RALEIGH – Talk about one of those “less-bad” situations.
In the best-case scenario North Carolina would not be poised to join the ranks of states with government-run gambling operations. The General Assembly’s enactment of a lottery bill last year was an embarrassing moment. It was quite possibly unconstitutional. It was squalid. It was cynicism and statism triumphing over sound policy and good judgment.
Assuming that the process of implementing the lottery bill continues apace – that is, assuming that the bill survives judicial review – there will be hundreds of millions of dollars coming into the state government’s coffers. The next-best-case scenario would be for North Carolina to devote these lottery revenues to something other than general state-government functions, so as to avoid the problem of supplanting existing revenue streams.
Unfortunately, the 2005 legislation didn’t do that. It allocates the largest share of the net proceeds to reducing class size in public schools and expanding pre-kindergarten programs, both functions already financed by broadly applied taxes. Thus we have a worst-case scenario: a government-run gambling monopoly, suckering people who are disproportionately low-income to fritter their money away so that government officials can maintain programs that aren’t worthwhile and at the same time transfer the tax money currently spent on the programs to other purposes, yet undetermined but most likely marginal in their public benefit.
Make no mistake, class-size reductions and expanded pre-K programs are not reasonable priorities for state government at the moment. A new paper by JLF education analyst Terry Stoops offers new reasons to accept my proposition in the case of the former. He looked at North Carolina’s High Priority Schools Initiative, a $23 million effort to reduce class sizes in schools with large percentages of poorly performing students. Comparing the 36 schools receiving the class-size money with nine schools that didn’t, but were otherwise similar in composition, Stoops found that after four years of the program, 7 percent fewer high-priority schools were meeting their expected ABC growth targets than before. At the same time, 45 percent more comparison schools were meeting growth targets.
“Comparison schools showed greater improvement than the [high-priority] schools even in reading proficiency,” Stoops said, “even though reading was the area where smaller class sizes were thought to provide the greatest benefits.”
There is plenty of other evidence available across the country showing that policymakers have put undue emphasis on class-size reduction as a school-reform strategy. Shrinking normal-sized classes down by a few pupils doesn’t really affect the outcomes much. Larger, targeted reductions in kindergarten might make sense, but targeting seems impossible.
That’s the problem with preschool programs, too. There are some data suggesting that it may make sense for taxpayers to provide desperately poor children – basically lacking even one functioning, responsible parent – with a preschool intervention. But every time politicians create these programs, they get carried away with themselves. For the vast majority of middle-class and even lower-income households, preschool intervention is unneeded and cost-ineffective.
Given the billions of dollars that North Carolina school districts say they must spend in the coming years on school construction to accommodate soaring enrollments, the not-so-worst-case scenario would be to devote lottery revenues to that purpose. I’m not planning to bet on it, however.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.