Cash for Clunkers at the Department of Education

To turn around the country’s failing public schools, President Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, created an innovative program of School Improvement Grants. The program allowed troubled schools to choose among several models of educational intervention. The mission was noble and the program was lavishly funded.

Now, $7 billion later, the Department of Education has evaluated the results, thanks to a new independent study.

The report is devastating. The School Improvement Grants (SIG) program was a complete failure. There were no academic gains for students. Different schools tried different models, but none of them worked. To quote the report:

Overall, across all grades, we found that implementing any SIG-funded model had no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment. 

Education policy analyst Andy Smarick called the study "devastating to Arne Duncan’s and the Obama administration’s education legacy." It "delivered a crushing verdict," he wrote. "The program failed and failed badly.”

That’s a fair reading of the report. It says the innovative program was a multibillion-dollar flop.

This mess ought to tell us two things, one about new federal programs, the other about our troubled public schools.

Why Don’t We Test Drive Programs First?

Before asking “what next for our kids’ education,” we ought to ask why the stewards of our tax money spent $7 billion without test driving this clunker first. That, alas, is standard procedure for Washington programs. Ambitious programs are seldom tested on a small scale, where they can be monitored, modified and then scaled up or killed off. Instead, the Beltway bureaucrats roll them out from sea to shining sea at enormous cost.

Bad idea. Wherever possible, programs should be tried on a small scale before they are tried on a large one. That is what every sensible business does. Why shouldn’t our government?

The federal government not only rolls out programs nationally, we keep pouring money into them without checking the results, much less demanding accountability from those who plan and execute them. Meanwhile, vested interests build up around each program and lobby to keep it going. If it is not producing results, then they claim that it needs more funding. If, on the other hand, it is succeeding, then they also claim it deserves more funding.

The lobbying effort to sustain these programs is a true public-private partnership. The bureaucrats who run the programs partner with the contractors who profit from them and the politicians who appropriate the dollars. The contractors then fund the politicians. It’s the Washington “Circle of Life.”

That's how the Department of Education wasted $7 billion on a full-scale national program instead of, say, $100-$200 million on carefully monitored, randomized trials. That’s how President Obama and the Einsteins in Congress and the Department of Transportation sunk $3 billion into the national program of car rebates. “Cash for Clunkers” was supposed to jump-start auto sales, especially those of fuel-efficient cars. They tried it everywhere all at once. And it failed everywhere all at once. Independent studies show it wasted about half the taxpayers’ money.

That’s how the Department of Housing and Urban Development built high-rise public housing in the 1960s and 1970s, all at once in every big city, and many small ones. Why wait? Why experiment? The results were catastrophic, and we are still suffering from them. If HUD had simply tried this approach in ten or fifteen cities and evaluated these results, generations of poor people would not have been trapped in another failed Washington experiment.

SIG was another one of these costly, centralized experiments, swaddled in good intentions and taxpayer money. But, like so many other Great Society programs, from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, it fleeced the taxpayers without helping its intended beneficiaries. This time, the victims were the children caught in failing public schools – schools we cannot seem to turnaround, despite the best efforts of education professionals and steadily rising public dollars. That's why there is such intense public demand for alternatives.

After Decades of Failure, It's Time to Move on

It's time to end these centralized education experiments, dreamed up in Washington and inflicted on the country. Allow local schools to try their own experiments. Let them compete. I would even allow them to choose their own school lunches. I know, that’s crazy talk.

Let public education dollars follow the children to schools their parents choose.

To choose intelligently, parents need transparency from the competing institutions, whether they are traditional public schools, charters or private. The teachers' qualifications should be publicly available and so should results on standardized tests.

Once parents have real choices for their children, they will pay close attention to what their friends and neighbors think about different schools. If the markets are large enough, services will spring up to compare schools, just as they compare colleges and everything else we consume.

If parents abandon failing schools, those schools should be given a brief period to turn around. If they cannot recover quickly, they should be allowed to go under. Our concern should always be for the students, not for the schools. Our focus here should be on children’s education, not adult employment.

With transparency and real competition among K-12 schools, parents will choose sensibly.

Give them a chance. End the monopoly. Or at least give it a test drive.

RCP contributor Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he is founding director of PIPES, the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He blogs at ZipDialog.com and can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.