Category Archives: education

The 529 Plan Expansion

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Recall that the tax reform enacted last December expanded the usability of 529 Plans to include expenses for K-12 education.  Now some are worried that this will harm State tax collections.  It’s a bogus beef on a number of fronts.

In December, as part of a broad tax overhaul, Congress expanded the accounts to cover up to $10,000 a year in expenses for kindergarten through 12th grade.

State budget officials are now concerned that a large number of parents will use 529 accounts to pay private-school tuition, giving them a new write-off for their state taxes.

School choice—the horror.  How terrible it is that parents have a way to help their children escape failing public schools or simply to transfer them to schools of their choice rather than be faced with the often poor choice of public school or home school.

There’s this bit of disingenuosity, too:

That could result in potentially millions of dollars in lost tax revenue at a time when most states are struggling to close budget deficits.

“I’m worried that families could use these accounts to avoid paying state taxes,” said Illinois state treasurer Mike Frerichs, a Democrat. “This is only going to put a deeper hole in the budget.”

This is especially rich coming from nearly bankrupt Illinois and that State’s Treasurer.  What’s actually blowing a hole in Illinois’ budget is its profligate spending, in Illinois’ case wastrel spending on public union pensions and teachers union pensions in Chicago.  Beyond that, using 529s to defray the costs of educating a child in Illinois isn’t tax avoidance, it’s parents seeing to the welfare of their children.

Then there’s this bit.

The Cruz provision [the amendment that inserted the 529 expansion into the tax reform bill] is projected to cost the federal government $500 million over nearly a decade, but it could cost the states much more, research suggests.

This is nonsense. Aside from the fact that it doesn’t cost the Federal government anything to not get what doesn’t belong to it, it’s also not costing the States anything for the same reason: the money isn’t the States’; the money belongs to the citizens of the States.

Furthermore, instead of worrying about deficits caused by not getting revenue that isn’t theirs, the States should worry about deficits caused by their profligate spending—and that’s not just Illinois.

This misunderstanding by American Enterprise Institute‘s Deputy Director of Education Policy, Nat Malkus, is surprising.

It’s not federalist at all.  I don’t think that the federal government should be cavalierly making problems for states by messing with state taxes.

Federalism isn’t touched by the 529 expansion.  That expansion doesn’t impact State taxes in the slightest; those remain the sole decision of the State governments.  All that’s “messed with” is tax collections, collections of OPM.

There’s More To It

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As part of the (actually quite minor) snafu wherein the House and Senate passed trivially different versions of the tax reform bill, the Senate’s Parliamentarian ruled that 529 Savings Plans—modified by the tax bill to be usable for K-12 as well as secondary education expenses—cannot be used, on a straight majority vote, for K-12 homeschooling, even though formally schooled K-12 children and their parents can use the Plans.  Two icons of Progressive Democracy, Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Ron Wyden (D, OR), had objected and raised the matter to the Parliamentarian.

The Senate passed its version of the tax reform bill minus the protection for homeschooled children, since there weren’t going to be eight (or even one) Progressive-Democratic Party Senators who would vote for tax reform or lower taxes in any form and sent it back to the House where the bill was passed again and then sent to the White House for the President’s signature.

Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX, and whose 529 amendment was cut back by this maneuver) expressed his dismay.

What the Democrats did is they carved out one group, they carved out just homeschoolers, and they cut homeschoolers out. It really was shameful.
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The Democrats view is they want control. They want control over everything, whether it is control over regulating an industry, control over the internet or, in this instance, control in how you educate your students.  The reason the Democrats don’t like homeschoolers is if you’re spending the time, investing the time at home teaching your kids, they can’t mandate what you’re teaching them.

Cruz is right, but that’s not all of it.  The Progressive-Democratic Party also is in the tank for the teachers unions, and homeschoolers are beyond the reach of those unions.  The Sanders-Wyden move also was in service to their unions.

In either case, or both of them, the Progressive-Democrats used children as political weapons.  That’s despicable.

