D.A.R.E. to Stop Wasting Time and Money

Posted on by Caitlin Hartsell

No school program epitomizes a childhood in the nineties like the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (D.A.R.E.). I still have a few awkward memories of wearing an over-sized D.A.R.E. t-shirt, reading my “I promise never to do drugs” essay at the D.A.R.E. graduation ceremony. I don’t remember the essay itself, but I do remember thinking that the concept didn’t mean a whole lot to me, or to many of my classmates.

Many research studies over the past two decades have reached the same conclusion: D.A.R.E. does not work. By the end of the ’90s, there had already been dozens of studies that reached the conclusion that D.A.R.E. is ineffective, at best. In fact, in some suburban areas, it appears to have the opposite effect: A six-year follow-up study showed an increase in drug use among D.A.R.E. graduates. Yet the program is still around, using up tax dollars and officer time.

Despite the plethora of research on its futility, Blue Springs, Mo., spends more than $1 million every year on its D.A.R.E. program. It is funded though a quarter-cent sales tax called “Community Backed Anti-drug Taxes” (COMBAT). From the Examiner (emphasis added):

[Jackson County Executive Mike] Sanders could not emphasize enough the importance of the tax, which funds many county services, including one-third of the county prosecutor’s budget; it also funds a portion of the drug task force and the popular and successful DARE program.

The Kansas City Star article criticizes the decision to keep the COMBAT tax and the D.A.R.E. program, pointing out that even supporters can’t show proof of its success, and many national studies have shown that it is unsuccessful. Even the surgeon general said, in 2001, that the program does not work. While it is certainly a “feel good” program, it is not a good use of tax payer dollars.

Twelve years have passed since I graduated D.A.R.E., and it has been an even longer time since the program has been debunked, yet it continues to remain funded because of the idea that something needs to be done, regardless of whether it is effective. Numerous studies have shown that the program’s touted “successes” can’t actually be credited to D.A.R.E. I personally have never taken an illegal drug, but I don’t think D.A.R.E. factored into my decision, and plenty of my classmates still chose to do drugs in middle school and high school, despite completing the program.

D.A.R.E. has consistently failed to prove that it’s worth the taxpayer expense. Considering that the Blue Springs children seem likely to fit the profile of children who have been negatively impacted by D.A.R.E. in the past, residents there certainly have better uses for that money than to fund a discredited program.

Local Food Policies and the Late Harvest

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

A Wall Street Journal article explains how unusually rainy weather affects the corn and soybean harvests. Most crops aren’t dry enough for storage yet, but leaving them in the fields puts them at risk for mold and other kinds of damage.

A late harvest that threatens crops is a challenge for the economy, and policies can either mitigate the problem or exacerbate it. For instance, requirements that public schools buy a certain percentage of food locally could force schools to wait weeks for crops to be harvested, or to pay extra for scarce local produce.

Conversely, allowing for open trade between regions protects consumers. People and organizations can buy food from areas that aren’t experiencing adverse weather, so no one has to go hungry because of a bad harvest where they live.

Nanny State Policies and Their Side Effects

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Matthew Kahn writes about safety precautions that can do more harm than good because they lull people into complacency:

Child proof safety caps on medicine lull people into not hiding medicine from kids and kids break into the pills. Diabetic medicines for fighting high blood sugar lull diabetics into thinking they can eat lots of sweets.

In the rest of the post, he applies this idea to climate change policies.

Kahn’s insight relates to many facets of the nanny-state agenda, such as smoking bans and caloric restrictions on restaurant food. When restaurant patrons believe that their dining experience is sufficiently regulated to optimize health and safety, they won’t go out of their way to look for the most nutritious menus or the cleanest environments. While some people might be brought up to a higher level of health by the imposed standard, others might make worse choices than they would if they were on their guard.

