In accounts of the activities and benefits of Parents as Teachers, supporters describe the program’s role in promulgating information that has previously been gleaned from academic research. If Parents as Teachers is also itself facilitating research with participants as subjects, that fact should be considered in debates over its funding.

The post Another Instance of Parents as Teachers Participants Serving as Research Subjects appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Some state representatives objected to an official honor for Seaman because they thought there wasn’t enough evidence that he traveled through this state:

“If we’re going to have an official dead dog for the state of Missouri, we should have some evidence that the dog actually went to Missouri,” said Rep. Vicki Englund, D-St. Louis County.

Others commented that, now that Missouri has plenty of official symbols, “enough is enough.”

I’m happy with the results of the Missouri House’s vote, and I hope that Newfoundland fans will find ways to promote the breed outside of government. It just isn’t practical for the General Assembly to confer honors on everyone’s favorite animals. At some point, enthusiasts have to step back from lobbying the state and take their message directly to their fellow Missourians.

The post Missouri Legislators Decline to Name an Official State Dog appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Nutritional Services is working with vendors to provide food and educational opportunities from local food producers and farmers to reduce the impact CPS has on the environment and to educate students about where their food comes from.

The assertion that local food is superior for environmental reasons comes up often in local food debates. To understand why districts should not conflate local food with environmentally friendly food, I recommend reading Caitlin Hartsell’s excellent post about why growing food closer to consumers is not always better.

In addition to in his claim that local food is better for the environment, the candidate says that purchasing food locally will teach students where their food comes from. I don’t know how he expects the food to do that. From the students’ point of view, food from Missouri looks the same as food from Illinois or food from Indiana. Of course, teachers could point out to students where the food originated from, and they could conduct lessons on where the food was cultivated and harvested — but they could do that just as well if the food came from a different state. In fact, if the place where cafeteria food is grown is to become a subject of study, it might be better to buy food from a distance. That way, students can learn about a place with which they wouldn’t otherwise become familiar, instead of focusing their local area, which they already know something about from experience.

The post Columbia Board of Education Candidates Discuss Cafeteria Food appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Enrollment in the SLPS Virtual School is constrained by the district’s rule that online students spend one or more days a week in a classroom, working with Virtual School teachers in person. This policy is unusual for an online school; most such schools allow children to talk to teachers through video conferencing or by telephone, and require less frequent meetings. If SLPS made weekly in-person meetings optional, it could open enrollment to students who live far from St. Louis.

Another factor that has limited the Virtual School’s growth is its policy that elementary students must be enrolled full-time. Permitting young students to enroll in individual classes would give more children the ability to participate.

The post An Opportunity for SLPS appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“The census is the basis of over $400 billion in federal funding,” she said. “The LGBT community is not able to effectively lobby to be recipients of any of that money.”

If advocates believe the Census questions are discriminatory or offensive to any group, they should certainly make that case. However, greater ease in lobbying is not a good reason to add to the list of questions. Census participation is required by law, and it would be an inappropriate invasion of respondents’ privacy to compel them to share their sexual orientation or other personal characteristics that some lobbyists would like statistics on. Similarly, while it would help advocates for funding of medical research if everyone had to reveal their medical histories on the Census, the Census does not gather this information.

Advocates can use other means, like petition drives and rallies, to show lawmakers how many people support their causes.

The post Lobbying Through the Census appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

[T]his could be seen as a historical turning point in the American consciousness about actually having awareness about where food comes from and what goes into how it gets made.

Most advocates for calorie count mandates emphasize the effect they could have on the population’s health. They say that if people read caloric data whenever they order food, they’ll make healthier choices and put less of a strain on the health care system.

The Huffington Post essay is unusual in that it connects calorie counts to the local food movement. At first glance, this seems puzzling, because a calorie count tells you nothing about where your food comes from. Furthermore, a dish that was served up from scratch in your home town might be high in calories, while produce flown in from hundreds of miles away could contain fewer calories. Supposing consumers pay attention to the calorie counts and consequently reduce the calories they consume — there’s evidence that they don’t, but supposing they do — the effect could be to discourage some people from eating local food. For example, think of people who live next to a cattle farm and have access to local hamburgers, but can’t buy vegetables unless they’re shipped in.

