam Luck, MPP Research Fellow Jayson Lusk, Ph.D. Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow Matt Mayer, J.D. Research Fellow J. Scott Moody, M.A. Research Fellow Andrew C. Spiropoulos, J.D. Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow Wendy P. Warcholik, Ph.D. Research Fellow

Tom H. McCasland III • Duncan

Perspective is published monthly by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Inc., an independent public policy organization. OCPA formulates and promotes public policy research and analysis consistent with the principles of free enterprise and limited government. The views expressed in Perspective are those of the author, and should not be construed as representing any official position of OCPA or its trustees, researchers, or employees.

Larry Arnn

John Bolton

William F. Buckley

George W. Bush

Arthur Brooks

Jeb Bush

Dinesh D’Souza

President of the American Enterprise Institute Author of the new book The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America

October 21 • Tulsa Mitch Daniels

Artur Davis

For more information, contact Rachel Hays at 405.602.1667 or rachel@ocpathink.org

Jim DeMint

J. Rufus Fears

Mike Huckabee

Brit Hume

Laura Ingraham Frank Keating Jeane Kirkpatrick

Rich Lowry

Ed Meese

Russell Moore Stephen Moore Peggy Noonan Marvin Olasky

Star Parker

Michael Reagan

Clarence Thomas

Steve Forbes

Paul Ryan

Scott Walker Malcolm Wallop

Tommy Franks

John Fund

Newt Gingrich David Horowitz

Charles Krauthammer

Art Laffer

Sarah Palin

Joe Sobran

Thomas Stafford

John Stossel

Cal Thomas

John Walton

J.C.Watts

Allen West

Walter Williams

Past OCPA speakers are pictured above.

A proposal to prepare the government of Oklahoma for emerging federal budget crises fell short in the 2015 session of the state Legislature. But it wasn’t for lack of trying, or support.

Some details follow. In a summary prepared by Democratic House media relations staffer Mike Ray, provisions in House Bill 1748 were sketched. State agencies would be required “to report each year the amount of federal funds they receive, the programs for which those funds are used, and to rank the federal funds according to the agency’s reliance on that source of money.”

The proposal from state Rep. Tom Newell, R-Seminole, and Sen. Greg Treat, R-Oklahoma City, would have required a description from each agency of actions required by the feds “as a condition of receipt,” as well as actions forbidden as a condition of acceptance, and prohibitions on businesses receiving funds.

This idea, if implemented, would have helped legislators make wiser decisions, and would have increased the awareness of federal funding issues among citizens in general, and the news media in particular.

It falls along the lines of the good old Scout Motto: Be Prepared. Former House Speaker T.W. Shannon first advanced the idea during his tenure in the Legislature. It is driven by federalist sensibilities, and remains popular among conservatives at the Capitol.

Good ideas are not limited to conservatives. In 2013, Ed Allen, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT, AFL-CIO) local union in Oklahoma City, had his own version of this prudential wisdom. More empathetic than most public education leaders to parental aspirations for choice, Allen has participated in some tough personnel decisions within the district, while sticking up for the embattled teacher pool, which faces often shocking discipline challenges in many schools.

4

PERSPECTIVE • August 2015

Allen reflected, “Our entire city is changing before our very eyes with one glaring exception—our school district.”

At an editorial board meeting at The Oklahoman, he said public school leaders would be well advised to “turn down some federal money” rather than sing to the king’s tune in every instance.

Interesting, that.

Under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 and its policy progeny, including No Child Left Behind, public school systems across the land must dance to the piper’s tune in return for federal monies.

Congress established an “accountability and reform framework,” as analyst Brandt Redd put it, one which the states have more or less accepted without demur. As he observes, “In theory, states have the ability to opt out ... of federal funding. In practice, no state is willing to give up approximately 11 percent of their educational budget.”

In case you missed it, take note: States allow the federal “tail” of 11 percent to drive the 89 percent “body” of state and local spending on education. To be sure, House Bill 1748 would have broader implications, but its most efficacious impact could come in schooling.

