Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (30 page)

Milwaukee’s Parental Choice program is a widely popular school voucher program that has been proved to increase math scores and raise high school graduation rates.
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The cost of educating one student in Milwaukee public schools is $14,011 every year. The Milwaukee Parental Choice program provides up to $6,501 to eligible students, saving taxpayers’ money and increasing parents’ freedom of choice.
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School vouchers have helped turn tragedy into triumph in New Orleans. Before the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans public schools were some of the worst in the nation. The city had only a 40 percent literacy rate, and 50 percent of black students did not graduate from high school in four years.
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In 2008, Louisiana enacted the Student Scholarship for Educational Excellence Program, which gives low-income students a tuition voucher to attend the school of their choice.
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The New Orleans school district now has an open choice policy that allows students to attend any public school regardless of their geographical location.

The results of Louisiana’s scholarship experiment have been outstanding. On the first day of the voucher program, parents were lining up around the block for a chance to get their child out of failing New Orleans public schools. Sherri Thomas, a parent with two children, who lined up for a chance to receive a voucher, said that “it gives my children, in particular, stability for the first time since Katrina has hit. The school that they are in is not up to standards, academically. And this program, of course, is, and that’s my main reason for being here this morning.”
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The combined district test scores have risen 24 percent since 2005, according to Louisiana Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek.
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The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program was authorized by Congress in 2004. Drafted and championed by House Majority Leader Dick Armey, the legislation allowed students to take some of the dollars that would have been spent on their education at the local school they would have been forced to attend and freed them to choose their own school. The program cost an average of $6,620 per student—one-fourth of the cost that the District pays for K–12 schooling.
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(Constitutional note: While education is one of the areas reserved to the states under Tenth Amendment, the Constitution gives Congress “power to exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever”—that is, to operate like a state or municipal government—within the federal District.
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)

The D.C. scholarship program has also been responsible for increasing student achievement and parental satisfaction.
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The Department of Education found that 91 percent of voucher students graduated, compared to 70 percent of nonvoucher students.
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Parents of students in the voucher program were more likely to describe their child’s new school as “orderly and safe.”
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Students who were in the D.C. Voucher Program when it first started had a nineteen-month advantage in reading compared to their public school counterparts.
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A young student named Mercedes Campbell was one of the 1,700 D.C. voucher students. The voucher money enabled her to escape the failing D.C. public school system to attend Georgetown Visitation Prep. “It’s different, now that I go to Visitation,” said Mercedes. “I approach things differently. It’s like a whole new world, basically.”
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Unfortunately, the program is a perennial target of entrenched union interests. With the election of Barack Obama, these interests asked for a return on the millions of dollars in campaign cash they had dished out to Obama and the Democrats.

Despite the substantial and verified benefits to the children of D.C., President Obama and the Democrat-led Congress obliged, ending the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2009. This was nothing short of tragic for the thousands of children who had no choice but to be “educated” in one of the nation’s worst-performing, most expensive, and most violent school systems. After the Tea Party sweep in 2010, the House of Representatives restored the program, but congressional Democrats will surely kill it again, if given the chance. In a brazen display of servitude to the education unions, President Obama again zeroed out the program in his 2013 budget—even while calling for more education spending.

Elsewhere, states are experimenting with personal education tax credits, which allow taxpayers to subtract educational expenses from the total amount of taxes that they owe, enabling parents to afford a better education for their child. A similar idea: donation education tax credits, which allow individuals or businesses who donate to non-profit scholarship-granting organization to subtract the contribution from the total amount of taxes they owe. These ideas are catching on. Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa provide personal tax credits to families to offset education costs. Meanwhile, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Indiana, Georgia, Rhode Island, and Virginia provide tax credits to those who donate to nonprofit scholarship organizations.
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The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program has been widely successful and popular. The program provides businesses with a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donating to Scholarship Funding Organizations. Students receive scholarships equal to $3,950, or the actual tuition and fees charged by the private school, whichever amount is less. More than 23,000 Florida students attend private schools using these generous scholarships. A study by the Friedman Foundation for School Choice found that 80 percent of parents are “very satisfied” with the academic progress their children are making, compared to 4 percent in their previous public schools.
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Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit has enabled hundreds of thousands of students to escape failing public schools. Over the past ten years, the program has awarded more than 284,000 scholarships to students, worth $335 million. The Keystone State’s EITC program has saved taxpayers millions of dollars and boosted parental satisfaction.
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It’s a huge win for students, parents, taxpayers, and businesses.

THE STUDENT LOAN BUBBLE

B
UT IT’S NOT JUST
K
–12 EDUCATION THAT NEEDS DRASTIC REFORM.
America’s higher education system is in crisis as well. Many colleges aren’t preparing their students for their future careers. The price of college is skyrocketing, but educational quality hasn’t improved. More and more college students are trapped with massive student loan debt once they graduate from expensive schools. And in this economy, many can’t find a job that will enable them to pay off the debt.

