It doesn’t have to be that way. The Data Quality Campaign gave our neighbor Illinois high marks for their school report card website. Their report cards are parent-friendly and go beyond the federal requirements for what must be included. The same analysis found that Missouri report cards have so much technical language that they are written at a 17^th-grade level. That means you have to be a year or two into graduate school in order to fully understand them.

Fortunately, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has built a website that is easily searchable with a nice display of information that may be of interest to parents and other stakeholders. Of course, the site only has information on the schools around St. Louis, not the whole state.

The St. Louis University School of Education has also launched the PRiME Center to provide education data to those who are interested in it. So far, they have built education profiles for St. Louis,  Kansas City, and the entire state. And here at the Show-Me Institute, we have been busy building datasets and analyzing Missouri education data so we can better understand how schools and districts actually perform.

According to Wikipedia, the purpose of a state education agency is to [be] “responsible for education, including providing information, resources, and technical assistance on educational matters to schools and residents.” So why are the media, universities, and non-profits doing the job that should be done by DESE?

We discussed this topic in a recent podcast. Listen here.

The post Why Are Other Organizations Doing DESE’s Job? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The protest movement that culminated with the Boston Tea Party was not a dispute about high taxes. The price of legally imported tea was actually reduced by the Tea Act of 1773.

Wait, what?

Let’s go back a bit. For years, the British East India Company enjoyed a monopoly — granted by the British crown — on importing tea to Britain. Because the American colonies were under British rule, this also meant that all their tea had to come from the East India Company — first imported to London, then shipped to America by a third party. At the time, Britain had high import tariffs, which raised the price of all East India Company tea. Colonists could buy Dutch tea smuggled into the colonies  much more cheaply because it never touched a port with high tariffs. In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to import tea to the colonies duty-free. Suddenly, all the people who imported tea to the colonies, legally and illegally, were priced out of the market by a competitor that received special government favors. Some of the people on the boats in Boston Harbor the night of December 16 were concerned about overreaching government authority and a pattern of abuse, but lots of them were smugglers or legal shippers who were rebelling against the loss of their livelihood to a government policy that favored one business at the expense of others.

Here’s another quote from Wikipedia:

In 1772, legally imported Bohea, the most common variety of tea, sold for about 3 shillings (3s) per pound.^[33] After the Tea Act, colonial consignees would be able to sell it for 2 shillings per pound (2s), just under the smugglers’ price of 2 shillings and 1 penny (2s 1d).^[34]

So the colonists got their tea cheaper than before. Where’s the problem? Well, in addition to the problem of taxation without representation, competing businessmen lost out under the new tariff regime. There were other losers as well — namely every British citizen who paid higher taxes because the East India Company had this duty-free dispensation.

My co-workers at the Show-Me Institute have talked about targeted tax credits before. Targeted tax credits are just one way that governments pick winners and losers in the marketplace. When this happens, the logic of the market is overturned and almost everyone suffers — except those the government selects to receive its largess. It’s easy to point to these people and conclude that the tax credit was a success, but maybe that’s because the injured parties so seldom throw a historic party to make their plight known to the world.

The post The Boston Tea Party and . . . Targeted Tax Credits? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Saint George is moving ahead with the disincorporation proposal. After a series of scandals in this small, south Saint Louis County speed trap with a city (like Prussia’s historic description as an army with a country), enough of the residents are fed-up that they are thinking about getting rid of the entire city.

At a meeting the other day about the subject, county officials discussed how the county would be able to provide services within Saint George if the city disincorporated. How would the county be able to do that without having to raise taxes on everyone? Part of the answer is the sales tax pool. Saint George receives $225,917 per year from the pool. If it disincorporates, all that money will go back into the pool, and a good portion of it would go to Saint Louis County government. That would be new revenue for the county that would allow it to provide services to Saint George without any need for a tax increase.

I wish the residents luck as they begin this process. City services in Saint George have long been funded by the writing of speeding tickets for other residents of south county. (According to Wikipedia, 28 percent of the city’s budget comes from traffic fines.) Places that provide government services to a small number of people by abusing the legal system like this probably should not exist in the first place. Saint Louis County will be fully capable of providing the services that the city residents need.

