Part two of my article on the relationship between economic and social conservatism is up over at Public Discourse. As promised, vouchers make an appearance:
Educational entrepreneurship is our only hope for replacing the failed 19th-century model that now reigns in both public and private schools. But social conservatives, a key political constituency of America’s school voucher programs, always oppose designing those programs in a way that would empower entrepreneurship. They want to put more kids in religious schools, but not expose those schools to the competition entrepreneurs would create. But while competition makes people uncomfortable, it is the only vital, life-giving force that can keep institutions mission-focused and drive them to be their best.
I have some tough love for the economic conservatives in there, too.
In a new Flypaper post, Checker and Mike argue that the federal government takeover of schools implementation of common standards can follow one of three paths:
1. “Let’s Become More Like France.” Here, we picture a powerful governing board—probably via a new compact among participating states—to oversee the standards, assessments, and many aspects of implementation, validation, and more.
2. “Don’t Rock the Boat.” We keep the Common Core footprint as small as possible. An existing group is charged with updating the standards when the time comes, but everything else stays with states, districts, and the market.
3. “One Foot before the Other.” This middle ground foresees an interim coordinating body that promotes information sharing, capacity building, and joint-venturing among participating states. By the time the Common Core needs revising, this interim body may evolve into something more permanent or may recommend a long-term governance plan.
In other words, our options are:
Too big, strong, and heavy handed.
Too weak, limited and complacent.
Just right!
Guess which one they favor. No hints!
JPGB readers will recognize Fordham’s longstanding addiction to the hemisphere fallacy – making themselves look good by oversimplifying the landscape into two extreme errors held by the extreme extremists on either side of them, and the reasonable middle ground occupied by reasonable middle grounders like themselves.
Some people say the earth is flat and others say it’s round, so the reasonable middle ground is to say it’s a hemisphere.
Personally, I’d rephrase those three Fordham options as follows:
So big and bold that the federal government takeover of schools becomes obvious, provoking an inevitable backlash from Americans who have repeatedly made it clear they don’t want any such thing.
So weak and limited that the federal government won’t actually be able to take over the schools.
Just strong enough to hand all schools over to federal control, but not so strong that the handover becomes obvious.
While we’re on the subject, Neal McCluskey notices something interesting in the new Fordham report:
All that said, there is one, small part of the report that I find quite satisfying. A few months ago, Fordham President Chester Finn called people like me and Jay Greene “paranoid” for arguing that national standards would be hollowed out by politics. Well, in the report, while it is not explicitly identified as such, you will find what I am going to take as an apology (not to mention a welcome admission):
How will this Common Core effort be governed over the long term?…This issue might seem esoteric, almost philosophical in light of the staggering amount of work to be done right now to make the standards real and the assessments viable. But we find it essential—not just for the long-term health of the enterprise, but also to allay immediate concerns that these standards might be co-opted by any of the many factions that want to impose their dubious ideas on American education. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to worry about this possibility [italics added]…
No, you don’t.
I’m not sure I would take it as an apology. If Checker wanted to apologize, he would. But he hasn’t.
Which leads me to wonder why he’s suddenly so anxious to make sure there’s something out there in print that shows him expressing exactly the same doubts we do. Something he could point to later, perhaps?
I have an update to Matt’s oustanding nomination of Herbert Dow for this year’s Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award. Dow, you will recall, is nominated for having used entrepreneurial ingenuity to circumvent corrupt political restrictions on his ability to serve his fellow human beings and improve the human condition.
Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have come up with a legal way of importing and distributing 75 and 100 watt light bulbs — by producing them in China, importing them as “small heating devices” and selling them as “heatballs.”
To improve energy efficiency, the EU has banned the sale of bulbs of over 60 watts — to the annoyance of the mechanical engineer from the western city of Essen.
Rotthaeuser studied EU legislation and realized that because the inefficient old bulbs produce more warmth than light — he calculated heat makes up 95 percent of their output, and light just 5 percent — they could be sold legally as heaters.
On their website (heatball.de/), the two engineers describe the heatballs as “action art” and as “resistance against legislation which is implemented without recourse to democratic and parliamentary processes.”
Costing 1.69 euros each ($2.38), the heatballs are going down well — the first batch of 4,000 sold out in three days.
