So you think slapping a high-stakes testing system on top of a government monopoly is going to tell you how well your kids are doing? Think again, mes amis, think again.
State finds schools broke WASL protocols
By The Associated Press
TACOMA — The state school superintendent's office has investigated nearly two dozen reports this year of improperly administered standardized tests at public schools across Washington.
In one case, a class of fifth-grade students in Graham, Pierce County, corrected their Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) tests after finishing them, The News Tribune of Tacoma reported yesterday.
School officials later invalidated the results of the science tests and gave the Rocky Ridge Elementary School teacher who administered them a 15-day suspension for violating WASL test protocols, the newspaper said.
Details of "irregularities" in the testing were spelled out in nearly 200 pages of documents obtained by The News Tribune through public-disclosure requests.
A handful of teachers have been reprimanded, placed on paid leave or suspended without pay after reportedly disclosing questions before the exam, changing answers or counseling students to fix their answers.
The state might invalidate certain tests at seven schools and is closely watching scores at eight other schools, according to preliminary estimates.
If you want an education system that will force schools to be responsive to your needs, and to prepare your children for higher-education and life and work, look not to our dysfunctional education monopoly, but to a free market.
In a market, schools are chosen (or rejected) based on their ability to deliver the things families want. All the things families want, not just a passing grade on one set of tests.
When you eliminate parental choice and evaluate monopoly schools using a single set of tests, you create incentives for exactly the kind of fraud we're seeing in Washington state. More broadly, however, you create a system in which schools cannot tailor their services to the particular demands of the families they serve, having instead to offer a standardized, homogenized course of instruction to match the standardized, homogenized tests.
Folks, Gidget is not a widget. Kids and families have different priorities, talents, and needs. Why have we turned education into a government cheese factory?
The dedication of the WWII memorial in D.C. is not the only commemoration going on today. While Americans remembered the War to preserve democracy, 5,000 Hong Kong demonstrators remembered the Beijing massacre that kept it at bay.
Fifteen years ago, the Chinese government sent tanks and troops into Tiananmen Square to disperse peaceful pro-democracy activists, "killing hundreds, perhaps even thousands."
The Independent of Zaire has thoughtful coverage of the Hong Kong demonstrations:
"Return the power to the people! End one-party rule!" the demonstrators demanded in slogans that have been condemned by Chinese officials. In mainland China, the ruling Communists ban any other political party.
Brandishing banners and placards, singing patriotic ballads, the protesters marched from Victoria Park to the main government offices in the heart of the Asian financial hub.
Some carried a mock coffin symbolising the "death of democracy".
Political tension is rising after Beijing said last month it would not allow full direct elections in 2007, when the next election of the city's leader is due.
The resignations of some popular broadcasters have fuelled the tension, because they cited threats of violence in incidents that prompted questions about freedoms in the city.
"We are here to mourn those who died 15 years ago," said Szeto Wah of the organising Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China.
Protesters urged China to vindicate the movement.
"I have come here every year and I will continue to come so long as the movement is not vindicated. So many people have died and their lives must be remembered," said a marcher who identified herself as Mrs Yam.
"Release all dissidents held on the mainland!" Szeto shouted. "Allow all Chinese dissidents in exile overseas to return home!"
I wonder if the French media are covering this story, given their slavish desire to please and appease the Chinese government (just search this blog for the word "French" ...)?
Just got back from the Cato Institute International Education Conference in D.C. (see May 26th post). May post some commentary on it in the coming days, but too sleepy and jet-lagged to do so now.
Just one thing I wanted to note today: On the flight into D.C. I was fortunate to be seated diagonally across from a Mr. Ross, who was awarded the congressional medal of honor for his service in WW II. It was nice to have a chance to say thank you in person.
As memorial day approaches, to all who have served in our armed forces: thank you.
In the current issue of US Magazine--screeeeech. Halt. Did he say US Magazine? Yes. Yes he did. Hey, look folks, these days I'm more embarrased to admit that I take a peek at the New York Times every now and then than to admit a casual glance at the pop culture rags.
Anyway, the current issue of the aforementioned mag has this quote from pop star Pink:
I need my nipples squeezed before every show. It gets me pumped to go on stage. My assistant Jackie has it down to a fine art.
There's an interesting item to put on your resume:
February 2003 - May 2004: Squeezed Pink's nipples (see letter of recommendation, attached).
I bring this up because I'm sure there will be plenty of preparatory nipple squeezing going on in the Green Room at the Cato Institute on Thursday morning, as the panelists get ready discuss the international evidence on parent-driven education markets.
Well, maybe not. But hey, with or without pinched areoli, I'm sure there will be much animated debate and the sharing of valuable insights on how best to organize school systems. I'll be delivering a paper titled "Market Education and its Critics: Vetting School Choice Criticisms Against the International Evidence."
You can drop by Cato if you're in D.C., or catch the live (and subsequently, the archived) webcast.
The Palm Beach Post newspaper has attacked Florida’s voucher and education tax credit programs with religious zeal ever since they began. With each new editorial and "news" story, The Post drifts further and further from the shores of reality.