The Newell-Treat bill passed the Oklahoma Senate 39-1 and the House 69-19.

But Gov. Mary Fallin vetoed it, asserting it had “new and onerous reporting obligations” that would amount to “a step back from the significant gains recently made in streamlining state government.”

In the latest budget appropriations at the Capitol, signed into law by the chief executive, that “streamlined” government grew by $17 million. In what many described as a year of crisis, elected officials decided to spend more, not less. This is a statement of fact, not opinion.

In order to spend more, elected officials relied on “raids” of special funds, a variety of budgeting maneuvers, and, to

Isn’t it best to account, at every step along the way, for the impact of federal money on state policy, and to be prepared with cost accounting and real-time knowledge about the good, the bad, and the ugly of government spending?

be sure, on federal funds. The Newell-Treat proposal was an Oklahoma version of an idea that has advanced in a few states.

Fallin’s veto defied some notable popular headwinds on federal funding. In a public opinion survey conducted early this year, SoonerPoll found 76.7 percent support for the practical idea that states ought to make preparations “in case federal funding … is reduced due to budgetary challenges in Washington, D.C.” That’s not all—87.3 percent of Oklahomans surveyed believe “state government spending of federal dollars should be more transparent.”

The same survey asked whether legislators should “increase, decrease, or maintain the level of influence the federal government has” over state policy.

Roughly two-thirds (64.9 percent) chose “decrease.”

I am somewhat moderate when it comes to federal spending. In some cases, it might be a wise policy choice to accept federal money. But not in every case, including in those instances where it erodes or destroys state and local management of state and local systems. And information is a good way to separate wise use of federal resources from its opposite.

And isn’t discretion the better part of valor? Isn’t it best to account, at every step along the way, for the impact of federal money on state policy, and to be prepared with cost accounting and real-time knowledge about the good, the bad, and the ugly of government spending?

Numbers like those in the SoonerPoll, coming from the distilled reactions of fellow Oklahomans, remind me of the response among Americans of all political stripes during the 1984 presidential campaign. Incumbent Ronald Reagan’s reelection committee broadcast an advertisement that “starred” a bear wandering through a wooded area.

The critter was not acting in a threatening manner—but then again, a big bear doesn’t have to act threatening. After all, it is a big bear. In those days, and in memory still, the bear was an apt symbol for the Soviet Union.

Elite liberal critics derided the ad, which appeared in versions ranging from 30 seconds to a full two minutes.

As was usually the case with the Gipper’s critics, they underestimated the political strength of symbols, the wisdom of Reagan, and the trust voters put in the man’s substance.

The advertisement’s voice-over intoned: “For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear…”

The visual ended with the bear, which had lumbered through the woods alone, coming to stand a few feet away from a lone hunter, an obvious stand-in for our country.

I’m not equating the federal government to the communist bear. I am comparing the unwieldy and seemingly uncontrollable annual deficits and the crushing federal debt burden to … well, something that will destroy us if we are not prepared.

No rhetorical queries on this one: There is a bear.

If we are not prepared to meet the budget bear wisely, vetoes and politics will matter for little in the fiscal Armageddon.

Isn’t it a good idea to be prepared for the federal spending crisis, if there is a spending crisis?

Repeat the question.

Patrick McGuigan Patrick McGuigan (M.A. in history, Oklahoma State University) is the editor of CapitolBeatOK.com and appears weekly as a commentator on NEWS 9, the CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City. He is a member of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame. McGuigan is the editor of seven books on legal policy and the author or co-author of three books, including Ninth Justice: The Fight for Bork.

He also teaches history at Justice Alma Wilson Seeworth Academy, a public charter alternative school in Oklahoma City.

www.ocpathink.org

5

Oklahoma Budget Writers Show Commitment to Education Funding

By Brian Bingman

Education will always be among the greatest priorities for the Oklahoma Senate. We owe it to every child in Oklahoma to continue pressing for higher expectations and a better educational experience. We want every child to reach his or her potential, regardless of socioeconomic status.