Yeah, I’ll bet they did.
And here’s some food for thought for all you green-green lima beans out there:
Rotthaeuser has pledged to donate 30 cents of every heatball sold to saving the rainforest, which the 49-year-old sees as a better way of protecting the environment than investing in energy-saving lamps, which contain toxic mercury.
For those who are interested, over on Public Discourse I have an article out this morning on the changing relationship between social and economic conservatives, as illustrated by the phenomenon of the tea party.
It’s the first of two parts. School vouchers will make an appearance in Part 2, so stay tuned!
I have been participating in a series of conversations about the future of Catholic schools, in part because Arizona’s tax credit system has helped Catholic schools defy a national trend towards closures. During a recent discussion, the point was made that waves of Catholic immigrants opened schools during the 19th Century, but the current Hispanic wave is not replicating this trend. This got me to thinking “Why not?”
Part of the reason: finances. The religious orders from which the Catholic schools of old drew for faculty have declined in numbers. The low-cost part of a low-cost/high quality education has steadily eroded.
Catholic schools generally have the basics down for success a strong culture controlled by the staff focused on academics, active opt-in required by parents. Suburbanization and the decline in participation in religious orders have thrown Catholic schools into a spiral of decline nationally. The advent of charter schools threatens to deliver the coup de grace for inner city Catholic schools, many of which have served as the only high quality schooling option in their neighborhoods for decades.
Today’s Catholic immigrants don’t face the same type of religious discrimination faced by their 19th Century forerunners, but let’s face it, they are getting the short end of the public schooling stick more often than not. Earlier I had written about the possibility of creating high quality/low-cost private schools in which content is partially delivered through technology. So could this come in the form of Catholic schools version 2.0?
A little snooping around on google revealed that people are way ahead of me. Go here for a link to a Virtual Catholic school effort aimed at both Catholic homeschoolers and supplementing the effort of existing Catholic schools. They even mention a “Clicks and Bricks” solution on the page.
“Our core mission is to partner with existing Catholic schools so that they can extend their reach, and broaden their curriculum offerings without the added expense of staffing high end, small class loads. We offer a cost effective alternative for small, advanced classes, summer school programs, credit recovery, hospital-homebound programs, and many other options, saving schools the expense of running their own costly programs in the traditional manner. Students may sign up for individual classes, or schools may enroll entire classes or grade levels of students with us.”
Can technology and programs such as the Alliance for Catholic Education at Notre Dame and elsewhere replace the religious orders in the cost structure of Catholic schools? How far can innovative school models such as Cristo Rey go if they successfully substitute technology for labor to lower costs? What does the staffing stucture look like for a hybrid school, and what is the optimal mix of personal instruction and technology? On the revenue side, can states with significant and growing tax credit programs provide the seed capital to spur this type of innovation? Moreover, could a Spanish/English online Catholic school hybrid model (clicks and mortar) lead to a revival of the high quality/low-cost Catholic schooling in both the United States and Latin America?
I honestly don’t know the answer to these questions, but I do know that there is both a revenue and a cost side to providing K-12 options to disadvantaged children. If Catholic schools reboot, they might not only survive, they just might prosper. I’m anxious to see what happens next.
Schools of the 21st Century need to do lots and lots of things. That is the message from local experts impaneled by the teacher education sorority here at the University of Arkansas. Summarizing the guidance from the panel, the Northwest Arkansas Times writes:
Students today need stronger foundations in foreign languages, physical education and the arts to participate and compete in a global economy, several panelists said Tuesday.
At the same time, schools need to be more responsive and tolerant to diversity, focus on higher educational standards and to be more effective in the use of data to better understand student learning, said Springdale School Superintendent Jim Rollins.
Schools also need a stronger foundation in multiculturalism because by 2030, research indicates more than half of all students will be non-white, Rollins said.
Later in the article, a professor is quoted as saying that our elementary and secondary students need a strong foundation in physical education, since they may end up working in a foreign country where people have to walk a lot.
I support foreign languages (though I speak none fluently), physical fitness (though I am a bit hefty), the arts (though I can’t draw to save my life), diversity (though I am a straight white male), high education standards (though I have a Ph.D. from Harvard), and data-based decision making (though I don’t always follow the projections when setting my fantasy football lineup). These are all desirable things for students. But are they all equally desirable? Don’t we need to prioritize and make tradeoffs? After all, children are only in school an average of 6.5 hours out of each school day. If everything is important, isn’t nothing important?
