Charters Shouldn’t Have to Copy Traditional Public Schools

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Worrisome news from Los Angeles suggests that some public school districts are not the “melting pots” that education lore makes them out to be. Students who don’t speak English are relegated to separate classes, where they have little contact with native speakers. Many who entered the schools in kindergarten still don’t know English by high school. And, once they’ve mastered the language, they have to catch up on the academics they missed:

Mary Campbell, who is in charge of English language learning programs at L.A. Unified, said students must learn English as well as the grade-level material to move into mainstream classes. That often takes longer than learning the language, she said.

It must be a big challenge for a district with lots of non-native language speakers to integrate them all within a few years, so I don’t want to rush to blame L.A. Unified. But it does make you wonder why traditional districts’ English language learning programs are held up as a model for charter schools. The districts’ approach doesn’t work with all students, and charters should be free to try new ways of teaching English that could help students who fall behind in regular English classes.

Several charter proposals in Oregon have been turned down on grounds that they lacked plans to educate children who don’t speak English (and that they didn’t have enough community support, and a bunch of other things). Given the results of English programs in districts like L.A. Unified, no plan could be the best plan. If charters don’t expect large numbers of English language learners, they might mainstream them and let them learn English through immersion. Students would hear English all day long, instead of sitting in a class with others who don’t know any more English than they do. Parents who prefer a structured English program would always have the option of staying in the traditional district instead of choosing a charter.

Language immersion charters are another alternative to traditional English classes. In these schools, part of class time is spent in English and the rest in a foreign language. Every student has the experience of learning in a language they don’t yet speak fluently, so English language learners aren’t the odd ones out. An advantage of immersion charters is that grade-level materials are taught in at least two languages. For example, a Spanish-speaking student attending an English-Spanish charter would learn English for part of the day, while continuing to study some subjects in Spanish. This prevents students from taking one step forward in English, two steps backward in math or history.

If they’re to improve education, charters have to be free to depart from the districts’ established routines — including English classes.

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.

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