Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling free trade & free markets

Will They Ever Learn?

In which industries do prices and costs rise fastest? Those in which government is most involved.

The process is no mystery. Regulate supply by limiting entry into the business — to “increase quality,” of course — will raise prices, as producers behave oligopolistically. Government does this with health care providers, and have done so increasingly for the last century. If, at the same time, you subsidize the consumption, that amounts to increasing demand, which also puts upward pressure on prices. This has been accelerated in America since the beginning of Medicare, and with each additional healthcare program.

Typical government intervention double whammy.

Higher education is also not exempt from the play of supply and demand. One policy advocate’s explanation of this, which you can read excerpted, online, at National Review’s site, is worth considering. He explains what happens as vendors rake in profits under a regulated-and-subsidized system: they

sponsor crowd-pleasing sports events on weekends, building public goodwill. Other profits are used to hire professional lobbyists to plead for both more subsidies and more freedom to set prices. You also convince the government to allow you and other incumbent . . . sellers to form a private organization with the authority to decide whether new sellers can become “approved . . . vendors” for the purposes of receiving public subsidies. Unsurprisingly, few new sellers are approved.

Predictably, the analysis is followed by halfway measures that don’t lead to a free market in education at all. That’s just too radical.

Education policy wonks, like educators themselves, seem never to learn . . . economics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

Earning Public School Privileges

For the last 22 years, I’ve had school-age kids. None of them went to a public school; instead, we homeschooled.

Though my children certainly didn’t cost Virginia’s state and local governments the more than $10,000 a year they spend on each public school student, I sure never got a letter from the government apologizing for not “earning” my tax payments or a reimbursement check for taxes paid.

PTAWhich went through my mind when I read an email from the Virginia PTA — the Parent Teacher Association. The group’s Janet Ciaravino urged its cadre to: “Let [legislators] know that public school is your choice and team sports are a privilege you earned and expect them to protect.”

The Virginia PTA has come unglued at the thought that House Bill 947, known as the “Tebow Bill,” may pass and allow homeschool children to try out for public school sports. To avoid that unthinkable prospect, the PTA pushes politicians to “protect” their privileges at the expense of homeschool kids who simply want a try-out.

Then come horror stories, unimaginable hypothetical situations designed to overwhelm our emotions. For instance, the PTA email posed a harrowing question, “What’s next? Drama, debate, electives?”

If we’re not careful, public education could break out.

The PTA’s orthographically deviant slogan is “every child. one voice.” Why not allow every one of those children his or her own voice? And an equal chance to win a spot on the team.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling national politics & policies

Can Senators Learn?

An 868-page bill said to be a fix for the loathed, landmark “No Child Left Behind,” was recently introduced allowing senators only 48 hours to read and consider it. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) objected, declaring, “This process is rotten from the top to the bottom.”

Sen. Paul called that a “tragedy.”

No senator could argue with his criticism of the process, of course, but Sen. Michael Bennett of Colorado did take to the floor to argue it was an even bigger tragedy that so many children failed to reach proficiency in math and reading. He begged Sen. Paul to stop objecting so the bill could move forward and be passed.

Sound reasonable? Well, Bennett did not claim to have read the entire bill, only that (like so many other bills passed in recent years) the legislation is so desperately needed that no time  could be spared to actually read it and deliberate.

Sen. Paul also lambasted the idea that senators had not held hearings where they might listen to the teachers and administrators struggling to comply with the federal mandates in No Child Left Behind. “I’ve yet to meet one teacher who’s in favor of No Child Left Behind,” he offered. “They abhor it.”

For his efforts, Paul got a hearing on the legislation, scheduled for November 8. Now let’s hope he can get senators to sit up in their seats and pay attention.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Bright College Days

We parents worry when we send our kids off to college. But do we worry they’ll become terrorists?

No.

But a funny and slightly disturbing article by Colin Lidell in Taki’s Magazine takes notice of the deep connection between college life and terrorism. Indeed, “every major Islamist terrorist attack in Britain has been led by university students or recent graduates.”