The post Disincorporation Nation and the Sage of Saint George appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Finally, one attribute for which Missouri is probably most famous is its Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Admittedly, we have a special fondness for this architectural wonder: It’s the world’s largest Laffer Curve!

I hadn’t noticed it before, but it’s true!

Illustration by Christine Harbin. Photo source: Wikipedia.

The post Saint Louis: Home of the World’s Largest Laffer Curve appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The most obvious consequence of these closings would be that people formerly employed in that segment of the adult business in Missouri would either seek new lines of work or move to other states that are more accommodating of their current professions. The supply of this good may diminish or even disappear, but the demand for it won’t go anywhere. This situation could easily lead to results that should give pause to the social conservatives who support this bill.

The increased hassle of the legislation might dissuade some people from consuming such lascivious services, but others will seek out substitutes. It would likely lead to an increase in the consumption of pornography and prostitution (and some unemployed strippers would probably enter the world of prostitution, as well). But that still may not be the worst of it.

A 2006 study by Clemson University economist Todd Kendall argued that greater access to Internet pornography helped drive down the incidence of rape during the prior two decades. In a Slate article, fellow economist Steven Landsburg summarized Kendall’s findings:

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, “More Net access, less rape.” A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that’s a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It’s hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.

If not Wikipedia, then what? Maybe rape is down because former rapists have found their true loves on Match.com. But professor Kendall points out that the effects are strongest among 15-year-old to 19-year-old perpetrators—the group least likely to use such dating services.

Moreover, professor Kendall argues that those teenagers are precisely the group that (presumably) relies most heavily on the Internet for access to porn. When you’re living with your parents, it’s a lot easier to close your browser in a hurry than to hide a stash of magazines. So, the auxiliary evidence is all consistent with the hypothesis that Net access reduces rape because Net access makes it easy to find porn.

There are legitimate reasons to question such a strong conclusion on Kendall’s part, some of which were pointed out by Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame, but it cannot be easily dismissed. Furthermore, it would be inappropriate to draw direct parallels between Kendall’s study and the strip club situation in Missouri, because they are not perfectly analogous. Most obviously, 15-year-old to 19-year-old boys are not likely to be found in strip clubs to begin with. Still, the general idea holds up. People seeking sexual gratification may turn to much worse alternatives in the absence of easy access to common consensual options like pornography and strip clubs.

Let me be very clear: I am not predicting that this law would result in a measureable uptick in rapes in Missouri. In fact, absent a good control group, it would be hard to establish statistical correlation, let alone causation. What we do have is some very suggestive evidence that the law of unintended consequences may apply to this law in a fierce way, and it is something that the law’s supporters should think carefully about.

The post East Side Stripper Full Employment Act Advances appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri’s 6th Congressional District, only two of whose 26 counties gave electoral majorities to President Obama, got more than $314 million last year from the federal economic stimulus program. […]

In Plattsburg, Mo., a $1 million stimulus grant is paired with a $4.3 million low-interest loan to help build a water treatment plant. “Those two things you can’t be upset about,” said City Manager D.J. Gehrt. “But it’s not as simple as getting $5.3 million and you can go out and start your project.”

The engineering plans were finished and submitted for review 13 months ago. But the reviews stalled while agencies pondered where the funding might flow. Further delays have come from setting up mechanisms to repay the debt incurred from the loan.

If all goes as planned, Mr. Gehrt said, the treatment plant will be completed in the summer of 2011, maybe a quicker timetable because of the stimulus money, but maybe not.

In the long run, he added, “it’s going to save the ratepayers in our service area a good amount of money.”

In St. Joseph, the stimulus program directed more than $31 million to recipients like the school district, Missouri Western State University, the Department of Transportation and Community Action Partnership.

Etc. No doubt some people are benefiting from the stimulus, but because government spending does not face a profit and loss test, there is no good way to determine which projects are worthwhile and which wasteful. The article also ignores all the things taxpayers and bond holders would have done with the money had it not been taxed away or loaned to the government — in other words, it only pays attention to the seen, but not to the unseen, effects of the spending. These recipients of stimulus funds would not have received the money to do what they’ve done, but that money would have been used instead to create something else, if it hadn’t been spent in the stimulus.

