The Harriet Tubman Agenda

Head Start Flop

2012-01-13T23:04:00.004Z

From The American Interest (via Instapundit), an overdue federal assessment of the Lyndon Johnson-era Head Start program. It does not work.

Is Your Fifth Grader Smarter than Your Fifth Grader's Teacher?

2011-12-08T02:10:00.003Z

From the Washington Post's The Answer Sheet (2011-12-05):...

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.
...
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate."

Perhaps a serious criticism of standardized tests impends. Or not. Later we read this...

The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year.

Follow the link and the success and Math test performance are explained:...

Roach was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. For the last 25 years he has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states.

That explains the "big house in a good part of town", the "paid-for condo in the Caribbean" and the "influential friends". While this:...

He holds a bachelor of science degree in education and master of arts degree in education and educational psychology

...explains the dismal 10th grade Math performance.
The volunteer victim makes some decent points:...

“Many of the kids we label as poor readers are probably pretty good readers. Here’s why.

“On the FCAT, they are reading material they didn’t choose. They are given four possible answers and three out of the four are pretty good. One is the best answer but kids don’t get points for only a pretty good answer. They get zero points, the same for the absolute wrong answer. And then they are given an arbitrary time limit. Those are a number of reasons that I think the test has to be suspect.”
*The math section, he said, tests information that most people don’t need when they get out of school.

“There’s a concept called reverse design that is critical,” he said. “We are violating that with our test. Instead of connecting what we learn in school with being successful in the real world, we are doing it in reverse. We are testing first and then kids go into the real world. Whether the information they have learned is important or not becomes secondary. If you really did a study on what math most kids need, I guarantee you could probably dump about 80 percent of math scores and leave high-level math for the kids who want it and will need it.

*His final conclusion on the FCAT:

“They are defending a test that has no accountability.”

"Accountability" is a matter of feedback. We deal with a system that responds to political feedback and resists market feedback mechanisms. System insiders dominate the political feedback systems, which explains "the margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen". Ten-to-one he gets the Florida teachers' union endorsement. Still, there is a point here. Why do schools require their particular course material? The State (government, generally) cannot require attendance at school without a definition of "school". The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". These definitions then bind students, parents, real classroom teachers, and taxpayers.
Consider again "IIf you really did a study on what math most kids need, I guarantee you could probably dump about 80 percent of math scores and leave high-level math for the kids who want it and will need it."
Seems to me if you really did a study on what schooling most kids need, you could probably dump about 80 percent of schooling and leave everything beyond fifth grade reading and Alg I for the kids who want it and will need it.

Update: The Headmistress over at the Common Room provided this link to a version of the Florida Math test. If this test reflects the 10th grade curriculum, then that curriculum is "a mile wide and an inch deep".

Technology, Education, and Collaborative Learning Systems (Guest post by Lindesy Wright)

2011-10-28T18:51:00.007Z

Updated with links.
The use of technology in the education of younger children, from kindergarten to grade school, has become an important tool in modern education. By effectively integrating new technologies into both individual and collaborative lesson plans, parents and educators can drastically improve the educational experience of their children. Furthermore, the importance of classroom technology has grown as computer literacy becomes vital to a child’s later success in society.

By the virtue of being capable of modifying the lesson to the child's strengths, educational technology focuses on those areas most difficult to address in the general classroom setting. Educational programs to assist in reading or math can adjust their questions and procedures to match the child's growing knowledge of the subject. This permits an individualized educational experience, where children of all skill levels can all benefit equally from using the same program.

Classroom technology also can be designed to be entertaining, such as planing a lesson around an educational computer game. The use of interactive learning games and activities can help maintain the child’s interest in the activity, long after a simple book would have palled. The value of this approach is well know, but the introduction of learning technology allows it to become far more integral to the student’s learning experience.

Beyond the use of computerized games and activities, the growth of technology, such as the adaptation of eBooks to the educational process, has vastly expanded both the amount and accessibility of resources available to the children and educators alike. eBooks now have a variety of features, including text-to-speech systems that make it much easier for non-native speakers to adapt to both the spoken and written word. The inclusion of integral dictionary, spelling and thesaurus functions can also assist students in the process of independently exploring their reading material.

The use of such computerized learning systems not only helps students learn the basics, but also prepare students (even kindergarten or grade school level students) for a future where computer literacy and skill will become ever more vital. In fact, one of the greatest benefits of classroom technology is that it will ensure that even low-income students, who might not have access to computers at home, are not left behind in their understanding of technology and its uses.

Classroom technology also assists with the collaborative learning process. Via the use of school intranets, online classes, as well as chat and other social media, a child can learn with other students, even when they are not physically together. This has already become one of the strengths of classroom technology as applied to developing nations, and is growing in importance in developed nations as well. This process will assist in the development of interpersonal social skills both in and out of the classroom setting.

Finally, interactive and collaborative classroom technology makes it far easier for parents, teachers, and administrators to observe and examine the child’s progress. By making use of a variety of computer based grading and evaluation processes, it is possible to continue to tailor the educational experience to best assist the student. In addition, this permits the student’s progress to be tracked throughout his or her educational career, which can be important in detecting the early signs of learning disabilities.

The use of computer assisted classroom technology, has been demonstrated to produce better results when compared to other methods. By adopting such techniques and tailoring them for kindergarten and grade school, students, teachers and parents will all benefit greatly. Given the now ubiquitous nature of the use of information technology in society, classroom technology is not only valuable for educational purposes, but as a method to prepare children for the information age.

Liberal Arts: Personal Investment, Public Good, or Luxury Good?

2011-10-12T23:41:00.005Z

Higher Education Bubble

After decades of selling college as an “investment” — and pricing it accordingly — it’s going to be hard for the higher education establishment to pivot to a college-as-personal-fulfillment argument. If it’s the latter, it’s a consumption good, priced on a par with a Porsche or Ferrari. Those shouldn’t be financed by debt, or bought by 18-year-olds. If college liberal-arts degrees, on the other hand, are to be sold as a public good, benefiting society so much that society should pay the freight, then (1) Society should have a much bigger say in what’s being taught; and (2) It might be nice to see some actual, you know, evidence of that.

Consider three possibilities:
1. The post-secondary Liberal Arts curriculum is an investment from which students will reap a financial return.
2. State support for Liberal Arts degrees provides a "public good".
3. The Liberal Arts curriculum provides "psychic income" to consumers (students) that is independent of any financial reward.

These are not mutually exclusive, but the implications, which are left as exercises for the reader, for the arguments for tax support are wildly different. Of course, there remains...

4. The post-secondary Liberal Arts degree is an employment program for due-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, which this suggests.

Read Fernandez

2011-09-23T10:25:00.006Z

Richard Fernandez ranges widely, though most often with a security policy emphasis, and expresses deep analysis simply. Anyway, read this. All of it.

...The market is writing down the value of the world economy. Right across the board. It is making a judgement on what they think the future is worth. By recent numbers, not much. Not just because policymakers have gotten it wrong about the “root cause” of terrorism, or the Euro; but also about “Too Big To Fail”, population policy, multiculturalism, a crippling environmentalism and Global Warming, to name a few. The financial, national security and educational systems of the world are in utter collapse because they are stuffed with lies, which even when they are shown to be obviously false suck up trillions of dollars in their pursuit . And nothing will turn the global elites from continuing their ruinous path until they have spent the last nickle and dime they can lay their hands on. Certainly not the media. As Osborne and Weaver wrote:
One urgent lesson concerns the BBC. The corporation’s twisted coverage of the European Union is a serious problem, because the economic collapse of the eurozone means that a new treaty may be needed very soon — plunging the EU right back into the heart of our national politics.

The problem is that the BBC’s record is dreadful. It simply cannot be trusted not to become part of a partisan propaganda operation.
Neither the BBC nor any of the similar organizations which have jointly created our fantasy world will return to honesty. Not until it annihilates itself into bankruptcy along with all the other causes it touted and supported. The bad news is that by then most of us will have sunk beneath the waves.

Neither can the mainstream US media be trusted. The relentlessly State-worshipful reporters and editorialists who write for local and national newspapers and broadcast media have not, by and large, accepted responsibility for the one-sided criticism of the Bush presidency and the sanctification of the Obama candidacy, which shifted control of Congress in 2007 and the White House in 2009. This is not a purely partisan point. If Guantanamo detention, warrantless wiretapping, and budget deficits mattered under President Bush, why do they not not matter under President Obama? If climate science mattered enough to appear in the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden in 2008, why does it not matter now? Why did it never matter enough to merit a thorough public discussion with all relevant areas of expertise represented? When journalists and politicians use issues as partisan weapons, news consumers discount news. Public attention is a scarce resource which reporters and politicians squander with their partisan cheerleading.

Voters, Journalists, or Politicians?

2011-08-29T20:45:00.003Z

Voters, journalists, or politicians? Whom to target with policy arguments? What impact can any interested individual have? Someone recently quoted Milton Friedman to the effect that political feedback involves less electing good people to office than creating an incentive structure such that bad people will enact good policy or lose office. Anyway, here.

You Already Knew This

2011-08-13T22:28:00.001Z

My Political Views
I am a right moderate social libertarian
Right: 5.71, Libertarian: 2.49

Political Spectrum Quiz

Sunny out. Good weather for climbing avocado trees. Enjoy the day, friends.
Tantalus workday next Saturday.

"I'll Probably Teach"

2011-08-11T13:09:00.003Z

This, from the Crack Emcee.
A friend who usually made sense once recommended to me a book by Cornell West. I could not get past the first few pages, for the reason given in the above video clip.

Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman

2011-07-31T20:43:00.003Z

Milton Friiedman, 1912-07-31-2006-11-16. The Grassroot Institute held a luncheon in Dr. Friedman's memory on Friday, 2011-07-29. Hawaii Pacific University Economics professor Ken Schooland and former Governor Linda Lingle spoke. Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter Derrick Depledge, formerly of the Honolulu Advertiser, attended. Depledge once called a "conspiracy theory" Harriet's assertion that DOE officials will lie about the DOE budget if cornered. He did not respond to documentary evidence and the question why he implied that people who hold this view are crazy. At the Grassroot luncheon Harriet suggest to Mr. Depledge that reporters ask to see the DOE Personal Service Contract logs. He said he'd pass the suggestion along to the Education writer, Vicki Viotti.

Wanna bet? Either reporters prefer to avoid conflict with a powerful bureaucracy that grants to friendly reporters easy access to story material or they fear to confront their own beliefs about the healing power of organized violence (the State). Or both.

Save the Cartel!

2011-07-31T19:11:00.008Z

Via Instapundit, this sequence: Michelle Fields of Reason TV interviews Matt Damon, Deborah Meier (who?), Jonathan Kozol, and some teachers.
Updated (* material added).
*(Fields): "So, you're the founder of the small schools movement, which promoted creativity and choice. Why won't vouchers and charter schools do that?"
*(Meier): "Uh, because the other were part of uh, uh community, democratic operation. This is precisely what differentiates me from libertarians. I've the same ideals but I also know more about the corruption of money."
From personal experience, right? If this response addresses the question "Why don't vouchers promote creativity and choice?", would it not then follow that a voucher-funded school which receives less than the per pupil budget of the cartel's schools be less corrupt and so more likely to promote creativity and choice than the cartel's schools?

*(Fields): "How much more would you like to see going to students?"
*(Teacher 1): "How much money do you think a child is worth? It's unconditional. Children aren't 'worth' money."
*(Fields): "It cost ten thousand dollars, more than ten thousand dollars per student right now."
*(Teacher 1): "I'd pay a million dollars to raise my children. There is no money that can be set, price, on a child's life and learning. This shouldn't be about money; this should be about educating our children in how to survive in today's world."
*(Field): "But if you want the government to spend more, how much more, per student, do you think should go to education?"
*(Teacher 1): "Billions."
*(Fields): "A billion dollars per student?"
*(Teacher 1): "Sure. Why not?"
Because it's mathematically impossible. One billion dollars per student times forty-nine million students is more than three times the US GDP.
**Duh! (49x10^6)x(10^9)=49x10^15, more than three thousand times the 15 trillion US GDP.

(Teacher 2): "Education is a basic social right. Everyone has a right to a public education."
(Fields): "What about food. Isn't food just as important as education?"
(Teacher 2): "Yes. We have...we have various kinds of social safety nets to make sure people can eat. That probably doesn't make some people in this town happy, that we have things like Food Stamps."
Food Stamps are vouchers.

(Fields): "We have choice and competition in preschools and universities, so why not K through 12 education?"
(Teacher 3): "Private schools and universities, if you're talking about private universities, then that is a, that's a money-making operation, right?..."
The NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools received a tax-generated revenue stream of more than $ 500 billion in 2007-2008, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
(Teacher 3): "...That is in bed with the capitalist system. If you're talking about public schools; I don't want that to be privatized."

(Fields): "You've written a lot about poverty in the South Bronx. Why aren't vouchers and charter schools an answer to that?"
(Kozol): "Vouchers and charter schools are the worst possible answer. First of all, because they will never serve more than two or three percent, maybe five percent, at most, of the population."
(Fields): "So then we need more charter schools."
(Kozol): "That's insane. The fact is, first of all, charter schools are, on average, are no more successful than public schools?"
Kozol does not address the rebuttal to his point about the fraction of the population served by vouchers. In some countries, it's well over 50% of the population.

Vouchers work.
Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings"
Comparative Education, Vol. 36 #1, 2000, Feb.

Furthermore, the regression results indicate that countries where private education is more widespread perform significantly better than countries where it is more limited. The result showing the private sector to be more efficient is similar to those found in other contexts with individual data (see, for example, Psucharopoulos, 1987; Jiminez, et. al, 1991). This finding should convince countries to reconsider policies that reduce the role of the private sector in the field of education.

Inevitably, for each sub-adult and at any level of tax support of sub-adult education, some adult or group of adults decides how to spend the subsidy that applies to that sub-adult, and what curriculum that sub-adult will pursue. The argument between voucher, charter, and tax credit advocates, on the one hand, and defenders of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers' pre-college education subsidy, on the other, turns on the issue of which adults decide: parents or government agents.

*Telling, isn't it, that the people whom our elected representatives employ to provide education services make such weak arguments in support of their exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers' K-12 education subsidy.

Democrats versus Government School Teachers

2011-07-28T18:53:00.007Z

Years ago, one of Honolulu's daily papers reported a fatal auto accident in which a driver apparently misread the ground, turned off his headlights, and, in the dark of night, rolled over the cliff on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island. A witness reported seeing the brake lights blink after the car was airborne. I think of this when I contemplate the finances of the City and County of Honolulu, the State of Hawaii, the United States of America, and governments worldwide. Vaclav Smil calls the inevitable slow-motion default the "Great Unraveling".

Via Public Finance, this news.

Off the cuff, and just eyeballing chart VI of this report, it looks like there's a strong negative correlation between unfunded public sector pension and benefit liablilities, on the one hand, and NAEP 8th grade Math scores, on the other. I'll take that as a measure of the relation between public-sector integrity and school system performance. Compare North Dakota (tops in the US on NAEP by some measures, low unfunded benefit exposure) and Hawaii (NAEP scores in the national cellar, high unfunded pension and benefit exposure).

Politicians at all levels have made more promises than they can keep. In democratic polities, they make these promises to influential interest groups such as unionized public sector employees and other contractors to the State, and to other well-organized, politically active constituencies. In bureaucratic one-party States, bureaucrats ascend the hierarchy through strategic alliances with superior patrons and loyal subordinates. Financial opacity allows politicians to make impossible promises without fear of immediate contradiction. Within organizations, opacity in either finances or goals contributes to inefficiency (and fraud), as Canice Prendergast suggests in his A Theory of "Yes-Men", (AER). Mounting inefficiencies reduce future resources, including those which would otherwise fund pension and benefit promises. When you (formally, "one", for the nit-pickers of the English Department) have made more promises than you can keep, you will have to break some of them. As Vaclav Smil observed, this will take decades to unfold.

Sorry to sound so grim. Hawaii politicians have not yet acknowledged the financial situation. We're accelerating toward the cliff edge and they refuse to accept even that brakes have a useful function. Individually, many probably accept that the State cannot long continue on the current path. Collectively, they close their eyes.

Homeschool. Start a garden. Learn First Aid. Buy ammunition.

Cato Gets It (no surprise there)

2011-07-27T17:33:00.002Z

The Heart of the Matter:
Neal McCluskey, "Eduction: the Relentless Political Weapon".
Andrew Coulson, "People Think Of Something As Their Business When It Is Their Business".

Hearing Notice, 2011-07-21

2011-07-21T16:59:00.002Z

What will the witness say at this hearing?
Dr. Laura Goe

has served as a visiting scholar to the NEA and advisor on their teacher evaluation work, advises the AFT as a member of their expert panel on teacher evaluation, and serves as a consultant to the AFTs Innovation Grant sites in New York and Rhode Island as they design innovative, comprehensive teacher evaluation systems.

This blog addressed the matter here.

Advice: "Be Grateful For The Chance To Be Lost"

2011-05-11T13:12:00.002Z

Five Feet of Fury linked "Best Alternative To Grad School" by Penelope Trunk. Excerpt:

...the thing that is pushing me over the edge with graduate school is that people who are thinking straight about schooling are not even considering graduate school. These people are debating if college is a rip off (here's a great discussion in New York magazine with James Altucher, a venture capitalist in NYC) And people are even debating if high school is useless (here's a great blog by Lisa Nielsen who is with the NYC Department of Education). And anyway, I'm losing interest in the debate about grad school because I'm convinced that the future belongs to home schoolers because they are self-learners.

A legislator recognized me on a downtown street yesterday. We were headed in the same direction for a ways and she asked what I thought of the last session, and specifically of education-related bills. I answered that I had not expected much from this session, and the session met my expectations. I was disappointed but not surprised that the legislature passed on the opportunity to expand homeschoolers' options. In testimony, HSTA representatives opposed bills that would have allowed homeschoolers to participate in extracurricular activities and most legislators voted as the HSTA instructed. You can measure how much the outlook of the average legislator must change before the legislature will address the State government's financial situation that they raided dedicated funds like the hurricane relief fund to address the budget deficit. A more accommodating attitude toward homeschoolers would reduce demands on the government's overstretched resources.

Thomas Sowell on "Education"

2011-05-10T19:32:00.002Z

If education is an investment, then the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's K-PhD school system is Enron. State "investment" in education makes as much sense as "industrial policy", the 50's era fad for State direction of investment in heavy manufacturing. Here's Thomas Sowell on "The Education Mantra".

No Way To Run A Railroad

2011-05-05T17:46:00.004Z

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt (Reuters, 2011-05-05): "Even though I believe in global warming and I believe in the science ... it just took on a connotation that was too elitist; it was too precious and it let opponents think that if you had a green initiative, you didn't care about jobs. I'm a businessman. That's all I care about, is jobs."

Whatever happened to Cornelius ("The public be damned. I am working for my stockholders") Vanderbilt?

A CEO who cares only about jobs runs a charity, not a business. The same goes for politicians who, in the interest of current recipients of tax subsidies (such as State employees), subsidize inefficient providers of public goods (such as government-operated schools) at the expense of taxpayers, recipients of those services (such as students), and current and potential employees of alternative providers (such as private school teachers).

Meanwhile, from the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice comes this news:...
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels Signs Historic Voucher Bill into Law

Thursday, May 05, 2011
Milton and Rose Friedman’s vision of school choice for all takes one step closer to reality
INDIANAPOLIS, IN — The Foundation for Educational Choice today praised Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels for signing the nation’s largest voucher program into law. The School Scholarship Act (House Bill 1003) creates a school voucher program that has the broadest eligibility of any voucher program in the nation.

“This is truly a historic day for Indiana’s children,” said Robert Enlow, President and CEO of the Foundation for Educational Choice. “Gov. Daniels’ signature today puts Indiana at the top of the class for educational choice. Moreover, this sends an important message to families across the country: meaningful education reform is possible. We should never give up fighting for access to high-quality educational options for every child, regardless of family income or where they live.”

School Choice Legislation in Oklahoma

2011-04-26T22:07:00.005Z

From Milton and Rose Friedmans' Foundation for Educational Choice:...
Oklahoma House Passes School Choice Program with Broad Student Eligibility

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK — More Oklahoma families will be able to send their children to the schools of their choosing, following today's passage of the Oklahoma Equal Opportunity Education Scholarship Act. The bill will provide partial tax credits to individuals and businesses that donate to nonprofits that distribute private-school scholarships to eligible families.

By a vote of 64-43, the Oklahoma House of Representatives approved the measure, which previously passed the Senate chamber by a vote of 30-14.

"This is another step in the direction of choice for Oklahoma's parents and children," Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the Foundation for Educational Choice, said. "We look forward to seeing school choice continue to flourish in the Sooner State, and we are eager to watch other states follow Oklahoma's lead."

Indiana Voucher Legislation

2011-04-21T17:00:00.004Z

From Milton and Rose Friedman's Foundation for Educational Choice:...

