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New at Reason

Fifty years after Milton Friedman first proposed school vouchers, Reason rounds up the head-of-the-class among education reform scholars and activists to discuss the future of school choice.

|12.1.05 @ 1:52PM|

My school choice: I'm paying taxes for this - we have one system and you parents have to work together and with the powers that be to make it work.

Not interested in funding whatever special school you think your child needs.

Have pretty much the same attitude about "libary choice" and "roadway choice" and "Navy choice."

|12.1.05 @ 2:04PM|

Barren,

So you believe that it should be illegal to drive on any roads that are not in your own town and you should not be able to go to a library that is not in your town?

|12.1.05 @ 2:37PM|

Ethan,

I think he just wants to not have to pay for you to drive on your private street and buy books to stock your private library.

By all means, drive up and down your driveway. But if it starts cracking, shell out for the sealant yourself.

Rich Ard|12.1.05 @ 2:40PM|

But what if it's the street that's cracked, even though I've been paying for it for years?

|12.1.05 @ 2:47PM|

"we have one system and you parents have to work together and with the powers that be to make it work."

Umm... why?

|12.1.05 @ 2:49PM|

Since people never appreciate the stuff they get for free, maybe we need to shut down the entire publically funded school system for a few years.

After a generation of kids are left ignorant, except for those who's parents have the money and the intelligence to send their kids to school, then we can have a rational discussion about the need for a public school system and what should be taught.

|12.1.05 @ 2:51PM|

Rich Ard,

I want you to know that I'm only doing this because it will be interesting to see how this conceit spirals out of control and crashes into a fiery wrech. Here goes:

If the street is cracked, you should yell and scream and make a fuss and write angry letters and attend candidate's forums and vote in every election and maybe run for City Council yourself.

|12.1.05 @ 2:54PM|

barren and Slash N Burn,
Take joe's advice. We'll be watching.

|12.1.05 @ 2:57PM|

Apparently joe has never lived in Vermont. :)

|12.1.05 @ 3:00PM|

"After a generation of kids are left ignorant"

As I said in the other thread, transitions would be surprisingly smoother and shorter if we can posit that the government first gets its hand out of our pockets.

|12.1.05 @ 3:02PM|

Ruthless,

The "dogs and cats living together" argument wears thin after a while.

|12.1.05 @ 3:03PM|

While I'm all for destroying the government monopoly on education (which would cascade into taking out the teacher's unions as one of the most powerful forces in California gov't), none of this really fixes one of the base problems in our schools - a lack of parental involvement. Parents that already care about their children's education will be more involved in the choice of their schools, etc. However, I don't see getting disengaged parents motivated by school choice. They'll simply let their kids go to whatever school gets handed to them and we're still producing a massive underclass of people who are unprepared to function.

This essay is a great look at why public schools are so broken in the first place.

|12.1.05 @ 3:04PM|

Keep in mind that despite apparently the wonders of "public schools" we have a population in large part believes in alien abductions, ghosts and all manner of quacky alternative medicine (alternative medicine being something that liberals orgasm over).

|12.1.05 @ 3:07PM|

I like Marshall Fritz's take-no-prisoners responses:

"Most necessary reform: None."

"Educational tax credits are merely covert mutations of the entitlement cancer."

Lot's of good stuff.

Since Bush got elected there is no chance of me voting for anything other than a Democrat, but I could easily be convinced of supporting some voucher systems. But I have what I consider legit questions:

1. Explain how we can measure success or improvement in both urban, rural and suburban locales.

2. Explain to me how in relative terms the kids who need the most help, those with unconcerned parents, will not be even worse off.

3. Explain why schools will not have an incentive to discourage students with higher cost/voucher ratios, or why this effect will be small enough to be overtaken by other gains.

4. How are we going to address religious issues, especially in rural communities that do not have a population to support several schools?

Pretty basic stuff. Show me a pilot program that address these concerns (for example a pilot program that takes students whose parents opt in is not a good example, because it does not address #2, unless it is proposing to study or project the effect of a refocusing of funds on a wider scale and specifically follows the results for non-involved parents), or at least will give us more information about these and other effects I am forgetting, and I will enthusiastically jump on board.

|12.1.05 @ 3:08PM|

"we have one system and you parents have to work together and with the powers that be to make it work."

