The Washington Post brings it again on behalf of the victims of Department of Education’s slavish decision to deny over 200 children access to the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Seven council members — including those who represent the poorest sections of the city — wrote to Mr. Duncan on June 22 challenging his decision not to admit new students to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. The federally funded program provides vouchers of up to $7,500 so that low-income students can attend schools of their choice. Because the program’s future is uncertain, Mr. Duncan decided — disappointingly to our mind — to rescind scholarships awarded to 216 families for this upcoming school year.
Ooops, there goes the local control argument. Perhaps Mr. Duncan and company would like to stand up and confess “We’d like to help these kids, but sadly, we toil as the servile minions of teacher union thugs. Please don’t pay attention to what we do, but rather to what we say. Move along, nothing to see here…”
Interesting article from the Economist on California vs. Texas: America’s future.
I’ve been an Economist reader for 20 years now, and their work is usually outstanding. They do however occassionally fall prey to an easy stereotype, and this article contains such a folly.
Read the article for yourself, but keep in mind that Texas has among the highest NAEP scores for Hispanic students in the nation (now edged out by Florida on 4th grade reading) and spends over $10,000 per child per year.
The only thing Texas has to learn from California is what not to do.
P.S.
This has been a settled question on the only true field of battle for some time now.
This morning, Pajamas Media carries my column on the upside of the political picture for school choice:
Some people think it’s been all bad news for school choice this year. Well, it’s all bad news if you follow the standard procedure of only paying attention to the bad news. But last month, the movement scored a big win: Indiana enacted a $2.5 million choice program, the state’s first. And if you take a broader view, you’ll see there was other good news for school choice along with the bad in the 2009 legislative season.
This is important because we’ve seen some people occasionally seize on any piece of bad news as an excuse to declare vouchers politically dead. It’s an easy way to avoid taking a stand on the issue, and in some of the more egomaniacal cases, to show the world how amazingly cool and above it all you are.
This is great news forwarded from Pauline Dixon, who with James Tooley, have done amazing work on the breadth and quality of private schooling in developing countries. Here is part of the article in the Guardian:
Aid vouchers will be given to millions of people in the poorest parts of the world so they can shop around for the best schools and services, under Tory plans to inject free-market thinking into development policy.
A Conservative government would also spend part of the £9.1bn overseas aid budget on funding for private schools across the developing world, which it believes would achieve better results than state schools and drive up standards overall. The controversial plans are in a draft Tory policy document leaked to the Observer before publication this week of the government’s white paper on development.
Andrew Mitchell, the shadow international development secretary, confirmed last night that the Tories were “investigating” using aid vouchers “to empower people in developing countries”. He also said his party had no objection to supporting the growth of the private education and health sectors in the developing world.
“Governments have a responsibility to guarantee access to health and education for everyone, particularly the poorest,” Mitchell said. “We stand ready to work with public, private and not-for-profit sectors to help make that happen. I don’t have any ideological hang-ups about whether it’s private provision or public provision: I’m interested in what works.”
In his bid to promote compassionate Conservatism, David Cameron pledges to match Labour’s plans to increase development spending to 0.7% of GDP by 2013. The budget in 2010-11 will be £9.1bn. But the policy has not proved universally popular in the party, particularly on the right, where many believe too much aid money is wasted. A survey of Tory candidates found only 4% thought international development should be the policy most protected from cuts.
Cameron’s critics believe he is promoting Thatcherite policies for aid to appease the right and reassure them the money will be well spent. The draft document suggests planning for a voucher scheme is well advanced.
“The vouchers would be redeemable for development services of any kind with an aid agency or supplier of their choice,” it states. The paper also says that a Conservative government would “embrace the potential of the private sector, not treat it with suspicion” when administering the aid budget.
As a result it makes clear the Tories would support private education in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, India and China, where it claims it has delivered better results than state-run schools “even adjusting for children’s backgrounds”.
The paper states: “We will stand ready to work with the public, not-for-profit and private sectors. We will consider funding insurance schemes, bursaries or targeted vouchers for the poorest children to attend a school of their choice.”
Earlier we had a lively debate on the obvious superiority of cover songs. This is a good lead in to my grand theory of popular music, which is: there is nothing new under the sun, so you may as well repackage tried and true things.
My theory holds that rock music essentially played itself out in 1974 with the creation of Punk Rock. If Rock and Roll was ultimately about rebellion, then you can’t get any more rebellious than anarchists who don’t know how to play their instruments screaming into a microphone. Of course most punks were poseurs. As Johnny Rotten said in advance of a reunion tour for what remains of the Sex Pistols “I am the Anti-Christ, won’t you buy me merchandise?”
But I digress.
Rock has been dead for ages, what to do then? Answer: take other genres of music, put a fresh coat of paint on them, and sell them to the kids as something new and cool! Much of it actually is cool.
The Ramones invented punk by taking 50s bubble gum pop songs, speeding them up, and giving them a psychotic twist. The Police were basically a Anglo-American reggae band. Paul Simon went through an interesting and profitable stage of his career by blending African music into an American context. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and others brought Swing music back into fashion in the 1990s, and Green Day and company did the same with punk, etc. etc. etc.