Indiana Senate Passes Nation's Largest Voucher Bill

INDIANAPOLIS, IN — The Indiana Senate today passed legislation that would create the nation's broadest school voucher program, allowing low- and middle-income families to use taxpayer funds to send their children to the private school of their choice.

House Bill 1003, which was approved by the Senate in a 28-22 vote, would create a new scholarship program enabling families to send their children to the private school of their choice. Scholarship amounts are determined on a sliding scale based on income, with families receiving up to 90 percent of state support.

The Indiana House of Representatives previously approved a similar version of the bill by a vote of 56-42. The Senate version, which adds a $1,000 tax deduction for families that pay out of pocket for private or homeschool expenses, will now go back to the House. If the House agrees to the changes made in the Senate, the bill will proceed to Governor Daniels, who is expected to sign the bill into law.

"This is exciting news," said Robert Enlow, President and CEO of the Foundation for Educational Choice. "We applaud those legislators who stood tall for kids, and we hope the House will concur as soon as possible so that Indiana families who desperately need educational options do not have to wait any longer."

If enacted, the voucher would be available to far more students than other programs in the country, where vouchers are limited to low-income households, students in failing schools, or special-needs students. Under HB 1003, a family of four earning up to $61,000 per year would be eligible.

Additionally, the $1,000 tax deduction for private and homeschool expenses has universal eligibility. The bill also improves Indiana's scholarship tax credit program by increasing the program cap to $5 million, making $10 million in scholarships available to Hoosier families.

This will merit celebration when the Governor signs it. Arizona's Governor, Jan Brewer, just vetoed a tax-rebate-funded voucher program (wasting litigation that had won a 5-4 decision from the US Supreme Court), so strange things can happen. Still, expect this to become law.

Let's Change the Name

2011-04-12T16:49:00.002Z

Governor Dr. Neil Abercrombie has made clear his support for public sector employees. He forgets (or refuses to acknowledge) the accumulation of pension debt. Do you get the impression he's just topping off his own pension, and leaving the mess for others to address when he's gone? As with federal entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, State pension obligations are uncertain but large. The Government Accounting Standards Board determines the rules according to which actuaries calculate pension commitments. Let's change the name to Government Accounting Standards Panel.

Education Bubbles

2011-04-11T18:47:00.002Z

...(F)or Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Much of this applies to K-12 schooling as well. State and local governments spent more than $800 billion on their K-PhD schools in the 2007-2008 fiscal year, according to this chart from the NCES.

Not The Tiger Mom

2011-04-09T17:12:00.003Z

P. J. O'Rourke reviews Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

Amy Chua, I’ve got bad news. "A"' students work for "B" students. Or not even. A businessman friend of mine corrected me. "No, P. J.," he said, " ‘B’ students work for ‘C’ students. ‘A’ students teach.”

I used to tell my students that it was okay to get an A if they found my course easy. A Math professor friend of mine says he prefers "B" students to "A" students, on average, since the temperment of the "A" students inclines them to unthinking acceptance. I'd like to see a scholarship for students with the widest variance between SAT scores and GPA. The kid with a combined 700 SAT (old style) and a 3.75 GPA would be an interesting kid to have in class. Ditto the kid with the 1560 SAT and the 1.75 GPA. I wonder if they'd get along in freshman Physics.

The Cartel

2011-04-03T22:01:00.003Z

Henry Cate reviews The Cartel.

Awww, Shoot

2011-04-01T17:59:00.002Z

How does one man with a six-shot revolver hold 76 hostages in their seats? He plugs the wheelchair-bound old man across the room between the eyes with one shot, to demonstrate that (a) he can hit his target and (b) he has absolutely no inhibitions regarding killing. If the crowd rises simultaneously, they'll get him, but the first five out of their seats will die.

The tragedy of the commons is a multi-party, iterated prisoner's dilemma, with memory. Why do people pick the mangoes on trees which grow on public land at an earlier stage of development than they pick the mangoes from the trees in their own yards? The commons does nor reward self-restraint in the harvest. The commons does not reward courage against a threat. Stay seated and live, or, at least, hope to be the last to die.

Friday, 2011-04-01 (1-April-2011), the Hawaii Senate Education committee holds hearings on Governor Abercrombie's nomination of J. N. Musto (Executive Director, University of Hawaii Professional Assembly) to the Education Commission of the States and Louise Cayetano (teacher), Wray Jose (teacher), and Barry Wurst (teacher) to the Hawaii Teacher Standards Board. The University of Hawaii Professional Assembly is an NEA subsidiary. Whether or not Dr. Musto's contributions to the Governor's election campaign influenced the Governor's selection, members of the legislature will note the access that the Governor has given to Dr. Musto.

Governor Abercrombie devoted several lines in his inaugural address to the State's budget problems, immediate and long-term. The State-Advertiser recently reported comments by legislators expressing dissatisfaction with the lack of leadership from the Governor on the budget issue. Leadership on budget issues will not come from the legislature. Public sector unions hold legislators hostage; oppose them and the NEA/AFSCME cartel will subsidize a primary challenge and your general election opponent, guaranteed.

Humans have the mass of the Earth, a steady rain of meteoric dust, and a solar budget. They apply ingenuity to these resources. The sun shines, rain falls, and the Earth sustains plants. Variations in the circumstances we call "economic" largely result from variations in human attention. While it may seem natural to nominate insiders to governing boards, the Governor's nominations of insiders to governing boards of the most expensive programs in the State budget communicate to legislators that they will get no leadership on budget issues from him. He may as well have tossed the gunman an extra box of cartridges. Governor Abercrombie won't be leaping from his seat, you can be sure.

Supreme Bigotry

2011-03-20T17:45:00.003Z

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has ruled that it's illegal for a parent to be too Christian.

...(I)t represents a sustainable exercise of the trial court's discretion to determine the educational placement that is in daughter's best interests.

The case arose from a contest for control between divorced parents. I see nothing but typical snobbery against people of faith, dressed in legalese and weasel words. Expressed as a principle (the quote above), it authorizes nearly unbounded intrusion into parental rights.

For the counter-argument, read John Coons, "School Choice as Simple Justice" (First Things).

Until yesterday it was also the practice of our schools to force dissenting and nonbelieving children of the poor to behave like Protestants. Eventually the courts said no. That particular tyranny is behind us only to be replaced by another: children of whatever belief now must study the gospel of secular neutrality.

Note that system defenders typically blame parents for system failures. Parent involvement is beneficial, except when it's not.

Food for Thought, Later

2011-03-20T01:05:00.004Z

Sarah Palin in India. This goes on the "to do" (view) list. Governor Palin could be stronger on school choice and immigration, but no one's perfect. Perhaps Herman Cain.
Update: More food. John Ray linked this

If The Nation Was A Family

2011-03-16T19:55:00.002Z

Here's a useful analogy. Thanks, Common Room Headmistress/Zookeeper.

Off to the Legislature, to make futile protest (about which, more later).

Go Away, Again

2011-03-15T14:19:00.002Z

Read "Why We Don't Agree" by Fernando Teson, a bleeding-heart libertarian (added to the sidebar).

Word

2011-03-11T13:59:00.003Z

There's not much to add to this post by Neal McCluskey. Go and read.

I have a small disagreement with many NCLB critics: one could make a decent argument for local determination of curriculum and performance measures, and still support NCLB. The choice of metric or English Standard measurement will not change my height or weight. The numbers will depend on the standard, but the rank (measure) will not change. If I outweigh my neighbor, by metric measure, I will outweigh my neighbor by English Standard measure.

Writing On The Wall

2011-03-07T18:10:00.011Z

Where's the clue bat? Oh, here it is.

It is not the on-balance sheet public debt of close to 100 percent of gross domestic product that makes governments insolvent but "the off-balance sheet liabilities of an additional 300-400 percent of GDP that are total impossible to fund," according to Edwards.
"Governments will have to default in some shape or form and part of that process will be inflation. But you cannot inflate away some of these liabilities. The US cannot inflate its way out of these ludicrously expensive, unfunded health care liabilities. It can only default. But how?" Edwards wrote.

In the same vein, more here.

Cicilline explainst that he "balanced" the budget every year through a variety of devices, which amount to gimmicks such as increased borrowing, depleting reserves, etc.. The problem is that those were bandaids on a gaping fiscal wound, and now there are no bandaids left. None of this explains how Cicilline during the campaing insisted that Providence was in good fiscal shape when it was not.

In fairness to Cicilline, the underlying problems were not of his creation. The problem arose because of outrageous union contracts with unsustainable retirement benefits. So I don't fault Cicilline for the underlying problem, but I do fault him for not dealing with it for 8 years and for minimizing it during the campaign.

Had Cicilline taken serious steps to deal with the looming crisis, rather than year-to-year budget gimmicks, it would have ruined his relationship with the unions and his liberal base.

One last whack across the legislators' and journalists' foreheads, here.

the power of the public sector unions will be broken, because there is no alternative. The ability to buy politicians who then "negotiate" pay and pension increases with their union friends delayed the inevitable for a while, but unions have priced themselves out of the market in the public sector, just as they did in the private sector. They are, I think, doomed.

Update (2011-03-08):Last.

Fiscal austerity may sometimes sound like a dogmatic religion, but fixed principles often help us do the right thing, especially when temptation beckons. Professor Buchanan argued that the real choice was between a religion of budget balance and a rule of illusion. Seeking an optimal technocratic path is not on the menu...In any case, the rigor of the numbers will soon sweep away the fiscal illusion. The only question is whether we will end the charade on our own terms or continue to play the fool.

Letter to My Legislators (spelling corrected)

2011-03-02T23:59:00.002Z

To: Senator Fukunaga
From: Malcolm Kirkpatrick
in re: Education and the State budget
2011-03-02 (2-Mar.-2011)

Aloha, Senator Fukunaga,

The State's amortized annual financial commitments (including pension and health care obligations to retired government workers and current employees) exceed its income. This condition defines "bankruptcy". In this respect, the government of Hawaii resembles many governments at all levels, city, county, and national, across the Earth. Politicians in democratic polities and bureaucrats in one-party States ascend the political hierarchy by promising support to superiors and buying support from constituents. Governments at all levels have made more promises than they can keep. When someone has made more promises than s/he can keep, s/he will break some.

The Governor and State legislators have arrived at only the first, just-walked-past-a-mirror-and-seen-themselves-naked stage of acceptance that the State needs to go on a financial diet. As with any serious addiction, government's addiction to tax revenues will not yield to the first, second, or probably even twentieth resolution to lose weight (or quit smoking, or quit drinking, or quit an abusive relationship).

The State of Hawaii cannot raise taxes. Literally "cannot". Charles Schultz, a Kennedy-Johnson era member of the President's council of economic advisers, called the Laffer curve a straightforeward consequence of standard economic analysis. Productive private-sector workers will not passively accept unlimited taxation. At some point, each productive private-sector worker (and corporation) will either 1) take productive work off the books, 2) trade productive work for leisure, or 3) move to a polity with a more favorable tax environment.

The government of Hawaii will cut spending. The only choices decision-makers have are when and where. The longer legislators procrastinate, the narrower and more unpleasant the range of options becomes. Legislators will not make up the State's budget shortfall seeking quarters under sofa cushions or making cuts to minor programs. Legislators will cut major programs or financial markets and a shrinking tax base will deprive them of any power to make these choices.

To minimize the harm of cuts, legislators must assess the relative value to taxpayers of individual State programs, and transfer to private service providers, whether under contract to the State or unsubsidized, those functions which State agencies currently perform which independent agents would fulfill better and cheaper. I suggest that the above considerations imply a major reduction in the DOE budget and in the State's role in the education industry.

Hawaii's government-operated K-12 schools cost taxpayers over $2.5 billion per year. It does not take 12 years at $16,000 per pupil-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. Homeschooling parents out-perform classroom teachers. Independent and parochial schools outperform government-operated schools. In Hawaii, juvenile arrests fall when school is not in session. Juvenile hospitalizations for human-induced trauma fall when school is not in session.

In abstract the education industry, with its critical dependence on enormously varied inputs (each individual student's interests and abilities, each individual teacher's personality and skill) an its enormously varied outputs (the possible career paths which a modern economy offers) is an unlikely candidate for (inevitably bureaucratic) government operation. It is simple mental sloth and fear of organized insider interest groups that blocks a reconsideration of the arguments for the State role in the education industry.

There are too many "r"s in "revolution". Radical change imposes costs in the form of lost information. The least disruptive path from the current policy, which restricts individual parent's options for the use of the taxpayers' K-12 education subsidy to schools operated by government employees, is a policy I call "Parent Performance Contracting" (PPC).

1. Mandate that DOE schools --must-- hire parents, on personal service contracts, to provide for their children's education, if the parents apply for the contract.
2. A child is eligible if:
2.1 S/he is at or above age-level expectations on standardized tests of reading vocabulary, reading comprehension (any language) and math as of August 15, the start of the contract year, and
2.2 S/he has not been convicted of any felony or misdemeanor crime against persons or property in the previous calendar year.
3. Make payment equal to some fraction 1/2 < a/b < 1 of the previous year's Hawaii DOE regular-ed per pupil budget.
4. Make payment contingent on
4.1 Performance at or above age-level expectations on standardized tests of reading comprehension, reading vocabulary (any language) and Math and
4.2 Remaining conviction-free of crimes against persons or property.
5. Count students educated under this program as enrolled in the DOE school which they would otherwise attend.
6. Administer the GED at any age.
7. Allow children who test out of school before age 18 to apply the taxpayers' K-12 education subsidy toward post-secondary tuition or toward a wage subsidy at qualified (e.g., has filed W-2 forms on at least 3 adult employees per sub-adult employee for at least the previous four years) private-sector employer.

Parents could then homeschool, hire tutors, extend daycare to age 18, or supplement the contract amount and send their children to an independent or parochial school.

Parent Performance Contracting (PPC) has several advantages over school vouchers and charter schools.
1. Districts already hire consultants on personal service contracts, so PPC requires no new administrative machinery.
2. PPC includes all currently available options (e.g., homeschooling, charter schools, independent schools).
3. PPC provides greater financial and performance accountability than do school vouchers.
4. PPC requires less intrusive oversight than tuition tax credits.
5. PPC poses less of a threat to the autonomy of independent schools than do school vouchers.
6. PPC is less respectful of current institutions, and so will more likely promote more rapid evolution of the education industry than will school vouchers or charter schools.
7. Since children educated under PPC remain enrolled in State (government, generally) schools, PPC elides the whole Church/State separation argument.
8. Since children educated under PPC remain enrolled in State (government, generally) schools, PPC is immune to the rhetorical attack that it "takes money from public education" or "from public schools".
9. PPC allows incremental implementation, which reduces the financial shock to the current system, and which allows continual assessment and modification.
10. PPC reduces taxpayer exposure to uncertain (but substantial) future public-sector pension and health care costs.

cc Della Belatti

Updated: noun-verb agreement, add comma.

EDN Hearings, 9, 11, Feb. (Wednesday, Friday)

2011-02-09T16:20:00.006Z

Senate, Wednesday. What's up with SB 1104?
House, Wednesday. HB 941 (Homeschooling), HB 875 (Power of Atorney).
House, Friday (none).
Senate, Friday.

Experience Abroad

2011-02-08T03:24:00.004Z

The Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson points to a study of schools in Sweden since voucher implementation.

Summary
• For-profit schools benefit students from all socio-economic backgrounds, but they
produce the largest benefits for students from less privileged backgrounds.
• School competition in Sweden has increased levels of educational achievement.
• Free schools enjoy higher levels of parental satisfaction than government schools.
• Competition from free schools has improved conditions for teachers.
• The profit motive provides strong incentives for entrepreneurs to enter the schools market and to expand their businesses. Banning for-profit schools risks dramatically reducing the number of free schools that are created, thereby limiting the benefits of competition.

SB 806

2011-02-07T19:06:00.008Z

To: Members of the Senate Education Committee
From: Malcolm Kirkpatrick
in re: SB 806 (Teacher Standards Board)
2011-02-07

Please DO NOT support SB 806 as written.

The Hawaii DOE operates one of the largest school systems in the US, the only State-wide school district. According to the NCES 2009 Digest of Education Statistics, table 36 the DOE reported a 2006 fall enrollment of 180,729 students. Taxpayers supported the Hawaii DOE with a revenue stream of $2.985+ billion dollars in the 2006-2007 fiscal year, according to the US Census bureau's Public Education Finances, 2007, table 1. The DOE reported total current spending of $2.081+ billion, according to table 6 and per pupil spending (table 8) of $11,060. Table 11 puts the Hawaii per pupil revenue at $16,520, which ranks fifth in the US. For all this, the Hawaii DOE generates a level of performance which puts Hawaii in the national cellar, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (8th grade Math).

The above figures understate the cost of the Hawaii Department of Education. These figures do not include the cost of pension and health benefits to retired employees. These figures do not include the cost of pension and health benefit promises to current employees. These figures do not include the opportunity cost to students of the time that they spend in school. These figures do not include the cost to society of the lost information which a competitive market in education services would generate.

With SB 806, the legislature would tinker with an enterprise its defenders call "broken", "dysfunctional" and "obsolete". The Teacher Standards Board makes a large contribution to the failure of the State school system. Recall the history of this board. When Teacher Standards Board legislation first appeared before the Hawaii legislature, the HSTA testified in favor and the Board of Education opposed the legislation. At that time, I testified against the creation of a Teacher Standards Board. In the next session, the Board of Education supported the bill, and the legislature passed a bill that authorized the creation of a temporary board which was to prescribe credential requirements for applicants for teacher positions within the government school system. The Board would then hand these recommendation to the DOE Personnel Office and expire. Before the Teacher Standards Board existed, a Teacher Standards Board Planning Commission met to determine the shape of the Teacher Standards Board. This Planning commission discussed how to talk the legislature into making the Board permanent and how to talk the legislature into extending the Board's authority to teachers already in service. Since then, the legislature has repealed the sunset provision of the enabling legislation, expanded the Board from nine to fifteen members, and given the Board authority over licensing of teachers already in service. Meanwhile, the Board has failed to develop effective standards for new-hire or in-service teachers. For new-hire teachers, the Board requires College of Education training. No statistical, empirical evidence supports policies which restrict the teaching profession to graduates of Colleges of Education. For in-service teachers, the Board requires, among other things:

Standard V: Demonstrates Knowledge of Content
STANDARD STATEMENT V: The effective teacher consistently demonstrates competency in content area(s) to develop student knowledge and performance.
Performance Criteria for Standard V: The extent to which the teacher:
Keeps abreast of current developments in content area(s).
Teaches mastery of language, complex processes, concepts and principles unique to content area(s).
Utilizes the school's current technologies to facilitate learning in the content area(s).
Connects knowledge of content area(s) to students’ prior experiences, personal interests and real-life situations.
Possesses an understanding of technology appropriate to the content area, e.g. computer-assisted instruction.

and

Standard VI: Designs and Provides Meaningful Learning Experiences
STANDARD STATEMENT VI: The effective teacher consistently plans and implements, meaningful learning experiences for students.
Performance Criteria for Standard VI: The extent to which the teacher:
Plans and implements logical, sequenced instruction and continually adjusts plans based on learner needs.
Provides learning experiences and instructional materials that are developmentally appropriate and based on desired outcomes, principles of effective instruction and curricular goals.
Incorporates a variety of appropriate assessment strategies as an integral part of instructional planning.
Links concepts and key ideas to students’ prior experiences and understandings, using multiple representations, examples and explanations.
Applies concepts that help students relate learning to everyday life.
Provides integrated or interdisciplinary learning experiences that engage students in generating knowledge, using varied methods of inquiry, discussing diverse issues, dealing with ambiguity and incorporating differing viewpoints.
Teaches for mastery of complex processes, concepts and principles contained in the Hawaii Content and Performance Standards.
Provides knowledge and experiences that help students make life and career decisions.
Organizes material and equipment to create a media-rich environment.

and

Standard IX: Demonstrates Professionalism
STANDARD STATEMENT IX: The effective teacher continually evaluates the effects of his or her choices and actions and actively seeks opportunities to grow professionally.
Performance Criteria for Standard IX: The extent to which the teacher:
Engages in relevant opportunities to grow professionally, i.e., taking university/college or in-service coursework, actively participating in a professional organization, serving on a cadre, council, or committee or serving as a cooperating teacher, mentor or advisor.
Reflects on practices and monitors own teaching activities and strategies, making adjustments to meet learner needs.
Provides and accepts evaluative feedback in a professional manner.
Conducts self ethically in professional matters.
Models honesty, fairness and respect for individuals and for the laws of society.
Demonstrates good work habits including reliability, punctuality, and follow-through on commitments.
Maintains current knowledge in issues and trends in education.
Practices effective listening, conflict resolution and group-facilitation skills as a team member.
Works collaboratively with other professionals.
Participates actively and responsibly in school activities.