Furthermore, although the $314 million that the 6th district received may seem like a lot of money, it amounts to less per capita than the national average. During the last year, $334 billion in stimulus spending has been allocated with $119 billion going toward tax cuts and another $14 billion in individual benefits like additional unemployment insurance payments. That leaves $201 billion in spending projects awarded during the last year. According to Wikipedia, the population of Missouri’s 6th district is 621,690, and the estimated population of the United States is 308,705,000, which means that the district contains just barely more than 0.2 percent of the national population. Given that 0.2 percent of $201 billion is $402 million, the district falls under the national average for stimulus spending by $58 million dollars.

Maybe the 6th district’s underwhelming support for Obama during 2008 is in some way related to the underwhelming amount of stimulus funds it has received.

The post The Mismeasure of Stimulus appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I call this event unfortunate not just because of the obvious benefit of reduced government expenses (some predicted that moving to a unicameral measure in Maine would save taxpayers a whopping $11 million per two-year legislative session), but because the current bicameral system is truly redundant.

According to this Wikipedia entry, it used to be the case that:

[T]he basis of representation in most state legislatures was modeled on that of the U.S. Congress: the members of the smaller chamber represented geography and members of the larger chamber represented population. In 1962, the United States Supreme Court announced the one person, one vote standard and invalidated state legislative representation based on geography. (One person, one vote does not apply to the composition of the U.S. Senate because that chamber’s makeup is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution.)

So, we now have a case in which 49 states have two houses serving the same purpose: per-capita representation. Nebraska — the one place where this good idea of house unification has taken place — has also adopted nonpartisan elections. The best explanation I have heard for why nonpartisan elections are a bad idea came from David Stokes: Political parties provide a general identification of a particular candidate’s political stances, and help voters save precious time obtaining information about every person on the ballot. Stokes has also written about the problems with nonpartisan elections, as well as ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of state government — right here in Missouri.

The post Honey, I Shrunk the Legislature appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The statistic quoted by McCracken, that St. Louis was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but is no longer among the top 50 cities, likely comes from the same statistical source used in this wikipedia list. There, it is plain as day: Austin: #16 (pop: 743,000); St. Louis: #52 (pop: 356,000). Never .mind the footnote in the list indicating that, like Baltimore, St. Louis is an independent city that is not a part of any county. More relevant is the fact that a city’s true population rarely comprises only the people who reside in its boundaries, but also the people who live and work within the vicinity.

There’s a standard measure of such population groupings, called “metropolitan statistical areas” (MSAs). Here’s a list of the top 25 MSAs and their populations. St. Louis is listed 18th now, with a population of 2.8 million. That’s more like it. Notice that Austin is not in the list? I found it here, listed 48th (2002 population: 1.3 million).

It’s true that the Austin MSA is growing fast, much faster than St. Louis’, but it’s unlikely that it will overtake us soon. What can residents of St. Louis and the state of Missouri do to ensure that we remain significant and grow strong? The Show-Me Institute has definitely covered some of this ground before. Here are some reminders.

The post In Defense of St. Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Some of the federal stimulus money may be used to speed things up. This article in the Kansas City Star gives the details: The Obama administration wants to spend $13 billion during the next five years to make train service faster. But not much faster. And Amtrak is blaming its slow-as-a-turtle pace on our free-enterprise economy:

“We are where we are because of where we’ve been,” said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. “Our rail system has functioned on a private ownership model going back to the 1800s. In the much more compact countries of Europe, they work on a government model.”

I’m thinking: What about Japan? Japan’s high-speed rail system is usually held up as a model of excellence. This is what the Mackinac Center concluded in a report on privatization and passenger rail:

In Japan, privatization has reinvigorated development efforts, and the new railways have designed more experimental trains using more advanced technology than the old national railway would have.

And as for Amtrak’s private ownership roots, here’s a lengthy Wikipedia article on the subject of Amtrak’s funding from federal and state governments. Given Amtrak’s extensive support from several levels of government, the comments about being hindered by too much capitalism sound like poor excuses for sticking to the same outdated technologies. Passengers would be better served by private ownership of the railways and healthy competition.

Or Amtrak could just continue on its uphill course, saying, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can …”

The post The Little Engine That Could appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A good Internet-enabled machine is relatively cheap, and gives legislators access to a plethora of information. I’m not talking about visiting Wikipedia to figure out the annual cost for dolphin studies during 2008; I’m talking about being able to figure out how much the Missouri government spends on particular projects, and how those figures compare to other states. Also, wouldn’t it be great if someone could easily pull out an article from the Show-Me Institute, the Cato Institute, or the Institute for Justice, and actually start talking about policy in-depth?