However, the Huffington Post writer may be on to something. Once people are comfortable with calorie counts on the menu board of every major chain restaurant, they’ll be less likely to object new national labeling mandates. They’ll take it for granted that the federal government tells restaurants what to write on menus. Proposals to label food as “local” or “organic” will then meet with less opposition.

The post First Calorie Counts, Next Local Food Labels? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I hope the charter school approval process in Missouri will remain friendly to single-language charter schools, so that a school like the New Jersey charter would be welcome here. There are many languages besides Hebrew that could possibly be studied for their religious significance. Religious texts have been composed in Greek, Latin, and Arabic, to name a few — yet all of those languages are taught in public schools. It’s unfair to single out Hebrew or any of those languages as unsuitable for specialization, when students’ reasons for studying them are as varied as the words in a dictionary.

The post Language-Specific Charter School to Open in New Jersey appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The video was produced by a University of Michigan student for a university-sponsored contest. It won second place. In the clip, students gather numbers representing how many people live in their houses — one takes a big “4,” another a “5,” and so on. The students bring their numbers to a bureaucrat and pile them on his desk. He, in turn, pulls a humongous dollar sign out of a drawer and hands it to them. Words flash across the screen, informing viewers that they can “earn money and recognition” for their communities by participating in the Census.

You have to see it to believe it:

The post University of Michigan Student: Census Participation = Cash appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The map is colorful and easy to use. Still, I can’t help wondering why the Census Bureau displays this information so prominently. The Census isn’t a contest in which we try to beat other states. It doesn’t really matter which cities or counties are “ahead” in mailing back their forms.

The post What Is the Point of This Interactive Map? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A requirement tucked into the massive U.S health care bill will make calorie counts impossible for thousands of restaurants to hide and difficult for consumers to ignore.

I’m following it until I get to the words “difficult for consumers to ignore.” There’s evidence that consumers are pretty good at ignoring the numbers on the menu. For example, this research on New York City’s calorie count mandate found that less than a third of consumers reported taking the newly posted nutritional information into account when they ordered. When the researchers examined caloric data from fast food sales before and after the change in policy, they found no decrease in calories purchased. (The AP story does mention this study a couple of paragraphs from the end.)

Another study that looked at data from Starbucks alone found a small decrease in purchased calories in food, but no change in purchased calories in beverages — the main attraction at Starbucks. People who headed over to Starbucks in search of the high-calorie drinks for which it’s known didn’t suddenly change their minds when they read the calorie counts.

The calorie count mandate won’t make the population healthier, because people are good are ignoring numbers they don’t want to see. You can plaster nutritional data all over a restaurant, but if people aren’t interested, they’ll tune it out.

It’s unfortunate that the federal government imposed this mandate on all states. States like Missouri should be free to weigh the evidence from places that have imposed mandates and come to their own determinations on calorie-posting policy.

The post Ignoring Calorie Counts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Dads often have a special interest in analytical skills such as math and problem-solving, which can support a child’s intellectual development and promote school readiness.

The page also states that fathers “are usually more rough-and-tumble in their play with children than moms.”

Mothers can also focus on problem solving and their children’s cognitive growth, and I see no reason to highlight those characteristics as the special domain of men. There are plenty of couples that don’t fit these generalizations; it’s unfair to them to imply that an analytical father paired with a docile mother is the norm, or that this is what men and women are “usually” like.

Now, the wording on this one page should not be a deciding factor in funding Parents as Teachers. I’ve set out my arguments for limiting Parents as Teachers in previous posts, and my reasoning doesn’t depend on what a small section of the program’s website says. However, because Parents as Teachers receives state funds, taxpayers should be aware of what it tells participants. Public programs that give parenting advice can acquaint parents with information, but they can also provide a platform for the promulgation of opinions, biases, and stereotypes.

The post Page on Parents as Teachers Website Reinforces Gender Stereotypes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This incident brings to mind a program that was introduced in Georgia back in 1998. The state distributed free classical music tapes and CDs to the parents of newborns, in hopes that listening to the music would stimulate babies’ cognitive development.