Problems with the above abound.
Consider: "Keeps abreast of current developments in content area(s)." Why? Does an English Literature teacher need recent Melville scholarship into the homoerotic imagery of Moby Dick to teach this book? Does a US History teacher need the latest reports from Colonial-era excavations to teach the origins of the American Revolution? What "current development" in Polynomial Ring Theory do you imagine I need to teach Alg. I? If I could read current research in Real Analysis or Polynomial Ring Theory I'd have a PhD in that topic.
Consider: "Provides learning experiences and instructional materials that are developmentally appropriate and based on desired outcomes, principles of effective instruction and curricular goals."
What "principles of effective instruction"? The College of Education for years promoted Whole Language methods of reading instruction. The DOE paid consultants from PREL to conduct workshops on Whole Language methods of reading instruction. The Whole Language fad died after PhDs in Linguistics and Psychology insisted that Whole Language theory was so misguided it was "not even wrong", so stupid it couldn't be said to be a coherent theory. Since a PhD trumps a EdD, the Whole Language fad died. The College of Education promoted "discovery" methods of Math instruction. A massive study of methods of Math instruction, Project Follow-Through, has demonstrated the superiority of direct instruction and practice over "discovery" methods. Why hire experts if you do not intend to use their expertise? Why compel attendance at school if children will discover Math on their own?

Some of these "standards" describe good practice, but they are too vague to qualify as "standards". Consider: "Reflects on practices and monitors own teaching activities and strategies, making adjustments to meet learner needs." How does the TSB propose to measure that?

Consider: "Teaches for mastery of complex processes, concepts and principles contained in the Hawaii Content and Performance Standards."
I looked at the the HCPS III standards for Alg I. They are clear and relevant. The problem with this Teacher Standards Board recommendation is that the TSB made the same practice a "standard" when student "Content and Performance Standards" referred to the Final Report of the Hawaii State Commission on Performance Standards (the Blue Book), which PREL billed taxpayers over $600,000 to develop and which the DOE discarded after four years as hopelessly complicated and vague.

The Teacher Standards Board advocated enhanced salaries for teachers who obtain National Board certification.

A review of the literature concerning national board certification will produce a vast amount of information, both for and against. According to Goldhaber, Perry, and Anthony (2003), national board certification is a process by which "outstanding teachers with demonstrated skills would be appropriately recognized" (p. 1). Supporters of NBPTS believe that teachers with national board certification will become the leaders in changing the culture of American education and that these changes will have "significant beneficial impacts on students" (p. 1).

In opposition to national board certification, Goldhaber, Perry, and Anthony cite Wilcox (1999) in claiming that the "NBPTS is an "insiders' organization that bases its authority on the evaluation of its own members. The inclusion of two prominent educators' unions on the Board also raises red flags for some" (p. 1).

Ballou and Podgursky (1998) questioned the value of the national board certification. They cited many policy questions that remain unanswered in regards to this popular type of teacher certification.

Their first question is at the heart of the NBPTS's philosophy: "Is the national board able to identify superior teachers?" (p. 1). The answer to this question, according to Ballou and Podgursky, is that "we simply do not know" (p. 1).

My point here is that the Teacher Standards Board members would not know a standard if you dropped one on their toes.

Who benefits from the Board's control over teacher credential requirements? As I suggested above the HSTA lobbied for TSB legislation. The Board originally consisted of four teachers, on HSTA recommendation, three administrators, on HGEA recommendation, a representative from the College of Education, and a Governor's appointee. Since, like the HSTA, the UHPA is an NEA subsidiary and UH administrators, like DOE administrators, pay dues to the HGEA, public sector unions controlled eight of nine seats on the Board. The current 15-member Board is similarly lopsided in it's representation by insiders.

In giving to the HSTA and HGEA the power to decertify teachers, the legislature has placed the HSTA and HGEA in a serious conflict of interest. Unions function as a combination of talent agent and law firm. They negotiate contracts and enforce contracts. A teacher's dues basically put the HSTA on retainer. By giving to the HSTA the power to decertify teachers in service, the legislature has created an enormous potential for abuse. It's as though the legislature has given to a committee of lawyers the power to determine which clients a lawyer who has collected a retainer must defend.

In the 1990 Brookings Institution study of school effectiveness by Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, the authors found that the strongest predictor of school success, after parent SES, was a composite variable they called "the degree of institutional autonomy". That is, the more people above the principal telling the principal how to do her job, the worse a school performed.

Principals at each school should have the power to determine the credential requirements of their own staff.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak.

I did not read the text to the committee. I explained that any discussion of the details of legislation regarding specific programs within the DOE implicitly accepts the suppositions on which that program rests. Once the legislature has created an institution like the Teacher Standards Board or the DOE itself, comments on related legislation do which address details of the legislation or the program assent to the existence of the program. Senator Sam Slom looked bored. The others displayed no expression at all. The HSTA will get its way, again. Homeschool.

SB 1120

2011-02-04T22:10:00.007Z

To: Senate Economic Development and Technology, Education Committee Members
From: Malcolm Kirkpatrick
In re: SB 1120
2011-02-04

Please DO NOT support SB 1120 as written. This bill would appropriate an undetermined amount of money for uncertain and ill-defined benefit. This bill subsidizes a demonstrably failed enterprise in pursuit of its stated goal.

As governor Abercrombie observed in his State of the State address, the government of Hawaii faces a serious budget deficit. This is not the time for expensive new projects. Further, the Hawaii State government's attempts at economic planning have failed repeatedly. You take resources from profitable enterprises and subsidize loss-making enterprises and wasteful bureaucracy.

The Hawaii DOE operates one of the worst school systems in the US. Its employees misrepresent DOE performance and the DOE budget. We have seen schools called "Blue Ribbon schools one year and "failing" by NCLB measures the next. We have heard administrators complain of budget cuts when the DOE budget was growing, in absolute and per pupil terms. They are not to be trusted with one more dime of taxpayer money. Your Auditor repeatedly finds misallocation of funds and deceptive accounting within the DOE.

This bill provides:...

SECTION 6. There is appropriated out of the general
revenues of the State of Hawaii the sum of $ ________ or so much thereof as may be necessary for fiscal year 2011-2012 and the same sum or so much thereof as may be necessary for fiscal year 2012-2013 for the development of professional development
programs in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines for practicing teachers. The sums appropriated shall be expended by the University of Hawaii for the purposes of this part.

If the purpose of this bill is NOT a subsidy to the make-work program we call "public education", why are funds restricted to the government-operated university system?

This bill provides:...

SECTION 7. There is appropriated out of the general
revenues of the State of Hawaii the sum of $ or so much thereof as may be necessary for fiscal year 2011-2012 and the same sum or so much thereof as may be necessary for fiscal year 2012-2013 for the transition to teaching program to provide stipends to attract science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates to the University of Hawaii post baccalaureate certificate in secondary education program.

1. If this bill is NOT a subsidy to the make-work program we call "public education", why are funds restricted to the government-operated university system?
2. No evidence supports policies which require that teachers have College of Education credits on their transcript. Abundant evidence supports policies which give to Principals the power to determine for themselves the credential requirements of their staff.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak.

Bad Goods

2011-02-04T03:27:00.002Z

Jane Shaw asks: "Is College a Bad Public Good?"
The public goods argument implies subsidy and regulation, at most, not government operation of an industry.

Mediocrity Incarnate

2011-02-03T20:03:00.002Z

The House Education Committee.
Senate Education Committee.

HB 1055

2011-01-31T22:54:00.014Z

To: Members of the House Education and Labor Committees, Senate Education Committee
From: Malcolm Kirkpatrick
In re: HB 1055, SB1282
2011-01-31

Please DO NOT support HB 1055 (SB 1282) (repealing the administration of a norm-referenced test).

The text of the bill includes:
"SECTION 1. The recent implementation of the common core
2 state standards initiative led by the National Governors
3 Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief
4 State School Officers, has resulted in a set of common core
S state standards in English language arts and mathematics that
6 have been developed by teachers, school administrators, and
7 experts to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare
8 students for college and the workforce. These standards define
9 the knowledge and skills students should possess within their K-
10 12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able
11 to succeed in entry—level, credit-bearing academic college
12 courses and in workforce training programs. Therefore, the
13 administration of nationally norm—referenced tests is no longer
14 necessary."

Note how much this resembles what DOE administrators said about the Final Report of the Hawaii State Commission on Performance Standards (the Blue Book), which the PREL compiled at a cost of over $250,000, and the DOE abandoned after four years, after floundering and failing to develop practical tests based on unnecessary or vague or contradictory "standards".

The Bill further says:
(Page 1)
18 The board of education has adopted the common core state
(Page 2)
1 standards and Hawaii is a governing member of the SMARTER
2 Balanced Assessment Consortium that will be developing and
3 implementing a summative assessment in grades 3 through 8 and
4 high school in English language arts and mathematics that will
5 provide comparable achievement standards across all of the
6 states that are members of the Consortium.

As the bill indicates, the alternative assessment does not yet exist.

The Hawaii DOE operates one of the worst school systems in the US, as measured by standardized tests. For years, DOE officials told the people of Hawaii that Hawaii students scored "above average" on Math. In 1990 Hawaii schools participated in the NAEP and we learned that DOE instruction generated a level of performance that put Hawaii in the national cellar. Standardized assessment is to system administrators and Professors of Education what sunlight is to vampires. Please do not eliminate one of the few means by which taxpayers and parents may assess DOE performance.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak.

To: House Education and Labor Committee members
From: Malcolm Kirkpatrick
In re HB 1540
2011-01-31

Please DO NOT support HB 1540 (lowering the time uncertified teachers may work in the DOE).
The "standards" advanced by the Hawaii Teacher Standards Board have no relation to teacher or student performance. The Teacher Standards Board requires College of Education credentials. College of Education credits add nothing to teacher performance. Please read Robert Holland's Policy Review article "How to Build a Better Teacher".

In the 1990 Brookings Institute study of school performance (Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools), the authors found that the strongest predictor of school performance, after parent SES, was a composite variable the authors called "the degree of institutional autonomy". That is, the more people above the principal telling the principal how to do her job, the worse a school performed. One key element of control the authors recommend that authorities give to principals is the power of a principal to choose her team. For this reason, they opposed policies which limit teacher employment to College of Education graduates, which current Teacher Standards Board standards require.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak.

To: Senate Education Committee
From: Malcolm Kirkpatrick
In re: SB 810
2011-01-31

The text asserts:...
(page 2)
6 ......According to the Georgetown
7 University Center on Education and the Workforce, by 2018
8 sixty-five per cent of Hawaii's jobs will require postsecondary
9 education and training beyond high school. Despite these
10 trends, Hawaii ranks forty-first in the nation in the percentage
11 of recent high school graduates who attend college. Even among
12 Hawaii's students who do go on to attend college, many are
13 academically unprepared and require remediation.

Against this, please consider:...

"The Great College Degree scam"

First, the push to increase the number of college graduates seems horribly misguided from a strict economic/vocational perspective. It is precisely that perspective that is emphasized by those, starting with President Obama, who insist that we need to have more college graduates.

Second, the data suggest a horrible decline in the productivity of American education in that the “inputs” used to achieve any given human capital (occupational) outcome have expanded enormously. More simply, it takes 18 years of schooling (including kindergarten and the typical fifth year of college to get a bachelor’s degree) for persons to get an education to do jobs that a generation or two ago people did with 12-13 years of education (graduating more often from college in four years and sometimes skipping kindergarten).

Third, a sharp rise in the dependency ratio—those too old or too young to work relative to the work age population is coming because of the aging of the American population. This means we need to increase employment participation in younger ages (e.g., 18 to 23) where participation is low today because of the rising college participation rate. The falling productivity of American education is aggravating a serious problem—a shortage of workers to sustain a growing population of those unable to care for themselves.

Fourth, all of this supports the notion that credential inflation arises from a perceived need by individuals to demonstrate potential employment competence through a piece of paper, i.e. a college diploma. Employers are using education as a screening and signaling device, at a low cost directly to them (although not costless because of the taxes they pay to sustain much of this), but at a high cost to the prospective employees and to society as a whole.

Fifth, this shows that the current problem of college student employability is not a new, and merely temporary, problem.

Lastly, I am saddened that this is happening. Many of those advocating more access are well meaning and have pure motives, but they are ignorant of the evidence. But higher education is all about facts, knowledge—learning how the world works and disseminating that information to others. Some in higher education KNOW about all of this and are keeping quiet about it because of their own self-interest. We are deceiving our young population to mindlessly pursue college degrees when very often that is advice that is increasingly questionable.

"From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: The Great College Degree Scam"

Executive Summary

Colleges and universities are turning out graduates faster than America’s labor markets are creating jobs that traditionally have been reserved for those with degrees. More than one-third of current working graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, and the proportion appears to be rising rapidly. Many of them are better described as "underemployed" rather than "gainfully employed." Indeed, 60 percent of the increased college graduate population between 1992 and 2008 ended up in these lower skill jobs, raising real questions about the desirability of pushing to increase the proportion of Americans attending and graduating from four year colleges and universities. This, along with other evidence on the negative relationship between government higher education spending and economic growth, suggests we may have significantly "over invested" public funds in colleges and universities.

Please also read Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs; The Great Training Robbery.

It does not take 12 years to teach a normal child to read and compute. State (government, generally) provision of History, Civics, and Economics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers and broadcast new media would be. Most of the world's work is grunt work and most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom.

Please do not support this bill.

Update. I was late, due to an appointment with the vet, and delivered the testimony to the Senate hearing after the committee's decisionmaking. I presented the testimony on HB 1540. As recently as three years ago I would have rescheduled the vet appointment, but since legislators pay no attention to what I say, my cats have a higher priority than the lives of 170,000 children.
Update. Added link to Holland's Policy Review article. Added link to Brookings study by Chubb and Moe (1990).

HB 97 (and HB 11)

2011-01-27T02:07:00.004Z

HB 11 (Cynthia Thielen, (R)) and HB 97 ( Kyle Yamashita, (D)) would lower the age at which the State compels attendance at school from six to five. Senator Avery Chumley's proposal to lower the age of compulsory attendance (start) from six to three provoked my initial interest in the relation between institutional variables such as age of compulsory attendance, district size, per pupil budgets, and teacher credentials, on the one hand, and system performance, as measured by standardized test scores, juvenile arrest rates, and juvenile hospitalization rates, on the other hand. Smaller is better. Later is better.

To: House Education and Finance Committee members
From: Malcolm Kirkpatrick
In re: HB 97 (mandatory kindergarten)
2011-01-26

Please DO NOT support HB 97 (mandatory kindergarten). HB 97 will increase the cost of State government, add to looming pension and health benefit obligations, and degrade overall system performance.

Increased CostsThe Hawaii DOE reported a 2006 fall enrollment of 180,728 and a 2007 fall enrollment of 179, 897 students, according to the NCES 2009 Digest of Education Statistics, table 34. Dividing by twelve grades, this gives about 15,000 students at each grade level. The DOE per pupil budget was more than $12,000 per pupil in the fiscal year 2006-2007, according to the NCES 2009 Digest of Education Statistics, table 183. This figure understates the total cost as it does not include pension and health benefit obligations to former and current system employees. Adding one more mandatory grade level will increase K-12 costs by $180 million (plus uncertain but large pension and health benefit costs).

Degraded PerformanceAcross the US there is a clear and strong relation between the age at which States compel attendance at school and NAEP 4th and 8th grade Reading and Math scores. States which compel attendance at age 7 or 8 have higher scores than States which compel attendance at age 5 or 6. Later is better. Early education may be important. Early compulsory attendance at school is counter-indicated.

Thank you for this opportunity to testify.

A Hectare of Confusion and a Tonne of Indifference

2011-01-27T01:33:00.005Z

As noted earlier ("Did He Mean It?"), Governor Abercrombie expressed concern for State's financial difficulties and then expressed his determination to treat State employment as a welfare program. Nothing better expresses the priority that legislators assign to maintaining the income of dues-paying members of the HSTA/HGEA/UHPA/UPW (NEA/AFSCME) cartel than the practice of measuring education in terms of time. "A year of Algebra I" and "three credit-hours of Sociology" make as much sense as "a pound of friendship" and "a square meter of health". With House Bill 954, Representatives Ty Cullen (D) and Joey Manahan (D) declare their affection for ... the support of the HSTA and HGEA in the next election, I suppose.

US "public education" has become an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded construction, consulting, and supply contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination. If this is not so, why cannot any student take, at any age, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers' age 6-18 education subsidy toward post-secondary tuition at any VA-approved post-secondary institution in the State or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified private-sector employer?

Criminalizing Concern

2011-01-27T01:00:00.005Z

Jay Greene asks "Who's the Criminal?"

In Akron, Ohio a woman who put her children in a better public school was sent to jail when private investigators hired by the school found that she did not live in the district. Her father did and she sometimes stayed with him, but that was not enough to keep her out of prison for seeking a better education for her children.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta there is evidence of widespread cheating on standardized tests by teachers and administrators as well as a potential cover-up in the investigation of those accusations. No one has gone to jail (and no one ever will) for robbing children of a quality education and then lying about their true achievement by cheating on the state test to hide that fact.

If Linda Ichiyama (D) and Aaron Johanson (R) have their way (House Bill 875), concerned parents in Hawaii will face charges for aiding and abetting their children's escape from wretched DOE schools.

Establishes requirements for powers of attorney executed for student enrollment purposes. Expressly prohibits uses of powers of attorney to circumvent school enrollment requirements, and requires parents and guardians to certify that a power of attorney is not being used for those purposes.

Did He Mean It?

2011-01-25T00:59:00.003Z

This morning, I went to the State Capital, seeking help in identifying the sponsors of HB 25. The Public Access Room distributes lists of legislators' committee assignments, office locations, e-mail addresses, and signitures. Capital guards directed traffic away from the public parking in the basement, reserving space for guests at Governor Abercrombie's State of the State address. I parked on Richards street and walked into the building. The Governor was a few sentences into his address when I walked into the Public Access Room.

Readers may decide for themselves how seriously the Governor intended the talk about facing financial reality and how much, on the other hand, he intended this:...

I expect collective bargaining negotiations to be conducted in good faith and with common goals in mind—to achieve savings without disrupting service to the public, to keep state employees on the job with paychecks for their families, and to exercise creativity and long-term thinking in the bargaining process to improve the work experience and achieve a resolution of the crisis of unfunded liabilities in pension funds and runaway health costs.

Rebutting the First Lady

2011-01-14T17:46:00.005Z

Professor Ann Althouse quotes First Lady Michelle Obama: "We can teach ("our" children) to give others the benefit of the doubt, particularly those with whom they disagree. We can also teach our children about the tremendous sacrifices made by the men and women who serve our country and by their families. We can explain to them that although we might not always agree with those who represent us, anyone who enters public life does so because they love their country and want to serve it."

Althouse responds: "But that's quite obviously untrue! Some people seek power for the wrong reasons or go astray after they've reached power. We need to observe the government with a clear, active, and critical eye."

A loving mother can teach a normal child to read (decode the phonetic alphabet) before that child can speak. The infant ears, eyes, and brain function at a level sufficient to this task before the child can coordinate the diaphragm, larynx, and tongue. A loving mother, moving through the lessons at a crawl, can teach a normal child to compute (add, subtract, multiply, and divide integers, decimals, and fractions) by age 8 if she starts early. Once a child can read and compute, s/he can study independently with a coherent course of instruction crystallized in books. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State (government, generally) provision of History and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers would be, and is in totalitarian States like Cuba and North Korea.

Professor Althouse explains that last point: "It would make more sense to teach creationism instead of evolution than to teach these wishful lies about government since children need to learn how to be effective citizens and lulling them into passive admiration of the government undermines the democratic process. Believing or not believing in creationism, by contrast, isn't going to change what happened in the grand expanse of evolutionary time."

What the State Can Contribute to the Education and Health Care Industries

2011-01-02T03:07:00.004Z

From the Why Evolution Is True site...

MichieuxPosted January 1, 2011 at 4:34 pm

Would you you care to elaborate on the “serious defects” in the “standard arguments for state provision of health and education services”? That is, could you explain what you take those arguments to be, and provide some evidence not only for those arguments, but also how they are defective? Also, and perhaps more importantly, how would you measure a nation’s health?

I will sketch a skeletal outline. I admit numerous qualifications.

Why the State cannot make any useful contribution to the medical care industry or the education industry.

The government of a locality is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition, after Weber). A law is a written threat by a government to kidnap (arrest), assault (subdue), and forcibly infect with HIV (imprison) someone, under specified circumstances. Individual A has a “right” to do X if the government has pomised not to interfere when A attempts to do X and, further, has promised to interfere with individuals B,C, etc. if they attempt to stop A when A attempts to do X. A State grants “title” to a resource X to an individual A when the State reecognizes the right of A to control X which includes the right to transfer control to other individuals B (to sell the resource) on terms mutually agreeable to A and B. Market-oriented policies combine title and contract law. Because barter and commerce benefit both sides of a transaction, markets unite control over resources with the incentive to use resources is socially benefiicial ways.

