Carey, a pundit at Education Sector, must also oppose the day care tuition tax credit adopted under President Clinton, deductions for charitable donations, and a host of other uses of the tax code to encourage or discourage what people do with their own money.
I say this because it is the logical conclusion that flows from Cary’s post at The Quick and the Ed railing against the tax credit-supported school scholarship program in Arizona whose legality was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court last week.
Carey seems to think that the Arizona tax credit is an unusual and inherently “corrupt” deviation from the “well-established process for spending public resources.” According to Carey, the normal and appropriate process is:
First, the government raises money through taxes. Then, elected representatives pass a law directing how that money should be spent. One could fill a warehouse with examples of how this process fails to be optimal. But it is open, rational and fair at the core, which is why democracies the world over and throughout history spend money this way.
So if Arizona citizens want to support religious schools with taxpayer money, they should go to the statehouse during budget season and make their case alongside advocates for regular public schools, roads, hospitals, police protection, mental health, higher education, state parks, light rail, and so forth.
Of course, that is one way that democratically elected representatives make policy. Another very common way to make policy is to use the tax code by offering deductions or credits to shape how people behave with their own money.
If Carey were consistent he would be incensed that promoters of home-ownership or charitable-giving use the tax code to encourage these behaviors with private money rather than having direct government appropriations to home-owners or philanthropists. He should denounce all tax deductions and credits as a “convolution” and “shell game.”
Carey reserves his venom for school scholarship tax credits, while inconsistently ignoring all other similar uses of tax credits and deductions (most of which I assume he supports), because he particularly hates private school choice. He hates vouchers with a condescension that is extreme even for DC policy-wonks, as we have noted on JPGB in the past. The only convolution here is Carey inconsistently arguing against private school choice as a violation of democratic policymaking principles rather than making the direct argument against the merits of private school choice.
Again, if Carey wishes to be consistent he should oppose the charitable giving deduction because that money really belongs to the government, not to individuals who the government is encouraging to support charities. He should also call for an elimination of the deduction because there are some charities that have misused or unwisely spent the money they have received. Keeping the deduction but cracking down on abuse clearly wouldn’t satisfy him because he seems unmoved by efforts in Arizona to do that with the tax-credit scholarship program.
Perhaps Kevin Carey should stick to writing about higher education, where he has a number of useful things to say. When he wanders into the world of K-12 he seems to lose the ability to make logical and consistent arguments. It is obvious he has not thought through the implication of his argument that would oppose all uses of tax deductions and credits. He’s so focused on under-cutting private school choice that he fails to consider what his position would mean for home-ownership, charitable giving, or pre-school attendance. Emerson may have been right that a foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but that doesn’t mean we can abandon consistency altogether.
Republicans take the U.S. House but the Democrats manage to hold the Senate. Paging Dr. Gridlock…
I just heard Larry Sabato just predict that as many as 10 state House chambers will switch from Democratic majorities to Republican majorities. The Indiana House is one of those chambers, giving Governor Mitch Daniels Republican majorities in each chamber. Wisconsin may follow suit. Ditto for Ohio– where Kasich is now Governor elect, and Republicans recaptured a House majority and added to their majority in the Senate.
Not all the news is bad for the Democrats, most notably Harry Reid’s victory in Nevada. The majority leader’s son Rory Reid however fell short in the Nevada Governor race against Republican Brian Sandoval. This was an especially interesting race from an education angle, as Sandoval called for Florida reforms, and Reid proposed weighted student funding. Sandoval read Reid’s education plan, and declared that it was a good plan, so he was going to do it and the Florida reforms.
Susana Martinez will be the nation’s first Latina governor after winning the Governor’s office in New Mexico. Governor-elect Martinez platform also incorporated Florida reforms.
Speaking of Florida, the Governor’s race there between Democrat Alex Sink and Republican Rick Scott is very close. Current Florida Governor Charlie Crist is close to being very unemployed. Illinois governor’s race is also neck and neck.
Jerry Brown has won in California over Meg Whitman. Pray for him- the Democrats now control all the levers in Sacramento. The USA will never make progress moving up the education tables with California hanging as an a huge academic albatross around our neck.
(Too) little noticed among the all-consuming drama of watching President Obama and Speaker Pelosi drive their Congressional majority off of a cliff are a number of governor and legislative races with education implications. Governorships and legislative chamber majorities are in play all over the place. Will try to pass on information here as I get it tonight.