Ain't gonna happen if it hasn't happened yet. I didn't RT entire FA, but I know in my guts this plan is nuts. Very few people are going to view this as a "here's the education infrastructure, choose your poison." Instead it will be "let's get our little dears out of these dangerous urban schools and send them to the safety suburbs."

We've had 100+ years to get this right, but what does that mean when the real objective was to create a docile, cooperative workforce? Education was never the primary objective. How could it be in a pedagodgic system? As opposed to a mix of teaching and free thinking, that is. OK, you've got to read the right connotations into that before you get my drift.

The liberal arts were never meant for the lower classes. The archaic term 'servile arts' described their education.

I would need to write a full-blown essay to get my thought across, but half a rant is better than none.

|12.1.05 @ 3:09PM|

Gatto makes the most sense to me. He is also the only one who appears to have actually taught K-12. He echoes what some others in the debate said: Compulsory education is for the birds. Here are some choice morsels:

As a 30-year schoolteacher in the classroom, I can say that nothing good happens from compulsion. Period. There aren't any exceptions unless you look at your fellow human beings as inferiors or serfs or slaves.

Yes!

And this interesting take on vouchers:

What vouchers will produce, very quickly, is a much deeper and broader reach of official pedagogy into every home and every small secular or religious group that puts together schools. They won't be allowed to run free: They will have to be monitored in their progress by standardized tests. And you can't very easily get an education and do well on standardized tests. They don't correlate with anything except what your score is going to be on the next standardized test you take.

Do others agree that compulsion is part of the problem? Does anybody else believe that vouchers will just entrench the control that the state has over our children?

|12.1.05 @ 3:11PM|

Is pedagogic a word? I don't know, I had a pretty lousy education. My 'fault.' I could see through their scheme and went into full resistance mode until I got to college where I studied the servile art of civil engineering.

Hey, this system was intended to break us. Resistance is futile.

|12.1.05 @ 3:16PM|

I said:
Before predicting a transition period,let's posit we get to keep a hell of a lot more of our money than the government is allowing us to now.

downstater said:
Which would be fine for those in the middle classes, but what of the poor who don't make enough money to be paying income taxes anyway and possibly also renters who do not pay property taxes? What money will they be keeping to put toward education?

Paging downstater! Come up here and be edified!

Gimme Back My Dog|12.1.05 @ 3:16PM|

Coach,

In answer to your question number two, children of uninterested parents will still be better off because public schools will be forced to improve when faced with increased competition from private schools. The same way that people who would never buy a foreign car got the benefit of the increased quality standards that Detroit adopted in the face of competition from Japanese carmakers.

Hakluyt,

There is plenty of junk science in private schools as well. My sister sends her kids to a private school so that they learn ID (Evolution being a "theory" and all).

|12.1.05 @ 3:26PM|

Let's back up.
Like the song, "War! What is it good for?"

Education! What is it good for?

Who should enlist? Who is "eligible"?

|12.1.05 @ 3:29PM|

Gimme Back My Dog,

Certainly, but that hardly undercuts my point.

|12.1.05 @ 3:33PM|

"until I got to college where I studied the servile art of civil engineering."

saw-whet,
This is part of what I'm saying. As an Arts and Science major, I used to ridicule engineering as a servile art. Now I'm poor and you are likely rich. But did my inner happiness over the years outweigh my servile economic circumstances?

|12.1.05 @ 3:33PM|

Education! What is it good for?
Absolutely crushin'.

The meter needs some work.

|12.1.05 @ 3:37PM|

saw-whet,
You're an engineer. You know nothing of no meters.

|12.1.05 @ 3:41PM|

Andy's right. And people who don't have the money or intelligence to send their kids to school should quit breeding anyway. It's too bad this point doesn't get made more often. I'm sick of hearing people say children are "gifts from Gawd" - I guess that depends on who gets these "gifts." Birth control in the water?

|12.1.05 @ 3:53PM|

I have met many people who had children so that they would be taken care of. Have a kid and get welfare or some such. Have a kid and have a job 'given' to you.

A rather pretty then-sixteen-year-old friend of mine did this. Her mother encouraged her to have a baby out of wedlock to keep the welfare payments coming in.