A society is free in proportion to the range of behaviors between compelled and forbidden. The advantages of freedom are obvious: how many times should you chew your next bite of apple? Should we conduct a nationwide vote on that? Each individual is the best judge of his own interests.

Separation of powers, federalism, and markets institutionalize humility on the part of government actors.

At this point, I invite critics of market economies to address two questions:
1. From a State presence in which industries does society benefit, beyond what the State contributes to markets generally (an original assignment of title and enforcement of contract law)? You may imagine either a) two categories: A = likely candidates for State operation or subsidy, and B = unlikely candidates for State operation or subsidy or
b) a continuum
(highly unlikely) -1_____._____+1 (highly likely).
2. What criteria determine an industry’s categorical assignment of position on the continuum?

Usual welfare-economic arguments for State intervention in an industry involve externalities, economies of scale, and information assymetries between buyers and sellers. In the case of the medical care and education industries, the information assymetry argument applies with greater force to remote State actors than to exchange between doctors and patients. Beyond a very low level, there are no economies of scale at the delivery end of the education industry as it currently operates. Education only marginally qualifies as a public good as economists use the term and the “public goods” (positive externalities) argument implies subsidy and regulation, at most, not State (government, generally) operation of school. The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of “education” and the State’s definition will then bind students, parents, real classroom teachers, and taxpayers to the State’s definition.

Similarly, the State cannot subsidize medical care without a definition of “medical care”. The taxpayers of one medium-sized US State could probably afford one band-aid and one aspirin for every person on Earth, but the entire Earth’s GDP is insufficient to keep even one person alive forever. Everyone dies. Barring a fatal accident, most of us will consume medical resources which we will never repay. In an unsubsidized market in medical services, relatives will face the decision: pull the plug on grandma and put braces on the kids, or sell the house, extend grandma’s life another six months, and declare bankruptcy. In a tax-subsidized market or a State-operated medical care industry, some State body will make the decision when to pull the plug (a “death panel”). Aggregation of resources and authority for control over resources into government hands contributes nothing to the performance of the medical care industry.

The “public goods” argument for subsidization of medical care or education has the logical hole I mentioned earlier, that oversight of corporate functions is a public good and the State itself is a corporation. Therefore, oversight of State functions is a public good which the State itself cannot provide. State assumption of responsibility for the provision of public goods transforms the free rider problem at the root of public goods analysis but does not solve it.

More later.

This was overlong, and the site owned complained, so I brought it here.

You Think You Have Problems?

2010-12-06T03:01:00.000Z

Not even close...

Who Cares What a Liar Says?

2010-11-19T17:16:00.003Z

Some people will believe anything. Secretary Duncan tells a self-selected audience at the American Enterprise Institute what they want to hear. Sorry. This man killed the DC voucher program. This man simultaneously opposes (ostensibly) seat-time as a measure of system performance and reductions in instructional time. In the presence of a friendly audience this man complains that school boards and district superintendents lack the courage to challenge employee unions. Like, this speech deserves the Medal of Honor? This man served a giant dollop of bailout money to the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, and now says to the AEI audience that that was a one-time event. Will anyone risk money on a bet against the prediction that the Secretary and his boss will deliver more unaccountable (meaning that States and local agencies get to define success) money in 2012?
.

Go Here. Read This.

2010-11-18T22:36:00.001Z

Go here.

...(A)n early study of 1400 middle-aged and elderly Swedish twins shows that the effect of upbringing on appreciation is very durable. If you make a loving and harmonious family, your children won't merely be grateful at the time. The memories you create for them will likely last a lifetime.

People often fear that the science of success will be misused. Twin and adoption research seem like handy excuses for lazy parents. But scaling back misguided investments isn't "lazy"; it's common sense. If your children's future success is largely beyond your control, riding them "for their own good" is not just wasteful, but cruel. The sentimental view that parents should simply cherish, encourage, and accept their children has science on its side. Modern parents need to calm down and reconceive family time as leisure, not work. Having fun with your children may not prepare them for the future, but there are few more rewarding ways to spend your time.

Don't You Wish You Could Write?

2010-11-17T01:29:00.003Z

Don't you wish you could write? I wish I could. Hat tip, Kathy Shaidle.

Ideologues versus Opportunists

2010-11-12T22:39:00.003Z

(Updated)
On the James Randi forum, a participant in a discussion of the US pre-college school system referred to free-market "ideologues" and "fairy tales about the magical properties of 'the market'". Earlier in that discussion, various participants argued whether Milton Friedman's views on tuition vouchers had changed between his 1955 essay and his death in 2006.

"Ideological" is an uncomplimentary way to say "systematic" or "principled". Antonyms include "scatterbrained" and "unscrupulous".

Individual humans have individual wants and goals. Aggregation of preferences of several individuals presents problems. For example, one process which aggregates dietary preferences produces stew (mix all preferred ingredients together), which may be on no one's preferred menu. Individuals prefer shoes that fit. No process that aggregates individual preferences in shoe size will generate a shoe size that fits anything close to a majority. Neither direct democratic processes nor representative democratic processes nor authoritarian processes will come close to market processes in fitting shoes to feet, food to palates, or curricula to children.

Friedman makes his policy preferences pretty clear. He wants parent control of education. People interested in the evolution of Friedman's school policy preferences can watch that evolution unfold by reading in sequence:
The Role of Government in Education (1955),
"The Role of Government in Education" (Capitalism and Freedom, 1962),
"Public Schools; Make them Private", (1995)
a Reason interview (1995),
and his notes to Liberty and Learning: Milton Friedman's Voucher Idea at Fifty (Enlow and Ealy. Cato. 2006).
It's not a mystery what Friedman wants.

It's also not a mystery why free marketeers think markets outperform command economies. Ludwig von Mises spelled it out in Socialism, (1922), Friedrich Hayek explained it again in The Use of Knowledge in Society (American Economic Review, 1945), and again in The Road to Serfdom,
and Friedman again in 1962.
Sheldon Richman (What Education Needs) finds scientific anticipation of an Austrian view of the education industry in the writings of Joseph Priestley.

Briefly, the government of a locality is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition, after Weber). A law is a written threat by a government to kidnap (arrest), assault (subdue), and forcibly infect with HIV (imprison) someone, under specified circumstances. Individual A has a "right" to do X if the government has promised not to interfere when A attempts to do X and, further, has promised to interfere with individuals B,C, etc. if they attempt to stop A when A attempts to do X. "Title" to a resource is a grant by a government to an individual of control over that resource which includes the power to transfer control (to sell the resource). Market-oriented policies combine title and contract law. As Adam Smith explained (I have not read this one), markets unite control over resources with the incentive to use resources is socially beneficial ways.

For those who approve the current policy which prevails across most US States, which reserves to schools operated by government employees an exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers' K-12 education subsidy, a thought experiment.
Compose answers to the following questions:...

1. From State operation of what industries does society as a whole benefit? You may suppose either a dichotomous classification:
A = unlikely candidate for State operation = {........}
B = likely candidate for State operation = {.........}
or a continuum:
(highly unlikely) -1________.________+1 (highly likely).
2. Now consider the further question: What criteria determine an industry's categorical assignment or position on the continuum?

To what industries can organized violence and the threat of organized violence make a positive contribution, beyond what it contributes to minimally-regulated industries in a market economy (an initial assignment of title and enforcement of contract law)? Are we naked because the State does not operate textile mills and clothing stores? Are we starving because the State does not operate collective farms, grocery stores, and restaurants? Why make an exception for the education industry?

A society is free in proportion to the range of behaviors not included in "compelled" and "forbidden". Separation of powers, federalism, and markets institutionalize humility on the part of government actors.

A widely-beloved fairy tale asserts the beneficent power of organized violence. Markets institutionalize non-violence. If a policy dispute turns on a matter of taste, federalism and a market economy allow for the expression of varied tastes, while the contest for control of a State-monopoly provider must inevitably create unhappy losers. If a policy dispute turns on a matter of fact, where "What works?" is an empirical question, local control of policy and competitive markets will generate more information than will a State-monopoly provider of goods and services. A State-monopoly provider is like an experiment with one treatment and no controls; a retarded experimental design.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell speculates that socialism originates in a hypertrophied sense of order, like those compulsive people who rearrange the socks in the dresser and the dishes in the cupboard ten times a day. Elsewhere ("Raffles and Mrs. Blandish", "Inside the Whale"), he speculates that a vicarious sadism generates a preference for authoritarian politics. Ludwig von Mises suggested something similar; that socialism expresses a primitive revenge fantasy. It looks to me that people who defend State operation of industry enjoy a self-congratulatory power fantasy: what a wonderful world it would be if I ran it. Supporting the government school system or government-operated health care is like buying a movie ticket or a lottery ticket. With the movie ticket you get to imagine yourself in Steven Segall's place, or Bruce Willis' place for a couple of hours. With a lottery ticket, you get to imagine how your life will change when you win $$$. The price of the fantasy is the price of the ticket. The difference with the State school system is it costs taxpayers more than $500 billion per year, as well as the opportunity cost to students of the time they spend in school.

Affirmative Action, Baby!

2010-10-30T02:17:00.004Z

Where's the evidence that Barak Obama is an intellectual? Granted, the President extemporaneously can string appropriate cliches together with the fluency of a street-corner evangelist reciting his catechism. Was the last person to hand you a copy of some religious tract an intellectual? In this case, absence of evidence is evidence of a vacuum. Beyond some wretched poetry about aquatic baboons and two apparently ghost-written books, where's the evidence? James Taranto has noticed.

Occam's razor suggests that Obama is a mere conformist--someone who absorbed every left-wing platitude he encountered in college and never seems to have seriously questioned any of them. Kloppenberg characterizes Obama as a skeptic, not a true believer. We're not sure he has an active enough mind to be either one.

Marxism Test

2010-10-30T01:48:00.003Z

Take the test.

"Your score is 90%."

Josiah Gray would score 100% and he's no Marxist. This requires basic literacy.

Physics Test

2010-10-25T17:55:00.002Z

Take the quiz.

"Your Total Score is 87.5%."

Oops.

I've been on a Biology kick lately: Matt Ridley, The Agile Gene and Genome, M. J. Benton, When Life Nearly Died (the Permian mass extinction). I have two in the air: Stringer and McKie, African Exodus (human evolution) and Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (c.a. 3000-323 bc). Next up: review basic Analytic Geometry (conic sections) and Calculus. Then I'll have time to review basic mechanics and thermodynamics. Why does the equilibrium temperature of a body (such as the Earth) in orbit around the Sun depend on anything other than residual kinetic energy of formation, heat from fission in the interior, solar output, and the radius of the Earth's orbit? I have questions but no answers. How can "greenhouse gasses" make any difference? The experts say so, so I'll believe, but, as the Marquis De Sade said "It is impossible for a man to believe in something he does not understand" (from memory, so it's not exact).

C'mon; my last Physics class was 40 years ago.

Another Poitical Quiz

2010-10-25T02:59:00.002Z

Take the quiz.
You are a Social Liberal (60% permissive) and an Economic Conservative (81% permissive). You are best described as a Capitalist.

"Free Marketeer" or "19th Century Liberal", more like.

Public Sector Pensions

2010-10-22T21:56:00.003Z

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser endorsed two of the most fiscally irresponsible candidates on the menu: Dan Inouye for US Senate and Neil Abercrombie for Governor.
Hawaii's public-sector pension system is under-funded. It appears that California is headed for bankruptcy. Hawaii to follow. We will return to this topic with updates and comments.

Political Quiz

2010-10-21T13:08:00.003Z

Take the political quiz.

"You scored the following on the PoliticsMatch questions:
Personal Score 75%
Economic Score 81%

Where You Fit In

Where your Personal score meets your Economic score on the grid below is your political philosophy. Based on the above score, you are a Conservative-Leaning Libertarian."

Now, if population control and immigration had appeared among the questions the results would have differed from the above.

Why Study History?...

2010-10-21T03:35:00.003Z

So you won't make an ass of yourself, like Gwen Ifil...

Lucky Guess

2010-10-12T23:21:00.005Z

Civic Literacy
"You answered 32 out of 33 correctly — 96.97%."

Politicians are retarded.

Hat tip: Blond Sagacity.
(Update) My homeless house-sitter: "You answered 33 out of 33 correctly — 100.00 %".

Stepping into the Ring

2010-10-02T04:21:00.005Z

Here, we tangle with a professional. This guy has credentials and, no doubt, citations up the Wazoo. I may wind up looking silly.
(Update) Something more here and here and here.
(Update) Elswhere, here (no professionals).

Dump the Incumbent

2010-10-01T02:00:00.005Z

Kim Coco Iwamoto recommends a level of funding for the Hawaii DOE at the level (per pupil) of the Department of Defense schools: "The Feds and State should be mandated to follow the US Department of Defense funding formula for public education. The DOD applies Government Accountability Guidelines to compute how much it invests each year into the public education systems they operate abroad. In 2009, the DOD spent $23,496 –$25,968/ student."

This would support a two-to-one student:teacher ratio, if the DOE were so inclined. This expresses an utterly irresponsible attitude toward her fellow citizens, who pay the bill for unscrupulous pandering to the public-sector unions.

As Andrew Coulson observes, beyond a very low level, budget bears no relation to system performance.

Iwamoto cites membership on the Teacher Standards Board as "civic or community service". Unless she worked toward repeal of this destructive institution, her participation degraded system performance.

Homeschooling by the Numbers

2010-09-26T18:56:00.001Z

Let's see if this code works:...
Nope. Well, the sidebar abbreviates it. Go here.

"More Gangs. Less Crime"

2010-09-25T03:42:00.003Z

Wisdom.

(W)ell-established economic theories on how and why governments evolve from situations of anarchy...suggest(s) that within a society without law and order, individuals are under constant threat of being victims of aggression and crime, and small "gangs" evolve to provide protection services to people. By forming groups, people who cannot protect themselves individually can be more secure...A clear example of our logic is the case of gangs in the prison system. This is one of the only (sic. "few") places where a 40-year old white man would be a gang member, and for good reason. In prison, inmates are frequently the victims of violence and intimidation that go unreported (or if reported, unpunished). This makes the environment similar to that in government-run schools and on inner-city streets. An inmate who joins a gang receives protection, which lowers the odds that he will be a victim of violent crime. Once again, the underlying demand for gangs stems from the presence of pre-existing violence.

Abortion and Gay Marriage

2010-09-17T01:31:00.006Z

This post is not about the school system.

Someone called and said he and his friends were asking about the candidates' position on abortion and gay marriage. This question makes more sense addressed to legislators than to candidates for the Board of Education. Schools don't have much to do with either issue. A requirement that schools notify parents when schools refer students for any medical procedure makes sense.

Perhaps the fellow was not seeking policy positions but some sense of the candidate's moral compass. Here goes.

Love is wonderful, and everyone would benefit from a loving relationship with a supportive partner or two. Or five. Your housekeeping and sleeping arrangements are not my business. That said, a court-mandated or legislatively-mandated expansion of the population covered by legally-mandated spousal benefits amounts to a tax increase, and US taxpayers are already overtaxed.

Abortion? Let's think this through. Morality is a result of biological and cultural evolution. Across time, various societies have applied different definitions of "human" (meaning, deserving of the protection given to humans). In ancient Greece, deformed newborn babies were left outside the city walls at night. Some African societies regarded twins as so unlucky that one would be left in the forest overnight. In ancient Rome, children were their fathers' property until they became adults (if male) or until they married (if female, at which point they became their husband's property). Basically, abortion was legal until the end of the 83rd trimester (20 years and nine months) for male children and indefinitely for female children.

1. The government of a locality is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition).
2. Value is determined by supply and demand, therefore a world in which human life is precious is a world in which human life is scarce.
3. The Earth's human population cannot grow without limit.
4. The Earth's human population will stop growing when either...
a) the birth rate falls to meet the death rate or
b) the death rate rises to meet the birth rate.
5. The Earth's human population will stop growing as a result of either
a) deliberate human agency or
b) other.
6. Deliberate human agency is either
a) democratically controled or
b) other.
7. All human behavioral traits are heritable (google the entire phrase).
8. Voluntary programs for population control selectively breed non-compliant individuals.
9. Humans who will reproduce at high density have a selective advantage over humans who require lots of open space.
10. Human misery is like heat; in the absence of insulators (barriers to immigration) it will flow until evenly distributed.
11. The world's maximum possible instantaneous human population is greater than it's maximum sustainable human population. Absent a reduction in the human birth rate or a gradual increase in the human death rate, expect a sharp decline in human population numbers from the instantaneous maximum.
12. Humans displace wilderness. The world's maximum possible sustainable human poulation leaves little room for wildnerness or terrestrial wildlife. Absent a reduction in the human birth rate or an increase in the death rate, expect a reduction in biodiversity before the Earth's human population stabilizes.

Malthus was right. Between vice (forced sterilization, forced abortion) misery (starvation, pollution-induced illness, epidemic disease, genocide, war) and moral restraint (hopeless, see #8), your choices are limited. Where do you disagree? I know: "Everything's fine so far" (said the man who jumped from the 50th floor, as he passed the tenth floor).

The feminists don't like this argument. Libertarians don't like this argument. Christians don't like this argument. Only the Christians (Baldilocks, The Common Room) and the Brits at Prospect magazine and at Dave Thompson's site remain polite. The argument basically summarizes Garrett Hardin's essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" (Science, 1968).

Schools, Markets, and Federalism

2010-09-16T19:53:00.002Z

As this article observes, the US State-monopoly school system stifles innovation and preserves inept practice.

In a Better World...

2010-09-10T20:40:00.002Z

If election ballots looked like referendum ballots, where voters could vote "no" (-1) for a candidate, incumbency could just as easily count against a candidate. This would make no difference in a two-way contest, but in a multi-candidate primary or a three-or-more party general election, the outcome of an election that allowed voters to cast a negative ballot could well differ from the outcome in the current system.
Think on it.

Voter Information

2010-09-10T02:23:00.008Z

The Office of Elections list of candidates.
Star-Advertiser voters' guide.
Project Vote Smart.
League of Women Voters candidate profiles.
Honolulu Weekly Board candidate profiles.
Olelo, Board candidate videos.
Saave Our Schools Board Candidates' Forum.
UPDATE
Family Forum candidate survey. A friend called to ask why this survey includes no response from Malcolm Kirkpatrick. Dunno. Perhaps it went into the round file by mistake. Here are my responses. Y,Y,U,U,Y.

Board Candidates on Olelo

2010-08-30T06:31:00.003Z

The public-access channel Olelo recorded videos of all willing candidates for office in Hawaii and presents Board of Education candidate videos here. Does this format provide useful information? Olelo gave each candidate five minutes. It's asking a lot from people to expect that they sit through one hour of self-promotinal monologue.

Perhaps the Star-Advertiser's voters' guide will present a more accessible summary of candidates' strengths and weaknesses. Some candidate information here.

In a voucher-subsidized competitive market in education services, legislators would determine the level of per-pupil support, parents would evaluate schools, and voters could ignore the issue of school administration.

Alfred North Whitehead observed that civilization advances by the number of things that we can ignore.

The Fraud of Race to the Top

2010-08-27T18:23:00.004Z

Remember the Clinton era Goals 2000? The US was to be first in the world in science and math. The legislation involved lots of lofty proclamations and little substance. Nothing has changed in the world of government schooling flackery except increasing growth in the bureaucracy and budget. Except for the positive assessment of Fordham, this analysis of Race to the Top gets everything right.
Update: Add this.

chart45

2010-08-25T21:13:00.001Z

chart45,
originally uploaded by malcolmkirkpatrick.

Between 1987 and 1997 most schools in the Hawaii DOE followed a September through June schedule. Juvenile arrests fall when school is not in session. Juvenile hospitalizations for human-induced trauma fall when school is not in session. Reported house burglaries fall when school is not in session (car burglaries rise).

Schools do not prevent crime; they cause it.

Naturally...

2010-08-21T16:14:00.002Z

Sex I.D.

Your empathy score is: 5 out of 20
Average score for men: 7.9 out of 20
Average score for women: 10.6 out of 20

On standardized measures of social skills your humble narrator ranks somewhere between clam and desert reptile.

August 23 Forum Flier

2010-08-18T19:14:00.003Z

This arrived in the inbox this morning.
................................................................
Candidate Forums on EDUCATION

The recent Furlough Friday crisis has reminded us all that our elected leaders matter! Come and hear what candidates for the offices most directly responsible for Hawaii’s public education system have to say in response to our most pressing questions.

Community organizations focusing on education will be holding a series of three candidate forums at the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus:

• Board of Education At-Large candidates, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Mon. Aug. 23
• Lieutenant Governor candidates, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Mon. Sept. 6, Labor Day
• Governor candidates, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sun. Sept 12

This is the only candidate forum for BOE offices, and is a unique opportunity to learn about and have your questions answered by a panel of 10 confirmed candidates. The public (parents, students, concerned citizens) are invited to submit questions at www.sos808.org.