I would expect complacency to be a negative side effect of most policies, but in some cases it could actually be a good thing. For example, Springfield local food advocates are really worked up about an impending economic collapse:

A food policy council should be created in the Springfield metro area because it would trigger an increase in the local food supply and protect the region if a catastrophic event severed the Ozarks’ national and global food link.

If something so disastrous happened that we couldn’t even bring food into Springfield, I doubt a defenseless community garden would survive unscathed. And even if the garden remained intact, the catastrophe would have to be remarkably well-timed to strike during those months when food can be harvested in Missouri.

I’m not a fan of farms on public land, but if a little garden can get these people to calm down and stop seeing the end of the global food system in the shadow of every tomato leaf, it might be worth it. (That’s assuming they really would be lulled into complacency and wouldn’t just proceed to demand more gardens.)

Test Scores Aren’t Set in Stone

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

At Cato@Liberty, Andrew Coulson discusses Charles Murray’s ideas about education. Murray advocates competition in education because he believes competing schools will offer safer environments and impart more knowledge, but he does not expect choice to raise test scores significantly. He thinks that students could learn more information than they do now, but he doesn’t think that reading comprehension or math test scores could rise much — according to Murray, those scores depend too greatly on IQ and family background for schools to make a difference.

Coulson cites research findings that private and charter schools do raise test scores, and that the effect lasts. Test scores really can go up. Then he makes this important point:

What’s more, this should be intuitively obvious. The current mean of the bell curve of educational achievement is not some inescapable fact of nature, like the value of pi. It is a symptom of the monopoly school systems that have stifled educational efficiency and innovation for more than a century.

That’s something that bothers me about Murray’s reasoning: He holds stagnant test scores under a monopoly system as evidence that mean test scores can’t change under any system. This extrapolation is unwarranted without evidence from competitive education systems. And, as Coulson notes, studies of competitive systems don’t support Murray’s argument.

In the book Real Education, Murray suggests another kind of study, one that he claims would put the debate to rest. First, he says, shower some below-average students with resources and attention. Next, give them a test. This, Murray writes, will determine “the outer limits of what can be accomplished with the current state of knowledge.” It would be futile to ask anything more of below-average children.

The fallacy here is readily apparent if we imagine an analogous experiment: Take some highly gifted people, and shower them with resources. Then see what they can do. Would you find the limits of human accomplishment?

Besides, Murray overlooks the fact that competition creates knowledge. As competing schools experiment and try new things, they gain knowledge of what works in education and what doesn’t. When we debate what a competitive market in education could achieve, we shouldn’t assume that knowledge of teaching will remain at current levels.

Virtual School Closure a Real Loss for Missouri

Posted on by Caitlin Hartsell

If a successful, low-cost, cutting-edge school in Missouri were being shut down midway through the school year, leaving thousands of students without feasible educational alternatives, the state would see an uproar. But recent budget cuts to Missouri’s virtual school program will bring essentially the same result, with little backlash.

The virtual school spent $5.8 million last year to educate 2,500 students. That comes to approximately $2,300 per student. The Salem R-80 district, which spent $5,418.37 per student in 2008, had the lowest per-student cost in Missouri. While some of the program’s online students are taking only supplemental classes, Missouri’s virtual education program is still one of the most cost-effective “schools” in the state.

The state’s budget cuts will necessitate that the program close at the end of the semester, leaving some students a few credits away from graduation. This cessation of the full program comes after its budget had already been scaled back earlier this year. From the Post-Dispatch:

Because of budget troubles, lawmakers already had scaled back the virtual school this year to a $4.8 million program serving 1,600 kids who enrolled on a first-come, first-serve basis.
About 2,000 were turned away when the free slots filled up.

Missouri’s students should not be denied the unique opportunities that virtual schooling provides. Although budget costs are necessary, the state’s virtual school was a very cost-effective program in comparison to existing public education. It supplemented traditional schools and home schooling for some, and allowed sick children who were unable to function in crowded classrooms to continue their educations.