Her life has been over since 1982. Well at least she was able to stay at home and watch soaps for the past 23 years.

|12.1.05 @ 3:56PM|

Pirate,
Let's not go there.
Nine-nine percent of people have "value."
What that value is varies with each individual. But, overall, the value of people varies inversely with the level of taxation.
It's similar to the effect the money supply has on your spending power.

Dan|12.1.05 @ 3:56PM|

And people who don't have the money or intelligence to send their kids to school should quit breeding anyway.

Why? Capitialism requires a great mass of poor people to do the actual work.

|12.1.05 @ 4:01PM|

I note that barren's implicit assumption is that it would be more expensive to have competition. I don't think that follows.

|12.1.05 @ 4:03PM|

Dan:

They're called either 'robots' or 'Mexicans' or 'Indians', depending on what you mean by 'poor' and what you mean by 'work'.

|12.1.05 @ 4:03PM|

Saw-whet: I got a full-body shiver from your 3:53 post.

|12.1.05 @ 4:17PM|

I don't think one can realistically claim that children of uninterested parents are getting anything more under an educational monopoly than they would otherwise get. In a market, there might be at least options and (horror of horrors) targeted marketing for targeted students. I'm sure we could all hear about how much money is wasted by such advertising, but still.

Fans of monopoly programs created by the government love to talk about how much waste is created in a private system. They do this because they have fantastic notions about what level of service and personalization is actually being realized in their preferred system.

|12.1.05 @ 4:18PM|

Gimme Back My Dog,
That sounds awfully high on the simplistic theorizing and awfully low on any details. I tend to be much more skeptical of the magical effects of competition. Sometimes it can provide incentives, but it has to be the correct mix, and it is not clear to me that the public schools would have that.
Obviously there are several different ways fo implementing, but it seems here you are assuming that the public would be mandated to have a choice of last resort school. In that scenarion, I am not sure where the incentive comes in, except marginally, especially, if they are burdened with much higher proportion of the least-likely to succeed kids.
A big problem in edcuation, as far as I can tell is the high cost of disruption of a small number of troublesome kids.

As I said, I am enthusiastic about a pilot program, as long as we went about it looking at the proper metrics to validate any results.

|12.1.05 @ 4:28PM|

Really interesting debate. I'm with Marshall Fritz. How we get their is the question. I think the key may be in home schooling and the internet. If we can convince enough parents to just yank their kids out of the public system and have them taught at home (or have them teach themselves with a little minimal guidence) then we'll be able to get some changes. The key is getting a critical mass of home school voters. Step #2 is having them demand that if your kid isn't in school, you don't have to pay the taxes. Once the tax break is in place, more parents will flood out of the system. The public schools will wither and die.

|12.1.05 @ 4:30PM|

theCoach:

What do you consider a valid metric for evaluating the current school system?

|12.1.05 @ 4:37PM|

Before we get to a "valid metric," we need to agree on more basic questions about the purpose of "education."

|12.1.05 @ 4:39PM|

The "uninterested parent" bit really gets me. One should not assume that children who aren't doing well have uninterested parents. Often, interested parents have uninterested kids--review "compulsion."

I have sat in umpteen parent-teacher conferences, while condescending teachers say, "he's a great kid, very smart, participates in class, but he just won't turn his homework. We don't know how to motivate him. Can you give us any suggestions?"

C'mon, people. If I knew how to motivate this teenager, it woulda been done long ago. But some kids have to wait and figure out for themselves what interests and motivates them, and until they do, all your notebooks and collages and game-creating and elementary-school-style fluffy projects, all based on "brain theory" and "pedagogical research," are going to be scorned.

I'm just about to join up with the crew who say: "let the public schools fold now."

Mike|12.1.05 @ 4:42PM|

In answer to your question number two, children of uninterested parents will still be better off because public schools will be forced to improve when faced with increased competition from private schools.

Yea...they'll compete just like Jamesway competed with Wal*Mart: they'll limp along until they go out of business completely. Competition is not the end, it's the means. The end is eliminating public schools entirely. Many here will say, "Hell yeah!" But let's not pretend this is anything other than a way to end government run education.

|12.1.05 @ 4:42PM|

April,
What are "interested" parents REALLY interested in? Is it necessarily the "education" of they chillen?

|12.1.05 @ 4:51PM|

Half baked thoughts - Schools as a sports team...