Bryan Setzer is obviously a master at this- having brought back Rockabilly with the Stray Cats and Swing with his orchestra. His latest album is a fun work that develops swing/rock versions of classical music.
Sting not only dabbled in reggae with the Police, but also jazz and even country music as a solo artist. In Desert Rose Sting wrote an Arabic song and got the biggest Arabic singer to do the song as a duet:
Genre-bending reached it’s natural conclusion with the development of mashups, which I understand to be matching different lyrics and music, with a good bunch of sampling thrown into the mix.
Example: take the tune to Jimmy Hendrix’s Purple Haze. Now do the same tune, but sing the words to the TV theme song to Green Acres in place of those of the original.
There, you just did your first mental mashup!
Some of the DJ’s doing mashups these days are really quite creative. They move in and out of genres within a single song, briefly foreshadow something to come, and then beat you over the head with the best part of it.
Here’s an example of two things you wouldn’t think would work in a fairly basic mashup: Madonna and the Sex Pistols
Ebert once describe Quentin Tarrantino movies as throwing a whole series of big scenes at you. He said that most thrillers might build up to a single shocking or grizzly scene, but that Tarrantino hits you with 12 of them with plenty of homages to previous films thrown in to boot.
A good mashup does the same: rather than having a song build to some single crescendo, they’ll take an alternate path to build to the same crescendo and then flip on to another. You already know how the original got to the crescendo-why not fast forward to the fun part?
The Mendozas represent the best of what the nation is celebrating this Independence Day weekend — liberty, freedom and the sacrifice it takes to keep them strong. They symbolize what’s right with America, a nation of immigrants that was built by opening its doors. And they speak to what could be so much better. At a time when anti-immigrant sentiment has swept through great swaths of the nation, much of it focused on those from Mexico, it’s worth recalling that more than 65,000 immigrants serve in the armed forces, about one-third of them legal residents but not yet citizens. Military service can shorten the usual five-year wait.
We should all be joyful and proud to welcome the Mendozas to our nation. USA Todaynotes that this contrasts starkly with the performance of Arizona high school students:
Immigrants seeking to become U.S. citizens have to pass a test, and the Mendoza brothers aced theirs this week in Baghdad. That’s more than you can say for a group of Arizona high school students who were surveyed recently on their knowledge of U.S. history and civics.
Just in time for Independence Day, the Goldwater Institute, a non-profit research organization in Phoenix, found that just 3.5% of surveyed students could answer enough questions correctly to pass the citizenship test. Just 25%, for example, correctly identified Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence.
I mentioned in an earlier post that we drew the title of this study from an Edward Gibbon quote:
In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.
That quote certainly does not apply to the Mendoza brothers. Can we say the same for young Americans born here in the United States? The United States was the first nation established not on the basis of ethnicity or tribalism but upon a set of ideals.
If you don’t the basics of American history and government, what chance is there that you are committed to liberty and self-determination? The pathetic level of ignorance displayed by this an other surveys are more than an indictment on our schooling system (and yes I’m looking at you too charter and private schools) but also an indictment of our entire society.
Consider the Gibbon quote and watch the above video. We have not been providing the type of education that the founders believed was essential to maintaining a system of ordered liberty.
It would be the height of folly to continue to do so.
Bill Evers has an excellent post over on his Ed Policy blog about how unreliable observational studies can be and how important it is to test claims with random-assignment research designs.
Observational studies (sometimes called epidemiological or quasi-experimental studies) do not randomly assign subjects to treatment or control conditions or use a technique that approximates random-assignment (like regression discontinuity). Instead they simply compare people who have self-selected or otherwise been assigned to receive a treatment to people who haven’t received that treatment, controlling statistically for observed differences between the two groups. The problem is that unobserved factors may really be causing any differences between the two groups, not the treatment. This is especially a problem when these unobserved factors are strongly related to whatever led to some people getting the treatment and others not.
The solution to this problem is random assignment. If subjects are assigned by lottery to receive a treatment or not, then the only difference between the two groups, on average, is whether they received the treatment. The two groups should otherwise be identical because only chance distinguishes them. Any differences between the two groups over time can be attributed to the treatment with high confidence.
If you don’t believe that research design makes a big difference, consider this table that Bill Evers provides on how much results change in the field of nutrition when random assignment (or clinical) studies are done to check on claims made by observational studies:
If we want to avoid the educational equivalent of quack medicine, we really need more random-assignment studies and we need to give the random-assignment studies we already have significantly greater weight when forming policy conclusions.
I believe that there are more random-assignment studies on vouchers than on any other educational policy and there are certainly more studies with positive results. The depth of positive, rigorous studies on voucher participant effects is worth keeping in mind each time some new observational or (even descriptive) study comes out on school choice, including the most recent report from Florida. Our opinion shouldn’t be based entirely on the latest study, especially if it lacks the rigorous design of several earlier studies.
Posted by matthewladner 
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Jay P. Greene's Blog 