In both cases, public programs inappropriately extrapolated from scientific research to prescribe parenting behaviors. Babies can enjoy music — and psychologists have debated the existence of a “Mozart effect” — but that does not mean all babies need to listen to CDs for healthy development. Likewise, research shows that fetuses can detect sounds and that young brains learn from repetition, but that does not imply that reading one book every day will be beneficial. It’s worth noting that despite the research on repetition, repetitive exposure to Baby Einstein language videos has been shown not to help babies’ linguistic abilities. The manner of repetition makes a difference. It’s not sufficient for Parents as Teachers to point to studies about repetition in general; the program would have to show that this specific repetitive activity has a positive effect.

It’s been brought up in our comments section that Parents as Teachers might endorse other ways of interacting with fetuses. This could be true. Similarly, if pressed, Georgia’s governor might have been forced to admit that country music has as much chance of promoting development as classical music. But what matters is the advice that was actually conveyed by the program. When participants honestly come away from a class under the impression that they need to do one particular thing — and I have no reason to believe the blogger I linked to was trying to misrepresent Parents as Teachers or make it look bad — we should evaluate whether that activity is as important as the program claimed. If Parents as Teachers never intended to promote one activity over others, then the program needs to do a better job of communicating with parents so they don’t form erroneous conclusions.

The post Public Programs Should Substantiate Claims About Child Development appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I wonder how the counties will use the grant to change residents’ behavior. They have ample public funding, but many of the behaviors they want to alter fall squarely in the private sector. For example, one of the stated goals is reducing the time people spend watching television. Do the counties plan to purchase a set of TV-B-Gone devices and manually turn off televisions? Presumably not, but how else can they get people to change?

Here are a few more things the counties want to accomplish:

Rauter said further efforts will be directed toward providing nutritional information for school lunches and restaurants, and making healthy choices more affordable in grocery stores. The program will promote community gardens, including implementing a Farm-to-School program, encouraging breast-feeding-friendly work sites and promoting overall good nutrition and physical activity.

Again, I’m curious how the counties will go about this. Changing workers’ attitudes toward breastfeeding is going to be harder than writing a check. And to make healthy groceries more affordable, the counties would have to either start their own grocery stores, or go into private grocery stores and tell them what products to carry and how much to charge.

If Missouri has to choose between the two approaches, I would prefer a campaign like Oklahoma City’s that’s financed by voluntary donations. But my first choice would be no campaign at all.

The post Spending on Health appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Contact your local representatives and let them know how important this event is to you and for what reasons, whether it is because of the economic impact it has on the local communities and state as a whole, the educational aspect of providing an interesting curriculum to the schools, that it promotes healthy lifestyles for children and adults alike (Bike sales increased the week of the event in 2009), the Tourism exposure as the eyes of the world focus on Missouri for a week each year, or the increased sense of community as all of the host cities unite to put together a special welcome to the visitors from nearly 100 countries and all 50 states. Or maybe you can just tell them you want it because it is a heck of a lot of fun!

The Tour of Missouri, like other potential recipients of state funds, does a lot of constructive things. But that’s not enough reason for the state to continue subsidizing it when revenue decreases.

In order to show that Tour of Missouri deserves a subsidy, supporters would have to demonstrate that a dollar spent on the Tour gives Missourians more benefit than that same dollar would if spent on anything else. There are other programs out there that claim to accomplish some of the same things as the Tour. For example, it’s been suggested that archery is a good basis for interesting curricula. Film tax credits are said to boost the economy, local food initiatives to engender healthy habits, and Census promotional events to build community.

This state representative gets the idea:

“You wouldn’t want to cut something that was proven to have brought money back,” he said, adding that the money has to come from somewhere. By way of example, he said you could ask educators if they would cut $1 million from Parents as Teachers or Career Ladders programs to fund the race.

Some people have told me that comparing programs like that is a “false choice.” They say that we don’t have to choose between Parents and Teachers and a bicycle race, because we can have both. They imply that it’s unfair to bring up education funding when you’re discussing a subsidy for an unrelated program — as if no program could appear deserving when held up against the schools.