The moderator will be Neal Milner, former ombuds for UH Manoa, professor of Political Science, and political commentator. The Architecture Building is on University Ave, across from the Atherton YMCA (corner of Metcalf). Street parking is free after 6pm, and a pay lot is availableadjacent to the building. Parking is free on Sundays and Holidays.

All fora are free and open to the public. The events will be broadcast on ‘Olelo. Please check www.sos808.org for updates.

Hosted by Save Our Schools Hawaii, the committee organizing a Hawai’i chapter of Parents for Public Schools, and the American Studies Graduate Students Association of UH.

Contact:
Marguerite Higa
sos.higa@gmail.com

Corey Rosenlee
coreyrosenlee@gmail.com

April Bautista
akbbautista@gmail.com

Save Our Schools Hawaii
www.sos808.org

S.O.S. Hawaii stands with Hawaii's public and charter school children and teachers. We are united behind one promise: we will do all we can to make sure Hawaii's keiki and teachers are valued, prioritized, and that education is sustainably funded. We believe that investing in education today supports all of Hawai'i for tomorrow.
--
April Kamilah B. Bautista

Think On This

2010-08-17T02:21:00.004Z

Just go to Sunshine's blog (sidebar) and browse "Iraqi Blogs I like". Notice something? Comfortable Americans, think on this. For some people, daily life is heroic when compared to the average American life.

Two Proofs by Contradiction

2010-08-07T11:22:00.004Z

After the fall of the Soviet State the British poet and historian of that State, Robert Conquest, wrote that the West had, as yet, incompletely learned two important lessons: the limits to the amount of good that organized violence (the State) can accomplish, and the stultifying effects of bureaucracy, public and private. The force of law is a blunt instrument. The enormous diversity of individual students' interests and abilities and the enormous diversity of their future career paths make the education industry an unlikely candidate for government control. Yet in the US, State Constitutions, State statutes, and policies in many school districts restrict parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' education subsidy to schools operated by State (government, generally) employees. The term "the public school system" designates those provisions in State Constitutions, those State statutes, and those district policies. Arguments in defense of these restrictions policies fail, as two proofs by contradiction indicate.

I.
The State (government, generally) cannot support education without a definition of "education". Curriculum standards define education. If the "public school system" is not an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded construction and supply contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination, why cannot any student take, at any time and at any age, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers' education subsidy toward post-secondary tuition or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified private-sector employer? If it is fraud for a mechanic to charge for the repair of a functional motor and if it is fraud for a physician to charge for the treatment of a healthy patient, then it is fraud for a teacher, school, school district,or State to charge for the instruction of a student who does not need help.

II.
According to the Common Core mission statement:

The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

If "education", as defined by curriculum standards, is really so important, why do these people oppose restrictions on immigration? Do they imagine that immigrant Central Americans enter the US fully informed of the US History standards and the English Language Arts standards?

Either immigration is a threat or education, as the NEA, the AFT, and the Common Core define it, is not necessary. Or both.

Education Under Obama

2010-08-06T11:35:00.002Z

Joanne linked this...
"It could have been worse." How?

I can see November from my house.

Hawaii Reporter Questionnaire

2010-08-04T21:04:00.005Z

By now, readers can predict my answers to most questions which reporters pose in candidate surveys. The only real point of interest is the questions themselves.

A Hawaii Reporter reporter sent the below.

1.Curriculum and Student Achievement: ...Do you favor the implementation of a sequential, quality, K-12 curriculum that would tie to the state’s standards and that would allow graduates to be college-ready?

No. Children are not standard. The "standard" with the best chance of improving system performance is the parent standard: "Do I want my child in that school?" I support open enrollment across school complex areas, credit by exam for all courses required for graduation, and access to an exit exam (the GED will do) which students may take at any age, at any time.

2. Teacher and Principal Compensation: The American Federation of Teachers finds that Hawaii’s teacher starting compensation package equals $52,150, with an average of $72,682, with principals’ average compensation package at $147,000. Should teacher and principal salaries be based on seniority or performance and outcomes? Should principal performance contracts, as required under Act 51, passed in 2004, be required?

Undecided. I do not see how anyone would assess the performance of an Art teacher, for example. "What works?" is an empirical question which only an experiment can answer. In the realm of public policy, this means numerous local policy regimes or a competitive market in goods and services. A State-monopoly provider is like an experiment with one treatment and no controls: a retarded experimental design.

3. Per pupil expenditures: Hawai‘i was 13th highest among the 50 states in per-student expenditures in 2006-07: $11,060 versus a national average of $9,666. Last year, when all spending is included, Hawaii had a per-student annual spending of about $16,000. Should the Weighted Student Formula funding be increased from .49 on each dollar to ensure that more of the budget gets to schools and classrooms? Why are why not?

The location of an expense is an ambiguous concept. State-level negotiations between the Board, the Department of Budget and Finance and the HSTA produce the teacher contract. Is a teacher's paycheck a school-level expense? If the Board demands that Moanalua Intermediate hire some politician's nitwit cousin on a $50,000 do-nothing consulting contract, is this a school level expense? If the Accounting Branch puts a downtown furniture purchase on Nanakuli's budget, is this a school-level expense?

4. Staffing Formulas: Act 51 implemented a weighted student formula and requires principals spend 70 percent of the DOE operating budget, excluding debt service and capital expenditures. However, the BOE still negotiates labor agreements that include employee ratio formulas, preventing principals from making autonomous hiring decisions. Do you favor eliminating employee ratio formulas in union contracts to allow principals to make hiring decisions? Why or why not?

I favor creation of independent complex-level districts and negotiation of contracts at the complex level. Abolish the Teacher Standards Board. Principals should have the power to build their team.

5. Reliable and Transparent Data: The State Auditor found that the DOE is unable to allocate costs properly and the DOE admits their information system needs replaced in order to provide the public, Legislature and department managers with data that will allow them to make timely decisions. What improvements would you make to get the following information to the public: (1) how much money is expended each year within the entire education system, (2) how much of that money is spent in the classroom, (3) how many people work for the DOE and what positions do they hold, and (4) how many of those employees are classroom teachers who report to a principal?

When a Republican became Governor, the Legislature (D) passed Act 51, which removed DOE finances from outside supervision. Repeal Act 51. Abolish the Board of Education. Remove from the Department of Education all authority over school operations. Transfer to County councils the authority to create school districts at the County level or below. Fund school districts on a per-pupil basis from the General Fund, with funds passing through a (very small) State-level Department of Education.

Real classroom teachers can be counted through student schedules. I have done this for one school. The computer which prints report cards could do this for the entire DOE.

6. Fiscal Autonomy : Should the Legislature would be required to provide lump-sum budgets to the DOE/BOE and the Governor could restrict spending, if at all, only on a lump-sum basis, to allow the DOE fiscal autonomy similar to the University of Hawai‘i?

Yes.

Likewise, should the BOE limit the use of categorical funding and instead provide lump-sum funding to schools or communities that may then choose to purchase centralized DOE or private services?

Yes.

7. Procurement: In 2009, the State Auditor issued a report on the DOE’s procurement practices involving $840 million in facilities money and revealed potentially fraudulent or unethical behavior and a lack of controls and indifference towards procurement compliance. Do you favor implementing internal controls in this department, with corrective or disciplinary procedures for procurement violations?

Yes.

Would you begin by investigating why many schools do not have soap, paper towels and adequate toilet paper? Why or why not?

There are bigger issues. We know from the Federal investigation into the Hawaii Department of Transportation Airports Division how insiders rigged the competitive bid process. Ten years ago, the DOE spent over $200,000 per room to build classroom buildings. This looks excessive for a row of 30'x40'x10' concrete boxes eight units long and three tiers high.

8. Decentralization or Community-Centered Schools: Given that communities in all other states have local control over their schools, do you favor a community-centered school system with control over 90 percent of their community k-12 school budget? Would you favor the BOE limiting itself to developing academic standards and holding accountable community-level school governance?

Abundant evidence supports local control of school. A State-level serves no purpose. Students, parents, real classroom teachers, and taxpayers would benefit if the State-level Department of Education had responsibility for funding and financial oversight only.

9. Charter School Cap: Should the cap on the number of charter schools be lifted with student funding that is equal to other public schools, including money for facilities?

Yes. Further, any 501(c)3 organization should have authority to establish a charter school, and the law should provide for representation elections at individual charter schools.

10. Pension Reform: Last year, $417 million of the DOE’s budget was consumed by pension or employee burden costs. Would you implement any pension reforms that would lessen these costs? If so, what would they be?

The answer is on the dollar bill: "This note is legal tender for all debts public and private". Pay teachers in cash and let them allot their pay to food, rent, health care, and retirement plans as they see fit.

Inquiring Minds

2010-08-03T07:51:00.004Z

Since they ask (the Star-Advertiser survey):...

Occupation and employer: Math tutor. Self-employed.
Job history past 10 years: Math tutor, self-employed.
Ever run for public office? When? Outcome?:
1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008. 0/6.
Other civic experience or community service: US Navy. Community workday volunteer.
Anything else you'd like voters to know about you?: DOE teacher (high school Math), 1982-1995. Blog: The Harriet Tubman Agenda.

Q: 1) What qualifies you to be a member of the Board of Education?
1. I'm a citizen of Hawaii, over 18 and a non-felon. That is all that the law requires.
2. No one is qualified to take education decisions away from parents. This job should not exist. My qualification is that I understand this.

Q: 2) What do schools need to do to better prepare students for careers and college in the 21st century?
Schools need to operate in a competitive environment in which schools offer a variety of courses and methods of instruction. The one-size-fits-all State-monopoly school system guarantees, for most students, a poor match between the individual student's interests and abilities, on the one hand, and the school's curriculum and method of instruction, on the other.

Q: 3) Do you agree the Department of Education should undergo an independent audit of its financials and operations?
Yes. It does not take 12 years at $12,000 per pupil-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Outside the US, other countries get better results for less than 1/2 what Hawaii's taxpayers spend, per pupil. In 1996, the Singapore TIMSS 8th grade Math 5th (fifth) percentile score was higher than the US 50th (fiftieth) percentile score.

Q: 4) How would you propose the department go about turning around low-performing schools?
1.Abolish the Teacher Standards Board. Allow principals to determine teacher credential requirements.
2. Offer credit by exam for all courses.
3. Mandate that schools must hire parents, on personal service contracts, to provide for their children's education, if the parents apply for the contract. Make payment contingent on performance on commercially available standardized tests.

Q: 5) Many are calling for more accountability at the school level for student achievement. How would you go about making that accountability a reality?
Internal accountability mechanisms inevitably fail. The most effective accountability system that humans have yet devised is a policy which gives to unhappy customers the power to take their business elsewhere. Subsidize parent control of education. Homeschooling, vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools.

Q: 6) What solutions should the board be considering as it attempts to improve student achievement during tough fiscal times?
Credit by exam for all courses required for graduation. Offer the GED at any age and subsidize early college admission or private-sector employment at 1/2 the DOE per pupil budget. Subsidize homeschooling at 1/2 the DOE per pupil budget. Abolish the Teacher Standards Board.

Q: 7) Some have argued that the Department of Education spends too much money at the central level and not enough at the school level. Do you agree? Why or why not?
Yes and no. If the Legislature, the Board, or the HSTA contract mandates a school-level expense, is this money spent "at the school level"? If the Board mandates that a school hire some politician's cousin on a $50,000 do-nothing consulting contract, is this a "school-level" expense? If the Accounting branch puts downtown furniture on Nanakuli's budget, is this a school-level expense?

Q: 8) How many children do you have, and do they attend public or private school?
I have no children. I would homeschool if I did. In Hawaii, juvenile arrests fall when school is not in session. Juvenile hospitalizations for human-induced trauma fall when school is not in session.

Olelo Presentation

2010-08-03T05:12:00.019Z

The public-access cable station Olelo invites candidates for office to tape a brief campaign pitch. Here's mine.
........................................
I'm Malcolm Kirkpatrick, and I want your vote, for Board of Education.

The Hawaii Department of Education operates the ninth largest school district in the US. Standardized test scores put Hawaii in the national cellar. Of course, standardized tests are not the only measure of school performance. In Hawaii, juvenile arrests fall when school is NOT in session. Juvenile hospitalizations for human-induced trauma fall when school is NOT in session. Schools do not prevent crime; they cause it.

Taxpayers supply the Hawaii DOE with over 2 billion dollars every year, over ten thousand dollars per pupil. More than 20,000 people work for the Hawaii DOE. How is it that so many people, with such vast resources, accomplish so little? I think I know.

Numerous lines of evidence support the following generalizations:

First: As institutions take from individual parents the power to determine for their own children the choice of curriculum and the pace and method of instruction, overall system peformance falls.

Second: Political control of school harms most the children of the least politically adept parents.

Mohandas Gandhi opposed compulsory attendance at school. Albert Einstein opposed compulsory attendance at school.

Thomas Edison was homeschooled and started work at 13. Hyram Maxim left school and apprenticed at 14. David Farragut joined the US Navy at 9, went to sea at 11, and commanded his first ship at 15.

It does not take 12 years at $10,000 per pupil-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. Government provision of History and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as government operation of newspapers would be and is, in totalitarian countries like North Korea and Cuba.

What we in the US call "the public school system" originated in religious intolerance and anti-Catholic bigotry. In Hawaii, Congregational missionaries established schools to convert the pagans, and the plantation aristocracy used school taxes to drive native Hawaiians out of the subsistence economy and into the cash economy.

The Hawaii "public" school system has become an employment program for dues-paying members of the HSTA, the HGEA, and the UPW, a source of padded construction and supply contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination. If this is not so, why cannot any student take, at any age, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers' $10,000 per year education subsidy toward post-secondary tuition or toward a wage subsidy at any private-sector employer?

In 1993, when Ben Cayetano was Lieutenant Governor, he said "We cannot afford to waste another generation of school kids". Since then, we have wasted another generation of school kids.

Will the current crop of politicians fix this wastful system? No, there's too much money in it. To fix this system voters must elect, to the Legislature and the Board of Education, majorities who favor vouchers, tuition tax credits, or other forms of parent control. They must also elect Governors who favor parent control until a majority of the appointed Hawaii Supreme Court justices favor parent control. In the most optimistic scenario, this is more than 12 years away.

If you have children, you cannot afford to wait. For your children's sake, please homeschool. As Gandhi observed, parents are the natural teachers of children. Nothing in Hawaii law requires that homeschooling instruction occur between 8 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. It is legal to extend daycare to age 18 and homeschool in the evening.

My name is Malcolm Kirkpatrick. I support school vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, homeschooling, and other forms of parent control. Please give me your support. Thank you for you attention.

The Cost of Teacher Certification

2010-07-30T18:59:00.003Z

Risen from the Hawaii Reporter archives (3/12/2004). The links appear as in the original. Some have expired.

Focused on the discussion of structural reform to the Department of Education, the public has heard little of a program within the DOE that threatens to degrade overall system performance more than any legislation passed since the advent of public sector unionization. At the insistence of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, the Legislature over the last 10 years has built into the Hawaii Revised Statutes and into the DOE a program, the Teacher Standards Board (TSB), which will certainly raise costs and almost certainly reduce overall system performance.

Costs will rise. As the TSB Web site says:

In the recently negotiated teacher's contract, any teacher going through the certification process will be reimbursed up to $2,500 for expenses related to the process. Teachers completing the process and receiving national certification will receive $5,000 per year for the duration of the contract (2 years). Legislation is now underway to extend the differential from the current two years to the lifetime of the national certification (10 years).

http://www.htsb.org/nbpts/index.html

This promises no performance gains:

The Education Consumers Consultants Network compared the academic improvement of Tennessee students taught by nationally-certified teachers with the improvement of all other students in the state. The data revealed that 'on the whole, the students taught by NBPTS-certified teachers gained no more than their local peers.'

This shouldn't be a surprise. NBPTS certification is really just ordinary certification on steroids -- a puffed-up assessment of teachers' mastery of conventional certification standards. Considering the large body of research finding almost no correlation between certification and teacher effectiveness, it makes sense to expect no correlation between "super-certification" and student performance. What one should expect is proportionately inflated rhetoric about the value of the certification, which is exactly what one finds.

--Education Consumers Network http://www.education-consumers.com/briefs/may2002.shtm

"No study, however, has ever shown that National Board certified teachers are any better than other teachers at raising student achievement" (Michael Podgursky, "Defrocking the National Board", commenting on the study "The Certification System of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards: A Construct and Validity Study", by Lloyd Bond, Richard Jaeger, Tracy Smith, John Hattie. http://www.educationnext.org/20012/79.html)

Robert Grey Holland details the links between the National Education Association (NEA) -- the HSTA is an NEA subsidiary -- and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) in his Policy Review article "How to Build a Better Teacher"
(http://www.policyreview.org/APR01/holland.html).

Holland writes:

The nbpts purports to identify excellence through this process, but economists Dale Ballou of the University of Massachusetts and Michael Podgursky of the University of Missouri -- who called 'professionalization' into question after careful analysis -- point out that there has been no evidence to show that students of nbpts-certified teachers learn any more than students of other teachers.

Holland continues: principals of NBPTS teachers...

found it difficult to link any improvements in student achievement to the teachers' national certification.

The latest installment in the steady increase of the power of the TSB is a provision in the majority's "reform" bill (HB 2002) which would require that taxpayers subsidize, through the TSB, applications for National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification. Taxpayers will not benefit. The math standards of the National Board, for example, mirror those of Colleges of Education and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which disdain memorization, drill, and practice in the application of algorithms, in favor of "discovery."

In the January, 1998, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Allyn Jackson reports her interview with Gail Burrill, President of the NCTM.:

"One small part of that report is very telling ...”

"Notices: Starting in 1968, the government funded a huge study called Project Follow-Through. It cost a billion dollars and ran almost thirty years. The purpose was to examine how different teaching methods or philosophies affected student performance. What they found was that the traditional, 'direct instruction' method was the most effective. Are you familiar with this study?

Burrill: "I have never heard of it."

http://mathematicallycorrect.com/never.htm

Hawaii’s single, statewide school district, State-wide collective bargaining law, and the unionization of administrators up to the highest level of the DOE have created an environment where there is little difference between "management" and "labor." The taxpayers' representatives give to DOE administrators control over a $1.7 billion+/year revenue stream. Hawaii's agency-fee policy gives to the local subsidiaries of the NEA and AFSCME a guaranteed dues revenue stream of, in the case of the HSTA, over $4 million/year. An administrators' ascent of the DOE career ladder requires the assent of established interests, that is, of Russell Okata and Joan Husted. Whistle-blowers, in-house critics, and workers who would exercise their right not to support union policies threaten the control which union officers and senior DOE officials exercise over the dues-generated revenue stream and the larger DOE budget. Public sector unions and senior DOE administrators clearly benefit from Hawaii's single, Statewide school district, agency shop policy, and Statewide collective bargaining.

Collective bargaining, like a trial, is necessarily an adversarial process. Advocates make a case for the side that represents them. In a criminal trial, the prosecution represents the State and the defendant's attorney represents the accused. It is not the job of the prosecutor or the defense attorney to deliver justice. Justice is the responsibility of the process as a whole. Anyone who maintains that the adversarial process is flawed must offer an alternative. TSB legislation damages this process. Neither real classroom teachers, students, or taxpayers benefit.

Recall the history of the Teacher Standards Board. In the first year that a bill for the creation of a TSB appeared, the bill described a temporary board, which had authority to compile licensing criteria for new-hire teachers. The board was to hand these criteria to the DOE Personnel office and expire. The Board of Education (and I) testified against the creation of this TSB, limited though it was. The HSTA supported creation of the TSB. The bill failed. In the next legislative session, the Board of Education supported the TSB, the bill passed, and Governor Cayetano signed it into law. This law required first the creation of a Teacher Standards Board Planning Commission. I attended meetiings of this commission. Before even the creation of the Teacher Standards Board, the Planning Commission discussed how to extend the authority of the TSB to teachers already in service, and how to get the membership of the HSTA to accept an assessment for the privilege of being less secure in their jobs than they were before the creation of the TSB. This Board, which has since grown in size and not in wisdom, then consisted of four members from the HSTA, three from the HGEA, one from the College of Education, and one from the Board of Education. Public sector unions controlled seven of nine seats on the Board. Counting the College of Education (the UHPA is an NEA subsidiary), eight of nine.

In later sessions, members of the Teacher Standards Board and the HSTA testified in favor of legislation which repealed the sunset provision, in favor of legislation which granted to the Board authority to decertify teachers already in service, and in favor of the assessment of a fee, from teachers' salaries, for the operation of the TSB, which earlier legislation had described as a temporary, non-cost program. The Legislature ultimately approved these bills, although the TSB had not performed its primary work, the specification of teacher credential requirements. The TSB named former HSTA President Sharon Mahoe to an $80,000/year position as Executive Director.