In recent years, our budget agreements have reflected a commitment to improve Oklahoma schools. Under last year’s agreement, $105 million in new funding was allocated to schools. Education got the single largest funding increase for any sector of state government, while other agencies had their budgets reduced.

This year, education was held harmless, despite a budget shortfall in excess of $600 million. The four years prior to the shortfall saw steady increases in funding for schools.

A recent report from a liberal think tank suggesting Oklahoma led the nation in education funding cuts has garnered significant attention. This report stretches the truth beyond the breaking point. The report failed to consider the total dollars available to school districts. It excluded local and federal funding. Worse, the report also failed to account for state-level education funding sources such as ad valorem reimbursement funds, motor vehicle taxes, gross production tax funds, and record revenues from state land funds for schools.

In the past five years alone, more than $380 million in revenue has been distributed to state schools from the Commissioners of the Land Office. Not one dollar of it was factored into this

6

PERSPECTIVE • August 2015

report, but $380 million is no small sum.

Additionally, the report refers only to K-12 spending, but Oklahoma’s funding formula also pays for pre-K. A valid comparison would account for all funding sources, the numerous differences in funding formulas among the states, and factors such as per capita income and state economic output.

empowering families with greater freedom of choice in education will also produce improved educational outcomes.

Reforms achieved in recent years have placed Oklahomans back in control. They gave us an opportunity to build a plan for student achievement crafted specifically to the needs of

A recent report from a liberal think tank suggests that Oklahoma led the nation in education funding cuts. This report stretches the truth beyond the breaking point.

Without consideration of these factors, the study doesn’t provide us with an accurate look at education funding in Oklahoma.

We’ve worked hard to increase investment in education in recent years, and we intend to build on these gains and ensure that more money reaches Oklahoma classrooms. But while money is important in education, it isn’t everything: Washington, D.C.’s per-pupil funding exceeds Oklahoma’s by nearly $16,000, but its schools consistently rank near the bottom for student performance.

Higher standards for student achievement are just as critical for classroom success. Providing better tools to evaluate progress and

our schools. Senate Republicans have consistently supported legislation establishing higher academic standards.

We will continue working with local districts to assist them in reaching those benchmarks.

In today’s economy, employers will only expand in states that are up to the task of accommodating them. We must have high standards to broaden our base of educated workers and ensure that our students are college and career ready to meet that challenge. By doing so, we can promote the best policy to strengthen our schools.

Brian Bingman, a Republican from Sapulpa, is president pro tempore of the Oklahoma Senate.

Apples to Onions: Liberal Think Tank’s Report Is Extremely Flawed Last fall, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a liberal think tank, issued a report claiming that most states, including Oklahoma, are funding schools at a lower level than before the recession. Indeed, the CBPP report claimed that Oklahoma led the nation in spending cuts, saying that Oklahoma’s per-student spending (adjusted for inflation) decreased 23.6 percent—or $857 per student—from fiscal year (FY) 2008 to FY 2015.

By choosing FY 2008 as its starting point, CBPP ignores the huge increase in education spending that occurred in most states from 2004 to 2007. But even apart from that, the report is highly misleading. As Oklahoma Senate president pro tempore Brian Bingman correctly put it on page 6, the report “stretches the truth beyond the breaking point.”

The CBPP report acknowledges the following: “The education funding totals presented in this paper reflect the funding distributed through states’ major education funding formulas.

The numbers do not include any local property tax revenue or any other source of local funding.”

Unfortunately, this methodology yields inaccurate results because states finance schools in different ways. It is unlikely there are even two states, much less 50, using the same school funding approach.

For example, all states have some form of local funding. Some states simply redistribute a portion of income tax revenues, sales tax revenues, or other tax revenues back to local schools via state appropriations. Other states

have local revenues provide a base supplemented by state resources.

Kansas, for example, uses local funds which are supplemented through an equalization formula by state funds.