The laundry list of supposedly required 21st Century skills articulated by the panel reminded me of the “Mountain of a Man” in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Upon entering a fancy restaurant, he refuses the offer of a menu, instead ordering plate after plate of everything. What does the 21st Century diner need in a meal? He needs steak, chicken, salmon, pork chops, tofu, arugula, tomatoes, yams, French fries, paella, gumbo, wienerschnitzel, lutefisk, roast turkey, pumpkin pie, carrot cake, and some more steak and salmon for good measure. He also needs a larger restaurant staff to prepare all of these foods and serve them to him during his meal. Can you say, “administrative bloat?”
The result of lacking discipline in selecting foods to eat is obesity and, in the movie, the Mountain of a Man explodes after a waiter insists that he cap off his bacchanal meal with “a wafer-thin mint.” The clear message is that we have to make good choices and set priorities. We can’t have everything. As John Chubb and Terry Moe originally argued in Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, a problem with education policy set by local experts through political bodies like school boards is that everyone has their own educational hobby-horse. Each contributor to policy making will insist that their pet program get adopted. The result is a curriculum like the Mountain of a Man — massive, bloated, and utterly lacking in discernment. Eventually something has to give.
How do we set educational priorities if lots of things are worth learning? One solution to the curricular and administrative bloat that comes from local experts and officials designing education is to allow the educational programs of schools to develop organically based on feedback from the choices of parents. As parents we want our students to develop many skills and master many subjects, but we also realize that the opportunities are not limitless and children need to focus on what is important for them. Parents who strongly value the arts would gravitate towards schools that emphasize the arts. Parents who instead think that science and math are the most important subjects would be attracted to ESTEM schools. Parents who feel that physical education is the most important skill for the 21st Century would send their children to ancient Sparta.
Schools would adapt to the choices of parents, offering more programs in areas of excessive demand and fewer programs in areas of lesser demand. Although education experts might warn us that curricula driven by parental choices might be intolerant of diversity and devoid of rigor in areas such as reading, writing, math, and science, I have seen no evidence that such worries are valid. The research on school choice and tolerance actually indicates that tolerance and a variety of other civic values tend to increase when parents are allowed to choose schools. I’ve spoken to many low-income parents in focus groups and all of them want their children to develop mastery of core competencies. Many, but not all of them, also express a desire for their child to learn a foreign language or develop as an artist or musician.
The point is that parents have views of what educational programs are best for their children that differ from each other and from many of the experts, but those views tend to gravitate towards rigor in traditional and important academic areas. If we let parents choose schools, thereby pressuring schools to provide programs that are responsive to those preferences, we can’t be certain what we would get but it probably would be quite reasonable. Our children wouldn’t get everything on the menu, but what they would receive from a 21st Century education driven by parental choice would likely be both nutritious and delicious. Plus, nobody would have to explode.
The Oklahoma legislature and its Democratic Governor adopted a law allowing disabled students to use public funds to attend a private school if they wished to do so. Similar laws have been passed in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Utah, and Arizona.
Disabled students have had to fight for decades to receive an adequate education from the public school system. Federal legislation, now called IDEA, was adopted in the mid-1970s to ensure an appropriate eduction for disabled students. Unfortunately, having a legal right to something and actually receiving it are two very different things and many disabled students continue to be denied appropriate services despite their legal entitlements.
That’s why several states have decided to empower families with disabled children with an additional mechanism by which they could ensure receiving an appropriate education — special education vouchers that would allow them to transfer to private schools if they believe that the public schools are not serving them adequately. Oklahoma is the latest state to offer these vouchers but it almost certainly won’t be the last as several other states are considering the idea. And there is good evidence that special education vouchers are significantly improving outcomes.
But, according toEducation Week, four Oklahoma school districts have decided not to offer these vouchers that are required by state law. The reasons given for willfully disobeying the state law are varied. One district, Broken Arrow, has suggested that the voucher laws violate the state’s constitution because funds would go to religious schools.