Schools should be local. Teachers should be mobile. Each school should have a salary cap. Schools should bid for teachers each year. Some schools may forego bidding on an arts teacher in order to bid higher for a good math teacher, for example. Money flows to needs. Bidding is done by the seats in each class room.

|12.1.05 @ 4:51PM|

Half baked thoughts - Schools as a sports team...

Schools should be local. Teachers should be mobile. Each school should have a salary cap. Schools should bid for teachers each year. Some schools may forego bidding on an arts teacher in order to bid higher for a good math teacher, for example. Money flows to needs. Bidding is done by the seats in each class room.

|12.1.05 @ 4:59PM|

April-Replace "Johnny is not motivated" with "Johnny is not sufficiently compliant" and you'll be closer to what's really going on.

|12.1.05 @ 5:04PM|

Number 6, that is exactly my line of thinking.

And given that I know that, you can imagine that I am not helping matters, because my son knows that I know that. It makes him even less motivated to be compliant.

I guess that makes me part of the problem?

|12.1.05 @ 5:20PM|

April-Or the antidote to the problem. Depends on how you look at it, and whether or not the inculcation of obedience to authority is one of your prime values.

|12.1.05 @ 5:26PM|

I don't really buy the "uninterested parent" bit. Sure, they're out there. But they're not the major problem.

For one thing, what about the parent who is "interested" but doesn't have the money to send kids to a private school or afford a home in a "good" district?

For another thing, parents are not supposed to be interested. The interested parent is the demon of today's public schools. A parent who suggests changes to the curriculum in English classes is accused of trying to "ban books"

M1EK|12.1.05 @ 5:31PM|

The whole idea that a system which has kids travelling all through a metro area to go to their preferred schools is somehow not a hell of a lot worse (all other things being equal) than the "neighborhood school" is pretty messed up, too.

Speaking for myself, getting mySELF to elementary, middle, and high school every day made me more independent than my sad-sack classmates who were driven there (mostly middle school). Today's students, unfortunately, are almost ALL driven to school; but this can still be turned around as long as the school remains within walking distance.

I'm a transportation-independence-zealot who pushed my 12-year-old stepson on the city bus when he transferred to another public middle school (not the one to which we would be assigned; but the one to which most of his friends went) - but I wouldn't put a first-grader on the bus.

|12.1.05 @ 5:31PM|

>But some kids have to wait and figure out for themselves what interests and motivates them, and until they do, all your notebooks and collages and game-creating and elementary-school-style fluffy projects,

With respect to the argument that public schooling is intended to create worker drones, I'd like to point out that my workplace (I do soft money funded public policy research) employs these tactics as "workplace development" techniques. Allegedly I work at some sort of think tank, but just perusing the halls in my office suite would be cause enough to doubt that characterization -- at the moment, they're covered in decorations made of construction paper and colored markers, featuring platitudes about how to make this a better workplace. We had to make them at a recent staff meeting.

The Wine Commonsewer|12.1.05 @ 5:33PM|

One of the things that shocked me about education was enrolling my kids in a private, secular, non-religious, non-Montesorri school only to find out that it was more PC than the local prison school.

Sure there was lots of personal attention but truthfully now that my kids are in a high performing public school, they are doing better and since I'm already paying for it I'm saving $900.00 a month for TWO kids to go to private school. That's a thousand bucks less per year than the cost of educating ONE kid in Californicate's public schools.

The Wine Commonsewer|12.1.05 @ 5:36PM|

This is applicable here even though it comes from Ted's Wi-Fi article.....

Take schools (in Nu Awlins). Two and a half months after Katrina, 14 Catholic schools are up and running, but only one public school has reopened.

I rest my case.

M1EK|12.1.05 @ 5:39PM|

TWC,

Catholic schools aren't operating on the kind of profit motive that most voucher schools would. This could be both good _and_ bad. If your motivation in going to work is to serve God rather than put food on the table, I'd imagine it's going to be easier to get a school back up and running after a disaster.

|12.1.05 @ 5:42PM|

Vabs. Oh. My. God. And I thought those insipid fucking motivational posters that feature some sort of nature scene and a line or two of happy-talk drivel were bad.

|12.1.05 @ 5:45PM|

At the risk of totally outing myself to any co-workers that might read this site (highly unlikely), here is my favorite -- what one co-worker proposes to make this a better workplace is..."do more yoga."

