Ways K12 Education Is Not a Free Market

Many times I have heard conservatives talk about K12 education as if it were a market, especially when the topic of school choice comes up.

I am completely in favor of school choice, but there are some important ways in which the market idea fails. If we want to talk about how to improve the situation, it might be useful to explore those ways.

First, education is mandated. In that way, it is like Obamacare. Parents cannot just opt out. If you want education to work like the free market, you have to let parents opt out, and you have to accept that some parents won't be able to afford to send their kids to school. Some kids won't get an education, just like not everyone can or wants to buy a Cadillac.

Second, public funding plays an essential role. As soon as you introduce public funding, including school choice vouchers, you are again not really dealing with a free market situation. However, if funding were attached to students, and students / families could choose which schools to attend, wouldn't that be analogous to a free market situation? Not as things stand now, because ...

Third, public and private schools do not follow the same regulations. If you really want to see how they stack up against each other, they need to follow the same rules. If we want improvement, we would let public schools act like private schools, meaning they don't have to take any given student, nor keep problem students, nor keep problem teachers. Here again, if you let every school decide not to take some students, you will end up with some students not getting any education.

How much we really want K12 education to be a free market depends in part on how determined we are to offer every child an education. The more like a free market we want it, the less we can insist that every child have the chance at an education.

So why am I in favor of school choice? Because we are stuck with a system that doesn't work for a lot of students. Until we pretty thoroughly overhaul our system, school choice is the best we can do.

Your Slip Is Showing

I thought we weren't supposed to talk about how female political figures dress anyway? Not true? Or maybe it's just that, you know, we aren't supposed to talk about it.

Leave our failing schools alone!

David Harsanyi on the demented interrogation of Dept. of Education nominee DeVos:

[M]inority groups in America’s largest cities are lagging in proficiency in reading and math. Most of them are at the bottom 5 percent of schools in their own state. There is only so much an education secretary can accomplish, but being accused of being a “grave threat” to this system is a magnificent endorsement.

* * *

. . . Democrats on the committee stressed that DeVos was a Republican appointed by a Republican president who had given money to Republican organizations. They further pointed out that DeVos was a Christian who had given money to Christian organizations (often referred to as “antigay groups”) that didn’t meet with their moral approval.

* * *

. . . [R]ich and middle-class Americans already have school choice. In most places, the whiter the neighborhood the better the school system, and the better the school system the higher the prices of homes, making it impossible for those who aren’t wealthy to escape substandard schools (rural school also often suffer.) This is the status quo Warren, Murphy, and Murray hope to preserve.

* * *

You can visit heavily Hispanic areas in Denver and watch mothers cry when their kids’ numbers don’t come up in a charter-school lottery. Or you can listen to technocrats in editorial board meetings, whose kids live in prosperous districts or attend private schools, telling you why too many of those parents have a choice.

Baked-in gerrymandering

Sean Trende has done a series of articles analyzing Trump's win, culminating in this one, which focuses on the geographical distribution of deep-Blue support.  Because we still have a federal system and do not elect Presidents by popular vote, the very division of the country into states imposes a basic gerrymandering on the electoral map.  Add to that a rural-urban split that's been growing for 30 years, and you have an electoral map in which a candidate like Clinton is "wasting" votes by running up the score in states like California, where she already had a lock on the electors.  A winning strategy requires finding a message that also works outside the large cities, which are concentrated in a few states.  Bouncing the rubble in those states won't get you the White House.

Spending the Afternoon

Following the inauguration, I've spent a beautiful warm, sunny afternoon riding my motorcycle, shooting, and will now spend the rest of it drinking my favorite (and American) beer on my back porch.

This may go on all weekend. We'll reconvene next week.

Ahhhhhh

For the first time, I just heard a newscaster say "Former President Obama."

That was satisfying.

The Moment of National Unity Lasted About 20 Seconds

Iowahawk:

It's Over. Now Comes Something Else.

I give you a toast: To the United States of America. May God bless her in this hour, and the years to come.

An Extended Civil War Analogy at the Inauguration

Here is the full letter that Chuck Schumer wanted you to read.

The bugle call that comes after the oath is taken is equally old: it's "To the Colors," sometimes called "Honors," four blasts.

Richard and John

I was unaware of the middle names of our (very) soon-to-be President and VP until this ceremony. In a way, it's no surprise to learn that they are named after Norman kings.

UPDATE: No joke, Mad Dog Mattis' middle name actually is "Norman."

One Piece at a Time

Check out the "Trumpmobile." (Note that the owner/builder is an immigrant -- a legal one, from Finland.)

It reminds me of the Johnny Cash tune about the auto worker who 'borrowed' a piece from the factory every day for 20 years, and then tried to build a car out of it. "This is Red Ryder in the pscyhobilly Cadillac."



That's some real Americana.