The licensing requirements composed by the Board are too loose to merit the name "standards." The Board requires that new-hire teachers have degrees from accredited Colleges of Education. No statistical, empirical research supports such a requirement. The Board requires that teachers keep abreast of current instructional techniques. Five years ago, that would have meant that reading teachers use Whole Language methods or risk dismissal. The U.H. College of Education still advocates the NCTM's Whole Math methodology and disdains memorization. The Board requires that teachers in service align instruction to Hawaii's content and performance standards. The problem here is that the content and performance standards to which this teacher standard then referred were those contained in the Final Report of the Hawaii State Commission on Performance Standards (the "Blue Book"), since abandoned as hopelessly complicated and vague. My point here is that the members of the TSB would not know a standard if you dropped one on their toes. One "standard" for Math teachers requires that they present a systematic sequence of instruction, another that teachers accommodate variations in students' interests and abilities, and a third that teachers remain alert to opportunities to introduce current events into instruction. These are all good ideas, but they are contradictory and cannot all be "standards." The TSB requires that teachers keep abreast of developments in their field. This is impossible for most math and physics teachers. It is unnecessary for almost all teachers. A teacher who knows what K. F. Gauss knew 150 years ago could teach high-school Math and Physics. Fifty year-old dissertations on colonial archaeology or Melville scholarship are as informative as current research in these areas.

"In a major report on how schools could meet the challenge in the No Child Left Behind Act to have a 'highly qualified' teacher in every classroom by the end of the 2005-2006 school year, the Secretary of Education cited in an approving way Abel's debunking of the ed-school-is-essential research (Secretary's Annual Report, 2002). Indeed, the report also commended the work of economists Dan Goldhaber and Dominic Brewer, who found that contrary to conventional wisdom, mathematics and science students who have teachers with emergency credentials do no worse than students whose teachers have standard teaching credentials, all else being equal." [Robert Grey Holland, How to Build a Better Teacher, p. 51]. This is a book of the same title as his Policy Review article.

The TSB has advanced counterproductive ("Utilizes the school's current technologies to facilitate learning in the content area(s)"), unnecessary (e.g., College of Education degrees), contradictory ("Plans and implements logical, sequenced instruction and continually adjusts plans based on learner needs" and "Connects knowledge of content area(s) to students’ prior experiences, personal interests and real-life situations.") or vague ("Fosters an appreciation of human and cultural differences") standards. The TSB has demonstrated indifference to improving the teacher workforce. Why, then, did the HSTA so strenuously promote the TSB?

Unions, even "public sector" unions, are -- private -- 501-c(5) corporations. Their assets are the property of their members and their legal obligations are to members and agency-fee payers. Sometimes unions, like other organizations, get captured by insiders, who bend the institution to their interests. Hawaii's public sector unions survive on their dues-generated revenue stream. They enhance their power by promoting or retarding people's ascent of the DOE career ladder. Control of a $1.7 billion+/year revenue stream is a valuable asset in itself. Contractors will hire your nitwit nephew. Your incompetent son-in-law will get a $50,000 do-nothing consulting contract. This is what is at stake in the HSTA/HGEA/UPW cartel's ability to terminate the employment of dissident employees.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that:

1. Workers in an agency-fee shop situation may be
compelled to pay no more than the cost of collective bargaining and contract enforcement (Communication Workers of America versus Beck. 487 US 735 (1988)).
2. The procedure whereby the employer deducts from the employee's pay the equivalent of dues, and the union sometime later gives to the employee an application for a rebate, is illegal, since it compels the employee to make an interest-free loan to the union (Chicago Teachers Union versus Hudson. 475 US 292 (1986)).
3. The burden of proof is on the union to justify the assessment, and not on the employee who disputes an assessment (Abood versus Detroit Board of Education. 431 US 209 (1977)).
4. Workers who dispute the union's assessment do not have to go through the Labor Relations Board, but may take their case to Federal Court (Air Line Pilots Association versus Miller. 523 US 866 (1998)).
The DOE and public sector unions operate in violation of the above decisions.

Additionally, courts have held:

1. That employees with a religious objection to union membership may substitute for dues a donation to charity in the amount of dues.
2. That "religion" does not require belief in a Supreme Being. A civic religion, such as Confucianism, qualifies.
Before the creation of the TSB, the HSTA and HGEA leadership had an interest in retaliating against whistleblowers and employees who insisted on their right not to contribute to the HSTA's political activity. Before the creation of the TSB, however, the DOE administration had no power legally to terminate an employee for such activity, and the employee had grounds to sue the DOE for wrongful termination and the HSTA for failure to represent, should the HSTA cooperate with the DOE administration. With the TSB, the DOE administration can argue that it is bound by contract not to employ unlicensed teachers. The HSTA can insist that it is legally bound to represent only employees. The employee who has been decertified by this "independent" (NOT!) board now bears an impossible burden of proof, to show (without access to confidential personnel records of other dismissed teachers) that the HSTA and HGEA use the TSB power to eliminate dissidents. Let the employee take the Board's decision to a state court. As in traffic court, where the judge will accept the word of a police officer over a civilian (s/he has to believe somebody), judges will take the union-approved "expert's" word for it. The "standards" advanced by the TSB are a rubber yardstick. How can a teacher prove that s/he is, for example, sufficiently systematic if the Board has never defined "sufficiently systematic"? The judge will simply accept the Board's determination that this teacher is insufficiently systematic. The troublemaker is dismissed. Please READ the Math standards (student at http://doe.k12.hi.us/standards/hcps.htm and teacher at www.htsb.org), and try to imagine an assessment mechanism which might use them. If the Math standards are so vague as to be useless, what can one say about History or Art? The Legislature would recognize a conflict of interest if trial lawyers requested that a committee of lawyers determine which clients on retainer deserved representation. A lawyer who has accepted a retainer has a legal obligation to represent the client who paid the retainer. If lawyers argued that guilty clients do not deserve representation, the answer would be that guilt is established by trial, by the adversarial process, in which the lawyer plays has an obligatory role. Just so, the HSTA and HGEA are in a conflict of interest when they appoint the members of the Teacher Standards Board. The conflict is worse in the case of the TSB, as agency fees are mandated by law. The TSB would have been a bad idea had it promoted the best of standards. It is a terrible idea with the bogus standards they have created. Insiders will benefit. Students, teachers, and taxpayers will suffer. If you operate an expensive piece of machinery, and if that machinery does not perform well, it is lunacy to destroy the gages and indicator lights which provide information. The DOE is an expensive bureaucratic machine. By giving to the HSTA/HGEA/UPW cartel, which currently receives $1.7 billion+/year to operate Hawaii's K-12 government school system, the power to dismiss dissidents and whistleblowrs, the Legislature has guarantees rising costs and falling performance.

We were warned. In 1991, the Brookings Institution published a study by John Chubb and Terry Moe of school effectiveness, What Price Democracy; Politics, Markets, and America's Schools (since renamed simply Politics, Markets, and America's Schools). At the end of this study, the authors list a number of ineffective policies that they expect reformers to inflict on teachers and taxpayers. On teacher standards boards they write:

"The proposal for state licensing boards is a bad idea. In the name of professionalization, it essentially retains the top-heavy bureaucratic arrangements already in place -- arrangements that cannot do a good job of measuring and promoting good teaching, and whose numerous, time-consuming formal hurdles discourage entry into the field and vitiate what ought to be a dynamic, exciting market for teachers. The only real difference is that teachers, rather than public officials and agencies, would be able to exercise this authority. But this does not solve anything. Regulation would be just as bureaucratic and just as counterproductive as before. Worse, as political scientists have complained for decades, these self-regulating boards -- whether for doctors and lawyers or for cosmetologists, plumbers, and dog-groomers -- tend to use public authority in their own self-interest to restrict entry and enhance their incomes. And worse still, it would not really be "teachers" who would control these boards, but almost certainly organized teachers -- and far-and-away the largest, most geographically dispersed organization of teachers is the National Education Association."

On the NBPTS, Chubb and Moe write: "First, no certification scheme, especially not a national one, can possibly provide much vital information n the quality of an individual's teaching: assessments will inevitably rely too heavily on standard formal measures and too little on school-level discretionary judgment. Second, voluntary national credentialing would doubtless become cloaked in public authority anyway, as states, districts, and collective bargaining agreements make board certification a requirement for increased pay and educational responsibilities. It would be voluntary only in the sense that it would not constitute a legal barrier to entry. It would, on the other hand, become a legal barrier to career advancement. Third, credentialing by a national board would, in the end, create yet another bureaucracy that teachers and schools would have to contend with in doing their jobs. Making it private or voluntary or teacher controlled does not change its essentially bureaucratic approach to the problem of teacher quality and professionalism. And fourth, this board would be strongly influenced and perhaps dominated by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, adding to their already stifling hold on educational personnel." (Chubb and Moe, p. 204-205).

Take care. Homeschool if you can.

A Personal Note

2010-07-28T02:45:00.005Z

Mary Frances Berry: "Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness."

I have experienced baseless accusations of homophobia (a redefinition of "marriage" that binds employers to an expansion of health care benefits amounts to a tax increase on shareholders, single employees, and the self-employed. Taxpayers carry too large a burden already) and racism (a moderator at the atheist/agnostic website Internet Infidels objected to "what do you mean 'we', paleface", and "Engrish, prease" in response to garbled text).

Until the campaign ends, this is my response to an accusation that I am a racist or a homophobe: "As I demonstrate on my website, The Harriet Tubman Agenda, the person making this accusation is a thief and a child molester." I can make this accusation with as much evidence as he has for his accusation (i.e., zero). I calculate that this citation will immunize me against legal liability. We shall see. At least, it does not leave the original accusation hanging in the air.

Updated with an expansion of the second paragraph.

Carnival of Homeschooling #239

2010-07-27T20:04:00.002Z

The Common Room hosts the latest Carnival of Homeschooling. Go forth and browse.

A Standard Con (2010 edition)

2010-07-22T03:59:00.004Z

Jay Greene and Joanne Jacobs discuss standards. Both pay due homage to Cato's Neal McCluskey. The comment below appears at Greene's place and Joanne's place, somewhat modified.

Support for curriculum standards proceeds from magical thinking. The fundamental flaw in the argument for standards is that neither children nor their future career paths are standard. The education industry is no more likely a candidate for national standards than is the restaurant industry or the shoe industry. Imposed standards are utterly inappropriate for an industry that would generate a more harmonious result if utterly free of external control, beyond individual parent’s desires and provider’s capabilities, for very young children, and students’ desires and instructors’ capabilities, for older children and young adults.

This view has empirical support. Years ago I took the grades which the Fordham Institute and the Education Trust gave to States for their standards, converted these grades into numbers on a 0-4 point scale, and applied the EXCEL correlation function to States’ NAEP 8th grade Math score. The result was negative–the higher the standard the lower the score.

What do people expect curriculum or performance standards to accomplish? What do these words mean?

A measure is an order relation on a set. Ordering students by height is a measure.
A test is a procedure or a device which establishes as measure. Standing back to back and shifting the taller to the right is a test.
A standard is a unit of measurement. A kilogram weight, a meter stick, and a mark on the wall are standards.
Standards impart no magic.

The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education", but then these standards bind students, parents, real classroom teachers, and taxpayers to the State's definition of "education". Standards distract attention from the critical argument: What does society gain from a State presence in the education industry, anyway? Aside from drug abuse, vandalism, and violence, that is.

Donna Ikeda, Clueless

2010-07-20T15:19:00.006Z

Katherine Poythress covers education for Civil Beat, an attempt at a viable (i.e., paying) new media news and comment enterprise. Poythress called various Board of Education candidates to hear their opinions on the proposal to shift from the current elected Board of Education to an appointed Board. She found Donna Ikeda's views worthy of publication.

Katherine Poythress writes...

"In all those years, no matter what we did, no matter what we'd try — and it's funny because they talk about education reform and reinventing education today, and we've tried that many, many times — nothing has gotten better," Ikeda told Civil Beat.

From Ikeda's perspective, the board has become mired in petty politics. And without an effective board, even the most well-intentioned reforms for Hawaii's schools will go nowhere.

As the closing comment indicates, Donna Ikeda expects "well-intentioned" top-down control to enhance overall system performance. Many people in Hawaii apparently agree. This widespread compulsion to control others, which the Statewide school district enables, is the reason "nothing has gotten better".

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell speculated that socialist leanings originate in a hypertrophied sense of order, like compulsive handwashing or people who sort the socks and underwear drawer ten times a day. Elsewhere (e.g., "Raffles and Mrs Blandish", "Inside the Whale"), Orwell suggested that a preference for authoritarian politics originates in vicarious sadism. In Socialism, Ludwig Von Mises suggested that the socialist orientation originates in a primitive revenge fantasy. The Russian mathematician Igor Shafarevitch advanced a similar argument in The Socialist Phenomenon.

System performance measures summarize student performance measures. Student performance depends on policy variables, things which policymakers can manipulate like budgets and teacher credentials, and non-policy variables, which policymakers cannot manipulate, like heredity, prenatal nutrition, parent SES, and a supportive home environment. The key policy variable which determines student performance is student motivation. Policies which enhance student motivation will enhance system performance.

Schools give to many students no reason to do what schools require. Training an artistically or mechanically inclined child for an academic career using a transcript as the incentive is like teaching a cat to swim using carrots as the reward. It does not take 12 years at $10,000 per pupil-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Compulsory unpaid labor is slavery, black or white, male or female, young or old.

Gandhi opposed compulsory attendance at school. He argued that parents are the natural teachers of children. Children, especially young children, will work their hearts out for the love of their parents. Older children will work for social reasons, for the love of their preferred subject, for freedom, or for rewards of which politicians and Professors of Education have no clue.

Size matters. The structure of the Hawaii education industry, encoded in the Hawaii Revised Statutes, is a policy variable. So long as remote authorities impose their designs on schools, the system will abide in the national cellar.

Update: misspelling of "Poythress" corrected.

Why School? (2010 Update)

2010-07-19T18:31:00.014Z

(A modified version of a communication to a reporter for Civil Beat)

When John Waihee occupied Washington Place his Lieutenant Governor, Ben Cayetano, coordinated meetings of a group called the Commission on School Governance. At that time (c. 1993) Lt. Gov. Cayetano said: "We cannot afford to waste another generation of school kids." A school generation is 12 years. Since 1993 we have wasted a generation of school kids.

Anyone interested in school system performance will benefit from reading the Brookings Institution study by John Chubb and Terry Moe, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools (1991, originally entitled "What Price Democracy? Politics, Markets, and America's Schools") and the Brookings/Urban Institute/Committee For Economic Development study Vouchers and the Provision of Public Services (2000, C. Eugene Steuerle, et al. eds.). The latter discusses a variety of industries from national, international, and abstract perspectives at various of levels of abstraction. Some of the essays require the economic and mathematical expertise of a specialist in tax policy while some essays are quite accessible. The brush-clearing introductory remarks on "public goods" in E.G. West's "Education Vouchers in Principle and Practice; A Survey" (The World Bank Research Observer, 1997-Feb., online) provide useful background. West's "Education Vouchers in Principle and Practice (full report)" (online) combines theoretical analysis and empirical research. Joel Fried's discussion of "the agency problem" in "Pots and Kettles: Governance Practices of the Ontario Securities Commission" (online) suggests important considerations which apply across the board to discussions of the relative merits of State-monopoly providers and competitive markets in goods and services.

When Chubb and Moe designed their study of school effectiveness they ranked schools by student gains between 10th and 12th grade on standardized tests of Reading, Math, and Science (they did not use Social Studies because Social Studies scores did not correlate with anything, which is pretty funny if you know any statistics). They then looked for systematic differences between the top 25% of schools and the bottom 25% of schools. The largest difference was, as expected, parent SES. That is, student gains correlated strongly and positively with parent income. The second most influential variable was a composite variable which Chubb and Moe called "the degree of institutional autonomy". That is, the more people above the level of Principal telling the Principal how to do her job, the worse a school performed.

Consider this question: "From State (government, generally) operation of what industries does society as a whole benefit?", imagine either a dichotomous classification Likely/Unlikely or a continuum, highly unlikely (______.______) highly likely, and try to generalize some principle which generates the assignment or position of an industry in this scheme.

(Hint)
Eduardo Zambrano
Formal Models of Authority: Introduction and Political Economy
Applications
Rationality and Society, May 1999

Aside from the important issue of how it is that a ruler may economize on communication, contracting and coercion costs, this leads to an interpretation of the state that cannot be contractarian in nature: citizens would not empower a ruler to solve collective action problems in any of the models discussed, for the ruler would always be redundant and costly. The results support a view of the state that is eminently predatory, (the ? MK.) case in which whether the collective actions problems are solved by the state or not depends on upon whether this is consistent with the objectives and opportunities of those with the (natural) monopoly of violence in society. This conclusion is also reached in a model of a predatory state by Moselle and Polak (1997). How the theory of economic policy changes in light of this interpretation is an important question left for further work.

After the fall of the Soviet State the British poet and historian of that State, Robert Conquest, wrote that the West had insufficiently learned two important lessons: the limits to the amount of good that can be accomplished by organized force (the State) and the stultifying effects of bureaucracy, public or private.

"Deadweight costs of taxation" (see an online economics dictionary) considerations imply that State operation of most industry imposes greater costs than benefits. As Zambrano indicates above, "communication, contracting and coercion costs" determine the cost/benefit result from a welfare-economic point of view. When inputs and outputs are simple, when systematic expertise matters more than specific local knowledge, and when capitalization costs are high (e.g., structural steel, plate glass), a sufficiently large State may operate an industry at close to the cost/benefit level of an industry in the private sector. Since inputs to the education industry (each individual student's interests and aptitudes) vary enormously and outputs (the potential career paths graduates will follow in a diverse modern society) vary enormously, since capital costs are low, and since specific local knowledge matters more than (bogus) systematic expertise, the education industry is a highly unlikely candidate for State (government, generally) operation.

Separation of powers, federalism (local control), and the legal system of private property and contract law institutionalize humility on the part of State actors. No one has privileged access to divine inspiration. If a policy dispute turns on a difference in taste, numerous local policy regimes or a competitive market in goods and services allows for the satisfaction of varied tastes, while a State-monopoly system must inevitably create unhappy losers. If a policy dispute involves a matter of fact, where "What works?" is an empirical question which only an experiment can answer, numerous local policy regimes or a competitive market in goods and services will generate more information than will a State-monopoly enterprise. A State-monopoly enterprise is like an experiment wit one treatment and no controls, a retarded experimental design. The system of markets (title and contract law) calibrates the reward for improved answers to resource allocation questions to the urgency of the question and the magnitude of the resources involved.

Empirical research finds what the above theoretical analysis predicts. Abundant empirical, statistical evidence supports the following generalizations:
1. As institutions take from individual parents the power to determine for their own children the course of instruction and the pace and method of instruction, overall system performance falls.
2. Political control harms most the children of the least politically adept parents.

Why, then, is the government in the education business? This "why?" question has three interpretations:
1. The welfare-economic "why?".
2. The historical "why?"
3. The political science "why?".

In brief:

1. No good welfare-economic case exists for State operation of schools.
2. The policy which prevails across the US and which compels attendance at school, mandates tax support of school, and restricts parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' pre-college education subsidy to schools operated by State (government, generally) employees originated in religious intolerance (specifically, anti-Catholic bigotry) and the ambition of public-sector entrepreneurs like Horace Mann and Richard Armstrong.
3. The current system survives on dedicated lobbying by current recipients of the US taxpayers' $500 billion+ per year pre-college education subsidy.

The $500 billion+ figure seriously understates the cost to society of the policy which restricts the taxpayers' education subsidy to schools operated by dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel. Additional costs include the lost improvements in educational methods and technology which a competitive market would generate and the opportunity cost to students of the time that they spend in school. The opportunity costs of student time in school include lost lifetime earnings, lower lifetime productivity, reduced longevity, and the cost of prison for the poor kids whose lives we trash.

It does not take 12 years at $10,000 per pupil-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State (government, generally) provision of History, Civics, and Economics instruction threatens democracy, just as State operation of newspapers and broadcast news media would threaten democracy (and currently help sustain totalitarian regimes in Cuba and North Korea).

If it is fraud for a mechanic to charge for the repair of a functional engine and if it is fraud for a physician to charge for the treatment of a healthy patient, then it is fraud for a school to charge for the instruction of a student who does not need our help. If "public education" is not an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded construction, supply, and personal service contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination, why cannot any student take, at any time, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers' $10,000 per pupil-year subsidy toward post-secondary tuition at any VA-approved post-secondary institution in the State or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified (say, has filed W-2 forms on at least three adult employees for at least the previous four years) private-sector employer?