The virtual school program is like a charter school for rural Missouri, where the charters do not exist. It provides an innovative learning experience, giving kids an alternative to traditional school. In this way, it both competes and meshes with the traditional school experience to give students a better learning experience. (Read these posts by Sarah Brodsky to find out more about the benefits and challenges of online schools.)

Missouri spends $5.4 billion on primary and secondary education; can it not find the few million necessary to educate students in an innovative, cost-effective manner?

Health Care Solutions Need to Be Feasible

Posted on by Caitlin Hartsell

The Missouri Budget Project recently wrote a special piece for the St. Louis Beacon about affordable health care, “What to do about health care? Make it affordable.” In it, the author conflates increased coverage with affordability, ignoring the systemic and regulatory factors that have led to the ever-increasing costs of health care we’ve seen in the United States. The piece makes a particularly problematic assumption that passing new government mandates for more coverage will guarantee better outcomes.

One way in which the author proposed to increase coverage is an expansion of Medicaid, because “Medicaid has a good benefit package, low administrative costs, and requires minimal out of pocket expense.” This may be true, but not because Medicaid is more efficient than private markets, but because the program pays a very low rate to doctors, which may become even smaller as a result of recent state budget cuts. Many doctors who face these lower mandated prices conclude that they cannot afford to take Medicaid patients, and are refusing to accept new ones. How will this improve coverage? It may actually decrease coverage by limiting the number of doctors available for an ever-growing Medicaid population.

Increasing coverage by creating deficits or a large burden on the state budget is not a long-term solution. It would be better to lower costs, as described in a recent study released by the Show-Me Institute, through increasing personal accountability. While the Missouri Budget Project’s proposed solution is well-intentioned, it is ultimately not fiscally feasible.

Dutch Court Abandons All Pretense of Impartiality in Dekker Case

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Today brought sad news for Laura Dekker: The Dutch court has forbidden her to set sail and extended state guardianship until July. This despite the fact that she passed every test they set for her:

The court said that while Dekker’s sailing skills were adequate and a psychological report concluded that the voyage would not harm her social or emotional development, there were questions about safety and her ability to continue her schooling while at sea.

It turns out that the psychological assessments were given simply for the purpose of digging up a reason to stop Dekker. She wouldn’t have been allowed to sail had she failed them, and she’s not allowed to sail now that she’s passed.

I’m appalled that Dekker’s inability to attend school while sailing is given as a reason for the state to detain her on land. By this reasoning, a court could prevent kids from going on extended vacations with their families or participating in any competitive sports.

Should the Government Instruct People How to Pray?

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

I think not, but that’s what a poster from the New York City Health Department does. The poster, which is intended for a religious Jewish audience and is also available in Yiddish, reminds people to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds. It also shows several hand washing steps that you would expect on a poster in the bathroom, such as “scrub” and “rinse.” The unusual thing is, the instructions incorporate a Jewish hand washing ritual and the prayer said after using the bathroom. The last instruction on the poster is “Pray,” underneath a picture of a scroll containing the first two words of this particular prayer.

I would find it cute and informative if a Jewish organization published this poster in an effort to educate people simultaneously about hygiene and Jewish religious practices. But the state shouldn’t tell people how to practice Judaism, or any other religion.

I’m not against translating government documents into foreign languages, and translating a poster into Yiddish could be reasonable in a city with a large Jewish population. However, the translation should present the same content as the original — it shouldn’t add religious instructions.

MO Budget Blues in the Nixon Era

Posted on by David Stokes

Our Policy Pulse site has a good story with some detailed links to the recent budget cuts announced by the governor. I hope and plan to have more thorough work on these proposals released soon, but I don’t want to rush anything — and many of us will be out most of next week at a conference. So, I just want to quickly take the opportunity to commend Gov. Jay Nixon for his willingness to make the hard fiscal decisions that are necessary, including laying off state employees and cutting budgets, rather than trying to raise taxes. He deserves a good deal of credit for that.

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