Category: education and schooling

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.


Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.