Candidate Questionnaire

2010-07-03T17:38:00.027Z

Here's the candidate questionnaire from the Hawaii State Teachers' Association.
.......................................................................
2010 Election
HSTA Government Relations Committee
Questionnaire
Hawaii State Board of Education

Candidate's Name: Malcolm Kirkpatrick
Office Sought: Board of Education At Large
Occupational background: Diver (UH), US Navy Engineman, Secondary Math teacher, tutor
Educational background: B.A. (Math). U.H. 1973. P.D. (Secondary Math Education), U.H. 1982
Political background: Candidate for B.O.E. 1998, 2000,2002, 2004, 2006, 2008
Community service: Tantalus Community Association Board member (former). TCA workday coordinator (former). Workday volunteer.

What schools do your children attend or have your children attended? Public or private? If your children attend(ed) non-public schools, please indicate your reason(s): I have no children. I would homeschool if I did.

1. What are your top three priorities in public education as a member of the Board of Education:
a. I support decision-making based on empirical support of policy.
Please explain: The DOE has access to abundant research. The DOE collects volumes of raw data. These can guide decision-making.
b. I support credit-by-exam for all courses required for graduation.
Please explain: Credit-by-exam will enhance student motivation, reduce costs, and enhance overall system performance.
c. Repeal the Teacher Standards Board.
Please explain: No statistical, empirical research supports policies which restrict access to the teaching profession to people with College of Education coursework, as the Hawaii TSB requires. The TSB has advanced contradictory, complicated, and vague "standards" which raise costs and do nothing to raise system performance. The TSB places the HSTA and HGEA is a serious conflict of interest as representatives both of teachers and taxpayers.

2. If you are elected to the BOE, what would you do to promote a culture within DOE that is more supportive of teachers regarding such things as payroll lag, reclassification, etc.? I would support expansion of education options (multiple independent school districts, charter schools, tuition tax credits, school vouchers, homeschooling, etc.). If we disagree about a matter of taste, a range of education options allows the satisfaction of varied preferences, while the struggle for control of a Statewide monopoly school system must create unhappy losers. If we disagree about a matter of fact, where "What works?" is an empirical question which only an experiment can answer, numerous suppliers of education services will provide more information than will a Statewide monopoly enterprise.

The following are position statements on some critical issues. For each issue, indicate whether you support or oppose HSTA's position. Please attach additional pages if you want to elaborate or explain your response. Be sure any additional pages clearly indicate the position or question to which you are referring.

3. HSTA opposes any continuing erosion of teachers' health and retirement benefits.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___Oppose_X_
Please explain: I support policies which empower individual teachers to allot their pay as they see fit. Governments at all levels have made more promises than they can keep. It's time to stop making false promises.

4. HSTA supports paying teachers (e.g., new teachers, teachers returning from leave, etc.) in a timely manner and believes that the Board can assist in rectifying the current practice of delayed payments.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support_X_ Oppose___
Please explain._____

5. The Collective Bargaining Law, Chapter 89, gives public employees the right to participate in deciding their wages, hours, and conditions of work. HSTA supports the preservation and strengthening of the intent and purpose of Chapter 89. HSTA opposes any action that diminishes the rights or protections granted public employees through collective bargaining or state legislation.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support_X_ Oppose_X_
Please explain: It's a matter of interpretation. One size (or contract) does not fit all. Federalism (local control), separation of powers, and markets institutionalize the principle of humility. No one has privileged access to divine inspiration. Students, parents, real classroom teachers, and taxpayers would be better served by an education industry that featured greater local control (independent school districts at the County level or lower, expanded charter options, school vouchers).

6. HSTA supports legislation and funding of programs and activities that reward continuing education for teachers and provide cost-free opportunities for teachers to pursue professional development.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support_X_ Oppose_X_
Please explain: I would support a legislative mandate that the College of Education allow teachers in service to audit courses at the U.H. College of Education tuition-free, if sufficient paying students enroll to justify the class. I oppose hiring of outside consultants to conduct in-service workshops. I oppose paying for travel and accommodations to out-of-State presentations.

7. HSTA supports legislation for compulsory or mandatory kindergarten in Hawaii.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___ Oppose_X_
Please explain: Abundant statistical, empirical research finds adverse effects and few benefits in early compulsory attendance. States which compel attendance at age 7 or 8 have higher 4th and 8th grade NAEP Reading and Math scores than States which compel attendance at age 5 or 6. Later is better. The rate of dyslexia in a population is inversely related to the age at which societies institutionalize reading instruction. Later is better. Studies of daycare find increased anti-social behavior associated with early institutionalization. Early compulsory attendance is strongly counter-indicated. Later is better.

8. HSTA supports legislative efforts to preserve public education and opposes the diversion of public funds or tax credits to non-public schools.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___ Oppose_X_
Please explain: It is a mistake to equate "education" and "school". It is a mistake to equate "government-operated schools" with "public education". Students, parents, real classroom teachers and taxpayers would benefit from an expansion of parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' pre-college education subsidy.

9. HSTA opposes any legislation to provide public funds for tax subsidies (tax credits, tax deductions) or vouchers for private education, religious or home school expenses, or inclusion of vouchers within the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___ Oppose_X_
Please explain: See answers to questions #5 through #8.

10. HSTA opposes any expansion of non-conversion charter schools. Before the legislature expands the number of non-conversion charter schools, the Department of Education must have a good handle on the current charter schools.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___ Oppose_X_
Please explain: The Department of Education should have NO handle on charter schools. The most effective accountability mechanism that humans have yet devised is the ability of unhappy customers (e.g., parents) to take their business elsewhere.

11. HSTA supports a single, statewide school district.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___ Oppose_X_
Please explain: States with numerous small school districts generate higher NAEP test scores at lower cost than States which maintain a few large school districts. Teachers would benefit from an expansion of contract options which multiple, independent school districts would offer.

12. HSTA supports legislation and funding to eliminate repair and maintenance backlog and keep repair and maintenance current to fix our public schools.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support_X_ Oppose___
Please explain: I would also support an investigation of the competitive bidding process. We know from the Federal investigation of the DOT Airport Division how insiders rigged the competitive bid process.

13. HSTA supports legislation and funding to reduce construction backlog.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support_X_Oppose_X_
Please explain: I would have to study this. Unit (per classroom) costs looked high to me when I last looked (ten years ago), at over $200,000 per room.

14. HSTA supports legislation and funding to provide a working phone in every classroom and to provide sufficient electrical and telecommunications infrastructure to accommodate school activities.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___Oppose_X_
Please explain: Performance gains would be insufficient to justify the cost to retrofit schools. Perhaps wifi would work.

15. HSTA supports legislation and funding to increase the safety and security of all schools.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support_X_Oppose_X_
Please explain: Schools chosen by parents in a competitive market would be safer than the State-monopoly system which the HSTA protects. The one-size-fits-all approach of the Hawaii DOE guarantees, for many students, a mismatch between the student's interests and abilities, on the one hand, and the school's curriculum and methods of instruction, on the other.

16. HSTA supports preserving basic student support services such as librarians, counselors, tech coordinators, etc.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___ Oppose_X_
Please explain: I support a review of effectiveness. The Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist James Buchannan attributed his success, in part, to his education in a one-room school house.

17. HSTA supports the utilization of alternative energy sources in the schools.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support_X_Oppose_X_
Please explain: I support measures which reduce costs without lowering system performance.

18. HSTA suports legislation to amend the State Constitution to repeal the Expenditure Controls, Article VII, Section 5, which controls the state's expenditure by creating an expenditure ceiling and prohibits the state from spending the monies needed to invest in public education.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___Oppose_X_
Please explain: It does not take 12 years at $10,000 (or $17,000)* to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State (government, generally) provision of History and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers and broadcast news media would be (are, in totalitarian countries like North Korea and Cuba).
Update: See this comment...

The path of big government and the welfare state is the path to broken promises and inter-generational warfare. The workers in California and vendors in Illinois are paying the price for the unsustainable public sector union contracts which preceded them, sometimes by decades.

Yet those of us who call for fiscal sanity and reform are derided by people like Sheldon Whitehouse and other Democrats as having no compassion.

Just the opposite is true.

It's called tough love. Those who feed the big government addiction are the cruel ones.

19. HSTA supports legislation to amend the State Constitution to repeal the Disposition of Excess Revenues, Article VII, Section 6, which prohibits the state from having any savings since tax refunds or tax credits must be given to the taxpayers of the state, thus, prohibiting the state from spending the monies needed to invest in public education.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___Oppose_X_
Please explain: See above. As Eric Hanushek observes, beyond a very low level resources do not matter much to school system performance. Compared to taxpayers in other US States and in other countries, Hawaii taxpayers already pay too much to operate the Hawaii DOE.

20. HSTA supports efforts to fully fund charter schools.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support__X__Oppose___
Please explain: I support most policies which expand parents' options for the education of their own children.

21. HSTA supports legislation to allocate all funds to schools according to a weighted student formula with the following conditions:
a. HSTA recognizes that there are essential elements that need to be in place in a child's education to ensure student success. Schools must have adequate funding for sufficient computers, software, equipment, and textbooks for every child. All laboratories, shops, and learning spaces must be properly equipped and maintained. Students, faculty, and support staff must have the training necessary to be proficient in current technology.
b. Teachers must be active decision-makers in how the money is spent.
c. Teachers' salaries must come from a central salary account based on the average teacher's salary.
d. Collective bargaining must be preserved.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___Oppose_X_
Please explain:
a. The use of any weighted student formula makes the DOE budget less transparent.
b. Principals should control schools, and parents should pick schools. Teachers would benefit from freedom to move between schools which offered a range of work environments.
c. "What works?" is an empirical question which only an experiment can answer. Would a pay schedule based, in part, on student performance raise system performance? Would a pay schedule which offered enhanced salaries for teachers in shortage areas make schools more appealing to students and parents? An institutional environment which featured multiple experiments in school operations would generate better answers to these questions than would a statewide monopoly school system.
d. If collective bargaining is a "right", why does the State and the HSTA force it on teachers? Does the right to keep and bear arms require I carry a firearm?

22. HSTA supports creating a funding source specifically for education.
Do you support or oppose HSTA's position?
Support___Oppose_X_
Please explain: This proposal would enhance the security of system insiders at the expense of taxpayers and all other State programs. It would make adjustments to the budget difficult in lean times.

___________________________ 2010-07-02 (2-July-2010)
(Signature)

Mailing address: ________________________ Work phone_______________
________________________ Home phone_______________
Business email ________________________ Fax number_______________
Personal email ________________________ cell phone_______________

* (Update) NCES gives three figures for the total DOE budget: "total revenues", "current expenditures", and "total expenditures". NCES gives two figures for enrollment: "September Enrollment" and "average daily attendance". This generates six possible figures for the DOE per pupil budget, which range from just shy of $10,000 to over $17,000. The Hawaii DOE compiles budget figures after the end of the fiscal year. The US Department of Education and Department of Commerce collect statistics from all local education agencies (LEA) which receive Federal funds, and publish various summaries. The figures therefore reflect a situation two or three years past.

Read Jay Greene's Blog

2010-06-30T20:05:00.003Z

In "Education and Citizenship On The Left And Right" (Jay Greene's blog), Greg Forster writes

It’s widely known that one of the major reasons America adopted the government monopoly school system in the first place was hysteria over the cultural foreignness of Catholics. However, there’s another tidbit worth knowing. As Charles Glenn documents in The Myth of the Common School, one of Horace Mann’s motivations for pushing the “common” school system was his vitriolic contempt for evangelical Protestant Christianity. The hicks in the rural Massachusetts countryside with their backward and barbaric adherence to traditional Calvinist theology – which had survived down through the centuries from the Puritan settlers – was repugnant to civilized and enlightened Boston-Brahmin Unitarians like himself.

Someone had to do something to rescue these culturally deprived children from their unenlightened parents! That’s why Mann’s schools had such a heavy emphasis on teaching the Bible – teaching it in a very particular way. Part of the school system’s purpose was cultural genocide against evangelicals, to use the power of the state to indoctrinate their children with unitarianism.

Provision of History and Civics instruction by State (government, generally) employees threatens democracy. The roots of the current US (and world) financial difficulty go very deep, to the establishment of the State-monopoly school system.

Comment at Joanne's Place (2010-06-21)

2010-06-21T19:29:00.003Z

Joanne Jacobs notices a new confirmation of an old result: Kids Get Computers; Scores Fall. Harriet left a comment.

TIMSS results, among others, as long ago as 14 years indicated that computers add little to basic instruction. This result parallels a similar assessment of the contribution which early use of calculators makes to Math performance. These are statistical results–”facts”, if you will–which admit various explanations and suggest various extrapolations.

First, note that most of these studies of school performance use standardized tests of reading comprehension and Math. As a wise lady from the ETS once said: “We can’t measure what’s important so we measure what we can.” When Chubb and Moe determined to study the relation between institutional structure and school performance, they used student gains between 10th and 12 grade on standardized tests of reading, Math, and Science. They did not use Social Studies scores because Social Studies scores did not correlate with anything (which is pretty funny if you know anything about statistics).

Second, computers have transformed so many industries one might reasonably project that they will transform the education industry when decision-makers face an incentive structure which rewards the choice of effective means. At Jay Greene’s blog, guest blogger Matthew Ladner described a successful charter thus:

Carpe Diem is a 6-12 school with 240 students. A value added analysis of test scores found that they have the biggest gains in the state of Arizona. Their math results are really off the chart, with some grades averaging at the 98th percentile on Terra Nova. Carpe Diem is a hybrid model school, rotating kids between self-paced instruction on the computer and classroom instruction.

Perhaps in the Vigdor and Ladd study we see the result of inept implementation and not a defect in the principle.

Third, skills improve with practice, and people will practice what they enjoy. When programs adjust the practice which they present to any student to that student’s skill level and when programs compose infinitely variable practice routines, it’s hard to see how they will not enhance student performance. Consider computer chess.

As usual: “What works?” is an empirical question which only an experiment (a decentralized public-policy regime or a competitive market in goods and services) can answer.

Try This At Home.

2010-06-04T14:07:00.005Z

Cato entitles a post "Don't Try This At Home, Kids", which contradicts the intent. Do try this at home. Conventional school is a huge waste of time for any child of normal-or-above ability. A loving parent can teach a normally bright infant to decode the phonetic alphabet before that child can speak. A loving parent can teach a normally bright child to add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole numbers by age six, and to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions and decimals by age eight. With this preparation, children can start of the material high school teachers call "Algebra I", and with basic literacy and basic Algebra children can work independently on self-paced, self-selected studies. The conventional K-12 curriculum is a make-work program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel. Compulsion detracts from education.

A "Standard" Con

2010-06-02T20:07:00.005Z

Joanne Jacobs observes the publication of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's national standards, in "Core Standards: The Final Version". Harriet left a comment, expanded below.

Arne Duncan is either stupid or dishonest, or both. The same goes for all other serious promoters of national standards. Amateurs who accept the arguments for government-imposed education standards succumb to magical thinking.

Some years ago Harriet took the grades which the Education Trust and the Fordham Institute gave to individual US States for their standards, converted these grades into numbers on a 0-4 point scale, and applied the EXCEL correlation function to these numbers and State-level NAEP scores. The correlation was negative.

A "standard" is a unit of measurement. A kilogram weight is a standard. A meter stick is a standard. A mark on a thermometer is a standard. Academic standards are to intellectual growth what kilogram weights are to physical growth. Platinum meter sticks will not make children taller and elaborate academic standards will not make children smarter.

"Uniformity shall prevail" say the control freaks, who would turn civilian society into an industrial army. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell argued that socialism originates in a hypertrophied sense of order, like compulsive handwashing or obsessively rearranging the socks drawer. Elsewhere, (e.g., "Raffles and Mrs. Blandish", "Inside the Whale"), Orwell suggests that a preference for authoritarian politics indicates vicarious sadism. In Socialism, Ludwig von Mises suggests that socialist leanings originate in a primitive revenge fantasy.

The State (government, generally) cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". Public frustration with the ever-rising cost and marginal performance of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools (the "public" schools) prompts legislators and administrators to deflect criticism of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools with distractions such as "standards", which voters apparently expect authorities to wield against failing schools, as a nun would yield a ruler in catechism class. Problem is, insiders get to define the standards and wield the ruler. Internal accountability mechanisms fail, through a process which economists call "regulatory capture". In the case of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools the industry starts the process several steps along the path. The most effective accountability mechanisms that humans have yet devised are policies which give to unhappy customers the power to take their business elsewhere.

Humans are not standard.

Profit in Education

2010-06-01T13:23:00.012Z

In "Not Welcome Sign = No R&D" EdReformer Tom Vander Ark relates the hostility of public sector employee organizations toward parent choice in education to the slow pace of innovation in the education industry. Vander Ark quotes an Oregon statute:...

All materials would become the property of the OVSD and the State of Oregon. OVSD would run all logistics for maintenance of this program (contracting, rate-setting, procurement, etc.).

The impact on incentives should be clear. Why would investors support the development of effective instructional methods if the State will steal them and deprive investors of any chance to recoup? One might draw an analogy to the disincentives to minerals exploration in countries where the State claims all sub-surface resources.

Joanne Jacobs noticed the Vander Ark article. A visitor (ceolaf) asked about the role of profit in the education industry and Harriet left a comment, with a botched link (the Joel Fried article, repaired in the expanded and revised comment below).

Thomas Sowell (Knowledge and Decisions) and Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom) discuss, in abstract, the role of markets in allocating resources to meet human wants. Myron Lieberman (Privatization and Educational Choice) discusses the role of market incentives in the education industry in particular. Friedrich Hayek addresses the role of markets (freedom, really) in generating information on human wants and resource availability, here. Please make time to read Hayek's brief essay.

“Profit” is a bookkeeping term, the difference between total revenues and total costs. An organization which has no line in its balance sheet for profit must attribute all revenues to costs. This says nothing about the motives of people in the organization.

Joel Fried
Pots and Kettles: Governance Practices of the Ontario Securities Commission, part 2 The Government’s Principal – Agent Problem.

2. The Government’s Principal – Agent Problem
The principal-agent problem for the private sector is well known: the owner/principal delegates to a manager/agent the responsibility to provide some services for the principal. The problem is one of structuring contracts and institutions to insure that, in carrying out her duties, the agent acts in the principal’s interest rather than her own.

Citizens of a country also face a principal – agent problem. Citizens “own” the machinery of government and employ bureaucrats to act as their agents in running this machinery. To reduce the costs of monitoring, the principals choose a legislature/board of directors to oversee the agents. Monitoring mechanisms are similar to those in the private sector: there are financial accounting standards that are met for each budgetary unit, and an external auditor checks these internal accounts. Transparency is maintained, in part, through freedom of information regulations. Compliance with procedures and other regulations are met both through internal monitoring and checks by units external to the bureau. Finally, contracts are structured, at least in a limited manner, to align the incentives for agents with those of the principals.

There is, however, an additional problem in the public sector that does not exist for private firms. The firm has a well defined objective function – the maximization of profits – whereas the apparent objective for the government is the maximization of some index of a (weighted) level of welfare of the electorate. An unambiguous index of social welfare has been impossible to construct (bold mine, HT) and, in its absence, monitoring the public sector is further complicated because data is generally lacking on whether or not the objective was actually approached and/or achieved and what the costs are that are linked to any specific objective. In effect, because of distribution issues and public goods, the cash flows measured with traditional accounting procedures will be, at best, only superficially correlated with that objective. Thus, looking at cash flows will provide the principals an extremely poor method of monitoring their public sector agents.

[As an aside, this last point: "...looking at cash flows will provide...an extremely poor method of monitoring...public sector agents" is why Harriet expects only marginal results from the popular "audit the DOE" imperative. As Harriet explained here, the difference between the demands which public-sector providers of education services make on taxpayers and students, on the one hand, and the tuition charged by schools in competitive markets, on the other, firmly establish the existence of gross waste and fraud in the US State-monopoly school system.]

Governments do not need to recognize “profit”; they could tax every dollar-denominated transaction. Markets do not need “profit”; contracts with investors could promise a percentage of receipts or a percentage of the amount lent (like a bond). Accounting rules which recognize “profit” allow a business to shield some revenue from taxation by deduction of research costs or capital expansion costs.

A market economy (a legal system which protects title to property and, by extension, enforces contracts) calibrates the rewards for the solution to resource allocation questions to the magnitude of the resources at issue and to the urgency of the question. “What do you want to eat for lunch?” is a question which becomes more urgent with every hour that passes since your last meal and which involves, over a nation of 300 million people, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food and prep time. A marginally better answer, such that several thousand people will spend an additional dime on lunch, or which saves a dime for each meal served to several thousand people, can make the person who finds that answer wealthy.

“What History (or Math, or poetry, etc.) should thirteen year-olds study?” is as inappropriate a question for citizens to pose to a State (government, generally) bureaucracy as “What size shoes should thirteen year-olds wear?” would be, as becomes obvious when one rephrases the question: “What Math material should my neighbor’s 13 year-old daughter study?” (what size shoes should she wear?). Remote authorities do not know this child. There is no good argument for taking from her mother the power to answer this question. Even if her mother needs help finding the answer, there is no good argument for restricting her choice of advisers to State (government, generally) employees.