The cost of higher education has become outrageous. In the 2011–12 school year, public four-year colleges charged, on average, $8,244 in tuition and fees for in-state students. Out-of-state students spent $12,526 to go to these same schools.
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Taxpayers subsidize a large portion of the tuition costs at public colleges. By comparison, private nonprofit four-year colleges charge, on average, $28,500 per year in tuition and fees.
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Since 1982, the cost of attending college has risen by 439 percent—more than four times the rate of inflation.
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And the price of attending public colleges has risen faster than that of private colleges. In the 2010–11 school year, the average increase in tuition and fees at public four-year colleges was 8.3 percent for in-state students and 5.7 percent for out-of-state students, compared to an average 4.5 percent increase in the tuition and fees for private nonprofit colleges.
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From 2001 to 2011, the average annual increase in the cost of public four-year institutions was 5.6 percent, compared to 2.6 percent for private schools.
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Where does all the money go? A lot of it goes to professors, who, like their counterparts in primary and secondary education, are protected by tenure. Colleges are
supposed
to be about educating students and preparing them for success in their careers, but many professors believe that their research is more important than actually teaching a class. Some even consider teaching to be a burden. A Texas Performance Review found that the average professor at a research university teaches only 1.9 courses per semester. About 22 percent of faculty members do not teach a single class.
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Tenure at the college level has been destructive to higher education. Tenured professors are guaranteed their jobs for life and generally only teach a few hours a week, if they teach at all. Most tenured professors make well over $100,000 a year, often producing research that has little to no direct value to students.
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Most colleges are also suffering from administrative bloat. The number of administrative employees at leading colleges is rapidly growing. Between 1993 and 2007, the number of administrators per 100 students at leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees dedicated to teaching and research grew by only 18 percent.
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Despite the ever-rising cost, college represents a low return on investment. The class of 2010 has faced the highest unemployment rate in recent years, at 9.1 percent.
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A survey found that 56 percent of 2010 graduates have not found a job within a year.
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Another study, conducted by Rutgers University, found that the median salary for students graduating in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000—down from $30,000 in 2006 and 2008.
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Many students who graduated with degrees in biology or English find themselves bartending or waiting tables.

At the college level, too, the problems can be traced back to a centralized approach to education policy. The federal government’s financial aid programs are largely responsible for higher tuition costs. These loans and grants increase demand for college, which translates to higher tuition costs for all. Ironically, some are unable to afford college because government has artificially increased the price by trying to make it possible for more people to attend college.

And you wonder why the Millennial Generation is pissed off and pessimistic about the future?

One of the most common government financial aid programs is Pell Grants. These taxpayer-funded grants are given to low-income students and do not need to be paid back. Approximately 8.3 million college students received an average of $3,865 in Pell Grants during the 2010–11 school year.
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Hillsdale College professor Gary Wolfram found that “private four-year colleges increased listed tuition prices by more than two dollars for each dollar increase in Pell Grants, and public four-year colleges increased their listed tuition by 97 cents for every dollar increase.”
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Only a small handful of colleges in the United States have taken the principled position of not accepting any form of federal funding. The earliest and still the most outspoken of these are Hillsdale College in Michigan and my alma mater, Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Since the enactment of Senator Ted Kennedy’s Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, both Hillsdale and Grove City have said, “No, thanks” to any federal student aid—forced by the government to refuse students who accept federal government loans or grants.

As I recounted earlier, it was Grove City’s refusal to sign a Title IX compliance form that led to the Education Department lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision that led to Senator Kennedy’s legislation mandating still more sweeping federal regulation and top-down control, under the guise of “civil rights.”

“We did not withdraw from these programs out of caprice or just for the sake of independence,” wrote the former president of Grove City, Jonathan Moore. “Nor did we do it because of the compliance costs (although they can be steep). We did it because we want to be free to pursue our mission.”
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Grove City established an entirely private student loan program with PNC Bank.

The tuition costs at Hillsdale and Grove City have risen slower than at other private schools whose students receive federal funding. In the 2011–12 academic year, the cost of tuition and fees at Grove City and Hillsdale rose by only 3.9 percent and 4 percent respectively, compared to the average 4.5 percent rise at private schools
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and the 8.3 percent increase at public colleges.
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The increased cost caused by inflated demand means that many recent college grads have massive student loan debt. A report by the Project on Student Debt concluded that students who graduated in 2010 owed an average of $25,250—up 5 percent from the previous year.
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A study by Moody’s Analytics found that student loan debt has surpassed $750 billion in the United States,
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and the volume of student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt in the U.S.

The stories of young people trapped under student loan debt are heartbreaking. Northeastern University alum Kelli Space, 23, is $200,000 in debt because she took out student loans to finance her sociology degree.
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That means she owes $1,600 per month for the next twenty years of her life. The government easily granted her a student loan without caring about her major, her grades, or how much money she would be able to make. A private lender operating in a free market would have never given out a loan so carelessly. Like so many recent college graduates, Kelli Space had to move in with her parents after she finished college.
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