Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by Mike McShane)

The internet is awesome. From the Marine in Afghanistan who can Skype home to Alabama to help his wife tuck his kids in, to the incredible amount of free, crowd-sourced information on sites like Wikipedia, to the connective power that social media has provided, even to the point of helping taking down unjust dictatorships, it has been an incredible force for good in our world.

But the internet is also terrible. The combination of anonymity, a perceived soapbox, and the belief that there is real connection between opinion makers and mothers’ basement dwellers has surfaced an ugliness that has meted mob justice (sometimes incorrectly), harassed people, hacked into cell phones and shared private photos, and said horrible things that I’m not even going to hyperlink to.

The internet has developed a word for the people who perpetuate such ugliness, trolls.  It is evocative and accurate. Some of these trolls become well known. Others shift from user name to user name and IP address to IP address to guard their secrecy.

By and large, trolls are terrible and most websites are powerless to do anything about them. But, a recent Gizmodo post reminded me of an individual that took on trolling in the only way that might actually work, by trolling the trolls.

Ken M, the nom-de-plume of comedian Kenneth McCarthy, pops into comment sections with a childlike wonder and an idiocy that is so deep and true that it drives self-righteous and pedantic internet commenters nuts.  Here are a couple of examples:

You tell ’em Ken.

I love Ken M for three reasons. First and foremost, he makes me laugh. Like big dirty, laughs. Second, he’s not mean spirited.  Sure, he’s pulling these folks leg and we’re having a laugh at their expense, but he’s part of the joke too, and there is no nastiness in what he is doing. Finally, like all great comedy, Ken M’s shtick is rooted in something true—it is stupid to argue on the internet.  It is stupid to argue on the internet, and only by watching a stupid person argue on the internet can we fully appreciate just how stupid it is to argue on the internet.

So I’d like to nominate the pedant-baiting, Mars Rover-chastising, Pompeii-defaming, National Geographic-baking, Ken M for the Al. Hope he made you laugh as hard as he made me.

[Guest Post by Jason Bedrick]

Enrollment in Wisconsin’s voucher program doubled for the second year in a row and members of the public education establishment are not happy.

“Private school vouchers aren’t making our kids smarter — but they are spiking our property taxes and siphoning money away from our kids’ public schools,” Mary Young, president of Support Our Schools Wauwatosa, said in a statement.

If the vouchers aren’t making kids smarter, then neither are the district schools. A longitudinal study found that they score about the same on test scores, with advantages for the voucher students in some years. The major difference is that the voucher students graduate at a higher rate and cost about 40 percent less per pupil — important facts that somehow didn’t make it into the Journal-Sentinel‘s coverage.

The Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated this year that the [school voucher] expansion could shift $600 million to $800 million from public schools over the next decade.

State Schools Superintendent Tony Evers said at the time that the plan would hurt public school budgets and students.

“You lose two or three kids, it doesn’t mean you can lay off five teachers,” Evers said. “It will have major negative impacts.”

First, it must be the case that Evers was misquoted. There’s no way he actually believes that a school losing “two or three kids” will suffer “major negative impacts.” If two or three kids moved out or town or started homeschooling and the resulting fiscal impact was anything approaching “major,” the town should fire the principal and impeach the school board for gross incompetence.

But wait, what about that “$600 to $800 million” that will shift “from public schools over the next decade”? Isn’t that a lot of money?

Well yes… and no. Here the Journal-Sentinel reporter yet again fails to provide the crucial context: how much the state and local governments currently spend on education. According to the latest figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Wisconsin public school system cost more than $10.6 billion per year (about half of which is state spending). Even assuming no growth in spending, that’s more than $106 billion over the next decade. In other words, the voucher program expansion is projected to result in a reduction of about 0.56 percent to 0.75 percent of public spending on district schools. (The precise amount may vary slightly depending on the data source and growth assumptions, but we’re still talking about a fraction of one percent.)

Moreover, this calculation does not factor in the reduction in costs associated with students who leave the system. Plus, as Marty Lueken recently detailed at the Friedman Foundation blog, under the current school funding formula, “school districts that lose students to the parental choice program actually end up with more revenue for each student who remains in their schools.”

In summary, the projected fiscal impact of the voucher expansion on district schools is minuscule overall and district schools may even see an increase in their per-student funding. Of course, that’s not the impression that a context-free mention of “$600 to $800 million” gives, which is why providing that context is so essential. Readers who don’t crunch the numbers themselves aren’t just uninformed, they’re misinformed. Failure to provide that context is journalistic malpractice.