If by “false choice” people mean that we shouldn’t fund one program we like best to the exclusion of all others, then they’re right. We don’t want to fund public schools and nothing else; government funding is not winner-take-all. However, at the margin — when we’re deciding where to spend that last dollar of state funds, or where to make the next cut to balance the budget — we do need to compare programs. We need to make sure that we’re cutting funds from the program that is least necessary, not the program that is most productive.

People who still think these decisions at the margin are “false choices” are making a mistake. They’re assuming that their favorite program doesn’t need to be as productive as others when, in fact, it does. Resources are scarce. Tax dollars can’t go toward funding just any program that does a nice job. Deciding to increase funding for one program but not another would be a false choice only if there were some way to give every program the full funding increase its supporters want. There isn’t — so, as the state representative pointed out, a dollar spent on one program is a dollar that could have been spent on something else.

It’s also a mistake to think that schools would gobble up all the money if only the most deserving programs were funded. Suppose we decided to spend tax dollars where they’re most needed, and we started funneling dollar after dollar into education. Pretty soon, the state would be in dire need of other services that schools can’t provide. In that situation, a dollar spent on one of several other programs would be more productive than a dollar spent on schools.

Besides comparing programs as I’ve discussed, legislators also have to consider whether the last dollar spent on a state program would have been put to better use if left in the private sector. If the answer is “Yes,” it should be returned to the taxpayers.

Choosing between funding a program that’s “a heck of a lot of fun” and funding a program that’s boring but productive may be a difficult choice, but it isn’t a false choice.

The post Hard Choices, Not False Choices appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

These great principles cannot be upheld if the quality of our public schooling continues to depend more on where a student lives than on a national commitment to excellence.

Advocates for standards rely on this reasoning time and again: In the current public school system, they observe, students can receive an excellent education if they live in a wealthy neighborhood or a terrible education if they live in a poor neighborhood. This is obviously inequitable. Therefore, they think that the federal government should intervene and ensure that every school follow the same standards.

There’s a problem with that argument. If the government could iron out variations in educational quality by imposing standards, we would already have a more equitable education system. States maintain education standards, yet there’s a wide range of school districts within each state; some districts exceed the state standards, and others fall short. School boards ostensibly choose one curriculum for all of a district’s students, but every district has some schools that are known to be better than others. Even within a single school building, you’ll find teachers who are helping their students excel and others who really ought to look for a new line of work.

Advocates for national standards are implicitly saying that the federal government is different. Where lower levels of government have failed, they expect a national policy to be more effective. This is wishful thinking. If levels of government that are closer to the classrooms can’t bring a few schools up to a standard, a directive from far-off Washington won’t be able to transform all the schools in the nation.

The post “Where a Student Lives” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Some of the educational choices that exist in Florida are notably absent in Missouri. For example, Florida students with disabilities may choose between different public schools or receive scholarships to attend private schools. Tax credits drive a separate scholarship program for students from low-income families; these students also have the option to receive tutoring, which is provided by private companies through contracts with school districts. Florida’s public school system boasts multiple virtual schools. And Florida does not constrain its charter schools to a few cities, as Missouri does; they’re spread out across dozens of counties.

Even more remarkable is the view expressed in the video that parents should research different schools and decide which would be best for their children. Missouri doesn’t need to import all of Florida’s parental choice programs and establish all of the same scholarships. It would be enough to adopt the perspective that choice in education is every parent’s right. Choice shouldn’t be seen as a last-ditch response to failure.

The post Parental Choice in Education: How Missouri Compares With Florida appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

First, they’re good, solid — indeed very ambitious — academic standards for primary and secondary schooling, at least in the two essential subjects of English and math. Students who attained them would be better off — readier for college, readier to get good jobs, readier to compete in the global economy — than most are today.

Students might be better prepared if they attained these standards, but it’s not clear that adopting the standards would achieve that result. Adopting standards on paper doesn’t, by itself, bring students up to a high academic level. In fact, the more ambitious the standards are, the less likely it is that U.S. students could meet them unless more significant changes were made to the public school system.

Second, they respect basic skills, mathematical computation, the conventions of the English language, good literature, and America’s founding documents.

This is faint praise. It would be pretty pathetic if the standards made fun of America’s founding documents. Nor is this a reason for states to agree to the standards. Anyone can have respect for basic skills and literature without uniform standards.

