Representing From Afar

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

This doesn’t bother me. A member of the St. Charles County Council is working in Iraq for one year of his four-year term. He stays in touch with constituents and the council through phone calls and online communication. A few of the other council members griped to the Post-Dispatch about the arrangement — they want a new ordinance requiring council members to attend meetings in person.

The question should be left to the council member’s constituents. If they’re satisfied with his telecommuting, that’s what counts. If they’re not, they should vote him out of office.

Internationally Competitive U.S. Education – at Home

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Any comparison of U.S. education with school systems in other countries is incomplete if it leaves out American parents’ freedom to homeschool. This family fled Germany, where their homeschooled children had been forcibly removed from their home and taken to a state school. They now live in Tennessee, and are seeking political asylum.

Tennessee has fairly flexible homeschooling laws. Homeschooling families have to report on curriculum and attendance every year to their local superintendent. Missouri’s law is even better — it requires some record keeping, but those records aren’t looked at unless there’s a problem. This leaves parents free to focus on teaching rather than notifying the public schools about their “attendance,” a term that’s meaningless for homeschoolers anyway. (How could homeschoolers be absent? If they walk outside?)

I hope the Romeike family is enjoying the freedom to homeschool in Tennessee. If they ever find Tennessee’s regulations too burdensome, they should consider Missouri.

“The Laws Sort of Differ From State to State”

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Some congressmen are irked that, in policy matters left to the states, laws are not uniform across the country. One of those issues is cyberbullying. Online harassment is difficult to define. Any definition depends on the intent of the bully and must encompass so many online activities that a resulting law would curtail free speech. At least, it would curtail free speech if it were enforceable enough to curtail anything, which is doubtful.

No one should be surprised, then, that some states don’t yet regulate cyberbullying or that the ones that do assign it varying definitions and penalties. Nevertheless, federal lawmakers are trying to rectify the situation.

The bill’s sponsor gives the weakest justification for federal interference in states’ affairs that I have ever heard:

“Some states do have … bullying laws on the books, many states don’t, and the laws sort of differ from state to state,” Sanchez said.

School Reformers Tinker Around the Edges

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

I’m not usually a “let’s tear down the establishment and start a revolution” kind of person, but even I can see that making minuscule changes in school policy will not turn around SLPS.

Superintendent Kelvin Adams wants SLPS students to wear uniforms. Maybe that’s a good idea, but a lack of uniforms wasn’t what lost SLPS its accreditation. Nor has it been the reason so many families are leaving the district.

Someone in the article’s comments section suggests that SLPS spend the uniform money on better school food instead. (Could it be a locavore?)

I don’t expect food to affect student achievement any more than clothing. These proposals focus on physical aspects of schools that have no direct connection to learning. As Bob Compton points out on the Two Million Minutes blog, successful schools around the world are built first and foremost on great teaching. Handsome uniforms, new buildings, and delicious food are just icing on the cake.

Education for Sustainable Living

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

There’s a great environmental economics blogger at UCLA, so don’t conclude from this post that all UCLA environmental programs are nuts. Just some of them. I’m watching a five-part series about locavores and “sustainable living.” I’m not going to torture everyone by embedding it, but the first part is here on YouTube if you’d like to watch from the beginning.

Some thoughts on Jules Dervaes’ lecture:

  1. (Part 2, 1:05) It’s interesting that he complains about the existence of a few hundred different brands of shoes. In his words, it doesn’t “necessarily ensure that you will have a successful future.” I can’t think of any particular number of brands that would ensure that. It seems like a bit much to ask of a pair shoes. Most importantly, if he got his way and everything had to be produced locally, there would be many more brands of all products, because each location would have to have its own brand. That really would be wasteful.

  2. (Part 2, 3:50) Now he’s complaining that there aren’t enough varieties of lettuce. Quite a leap from his train of thought five seconds ago. I was expecting him to make better use of logic after he drew all the Venn-diagram-look-alike circles on the board — although I have to admit that his mastery of the Socratic method is impressive. The students, at his prompting, are listing all the ills a diverse seed bank would save us from, including global warming. What about an attack of killer shoes?

  3. (Part 2, 4:00) If he’s so concerned about hedging his bets and guarding against all these risks (drought, disease, etc.) you would think buying food from a variety of places would be more effective than using a variety of seeds. If there’s a natural disaster in your area, for example, your seeds are going to die and it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 25 varieties.

  4. (Part 2, 6:45) I don’t have data on hand, but I think he’s wrong about fewer varieties of produce. You can get many varieties of fruits and vegetables at a grocery store, if you’re willing to buy food from far away. Like those fancy tomatoes in different sizes and colors. And the apples they’ve bred to be extra sweet.

  5. (Part 3, 0:20) Who wants to eat that one ugly squash for two weeks straight?

  6. (Part 3, 3:20) Now he implies that eating local food gives you an advantage in sexual selection and evolution.

  7. (Part 3, 6:00) I planted seeds in cups, too, in preschool.

  8. (Part 4, 3:08) “Resistance is fertile.” Ha ha ha ha ha …

  9. (Part 5, 0:10) He orders bugs, like from a catalog. Isn’t that cheating? That’s not local if you introduce foreign animal species!

I wouldn’t pay much attention to this if his ideas stayed in his vegetable garden. But the locavores want to force the rest of us to jump on the bandwagon — or should I say, hay wagon? This nutty ideology may soon be coming to a school near you. Stay on the lookout. Keep the friends of the free market close, keep the enemies … local.

It Looks Like the Public Service Academy Might Already Be Here …

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

… And it’s a charter school. Actually, I’m not sure whether this particular school is truly the long-dreaded Bureaucrat High or not. The school is the Academy for Civic and Entrepreneurial Leadership. “Civic Leadership” could mean civil service prep, but “Entrepreneurial” invokes business and the marketplace. So which is it? I’m still confused after reading this article (link from Edspresso). Leaning toward the private sector, the school will incorporate technology into the classroom, and students will participate in internships. On the government side, students will research government agencies, and someone is quoted saying that the school should be close to as many public sector office buildings as possible.

The school’s website isn’t enlightening — the few paragraphs posted so far basically just talk about video production. What do you think? Evil government service academy of doom, or just a confused charter?

Say No to National Schools – Even Virtual Ones

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

This op-ed in the Chicago Tribune suggests that the United States needs a federal virtual school. The authors, Jeb Bush and James B. Hunt Jr., put it this way:

We think it is time for America’s first national online campus of virtual schools–an Amazon.com of courses and curricula where students, parents, teachers, principals and school administrators could shop for a better education. Virtual courses open to everyone would tear down the chief barrier to student achievement–access to a quality education.

The most striking difference between Amazon and a hypothetical national virtual school is that Amazon came about naturally in the competitive marketplace, while government programs don’t. A national online school would be like any other unwieldy federal bureaucracy, and very unlike Amazon.

A better idea is for individual states to take down the barriers to entry that they’ve set up. Some states, like Missouri, have only one virtual school. Others allow several virtual schools to compete with each other, but hit them with all the restrictions that apply to brick-and-mortar charter schools. Each state should allow its students to participate in a virtual school based in any other state. The money should follow the student.

This would work like the system of public colleges and universities. You can attend a public college in your own state, or in another state, but you don’t have to go through a “national campus.”

While I’m on the topic of virtual schools, it occurs to me that online education might be a way to cut down on the costs of the public service academy everybody’s talking about. Let people learn to be bureaucrats online.

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