As Harriet has written many times before, the US taxpayers' $555 billion+ per year age 5-18 education subsidy ($2.9 billion, Hawaii) significantly understates the cost of the current US State-monopoly school system.

The cost of the US State-monopoly school system includes the opportunity cost to students of the time they spend in school. It does not take 12 years to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. This opportunity cost appears as lost productivity in two forms: absent child labor and less practiced adult labor. Just as few adults will exhibit native fluency in language without early experience, "fluency" in carpentry, masonry, machine tool use, or other vocational skill depends on early experience.

The cost of the State-monopoly school system includes the cost of prison for the children of poor and minority parents who are ill-served by a school system designed by and for academics.

In support of the bureaucratic imperative to regulate and in the name of "equality" and "standards" the US State-monopoly school system imposes a uniformity of treatment upon an enormously diverse student population with a wide range of interests and aptitudes. Obvious costs include apathetic scholarship and perfunctory effort as adult workers. The cost of the US State-monopoly system also includes the opportunity cost to society of the lost innovation in instructional methods and individualization of curriculum which a competitive education industry would generate.

We walk over the Comstock Lode every day, unaware of the wealth beneath our feet.

Happy Birthday

2010-05-29T05:50:00.002Z

Today (2010-05-29) is the 22nd birthday of the gymnast Cheng Fei.

In Abstract

2010-04-28T21:32:00.005Z

Over at Joanne's place, Harriet entered a conversation about the role of unions in education. In response to a reference to "free market fundamentalists", Harriet left the comment below.
..................................................................
The argument for policies which give to individual parents the power to determine for their own children the choice of curriculum and the pace and method of instruction parallel closely the argument for a market economy in general. Markets, the system of title and contract, institutionalize humility on the part of State actors. “What works?” is an empirical question which only an experiment can answer.

“Private property is socially defined” say my Marxist friends, trying to sound deep while stating the obvious. All legal regimes are socially defined. The system of private property combines control over resources with the authority to transfer control, to other parties on mutually agreed-upon terms.

In general, free marketeers accept that society at large benefits from a State strong enough effectively to suppress competition in the extortion business and to enforce contracts. Markets (the system of private property and contract law) combine local knowledge of resources with the incentive to use these resources in ways that please others. Markets calibrate the reward for improved answers to resource-allocation questions to the magnitude of the resources at issue and the urgency of the question. “What do people want for lunch?” is an empirical question which only an experiment can answer realistically. “What resources (including time) does it take to bring an infant to the point that s/he can contribute to society?” is an empirical question which only an experiment can answer with any accuracy. A State-monopoly enterprise is like an experiment with one treatment and no controls: a retarded experimental design.

The US State-monopoly school system lurches from fad to fad because it is a State-monopoly enterprise. Read Steven Moser’s meditation on campaigns in the People’s Republic of China in Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese. Current recipients of the US taxpayers’ $600 billion+ K-12-dedicated revenue stream have no interest in a less expensive answer to the question: “How do we prepare the next generation to replace their parents?” Thus, the continually expanding span of school attendance, the continual demands for more funding, and the systematic elimination of alternatives to schools as providers of education.

The arguments for State (government, generally) subsidy of education are weak. The arguments for State operation of school are so weak as to be nearly non-existent.

Not that it matters. It makes about as much sense for people who are not in government to argue about what governments should do as it makes for the swimming survivors of a mid-ocean shipwreck to argue about what sharks should eat.
.....................................................................

Exercise for the reader: Compose criteria which classify industries on the basis of their suitability for State (government, generally) operation. Imagine either a dichotomous classification (likely candidate, unlikely candidate) or a continuum
-1----------0---------1
from "highly unlikely" to "highly likely".

What criteria would you suggest?

Joanne's New Blog

2010-04-23T21:20:00.002Z

Joanne Jacobs has a new blog, Community College Spotlight. Be a neighbor. Visit.

In Memoriam

2010-03-10T20:07:00.003Z

Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c. 1820) died on this day, 1913-03-10.
From the Wikipedia entry (citing Larson, Kate Clifford. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero:...

Master Lincoln, he's a great man, and I am a poor negro; but the negro can tell master Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the negro free. Suppose that was an awful big snake down there, on the floor. He bite you. Folks all scared, because you die. You send for a doctor to cut the bite; but the snake, he rolled up there, and while the doctor doing it, he bite you again. The doctor dug out that bite; but while the doctor doing it, the snake, he spring up and bite you again; so he keep doing it, till you kill him. That's what master Lincoln ought to know.

Ravitch Review (Updated)

2010-03-04T23:55:00.005Z

Joanne Jacobs collects commentary on the The Death And Life of the Great American School System, the latest work by Diane Ravitch. Harriet left this comment...

Diane Ravitch deserves respect for her energy and dedication, displayed in her numerous publications and for the endurance she displayed in wading through volumes of educationese while researching Left Back. Any normally compassionate reader will finish __Left Back…__ appalled at the arrogance of socialists (Dewey, Cubberley, et. al.) who treated other people’s children as their clay. Ravitch laments the abandonment of a rigorous classical curriculum in favor of a succession of fad reforms that reduced system performance and raised costs. While Ravitch criticizes the policies which self-appointed experts prescribed, she does not question the premise that some expert ought to prescribe curriculum.
In “School’s Out“, his review of the latest Ravitch book, Chester Finn writes:
“Diane and I go back a very long way–three decades, give or take–and in addition to the personal friendship we have, during that period, shared a basic diagnosis of what’s awry in U.S. education. It boils down to this: Most kids aren’t learning nearly enough of the important stuff that they ought to be learning.”

That’s not a diagnosis; that’s a symptom. Why do schools fail?

Finn continues: …”She would undo most if not all of the “structural” reforms that have been put in place in recent years–mayoral control, performance-based pay, charter laws and other choice schemes, reliance on entrepreneurship and market incentives, federal efforts to incentivize and prod the system to change in constructive directions, testing- and results-based accountability and more. She would, instead, look to the “great American school system” and a (somehow) renewed culture and family structure to do right by our children.”

Umm…”Schemes”? Vouchers and charter choices enhance overall system performance. And when/where has “reliance on entrepreneurship and market incentives” been tried?

Elsewhere, Finn writes: “Any successful redesign will require a clear-eyed assessment of what has and has not worked in the effort to achieve the last generation’s reform goals, and must open itself to new aims. It will demand long, concerted effort by experts, civic and business leaders, educators, parents, and policymakers. And while it must be realistic about politics and the difficulties of transition, any overhaul of American education must also be informed by an overarching vision of the kind of system it is after. That vision, more than the details of individual reform proposals, may be what is most sorely needed now.”

Finn does not hide his commitment to centralized (expert) control.

As Neal McCluskey observed, Chester Finn is no fan of market-oriented reforms. Ravitch and Finn may merit the term “conservative”. They in no sense qualify as pro-(school)choice.

Milton Friedman rejected the label “conservative”. He called his viewpoint “liberal” (in the classical, 19th century sense of the word, meaning pro-freedom).

Several lines of evidence support the following propositions:
1. As institutions take from individual parents the power to determine for their own children the choice of curriculum and the pace and method of instruction, overall system performance falls.
2. Political control of school harms most the children of the least politically-adept parents.

Political control of school invites critics and defenders of the current system to imagine prescribing reforms to that system. Critics such as Finn and Ravitch do not address the obvious fact that their opponents occupy their current positions because of this system. Public-sector unions, their kept politicians, and Professors of Education won the contest for control of this system. Reform proposals which ignore the rules of the game that enabled this result must either accommodate the policy preferences of these interest groups, or fail.

Practically, this observation implies that effective reform will occur one family at a time, as parents decide to homeschool.

Update: A Volokh conspirator discusses the newspaper report on the Ravitch book. Harriet added 2 cents worth (comment 67).

Jay Greene on Education Research

2010-03-03T20:45:00.003Z

Jay Greene initiated a discussion of federally-funded education research. Harriet would have left a comment, but it went over-long.

The tax-funded education research apparatus provides an endlessly entertaining playpen for the statistically literate puzzle addicts who become quantitative researchers and to the proponents of non-quantitative research such as Jim Horn, who's authority depends on the authority of the statistically literate empiricists. Both groups deserve the mistrust which Jay Greene advocates in his essay.

Professor Greene's recommendation, that legislators restrict the Federal role to accumulation and distribution of raw data, likely would lead eventually to the situation which he laments. What data would the Feds amass? Why suppose that the people who collect these data would perform any more honestly than climate scientists who report favorable data from non-existent stations in China and omit stations which yield data contrary to their preconceptions? Substitute "school" for "weather station" or "proxy source" (fossil tree, stalagmite, glacial gas bubble), and "standardized test" for "thermometer" or "tree rings", or "isotope ratio".

Some Texas financier once said: "Money is like manure: when you spread it around it can do a lot of good; when you heap it in one place, it stinks."

Government policy may effectively address problems which arise from free rider issues and tragedies of the commons, such as overfishing, or from other sources where free rider problems inhibit market solutions, for example, the threat from Earth-crossing asteroids. I expect, however, that, given a sufficiently large budget for a sufficiently long time, the Asteroid Defense Agency would spend its budget on plush conference venues and overpriced, redundant studies, and, come crunch time, perform as well as the French army in 1940. We're screwed, or we're robbed, then screwed.

Education does not belong in either of the above categories. Parents have an alternative to the wasteful and abusive, tax-funded K-PhD school apparatus. Homeschool. The market (meaning, whatever happens in the absence of State coercion beyond the protection of individuals and property) will generate more reliable information on effective practice than will PREL (nee the Pacific Regional Education Lab, once an offshoot of the Northwest Regional Education Lab and now the "Pacific Resources for Education and Learning").

Read Cato, Watch Fox

2010-02-18T01:19:00.002Z

A Severe Irony Deficiency
Posted by Andrew J. Coulson

Tomorrow night at 8:00pm, Fox Business News will air a John Stossel special on the failures of state-run schooling and the merits of parental choice and competition in education. I make an appearance, as do Jeanne Allen and James Tooley.

News of the show is already making the rounds, and over at DemocraticUnderground.com, one poster is very upset about it, writing:

When will these TRAITORS stop trying to ruin this country?

HOW can AMERICANS be AGAINST public education?

Stossel is throwing out every right-wing argument possible in his namby pamby singsong way while he “interviews” a “panel” of people (who I suspect are plants) saying things like preschool is a waste of money and why invest in an already-failing system….

I hate Stossel and I hate all of those who think the way he does.

This poster goes by the screen name “Live Love Laugh.” I guess there wasn’t enough space to tack “Hate” onto the end.

Harriet adds this to the "To do" list.

Case, Djou, or Hanabusa

2010-02-12T20:59:00.005Z

Harriet at one time regarded the three candidates for US Congress from the windward Oahu district (Neil Abercrombie's seat) as competent and qualified. Any of them would represent the people of Hawaii well. Senator Hanabusa fell in Harriet's estimation after introducing SB2007.

Measure Title: RELATING TO BUDGETARY POWERS.
Report Title: Budgetary Powers; Legislature; Governor
Description: Clarifies the budgetary powers of the legislature and the executive branches of government.
Companion:
Package: None
Current Referral: WAM
Introducer(s): HANABUSA

Underlined material is added.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF HAWAII:
SECTION 1. Section 37-31, Hawaii Revised Statutes, is
amended to read as follows:
"137-31 Intent and policy. It is declared to be the policy and intent of the legislature that the total appropriations made by it, or the total of any budget approved by it, for any department or establishment, shall be deemed to be the maximum amount authorized to meet the requirements of the department or establishment for the period of the appropriation, excepting as may otherwise be provided by law, and that the governor and the director of finance should be given the powers granted by sections 37-32 to 37-41 in order that savings may be effected by careful supervision throughout each appropriation period with due regard to changing conditions; and by promoting more economic and efficient management of state departments and establishments[.];provided that the powers granted to the
governor and the director of finance by sections 37-32 to 37-41 17 shall not be construed to include the power to:
-(1) Restrict funding to a program to the extent that the program cannot adequately execute its intended purpose; or
-( 2 ) Suspend or abolish any existing program, if the program has been authorized bv the leaislature and moneys have been appropriated for the program, unless specifically authorized by the legislature by legislative act.

....
....
....

5. No modification or amendment shall reduce an allotment
below the amount required to adequately execute the intended purpose of an existing program authorized by the legislature and for which moneys have been appropriated unless specifically authorized by the legislature by legislative act.

....
....
....

no reduction shall reduce an allotment below the amount required to adequately execute the intended purpose of an existing program authorized by the legislature and for which moneys have been appropriated unless specifically
authorized by the legislature by legislative act.

....
....
....

The governor shall not utilize the powers granted under sections 37-32 to 37-41 to:
-(1) Restrict funding to a program to the extent that the program cannot adequately execute its intended purpose; or
-(2) Suspend or abolish any existing program, if the program is authorized by the legislature and moneys have been appropriated for the program, unless specifically
authorized by the legislature by legislative act.

Without the power of the single State-wide elected office to restrict expenditures, the State budget becomes a commons, which politicians will abuse. This is the argument for a line-item veto at the national level. Currently, the Hawaii Revised Statutes requires that the Governor balance the budget and gives her the power to do so. Senator Hanabusa's amendment to State law would deprive the Governor of that power. With this bill, Senator Hanabusa assures public-sector workers that she elevates their interests above the interests of taxpayers (and locks in a powerful constituency for the upcoming Congressional election).

Basic Budget Arithmetic

2010-02-11T20:21:00.005Z

What is the DOE per pupil budget? With three figures for total budget and two for enrollment, this question has six reasonable answers.

2005-2006 School Year
Total Revenues: a=$2,703,718,000
Total Expenditures: b=$2,026,254,000
Current Expenditures: c=$1,805,521,000
Fall enrollment: d=182,818
Average Daily Attendance: e=168,009

According to the online calculator, this gives...
a/d=$14,789
a/e=$16,092
b/d=$11,280
b/e=$12,060
c/d=$9,876
c/e=$10,746

Guestimating here, suppose the average classroom teacher makes, say, $40,000 before taxes. Suppose that pension and benefits add 50% or $20,000 to the cost of a classroom teacher's total compensation. How many students would the average teacher have to take into her home to earn her salary as a contractor to parents empowered to provide for their children's education?
$60,000/$16092=3.728; round up to four.
$60,000/$9,876=6.075; round down to six.

If your average DOE classroom contains 24 students, the average DOE teacher carries bewteen three (24/6-1) and five (24/4-1) out-of-classroom parasites on her back.

"What about special ed?", defenders of the NEA/AFSCME cartel will ask. The State Auditor has calculated that sp-ed students cost, on average, twice what regular ed kids cost, and the DOE reports that sp-ed enrollment amounts to about 11% of the population. Let the mean cost of a regular ed student be x. Then the mean cost of a sp-ed student is 2x. Special ed enrollment (fall, 2005) was .11(182,818) or 20,110. This gives a regular-ed population of 162,708.

Now, solve
2(p)(20,110)+(p)(162708)=$2,703,718,000 => p=$13,324
2(q)(20,110)+(q)(162708)=$2,026,254,000 => q=$9,985
2(r)(20,110)+(r)(162708)=$1,805,521,000 => r=$8,895

If we trust the DOE's accounting, regular-ed students cost, on average, between $8,895 and $13,324 per year. If the legislature were to mandate that the DOE allot 2/3 of the lower figure, $5930 to Parent Performance Contracting, rounding up to $6,000 (for convenience), the average classroom teacher could earn her current compensation by taking ten neighborhood kids into her house.

Your legislators would rather bankrupt the State.

When You're In A Hole...

2010-02-11T19:48:00.006Z

Jay Greene linked to "Out of Chalk", by RiShawn Biddle. Teacher pensions contribute to the difference between "Total Revenues", and "Current Expenditures". The Digest of Education Statistics gives a "Total Revenues" figure of $520,643,954,000 nationally and $2,703,718,000 in Hawaii over the 2005-2006 school year (Table 172), and a "Current Expenditures" figure of $449,594,924,000 nationally and $1,805,521,000 in Hawaii over the 2005-2006 school year (Table 177). This, for a total US "public" (i.e., government) school enrollment of 49,113,298 nationally and 182,818 in Hawaii, according to table 35.

Read Megan

2010-02-05T20:42:00.002Z

Please read Megan McArdle's recent post on unions, pay schedules, and merit pay.

Hawaii's charter school legislation binds charter schools to the Hawaii State Teachers' Association.

SB 2437

2010-02-03T21:46:00.004Z

Testimony. SB 2437
DATE: Monday, February 01, 2010
TIME: 1:15PM
PLACE: Conference Room 225

To: Senate and House Education Committee members
From: Malcolm Kirkpatrick
In re: SB 2437
2010-02--1

Please DO NOT support SB 2437 as written.

This bill proposes to address a shortfall in tax receipts with an increase in the rate at which the State taxes commercial activity. An implicit assumption behind this bill is that the proposed rate increase will generate increased revenues. A further assumption behind this bill is that the State will spend the generated revenues wisely.

Both assumptions are probably false.

Across the US, tax receipts declined as commercial activity declined. Tax receipts will recover when commercial activity recovers. Taxes have the same effect as fines. You can without mistake consider a tax as a fine on the taxed activity. Taxes reduce the entrepreneur's incentive to start a business, the investor's incentive to lend, and the tradesman's incentive to practice his trade.

Hawaii is not the only State under financial stress. Look to California to see Hawaii's future. California faces a $10 billion per year projected budget shortfall where ever-increasing demands by an unrestrained public sector have caused a collapse in real estate prices and new business start-ups. Anyone who buys land in California paints a target on his back. Anyone who opens a business in that State volunteers to be bled white. Investors and productive workers have fled. They will flee Hawaii, also.

SB 2437 lacks any indication that Hawaii's legislature intends to reduce the demands made upon the productive private sector by this State's bloated public sector. Hawaii's tax-subsidized K-Ph.D. education industry exhibits the defects of tax-subsidized State-monopoly industries elsewhere. Across industries, across countries, monopolies deliver wretched goods and services at high cost and subsidized goods are over-consumed.

The people of Hawaii are among the highest taxed in the US, as measured by total State and local expenditures per capita. Hawaii's State-monopoly school system cost taxpayers nearly $15,000 per pupil to operate in the 2005-2006 school year, when the DOE (2008 Digest of Education Statistics) reported total revenues over $2,703,718,000(table 172) and total enrollment of 180,728 (table 34). $2,703,718,000/180728= $14,960

The nearly $3 billion per year DOE budget total does not include two large additional costs of this system. The cost of the State-monopoly school system includes the opportunity cost to students of the time they spend in school and the cost to society of the lost innovation in instructional methods which a competitive market would generate. The lost opportunity cost appears as reduced lifetime earnings, reduced longevity, losses due to crime, and the cost of prison for the poor kids whose lives we trash.

For all this cost to the people of Hawaii, the tax-subsidized State-monopoly education industry delivers a level of performance which puts Hawaii in the national cellar. By some measures we are dead last. The 1996 TIMSS placed Singapore at the top of international rankings and the US among the laggards among the world's industrial democracies. The Singapore fifth (5th) percentile score (TIMSS 8th grade Math) was higher than the US fiftieth (50th) percentile score. With Hawaii's DOE delivering instruction which puts Hawaii students in the national cellar, Hawaii's valedictorians will be shining Singapore's janitors' shoes.

Will higher tax rates repair Hawaii's dysfunctional school system?

Arthur Laffer summarized the relation between tax rates and tax revenues with the notorious Laffer Curve, the inverted parabola. Critics who ridicule the Laffer Curve reveal more about themselves than about Dr. Laffer. Charles L. Schultze, who served as chairman of the United States Council of Economic Advisers during the Carter Administration and as director of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget from 1965-67 during the Johnson Administration and as President of the American Economic Association, called the Laffer curve a straightforeward consequence of standard economic analysis.

Increased tax rates will not generate increased revenue, and the Hawaii's K-PhD State-monopoly education industry will not improve with more money.

Across the US, between 1920 and 2006, total expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance increased from $685 to $11,643 and current expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance increased from $571 to $10,041, in constant 2007 dollars, according to table 181 of the 2008 Digest of Education Statistics.

In Hawaii, current expenditure per pupil in fall enrollment has increased from $4,280 in 1970 to $10,131 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to table 184 of the 2008 Digest of Education Statistics.

It does not take 12 years at $10,758 (table 182, current expenditures per pupil in Fall enrollment, 2005-2006), or $14,960 to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State provision of History, Civics, Economics, or other "social studies" is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of news media would be (is, in totalitarian countries).

Until Hawaii's politicians reject the demands of Hawaii's predatory public sector, investors will shun this State and entrepreneurs will take their business overseas or underground.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak.

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Mediocrity Incarnate

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Olelo Presentation

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A Personal Note

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