Its most recent rant was over the fact that schools serving McKay voucher students are not compelled to accept the voucher as full payment. The McKay voucher program is only open to disabled students. Here's an excerpt from The Post's editorial:
Florida's voucher programs have crossed the line at which the pretense of helping students ends and the real goal of enriching private schools becomes clear.
As The Post reported this week, private schools that take McKay vouchers to teach disabled students originally could not charge tuition in excess of the vouchers. But in 2001, a private school operator who takes the disabled-student vouchers lobbied for a change that has blown away the cap.
The change was made so stealthily that most lawmakers didn't notice. But the effect is clear. Parents of disabled students have to pay more -- thousands more, in some cases -- and the private schools can reap correspondingly higher incomes....
As voucher proponents such as Floridians for School Choice readily admit, their ultimate goal is a voucher that every student can take to whatever school the parents choose. While that might sound like equality, in practice, vouchers under such a system would provide a subsidy for private schools and wealthier parents. Public schools and some private schools would accept the voucher as full tuition. But many private schools simply would increase tuition, perhaps passing a share of the publicly provided windfall back to the parents. Any scheme, such as that one, that gives public money to every child who attends private school either will force a big increase in taxes or -- more likely -- a big reduction in budgets for regular public schools serving families that can't afford the extra private school tuition.
Disclaimer: While I favor the expansion (and revision) of existing voucher programs, I have long argued that there is a better way of reintroducing market forces to the field of education. My reservations about vouchers notwithstanding, The Post's concerns are nothing but hysterical fabrications.
First, no education system in a liberal democratic country can prevent the wealthy from spending more on their children's education than the poor spend on theirs. That includes the current U.S. public school system.
Even if voucher school tuitions were capped, as The Post wishes, there would be nothing to stop the schools from offering additional services for additional fees. Similarly, wealthy families could still buy tutoring services from separate education service providers. Finally, some private schools could opt out of the school voucher program entirely.
These are the things that happen in the real world, a land with which The Post seems strangely unfamiliar. In Holland, which has had a nationwide voucher program for nearly a century, the voucher must cover the participating school's full tuition, but schools can charge extra fees. Dutch politicians have elected not to close this loophole because the general understanding is that it would simply drive the expansion of a separate for-profit education sector outside the government voucher program, increasing rather than decreasing inequality.
In Japan, that nation's excessively rigid public school system has done just that, prompting the rise of a huge multi-billion dollar a year for-profit, unregulated tutoring industry. Kumon, a Japanese import, is now flourishing in the United States, as are tutoring chains Sylvan Learning Systems and Huntington.
In Chile, which has had a nationwide voucher program since 1982, participating schools were initially required to accept vouchers as full payment. Unlike Holland, Chile has retained its non-voucher private school sector which continues to serve many of the wealthiest families.
In the U.S., the wealthy can already choose between elite private schools and the expensive public schools in their own communities (to which poor families do not have access in the vast majority of cases).
If The Post wants an example of a system that enforced equal education spending and forbid the existence of private schools, it would have to look at utterly totalitarian states such as the defunct Soviet Union or ancient Sparta.
The real question that The Post would be asking if it cared as much about children as it does about its blindly-held political beliefs is: Do vouchers or other market education reforms provide better educational options than the existing government school monopoly (in which the achievement gaps between black and white and between rich and poor remain monstrous chasms)? The answer, as I have often noted, is a resounding YES!
As for its charges that vouchers would inflate spending, The Post is firing an AK-47 inside a conservatory. The current U.S. public school system is the single most expensive school system in the world according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
While The Post article lamented a private school that may soon charge $10,000 per year, it is apparently unaware that this is the average per-pupil expenditure of U.S. public schools!
The longest lived large-scale voucher program is to be found in Holland, and that nation has below average school spending. Its students, however, consistently rank in the top three on international tests, soundly kicking the butts of U.S. students whose public school education costs us nearly twice as much.
So get a grip down there in Palm Beach, and start actually thinking about what's best for kids instead of thoughtlessly rehashing your petty political grievances.
Market education has been tried repeatedly over the past 2,500 years and it works. The sooner you familiarize yourselves with the evidence on this subject, the sooner your editorial page will cease to be the mean-spirited embarrassment you have allowed it to become.
Hassan Nasrallah, head of Lebanese Hezbollah, gave a Friday sermon supporting Muqtada al Sadr, and bereating the U.S. for disrespecting Shiite holy sites in Iraq.
In a joint response, the leading clerics of Najaf and Karbala dressed down Nasrallah and blamed the recent battles near Shiite holy sites on al Sadr himself. Translated excerpts of their response can be found at the Healing Iraq blog (run by an Iraqi dentist).
Came across a link to this story last night while browsing The Volokh Conspiracy:
SEATTLE -- The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington today announced an agreement settling a discrimination complaint filed by a gay man against a local business that refused to print invitations to his wedding with his same-sex partner. Under the agreement, the business owner has apologized for her actions and agreed to abide by Seattle’s anti-discrimination law in the future....
