November 27, 2006

Set Up?

With Tennessee Comptroller John Morgan pushing a proposal for the legislature to take over local public schools statewide, and to fund them with a new statewide property tax, tax control activist and blogger Ben Cunningham sent me the text of a Jan 7, 2001, Tennessean article regarding a poll of Tennessean's opinion of various tax reform options, which reported that "when Tennesseans were asked whether they favor a state property tax, 85% said no and just 7% said yes."

"Why would Morgan promote a plan opposed by 85% of Tennesseans?" Cunningham wonders. "Is Morgan setting the stage for an income tax by proposing an alternative which is clearly opposed by a huge majority of Tennesseans?"

Meanwhile, while he's proposing that the state of Tennessee take over control of local public schools statewide, Tennessee Comptroller John Morgan's office also has issued a "Request for Proposals" seeking a contractor to perform an "Assessment of the Effectiveness of Tennessee's Pre-Kindergarten Programs." From the RFP:

The intent of this project is to assess the effectiveness of Tennessee's pre-kindergarten program on student achievement. The assessment shall include analysis of near term effects (kindergarten through second grade) and long term effects (third grade through fifth grade). Effectiveness shall be assessed by analyzing data (including test scores, readiness assessments, curriculum evaluations, or other relevant data sources identified in the applicant's methodology) gathered and maintained by local education agencies and/or the state department of education.

Update: A year ago while I was traveling a lot and had several guest bloggers filling in, Adam Groves posted here about Morgan's proposal for a statewide property tax and state control of local schools.

Update: Kay Brooks predicts that the "Assessment of the Effectiveness of Tennessee's Pre-Kindergarten Programs" will determine that they are effective and worthy of more tax dollars - and notes that the state is partially stacking the deck by excluding private-sector pre-K programs from the assessment. Brooks:

If we're going to spend funds evaluating pre-K for our children shouldn't we be willing to look everything? What's the purpose in looking at only state run classes? Because we don't recognize that public schools are in a race with private options? Because we don't want the state-run programs to look bad compared to the private ones?

Brooks calls the Reason Foundation's May 2006 report on pre-K, titled Assessing Proposals for Preschool And Kindergarten: Essential Information for Parents, Taxpayers And Policymakers, a "must read," and I agree. The authors of that report wrote, "We find strong evidence that widespread adoption of preschool and full-day kindergarten is unlikely to improve student achievement. For nearly 50 years, local, state, and federal governments and diverse private sources have spent billions of dollars funding early education programs. Many early interventions have had meaningful short-term effects on grade-level retention and special education placement. However, the effects of early interventions routinely disappear after children leave the programs."

Don't misunderstand me - I'm all in favor of government assessing the effectiveness of its programs, but this planned "assessment" is flawed from the get-go both for its definition of "long term" effectiveness being through the fifth grade, rather than through 12th grade, and for its failure to compare the effectiveness of government pre-K and private-sector pre-K efforts. The private sector programs may be more effective than the government programs, or less effective. If they are more effective, then the government programs need to be shut down in favor of expanded private sector initiatives. The government, for obvious reasons, has no interest in doing that comparison.

Instead, it will pay for an "independent" study that is rigged from the start to prove the program is "effective" long-term by using a definition of long-term - five years - that sets the bar low enough to virtually guarantee a positive assessment..

Meanwhile, somebody really ought to do a real assessment of pre-K that looks at its impact over not five years of schooling but 12, and compares it to private-sector pre-K. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research is the most obvious candidate in that they - unlike the state bureaucracy and the state public education establishment, have no vested interest in undertaking a biased assessment with a virtually predetermined outcome.