By excluding these local funds, the CBPP methodology understates total funding significantly. CBPP singled out Kansas as a state which has “cut funding by 14.8 percent,” but when one considers the local contributions and other funding sources, it turns out that Kansas actually increased funding by 27.8 percent, or $868 million, during the period cited.

Rather than picking and choosing which expenditures to include, the proper way to identify school expenditures is to use the rules established by an impartial referee: the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). GASB is the official, non-partisan rule maker for governmental accounting. It is the scoring system for financial transactions.

To better understand the flaws in the CBPP report, consider just two examples.

First, the CBPP report excludes Oklahoma House Bill 1017 funds for schools because those funds go directly to schools. In FY 2014 alone this amounted to $594.5 million.

Second, the CBPP report excludes roughly $300 million in pension payments for Oklahoma’s teachers— even though the report includes those payments made in Arkansas for teachers there. The only difference is that the State of Arkansas directs its unfunded liability payments through the employer

contribution of each employee’s paycheck, whereas Oklahoma bypasses the school districts’ payroll and sends the funds in a more direct path to the Oklahoma Teachers Retirement System.

In Arkansas, the employer contribution rate for teacher pay to the Arkansas Teachers Retirement System is 14 percent, with 7.11 percent of that contribution going directly to the unfunded liability. On a payroll of approximately $2.5 billion, Arkansas gets credit (in the CBPP report) for school funding of more than $175 million—while Oklahoma’s contribution of more than $293 million on top of the teachers’ employer contribution of 9.5 percent is ignored.

Under GASB rules, both states should be given credit for their payments as school expenditures.

CBPP is certainly entitled to its “policy priorities”—higher taxes and increased government spending. But this report indeed “stretches the truth beyond the breaking point.”

Steve Anderson Steve Anderson (MBA, University of Central Oklahoma) is an OCPA research fellow. A Certified Public Accountant with more than 30 years of experience in private practice, he is currently a partner at Anderson, Reichert & Anderson LLC. Anderson spent two years as a budget analyst in the Oklahoma Office of State Finance, and most recently served as budget director for the State of Kansas. At one time he held 17 state teaching certifications ranging from mathematics to physics to business.

www.ocpathink.org

7

When Will Climate Scientists Say They Were Wrong?

By Patrick J. Michaels Patrick J. Michaels (Ph.D. in ecological climatology, University of Wisconsin at Madison) is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. Michaels is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He was a research professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia for 30 years. Michaels was a contributing author and is a reviewer with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007

8

PERSPECTIVE • August 2015

Day after day, year after year, the hole that climate scientists have buried themselves in gets deeper and deeper. The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science.

The story is told in a simple graph, the same one that University of Alabama’s John Christy presented to the House Committee on Natural Resources on May 15.

The picture shows the remarkable disconnect between predicted global warming and the real world.

The red line is the five-year running average

to be pretty solid because they come from calibrated instruments.

If you look at data through 1995 the forecast appears to be doing quite well. That’s because the computer models appear to have, at least in essence, captured two periods of slight cooling.

The key word is “appear.” The computer models are tuned to account for big volcanoes that are known to induce temporary cooling in the lower atmosphere.

These would be the 1982 eruption of El Chichon in Mexico, and 1992’s spectacular Mt. Pinatubo, the

The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science. temperature change forecast, beginning in 1979, predicted by the UN’s latest family of climate models, many of which are the handiwork of our own federal science establishment. The forecasts are for the average temperature change in the lower atmosphere, away from the confounding effects of cities, forestry, and agriculture.

The blue circles are the average lower-atmospheric temperature changes from four different analyses of global weather balloon data, and the green squares are the average of the two widely accepted analyses of satellite-sensed temperature. Both of these are thought

biggest natural explosion on earth since Alaska’s Katmai in 1912.

Since Pinatubo, the earth has been pretty quiescent, so that warming from increasing carbon dioxide should proceed unimpeded. Obviously, the spread between forecast and observed temperatures grows pretty much every year, and is now a yawning chasm.

