Category: education and schooling

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crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture

The Kid With the Illegal Magic Marker

Want to be marked for life? Be a student in DeLynn Woodside’s math class at Roosevelt Middle High in Oklahoma City, where last month a 13-year-old boy fell prey to another exercise of unenlightened zero-tolerance-for-common-sense policies.

The child’s high crime was using a magic marker in school, a no-no in light of the school’s graffiti problem. The police report documents his “possession of a permanent marker on private property,” which is illegal. According to Ms. Woodside, the boy was “writing on a piece of paper, which caused it to bleed over onto the desk.” When she asked for the marker, he tried to hide it.

A problem? Perhaps. But if so, a minor one. She could have dealt with it by explaining that markers are not allowed in school and by asking him to put the marker away and not bring it back to school. Instead, at the teacher’s behest the child was arrested and taken to a certain Community Intervention Center, a holding facility for juvenile offenders. A sergeant “booked the marker into the property room.”

Stories like these seem like real knee-slappers until you realize the outsized inanity displayed is probably not so funny for the kids being dragged downtown and booked.

Legislators, teachers, police — nobody who enables, sanctions or participates in such episodes — deserve any laurels. Treating kids as criminals for the most trivial violations of the rules, even rules that make sense, is itself criminal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies

Fat Lot of Good That’ll Do

It sounded like a good idea — Michelle Obama would get involved in a campaign to reduce childhood obesity. Obesity is a problem, yes, and a good cause for the First Lady. But, today, advocacy must always be paired with legislation.

An AP news story provides all you really need to know:

A child nutrition bill on its way to President Barack Obama — and championed by the first lady — gives the government power to limit school bake sales and other fundraisers that health advocates say sometimes replace wholesome meals in the lunchroom.

So now we are to have federal government’s micro-mismanagement reach far beyond the curriculum. The basic idea being . . . give up on parents. Give up on local control. Go, Washington!

Our national nannies took special care with the bill’s language, adding the category of school fundraisers as a special target of the regulations. Apparently, they can’t stand the fact that, on special occasions, mothers and fathers bake up sugary treats to sell, to support special school activities that affect their kids.

I guess they want us to sell broccoli.

Yup. That’ll send the school band to Disneyland.

The whole bill is a bad idea, and not just because Washington can’t tell special occasions from one’s day-in/day-out diet. The very singling out of special fundraisers for federal attention shows just how far into our lives Washington’s busybodies believe they can insert themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

Diminishing Diminishing Returns

In late September, President Obama announced a goal. Noting that American students average out in the middle of the pack, vis-à-vis students worldwide, in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), he pledged to recruit 10,000 STEM teachers over the next two years.

This was put in proper context by Andrew J. Coulson, on a Cato website. He displayed two graphs. One compared employment rates versus enrollment rates in public schools. The enrollment rates have slightly risen since 1970, while the employment rate has skyrocketed. In the other graph, the inflation-adjusted cost of a K-12 education contrasts with achievement scores for reading, math, and science during the same period. The costs skyrocketed, while the test scores had barely moved.

Perhaps students should be encouraged to apply a little math to this.

From economics we have the concept of diminishing returns. For each expenditure of input, smaller increases are expected of output. So, if we’ve been increasing teachers and administrators during this period, but the scores have neither diminished nor increased, this suggests a number of things, chief being that, well, expenditure of funds on public schooling is not the chief variable in improving knowledge or achievement. Not now, anyway.

So why would we increase expenditures?

Could the expected returns be political rather than academic? Could President Obama care more about teacher union support, say, than what kids actually learn?

Far be it for me to suggest this. Let the data alone do that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

My Child Before My Country

Last week, NBC launched its Education Nation Summit, stating its goal as providing “every American with an opportunity to pursue the best education in the world.”

Perhaps you see our trouble right from the start: There’s little agreement on what constitutes “the best education.” Best for whom?

NBC says, “Education is the key to our future success as a country . . .  Yet, we have allowed our students to fall behind. . . . One-third of our students drop out of high school, and another third aren’t college-ready when they graduate. . . . Our workforce is largely unprepared for today’s rapidly changing marketplace, and we face stiff competition from abroad. . . . The stakes are high for our economy and for our society as a whole.”

I have three kids: One grown, one a college freshman and one still at home. My wife, with my expert advice and assistance, has homeschooled all three. We have not concerned ourselves with what is best for the country or the economy or how to compete with other nations. We have focused, solely, on what is best for our kids — on what they care about, what inspires them.

As long Americans try to solve “our” education problems as “national policy” to be battled over by politicians and teachers’ unions, we will fail.

Focus, instead, on each individual child, not an Education Nation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

The Bad Lesson

If you favor hiding evidence and quashing open inquiry with regard to public questions of the most urgent interest, what does that say about your philosophy of education?

Teachers’ union officials in Los Angeles have been in a tizzy because the Los Angeles Times, a liberal bastion, published a detailed series casting controversial light on the quality of public school education in the city. The articles include a database of scores assessing — gasp! — the effectiveness of teachers.

This is a disturbing development for union reps demanding ever greater pay and job security for even lackluster instructors. To be sure, it’s not the negative evaluations that most intensely disturb them, nor even any debatable aspect of the methodologies used to assess effectiveness. It’s that the data has been publicized and discussed at all. The Times should not have published the database, complained one union official, Randi Weingarten. Another union honcho, A.J. Duffy, even called for a boycott of the paper, as if it were morally turpitudinous to give parents even an inkling of teacher performance.

Slate.com contributor Jack Shafer concludes that the Times has “done its readers a great service” by exposing Duffy and his cronies as “enemies of open inquiry, vigorous debate, critical thinking, and holding authority accountable — essentially the cognitive arts that students are supposed to be taught in schools.”

