It Pays for Traditional Public Schools to “Start Up” as Charters

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Another Oregon public school plans to become a charter. The ability to enroll students from other districts is an attraction, as it was for the last school I blogged about. But this time, the school also identifies funding as a reason to change its status.

A few years ago, no school would have expected better funding as a charter. Charters usually received less state funding per student than traditional public schools. Now, the federal government is giving out grants to start charter schools, and traditional public schools can receive these grants if they reorganize as charters.

Turning existing schools into charters isn’t the most appropriate use of startup money, which ideally should help people build schools from scratch. District schools that need to develop specialized curricula to become charters would also be worthy recipients, but this particular school in Oregon developed its specialized academic program before it sought charter status.

The startup grants encourage public schools to make nominal changes in exchange for infusions of cash; that’s a wasteful policy in the short term. However, it could bring positive results over several years. Public schools that become charters to take advantage of one-time grants will find themselves competing with the districts and with other charters. No one is assigned to a charter by residence, so charters don’t have their student bodies handed to them — they have to work for enrollment. The new charters could soon contribute to a more competitive education market, assuming they don’t find a way to switch back to regular public schools after they spend the startup money.

A Los Angeles Middle School Offers Single-Sex Education

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

This article in the L.A. Times describes Young Oak Kim Academy’s foray into single-sex schooling. The public middle school has separate classes for boys and girls. Teachers use different methods to teach the two groups, corresponding to what they believe are the innate characteristics of the sexes:

“Boys are impulsive,” said science teacher Shambo Lerer. “Their hands go straight up. They ask questions like, ‘What happens if a planet explodes?’ “

Girls, according to Lerer, are more inclined toward creative projects and collaborative work.

I would be unhappy if students everywhere were confined by these stereotypes. In the context of a single choice school, however, the generalizations are OK. Parents of children who fit these descriptions will find the school to be perfectly suited to their kids’ personalities. Parents who don’t agree with the school’s conclusions can send their children elsewhere.

School Lunches in New Orleans

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools website states:

Our vision is simple: a great education for every kid in our city, no matter the color of their skin, what neighborhood they stay in or how much money their parents make.

This statement, combined with the New Orleans location, led me to guess that the organization favors parental choice in education. “What neighborhood they stay in or how much money their parents make” sounds like a reference to the traditional district system, in which school assignments are based on geography and the alternatives are open to people who can pay tuition. And choice policies have shaped the New Orleans school system to a degree reformers most places can only dream of: Children who temporarily relocated from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina received vouchers to attend public or private schools of their choice, and New Orleans has a larger percentage of students attending charter schools than any other city.

I read further and saw that my guess was wrong. The “What We’ve Done” section of the website is all about school food. Of the 12 recommendations for change, two call for more local food in school lunches. One suggests that schools establish gardens on their premises because “Students need to grow fresh food and taste what they grow.”

Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools is lobbying for something peripheral to a great education. It doesn’t matter where school food was grown, as long as students get a nutritionally complete meal. And gardening, while it’s possibly educational and rewarding, is not a basic human need. If you think of school priorities, like creating a safe environment and teaching students to read, maintaining a garden would be pretty far down the list.

I hope Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools will reevaluate its goals and stay true to its original mission. A couple of questions to consider: Are the most pressing inequities already addressed, so that we can now devote our attention to gardens? Or do neighborhoods and parental income levels continue to keep a great education out of reach for many students, for reasons that have nothing to do with food?

Alaskan Schools Should Consider Charter Status

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

This article in the New York Times explores the plight of Alaska’s rural public school districts. These schools serve only a handful of students, and to survive, they have to try to convince families to move into homes within their boundaries. One district advertised on Craigslist.

Few parents are eager to move to remote parts of Alaska, so the districts are in for a struggle if they stick to that strategy. Here’s a better idea: These districts could convert to charter schools, like the district in rural Oregon that reopened as a charter. The Alaskan districts wouldn’t be able to physically bring in many new students to class every day — the bus ride would be too long. But they could enroll additional students online. The districts could continue to hold classes in person, while conducting parallel lessons over the Internet for students who live far away.

