Funding Education Opportunity: No Secretary Cardona, student loan forgiveness is not the answer to strengthening public education

Good morning,

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is on a five-week tour through swing states aboard a bus emblazoned with “Fighting for public education” on the side. 

This begs the question, ‘How exactly is the head of a federal agency fighting for public education?’ Even the chancellor of New York City Schools recently emphasized that K-12 education should remain a state issue. “Ultimately, I go back to the fact that education is still within the full purview of the states,” Chancellor David C. Banks told The New York Times.

Accompanied by Becky Pringle, president of the nation’s largest teacher union, the National Education Association (NEA), Secretary Cardona revealed some of his cards at a roundtable in Michigan, “When we talk about fighting for public education, we gotta fight for our educators too,” he said. 

In particular, Cardona emphasized how Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) programs signal a strong federal investment in K-12 education by forgiving eligible teachers’ student loans. To date, the PSLF program has covered approximately $4 billion in debt for nearly 470,000 teachers.

Unfortunately, we can’t say that PSLF for teachers paid off for students. “Despite decades of reform efforts, substantial public investment, and increased staffing levels, outcomes in public schools, especially those serving disadvantaged communities, have barely budged in half a century,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Pondiscio explained.

For instance, Reason Foundation’s K-12 Spending Spotlight shows that, on average, 4th- and 8th-grade students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress failed to make significant progress, if any, between 2003 and 2019 in math and reading.

Given this failure to improve national test scores and student learning, recently exacerbated by pandemic-induced learning loss, Secretary Cardona’s joint bus tour with the NEA’s president, campaigning for federal handouts for teachers, appears tone-deaf at best. There are important differences between fighting for public school students and fighting for teachers’ unions.

To make matters worse, PSLF programs help subsidize a broken system where teachers are rewarded for earning degrees that might not even help them improve student learning.

For instance, at least 46 states pay teachers with master’s degrees more on average than teachers with only bachelor’s degrees. However, Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek’s research showed that teachers’ master’s degrees don’t improve student outcomes. “Perhaps most remarkable is the finding that a master’s degree has no systematic relationship to teacher quality as measured by student outcomes,” Hanushek finds.

Taxpayers should not pay double for degrees that fail to impact student learning. Instead of promoting policies at the state and federal levels that encourage degree inflation, policymakers should reconsider how to make careers in public education more attractive and accessible. 

For one, state policymakers should ensure that increases in education revenues make it into instructional salaries. Teachers in many states have not seen salaries increase even as there have been massive increases in overall education funding. Reason Foundation research showed that total K-12 revenues increased by 25% between 2002 and 2020. However, “inflation-adjusted spending on instructional salaries hardly budged, increasing from $4,920 to $5,145 per student,” an increase of just five percent for teachers.

Additionally, state policymakers should remove unnecessary barriers to the teaching profession, such as requiring teacher licenses. These exams are poor predictors of candidates’ teaching abilities and impose financial barriers to entering the profession.

Reforms like these can help states attract and retain good teachers who can help students recover from learning loss and improve in the years ahead.

From the states

North Carolina policymakers vote to expand private school scholarship funding.

In North Carolina, the state Senate and House passed a supplemental spending plan that includes $248 million for the state’s Opportunity Scholarship, which parents can use to pay for student’s education expenses, such as private school tuition or transportation. This new funding aims to provide scholarships to the 55,000 children who were waitlisted for the program after the General Assembly removed eligibility caps from it. The proposal now goes to Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk, and the Associated Press reported that Senate leader Phil Berger anticipates a veto and “an override vote would be more likely in November.”

What to watch

Arkansas’ Attorney General Tim Griffin announced that private schools participating in the state’s private school choice program are not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. He argued that even though private schools accept state funds, they are not intertwined with the state since private schools existed and operated independently of the state before the scholarships were established. Moreover, he argues the state did not delegate its education authority to private schools since public schools will continue to operate free of charge to students and “under State control,” Griffin announced, according to the Democrat Gazette. Opponents say private schools that accept taxpayer dollars should have to follow the same rules as public schools.

South Carolina’s Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Education Scholarship Trust Fund Program, a targeted education savings account, is unconstitutional. Codified in 2023, the program would have provided eligible recipients (students whose families earned 200% or less of the Federal Poverty Limit) with scholarships valued at $6,000. In a 3-2 ruling, the state Supreme Court stated that the program financially benefits private schools in violation of the South Carolina Constitution.

Recommended reading 

A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?
Jay P. Greene at Education Next

“If [Joshua] Cowen were to critically examine his own argument, he might consider alternatives to his contention that school choice has only spread across the country because billionaires used their wealth to weave a vast conspiracy that has hoodwinked people into ignoring the “overwhelming” evidence against vouchers. He might consider the possibility that other people interpret the evidence differently and also assign different importance to various kinds of outcomes.”

Should Schools Hire More Staff or Pay Teachers More?
Paul Peterson at Education Next

“We are still refining our analysis, but our early results indicate that the recent run-up in non-teacher employment is not as troubling as it seems. In states without a duty-to-bargain law, hiring other school employees yields at least as much gain in math achievement as hiring additional teachers. If districts have a shortage of employees who provide nutritional, medical, social, psychological, and other needed services, then hiring more of them may be beneficial. The need for additional hires may be especially large in states without duty-to-bargain laws.”

The Miseducation of America’s Teachers
Daniel Buck at National Affairs

“Our nation’s teacher-preparation system is broken. Our educators enter the profession woefully unprepared for their jobs. The large majority attend programs at university schools of education, where they read and discuss esoteric academic literature that contains no references to classroom-management techniques, lesson pacing, learning assessments, or other practical knowledge. These schools are boxing academies that don’t teach their students how to duck and weave.”

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Source: https://reason.org/education-newsletter/no-secretary-cardona-student-loan-forgiveness-is-not-the-answer-to-strengthening-public-education/