In August 2003, Seattle resident Tom Butts contacted Starfish Creative Invitations to hire them to print invitations for his upcoming wedding ceremony with Scott Carter in Vancouver, British Columbia. Butts liked samples of the company’s work he had seen and liked the fact that it was a local business. But Starfish, a Seattle company, refused to provide their services because, in the proprietor’s words, she believes “homosexuality is wrong” and same-sex weddings are “against her belief system.”
The business owner’s refusal violated Seattle’s Open Housing Public Accommodations Ordinance, which protects an individual’s right to purchase products and services without regard to sexual orientation. With legal representation by the ACLU, Butts filed a complaint with Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights, the agency that enforces the non-discrimination law.
First, a disclaimer: On a individual level, the only person whose sexual orientation is of significant interest to me is my wife’s. I am unable to whip up an interest in what other consenting adults do, or whom they chose to do it with (I am glad to be alive, though, so: thanks for being straight, Mum and Dad). On a legal level, I strongly endorse equal protection of the laws for all citizens and the separation of church and state, and hence support the right of gays to marry (as a search of this blog for the term “marriage” will attest).
Now, “on with the show,” as Bugs would say.
In a post on this case, legal luminary Eugene Volokh presented the First Amendment arguments that could be made on both sides. But I think it’s more fundamental than that. To me, this isn’t so much a case of free speech as one of involuntary servitude under the Thirteenth Amendment. Free speech arguments would not be germane if the conscientious objector to gay weddings was a baker rather than a printer. It’s certainly conceivable that a conservative baker might object to making a wedding cake capped with two men, or two women.
So the question, to me, is: In AmericaLand, is it right for one citizen to be able to compel another citizen to do work for them against their will? I don’t think so, and I think this should rightly be construed as a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s proscription against “involuntary servitude.”
I asked Eugene about this, and he wrote back that:
It could be argued, but the argument would lose. The Thirteenth Amendment has never been read as prohibiting all involuntary work (e.g., the draft, the duty to serve on a jury, the duty to testify); it has been generally understood as prohibiting only slavery and things much like it. This narrow interpretation is probably faithful to how it was understood at the time it was enacted, though I'm not sure.
I’m not a lawyer, but since the Thirteenth Amendment refers to slavery and “involuntary servitude,” I figured there had to be more to it than that. Sure enough, a little surfing turns up the fact that the “involuntary servitude” clause was meant to apply to peonage: an employer physically forcing an employee to work for him to pay off a debt. According to a paper on the subject, the requirement that a monetary debt be involved was relaxed in practice during and immediately after World War II.
So, to me, it doesn’t seem that far a stretch from employers forcing employees to work for them, to customers forcing businesses to serve them. More fundamentally, whether or not this legal case currently can be made, I think it should be able to be made.
A news story today reports that 75 public school teachers in California have been found guilty over the last several years of cheating on state tests in order to give the impression that students knew more than they actually did.
Incidents include teachers who gave hints by drawing on the blackboard or leaving posters on the wall, told students the right answers and changed the students' responses themselves, the Los Angeles Times reported, referring to documents obtained through a Public Records Act request....
Some educators said temptation to cheat soared under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which can take away funding or reassign teachers in schools with consistently low test scores....
"Some people feel that they need to boost test scores by hook or by crook," said Larry Ward of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a watchdog group that has criticized many standardized tests. "The more pressure, the more some people take the unethical option."
Union officials said cases of possible cheating soared after the statewide testing began. Since 1999, the California Teachers Association has defended more than 100 teachers accused of cheating, compared to one or two a year before that, chief counsel Beverly Tucker said.
Though state officials say the teachers found guilty of cheating represent a tiny fraction of the total teaching workforce, it isn't clear that their system for detecting cheaters is truly comprehensive or effective. I recall having looked at the test fraud detection policies of several states a few years ago, one of which was California, and none were especially thorough. You can easily see why.
The real problem here is that parents have little choice but to keep sending their children to the same public schools in which this fraud went on. Despite the commonly heard protestation that private school choice programs are "unaccountable," it is the present system of automatically assigning children to government monopoly schools that provides the least redress for dissatisfied parents.
That costs $4 an ounce!" -- Grouch Marx, A Day at the Races.
Worked late tonight, so can't get up the cogitative energy for a hard-hitting blog post. Instead, I'm planning to pop an old Marx Brothers movie in the moving picture display box and catch some zzzz's.
Marx Brothers movies, by the way, make great go-to-sleep fodder. Also respectable contenders are Bob Hope, Bing Crosby road movies, and Bogart flicks ("We didn't believe your story, Ms. O'Shaughnessy, we believed your two hundred dollars.") The academy award for relaxing, sleep-inducing entertainment goes to the British "Jeeves and Wooster" series in my book, though. (Not sold without a prescription. Please consult your doctor before viewing any Wodehouse adaptation starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry).
