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school choice Archive

Wednesday

5

February 2014

0

COMMENTS

Children Are Not Property of Society

Written by , Posted in Education

One of the more pernicious examples of collectivist ideology in practice is the insistence that children belong to the state. This might seem like an outrageous assertion. Who, after all, could possibly believe such a ridiculous thing?

Well, Hillary Clinton, for one. She has argued that “there is no such thing as other people’s children.” And her book, It Takes a Village, has as its entire premise the notion that children are ultimately the responsibility of the society as a whole, which in practice she holds as indistinguishable from government.

MSNBC host Harris-Perry made a similar argument when she said that we need to “break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents,” and replace it with the more enlightened view “that kids belong to whole communities.”

To this list we can now add Common Core advocate and former Massachusetts education secretary Paul Reville:

At an event on Friday sponsored by a leftist think tank, former Massachusetts education secretary Paul Reville called Common Core critics a “tiny minority” and asserted that “the children belong to all of us.”

Reville also claimed that opponents of Common Core are against any academic standards, reports CNSNews.com.

“To be sure, there’s always a small voice — and I think these voices get amplified in the midst of these arguments — of people who were never in favor of standards in the first place and never wanted to have any kind of testing or accountability, and those voices get amplified,” Reville declared.

…“Again, the argument about where it came from I think privileges certain sort of fringe voices about federalism and states’ rights, and things of that nature,” he told CNSNews.

“Why should some towns and cities and states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards when the children belong to all of us?”

The errors here are manifold. Children do not belong to “whole communities,” “all of us,” or even their parents. Children are not slaves; they belong to no one. They have fundamental rights like any other person, some of which their parents have the responsibility to exercise on their behalf until such time as they can do so on their own.

But more specific to the issue of education, Reville’s argument is a befuddled mess. Many of those who oppose Common Core for “federalism” or “states’ rights” reasons would prefer tougher standards, so to say that they “never wanted to have any kind of testing or accountability” is simply untrue. The operative policy question is how best to ensure that the standards used are the most productive. As it turns out, centralization is a very poor method.

The benefit of having a multitude of standards, or allowing “some towns and cities and states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards,” is that what a central planner like Paul Reville might think is a low or errant standard could well produce the greatest educational outcomes. After all, if we perfectly understood how best to education students the debate would be moot. Rather than fighting over a one-size-fits-all standard from central planners, we should let educators try different standards and see what produces the best results.

At the same time, if we realistically want to see real, effective standards develop then we need to reform the system to encourage innovation and experimentation. The way to do this is by embracing school choice and a true market in education.

Tuesday

12

March 2013

0

COMMENTS

Is There a Fundamental or Unalienable Right to Homeschool?

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Education, Liberty & Limited Government

Do parents have the rights to educate their own children? That’s the question at the heart of an ongoing legal battle between the Obama administration and a German couple who sought, and were originally granted, political asylum in the US on the grounds that Germany’s ban on homeschooling was a violation of their rights, and that being forced to return home would subject them to persecution. Reason covered the issue rather thoroughly in this video:

After a judge originally granted the couple’s request, noting that Germany’s policy was “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans,” the Obama administration naturally stepped up to defend the indefensible, claiming that homeschooling is “not a fundamental right.”

This is an outrageous assertion. There are few rights more fundamental than that of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. The US Supreme Court has afforded parental rights the respect they deserve, noting in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that “the child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right and the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

Given its views on power in general, I suppose it shouldn’t be all that surprising to see the Obama administration disagree. Parental authority is, after all, in direct competition with that of the state, and is an important and necessary check against the growth of tyranny. It’s no coincidence that a Nazi-era German law is at issue here. Affording the state the unique power to indoctrinate the next generation with its own propaganda, without competition or recourse, is a serious threat to basic human liberty, and is also why we need to do a lot more than the basic minimum of allowing home or private schooling in the US. We need to end government monopoly schooling across the country and replace it with a system of choice, not only to improve educational outcomes, but also in defense of our liberty.

Tuesday

17

August 2010

0

COMMENTS

Teachers Union Threatens LAT Boycott Over Teacher Effectiveness Analysis

Written by , Posted in Education, Free Markets, Labor Unions

It’s hard to imagine a teacher’s union making themselves even more despicable and obstructionist, but they’ve found a way.  First, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis on teacher performance:

With Miguel Aguilar, students consistently have made striking gains on state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, according to a Times analysis. John Smith’s pupils next door have started out slightly ahead of Aguilar’s but by the end of the year have been far behind.