It’s Nice That the USPSTF Isn’t NICE … For Now

Posted on by Caitlin Hartsell

Christine Harbin recently wrote an interesting post about the new mammography guidelines issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. This is a hot topic in the public health field at the moment, and we have talked about it in a number of my graduate classes. I agree with Chrissy’s ultimate reasoning: When something is paid for with tax dollars, the taxpayers should be getting the best bang for their buck. However, I disagree with the USPSTF’s new recommendations, because they did not use sound reasoning in formulating them. Their recommendations have potentially negative ramifications for future coverage when one considers them in light of the pending federal health care legislation.

The USPSTF based its guidelines on the results of a poorly conducted study. Some of the data is predicated on decades old studies, which were conducted when mammography was very different than it is today. The American Cancer Society looked at the all the data and additional studies, and came to the opposite conclusion. Out of all breast cancer deaths, 17 percent occurred in women who were diagnosed from ages 40 to 49, and deaths of similar women would substantially increase if women were not screened until their 50s.

Additionally, the USPSTF study did not take into account more recent studies or changes in health technology, like digital mammography, which is more effective for finding tumors in dense breast tissue — something more common in women aged 40 to 50, the very group that USPSTF recommended against receiving annual mammography. The group’s recommendation may have made sense a few decades ago, when some of the studies originally came out, but it does not make sense in light of today’s constantly improving technology.

Potential anxiety over false positives and overtreatment supposedly justify the USPSTF’s recommendation. Yes, overtreatment might be a problem, but most women (if they are going to get a mammogram) are trying to detect a potentially deadly disease. Personally, I would prefer to get a false positive than to miss a fatal true positive. When I turn 40, I want to be able to get a mammogram. I want to have the choice either to select an insurance company that covers it, or to be able to pay for the test out of pocket.

This may not be an option very soon. At the end of her post, Chrissy wrote:

Paranthetically, I want to point out that the guidelines issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force are normative and non-binding. The panel isn’t banning anything. A person can get a mammogram or a PSA test at any age if she or he has both the desire and the ability to pay for them, either via insurance or out of pocket.

This is true — but not entirely true. The recently proposed federal health reform legislation specified that insurance companies and Medicare will cover what USPSTF recommends. Even now, certain insurance companies and Medicare base their compensation decisions in part on the USPSTF guidelines. This is a real problem. It is illegal to accept Medicare money outside of the Medicare system (if a doctor takes any Medicare patients), so it could conceivably become illegal for non-recommended breast exams. This may not have been USPSTF’s intention, but unintended consequences always need to be considered.

The USPSTF’s recommendtion is a great preview of what it would be like if the National Health Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) or a governmental group were making health decisions for the United States. The USPSTF’s study was poorly conducted — but it will still have repercussions for insurance coverage if it or any government entity chooses what constitutes a proper private insurance plan.

I completely agree with Chrissy that when taxpayer funds are involved, cost-effectiveness needs to be considered. But, when health is involved, most individuals would like to make the decision — and pay for it themselves — than to let a government organization like USPSTF base life-and-death decisions on questionable science.

Oregon’s Puzzling Response to a Successful School

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Oregon Connections Academy (ORCA), an online charter school, received an “Outstanding” rating from the Oregon Department of Education for its students’ test scores. That’s the highest rating that the Department of Education gives schools. ORCA is, by the state’s evaluation, one of the best public schools in Oregon.

In any other state, I would expect new students to enroll in a great charter school like ORCA. But this is Oregon — not a welcoming place for charters in general, or for online schools in particular. Additional students can’t enroll in ORCA, because a law that became effective this past summer capped ORCA’s enrollment at 2,574 students.

The ostensible purpose for the enrollment freeze was to give legislators time to study online schooling. I say, study it all you want — but, in the meantime, let new students enroll and do some studying of their own.

You, Too, Can Be a McCarthyite!

Posted on by Dave Roland

I was very pleased with how this morning’s interview went with Charlie Brennan. I hope you’ll give it a listen.