It’s impossible, as a scientist, to look at this graph and not rage at the destruction of science that is being wreaked by the inability of climatologists to look us in the eye and say perhaps the three most important words in life: we were wrong.

www.ocpathink.org

9

Outnumbered Three to One, Arthur Brooks Shines Panel discussions on poverty tend to take a predictable course. Speaker after speaker will deplore the existence of poverty, accuse the wealthy of running off with all the money, and propose more taxes (and—as inevitable as sunrise—more government programs).

That is especially true when you stack the panel with President Barack Obama, leftist columnist E. J. Dionne, and Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, which is what the organizers did for a May 18 discussion at the CatholicEvangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty.

But there was a fourth chair on the stage that day, and it was occupied by

Watch the panel discussion at ocpa.us/1LyqmSd Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute. The audience at Georgetown University may

10

PERSPECTIVE • August 2015

as well have been watching a high-level tennis match as the two sides, ultimately represented by the two presidents, volleyed back and forth. The winner?

Well, listen to these exchanges: President Obama started out with some promise, even admitting that some on the left react to poverty with knee-jerkism and more spending and programs. Of course he soon slid into brief diatribes against “coldhearted free-market capitalist types who are reading Ayn Rand and think everybody is moochers.” What to do? Our President, quite predictably, would like to raise taxes to take money from the undeserving rich and bestow those dollars on the poor. He raised the common liberal analogy of the pie with finite slices where the rich gobble all the cherries and leave nothing for the poor.

Not so, Brooks volleyed back. The rich are not stealing from the poor.

“In fact, two billion people around the world have been lifted out of poverty because of the ideas revolving around free enterprise and free trade . . .”

Brooks offered a three-pronged point of view: that the social safety net is a good thing upon which all should agree, that it should be deployed only for the truly indigent, and that work should be an expected response by the recipients of that taxpayer generosity. In other words, it’s good to help those who really merit that help, but in turn they need to get up and work.

And then came President Obama’s tired old pie analogy with lamentations about income inequality and the need for more taxes. He noted that the “banker’s son” and the “janitor’s son” should be equals. To which Brooks

responded with a cleaver that cut right to the heart of the issue. It’s not about the banker’s son or the janitor’s son, he noted; it’s about the everexpanding entitlement state (can you say Obamacare?) and the intolerable present and future costs that expansion represents. And in fact that is precisely not how you help the truly poor.

“When we don’t make cost-benefit calculations at least at the macro level about public goods, the poor pay,” Brooks said. “If you don’t pay attention to the macro economy and the fiscal stability, you will become insolvent, you will have austerity. And if you have austerity the poor always pay.”

In other words, Mr. President, your way lies Greece.

And then Brooks cut even deeper.

“The real issue? Middle-class entitlements—70 percent of the federal budget.”

To which President Obama said . . . well, he made a joke about the infamous “Obama phones.”

The entire discussion was civil and elevating, but it was clear that despite being outnumbered three to one, Arthur Brooks and his views virtually dominated the discussion.

Mike Brake Mike Brake is a journalist and writer who has recently authored a centennial history of Putnam City Schools. He served as chief writer for Gov. Frank Keating and for then-Lt. Gov. and Congresswoman Mary Fallin, and has also served as an adjunct instructor at OSU-OKC.

How to Make the Government Pay for the Perfect Education for Your Kid Imagine being able to create a tailored, made-to-order education for your child.

Perhaps you know that the private school one neighborhood over has an excellent high school mathematics program. It allows students who don’t attend full time to take individual courses there, so your daughter takes an Algebra II class there three days a week.

In the afternoons, she joins a group of students of various ages who gather as part of a tutoring co-op, and takes Advanced Spanish from one tutor and an economics course from another tutor on alternating days. Two nights a week, she takes an online English literature course offered by the local state university, for which she receives dual enrollment credit. And twice a week and once on the weekend, she participates in a fencing course offered at the local community college.

Your daughter is getting a wellrounded, high-quality education that fits her learning pace and style.

Sounds like a dream come true for K-12 education. But how do you pay for it?