Is there any way to bypass the dilapidated and authoritarian educational regime altogether? You homeschoolers out there: Any ideas?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling

Virtual Charter Schools

Progress in education does not require a never-ending increase in funding for public schools.

My wife and I have home-schooled our daughters. I know that kids like learning, and away from classrooms can learn, and learn well. The future of education almost certainly involves a wide diversity of educational methods and systems that place children in environments where they learn best, not where it is merely convenient to spend tax funds in huge gulps.

In Washington State, government is adapting to such new options. This was noted in the papers, recently, when Tim Sutinen, a candidate for the state legislature under the “Lower Taxes” party label, praised the state’s virtual charter schools. All of his school-aged kids (he and his wife have ten, total) receive instruction at home. But their lessons and testing are conducted over the Internet, from teachers hundreds of miles away.

Had he lived south of the Columbia River, in Oregon, though, his children would not be so lucky.

There, the teachers’ union has made opposition to virtual charter schools its “top priority.” Olivia Wolcott of the Cascade Policy Institute correctly argues that were the union truly supportive of “the best interests of Oregon children, it would support the virtual charter schools that have the ability to improve education through cost-saving innovation.”

But unions are in the business of raising pay for public school teachers. And that’s not the same thing as improving education.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling free trade & free markets too much government

Take That Money

I didn’t notice it right away, but President Obama included some strange stuff about student loans in his State of the Union address. He called the current system an “unwarranted” taxpayer subsidy to banks.

Well, yeah. His solution? Another unwarranted taxpayer subsidy.

The president seeks to give families a $10,000 tax credit for sending kids to college. He also insists that no student spend more than 10 percent of his income to pay back loans, and that the unpaid portion of loans be forgiven after 20 years.

Further, if the former student happens to work for the government, the loan would be forgiven in half that time — just ten years!

This amounts to a huge special favor to government workers, of course. It may sound nice and patriotic when the president calls it “public service,” but it seems less so when you realize that government workers now earn, on average, more than private sector workers. Perhaps the fact that public employee unions are a big spending political powerhouse for Obama and Democrats matters in some small way.

Alas, more vote buying.

The president used an interesting phrase, explaining what he’s up to. He instructs us to “take that money” now loaned by banks and “give to families.” This is pseudo-specific. It’s not the same money.

But a politician obscuring the real source of wealth is nothing new.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling free trade & free markets individual achievement

High Marks for Marko

I wish 9-year-old Marko Calasan had the office next to mine. Then when something goes wrong with my computer — through no fault of my own, I assure you — I could yell “Hey Marko, come fix this!” Alas, he lives in Macedonia.

The CNET website has a nice profile of this genius. We learn that Marko is “perhaps” the youngest system engineer Microsoft has ever certified. He snagged his first credential as a systems administrator when just six.

Marko works for a living. He remotely manages a computer network for a nonprofit organization. The employees tell him they are “very glad that that there is a good administrator.” But he seems a little unsure of it, saying, “I think that’s true, but who knows.”

Marko also teaches computing to other kids at his school. When I heard this my spidey sense tingled ferociously. What? Has he put in his years at a teaching college? Mastered the latest labyrinthine educational theories? Where’s his teaching certificate? The kid’s an outlaw!! At least, he would be stateside.

Marko works when he works and plays when he plays. He doesn’t indulge in computer games because, as he puts it, “there is nothing serious about playing games on computers. . . . If you want to play, go outside and play with your friends.”

Yes sir! I will do that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling local leaders

Tea Party Principles – Populist?

When friends of mine started up the “tea party” protests last year, I wondered: Could large numbers of American take the common-sense, freedom point of view and really run with it?

I had hopes.

But for Democrat congressional leaders, and some in the media, there was mostly fear and loathing — along with red-herring charges of racism against Tea Partyers.

Now, David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, focuses on something a bit different. Noticing that 41 percent of Americans have a favorable attitude towards the Tea Party movement — far higher levels of support than for either major party — Brooks interprets that tendency in terms of what we oppose: “The concentrated power of the educated class.”

Brooks insists that “Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.” And he’s not cheering.

Michael Barone, in The Washington Examiner, clarifies this new class divide, writing, “The Obama enthusiasts who dominated so much of the 2008 campaign cycle were motivated by style. The tea party protesters who dominated so much of 2009 were motivated by substance.”

There is an ancient truth: Being smart doesn’t make you wise. In fact, flaunting your schooling and lording over others with your cleverness makes you a de facto fool.

And wrapping up fantasies and hopes in stylish, we’re-smarter-than-you packaging doesn’t make them any more intellectually defensible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense education and schooling First Amendment rights

No More Cruel and Unusual?

In recent years there’s been a spate of so-called “zero tolerance” policies — actually, zero common sense policies — in our schools, especially after Columbine and 9/11.

Last October in Delaware, six-year-old Zachary Christie faced 45 days of reform school for bringing a camping utensil to lunch. The gizmo combined a knife, fork and spoon. There was no evidence of evil intention. But the school thought their zero common sense policy against weapons had been violated. After a public outcry, the draconian punishment was dropped. The local school board modified some of its rules, though only for kindergartners and first-graders.

In Florida, lawmakers recently revised zero common sense policies statewide in hopes that only students who pose a genuine threat get expelled or arrested.

Hurray for any glimmer of a return to common sense. But why all these policies to begin with? Why instruct educators anywhere to respond maniacally to meaningless deviationism?

Maybe common sense and conscience are often the same thing.

Imagine if jay walking, littering and talking too loud in elevators were punished in comparably cruel and unusual fashion. Imagine judges and prosecutors always claiming they can’t distinguish between trivia and real crime — so better respond to both with equal force. Would we not accuse such meters-out of injustice of crimes of their own?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.