Bonne nuit
There is nothing news under the Sun... or the Times, or the Independent, or Post-Intelligencer.... Today, there is only commentary and opinion selectively garnished with whatever factoids and hearsay the writer can find to support his or her creation.
There was a time, not so many decades ago, when many newspapers grinded their political axes almost exclusively on the editorial and op/ed pages. Their news pages were filled with prose so detached and dispassionate, so reportorial, as to be almost unrecognizable as newspaper copy by a modern reader.
Consider the following excerpt from this syndicated May 18, 1954 UP (United Press) story on the Supreme Court's verdict in Brown v. Board of Education:
Dixie Forming Its Battlelines
Dixie segregationists formed battlelines today in an effort to preserve the South's traditional color barriers despite the supreme Court's historic position that segregation in the public schools is unconstitutional....
Georgia Att. Gen. Eugene Cook said he had contacted 17 states and had found none willing to submit to the decision without further litigation....
States on the fringe of the deep south expressed willingness to comply to the letter with the Supreme Court order, whatever it eventually may be. Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma were among them. Not so with the stronger segregation states like Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi.
That's the gist of it, but that's not how it is generally reported. Instead, most news outlets attach comparatively little skepticism to the statements of the Iraqis, and much to the statements of U.S. military officials.
I have no idea what actually happened, but neither do the reporters writing these stories. Nevertheless, some of them, and their editors, have made up their minds already. CTV News, a Canadian television and Internet news outlet, has the following headline on its "news" story about the event: "Dozens killed as U.S. fires on Iraqi wedding." Then, next to a photograph of a body completely wrapped in white fabric being lowered into a grave, is the caption: "Iraqi's dig graves for members of a massacred wedding party."
The problem with this caption is not just the spurious apostrophe. The problem is that, whether or not CTV staff are eventually proven right in their opinion of what took place, it's just that at the moment: an opinion. They're guessing that the interviewed Iraqis are right, and the U.S. military personnel are either lying or mistaken. Just guessing. That isn't reporting the news, it's making up the news.
All I can say is, whenever you pick up a paper or browse a media site: Caveat Lector--Reader Beware. Current "journalistic" practice gives a whole new meaning to the addage "No news is good news."
Oui, mes amis, China is at it again. Bloomberg News reports that
China Steps Up Talk of Taiwan Attack Before Chen's Inauguration
May 19 (Bloomberg) -- China stepped up threats of attack against Taiwan a day before President Chen Shui-bian's inauguration, saying it would be willing to forfeit strong U.S. ties, economic growth and the success of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to quash independence moves by force....
China escalated threats after Chinese leaders were slipped an advance copy of Chen's speech by the U.S., the China Times newspaper in Taiwan reported, citing unidentified local officials. About 70 percent of Taiwan residents want Chen [to] make a peace offering to China in his speech tomorrow, according to a poll commissioned by United Daily News in Taipei. The poll had a 3.1-point margin of error.
Beijing said Monday it will ``crush'' any Taiwan steps toward independence ``firmly and thoroughly'' at any cost. ``It's the most toughly worded statement the Chinese government has made yet to halt Chen's attempts to separate Taiwan from China,'' Zhu Weidong, an assistant fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told a press briefing in Beijing organized by the State Council, China's cabinet.
Surely, given how sensitive the world media has become to beligerent foreign policies, China's rather unfriendly overtures toward the Taiwanese must be eliciting enormous outrage. Yeah, right. A Google News search on the string [Taiwan China Crush] returns a whopping 169 hits, many of which are Chinese government media sites putting a positive spin on the nation's threats.
For a real treat, however, you have to do the search in French, over at http://news.google.fr (the French language version of Google's news service). A search on [Chine Taiwan ecrasera] returns ONE hit. ONE. It's an article in France's less socialist national newspaper, Le Figaro.
Apparently, the rest of the French media and government can't cover this story because they're too busy prostrating themselves with sado-masochistic fervor in the hope of selling more weapons and consumer items into the Chinese market.
(Oh, and if you speak French and are wondering if the verb conjugation issue affects the search results, the answer is no. If you substitute "ecraser" or "ecrase" (Google.fr appears to ignore accents in searches), you still only come up with the one story in Le Figaro.
UPDATE:
Now the search [Chine Taiwan ecrase] at news.Google.fr returns TWO hits!!! But the second is a business story about Taiwan Semiconductor Corp. (TSMC), and doesn't mention the Chinese threat.
NYTimes reporter Seymour Hersh wrote a now famous piece last weekend in which he alleged that:
The interrogations at Abu Ghraib were part of a highly classified Special Access Program (SAP) code-named Copper Green, authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ultimately overseen by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. Originally a joint CIA-Pentagon program in Afghanistan that utilized highly trained Special Operations personnel, Copper Green eventually expanded to Iraq, Hersh reports, where Cambone decided it would begin using non-Special Operations personnel--including military intelligence officers and other military personnel--to begin questioning prisoners whose status was outside the program's original brief.
