Marcus Winters for Economic Policies for the 21st Century: If charter schools systematically pushed out their lowest-performing students to boost test-score rankings, one would expect those students to be more likely to exit charters than traditional public schools. Yet analysis of enrollment and test-score data from New York City and Denver, as well as from an anonymous urban school district in the Midwest, found that low-performing students are just as likely to exit traditional public schools as they are to exit charters.
Empirical research from Denver and New York City also finds that students with disabilities are more likely to remain in charters than in traditional public schools. In Denver, four years after entry into kindergarten, 65 percent of students with disabilities remain in charters, compared with 37 percent of such students in traditional public schools. In New York City, 74 percent of students with disabilities who originally enrolled in charters remained, compared with 69 percent of such students in traditional public schools …
These empirical findings do not disprove the possibility that certain charters have inappropriately pressured students to leave. But to the extent that such behavior exists, the enrollment data confirm that it is the exception, not the norm: Charters retain difficult-to-educate students at rates comparable with, or better than, those of traditional public schools.
If difficult-to-educate students are less likely to exit charters than traditional public schools, why do charters enroll smaller percentages of such students? The answer is straightforward: Difficult-to-educate students are significantly less likely to apply to charters than other students. Efforts to boost charter-enrollment rates among the former should thus focus on encouraging more applications to charter schools.
Tuition growth is leveling off
Robert Kelchen for the Brookings Institution: As student-loan debt has exceeded $1.2 trillion and many colleges continue to raise tuition faster than inflation, students, their families and policymakers have scrutinized how much money students pay to attend college. A key metric of affordability is the net price of attendance, defined as the total cost of attendance (tuition, fees, books, supplies and a living allowance) minus all grants and scholarships received by students with federal financial aid …
The net price trends in the most recent year of data (2012-13 to 2013-14) look pretty good for students and their families. The median net price for all students with financial aid increased by just 0.1 percent at two-year public colleges, 1.4 percent at four-year public colleges and 1.7 percent at four-year private nonprofit colleges — roughly in line with inflation. The lowest-income students saw lower net prices in 2013-14 at two-year public colleges (-1.4 percent) and four-year private nonprofit colleges (-0.5 percent) and a small 0.4 percent increase at four-year public colleges.
Even with one year of good news, net prices are up about 15 percent at four-year colleges and 10 percent at two-year colleges since the beginning of the recession, with a slightly larger percentage increase for lower-income students. Much of this increase in net prices, particularly for lowest-income students, occurred during the 2011-12 academic year.
Libertarianism on PBS
David Boaz for the Cato Institute: Libertarian fans of “Downton Abbey” got a special treat when Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, let loose with an excoriation of statism right out of John Stuart Mill. Debating whether the village hospital should be merged into the larger regional hospital in 1925, Lady Grantham exclaimed:
For years I’ve watched governments take control of our lives, and their argument is always the same — fewer costs, greater efficiency. But the result is the same, too. Less control by the people, more control by the state until the individual’s own wishes count for nothing. That is what I consider my duty to resist …
The point of a so-called great family is to protect our freedoms. That is why the barons made King John sign the Magna Carta.
Rosamund: Mama, we’re not living in 1215. And the strength of great families like ours is going, that’s just fact.
Countess: Your great-grandchildren won’t thank you when the state is all-powerful because we didn’t fight.
Of course, the Dowager Countess is not a libertarian, nor a liberal, but a reactionary aristocrat. Still, libertarian ideas crop up wherever people feel their liberties are being infringed. And such ideas were being enunciated by genuine liberals in that era.
An editorial in The Nation in 1900, thought to have been written by its founding editor E. L. Godkin, mourned the decline of liberty and liberalism … Liberalism was giving way, he said, to the forces of socialism and imperialism; and “international struggles on a terrific scale” were the likely result, struggles that indeed had already begun by 1925 and would only get worse in the lives of Lady Grantham’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