Having worked in the legislature, I am all for the efficiency of government — and there was more than one occasion in which I received a phone call or text message asking me to look up certain facts or find a rebuttal to a policy argument. I was happy to do my job, but by the time I actually found something, printed it out, went to the floor, had an usher get my legislator, wait for him read it, and then watch him wait to be called on by whomever was at the dais that day/hour, the point was moot — by that point, the bill or amendment was no longer up for discussion. So, allowing each legislator a laptop would hopefully solve at least this issue, while allowing them to particiapate in actual debate.

I know that there may be some issues with security and whatnot but I have to downplay those as minimal. Good firewalls, antivirus programs, and a great tech staff already exist, and this would not present any significant additional burden on the system. I have a very hard time understanding why legislators would protest the proposal so much. Someone care to explain it to me?

The post Dark Chambers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Naturally, I oppose this on ideological grounds, but I am willing to consider the case for the sake of argument. A plethora of good links can be found at Wikipedia’s section on the Bicycle Helmet Debate. The conclusion? There is no consensus, but there is also a dearth of reliable data on the efficacy of helmet-wearing. A rather pithy link points out:

• Children are 2.6 times more likely to suffer head injury through jumping and falling than by cycling. [5]
• Helmets for motorists are much more effective than those for cyclists and more beneficial than seat belts, interior padding or air bags. Their potential for reducing injury is 17 times greater than that of cycle helmets. [7] [3]

At this point, I am not prepared to say unequivocally that helmets do not improve safety significantly. I think we can all agree that car accidents are a much greater risk to us all, and therefore a helmets-while-driving law would entail much more improved safety, and much more voter outrage.

This proposal is a classic case of legislators lashing out at an “easy fix” that isn’t really that easy (but is unlikely to be unpopular) to a problem that doesn’t really exist. Cost/benefit analysis is out the window, because we must protect our children.

The post Another Potential Meaningless Victory for the Nanny State: Bike Helmets appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Resolved, that next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind.
Resolved, that the public funds should be appropriated (to a reasonable extent) to the purpose of education upon a regular system that shall insure the opportunity to every individual of obtaining a competent education before he shall have arrived at the age of maturity.

So voted New York City’s party of Mechanics and Workingmen in 1829.

There wasn’t always public education in the United States. And the state didn’t always pay. Our current system, in which property owners pay for public education regardless of whether they have children in school, came about after decades of debate. My most recent posts have touched on school district tax levies and state funding. Before going further, I wanted to reach back to where this all began. How did we arrive at this system of partial federal and state funding combined with local property tax levies?

There is a fantastic reference, Public Education in the United States, that discusses education’s history from the founding of the colonies until the book’s publication in 1919. The book itself is out of print, but a used bookstore should be able to track it down for you cheaply. Or, even better, the entire book is free to read online.

Its history of public finance for schools is something I want to summarize, in part. Our current system of public education, which seems like such a basic right now, was an argument that spanned decades in the mid-1800s. Author Ellwood Cubberly wrote: “Excepting the battle for the abolition of slavery, perhaps no question has ever been before the American people for settlement which caused so much feeling or aroused such bitter antagonisms.”

How public education developed in the United States is itself a story of dollars. For the rich, there was no question — they hired teachers and tutors themselves. Many times, churches set up schools. Occasionally, pauper schools were set up by a well-minded benefactor, or by the state. But, in general, the cost to pay one teacher to educate only a few students was just too expensive and the question of using either local or state tax dollars as a funding source wasn’t broached.

In the early 1800s, factory-like schools were opened in the United States, the first in New York. An English schoolmaster, Joseph Lancaster, is credited with the method. Anywhere between 200 to 1,000 children were taught by a single teacher with the help of a few outstanding students. Despite the problems inherent in such a system, some arising from students teaching one another (others, according to the Wikipedia article, included tying children up in sacks or hoisting them above the classroom in cages), the Lancastrian system did teach children for very little cost per student.

Suddenly, education was cheap, and the schoolroom was a place where many students from different backgrounds learned together. The idea of public education became common, paving the way for modern public schools and local taxes to support them.

