Extra Ordinary Ideas

Damage Control 101

I recently attended my first White House briefing along with my education policy colleague, Casey Lartigue. The subject of the briefing was the administration’s implementation of the new No Child Left Behind Act, dubbed NCLB (“Nicklebee”) by DC wonks for short.

A White House briefing is an invitation only, handbag-search required, high-security event inside either the White House itself or the Old Executive Office Building next door. The OEOB is where all the spillover staff belonging to the administration’s inner circle is housed. The building is connected to the White House by an underground tunnel, and is full of people who are amusingly desperate to secure office space on the other side.

Casey and I arrive half an hour early at the OEOB with two forms of ID and pass through two layers of security. We’re directed to one of the small auditoriums several floors up. When we get there, we see representatives from most of the important school choice organizations with offices in town. Christina Culver from Children First America and Krista Kafer of the Heritage Foundation are there. Trent Barton, who runs the education task force for of the American Legislative Exchange Counsel says hello. We spot Maureen Blum, recently with IJ, in the back of the room. We understand she is now a consultant, and is doing direct lobbying for a school choice pressure group in New York.

We notice Virginia Walden-Ford sitting at the front of the room and decide to join her. She is a wonderful lady, and a tireless local advocate for school choice here in DC. Her parent group - called DC Parents for School Choice - has been working closely with Casey in his efforts to raise public awareness about the need for school choice in the nation’s capital.

Members of the administration come in right on time, and we all sit down to hear what they have to say. Nina Rees, new Deputy Under Secretary of the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, speaks first. It’s loosely true what they say about titles in Washington: the longer they are, the less important the title-holder. But this isn’t true of Nina. Still in her (early?) thirties, she previously advised Vice President Cheney directly on education issues, and is widely considered an up-and-comer. And the Office’s budget – Washington’s measure of status – is huge.

She thanks us all for our efforts to push for school choice around the country, and says she sees choice reform as the core mission of the new office. She specifically mentions the outstanding work that the Cato Institute has been doing on the issue! Casey and I sit up a little bit in our chairs. She doesn’t mention any other organization by name.

Then Education Secretary Rod Paige gets up to speak. He touches on some difficult issues with respect to NCLB. It was a political compromise, he said, and that is why private school choice is not in the law. He focuses on the public school choice aspect of the legislation, which in theory requires states accepting federal funds to provide exit options to kids trapped in failing schools.

Secretary Paige then says that he knows that real choice – private school choice – is a necessary part of the solution to the problem of failing public schools. “Without choice, real reform is impossible,” he says, “The difficulty is mustering up the political will to do it.” He urges us – the school choice advocates – to keep the faith and to continue to advocate for choice, especially at the state level.

Now Casey and I believe choice reform should occur at the state level anyway, so we don’t have an argument with that approach. But what is interesting about the briefing is how apologetic the administration appears over the shortcomings of NCLB.

Not placated by our praise, I ask the tough question during Q&A. Isn’t NCLB rendered toothless, I said, because states can simply claim that no space is available at non-failing schools? After all, the media is full of reports like the one in the Chicago Tribune: 125,000 kids in Chicago attend failing schools, but the non-failing schools selected by the district to take them only had “room” for 3,000.

That’s been a problem, administration officials agree, but it’s being worked on. They emphasize the need to move at a speed that lumbering public school bureaucracies can reasonably be expected to match.

The purpose of the briefing, I realize as I exit, is damage control. The administration is asking us, writers and speakers with ideological rather than political allegiances, not to give them a hard time about the shortcomings of NCLB. To leave them with political capital, they imply, to fight the next battle.

But I am even more convinced than I was that it is not a commentator's function to support the administration’s efforts where those efforts fall short. Its members get enough free media to explain their miscalculations and political defeats. It’s our job to hold the administration to higher standards, and to discipline them when they back down on their few promises to America that actually involve more freedom, rather than less.

The Last Commute

Charlotte offers a new perspective on eminent domain. Who knew this was what city planners meant by mass transit?

At least IJ has some prior experience with the client base.

Fire and Ice

SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

- Robert Frost

(From Harper’s Magazine, December 1920.)

Requiem For Wit

As you’ve likely heard, The West Wing is losing its creator and chief writer this spring. This show is undoubtedly the cleverest thing on television, and for me the writing has more than made up for the politics.

I’ll be surprised if the show is able to maintain its fearsomely high quality in coming seasons without the talents of Aaron Sorkin. As NYT columnist Alessandra Stanley observes, it takes fantastic writing to get the nation’s lawyers and economists to wait years for Josh and Donna to get together.