Hey, it could be true, but don't take Seymour's word for it. The guy does not have a reporter's nose for bulls--t. He has been massively duped before. In a case where he had every reason to doubt the veracity of his informant he showed a stunning lack of skepticism. If a source tells him what he wants to hear, he seems reluctant to ask too many questions.
Here's the story: Back in the late 1990s, Hersh was writing a salacious book on JFK with an entire chapter dedicated to the President's ties to Marilyn Monroe. As it happens, my wife, Kay, is an expert on Monroe's life, and agrees with the general wisdom that Marilyn and Kennedy probably had at least a brief fling. What Hersh had written in his chapter, however, was that Marilyn agreed to keep quiet about Kennedy's supposed mob ties in exchange for a payoff.
At the time the document controversy was becoming public, Kay thought that the story was beyond belief, and that Hersh' stack of "newly-discovered" documents signed by JFK were completely out of keeping with what she knew about Marilyn Monroe. She was sure the documents were fakes, and was astonished that anyone would think otherwise.
Hersh wasn't so skeptical, even though he knew some things about the letters that Kay didn't. He knew, for instance, that people who had been close to JFK, and were presented with the letters, denied their authenticity. One of the denials even came from one of JFK's secretaries, Janet Des Rosiers, whose presumed signature appeared on one of the documents. Here's what happened when Hersh interiewed her, according to a November 1997 Vanity Fair article by Robert Sam Anson.
"He was like a boy with a new toy," says Des Rosiers describing how Hersh whipped out the paper she'd allegedly signed. Des Rosiers quickly deflated him. She'd never been in the Carlyle hotel suite (where the document was purportedly signed), she told Hersh; never laid eyes on Marilyn Monroe; never met the attorneys; never been alone with Jack and Bobby. And, she added, that was not her signature. "You better be careful," Des Rosiers advised. "Because someone is conning you."
Hersh appeared unconcerned. "Why should I believe her," he asked?
Well, guess what. JFK's secretary was telling the truth about her signature having been forged, and Cusack was a con-artist who wound up being slapped with a $7 million fine and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was put away after an independent expert analysis discovered that the documents used lift-off typewriter correction tape that was not yet in use during Marilyn's lifetime, and that some of the letters contained zip codes -- which weren't in use at the time either.
Kay, my lovely wife, was spot on (Way to go, Kay!). Seymour "I'll believe what I wanna believe" Hersh was humiliated and had to ax most of the Marilyn chapter from his book.
So take what this guy writes with a cup o' salt, eh.
This essay was written for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
After half a century, Brown v. Board of Education has a bittersweet lesson to teach us: there are some problems courts can solve, and there are some they can’t. The trouble is, we aren’t listening.
Legally mandated racial discrimination was always a violation of the letter and spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees to all people “the equal protection of the laws.” Today, anyone reading the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that established the “separate but equal” doctrine, or the 1849 Massachusetts school segregation case on which Plessy relied, will be tempted to scream: “what part of the word ‘equal’ did you not understand?!?”
Because mandatory public school segregation violated the Bill of Rights, it was a legal problem amenable to a legal solution. But the unanimous Supreme Court victory in Brown was so momentous that some of its champions lost sight of its limitations. In the wake of Brown, many people came to believe that the courts could do more for American education than just interpret law. They began to think that the courts could bring about specific social and educational outcomes with the stroke of a judge’s pen.
Civil rights advocates wanted to ensure that the education offered to black students was every bit as good as that offered to whites, and they doubted that this could happen so long as public school classrooms were not fully integrated. But Brown did not require, or produce, integration. What Brown did was to strike down compelled segregation. Any district that treated students in a race-blind fashion, and that provided avenues for desegregation to occur (such as parental choice of school), was deemed to be in compliance, whether or not students of different races actually intermingled as a result.
Given their dramatic success in Brown, civil rights attorneys returned to the Supreme Court in 1968, and argued in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County that a lack of racial mixing should be considered unconstitutional whether or not it was the product of compulsion. They won.
But what Brown could not do for America, Green was equally incapable of achieving. Public schools are little more integrated by race today despite decades of court-ordered busing, and the nation’s racial and economic achievement gaps remain tragically broad. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, black children are two, three, or even four times as likely to lack a basic understanding of reading and mathematics as white children. A similar chasm separates the achievement of low-income students from their middle- and upper-income peers.
Brown and Green undeniably failed to realize the dream of public education, but there are still many who believe that litigation can solve our educational problems. Only the tactics have changed. Instead of trying to bridge the education gap by litigating for integration, they have sought to do so by litigating for higher funding. For the past two decades, numerous lawsuits have been fought, many of them successfully, to achieve spending parity between poor and wealthier districts, or even to secure higher spending for districts serving low-income families. But have these efforts fared any better than their predecessors?
In the 1980s, the most promising test case looked to be that of Jenkins v. Missouri. As part of a court-ordered desegregation program, federal Judge Russell Clark ordered the state of Missouri to spend almost $2 billion on Kansas City schools over a 12 year period, over and above its normal budget. The goals of this ruling were to improve integration, raise the scores of minority students, and diminish the racial achievement gap. On every count, it failed and Judge Clark terminated his order in despair in 1997.