In keeping with our tradition on JPGB, Halloween is the time to announce the winner of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award. “The Al” is meant to honor a person who has made a significant contribution to improving the human condition.
“Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards. Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997. And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu. Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists. From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.
Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone. By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian. But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.”
This year the nominees were The Most Interesting Man in the World, the fictional spokesman for Dos Equis and model of masculine virtue, Stan Honey, the inventor of the yellow first down line in TV football broadcasts, Herbert Dow, the founder of Dow Chemical and subverter of a German chemicals cartel, Wim Nottroth, the man who resisted Rotterdam police efforts to destroy a mural that read “Thou Shall Not Kill” following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist, and Marion Donovan and Victor Mills, the developers of the disposable diaper.
These are all worthy nominees. They all meet the minimum requirements in that none of them threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone. And they all have done something to significantly improve the human condition. But I think we can rule out The Most Interesting Man because I’m not comfortable with the idea of giving the award to a fictional person. I also think we can rule out Herbert Dow because I’m not sure that he did anything beyond what almost all entrepreneurs have to do — overcome the government-assisted cartels of existing businesses to prevent the entry of new competitors.
Stan Honey’s yellow first down line is an amazing improvement for watching football on TV, but what about those who see the game in the stadium? I keep expecting there to be a yellow line on the field, which decreases my pleasure from watching the game in person. As soon as Stan Honey figures out how to install yellow lights to form lines in the turf, I’ll be sure to give him The Al, but until then he will have to be satisfied with a nomination.
Marion Donovan and Victor Mills greatly improved my life and the life of countless million with the invention of the disposable diaper. I should mention that in addition to their greater convenience, better function, and lower cost, disposable diapers may even be better for the environment.
All of this makes for a compelling case to award The Al to Donovan and Mills. But there is an even more compelling case to give The Al to Wim Nottroth. All of the consumer items that improve our lives, whether spicy chicken, roller-bags, or disposable diapers, depend on the existence of liberty for people to choose how they live, including what they make, what they buy, and what they believe. If the forces of tyranny that Wim Nottroth resisted prevail, we will eventually lose the liberty to enjoy these other benefits.
The tyranny Nottroth directly resisted was the kowtowing of Western governments to radical Muslims who found it offensive to say “Thou Shall not Kill” in the aftermath of the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic fascist who disliked a film made by van Gogh criticizing Islam. If we allow these restrictions on free speech we are surrendering our liberty bit by bit.
The only way we lose our liberty completely is if we surrender it to the new wave of fascists. Contrary to the gloomy claims of defeatists during the Cold War and today, freedom is not at a disadvantage in a struggle with tyranny. Freedom does not make us weaker; it makes us much stronger. Freedom makes us richer, which gives us the material advantages to defeat the enemies of freedom. Freedom improves the quality of our information and decision-making. Under tyranny everyone distorts information to fit the wishes of the tyrants for fear of punishment. And no one scrutinizes the quality of decision-making. The competitive market of ideas and the freedom to critique decisions improves the their quality in free societies.
As long as we maintain our appreciation for freedom and our desire to struggle for it, both at home and abroad, we are sure to win. The problem is that it is all too easy forget how wonderful our freedom is relative to the tyranny that exists in many other places. And it is an even greater danger for us to tire of having to struggle to preserve it, both at home and abroad. That struggle never ends. When the challenge from Nazis faded, the threat from the Soviets rose, and when that crumbled the danger has come from radical Islam. And when we defeat them, as I am confident we eventually will, some other threat will take its place.
There will always be people who prefer to tell other people how to live — what you can say, what you can buy, what you can sell, with whom you can sleep, and what you can think. In fact, there is nothing natural about freedom. It’s natural to want your own freedom, but it is equally natural to want to tell everyone else what to do. Respecting other people’s freedom is something that is acquired and sustained, not something with which we are born.
Clearly some government officials in The Netherlands as well as in other places in the free world are failing to teach and sustain the love of freedom. They tire of the struggle to preserve freedom and look for compromises with tyrants. Wim Nottroth resisted his government’s unacceptable surrender to tyranny. He reminded us how free speech is worth fighting for, even in the face of murderous thugs and their lackey government enablers. For that he has significantly improved the human condition and is most worthy of this year’s Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.
Since several of you will be donning masks in a couple of days, possibly to rob banks with enhanced anonymity, it seemed appropriate to share the great Tom Jones homage to Point Break . Yes, I know how you JPGB readers think, don’t bother to deny it. Really, who hasn’t thought about getting together with your buddies on Halloween, donning ex-President disguises, robbing banks and blending into a crowd of trick or treaters to foil the police?