Blogorama IV

Wanna talk in real space? Drop by the fourth occasional Blogorama on Kolorama at the Rendezvous Lounge, beginning at 7pm on May 22nd.

Moving Up

The editors of Reason Magazine have displayed prodigiously good judgment by hiring the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez as Assistant Editor. Drop by and congratulate him on this promising early move in what will no doubt be an extraordinary intellectual career.

Easily Solved?

Last week Glenn Sacks and Phillip Cook published the most recent of a growing number of panicky columns about the "mystery" of the alleged gross decline in men’s academic performance. Titled “Mysterious decline – Where Are All The Men On Campus?” the article cites such terrifying statistics as “Men earn only 43% of college degrees” as proof that women as a group are sailing ahead of men in terms of academic accomplishment.

“We have thrown the gender switch,” AEI scholar Christina Hoff Summers warns, “What does it mean in the long run that we have females who are significantly more literate, significantly more educated than their male counterparts?” The article rattles on feverishly about the “loss in national productivity that this trend [of male ‘decline,’ presumably] portends.”

Thus, according to Cook, Sacks and Sommers:

1) Men are in “decline” academically;
2) The fact that women form more than 50% of college students indicates indisputably that women as a whole are outperforming men; and
3) The above are new and disturbing trends.

But in fact there is a very simple alternative explanation for the recent college gender imbalance that makes it seem pretty benign to anyone not seeking to secure a date in freshman econ. Men are over represented at the extreme ends of most measures of intellectual or academic achievement, both good and bad. Women, by contrast, tend to be over represented near the middle. This is not a new phenomenon; it’s been true as long as empiricists have bothered to notice.

And so it appears to be today. True, the young ladies have been making slightly better high school grades, of late, but boys still outscore girls just a little on most standardized tests. Thus, you can probably graph male and female overall college preparedness about like this:

Women form the higher, narrower bell curve. There are a lot of them in the middle, and fewer on the edges. By contrast, men (represented here by the thicker line) will form more than half of the students who ace everything, and more than half who flunk out of school.

Now imagine drawing a straight vertical line through both bell curves at the 50th percentile mark, and sending every student on the right side of that mark to college. College bound men and women would be even-steven, with 50% of each gender in a degree program. This is true because the men and women represented on this graph are – taken as a whole – equally academically prepared.

Now suppose we hypothesize that more than half of these high school students attend college. Let’s say that 60% do. We can draw a vertical line through these same bell curves at the 40th percentile mark, and send the 60% of students to the right on to college. The graph would then look like this:

As you can see, the result is that more women will be attending college than men, if we send the majority – but not all – of our high school students.

Well, Americans may be doing just that. The National Center for Education Statistics informs us that 62.9% of high school graduates went directly to college in 1999. That number doesn’t account for high school dropouts, but nor does it account for students who go back to school after taking a year or two off.

So why the hysteria over boys suddenly experiencing a “mysterious decline?” Ah yes, crises sell articles, don’t they? Books too!

It seems more likely to me that women simply happen to comprise more than half the group of beneficiaries of a general expansion of college opportunities, due to very long-term demographic factors explained above. I never thought I'd be agreeing with a statement issued by the American Association of University Women, but spokesperson Jacqueline Woods is right on. Those concerned about the percentages of men on college campuses "are playing a zero sum game," she says. "I refuse to play."

Chill Haunts

If you're in DC or just planning to visit, you must check out this excellent new website. Our-dc.com provides great information on real local culture from people who've been there.

The Real World

Despite my shameful, longer-than-planned absence from this page, a surprising number of you continue to trickle through wondering whether I have emerged from the blog coma that has afflicted me these few weeks. Since I know most of you in the actual physical universe, I want you to know what’s been happening:

My brother visited DC and took the Foreign Service exam. I, at least, am confident he kicked its ass. Always more temperamentally suited to making peace than war, he may decide to trade Air Force blues for diplomatic immunity next year. A salutary exchange, as you know if you’ve seen him drive.

I’ve decided to move to Boston in September to pursue a(n additional) graduate degree. I plan to learn empirical analysis and basic economics, and prolong my extended adolescence by wearing jeans every day, dancing regularly, and flirting with interesting law students and graduate philosophy TAs. I’ll continue to work with the Cato Institute from a distance while I am there.

I am 96 footnotes into what is shaping up to be about a 140-footnote paper. Expect posting to continue to be more sparse than usual until I finish.

I'm going to be in Seattle next weekend on business. I’ll be quite busy, but do harass me by cell phone if you want to try get together.

This is an issue blog. Really it is. But it’s only for extra ideas, and I haven’t had many to spare just lately. Don’t worry; I will be back. Until then, go see Julian’s extra ideas. That man never runs short.