Between 1800 and 1850, states began to allow school districts to levy taxes. With the Missouri law of 1824, districts could only do so with “the written demand of two-thirds of the voters of the district.” That’s a substantial requirement. In fact, the first public school district in Missouri didn’t show up until 1838, in St. Louis.

Schools could get local dollars only if voters approved. On top of that, they often asked for parents to pay for each of their children that went to school. It wasn’t a large fee, but it was enough to discourage poorer parents. For example, in 1826, when one school organization in New York City asked parents to pay per-child fees, enrollment dropped by nearly 15 percent.

Although schools could ask for taxes and fees, the states generally remained out of it.

The push for state funding for public education accelerated when men no longer had to own property to vote (by 1850). Before then, the pool of voters was rich — rich enough to pay for their children’s education themselves. Afterward, voters were both rich and poor, educated and uneducated … and electoral power no longer resided solely in the hands of the upper class.

“With the extension of the suffrage to all classes of the population, poor as well as rich, laborer as well as employer, there came to thinking men, often for the first time, a realization that general education had become a fundamental necessity for the State,” wrote Cubberly.

This is a pretty lengthy post (though still shorter than the book); I’ll write more about state funding for schools and how it changed school administration on Wednesday. If you have any questions or comments about state or local funding for schools, leave them below or email me.

The post Foundation(s) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Which gets me back to the point I was originally trying to make. Some of you may be aware of the Free State Project, in which dedicated Libertarians declared their intention to move en masse to New Hampshire in order to bound their voting power and principles together in one state. This would have been another exception to my above statement, if it had worked. Needless to say, far fewer people have actually followed through on their commitment to make the move to a new state than hoped. According to Wikipedia, 269 Libertarians have followed through on their promise to move to New Hampshire during the past two years, which was probably dwarfed over the same time period by the number of Massachusetts liberals who moved to southern New Hamphire for more standard reasons. Within New Hamphire itself, the Free Town Movement was born, with the idea of making Grafton, N.H., a libertarian paradise. This, too, has not succeeded yet, and was not helped by the involvement of lunatics who advocated legalizing cannibalism, among other things. (Third-party movements always have difficulty with extremism, almost by definition.)

OK, now I am finally at my original point. There is a perfectly legitimate and also viable compromise between the village law, respect for democracy, and libertarian principles. With that, I urge the libertarian community here in Missouri to consider the Missouri Free Suburb Project. (My family will happily remain in University City.) It would be EASY to take advantage of the number of small cities in Missouri, and in particular the smaller suburbs of our larger cities, to establish a voting bloc to create as much of a libertarian community as possible, via pure democracy. To do this, you need not convince tens of thousands of people from across the country to more to another state, you just need to convince 10 people in St. Louis County to move to Champ. Or 100 Ron Paul supporters to move to Mackenzie. In Jackson County, you just need to find 200 libertarians to move to Sibley. This isn’t quitting your job, picking up your entire life, and moving to a new state. This is staying within your own metro area.

Once a voting majority was established within an existing community, you could do a number of things to promote local libertarianism. You could get rid of planning and zoning laws, forbid the use of eminent domain, take the radical step of allowing pickup trucks to park overnight on the street (forbidden in many suburbs), completely privatize every service possible (such as trash collection), and contract with larger governments to provide other services (such as police protection, which probably would not be needed as you would be living in a utopia). If you kept your own police force, the elected officials could instruct the chief to de facto decriminalize certain things like drug possession, although legalization would probably not be valid.

This is really a great idea. All it takes is for one 1950s-style Irish-Catholic libertarian family of 13 to move to Champ (population 12), and you have control. You don’t need to convince yourself that someone in the Ozarks who just wants to build a casino is the next Daniel Boone in order to achieve true freedom. It’s right here for the taking.

The post The Missouri Free Suburb Project appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are two new municipalities being considered in Franklin County. The Post-Dispatch has a good article on the debate today. One of the proposed cities, Lake St. Clair, has gone about the process the right way, and one, Stonewater, has taken advantage of the controversial "village law" passed last session to attempt to bypass the normal rules. It should also be noted that there is only one resident of Stonewater, and nobody can reasonably be so pro-property rights that they think any single individual should be able to incorporate their property into a new political entity on a whim.