In Los Angeles and across the country, education officials have long known of the often huge disparities among teachers. They’ve seen the indelible effects, for good and ill, on children. But rather than analyze and address these disparities, they have opted mostly to ignore them.

Most districts act as though one teacher is about as good as another. As a result, the most effective teachers often go unrecognized, the keys to their success rarely studied. Ineffective teachers often face no consequences and get no extra help.

…Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.

This is exactly what one would expect from an industry shielded from the competitive pressures of the market, and instead dominated by the influence of powerful unions.  In a free market, understanding what makes one teacher successful over others would be a top priority as schools seek to attract students by providing the highest quality education possible. But our public education system is more like a jobs program for union members, and it’s too much of a bother for them to worry about the little things like whether or not students are learning and why.

Rather than attempt to improve upon their performance and learn from this analysis, the LA Times reports that union leaders are threatening to boycott the paper.

The Los Angeles teachers union president said Sunday he was organizing a “massive boycott” of The Times after the newspaper began publishing a series of articles that uses student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers.

“You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test,” said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.

Duffy said he would urge other labor groups to ask their members to cancel their subscriptions.

Measuring teacher quality based on student performance, how outrageous!

Friday

28

May 2010

0

COMMENTS

School Choice Before The Supreme Court

Written by , Posted in Education, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

Reminding us again how important it is to place judges on the Supreme Court that actually adhere to the doctrine that the Constitution is the law of the land, another important case is before the court.  The Ninth Circuit wrongly sided with the teacher’s unions and others with a vested interest in defending education’s status quo of failure, but now the Supreme Court has a chance to correct this error.

From an Institute for Justice press release:

…This week, the Court agreed to decide whether Arizona’s scholarship tax credit program violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.  That will thrust school choice back into the national spotlight to a degree not seen since 2002, when IJ defended the Cleveland school choice program in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that vouchers are constitutional.

…The ACLU claims that the state, by giving taxpayers the choice to donate to both religious and nonreligious School Tuition Organizations, is unconstitutionally advancing religion in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because most taxpayers to date have donated to religiously affiliated charities.

Mellor said, “This case is most notable for what it does not involve:  state action advancing religion.  Arizona structured its tax credit program to be completely neutral with regard to religion.  Neither taxpayers nor parents have any financial incentive to donate to a religiously affiliated scholarship organization over a nonreligious scholarship organization or to select religious over nonreligious schools.”

Friday

16

October 2009

1

COMMENTS

Short On Good Teachers

Written by , Posted in Education, Labor Unions

Michelle Obama is warning of a coming teacher shortage. Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute disagrees, noting that even if a million teachers retire in the next four years, we’d still have a lower pupil/teacher ration than we had in the 1970’s. I agree with him that a shortage of total teachers is not one of the problems we face in education, but there is a shortage of good teachers.

There are several reasons why there are not enough quality teachers. Because public schools operate outside of normal markets, the provision of education is highly inefficient.  A lot of money is wasted on things that do not increase education outcomes, while there is little pressure to invest in the most promising areas for increasing performance.  One such area is teacher quality.

Good teachers improve student performance, yet those with the best skills and experience find teaching salaries to be woefully inadequate compared to what they can make in the private sector.  School systems looking to hire teachers also undervalue subject matter knowledge and overvalue education degrees. A system of choice would encourage schools to place more appropriate value on the importance of quality teachers, and the result would be greater competition to attract and retain high performing teachers. As an example, The Equality Project Charter School recently opened in New York and offers a starting salary of $125,000 for its teachers. Impressively, the new charter is able to do this while receiving the same per pupil funding as the city’s public schools.

Another obstacle to filling schools with quality teachers is the unparalleled political clout wielded by teachers’ unions.  In many places it is simply impossible to fire teachers for incompetence. Thanks to union influence, teacher rating systems – where they even exist – are a joke, routinely finding the most incompetent teachers to be “satisfactory.”  Unions also strongly oppose merit pay, so despite the compelling evidence that shows the importance of effective teachers, the current system does next to nothing to reward effective teaching.

Unions are only able to dictate school policy because schools are governed through a political process. With a more market oriented system, where parents held the power of accountability instead of politicians and their appointees, union influence would wane, good teachers would be offered more competitive salaries, and students would be eminently better off.

Tuesday

29

September 2009

0

COMMENTS