Oregon: “Land of the Empire Builders” ? and Charter Deniers

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

A proposed charter school, Excelsior Prep, has been turned down by a school board in Oregon. Surprise, surprise:

“We were expecting this,” said Excelsior Prep Board member Tonjia Haskins after the meeting. “They have been opposed basically since the beginning.”

Getting charter applications denied by Oregon’s school boards is par for the course, but what’s outrageous in this case is that the reasons given are the charter’s impressive standards and goals. Here are the district advisory committee director’s comments:

“They thought they could go out and hire teachers for half of what public teachers are paid to deliver a more difficult curriculum than most public schools currently offer,” he said. “I don’t question their commitment at all, in fact, I applaud it, but they didn’t know how to get it done.”

So an intention to be more efficient and academically rigorous than traditional districts is reason enough to deny a charter! Charter proposals in Oregon don’t stand a chance — charters that want to do better than the districts aren’t allowed to go forward, while few students would ever enroll in a charter that made no improvements over the traditional public schools.

“Lack of community support” is another common criticism of Oregon’s charter hopefuls, and it was brought up in this case, too. Again, it’s a test that charters can’t pass. Most parents won’t sign on to a school that doesn’t yet exist, especially if the charter proposal constantly fluctuates in response to district demands. The problem is compounded because marketing has to be limited to word of mouth, for who would pour money into an advertising campaign for a proposed school that may never be approved?

We can’t foresee whether any charter will succeed, but we shouldn’t summarily write them off as failures and forbid them to open. If a charter doesn’t find enough community support or neglects to keep its promises, students will abandon it to return to the traditional public schools.

I’m anxious to see the result of Excelsior Prep’s appeal to the Department of Oregon. Knowing the state’s track record, I can’t be very optimistic.

School to Farm

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

When teachers in the Harlem Success Academy charter schools observed that students were struggling with farming references on standardized tests, they decided to do some unconventional test prep. They took their classes to a farm and let them learn firsthand about sheep and pumpkins.

Some people (namely, commenters on the New York Times website) see this as a sign that teaching to the test has gotten out of hand. I think the field trip is more reasonable than most of the test prep that goes on in schools. Children who struggle to read a passage on a standardized test because they’re unfamiliar with farms will run into the same problem whenever they come across agricultural terms in a newspaper or a novel, so schools are right to address the deficiency early. And a field trip to see farm animals gives students direct knowledge of the world, unlike a day spent memorizing “test-taking strategies” that have no application outside of the classroom.

The traditional approach to test-prep — practice questions, out-of-context vocabulary lists, and lectures on the process of elimination — doesn’t work very well, but many schools fall back on it because it’s easy to implement during regular class time. It’s great that a charter has approached the problem creatively and found a hands-on way to give kids an advantage on tests.

Of course, students wouldn’t have to go all the way to a farm to learn about chickens if enough chickens lived in the city. Local governments should bear in mind the educational repercussions when they consider banning farm animals.

A House Is a Man’s Castle, Fortress, and Barnyard

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Clayton residents are debating whether the city should restrict pet chickens. This Post-Dispatch article presents the usual quotes from neighbors who abhor all things farm-related. Also noted are the people who want Clayton to promote chicken ownership actively:

On the other side of the issue is Clayton resident Stan Braude, a biology professor at Washington University.

Braude said after the meeting that he hoped the city would encourage more residents to have a few hens in their backyards.

What would Clayton have to do to increase hen ownership? I’m imagining a chicken incentive program, reminiscent of Cash for Clunkers — or, alternatively, a fresh eggs buyback program.

I hope Clayton avoids both regulation and encouragement, and instead allows people to make decisions about chickens for themselves. If anyone can’t stand to live in a city that permits chicken raising, they can always move out to Chesterfield.

Listen Up!

Posted on by Dave Roland

This week, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to spend two consecutive afternoons being interviewed on St. Louis’ WGNU, a radio station with programming directed to the city’s African-American population. On Monday afternoon, I spent an hour as part of a panel conversation (with Sheila Rendon and Romona Williams of the North Side Community Benefits Alliance) discussing eminent domain and the proposed NorthSide Regeneration Project on Kuumba Nia’s radio show. (Audio available here.)

The conversation went so well that I was invited back the following afternoon to spend another hour discussing the same topic with co-hosts state Sen. Robin Wright-Jones and John Bowman on her show, “The Wright Side of Politics.” (Audio available here.) My conversation partners the second day were Barbara Manzara and Keith Marquard, also of the North Side Community Benefits Alliance. If you’re interested in hearing from those on the front lines of the upcoming battle over the proposed redevelopment effort, give these two shows a listen!

Proposed Variant of the Public Service Academy

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

By way of the Panama City Renaissance School blog, I’ve learned that an executive director of a teachers’ union in Nevada wants to start a charter school for the purpose of preparing future teachers.

The proposal has some characteristics in common with the apocryphal public service academy:

  1. Its goal is to teach high school students how to be teachers, and most teachers work for public schools. Teacher training is de facto public service training.