I actually don’t have too much to add from the article’s coverage of the decisions of the Franklin County Board of Commissioners. It seems correct to me that the residents of Lake St. Clair form a new city, and it seems more than reasonable that Stonewater was denied:

Stonewater is 40 acres of almost entirely vacant ground off Holtgrewe Road southwest of Washington. Ferguson, a developer in the county, is the site’s only resident.

Just because Wikipedia has a terrific article on micronations does not mean you have to grant political autonomy to every jerk who wants his own city. ‘Nuff said.

The post Two New Cities Considered in Franklin County appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The methodologies of traditional mathematics remain the most efficient algorithms for solving mathematical problems. Advanced math and science are based on these very methods.

This is a great example of why we shouldn’t just say "No new math." Horner is assuming that the way he learned to multiply is the "traditional" and "most efficient" way. But as you can learn from a little research on Wikipedia, lattice multiplication has been around since 1202. It’s hard to be more traditional than that. Furthermore, lattice multiplication is algorithmically equivalent to long multiplication. That’s a mathy way of saying that you’re doing exactly the same thing and you’ll get exactly the same answer. Lattice multiplication is not a less efficient algorithm than long multiplication; it’s the same algorithm, written out in a way that looks different. (And in a way that might be easier to understand for some students.)

So if a method that was invented around the year 1200 is too new, how are kids supposed to learn math? With only the most ancient Chinese abacuses?

Parents should be able to choose new math — even if just for the simple reason that we can’t agree on which kinds of math are really "new."

The post Is 800 Years Old Enough? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I think Justin is 100-percent correct (see, I can use numbers in real-life situations!) that math classes treating all answers as equally right aim only to fluff up students’ self-esteem, not to teach them anything. And when students go through school without learning math facts and formulae, they miss out on a basic part of education.

But I think parents should still be able to choose integrated math, for a few reasons. First, there’s disagreement about which curricula constitute integrated math. One of my brothers attended an elementary school that used Everyday Mathematics, by the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project. My brother hated this curriculum, and I thought it had several disadvantages. It encourages calculator use at a young age, some of the activities are pointless, and it presents some concepts in a more complicated way than necessary.

On the other hand, the curriculum emphasizes practice and getting the right answer. And although many critics object to it because the algorithms it teaches aren’t the same ones they learned in school, no one could accuse it of foregoing algorithms altogether, or of allowing students to make up answers. Is Everyday Math "integrated math"? This Wikipedia article says yes. Personally, I think Everyday Math isn’t so bad as the other integrated programs out there, and parents who choose it aren’t necessarily dooming their children to ignorance.

Justin’s suggestion to encourage computer programming, which uses set theory, is a good idea. But some people consider teaching set theory before college to be a "new math" scheme itself. I’ve seen traditional math books that eschew set theory entirely, even at the high school level.

Even curricula that are indisputably integrated might not be harmful in the long term. I went to a public elementary school that taught integrated math. We were always doing creative projects that were only tangentially related to arithmetic. But when I switched to a private school that taught only traditional math, I didn’t really miss anything, because the traditional sixth-grade math curriculum was basically a review of third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade arithmetic.

What about my peers who stayed in the public school? They started using a more traditional curriculum around that time, too. Several of them went on to major in science at college. Sure, our time could have been put to better uses in elementary school, but the fact that you don’t learn long division in one grade doesn’t mean that you’ll never learn it in any other grade. If parents choose integrated math for their kids in the early grades, their kids could still study all the traditional topics when they’re a little older.

In fact, given the pressure some parents put on their five-year-olds to memorize lots of facts, study textbooks, and prepare for first grade, I imagine I would request integrated math if I had little kids in kindergarten. I probably wouldn’t choose it for later grade levels. But if parents want to put off teaching traditional math until second or third grade, I think that should be up to them. And as for the parents who want their kids to study integrated math through high school? I think they should be free to choose that, even though I disagree with them.

If everyone sent their kids to private schools of their choice, we wouldn’t have this dispute about what schools should teach. The math wars (and reading wars, and spelling wars, etc.) are a product of our one-size-fits-all public school system, which forces a few educational approaches on all families. Opening up the system to choice would lead to more diversity, and less arguing.

The post Return of the Math Wars appeared first on Show-Me Institute.