It has been brought to my attention, however, that at least one person in a position of relative influence in the city of St. Louis was not pleased with what I had to say. He claimed that Mr. Brennan and I were both “McCarthyites,” attempting to scare citizens with false claims about imagined evils. I’ll explain the critic’s displeasure as best I can, and I hope that our readers will offer their own perspectives in the comment section.

The central point I wanted to make in the interview was that I see in Missouri an unsettling pattern of powerful people working to prevent citizens from having their say on matters of public importance. Mr. Brennan and I discussed several examples of such behavior — most of which were noted in yesterday’s blog post. My critic felt that we were unfairly assigning blame to government officials. He also claimed that the examples we cited in no way constituted a “pattern” of bad behavior.

My critic’s first argument was that I was leveling baseless charges against government officials. Specifically, he said that I had accused a particular elected official of ordering Gustavo Rendon’s arrest. In fact, if you listen to the interview, it is clear that I did not do so, and I continued to refrain from doing so even as this critic was trying to goad me into it. As I tried to communicate in the interview, it may well be a coincidence that Mr. Rendon’s arrest took place outside of the church attended by a city official who champions the plan that Mr. Rendon’s flyers criticized. But, regardless of what the facts eventually show about whether this official actually played a part in Mr. Rendon’s arrest, the circumstances allow for a reasonable inference that this was the case because of previous (and ongoing) situations in which powerful people have tried to squelch the voices of those who oppose them. My conversation with Charlie Brennan simply laid out part of the reason why I am concerned that it may not, in fact, have been a coincidence — but it is up to everyone else to draw their own conclusions.

As for those other situations, my critic acknowledged that the Northeast Ambulance and Fire District is a concrete example of powerful people attempting to intimidate and silence opposition (although he wrote off those officials as “a bunch of crooks”). But he took issue with the rest of my examples. In regard to the governmental effort to eliminate Jim Roos’ “End Eminent Domain Abuse” sign, he first tried to say that matter was settled years ago (I reminded him that, in fact, it is still being litigated), then he tried to say that the sign was “an eyesore” that is bad for the community. I responded that one man’s eyesore is another’s call to action, and pointed out that the Constitution does not generally permit aesthetic considerations to trump a citizen’s right to express a political opinion. My critic was (apparently) unpersuaded by that point.

When I pointed out how, at a meeting in which Paul McKee addressed residents about the proposed NorthSide Regeneration Project, public officials sent staff members to prevent a resident from filming the meeting, my critic argued that because I could not at the moment recall whether the meeting was held at a public facility (it was) and whether the meeting was open to all interested citizens (again, it was), my concern was not valid. As for the Missouri Municipal League’s efforts to prevent Missourians from voting on a constitutional amendment that would restrict eminent domain abuse, I don’t recall any specific objection by my critic, just a return to the claim that these were (in his words) unsubstantiated claims about isolated incidents, and that no fair-minded person could draw from these my conclusion that they represented a pattern of powerful people trying to prevent citizens from having their say on issues of public importance. He demanded that I offer more examples.

Now, I don’t believe this critic will ever really be satisfied — but my call to you, gentle readers, is to think of further examples (from anywhere in the state) that also seem to fit this pattern, then please post them in the comments. I’d love to start keeping a running tally.

Permits for Chickens

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Urban chickens are legal in Minneapolis. Legal, but regulated:

Those interested in keeping chickens in the city must apply for a permit and get approval from 80 percent of their neighbors within 100 feet of their property.

Just 120 people have the permits, although a chicken owner estimates that more than 1,000 people in Minneapolis raise chickens.

I can understand why most people don’t comply with the law (Title 4, Chapter 70). Getting those signatures must be a hassle, and then there’s the $30 fee you have to pay each year. It’s not an exorbitant amount, but for people raising chickens in hopes of saving money on a few eggs, it could mean the difference between profit and loss.

A better system would allow anyone to keep a few chickens, and require a permit only for a large number of poultry — as is the law in St. Louis.

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