Besides the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court and several states have ruled that these vouchers would not pose this type of constitutional threat, apparently public school district officials in Oklahoma think they know better. And they’ve discovered some new constitutional process by which school officials interpret the constitution rather than the courts.
Actually, it’s not really a new method of deciding who should interpret the constitution, since it was a method well-established by segregationist school officials and governors who believed that they had the power to block black students from exercising their civil rights no matter what the law or courts said. Now it is disabled students who are being blocked at the schoolhouse door.
Public school officials get away with this kind of willful violation of the law far too easily. No one will go to jail. No one will lose their job. No one will be sanctioned in any way. And they wonder why having a law to ensure appropriate services for disabled students isn’t sufficient. Maybe it’s because public school officials apparently don’t have to follow the law.
Molly, if you’re reading this – you still have a choice. You can try to run away from what you know you’re called to do, but Victor Laszlo is right: like Rick Blaine, you’re trying to run away from yourself, and you will never succeed. Or you can rejoin the fight from wherever you are now; the Internet makes it possible to do your part to save the world from any computer station, anywhere.
In case you missed the news, Molly Norris, the cartoonist who came up with the idea for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, was admonished by the FBI that she needed to erase her identity and go into hiding, and she has done so. As Mark Steyn and others have observed, it appears that the United States law enforcement apparatus is now, effectively, working for the other side. Terrorizing people into abandoning their freedoms is precisely what the enemy is trying to accomplish. Now the FBI is helping them.
This is not the same thing as doing this for a witness in a criminal trial. You send mob informants into hiding because for them, hiding is what they need to do in order to fight the enemy. You can’t testify against the mob if the mob can kill you before you get to the stand. And if they get to you after you take the stand, the next informant won’t testify.
But for people like Norris, not hiding is what they need to do to fight the enemy. If mob informants go into hiding, we win. If Molly Norris goes into hiding, the enemy wins.
Earlier this year, when Norris cancelled her proposed Everybody Draw Mohammed Day out of fear for her life, I expressed my disappointment and she showed up in the comments to ask where all the people who were supposed to be protecting her had gone. It was a very just question! And she was thinking only of politicians and intellectuals, not the police. Who knew, then, that even the police would turn against her?
Yet we can’t give up. We can’t become cowards just becasue the FBI has done so. We are still human beings, and there is no escape from responsibility.
Back in the fall of 2004, just after Theo Van Gogh was murdered, an artist named Chris Ripke painted a mural on a Rotterdam street with the text: “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. A scriptural quote, but universally accepted, one would think, and not at all controversial.
Needless to say, local Muslims complained, and the municipality ordered city workers to remove the mural. A video reporter [for a local TV station] named Wim Nottroth stood in front of the mural in an attempt to prevent its removal, but he was arrested by police.
The authorities also ordered all news videos of the operation destroyed, but at least one survived and was uncovered by the diligent detective work of Vlad Tepes.
The mural was on private property. The owner of the property had approved the mural. No laws were violated. But the police destroyed the mural and confiscated all videos of their crime (or so they thought) and erased them.
Four months later, it was revealed that an imam from the mosque that demanded the destruction of the mural was connected to terrorist organizations and inciting his followers to violence. He was deported for being in the country illegally.
Nottroth had been sent to the scene in his capacity as a journalist. His job was to film the police destroying the mural. But as the moment of destruction approached, Nottroth realized that although he was a journalist, he was a human being first. And nobody else was going to do what needed to be done by somebody.
So he went and stood in front of the mural. And he stood there until the police arrested him.
The translation from the Dutch is awkward in some places, but it’s impossible not to hear the courage and integrity behind the awkwardness: “We all do agree to that, don’t we? Thou shalt not kill, we all agree to, isn’t it?…If this goes away there will be more misery than there would be if you leave it.” He couldn’t have been more eloquent if he’d quoted Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration or Milton’s Aeropagetica.
This exchange encapsulates a lot in a short space:
Nottroth: It should be possible here in a democratic…
Policeman: You rather go stand there.
Nottroth: Well then, I will remain standing here.
Darn straight.
Each and every one of us must be ready to say that at any time, when our duty as human beings calls upon us. For reminding the world that standing for freedom, even against your own government when necessary, is every person’s responsibility, I nominate Wim Nottroth for the 2010 Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award.
Posted by Greg Forster 
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
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