Michigan itself has been another case in point. This state greatly reduced spending disparities between districts with the passage of Proposal A ten years ago. About three quarters of all public school funding now comes directly from the state, diminishing the effect of widely varying local wealth. Nevertheless, the public school achievement gap between Michigan’s black and white students is larger than the national average, as is its gap between poorer and wealthier students.
In light of the mounting evidence of the past 50 years, it is time we realize that the courts cannot fix everything that ails our public school system. They cannot make the institution of public schooling, as it is currently organized, fulfill our ideals of public education. But there are reforms that can.
Though independent schools have never been subjected to court-ordered integration or funding parity plans, they have come to enroll an ever larger share of minority students since the 1960s. Researchers disagree on whether public or private schools are now more physically integrated, but in any event the simple fact that a school enrolls a diverse body of students does not mean that it is integrated in a meaningful way. A school that is integrated on paper may still have a climate that leads students to self-segregate by race. That’s why a 1998 study of school lunchrooms was so persuasive. Instead of just looking at enrollment numbers, researchers observed the voluntary lunchtime seating patterns of black and white children. What they found is that private school students were more likely to choose to sit with children of other races than public school students.
The achievement gap evidence is also striking. Though public and private schools have a comparable black/white achievement gap in the 4th grade, that gap narrows substantially by the 8th grade in the private sector, while remaining the same size in the public sector. A study of urban Catholic schools has also found that they are dramatically more successful than public schools at helping black students complete high school, gain admission to college, and complete college.
So, on this 50th anniversary of Brown, it’s time for Americans to stop asking what their justices can do for education, and start asking what they can do for educational justice. It’s time to give all families, black and white, rich and poor, the chance to secure the best education they can for their children, whether that education comes from a public school or an independent one.
An event so rare it deserves a blog entry all its own. The subject of the editorial is India's political upset, with the ruling Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Vajpayee having apparently been ejected by the secular left-leaning Congress party of Sonia Gandhi.
The Times' editors made a number of shockingly rational observations and recommendations. Among them, that the Hindu emphasis of the ousted party was religiously divisive, that its pro-market economic policies were fundamentally sound and should be continued, and that the Congress party should move quickly to take up where Vajpayee left off in peace talks with Pakistan. From the NYT website:
India Shifts Course
In a stunning political shift, Indian voters have decisively rejected the governing Hindu nationalist party and the coalition partners that have kept Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in office since 1998. Liberalizing economic policies carried out under Mr. Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party governments have given India statistically impressive economic growth. Yet in a country where poor people vote in large numbers, most of them remain unimpressed.
Along with the coalition's drubbing came the equally unexpected revival of the long-fading Congress Party under its Italian-born leader, Sonia Gandhi. Mrs. Gandhi, the widow and daughter-in-law of assassinated prime ministers, capitalized on her family name. But she also benefited from uneasiness over economic change and a backlash against the B.J.P.'s religious divisiveness.
If, as now seems likely, Congress leads the next government, it should press ahead with market reforms while broadening their benefits. The party will also need to reinforce India's secularism, reassuring Muslims and members of other minority faiths that religious freedom will be fully protected. Another priority should be following through on Mr. Vajpayee's welcome steps to reduce tensions with Pakistan and to resolve the Kashmir conflict peacefully. With India and Pakistan both armed with nuclear weapons, this issue, which has sparked repeated full-scale wars, cannot be left to fester.
Lula da Silva, president of Brazil and darling of the international socialist set, is out of sorts. Piqued by a New York Times story insinuating that he's a lush, da Silva has had the reporter, Larry Rohter, ejected from the country. Here's The Guardian's synopsis of the events.
Brazil's justice ministry revoked the visa held by the New York Times correspondent Larry Rohter, describing a recent article as "offensive to the honour of the president".
Rohter, a veteran Latin American correspondent, had suggested that the former union leader may have been limiting his public appearances because of over-indulgence on beer and cachaca, a potent sugar-cane spirit.
Government and opposition politicians at first united to condemn the article as unsourced and slanderous, while Brazil's presidential palace threatened legal action against the New York Times, which has stood by the story.
"This is not about freedom of speech," said the foreign minister Celso Amorim. "It's about story that is libellous, injurious and false. We never acted against anyone who criticised Brazil's internal or foreign policy but it is another thing to offend the honour of the chief of state."
A Judge in Kansas has just ordered all public school spending halted, and hence all public schools shut down, on June 30th. In an earlier ruling, he found that the state's funding formula is unconstitutional, in that it doesn't spend enough on the education of poor children to provide a satisfactory education.
Here's what the Kansas City Star has to say:
TOPEKA, Kan. - (KRT) - A Kansas district judge on Tuesday ordered public schools to close, beginning June 30, until the state's flawed school finance law can be overhauled.
Shawnee County District Judge Terry Bullock, who had declared the school financing law unconstitutional on Dec. 2, ordered the expenditure of school dollars to be halted at the end of next month.