Jim Webb: "The Promise of President Trump"

I might have titled it "the opportunity for" rather than "the promise of," but my favored candidate for President last year has penned a short piece on some hopes he has for the next few years. First, he hopes to break the hold of the group that thinks of itself as our 'governing class,' in favor of the ideal of Cincinnatus. Second, he would like to see us refocus our affirmative action policies on Americans, rather than using them to 'increase diversity' at the expense of those Americans who are already quite poor.

So far, we have no idea what Trump will actually do as President, but those seem like plausible things to think that he might do. We'll see, soon enough, if they happen.

DB: Obama Touts Legacy of Renaming Wars

When pressed to explain the current military operations against ISIS in Iraq and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama responded with “I said I ended the wars didn’t I? There’s no more war. What’s going on now is more like ‘kinetic foreign advising.’”

...The Obama administration’s reluctance to call the actions in Iraq against ISIS which have claimed the lives of three US serviceman “combat operations” has angered veterans and the other dozen or so Americans who pay attention to the nation’s continuing wars.

“The third time we took indirect and sniper fire, I asked my squad leader if we’d get our CIBs (Combat Infantryman Badge) yet,” said Army Pvt. Anthony Dunn, “but he just shrugged and said the commander was going to see if we could get a pizza night in the DFAC.”

Taking Up the Colors

Symbolically, the US is broken up into red states and blue states, and if we end up in another Civil War, those may well be the colors of the two major sides.

However, this is very recent, as many of you probably know. Beginning in 1976, red and blue were used on TV broadcasts to differentiate states on election night, but there was no consistency. One network might have the Democrats red and Republicans blue, another the opposite. After the 2000 election, the networks coordinated and began consistently our current color scheme.

I've wondered quite a bit about why the colors sorted out the way they did. Blue is the traditional color for conservative parties,  and red is normal for the left. In fact, blue used to be more common to represent the Republican Party because of its Civil War association with the Union. So how did the Republicans end up red?

Honestly, it could well have been just a random thing. According to the All-Knowing Wikipedia, journalist Tim Russert started using the terms "red state" and "blue state" while covering the 2000 election, and it has stuck. Maybe that's all there is to it.

On the other hand, the conspiracy theorist in me whispers that it could have been an intentional thing. If the Democrats were red, it would be too easy to just call them reds. Maybe journalists anticipated this and protected their own.

In any case, each side now has a permanent color to rally to, the beginnings of a flag, semi-permanent colors marking territories on our maps. This seems to have emerged out of a genuine increase in polarization, but at the same time, I wonder if, now commonplace, it doesn't also support that polarization by making what had been abstract and fleeting designations used only on election nights into permanent or semi-permanent representations.

Compared with economics and ideologies and cultures, this is a very small thing, but it makes it easier to imagine us as separate peoples, maybe even separate nations, and imagination has its own kind of power.

DB: NATO Called 'Obsolete' by Trump, Anyone Who Saw them in Afghanistan

Remarks from President-elect Donald Trump earlier this week calling NATO allies ‘obsolete’ have been labeled completely unprecedented by everyone except the thousands of American soldiers who have fought alongside them in Afghanistan, sources confirmed today.

The Coalition soldiers in Iraq in 2007/8/9 included some sharp looking guys, but I don't know that they ever left the wire. The Georgians, who weren't in NATO, did so regularly. Admittedly, they wrecked a lot of Hummers because of their sizable liquor ration, but they were willing to go out.

Oh, That's Brutal

As Devos made her way around a crowd and proceeded to shake hands with the senators who questioned her, she extended her hand to Senator Elizabeth Warren, but the progressive icon and 2020 Democratic frontrunner promptly “waved her off” and left the room.

Warren’s apparent snub was widely criticized on social media by pundits on the political right, who called the move classless and another example of the erosion of proper decorum in Washington...

Upon closer examination, Warren appears to be signaling to DeVos in her native Cherokee.

What are they thinking now?

Agriculture

I thought I recalled that Grim didn't think much of ex-Georgia-governor Sonny Perdue.  I was right.  Anyway, Trump has picked him for Secretary of Agriculture.

The Intelligence Community vs. Trump?

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist gives a good history of this conflict from the election until this week. At the beginning, she frames it as the intelligence community taking on Trump, but later on she specifies that she is talking about political appointees within that community. The value of the article is its thoroughness (for an article, mind you), so it isn't worth much to excerpt it here.

In my earlier post, Trump Does Counter-Intelligence against the IC?, I asked a couple of questions that trouble me, and for which I have no answers.

What if we find out the IC in general is partisan? How could a problem like that be solved? These are the folks who have permission to hide information from us and lie to us for our own good, whose job is ideally proper management of information, but who could easily manipulate it for their own purposes, all protected from scrutiny by law.

Hemingway narrows the conflict to Obama's political appointees in those agencies, but I'm not sure that's the case, and what if it isn't? Intelligence services are essential, and they do very valuable work. But the people in them go through the same schools and programs our neo-Marxian radicals do, and it is likely that many of them identify with the same socio-cultural elite Trump just defeated.

The Speed of Rubber

Joerg Sprave of the Slingshot Channel demonstrates and explains his full-auto crossbow.

Ha ha ha ha!