  2. It’s based on the premise that if you want to work in the public sector, you should go to school with people who all have the same career plans as you do. That means schools for future public leaders, schools for future civil servants, and schools for future teachers.

  3. The proposed course of study concludes with a college scholarship, conditional on the student’s agreement to teach in the local traditional district for four years.

And here are a few reasons why this could actually be a good idea:

  1. A new teaching charter would compete with existing high schools. If students choose the new charter over traditional schools, that’s a good indication that they’re better off attending the charter. And the competition could spur traditional public schools to make improvements to retain students.

  2. Some people know they want to be teachers from an early age, and they might want to start preparing before college. A teaching charter may turn out to be as popular as charters dedicated to environmental science or the arts.

  3. The scholarship program could be redesigned so that graduates choose between work in traditional public, charter, and private schools. That way it wouldn’t be biased toward any particular sector.

Legislating Common Sense

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

This week’s Well-Intentioned But Ineffectual Nanny State Award goes to California, for enacting a law requiring doctors to conduct a physical examination before performing cosmetic surgery. At the Orange County Register‘s In Your Face blog, Colin Stewart writes:

As this blog commented last year, passing a law requiring doctors to examine their patients is like mandating that surgeons wash their hands before an operation. Anyone who would ignore such a basic safety precaution isn’t likely to worry about the prospect of a technical infraction, yet violating the Donda West Law would not be a criminal offense.

Stewart recommends that patients find out whether their doctor has been the subject of complaints; patients’ research will protect them better than a law with no penalties can.

Here in Missouri, we don’t have as many cosmetic surgeons as they do in California, but we have our own version of the nanny state. Targets include kids riding bicycles, playground equipment sitting in the sun, and now haunted houses.

A Small Improvement for the Virtual Instruction Program

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MoVIP) is offering additional courses at the high school level through the National Repository of Online Courses Network. When I first saw the news, I was thrilled because I’ve long thought that the online school covered too few subjects. Then I read through the press release and noticed that the new courses were already available to anyone for free at hippocampus.org.

MoVIP is not bringing students any content they didn’t have access to before. This move is comparable to including a free online dictionary in a virtual English course. There is a potential benefit: MoVIP will direct some students to resources that were out there on the Internet, but that they wouldn’t have looked for on their own. Still, adding these courses does not represent a substantive innovation, which is perhaps why there’s no mention of the news on the MoVIP website.

Rampant Licensing Requirements Are Tricks, Not Treats

Posted on by Christine Harbin

Today, Matt Drudge linked to two articles that illustrate the negative consequences of excessive licensing requirements. The city of Ventura, Calif., has condemned a homemade haunted house on private property as an “unsafe structure,” and prohibits visitors from entering it.

Responding to an anonymous complaint, the city said the 1,200-square-foot “amusement building” didn’t have a permit.

As a consequence, the cavorters will have to limit their fun to that which the city will allow.

There will be no maze, and it will only be open Halloween night, to coincide with a block party the neighbors are hoping to have, with the city’s permission.

This story has a lot of similarities to a story I blogged about recently in which a Michigan woman was cited for running an unlicensed daycare center. In both situations, no one had been physically hurt, all involved parties were happy with the arrangement, no money had been exchanged, and it occurred on private property.

This demonstrates how red tape can negatively affect the general welfare. For many families, visiting this haunted house is a Halloween tradition. The unintended consequence of requiring vigilante haunted houses to obtain a permit is disappointed children. Parents should have the right to determine what constitutes a safe environment for their children.

As contributors to this blog have discussed, Missouri is a milieu for rampant licensing laws, too.

Interesting Tax Data From the Tax Foundation

Posted on by David Stokes

The St. Louis Business Journal has a story about a recent study comparing sales tax rates in the 50 states. The study is from the Tax Foundation, one of my favorite think tanks. The foundation’s task is difficult, because compiling local tax data is very complicated, nowhere more so than in Missouri. We are listed as having the 15th-highest combined state and local sales tax rate. Illinois is seventh. Illinois’ average is increased by Cook County having the highest local sales tax rate in the country, so the part of Illinois along the Missouri border is going to be more closely aligned with us. Illinois also has higher property and gas taxes, but a lower state income tax.

This previous study by the Tax Foundation ranks the level of dependency that states have for various types of taxes: sales, income, property, and licenses. Missouri is not in the top 10 for any of the four categories, although it just misses the top 10 for income taxes. Illinois makes the top 10 for property taxes. Tennessee is right at the top for sales taxes, as are a number of other states without income taxes. All of this is important, because Missouri is currently debating the state income tax, and we are hopefully getting a full and accurate debate regarding that issue.

I would like to see a Missouri system in which local government is funded primarily by property, especially land taxes, with a more fair and reasonable system of assessments equalizing and lowering the property taxes that most people pay. State government should be funded primarily through sales taxes, without increased reliance on user fees (like toll roads). At both levels, privatization opportunities should be pursued whenever appropriate. At the local level, more shared provision of services between cities and counties is also needed, and can be a very good alternative to privatization. This is, in my opinion, a recipe for economic growth and fair taxation.

Thanks to Mr. Combest for the original link to the StLBJ.

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