Lidell makes a broader point, too, even with his title: “The Persistence of Bourgeois Radicalism.” Universities and colleges have long served as hotbeds of extremism:

Becoming “radicalized” — whether your bearded prophet happens to be Marx or Muhammad — is essentially code for having too much time on your hands and a sense of smug entitlement. This is the essence of university life. With three years of sleeping late, anything seems possible.

The author concludes that the best cure for such radicalism is the requirement of work. He leaves that thought to linger in the readers’ minds, letting us extrapolate upon government subsidies to increase the rolls of college student bodies.

A related fact, uncovered by previous scholars of Islamic radicalism, is that the main subsidizer of Muslim radicals in the West have been the welfare states of those countries. It seems that the safety nets of British and European states (as well as Canadian and Australian governments) have funded quite a number of terrorist cells.

Perhaps one reason America has nurtured fewer home-grown terrorists is our tougher-to-obtain “welfare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Johnny Can Be Indoctrinated

Government schools in Frederick County, Maryland, deem the third grade the appropriate time to push a political agenda. Cindy Rose found this out when her daughter came down with the flu and read a textbook, Social Studies Alive! Our Community and Beyond, at home.

Mrs. Rose calls the book “socialistic.”

Judge for yourself. On page 104, it reads: “Child care is important, but it is not free for most people in the United States. Families have to pay for child care. It can be very expensive. In some countries, child care is a public service. For example, in Denmark and Vietnam, child care is free or costs very little. This makes it easier for parents to work. Do you think child care should be a public service in your community?”

Rose took her complaint to the school board, which suggested that the book’s slant might be balanced by other materials — but could point to no evidence it was being balanced. Those defending the textbook insist that it teaches critical thinking, but as one school board member asked, “Do you get much pushback from an 8 or 9-year old?”

Only if the book explained marginal utility and the Thomas Theorem would I put much stock in the “critical thinking” excuse.

“The entire slant of the book,” Cindy Rose argues, “is . . . the idea of government running your life.”

Thankfully, my wife homeschools our children. I can tell you that’s not one of the lessons.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Cheaters Never Prosper?

The cheating scandal in the Atlanta Public Schools is ugly — 178 administrators, principals and teachers were caught changing answers on standardized tests. Nearly 80 percent of the schools investigated were found to be guilty.

One school held weekend pizza parties to organize the fraud. Former Superintendent Beverly Hall — named the National Superintendent of Year in 2009 — “is accused of encouraging the cheating.” Hall made hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses for the fraudulent test scores.

Meanwhile, one teacher fearing retaliation if she blew the whistle, declared, “APS is run like the mob.”

Yet much of the media spin is excuse-making:

  • On NBC’s Nightly News, Brian Williams called it “the risk of high-stakes testing.”
  • CBS Evening News informed us that, “Educator Diane Ravitch blames it on a federal law that links funding with test performance.”
  • ABC News reported that, “Many in the community are pointing the finger at No Child Left Behind, the federal policy that made test scores king.”
  • One expert said, “[S]ome educators feel pressured to get the scores they need by hook or by crook.”

I’ve been a consistent critic of No Child Left Behind and deplore the federal micro-managing of schools. But cheating is wrong. And the fault lies with the cheaters — not with those demanding better performance.

Paul Landerman, a former Atlanta teacher fired for reporting the cheating, told NBC, “The greatest value inside that system is loyalty to the system.”

System first. Your kids? Somewhere after that.

That’s the opposite of Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling too much government

Explaining the Next Bust

Is the long-cycle “higher education boom” now beginning to go bust?

Like financial bubbles fed by subsidy and the Federal Reserve’s limbo-low interest rates, American colleges and universities are plagued with too much government attention —particularly by policy that says “everybody should go to college.”

But common sense tells us that not everybody profits by going to college, that sending ill-prepared, unqualified and even uninterested young non-scholars to college, largely so they can “earn higher incomes” is absurd. Pushing the vast majority of American humanity through the university mill cannot ineluctably yield increasing returns. With diminishing returns, increasing government attention can only feed a dangerously unsustainable bubble.

And once it bursts, Americans will demand explanations.

Look to the theory of “signaling,” which posits that a (or the) chief use for schooling is not learning but a demonstration: Getting a college degree shows (“signals”) employers that the persevering student possesses virtues useful in “the real world.”

