Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Private School Choice Works

Post author By CS Admin
Post date May 28, 2015
1 Comment on Private School Choice Works

Private school choice is “in,” writes Patrick Wolf. “Far from being rare and untested, private school choice policies are an integral part of the fabric of American education policy.”

Now, these “new ideas” really upset some folks. I’m not one of them. School choice is greater freedom.

Freedom works.

Public schooling, on the other hand, is based on very different principles — and principals. It’s no wonder that a system based on compulsion (taxes, attendance, etc.) tends to have so much trouble performing well: it’s not the forced sector of the economy that booms.

Enter school choice. As long as kids must be forced to “attend” a school, I (as a parent) would rather decide which school, for both my sake and my children’s. And if I’m paying taxes, and other kids are getting tax moneys for their education, vouchers are more fair.

Wolf, writing in The Daily Signal, offers evidence that these eminently sensible policies lead to great results. “In Washington, D.C., use of an Opportunity Scholarship increased the likelihood of a student graduating by 71 percent.” Research into the effects of Milwaukee’s program show it “significantly increased the rates of high school graduation, college enrollment and persistence in college for the low-income students. . . .”

Researchers at Brookings Institution and Harvard found similar results for New York City’s “privately funded K-12 scholarship program.”

In his 1859 philosophical polemic, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that parents have a duty to educate their children — and society an interest in seeing these duties met. But that doesn’t entail setting up government schools.

It’s time to catch up with Mill’s 1859 wisdom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags choice, education, school choice, schooling, vouchers

Thought

Averroës

“Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.”

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Under Their Thumb

What if police grabbed your children off the street and held them for five hours?

Alexander and Danielle Meitiv of Silver Spring, Maryland, have been investigated three times. First, when their children were discovered playing by themselves in a park a block from their home. The second time when police picked up the kids walking home from a park about a mile away. The third investigation was launched when the Meitiv’s 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter were arrested and held for five hours for walking home from a different park.

Nothing came of the first investigation. In the second, CPS originally found the couple guilty of “unsubstantiated neglect.” But last week, the Meitivs received a letter from Maryland’s Child Protective Services (CPS) now ruling out neglect in the second investigation.

Gee whiz, it’s good news. But the Meitivs still have investigation No. 3 to contend with. And CPS remains completely mum on whether the agency’s letter means the Meitivs and other parents can now freely allow their kids to walk to and from public parks and other venues.

Or not.

Can we really live in the “Land of the Free” and our children not be free to walk in public? What kind of freedom is that?

If the Constitution isn’t sufficient to stop police and child welfare [sic] agencies from snatching kids off the street, terrifying them, investigating their parents and threatening to take those children, we need to pass new laws granting children the right to walk down the street . . .

. . . as long as it’s okay with their parents.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags children, constitution, free range, kids, law

Thought

Jacob Burckhardt

“The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state’s power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.”

Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History

Today

Habeas corpus

On May 27, 1863, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland issued Ex parte Merryman, challenging the authority of President Abraham Lincoln to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland, the legal procedure that prevents the government from holding an individual indefinitely without showing cause.

Two days earlier, John Merryman, a vocal secessionist, had been arrested in Cockeysville. Although military officials continued to arrest suspected Southern sympathizers, the incident led to a softening of the policy.

national politics & policies term limits

Unlimited Gall

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Some claims don’t persuade. For example, the claim that starting a conversation is an effort to end conversation. Or that one “bullies” officeholders by telling constituents what officeholders are up to.

But so contends a Columbus Dispatch editorial (“Don’t let pledges close discussions”) chastising U.S. Term Limits, my old stomping ground, for spotlighting pols plotting to pulverize term limits.

U.S. Term Limits advised constituents of Ohio State Representatives Bob Cupp and Nathan Manning that neither will pledge to forbear from weakening Ohio’s state legislative term limits — and that both men serve on a commission scheming to weaken the limits.

The organization’s mailing is “out of line in two ways,” the paper opines.

First, lawmakers mustn’t “surrender their autonomy to bullying interest groups” but must consider issues “with open minds.” Should these open minds be closed to any reminders of the legitimate interests of constituents? The Dispatch editors write as if they’d never head of politics and political debate before; anyway, as if it should desist forthwith.

Second, the pledge itself is “misplaced,” because Ohio voters must approve any referendum Ohio lawmakers send to ballot; lawmakers can’t act unilaterally. True. But why take even one bad step on a bad road?

How can the Dispatch’s theme be that USTL seeks to “close” discussions of term limits? U.S. Term Limits would be delighted if all Ohioans engaged in loud and long discussions of term limits, as well as of what Ohio lawmakers hope to do to their constitutionally limited terms in office.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags media, term limits

Thought

Jacob Burckhardt

“Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully.”

Jacob Burckhardt was a teacher and reserved, cautious mentor to Friedrich Nietzsche.

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Memorial Day Questions

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What do we owe to those who fight and give, as President Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, “their last full measure of devotion”?

More, surely, than appreciative applause for the troops on airplanes and at professional sporting events . . . with their high-priced, taxpayer-paid military promotions.

First, vets are entitled to contracted-for medical care, as I addressed in greater detail at Townhall.com yesterday — not a Veterans Administration that systematically denies them needed diagnoses and treatments.

Second, wiser strategic decisions going forward. Vets deserve, and we all need, more (not fewer) questions of presidential candidates, such as the hypothetical inquiry of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Iraq, and the hypothetical Libya question Sen. Rand Paul suggests should be posed to Mrs. Clinton.

Bring on the if-you-knew-then questions!

But wait, what about a non-hypothetical: Are we today at war against the Islamic State?

We really should know . . . I mean, on Memorial Day and all.

President Barack Obama claims he has the constitutional power to engage militarily against the Islamic State under Congress’s 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). A number of legal scholars vehemently disagree. Which may be why, back in February, Obama asked for a new, anti-ISIS AUMF. Congressional Republicans balked, complaining the president’s proposed AUMF isn’t strong enough.

Of course, nothing prevents congressional Republicans from passing a stronger version.

Or better yet, demand that President Obama keep American boys and girls out of harm’s way in the always-messy Middle East.

The murderous leaders of the Islamic State may wish to be at war with us, but we don’t have to humor them. Let Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Iran defend themselves and their territories from this gang of cutthroats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags foreign affairs, military, responsibility, veterans, war

Thought

John Calvin

“There are people who are known to be very liberal, yet they never give without scolding or pride or even insolence.”

John Calvin, De Vita Hominis Christiani, 1550.

Today

Burckhardt Born

May 25, 1818, the Swiss historian and academic Jacob Burckhardt was born. Burckhardt’s best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), but is remembered here as the author of Reflections on History (1905).

Erratum: In our daily email, we erroneously gave May 25 as the date for William of Okham’s fleeing the papal city of Avignon. That event, and John Calvin’s banishment years later, both occurred on May 26 of their respective years. We are sorry for the error.