No shit.

|12.1.05 @ 5:49PM|

Vabs- So when is the killing spree scheduled?

|12.1.05 @ 5:51PM|

My kids have attended both public and private schools (as did I). The only "metrics" that concerned me was wether or not they were performing up to their abilities, were reasonably happy and safe.

In the private schools you could join with other parents and make suggestions. Things didn't always change but the tone was always respectful (both ways) and explanations of policy were reasonable. I think that's because they had to "serve" us.
In the public school (an "elite" one at that) complaints fell on utterly deaf ears UNLESS the complainer had POLITICAL connections. Explanations of policy changes were simple; get lost. Explanations of most everything were pretty simple; get lost.
I think the difference is that the public school served political interests first and foremost.

I think its fascinating that the "barren by choice" crowd believes the only answer is a collective answer for primary and secondary education yet no one applies that same logic to private college educational choices. Why are people emancipated to enjoy some government subsidies of their education when they attain the age of 18? What changes? Gee, could it be the politics involved with new voters and the rich deals so many politicians get from private colleges when they leave politics? The speaking fees they get when they are in politics?

Give people freedom and forget the metric/equality/diversity crap. I only care for what's best for my child. I'd love for your child to do great too, but the path that's best for you and yours, I suggest, is one that only you and your child can determine.

M1EK|12.1.05 @ 5:53PM|

"Give people freedom and forget the metric/equality/diversity crap. I only care for what's best for my child. I'd love for your child to do great too, but the path that's best for you and yours, I suggest, is one that only you and your child can determine."

That's pretty much the Third World in a nutshell. The rich do well; the poor, well, you don't need an education to be a maid. Didn't want to grow up to be a maid? Well, you should have chosen richer parents.

|12.1.05 @ 5:54PM|

How to reform collective farms? Some extremists are talking about privatizing the farms. Phooey to that, I say! My taxes pay for the collective farms, we have one system and the consumers have to work together and with the powers that be to make it work.

If farming is turned over to the private sector, how will consumers be able to get bread? There are lots of consumers who simply don't care about what they eat; what will we do about such people if all the farms are private? What about children in these poor, nutritionally-deficient families?

M1EK|12.1.05 @ 5:59PM|

That analogy would work if we didn't have history that shows that poor kids in this country, without collective farms OR collective education, DID get fed, but quite often DIDN'T get educated.

|12.1.05 @ 6:01PM|

>So when is the killing spree scheduled?

Hmm. I've been trying to focus my attention on more productive schemes, like finding a totally different kind of job that will also permit me to pay my mortgage more easily than this one does. You've put a nasty little idea in my head, but for now I'll play the optimistic and assume that better solutions will be found?

Timothy|12.1.05 @ 6:06PM|

"he's a great kid, very smart, participates in class, but he just won't turn his homework. We don't know how to motivate him. Can you give us any suggestions?"

Yeah, I know the answer as I'm young enough to remember junior high and high school: ASSING INTERESTING NON-REPETITIVE THINGS YOU STUPID ASSHAT.

40 math problems that are all the same? Some dumb paper that's exactly the same as all the other papers written this year, save the subject? 35 stoichiometry problems? Boring, uneducational, hardly worth the effort. The problem likely isn't the kid, the problem is likely the goddamn subject matter.

|12.1.05 @ 6:12PM|

M1EK,

That's pretty much the Third World in a nutshell.

Can you name one or two of these Third World countries with governments committed to laissez-faire policies. I'd like to learn more about them.

M1EK|12.1.05 @ 6:19PM|

Russ,

Whatever the stated policy of the government, it seems to me that a number of countries have far less regulation and less (effective) taxation than the United States do, but none of them are in the First World, barring banking/tourist economies.

It has always been curious to me that this is the case, since it's Canon That We Tax Too Much And It's Killin' Us.

But anyways, that wasn't the question I was responding to. So, try again. Here's what I responded to:

"I only care for what's best for my child. I'd love for your child to do great too, but the path that's best for you and yours, I suggest, is one that only you and your child can determine."

|12.1.05 @ 6:30PM|

>40 math problems that are all the same?

I can remember crying over long division in the third grade. As if one problem isn't repetitive enough you have to assign 20 of 'em to torment me with on the weekend? Couldn't they have limited it to 5 or so?