His order, unprecedented in Kansas, applies not only to state education spending but also to additional property tax levies that local school boards authorize and local sales tax money collected for education in certain counties.
"This action by the court will terminate all spending functions under the unconstitutional funding provisions, effectively putting our school system on `pause' until the unconstitutional funding defects are remedied by the legislative and executive branches of our government," Bullock said.
As news of the ruling spread in media reports, concerned parents called schools to see if they would remain open, and worried school employees asked if they would receive paychecks after June 30.
State and school district officials urged people not to panic, predicting that the Kansas Supreme Court would delay implementation of the order.
Attorney General Phill Kline called a news conference to announce that he would ask the Kansas Supreme Court Wednesday to put the District Court order on hold until the high court considers it.
Kline already has appealed Bullock's original order that declared the school finance law unconstitutional. That appeal, authorized by a special law passed by the Legislature this year, is scheduled to be heard in September.
Kline was among those predicting that the Supreme Court would overturn Bullock's orders.
"Everybody needs to take a deep breath," he said. "There is a process, and we are following this process."
Last December, in declaring the school financing law unconstitutional, Bullock said it failed to distribute school aid equitably to students, failed to spend enough to provide students a "suitable" education and did not serve the needs of poor, minority, disabled and non-English speaking children.
"The current funding scheme was found to be irrational; that is, those schools with the children most expensive to educate receive the least," he said.
Bullock was critical of the Legislature for failing to deal with his December ruling.
"In fact, rather than attack the problem, the Legislature chose instead to attack the court."
Bullock had directed the Legislature and the governor to come up with a constitutional school-aid plan by July 1. But lawmakers could not reach agreement on one.
The judge said in his ruling that lawmakers running for re-election were reluctant to raise taxes for schools. However, he also noted that in the past 10 years, the Legislature had cut taxes by nearly $7 billion.
As a result, he said, the school funding method is now unconstitutional, in part because of inadequate funding. In last year's school-finance trial, Bullock heard unchallenged testimony that the cost of providing a suitable education for Kansas children is nearly $1 billion more than is currently provided.
I'll probably be writing more on this story in the coming week, so for now, I'll just leave it at that.
... isn't worth the money you don't pay for it.
It's an uncomfortable truth, but a common thread that emerges from studies comparing alternative school finance structures is that schools paid for at least in part by parents tend to be more responsive, more efficient, and more effective than schooling given away for free.
Folks in Milwaukee are apparently finding this out for themselves in the context of a program that gives away free tutoring on top of the existing free public schooling. It's like this: what we pay for, we pay attention to, and what we get for free we feel free to ignore.
But this reality bites, since low income families can afford to pay little toward their children's education, and hence are disproportionately likely to be stuck in unresponsive, inefficient, academically craptastic "free" schools.
On a positive note, the research shows that even a small co-payment can make a big improvement in school performance when compared to a situation in which parents pay nothing. Choice programs should take this evidence seriously, and try to ensure some level of parental co-payment, however small, wherever and whenever possible.
In a 13-10 vote, the New Hampshire Senate just rejected a school voucher program for elementary-aged children. I don't happen to think that vouchers are the ideal policy for introducing market education in most states, but the excuses that folks were tossing around in the "Live Free or Die" state just don't cut it. According to The Union Leader,
The school voucher measure lost... after [a] debate centered on the wisdom of taking money from public schools and the constitutionality of both sending taxpayer funds to religious schools and funding the voucher system with a cigarette tax that applied only to some manufacturers....
Sen. Clifton Below, D-Lebanon, was among the majority in killing the voucher bill. He said the bill “was a choice to step away from public education . . . and to pretend like we can do public education on the cheap.”
The thing is, The Netherlands has had a national voucher program for nearly 90 years, it is only an average spender, and its students kick the asses of those in most other countries, including ours.
Huh. Spend less, get more.
Nah, "public education on the cheap" is a really bad idea. Let's just keep dumping $10K a year into our craptastic education monopoly. That'll show 'em.
Public school choice has come to Japan in recent years and, surprise surprise, some public schools have turned out to be more popular than others.
Public school choice, just to put things in perspective, is not exactly a radical reform. To say that it's like rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking Titanic is too generous. It's more like changing the fabric on the deck chairs and leaving them right where they are.
Nevertheless, it is shaking up some Japanese education academics. Professor Isao Kurosaki recently opined in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper that sometimes, heaven forbid, some maniacal parents are influenced in their choice of school by--get ready--its reputation. I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you. Cats and dogs sleeping together, fire from the sky, and all that.
What's particularly funny about this objection to parental choice in education, whether it takes place within the confines of a government monopoly or in a true education market, is the alternative. After all, the alternative to parental choice is not school assignment by all-wise and benevolent philosopher kings, but rather it is assignment based, utterly irrelevantly, on where students live.
So what these anti-choice hair-pullers are saying is that random chance is better than parental choice: If you could choose from among a variety of schools for your child, critics think you'd find no better fit than if you threw darts, blindfolded, at a list of your educational options.