We’ve come to rely on those crude signals, but as economist Bryan Caplan argues, businesses could adapt to a very different information market: “Ending government subsidies for education wouldn’t create a new working-class generation; it would lead businesses to massively expand the employment of interns to take advantage of the large pool of talented, young people who can’t afford tuition.”

Gee, learning one’s trade for free sounds better than going into debt to “signal” employers that one would likely be able to produce for them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling free trade & free markets individual achievement

Entrée “Preneurial”

Today is Memorial Day, but the larger season is one of graduations, from college and high school and even lower grades. It’s fitting, then, to take a step back and consider the philanthropy of Peter Thiel, who is working on a different course.

Thiel, PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor, made headlines last year as he began his anti-scholarship program, “20 Under 20.” He is giving $100,000 to 20 young people under 21, but on one condition — that they not go to college.

Instead, his bequests amount to angel seed money for young go-getters to do something original, entrepreneurial.

Now, Thiel has announced his first 20 recipients. An AP story by Marcus Wohlsen leads with the circumstances of one recipient, Nick Cammarata, a young genius programmer. Cammarata wasn’t one of those grade A students. Instead of studying hard, he did what he liked, including reading books on subjects he was interested in. And programming, which got him attention outside his school and town.

Like other recipients of the Thiel hundred grand grant, he plans to parlay the money into a hopeful tech project.

The article dutifully quotes skeptics of Thiel’s program, and mentions the oft-quoted statistic that workers with college degrees have been laid off at a lower rate than non-degreed workers.

But this misses the main point of Thiel’s intent. He’s not interested in making “workers.” He’s interested in creating entrepreneurs. The people who hire workers.

A very different goal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling too much government

Freedom Is a Brown Bag

American society still features a fair degree of freedom and respect for the individual. We’d all be pretty shocked were a public-school bureaucrat to dredge up Plato’s old notion of forcibly removing babies from the care of their parents and letting the state raise them communally.

We’re not that far gone. Nobody advocates the utter communization of the care and feeding of the young.

Instead, we confront more incremental yet ever-bolder assaults on parental responsibility and rights in favor of such Grand Liberal Ideas as Puritanical State-Subsidized Nutrition. Thus, the educrats at a Chicago public school, Little Village Academy, prohibit kids from bringing lunch from home.

Yep. Not only are students prohibited from toting squirt guns and pictures of paper knives, at LVA they’re now also prohibited from importing such dangerous products as Coca Cola and Twinkies. It’s all about “healthier choices,” blathers a Chicago Public School spokeswoman, who stresses that it’s up to individual schools whether to adopt such bans. After all, what could be “healthier” than training families to be dependent on the state for homogenized sustenance?

Not surprisingly, some Little Village kids dislike the cafeteria food. Sometimes they throw it in the garbage. “We should bring out own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!” they shout when asked about the policy.

They should do more than chant. They should flout the ban en masse.

They can’t all be arrested for smuggling in peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling Tenth Amendment federalism

Fighting the Centralizers

National politics tends to frame every debate.

Or, perhaps I should say “mis-frame” every debate. Trouble is, there’s this tendency to make a “federal case” out of everything.

Politicians seem driven to add on bureaucracies and taxes and programs, rather than root around government to repeal programs that aren’t working. More failed programs beget more failed programs.

We witness this, these days, in the debate over medicine. The drive to centralize is strong, seemingly irresistible.

But centralization rarely accomplishes what people hope for it.

K-12 public schooling has been systematically centralized first at state levels, and then, increasingly, at the federal level.

“Closing the Door on Innovation” is a broad-spectrum, trans-partisan attack upon the very idea of (as well as recent calls for) a national curriculum. Its sponsors know that calls for increasing centralized control over what kids learn in our public schools only sounds good as sound bites. In practice, centralization strangles innovation and closes off diversity in schooling.

I encourage you to read the manifesto. Sign it. In my opinion, the further we place our kids’ educations out of the hands of parents and into the hands of bureaucrats and politics, the worse things will get.

It is decentralization that should be our watchword. Let’s add it to our political agenda.

And let’s teach it to our kids. They could use a good education, after all, one good concept at a time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.