It turned me right off of math, which didn't change until nearly a decade after I graduated from college and realized that math can be used to answer a lot of interesting, real world questions. Then I had a lot of catching up to do...never took calculus until my early 30s.

I can also remember the public school where I attended the first grade. They had the library divided into sections by grade. I would sit in the library and read books from the second grade section, but they wouldn't let me check them out because they said they were too hard for me and I couldn't understand them.

Another thing that drives me nuts about the all-structured crowd is the idea of year-round schooling. As others here have said, with universal preschool we risk producing generation after generation of people who never understand how to be on their own, appreciate solitude, follow a lark, or discover what interests and motivates them. Add in year-round schooling and it gets worse. Lord knows, besides the fact that summertime was the only time I got to experience what it was like to be safe from harassment by my "peers" for entire months at a stretch, it was also the only time I got to experience reading a stack of books from cover to cover for an entire week, spending the next week exploring the outdoors around our neighborhood, and yes, even spending days or weeks at a time vegged out in front of the television. All of which are worthwhile things to experience, in my opinion.

|12.1.05 @ 9:47PM|

Didn't J. S. Mill come up with the basic idea of vouchers in On Liberty about a century prior to Friedman?

M1EK|12.1.05 @ 9:48PM|

"I can also remember the public school where I attended the first grade. They had the library divided into sections by grade. I would sit in the library and read books from the second grade section, but they wouldn't let me check them out because they said they were too hard for me and I couldn't understand them."

Positively Dickensian. I, as well as everybody else I know, was able to check out whatever books we wanted. And we all went to public schools. Oooooo.

|12.2.05 @ 10:43AM|

So we should have a huge monopoly which sucks up unbelivably large amounts of tax dollars that could be used for better thought out social programs just so the poor get an "education"?

I have no problem with the poor getting an education, the smart poor will work out a way for their children to go to school, just look at all the immigrants who come here with nothing and then their kids become well off leaders in society.

My beef is throwing good money after bad worrying about the stupid poor who have been assimilated in the US for generations, and then still drop out as soon as possible, because they just don't care for book learning. Why shouild money be spent on forcing them to do something they don't want to do, when the money could be spent on teaching them trades or just paying them to stay home and watch TV and out of the way of more productive members of society?

|12.2.05 @ 11:11AM|

"Do others agree that compulsion is part of the problem?"

Compulsion is always immoral, so yes, it's part of the problem.
Compulsion also is part of the method of indoctrinating kids, and their parents, that The State has the right to run their lives for them.

Since it's illegal for kids to do anything useful for money (oh, the Horror!), the other purpose of State schools (not education) is to provide babysitting. It's pretty obvious when you think about how little most kids learn in 12 years of schooling (not education).

"Does anybody else believe that vouchers will just entrench the control that the state has over our children?"

Yup. Vouchers are a band-aid on a tumor, and just delay the proper solution.

M1EK|12.2.05 @ 11:13AM|

"I have no problem with the poor getting an education, the smart poor will work out a way for their children to go to school, just look at all the immigrants who come here with nothing and then their kids become well off leaders in society."

And they do so thanks to public education, which people like you want to get rid of. Good one!

|12.2.05 @ 1:38PM|

"And they do so thanks to public education, which people like you want to get rid of. Good one!"

Yes, but they would have paid for sending their kids to school, their children would have been educated if public schools did not exist.

You didn't respond to the point that we are throwing trillions of dollars away on people who do not really want to or have a motivation to learn. Just because you enjoyed your school years does not mean you should project those feelings onto others and force them to live the way you want to live.

If we weren't forced to educate everyone, then every single poor but hardworking student in the US could have a full scholarship to the school and university of their choice.

Perhaps school should be voluntary?

M1EK|12.2.05 @ 2:33PM|

"If we weren't forced to educate everyone, then every single poor but hardworking student in the US could have a full scholarship to the school and university of their choice."

This is an utter an absolute load of crap, since you used the word "hardworking", which to me, applies to fairly few students. So yes, if you want to say that we only need to educate 10% of the poor, then yes, we can probably pay for the scholarships. That doesn't do anything useful for us, of course, since the other 90% are going to be filling up our prisons.

|12.2.05 @ 4:42PM|

Dude, they're filling them up already. You think many Rhodes scholars are in cellblock d2?

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