In June, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval signed into law an option that allows parents to craft exactly that style of à la carte education. Nevada became the fifth state to enact education savings accounts, or ESAs, and the first state to make them universally available to all students enrolled in public schools.

Instead of assigning students to the nearest brick-and-mortar public school, regardless of whether it meets their needs or is underperforming, Nevada now enables families to have their child’s share of state education dollars deposited into a parent-controlled

savings account.

Parents can receive anywhere from 90 percent to 100 percent of the state per-pupil allocation deposited into their ESA account, and are then able to access funds via a restricted-use debit card.

This card can be used to pay for any education-related service, product, or provider. That includes private school tuition, individual courses at public schools and public charter schools, private tutors, online learning classes, curricula, textbooks, dual enrollment college courses, and a host of other education-related services and products.

Parents can even roll over unused funds from year to year.

Nevada’s ESA option is revolutionizing education financing.

The Silver State isn’t the first to create ESAs (Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee now have them either fully implemented or recently signed into law), but it is the first to allow any student currently enrolled in a public school (roughly 90 percent of all Nevada students) to have an ESA. ESAs build on the exciting proliferation of school choice now under way across the country. Today, 57 private school choice options operate in 28 states and Washington, D.C. That’s significant momentum, considering the first large-scale school voucher option began in Milwaukee in 1990 and was effectively the only such program for years.

ESAs build on the very worthwhile voucher and scholarship option by enabling families to direct every single dollar in their child’s account to multiple providers and products.

And they include solid accountability

measures, including providing receipts for expenditures to those managing the ESA programs in state agencies.

In Arizona, which pioneered the ESA option four years ago, participants have been thrilled with the option.

“When I discovered ESAs in 2011, I was floored when I found out the choices parents can have,” says Holland Hines, whose son, Elias, has autism.

Amanda and Michael Howard also utilize the ESA option in Arizona. Their son, Nathan, has a mild form of autism which causes learning delays. The Howards have used their ESA to finance a combination of private schooling, home schooling, private tutoring, and speech therapy. “It’s exciting to see all the progress Nathan has made communicatively. He is really making academic progress,” says Amanda.

“Now he likes to learn, he likes school, and he is good at math and social studies. Two years ago we weren’t sure if we would ever have a conversation with him.”

The public funding of education doesn’t require that education be delivered solely through ZIP code assigned government schools. “ESAs put parents in full control,” Hines adds. And that’s very good news for students.

Lindsey M. Burke Lindsey M. Burke researches and writes on federal and state education issues as the Will Skillman Fellow in Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Burke holds a master of teaching degree from the University of Virginia.

Before joining the Heritage Foundation, she taught high school French.

www.ocpathink.org

11

Toddler Technocracy Oklahoma is one of only a tiny handful of states in which the overwhelming majority of four-year-olds attend government-run pre-Kindergarten. Oklahomans ought to ask themselves if that aligns with who they are as a people and what they think is important for young children.

Rounding up toddlers into the nurseries of the all-providing, all-benevolent state is certainly good for public employee unions, but is it good for the state and its children?

Fully 76 percent of Oklahoma’s four-year-olds are in government pre-K. The average U.S. state has only 23 percent.

Only two states (Florida and Vermont) are higher than Oklahoma; only five states send even as many as two-thirds of their four-year-olds to government schools. Nine states don’t have any government pre-K at all—and have somehow managed to stave off a descent into anarchy and barbarism.

Of course this is nothing but good news if you think the purpose of the system is to provide largesse for the special interests that dominate education policymaking. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister recently noted: “We lead the nation in early childhood” education.

Education officials have good cause to brag about this accomplishment; every child roped into government schools puts more money in the pockets of teacher and staff unions by expanding the size of the system.

But children aren’t actually served by the unions’ cash bonanza. A large body of research has consistently found that mass-scale early child education like Oklahoma’s is ineffective. There is no serious case to be made that pre-K programs lead to better outcomes.