Job Cut Worries

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The Left has them in the Department of Education.  It seems that the DoEd is sharply cutting back staff in its Office for Civil Rights.

[C]ritics say the move will blunt the office’s response to issues like sexual assault on college campuses and racial discrimination in public schools.

And

Some civil rights advocates are…saying the buyouts [to encourage departure] are determined by department chiefs who they say are targeting the civil rights office.

I certainly hope so.

Law enforcement and crime, including sexual assault, are matters for the police and the DoJ.  DoJ also has its own civil rights section. DoEd has—or should have—nothing to say on these matters.

The duplication needs to be eliminated altogether, and not just with a few job cuts.  All of the should be jobs cut, and DoEd’s Office of Civil Rights should be completely eliminated.

Safe Spaces and Timidity

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Antonia Okofor is an advocate for empowering women, and she argues that the 2nd Amendment is a valuable tool in the empowerment.

She was scheduled to speak at two Liberal (note: not Liberal Arts—they’ve long ago lost that breadth) colleges, Hampshire College and Mount Holyoke.

Hampshire College canceled Okofor’s engagement on short notice—two hours’ notice—claiming that her speech was “too controversial.”  Then the place thought better of its excuse and claimed the trivial technicality of a student application not being complete as the premise for canceling.  This is nonsense: if that had been the reason, school management would have said so in the first place.  On the other hand, the lack of dotted i’s and crossed t’s would have been just as indefensible as an excuse.  This is fear, instead, fear of a better argument.

Mount Holyoke “allowed” Okofor’s speech to proceed, but here the pupils displayed their own timidity.  Their “angst” was centered on the horror of “the idea that women’s rights and safety is being linked with their right to bear arms.”  Empower women, sure, but only in terms of the power of others to protect them.  The Holyoke pupils’ solution was to set up a separate “safe space” where their own Precious Ones could go to hide from such uncomfortable subjects.

We feel that creating a deliberately separate space for conversation rather than holding a direct act of protest will be a more productive action for us without fueling the messaging of the Right.

Because actual participation would require determination and positive action.  Because actual participation would require the effort of rational thought and debate instead of the comfort of inchoate feelings and ducking away.

This is the pseudo-education that our children are getting at Liberal not-Arts places like these two.

Higher Education Improvement

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The Wall Street Journal has a summary of the House’s The Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act, to be proposed this week.  It’s aimed at

filling that gap [in college graduates’ skills, with 6 million jobs left begging] by both deregulating parts of the sector and laying the conditions for shorter, faster pathways to the workforce. The act focuses on ensuring students don’t just enroll in school, but actually graduate with skills that the labor market is seeking.

Highlights include these:

  • revamp of the $1.34 trillion federal student loan program
    • graduate students and parents of undergraduates would have overall caps on tuition and living expense loans, instead of borrowing whatever schools charge.
    • end loan-forgiveness programs for public-service employees
    • eliminate a program that ties monthly payments to income levels for private-sector workers.
  • community colleges would get more funding to team with the private sector and create or expand apprenticeships and learn and earn programs
  • for-profit college sector would be on equal footing with nonprofit schools regarding limits on federal aid and measurements of graduate success: overall, competency-based education
  • functional repeal of the gainful employment regulation, which ties access to federal student aid to whether career programs lead to decent-paying jobs. Government will no longer be the decider of what jobs are suitable; the graduate and employer will.
  • increased accountability of schools by improving the quality of information available to prospective students
  • “historically black” and developing Hispanic schools would have to provably graduate or transfer at least 25% of their students in order to get funding from the pile otherwise earmarked for these schools
  • require schools to pay back some portion of federal loans if the student didn’t rather than leaving the schools strictly as loan generators that get the proceeds from the loans without regard to suitability or outcome.

All in all, this could represent a major improvement to our higher community college/college/university education system, especially in its core: graduates’ employability and the costs incurred (and by whom) in achieving that employability.

Naturally, the colleges and universities, whose funding oxen are going to get gored, will squawk.  Ignore them, and move past the dinosaurs and vested interests.