Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
Ingrid Bergman
Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day
What I would quibble with here is Ron Paul's use of "democracy"; I don't think that a simple majority of bloodthirsty jingoists would ever justify interventions, which I find at best morally hazardous, if not outright evil. Instead, I would substitute something like "in the cause of freedom"
Towards a Competitive Educational Market
Facebook Corner
(Drudge Report). Romney slams president for 'faulty judgment'...
Oh my God, do I have to be reminded how Romney misplayed the foreign policy card from electoral strategy? First, Romney had no foreign policy background. He would have had more success if , instead of running for the tiny room on Obama's right, he had run against 12 years of failed Bush/Obama domestic/foreign policy. He should have said spending a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't worth the lives of 8000 soldiers and over 1 trillion in charges to our children and grandchildren, and George Bush was right when he criticized Clinton's nation building. Do we really need to exacerbate global tensions over secession of an autonomous region that recently was part of Russia for nearly 2 centuries? Romney's rhetoric does little to alleviate the situation; is there really a need to rub Obama's famously post-election flexible nose in it? "I told you so" may be cathartic to him. It's enough simply to point out that the Obama/Clinton/Kerry foreign policy is an incompetent, unprincipled, incoherent, seat-of-the-pants mess.
(Cato Institute). "No principal or teacher will get a raise for attracting more students to his or her school. A successful manager in a private business gets a raise, or gets hired away for a bigger salary. A successful entrepreneur expands his or her store or opens a branch. Can one imagine a public school choice system allowing a successful principal to open another school across town and run both of them?"
But can traditional education keep up with the 21st cent....?
Absolutely. Education is significantly about process--rigor, high expectations of student performance, discipline, etc. Learning is a lifelong process. Content may develop over time, but the curious mind anticipates and embraces change. When I taught MIS at the university level, at least 30-40% were unprepared even though they technically met course prerequisites; it definitely affected how I approached teaching, although I held higher standards than my colleagues.
One thing this article fails to consider is that many of the best schools are the best precisely because they have huge waiting lists. My daughter attends a magnet school (ranked as the 12th best in the state) with a waiting list twice the total enrollment. Having so many students waiting to get in means that school can clearly and truthfully tell parents, "If you don't meet our standards, you're out." And make no mistake, it's the parents who meet the standards. At the kindergarten orientation, parents signed contracts about volunteer hours, mandatory event attendances, etc. And the principal said at least ten times, "If any of these rules don't work for your family, we perfectly understand, and we'll be happy to reconnect you with your zoned school." Admission is by lottery, so the school doesn't get to select students. Instead, the schools just makes it difficult enough for the parents that only parents who really, truly care about their kids' educations will go through it all. If this program was to be expanded and the waiting list disappeared, then much of the quality would disappear. Fine, kick me out for not volunteering enough hours, or for not getting my kid the right color socks; I'll just go down the street to the equivalent school.
I don't think anyone disputes that parents should be vested in their children's scholastic success. There are a couple of points where you lose me: (1) the student and his/her parents are the customers; they do not work to accommodate the convenience of the vendor and his petty, arbitrary, unilateral demands; the idea of a public sector Soup Nazi is unacceptable; (2) the idea that as suppliers reach demand, quality is adversely affected at the margins. Granted the dynamics of say lecturing in a 500-seat auditorium are different from a small intimate class but one of the best lecturers I've ever seen taught a huge undergraduate MIS service class at UH. Depriving a child of a competitive education hurts the child, and he or she has little control over a key determinant of a viable career.
Businesses hire the best they can find/afford. Schoolmasters that are rewarded as this article suggests might not admit lesser qualified students, to keep their success rate up. How would success be measured? BTW, I'm 100% for abolishing the Dept of Ed, pro-homeschool, local control, school choice, etc.
It depends on how you measure adminitrator peformance. If you want to catch the biggest, most fish you go to where the fish are, not necessarily everyone else's favorite spot. One might argue the biggest improvement in learning might come from "problem students". Look, if you have a kid with a 150 IQ, he'll perform well no matter whom you have in the classroom; it's hubris to argue it's the teacher.... But I would infer that waiting lists for a school are indicative of better schools.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne and Townhall |
Neil Diamond, "Brooklyn Roads"