Third, they emerged not from the federal government but from a voluntary coming together of (most) states, and the states’ decision whether or not to adopt them will remain voluntary. Each state will determine whether the new standards represent an improvement over what it’s now using.

If states fail to adopt the standards, they lose their chance to receive some kinds of federal funding. The federal government approves of these standards and is using its power to get states to agree to them. That’s enough evidence that the federal government is imposing the standards on states. Where the standards originally “emerged” from is irrelevant.

Fourth, they do not represent a national curriculum — though to gain traction they’ll need to be joined by solid curricula, effective instruction, and quality testing.

In other words, if states adopt the standards, a national curriculum is sure to follow. For what would be the point of standards that don’t “gain traction”?

Fifth, one little-noted benefit of properly implemented common standards is a better-functioning education marketplace, in which parents will be able to make choices about schools on the basis of more accurate information about how school A’s performance compares with that of school B — not just within communities and states but also when considering a move from state to state. Entrepreneurial school operators (such as KIPP and Edison) will also be better able to gauge and manage school performance in locations across the land.

Give me a break. It’s the old “standards will help the charter schools” argument. I don’t know how standards alone could give people more information about their limited educational choices — unless states also agreed to tests that match the standards, and then published the scores. Sounds like No Child Left Behind all over again.

The post Chester E. Finn Jr. on the Common Core Standards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The blogger writes that a Parents as Teachers educator came to speak to her parenting class, and gave the following advice:

We were told that we needed to not only read to the little guy everynight (even before he’s born–which we knew) but right now to read the same story. Repitition will help him learn sounds, rhythm, words and will also help him develop comfort and a bond with us. Then when he’s fussy, reading this story that he’s heard so many times in our voices will make him feel better and remind him of when things were less stressful for him before he was born.

This way of doing things might work for many people, but it’s problematic for Parents as Teachers to present it (with state approval and funding) as the correct way to raise a child, when it’s basically somebody’s opinion. The recommendations I’ve seen suggest that parents begin reading to children at six weeks, three months, six months — not every night when the baby is still in the womb. There’s no medical consensus that you have to do that. (There are other ways to interact with unborn babies, like talking to them or singing a song.) And the idea that it has to be the same book every single time is nonsense. Babies learn from repetition in conversations and daily routines; that doesn’t have to come from one book and one book alone.

The assertion that hearing a story repeated will remind the baby of the womb is a nice theory, not a confirmed research result. Babies fuss for many reasons, and hearing a story won’t always calm them. When a story does soothe them, they may be reacting to the parent’s tone of voice or touch. It’s speculation to say that they remember hearing that exact wording from the womb.

Maybe these ideas aren’t completely scientific, but they can’t hurt, right? Actually, they could be harmful to parent-child relationships if parents feel guilty when they can’t maintain the regimen. Skipping reading for a night or two or switching between a few different stories won’t hurt your baby, but people could reach that conclusion if they’ve sat through this presentation by an official state educator. It’s not surprising that the blogger describes herself as “overwhelmed” by what she heard.

The post Advice From Parents as Teachers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

They aren’t asking for subsidies for their enterprise, and they don’t insist on free public land. They aren’t lobbying the state to impose their preferences on anyone else, either. While they would like more people to agree with them, they go about convincing people without coercion. They show their neighbors the benefits of their lifestyle — no local food mandates or preferential policies are involved.

Anyone who lives in an area that allows chickens can try this approach.

The post I Applaud These Locavores’ Efforts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

However, everything the Census Bureau put up on YouTube has been a wild success when compared with the embarrassing event in Jefferson City yesterday. I say “embarrassing” not because I’m scandalized that there were belly dancers there, but because almost no one showed up to watch them. My Two Census picked up the story as an example of ineffective Census promotion.

I actually feel bad for the belly dancers, who had to perform with little clothing on when the temperature was in the low 50s. The poor turnout couldn’t have helped their self-esteem much, either.

I have a better idea for promoting the Census: Promise that if enough people mail back their forms, the Census Bureau will post a clip on YouTube of its director belly dancing.

The post The Census Bureau Should Stick to YouTube appeared first on Show-Me Institute.