totalitarianism today

"You're so smart" shouldn't be a compliment taken seriously.

"Intelligence is morally neutral. It is no more virtuous than athletic prowess."

        -Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

Everyone seems to have a side in the Tiger Mom debate. Meanwhile, concerned parents in my small southern town show their unconditional love for their children through continuous cajoling and scheduling to make sure they maximize the socializing experience-- the teamwork-building triumph-- of youth athletics. But few Americans seem concerned about the extent to which their children are truly educated as discerning, critical thinkers. The next time someone says, "Your son is SO smart," I will bite my lip again and wonder when we will debate the ability of our children to feel empathy for their fellow human beings. If you want to give me a compliment, please skip the smarts. Tell me my children are kind and absolutely incapable of using nuclear devices on unarmed populations. That would mean much more to me.

The market for school choice in DC, and how government influences outcomes.

The neighborhoods of Southeast Washington, D.C., are among the poorest in the city. There, the grocery stores, banks, restaurants, and other institutions that suburbanites take for granted have long been in short supply. In recent years, things have started looking "brighter", thanks to a little assistance from the good guys on the Hill:

A brand new, government-subsidized shopping center recently opened on Alabama Avenue, providing one of the few full-service grocery stores in the area, along with a new sit-down restaurant and mainstream bank branch. But reformers are finding that such initiatives won’t fix decades of market dysfunction overnight. Not far from the new Super Giant grocery store and Wachovia Bank are older businesses that continue to draw a steady stream of customers—corner stores that sell little fresh food, fast-food outlets that serve meals low in nutritional value, and tax preparation firms and check-cashing outlets that charge high fees. Markets are complicated, and improving them requires more than just creating incentives for new providers to set up shop.

This is equally true in the market for public education. The growing charter school movement has spurred the creation of new education organizations like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which recently opened a shiny, new 85,000-square-foot facility four miles north of the Super Giant. KIPP has become a national model of high-quality, urban education, posting impressive achievement gains with low-income student populations. Sixty-six new KIPP schools have opened in 19 states and the District of Columbia in the last 15 years. KIPP is what school choice proponents claimed would happen with market-based reforms in education: entrepreneurial educators successfully teaching the students who need help the most.

But KIPP is an outlier among its peers—many other charter schools in the district have been unable to achieve such impressive results. Just around the corner from KIPP, a recently restructured charter school shares space with a church in a small, unimposing brick building. Over the door hangs an easy to miss sign with the school's new name—The Howard Road Academy of Excellence. The previous charter school occupying the space gave up its charter after the D.C. Public Charter School Board threatened to shut it down due to financial mismanagement. That school also posted some of the lowest student-achievement scores in the city, with just 13 percent of students scoring proficient on the city test. Its failure serves as a warning to those relying on the free market alone to improve education in low-income, urban neighborhoods.

And while choice advocates predicted that the increased competition from charter schools would produce substantial improvements among nearby traditional public schools, this often has not been the case. Despite the fact that over 20 percent of the public schools in the neighborhoods surrounding KIPP are charter schools, the traditional public schools in the area still post some of the lowest student-achievement results in the city. Government programs that bring in private sector firms like Giant or nonprofits like KIPP can increase the supply of market options in low-income communities. But such subsidies will not, in and of themselves, ensure that all of those options will be high-quality. Nor will they guarantee that consumers will make good choices and utilize the newer, better options that come along. Functioning, well-designed markets improve higher-quality supply and higher-quality demand.

You can read the totality of Erin Dillon's report here. Unfortunately, Dillon assumes that the best and the brightest must be government planned. While she is willing to sanction private "ownership" of businesses, she ultimately believes that their success is a result of government assistance. The market for schools, unfortunately, might be a market in which the complicated public-private relations engendered by school choice prove Dillon's assumptions right. 

Communism and cartoons: Links on a theme.

What better way to distract concerned Americans from the growth of government than by suggesting that the media which they religiously consume is actually covert communist brainwashing? Apparently, the Smurfs were a communist allegory with traces of misogyny and anti-Semitism to boot. By now, every red-blooded American parent knows that Walt Disney was a rich communist trying to spread revolution through fairy-tales. We can only heave a sigh of relief to discover that Corky the Communist Cat makes no attempt to hide his political position. Of course, the fact that Corky is an honest communist poses its own set of problems. The ghosts of communism live on in American cartoons.

Not to be outdone by those rotten commies, alleged anti-commies are using the cartoon medium to make their points as well. Having witnessed the effectiveness of the Cold War's anti-communist crusade, the Recording Industry of America hitched its wagon to the old ox and came up with a few ridiculous ads. Whatever one might think about file-sharing, the comparison to communism is overblown.

The truth about communist cartoons is a distraction. All the communism lurking in Disney cartoons or file-sharing does not hold a candle to the elementary principles of class-consciousness as inculcated by American public schools in Keynesian-driven economics courses. We've all had the pleasure of learning about how much we need economists to protect us from the dirty side of supply-and-demand curves. Children who learn that economics lies in graphs, as opposed  to everyday market transactions, will grow into adults who can't manage their checkbooks. If economics is the province of an elite, then every American needs an accountant.