It was even included in my Point Break 2: Electric Boogaloo screenplay I mailed to Keeanu Reeves in 2001. Keanu, baby, I’m still waiting to hear back from you! Point Break of course was voted the Greatest Bad Movie of All Time by JPGB readers, an honor which it richly deserves. Tom Jones has provided the only sequel:
One of those little one-sentence news items on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal reads:
College tuition and fees climbed again this year, but the burden was tempered by an increase in financial aid.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t that read:
The real price of a college education remained constant, but concealed government subsidies to colleges kept growing.
If you add up the revenue colleges derive directly from government through grants and contracts, the indirect revenue from government cartelization of labor pools such as teachers, nurses and social workers, and concealed subsidies through student loan programs, I wonder how big the total financial dependence of our higher education institutions on socialism in its various forms really is.
Over 50%, do you think?
It doesn’t actually matter; the tipping point beyond which an institution becomes de facto subservient to socialism is well below the halfway mark. The ideological reasons colleges indoctrinate students with collectivism and use their social prestige to promote it in the nation at large have been widely analyzed. The institutional reasons seem to me to require further publicization.
Four years ago or so I attended the graduation ceremony of Arizona State University’s law school. I remember thinking to myself that there were a rather large number of new attorneys walking across the stage. Later I was told that ASU is not considered a large law school, and this was during the bubble years.
One Boston College Law School third-year—miraculously, still anonymous—begged for his tuition back in exchange for a promise to drop out without a degree, in an open letter to his dean published earlier this month. “This will benefit both of us,” he argues. “On the one hand, I will be free to return to the teaching career I left to come here. I’ll be able to provide for my family without the crushing weight of my law school loans. On the other hand, this will help BC Law go up in the rankings, since you will not have to report my unemployment at graduation to US News. This will present no loss to me, only gain: in today’s job market, a J.D. seems to be more of a liability than an asset.”
Herewith I offer my first attempt at a grand unified field theorem of education reform. It’s a first attempt. Critique, suggestions, praise, horror, abomination, or testimonies of reveltory epiphanies are all equally welcome.
Most of the education space is divided into two loosely congealed groups. There is a lot of diversity within each group, and sometimes there are nasty fights within the respective groups. But the big landscape is most fundamentally dominated by the dividing line between the two groups.
One group wants schools to focus on teaching basic skills first, and then a traditional liberal arts curriculum, to all students. The other group wants schools to be, in various ways, more “relevant to real life” – including everyone from down-to-earth, leathery-handed blue-collar voc ed advocates to pointy-headed, pie-in-the-sky, ivory tower touchy-feely progressives. Let’s call these groups the liberal artists and the pragmatists.
[Clarification: When I say “basic skills” I mean the three Rs.]
My formation and career have been entirely among the liberal artists. Ever since I read Dewey in college and recoiled in horror as if from the face of Satan himself – and indeed I can think of few intellectuals whose work has been more useful to Satan than Dewey – I have known that whatever else schools must be, they must not be what Dewey wanted.
For example, most of what’s in this video seems to me to be not only true, but urgently needed:
And I found myself troubled by something in this exchange. Boiled down, it ran like this: Checker Finn sounded the alarm that P21, a key pragmatist organization that wants to destroy basic skills standards, even to the extent of suggesting that schools should really teach less algebra, was being incorporated into the push for national standards. Jay responded more or less with, “yes, and you should have seen that coming, because we told you so.”
Jay was, of course, right. But both Checker and Jay seemed to take it for granted not only that P21 wants to destroy academic standards, which it does, but also that the very idea of anyone wanting schools to provide practical applications, teach critical thinking or “instill an entrepreneurial mindset” is dangerous. That strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I want my daughter’s school to instill the entrepreneurial mindset.
And I don’t even buy the idea that applied or attitudinal outcomes are unmeasurable. We may not yet have an agreed-on way to measure them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not measurable. As Milton Friedman said, if you can measure it, measure it; if you can’t measure it, measure it anyway.
I think when Jay describes these things as “unmeasurable” what he really means is that they can’t be measured for accountability purposes, because that kind of measurement can be more easily manipulated. And there’s the rub; too many of us liberal artists have now reached the point where we’re only thinking about accountability, not about education.
Hence, my attempt to construct a grand unified field theorem.
