After last week’s release of Education Next’s 2016 survey of education opinion (see Jason Bedrick’s and Neal McCluskey’s responses), Phi Delta Kappa yesterday released its own poll (see Neal’s take on that here). Once again, the poll sheds light on the public’s understanding (or misunderstanding) of school financing.

In an open-ended question, Americans for the 15th consecutive year designated “lack of money/financial support” the biggest problem facing public schools. Perhaps as a result, most Americans—53% in support to 45% opposed—favored increasing property taxes to boost school funding. However, there was broad skepticism (47% of respondents) that increases would spur quality improvements. What explains this apparent inconsistency?

It turns out support for increased property taxes is correlated with how respondents ranked local public schools. Those that viewed their public schools more favorably were more likely to support property tax hikes and be confident that increased funding would improve schools. Conversely, those that rated local schools lower were more resistant to hikes and skeptical that increased funding would result in improvements. While two-thirds of those that gave their local schools an A grade were confident that increased funding would help, only 17% of those that gave their schools an F agreed.

In what PDK calls its most “lopsided” result, Americans overwhelmingly preferred keeping a failing school open to closure, 84% to 14%, but 62% favored replacing teachers and administrators to increasing funding in the turnaround. Americans, it seems, agree that increased funding will not improve underperforming schools. Furthermore, 26% of those that gave their schools a failing grade thought school closure was the more appropriate response, compared to only 13% of the general public.

Listing funding as a problem also does not necessarily result in support for increased property taxes. In the latest poll, 19% of respondents cited school funding as the biggest problem, down from a record high of 36% in 2010 and 2011, the peak of the recession years. But the Education Next poll demonstrates that support for property tax hikes declined dramatically during those years.

Another reason so many respondents cited “lack of funding” as a major problem? The open-ended nature of the question allowed up to three responses, increasing the likelihood that many respondents would include school funding as one of their answers. That only 19% of respondents included it seems low given that that majority of respondents favored property tax increases. Moreover, the EdNext pollsters theorize that support for increases in funding rises in election years, when this issue is most hotly debated, and it’s therefore unsurprising that it was seen as the biggest problem in public education.

An important caveat to these findings is that support for increased funding dramatically drops when an individual is informed of real spending. In the EdNext poll, uninformed respondents estimated average per-pupil spending at $7,020, a little more than half the actual average of $12,440. When uninformed respondents were asked if they favored an increase in school funding, 61% supported the idea; when a separate group of respondents was told the actual per-pupil expenditure, support dropped to 45%.

These results lead to a number of conclusions. First, support for increased schooling taxation comes disproportionately from the wealthy, already well-performing public schools, where parents are confident that spending is put to good use. The poll results shouldn’t be seen as supporting property tax hikes in communities with failing schools where the effectiveness of more funding is suspect. Second, because the public appears uncertain about funding as a tool to turn around schools, perhaps a better alternative is to give parents more control over their children’s education via school choice policies, as minority groups favor. Finally, these studies together reinforce the importance of a well-informed public. Support for spending increases drops for all groups—teachers, Republicans, Democrats, and the general public—when given accurate information.

Despite large numbers of respondents favoring property tax increases, the PDK poll demonstrates a broad skepticism of more funding for failing schools. And there is no powerful  link between spending and academic performance, making it heartening that the public appears intuitively aware of this.

Earlier this month, the New York Times ran a headline “Trial by Jury, a Hallowed American Right, Is Vanishing.”  This is very true.  It’s a trend that we at Cato have been lamenting for many years.  Despite the clear language of the Sixth Amendment, that the accused shall enjoy the right to trial by jury in “all criminal prosecutions,” the government manages to oversee a system where jury trials are quite rare–only about 1 percent of the criminal cases will be decided by juries.

Fortunately, there’s a new book that calls attention to this problem, The Missing American Jury, by Professor Suja Thomas.  Entrepreneur Mark Cuban recommends the book, saying jury trial “is a right that you never think you will need … until you do.”  Precisely.  Beyond the criminal area, the administrative state is also trampling the right to jury trial in the civil area. 