If you think kids are learning communism from cartoons, then turn off the TV. Or take the problem into your own hands and teach them anti-communism through cartoons. Hungarian cartoonist Victor Vashi makes this easy with his wonderful communist history through cartoons, Red Primer for Children and Diplomats, published in 1967. In fact, Vashi's life provides a key teaching opportunity about life under communism. When public schools fail to equip children for the future through a well-reckoned study of the past, home-schools offer a ripe alternative.

Ultimately, whining about "the communists that control Hollywood" teaches children two, equally useless bits of information. First, it teaches children that wealthy, airburshed starlets can have their money and communism too. This is a distorted picture which allows children to believe that communism can co-exist with Hollywood culture; even the apparatchiks couldn't find a good macrobiotic restaurant in the former USSR. Second, it teaches children that whining is an effective way to communicate. I won't go into details about why this might not be the best lesson.

Instead, I leave you with a few fond links to fondle... Ayn Rand and Song of Russia by Robert Mayhew +  "Hollywood's Hidden Anti-Communist Classic" by Thomas Lifson + "Reds and Radicals in Hollywood" by Jack R. Fischel + "The Big Lie in Hollywood" by Michael Berliner + "Communist crimes-- a theme for Hollywood?" by Michael Weiss + "I Was A Hollywood Communist" with Duncan Campbell

The demise of higher education? Or the new beginning?

Tim Swanson presents the current challenges for universities-as-we-know-them. In noting how the modern university resembles an advanced baby-sitting service for extended adolescence, Swanson observes:

"...cell phones have dramatically altered one traditional revenue stream of many universities -- that of long-distance phone calls. As a result, some colleges have raised other student fees to compensate for the budget shortfalls. Or, as Rothbard's adage literally rings true, several universities are now offering their own cell phone plans to counter this trend."

How did institutions specializing in knowledge move into the cell phone industry? And why do privatized university cafeterias continue to provide examples of market failure? Swanson doesn't answer these questions, but he keeps you reading with more preposterous tales of higher-ed-gone-wrong and linkage that reads like Miami cleavage.

Education report.

For those tracking progress in education reform, the National Assessment of Education Progress report for 2004 is finally available. According to the website summary:

Since 1969, NAEP has conducted ongoing nationwide assessments of student achievement in various subjects. This report presents the results of NAEP's long-term trend assessments in reading and mathematics that were administered in 2004 to students aged 9, 13, and 17. Because these same assessments have been administered at different times during NAEP's 36-year history, it is possible to chart educational progress back to 1971 in reading and 1973 in mathematics. The previous long term trend assessment occurred in 1999. This report provides trend results in terms of average scale scores, percentiles, and five performance levels. Results are described by gender, race/ethnicity, and parents’ highest level of education. The report provides sample test questions for each age level. Overall, the national trend in reading shows improvement across most reporting metrics at age 9 between 1999 and 2004, as well as between 1971 and 2004. Students at age 13 show no significant improvement in recent years, although most reporting metrics indicate that performance in 2004 was higher than in 1971. At age 17, no measurable differences in performance were found between 1971 and 2004 for any reporting metric. The national trend in mathematics shows improvement at ages 9 and 13 from 1973 to 2004, but few changes over the years among 17-year olds. Both 9- and 13-year-olds had higher average scores in 2004 than in any previous assessment year. For 17-year-olds, there were no significant differences between the average score in 2004 and those in 1973 or 1999.

Findings in brief are available online.

In favor of unelitist education.

Ross Farrelly makes a case for parent-led education in Australia. He begins with a Hayekian syllogism-- each child is different and therefore has different educational needs; parents know their own children most intimately, so parents rather than "educationalists" should choose the best education for their children. Under the centralized curriculum, the conception of education as a highly specialised subject is encouraged and validated, since education experts are the only ones who are allowed to develop curriculum.

What is wrong with this picture? Farrelly points out that the curriculum boards are insulated from the complex and diverse reality of knowledge when they meet to make decisions. At best, such boards can come up with curricula to meet the needs of the government (i.e. civic education, blah, blah, etc.), but they cannot actually prepare children for reality.

As we have seen, despite the appearance of consultation, NSW curricula are determined by a small homogenous panel of experts. When they meet they are trying to solve a very complex problem which has many different possible solutions. The exact nature of the problem which the curriculum ought to solve is itself open to debate and will reflect one’s view of human nature and the meaning of human existence. Materialists will develop quite different curricula to those who believe that a human being is more than a physical body. Those who believe in the Christian salvation will educate their children quite differently to the utilitarians. Those who believe that the most important aim of human life is to support one’s society and nation will emphasise different aspects of history and character building to those emphasised by rugged individualists.

Deciding the aim of a school curriculum and the criteria by which we will judge its effectiveness is a complex and multifaceted task. It is especially complicated because there is no set number of predetermined options from which we must select the best answer, but there is, in a sense, an infinite number of different answers.

Farrelly goes on to outline his plan for education policy in Australia, which includes an ingenious plan for revising school accreditation standards.