Admittedly, some small and highly intensive early childhood programs have shown benefits. In some cases, they cost a ridiculous amount of money per student, and thus are utterly impossible to implement on a large scale (Google “Perry Preschool Project”). In other cases, they’re taken to scale and then fail for various other reasons—including a lack of interest in innovation on the part of tenure-protected teachers (head to Jay P. Greene’s Blog and search for “Reading First”).

12

PERSPECTIVE • August 2015

Greg Forster Greg Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is a senior fellow with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. He is the author of six books, including John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (Crossway Books, 2014). He has written numerous articles in peer-reviewed academic journals as well as in popular publications such as the Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

So maybe the kids don’t come out any better in the end because they go to pre-K. But is there any harm? Maybe parents like this arrangement because it takes the kids off their hands during the day. Why not leave it alone?

Well, for one thing, it’s not clear why parents of fouryear-olds should have free babysitting services provided by hardworking taxpayers. I’d like free babysitting for my nineyear-old; why take my money away from me and hand it to other parents—not to mention the unions? But there are more important problems here, too.

A thing like the expansion of government control over education does not take place in a vacuum. Wherever it happens, it is part of a larger social change that affects much more than education. It changes our assumptions about what is right and wrong, what the public square is and what it is

Much more than a year of schooling is at stake here.

A new view of the proper relationships between human beings is being introduced.

for, and even what it means to be human.

The whole idea of pre-K, like the idea of Kindergarten before it, is (as the Germanic name suggests) a product of the technocratic European social welfare state. In the 19th century, Europeans—and then later, Americans, following them—became enamored with technocracy. Just as the advance of science had led to vast progress in our understanding and control of the natural world, it would also give us similar insight and power over human beings themselves. Government would no longer be content to enforce the rules of justice; it would now glean the latest findings of science and take control of our lives to improve us, just as science had allowed engineers to take control of nature and improve it.

Government control of education was the deepest expression of this revolutionary change. At the same time government began taking control of educational systems, which had previously been responsible to families and churches, it was also expanding the scope of its reach to younger children. Believing he could use his superior scientific understanding to improve the early development of children, Friedrich Froebel created the world’s first Kindergarten in 1837. He theorized that children would develop better if given more opportunity to socialize with peers rather than with their families and others. American admirers of the European technocratic experiment were quick to follow suit; in 1856, the first U.S. Kindergarten was founded

less than an hour’s drive from where I live in Wisconsin.

This technocratic view embodies the assumption that the most basic structures of human life can be manipulated by experts to improve them. Sure, young children have always been raised in families under the direct purview of their parents and the institutions their parents connect with, such as churches. But what do parents know? Our experts can design something better.

Much more than a year of schooling is at stake in this changed conception. A new view of the proper relationships between human beings is being introduced. If the rearing of children is essentially the responsibility of families, we are (at least when it comes to education) all equal with each other, because we all equally come from families. As G. K. Chesterton said, mothers and nurses are not only the guardians of tradition, but of democracy. Whereas if the rearing of children ought to be turned over to experts, those of us who aren’t experts are essentially raw material for our superiors to manipulate.

Equality is not the only thing we stand to lose. In 1943, C.S. Lewis wrote a famous book called The Abolition of Man about how western democracies were losing the concept of a transcendent morality to which all people were equally subject, creating a danger of totalitarianism even in places like England and America. The thing to notice is that it was a book

continued on page 14 >>

Percentage of Four-Year-Olds in Government Pre-K Wyoming Utah South Dakota North Dakota New Hampshire Montana Mississippi* Indiana Idaho Hawaii Minnesota Rhode Island Alaska Missouri Nevada Ohio Delaware Arizona Washington Alabama Oregon Pennsylvania Connecticut Massachusetts Virginia California Kansas North Carolina Tennessee Colorado Michigan Illinois New Mexico New Jersey Kentucky Nebraska Louisiana Maine Maryland Arkansas South Carolina New York Texas Iowa Georgia Wisconsin West Virginia Oklahoma Florida Vermont

0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 1% 2% 3% 4% 4% 4% 6% 7% 8% 9% 10% 12% 14% 14% 18% 18% 21% 21% 22% 22% 26% 27% 27% 29% 30% 30% 32% 35% 36% 38% 39% 44%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

It is no coincidence that the aggressive expansion of power in the hands of government monopoly schools since the 1950s has coincided with a declining social role for families and (by extension) churches and other community groups.

