The next Two Million Minutes documentary will be released in one week. You can watch the trailer here.
For background reading, here are some previous posts about Two Million Minutes.
When Charter Schools Meet Video Games
By way of Freakonomics, I found this Economist article about a new charter school that includes video games in the curriculum. The thinking behind this is that students are immersed in digital media outside of school and unengaged in traditional classrooms, so bringing games into their schoolwork is the best way to grab their attention.
I love charter schools, but I’m fond of books and paper, too. Here are some reasons I’m wary of the video game school concept:
- Video games are fascinating and mysterious to adults; kids think they’re normal. Contrary to what tech-phobic adults imagine, kids are not drawn to all video games by an inexorable pull. Kids choose to play the games that are the most fun. To hold students’ interest, it’s not enough to translate a science curriculum into video game format. You have to make it as good as the best video games — a formidable challenge for a video game producer, let alone a school.
- The rest of the world is not a video game. The charter school’s stated goal is to prepare students for college; its future graduates may be in for a rude awakening, however, when they discover colleges rely on textbooks and lectures. I’m not one to say students should study note-taking for the sake of note-taking, but I wonder whether the graduates would be able to pay attention when professors teach in traditional ways.
- An emphasis on gaming may keep kids happy at the expense of developing academic skills. How do you learn to read Shakespeare from a game?
And here are some reasons the school looks promising:
- It’s not the same as every other school. Charters should experiment, and that includes trying things that are radical or outrageous (as long as they’re legal). Unsuccessful programs won’t last.
- It defies stereotypes about charters. The most visible charters are the ones with extended school days and math drills. Occasionally, a charter receives news coverage for its environmental theme or language-immersion program. When people hear about the game-based charter, they may revise what they think about charter schools.
- It leaves little of the learning experience to chance. The typical school buys textbooks, writes a list of main topics students are supposed to study, and then turns responsibility for students’ learning over to the teachers. It’s no wonder that studies find teacher quality to be so important! A charter school that designs classroom activities ahead of time, in the form of digital games and projects, can fine-tune students’ educations without firing anyone.
“We Are Forced Into Constant Conflict Over What Our Schools Will Teach”
Neal McCluskey explains what the president’s speech to students has in common with new math and evolution: It’s something we fight over because taxpayers fund a single system of schools. One person’s inspirational message is another’s exploitative propaganda, just like one person’s sound instruction is another’s educational fad. Political discussions will be less shrill when we have a marketplace of diverse schools for everyone to choose from.
Tort Reform 3: Final Judgment
Hopefully, this will be my last post about tort reform for a while. Combest has a couple of KMOX links today dealing with the issue. The question has largely been settled in Missouri, given that comprehensive tort reform was passed five years ago. How has it worked out? Very well for the insurance companies, as well as for the doctors who are paying lower malpractice rates.
I truly believe that the passage of tort reform was the best change for long-term economic growth that Missouri has made in decades. The benefits are realized every time a doctor decides against moving her practice across the state line. But I still don’t think a preemptive federal reform would be appropriate. This is a state issue, and Missouri has properly addressed it.
Trucks and Tolls and Stuff
According to the Kansas City Star, Missouri has been approved to move ahead with a plan to install truck-only lanes within a new I-70 across Missouri. Now, these plans take a long time, so we shouldn’t expect to see this realized anytime soon, and perhaps it will never actually happen. MoDOT is hoping to get funding for a demonstration section of 30 miles of truck-only lanes in western Missouri.
In the long run, there is exciting potential here for both safer highways and economic growth:
[MoDOT Director Pete] Rahn said there has been talk at the national level of coming up with a dedicated funding source for so-called freight corridors, something that could boost I-70’s chances of getting money in the future.
Missouri is well positioned to take advantage of this proposed “freight corridor,” but there is not much current discussion of using tolling to pay for these truck-only lanes. The talk still centers on a general sales tax increase to fund highway improvements, which is a fairly horrible idea and serves to even further externalize the externalities of driving, to use some fancy economics lingo I got out of a book somewhere.
We have written before that the most preferred use of the stimulus money would be for infrastructure, such as transportation-related projects — sort of a “least bad”–type thing. So, I hope Missouri gets stimulus funding for the demonstration area, and I hope it works well — which I am confident it will. Beyond that, though, MoDOT should use the hard-to-get waiver it received a few years ago from the FHA to toll I-70 and pay for both road improvements and truck-only lanes with highway tolls.
There would be nothing wrong with using some tax dollars to offset in part the cost of the tolls, thereby helping to guarantee heavy use of the toll roads. This idea was suggested by Professor Ken Small in his study about private financing of highways written for the Show-Me Institute last year. However, tolling needs to be the primary way Missouri pays for its highway system, although I have no illusions that this will happen quickly or easily.
Speech to Students
I hope you had a good vacation; now it’s time to get in a straight line and listen to your teachers. Welcome to kindergarten.