For a podcast interview with Suja Thomas, go here.

For related Cato scholarship, go here and here.

My previous attempts at asking a Trump trade adviser directly about trade policy failed. I’m now going to try another approach: Interpreting something surprising two other Trump advisers said.

Here’s what Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro wrote recently:

The saddest fact here is that Hillary Clinton doesn’t know the difference between a good trade deal and a bad one. Exhibit A is the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR).

In her economic speech in Detroit, Clinton bragged that she voted against the one multilateral trade deal that came before the Senate while she was there. That was indeed CAFTA-DR, a multilateral deal involving the U.S. along with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.

Here’s what Clinton did not confess to: She was wrong to oppose CAFTA-DR. In 2014, we had a favorable trade in goods balance with the CAFTA-DR countries of $2.7 billion. By 2015, that jumped to $5 billion. This pattern continued in the first half of 2016 with a surplus of $2.4 billion.

Did you catch that?  Trump’s trade advisers are praising a U.S. trade agreement.  That doesn’t sound very Trump-like, as Trump has been saying NAFTA is a “disaster” and has been calling the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) the “rape” of our country.  

So why do they like the CAFTA-DR?  Because in 2014 (9 years after the deal went into effect), there was a U.S. surplus in trade in goods with the various members of CAFTA-DR.  That by itself tells them it was a good deal. 

They follow this up with their typical criticism of NAFTA and the US-Korea FTA, complaining that these agreements led to a trade deficit:

Now what about the very poorly negotiated trade deals Hillary Clinton did support? Take NAFTA, which she lobbied for and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, signed in 1993. At the time, our trade in goods with Mexico was roughly in balance, with a small surplus of $1.7 billion. Today, we run a trade deficit in goods of roughly $60 billion — an astonishing leap. 

…

NAFTA is hardly a bad trade deal outlier in the Clinton oeuvre. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton helped draft the South Korea Bilateral Agreement, describing it as “cutting edge.” She was right. It cut 75,000 American jobs, according to the EPI, rather than the 70,000 gain promised by the White House. Meanwhile, our trade deficit with South Korea has doubled.

So the argument seems to be this: There are good trade agreements that lead to trade surpluses and bad trade agreements that lead to trade deficits. A good negotiator can get you an agreement with a surplus; with bad negotiators, you will end up with a deficit.

In reality, this is complete nonsense. These agreements were all negotiated by basically the same people (the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office), and they all say basically the same thing: They all lower tariffs; they all open services and procurement markets to some degree; they all protect intellectual property; and they all have rules on investor protection. There wasn’t some tricky maneuver the U.S. trade negotiators carried out it in the CAFTA-DR context to get a trade surplus, but forgot to use in the other trade agreements.

So why the variation in trade flows between agreements? Well, it’s complicated. These trade numbers actually fluctuate quite a bit from year to year.  See below for tables showing the U.S. trade balance over the years with several CAFTA-DR countries:

There are a lot of reasons for these fluctuations. Among other things, there are overall trends in the global economy and in specific national economies; and there are the decisions of private actors operating in the marketplace (it is these actors who are the ones actually doing the trading), which affect particular sectors over time. Thus, citing a trade surplus with CAFTA-DR countries – especially when it focuses on only the brief period 2014-2016 – as a reason for the success of the agreement vastly oversimplifies the impact of trade agreements on trade flows. Again, it is not the skill of the CAFTA-DR negotiators vs. the incompetence of the NAFTA or US-Korea FTA negotiators that led to the different results here.  As noted, it was basically the same people on each.  This is not like baseball. Trade negotiators do not have an off year and negotiate a bad trade agreement one year, but then come back a couple years later and have a career year by negotiating a good trade agreement.

But Trump’s advisers don’t realize that, probably because they don’t really know much about the substantive details of trade agreement.  They are simply looking at U.S. trade deficits or surpluses that arise after the fact, which generally matter very little (as my colleague Dan Ikenson has explained), and certainly don’t matter much at all in the context of trade between the U.S. and individual countries.