52%

60% 60%

60%

66% 69%

70%

76% 80% 80%

90%

91% 100%

Source: “The State of Preschool 2014,” National Institute for Early Education Research, 2015. *Note: Mississippi does have government Pre-K but it is not included in official counts due to part-time status.

about education. Its argument was that western cultures were being de-moralized because their educational institutions were based on, and were therefore inculcating in the young, technocratic premises.

In the old view, certain basic commitments and structures, like the family, are taken for granted as essential to human nature. They don’t have to make a moral argument to justify themselves; rather, moral argument depends on presupposing their validity. If we know that providing the body nutrients is good, we can call eating bread “good” and eating bricks “bad.” But if we think we’re free to decide for ourselves whether we ought to provide our bodies with nutrients, on what grounds can we make such judgments? The same principle applies to social structures and activities like education. If you don’t begin with something that you take for granted as good, you can never find a basis for establishing anything as good, and morality is impossible.

The ideology of the people who invented Kindergarten was that they could reshape the basic social structure of childhood in order to make it better. But, as Lewis shows, if you treat

14

PERSPECTIVE • August 2015

the basic structures of human life that way, you have actually removed the only basis for calling one thing “better” than another. We might call this basis the “givenness” or “takenfor-grantedness” of the basic structures of human life.

Like I said, this does not happen in a vacuum. It is no coincidence that the aggressive expansion of power in the hands of government monopoly schools since the 1950s has coincided with a declining social role for families and (by extension) churches and other community groups. They’re being pushed out of their role in the formation of children, and hence displaced from the center of culture.

It may seem extreme or alarmist to make such a fuss about something as simple as pre-Kindergarten. And in one sense, I suppose it is. Of course this individual straw will not by itself break the camel’s back of our humanity and liberty. But it is still important to know whether we are in the process of taking straws off the camel’s back or loading more on. It will only hold so many. We may one day wake suddenly to discover that we know exactly how many.

1

2

3

4

@OCPAthink 1. OCPA executive vice president Jonathan Small was a featured speaker at the spring task force meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

2. OCPA’s senior staff attended the 2015 Resource Bank meeting May 6–8 in Bellevue, Washington. Hosted annually by The Heritage Foundation, the event brings together conservative leaders from around the country.

3. OCPA president Michael Carnuccio speaks at the Resource Bank meeting.

4. OCPA executive vice president Jonathan Small was a featured panelist at the Resource Bank meeting.

www.ocpathink.org

15

QUOTE UNQUOTE “The emergence of education savings accounts may mark the beginning of the end for an ossified education-delivery system that has changed little since the 19th century. It begins an important shift of government from a monopoly provider of education into an enabler of education in whatever form or forum it most benefits the child.”

Goldwater Institute attorney Clint Bolick, writing June 15 in The Wall Street Journal

“Zero out fossil fuels by 2050.”

Headline on a recent USA Today column by Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley. He says “we must be intentional and committed to one over-arching goal as a people: a full, complete transition to renewable energy— and an end to our reliance on fossil fuels.”

“Why then do so many schools and parents resist passing a third-grade reading test as a prerequisite for promotion? We must ask ourselves, what is wrong with an educational system that allows students to progress, many with excellent grades, who then have trouble passing the eighth-grade reading level assessment required to get a driver’s license at age sixteen?”

State Rep. Doug Cox (R-Grove)

“The only certain way to keep a lid on government spending is to steadily reduce tax rates.”

Andrew Spiropoulos, OCPA’s Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow

The State of Oklahoma “is not suffering from a drought of revenue. It’s quite the opposite. The state is collecting hundreds of millions of dollars more than in the prior year. The state does not have a revenue problem.”

Fred Morgan, president and CEO of The State Chamber of Oklahoma