President Obama has talked a lot and taken some action on education reform.  Careful examination, however, reveals that his sound and fury is virtually all anvil and no hammer, that is, there’s still no effective consequences for failing to reform.

Take the administration’s efforts to expand charter schools, which are public schools less restricted by red tape.  Charter schools have improved education by spurring innovation and by putting competitive pressure on traditional public school.  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has warned, “States that don’t have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application” for $5 billion in discretionary federal funds available to promote better performance and innovation in education.  While that sounds good, the reality is that nothing really bad happens to states that ignore Duncan’s call.

If states don’t enact the charter school measures that Duncan wants, no federal education dollars that states already receive is taken away.  These states may not get the extra money from Duncan’s discretionary pot, but that’s little consequence compared to taking away, let’s say, federal Title I funds for disadvantaged students that states already receive.

Obama also wants to improve teacher quality in high-poverty schools through the expansion of the Teacher Incentive Fund.  The Fund, which is proposed to go from about $100 million in 2009 to nearly $500 million in 2010, would channel federal dollars to support pay-for-performance experiments around the country.  Traditional teacher-pay systems base salaries mainly on years of service rather than merit factors.  While the president’s efforts to change this ineffective system are praiseworthy, there are no teeth in his proposal.

Teacher Incentive Fund dollars are add-ons for school districts.  They offer some financial incentives to change teacher pay systems, but if districts fail to do so then nothing happens to them.  Local union contracts that enshrine the old pay rules and protect incompetent teachers would continue to operate.  Thus, the Fund will likely have no effect on the 160 bad teachers in Los Angeles and 700 in New York who, according to recent shocking revelations, are being paid by their districts to stay out of the classroom and not teach.

Secretary Duncan has also come out in support of the effort by 46 states to craft a common set of national reading and math standards.  Dangling the potential of federal aid, Duncan says, “This is the beginning of a new day for education in our country.”  He’s correct that the current patchwork of state standards and testing systems often vary in their level of difficulty, which results in students in some states seeming to be higher achieving when they aren’t.

Even if states agree to national standards that are rigorous, however, what happens if those states and their public education systems fail to live up to them?  State school accountability systems have been notoriously lax and the federal No Child Left Behind Act issues penalties only to certain schools and districts.  Further, even these penalties are likely to be watered down by the Democrat-controlled Congress as it decides the future of NCLB.

In the marketplace, producers pay an immediate price for producing inferior products through consumer refusal to purchase their goods and services.  Failure to heed this market signal usually results in producers going out of business.  This all-or-nothing prospect is the greatest incentive available for companies to meet the needs and demands of the consuming public.  Because the public education monopoly does not have this incentive – indeed, the stimulus package was crafted mainly to bail out public education and continue the status quo – no immediate systemic change will take place.  Only when all education consumers are given the ability to shun the deficient services provided by the public education system will there be real change.

That’s why broad school-choice systems, such as universal voucher programs available to all parents, are so effective.  Under these programs parents can pull their children out of public schools and send them to private schools, depriving the public schools of the per-pupil funding attached to each child.  By doing so, parents impose real consequences on the government-run schools and the adults that run them.  Until President Obama is willing to man up and implement such real consequences, don’t expect much improvement.

~

Lance T. Izumi is the Koret Senior Fellow and Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute.