Tag: education

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education and schooling free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

The Pushers

Lunchroom Black Market

When I was a teenager, my mom attended nursing school and became very interested in nutrition. This had consequences.

She stopped buying sugary cereals, for instance. Well! We could not supinely accept this. My younger brother hid Cap’n Crunch and other stuff like that under his bed; and when we wanted a bedtime snack, we’d find him and barter on the black market.

I cite those halcyon days of determined resistance as a relatively benign example of adults regulating kids. Parents have that job. Mom was certainly within her rights. Yet children, although they should gladly obey all reasonable parental injunctions, can only be expected to resist when parental prerogatives stray into sugary-​cereal-​banning territory.

How much more enthusiastically, then, must we cheer kids who valiantly evade not the proper authority of parents but the improper, pushy, Puritanical programs of joy-​stomping institutional busybodies?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Are you by any chance referring to the efforts of Michelle Obama and snivelingly acquiescent educrats to expel anything tasty from school lunchrooms across the land, as if innocuous condiments were the equivalent of strychnine?” Correct!

I’m also talking about kids “caught bringing — and even selling[!!] — salt, pepper, and sugar” to rescue their taste buds from the arbitrarily bland fare.

Good going, guys! And if moms and dads want to take this Declaration of Independence even further, let them yank their kids out of these places and find another way to teach them the ABCs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Lunchroom Black Market

 

Categories
education and schooling

Private School Choice Works

Vouchers Work

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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Vouchers Work

 

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crime and punishment education and schooling folly Second Amendment rights

Pop Gun Tart

Pop Tart Criminal

America is often said to be a land of second chances.

Just not for 7‑year-​olds. At least, not when they’re in the public school system.

Back in 2013, a boy then in second grade in Anne Arundel, Maryland, was suspended for two days for what was deemed a “gun-​related” offense.

It was also a Pop Tart-​related offense.

No, he didn’t shoot a Pop Tart; he bit his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. There’s a dispute as to whether he then pointed the high-​calorie weapon at the ceiling or at other students. Either way, unless the strawberry filing was piping hot (it wasn’t), there wasn’t really anything to fear.

Still, school officials pretty much freaked out.

Of course, the incident did occur just months after the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting, when six- and seven-​year-​olds were feeling the full weight of adult hysteria about guns, pastries, pointed fingers, etc.

Fast-​forward to the present: the Maryland lad’s parents are still fighting to clear this gun-​related black mark from his permanent record, fearful it could damage him even decades from now.

I don’t blame them.

Unfortunately, last week the Maryland State Board of Education upheld the suspension. A spokesperson for the local schools claimed it was warranted because of the lad’s “long history of disciplinary issues,” adding that the school “has gone to every conceivable length to assist that student.”

The attorney for the family says they will appeal.

My kids have been homeschooled, but next year my youngest will attend a public high school. I just hope we can find a good, inexpensive attorney to go with her.

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.

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

Educational Snow Flakes

Up north, it snows enough that schools can’t just close every time a few flakes fall. But I live in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC, and it doesn’t snow that much here.

Weeks ago it snowed eight inches, a lot for us. The schools in my county — and throughout the region — closed. 

But in Washington, DC, the schools stayed open. And controversy ensued. 

Was opening the schools unsafe? Was it a waste of money, since only a small percentage of students and teachers showed up? Or was a school day too valuable to lose? 

For me, that’s all beside the point. I think a day having fun in the snow is more valuable than a yet another day in class. 

This came to mind again when I listened to President Obama’s recent speech about public education. Obama wants our kids to attend school more days and longer hours. Apparently, children in South Korea go to school more and score better on tests.

Not only am I skeptical about such comparisons, and those tests, I’m totally uninterested in educating my kids to best the Russians or the Germans or the Japanese or anybody else. 

To me, education is all about encouraging my kids to love learning, and then facilitating their very personal pursuit of their own dreams. It’s not an international competition demanding ever-​more hours of drudgery.

So, let it snow. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.