The president’s address turned out to be apolitical, as promised — it was all about paying attention in class and doing your homework, the kind of stuff they tell little kids at the start of any school year. I didn’t hear any socialist indoctrination, and although I take issue with the assertion that it’s the government’s responsibility to set standards for everyone, that idea was only mentioned in passing.
One striking feature of the speech was its emphasis on going to college — and on going to a good college. I say “striking” because the competitive post-secondary education market stands in sharp contrast to the k–12 public school system. We take it for granted that students will choose a college, which may be either public or private. There’s no expectation that people will attend the college closest to their home. And, while the importance of rankings is a contentious issue, it’s widely accepted that some schools are better than others and that students should try to get into a good school.
However, for younger students, the prevailing attitudes are different. Many people assume that parents aren’t capable of choosing good schools over bad — a comment I often receive when I write about choice within public education. Children in the wealthiest families are encouraged to go to a good high school, or even a good kindergarten, but it’s a foreign idea for children on the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Those children will go to a school determined by their street address.
America’s colleges and universities thrive under a competitive system. When politicians encourage students to aim for college, they should also think about how to make k–12 schools more like the successful post-secondary schools.
Amtrak and High-Speed Rail
There’s a nice article in the Kansas City Star discussing the improvements made to Amtrak service in Missouri. In fact, spending a (comparatively) small amount of money on improving the existing service is another reason, among many, not to implement high-speed rail.
Much more to come from the Show-Me Institute about this very topic in about three weeks.
Why the Secrecy?
It took awhile to find in today’s paper, but the Post-Dispatch had a good article about developer Paul McKee’s $8 billion pitch to redevelop Saint Louis’ north side. As I wrote before, this development involves Tax Increment Financing, eminent domain, and debate about the role that city agencies should play in the real estate business.
Tim Logan, author of the McKee article, did a great job of talking to the people involved. There’s also some good context. But my recent experience at a public meeting about the development, held at Zion Lutheran Church by McKee, Alderman Marlene Davis and Alderman April Ford-Griffin makes me doubt the thrust of Logan’s article.
Is McKee really winning people over?
At his meeting at Zion Lutheran Church, which was open to the public, Ford-Griffin actually told a journalist to stop recording. When McKee spoke, he told a girl in the back of the church basement to stop videotaping, because it makes people “uncomfortable.”
McKee said then that he doesn’t ask media outlets like the Post-Dispatch to attend such meetings. I can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure area journalists know this. In order to fairly characterize the community response to this proposed project, you have to go see what community members are saying to the developer himself. I hope some Post-Dispatch journalists have at least tried to attend.
If McKee is winning over the north side community, and there is really a sea change, why doesn’t he want the media to come to meetings and see that? Why would an elected official tell a journalist to shut off his microphone at a meeting open to the public?
Well, in the case of the Zion Lutheran Church meeting, the meeting didn’t go smoothly. Some attendees muttered about the aldermen’s chances at reelection. Others stood and made long speeches about eminent domain. There was some shouting.
In response to some community members criticizing her by name, Davis said, “No one is in love with anything. This is business.”
To be sure, there were some vocal critics at the church who make it a point to go to all of McKee’s meetings and attempt to cast the development in a bad light. However, I’ve been to a number of meetings organized by the critics. I know their faces. And there were a lot of other faces at Zion Lutheran Church that I hadn’t seen before.
I personally can’t wait for the updated TIF application to come out tomorrow. McKee, Davis, and Ford-Griffin say that the use of eminent domain has been ironed out of that version. If that’s the case, then north side residents will know that their property won’t be taken away from them by the government for the use of a private developer. But I’m still wary. After all, if the application is the answer to all of the critics’ concerns, why wasn’t it made available for scrutiny as soon as possible?
The Council on Women and Girls
The Council on Women and Girls has a new website. It provides a list of council members, as well as the Council’s mission, which is to “ensure that each of the agencies in which they’re charged takes into account the needs of women and girls in the policies they draft, the programs they create, the legislation they support.”
Since women and girls make up more than half of the United States population, government agencies should definitely take us into account. If agencies are not even considering half the population in their routine work, they should start today.
Separate councils for different demographic groups are not the way to go, however, for several reasons. First, they imply that all members of the designated group are affected by regulations and other government actions in the same way, which is not the case. The Council on Women and Girls lists several bills that would purportedly help women, without providing any counterarguments or suggesting that any women might disagree.
Second, these councils lead to a proliferation of boards and committees, with the potential to burden all levels of government. There are women’s councils at the state level, too; here’s the one in Missouri. What’s next? A women’s council in every county and township? (Local governments also need to take women into account.) It’s unfair to have councils for only certain sexes, age groups, and ethnic groups, but it’s also impossible to create new councils for all the groups that don’t have them.
And, finally, councils take pressure off of government agencies. When regulations turn out to be harmful to segments of the population, regulators can say, “That wasn’t our responsibility. The council was supposed to investigate how it would affect that group.”
