Tag: schooling

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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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video

Video: Decentralize the Schools

Too many people want to push America’s schools in the wrong direction. Neal McCluskey, of the Cato Institute, isn’t one of them:

Categories
education and schooling

Look in the Backyard

“Social scientists have long tried to determine why some children grow up to be successful adults and others don’t,” fatherhood blogger Kevin Hartnett wrote in the Washington Post. “The causes are hard to untangle.”

Really? I think the causes are pretty obvious. Number one being parents.

Hartnett’s opinion piece was entitled, “What matters more to my kids’ future: Their school or quality time with their parents?” Frustratingly, Hartnett’s not sure, though he “intuitively” feels his two very young sons would gain more benefit from additional time with their parents than a better school.

Harnett and his wife are beginning careers, concerned about the trade-offs between earning higher income to afford the best schools versus providing more parental time at home.

So he turned to several researchers:

  • Susan Mayer, author of the book, What Money Can’t Buy: Family Income and Children’s Life Chances, and a professor at the University of Chicago, believes that inexpensive trips to the museum or books in the home are often more important than expensive tutoring or schools.
  • “I think it’s very reasonable for parents to choose to work less in order to have more face time with their children,” Professor Annette Lareau of the University of Pennsylvania told Hartnett, “even if that means their children attend a school where they’re not challenged as much as the parents might like.”
  • University of California at Irvine Professor Greg Duncan looked at the impact of non-parents on children and concluded, “Schools and neighborhoods might have some effect, but I think it’s pretty clear that a lot more of the action around child development takes place at home.”

The future will be shaped at home, more than at school.

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.