I still think the liberal artists have a powerful historical case against the pragmatists. To speak in a fairly broad generalization, in the 20th century, K-12 public schools mostly gave a traditional academic education to middle-class (and above) white kids, and all the other kids were barely educated at all (if they were even in school). That problem was bad enough in the beginning, but it actually got worse over time, not better, even as the rest of society did a better and better job of including marginalized populations. That’s primarily because the school system fell under the thrall of the pragmatists, who didn’t value traditional academic education, and were even actively hostile to it because they thought it was inimical to learning practical application, critical thinking, creativity, the entrepreneurial mindset, etc.
The practical result of such thinking has always been the same. In the white suburbs, parents are rich and powerful enough to place limits on how far the schools go in gutting the traditional academic curriculum. Fail to teach a rich white kid algebra, and his mom and dad will notice, and they will make their presence felt. But in poorer and darker-skinned communities, while parents may want basic skills education just as much, they have less ability to make their demands heard. So the kids didn’t learn basic skills, and as a result, nothing else the pragmatists tried to teach them worked either.
The rise of standardized testing was the revenge of the liberal artists. They wanted to force schools to teach basic skills to every child. And bully for them! They’ve accomplished much good in doing so.
Yet it doesn’t work in the long term. Yes, to some extent you need to hit institutions over the head when they misbehave. But that alone cannot make an institution work. You can hit some of the people some of the time, but you can’t hit all of the people all of the time – as NCLB has shown. And if you try to make the club big enough to hit everyone over the head all the time, you’ll be giving way too much power to the people who hold the club – who watches the watchmen?
What’s needed to make institutions work is intrinsic motivation. People have to want to do what they ought to do, not primarily because of some extrinsic reward or punishment but because they understand it to be good in itself. No extrinsic motivations are strong and consistent enough to keep people doing what they need to be doing day after day after day.
And on that score, we liberal artists are not offering what we need to offer. We’re just hitting people over the head with basic skills tests. Watch that video again – that’s the voice of the professional educator who wants to educate the whole child, and doesn’t understand what basic skills tests have to do with that. He even affirms his desire for “higher standards,” but doesn’t understand why standardized tests are necessary for that.
I don’t think his view is adequate by itself. I think he’s missing the value of traditional liberal arts education. But if we want people like him to adopt what we have, we need to offer intrinsic motivation for liberal arts education – and that’s going to mean connecting our concerns to their concerns.
I’ll cut out the rest of the verbiage and come to the main point: Education needs to integrate the legitimate concerns of the liberal artists – basic skills and traditional academics – with the legitimate concerns of the pragmatists – a focus on active problem solving, creative thinking, and entrepreneurial innovation.
There are two main obstacles:
Liberal artists and pragmatists see each others’ concerns as mutually exclusive. To pragmatists, time spent on basic skills and liberal arts is time wasted pursuing a failed 19th century model of education, time that could be spent on teaching kids how to solve real-world problems and connecting with their real-world needs. Meanwhile, to liberal artists, time spent on all that practical stuff is time that will ultimately be wasted because it’s outside of effective accountability structures that will ensure the schools teach all children basic skills and traditional academics.
Some people have discovered that they can get credit for talking about integrating the two concerns without actually integrating them. See for example P21, which has been making noises about basic skills and 21st century skills being a “both-and” proposition. So are they now prepared to state for the record that schools should teach more algebra, not less? Eh, not so much.
The answer? School choice, of course. It solves both the liberal artists’ problems (how do we force schools to teach poor black kids how to read, and raise standards across the board for all kids?) and the pragmatists’ problems (how do we create new models of education that will prepare kids better for real life?) without a naïve reliance on changing schools through brute force systems (the most widespread fallacy among liberal artists) or neglecting to hold schools accountable at all (the most widespread fallacy among the pragmatists).
Coming next: where fighting the unions fits into all this.
HT to DB for this hidden-camera window into a New Jersey teacher union meeting. Beside the bad attitudes and bad language, it looked like a pretty lame party. They haven’t hung out with Ladner.
HHGTTG on the many uses of towels: “wrap it round your head to … avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous)”
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
The Journal reports that the New York City DOE, at the bidding of the UFT, is withholding teacher data that would allow the public to evaluate 12,000 teachers the same way the LA Times did in Los Angeles earlier this year. The data were to be released in response to public record requests by the Journal and other organizations, but the UFT sued. Now a court will have to pry the data loose.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