Are you that backward? I don't think you're that backward, but they apparently do.
Keep that in mind on your way to the voting booth next time a real market education reform comes along.
It's late. Mental acuity is failing. Judgement is impaired. So rather than post something useful, I will make the following perfectly trivial observation.
In a recent rerun of the 80's TV mediocrity "MacGyver," our mulletted hero comes to the aid of naturalists and game wardens in an unspecified African country. And there, on the savannahs of "Africa," were some lovely stands of Pseudotsuga Menziesii--Doug Fir. They're huge distinctive conifers, native to the Pacific Northwest (of North America). I gotta think they're not thriving in big numbers in the Southern hemisphere.
God, I love watchin' these MacGyver reruns. They're like a tasty Swiss cheese--more enjoyable because of all the holes.
See, I told you this would be perfectly trivial.
Fifty years after the long-overdue Supreme Court ruling that public schools cannot discriminate by race, African Americans and other minority groups have long had the right to attend public schools along with whites. But do they have reason to celebrate?
Not hardly. The achievement gap between black and white students is still enormous, closely tied to the academic gap between the rich and the poor. As I've written elsewhere,
If you are wealthy in America, you have a one-in-one-hundred chance of being functionally illiterate. If you are in the bottom fifth of wage earners or have no income at all, you have a less than even chance of being able to read a newspaper or write a resume. Wealth and literacy are positively linked in most nations, but nowhere more so than in the United States. Poor Americans academically underperform their fellow citizens by a wider margin than is to be found in any of the 26 other countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Would reintroducing an education market with some sort of financial assistance mechanism help boost student achievment among minorities and low-income families? A new book by the Cato Insitute, Educational Freedom in Urban America: Brown v. Board after Half a Century, argues that it would. I wrote the chapter titled: "How Markets Affect Quality: Testing a Theory of Market Education Against The International Evidence." Which you can check out in .pdf format.An editorial in today's Washington Post condemns President Bush's recent policy statement on the conditions of any eventual settlement between Isreal and the Palestinian territories. The trouble is, the piece doesn't actually argue that the Bush policy change is unjust or unjustified, it just says that the President has angered the Arab world and our European AlliesTM, and therefore his policy is wrong.
Yo, Wash Post, that ain't enough. There are plenty of Americans who don't think we should design our foreign policies purely to avoid the disapprobation of foreign powers. Some Americans think that reason and justice should play a considerable role. If you want to reach those folks with your view that Bush made a mistake, you might want to try making the case that his policy is unreasonable or unjust.
I think we can take it for granted at this point that unless we nuke ourselves off the face of the planet, much of Europe and the Arab world are going to go right on being pissed at us no matter what our policies are.
Consider two stories that broke in the past few days:
At Abu Graib prison in Iraq, several American soldiers were discovered to have humiliated Iraqi prisoners by photographing them nude and in groups.
In Gaza, palestinian gunmen rushed a pregnant woman's vehicle and riddled her and her four young daughters with bullets at point blank range.
Curious to know which of these two stories was getting more attention and raising more outrage around the world, I did the following two Google News searches:
["iraqi prisoners" American prison] and
[pregnant woman palestinian]
The first search returns 2,540 hits. The second returns 304 hits. That's the relative emphasis that the world puts on humiliating criminals versus murdering a pregnant woman and her children.
But don't jump to the conclusion that there are 8 times as many stories expressing uniform outrage over the humiliation of the prisoners and the murder of the family. You see, not everyone is outraged about the execution of a young woman, her fetus, and her four little girls. In fact, the story linked to above notes that: "Militants from Islamic Jihad, Fatah and Hamas all claimed responsibility for what they described as the 'heroic' attack."
"Fatah." That names seems to ring a bell. Oh yes, that's the political party co-founded and led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Yasser Arafat.
What lesson should we draw from all this?
A group of South Carolina public school advocates, including the P.R. man for the state teachers' union, will pass out a pledge to state lawmakers next week. The purpose of the pledge is to have politicians swear allegiance to the current public school system, and promise to "fully fund" it--where "full funding" is defined chiefly by the system itself (specifically, "the State Department of Education... and local school districts").
In the pledge itself, and the editorial endorsing it in The State newspaper, the terms "public schooling" and "public education" are treated as if they were synonymous. They aren't. Public schooling is a means to an end, and the end it seeks to achieve is public education. Public schooling is an institution, just one of many possible systems for attempting to fulfill the ideals of public education.
Maybe it's just me, but if we swear allegiance to anything shouldn't it be to the achievement of our ultimate goals, rather than to one particular institution? After all, what happens if that institution turns out not to be the best way of achieving our goals? What if the institution of public schooling is actually inimical to the very ideals of public education that it is supposed to fulfill?
Shouldn't we be trying to give our kids the best possible system of education, rather than simply trying to make the best of the system we happen to have inherited from some well-intentioned but overweening 19th century reformers? Just a thought.