TV host John Oliver is essentially a court jester for people who consider themselves political and cultural elites; the topics he addresses reflect their concerns. So when he does an extended take on homeschooling, you can assume that, after years of innovation and growth, DIY education is on the radar of the tut-tutting class. And when he accepts homeschooling as a potentially beneficial practice, but one that needs more oversight from the right people, you know anti-homeschoolers are in retreat, fighting a rearguard action to maintain a degree of control because it's too late to abolish a practice they dislike.
"By one estimate, there are now around 2 million children being homeschooled in this country, and parents can choose that for all sorts of reasons," the host allowed on the October 8 episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. "Maybe their kids have social or health problems, or disabilities that aren't being accommodated. Maybe they're families with legitimate fears about school safety, or who are in the military and move around a lot. And there's also a growing number of black parents opting to homeschool due to whitewashed curriculums and zero-tolerance policies in schools that disproportionately criminalize their kids at an early age. So, there are a lot of reasons to do it. And the fact is, for some kids, getting to be homeschooled can be transformative."
That's quite a shift from a few years ago when Harvard Law School's Elizabeth Bartholet penned a sniffy Arizona Law Review piece favoring a "presumptive ban" on homeschooling.
Oliver showed a brief clip of Victoria, a Detroit girl who described switching to homeschooling as "just like a kind of like a sunshine, like the clouds opening a little bit."
But then we get the cautionary note.
"The ceiling of how good homeschooling can be is admittedly very high," Oliver added. "But the floor of how bad it can get is basically nonexistent. Because to an extent you may not realize, in many parts of the country, homeschooling is essentially unregulated."
"Let's start with the fact there's a lot we don't know about homeschooled kids—from exactly how many there are, to what they're learning," he added ominously.
Who is this "we" who doesn't know how many homeschooled kids there are or what they're learning? Because I'm pretty sure those kids' parents have a handle on things. I don't know where John Oliver sends his kids to school, but that doesn't keep me up at night. Of course, I may not be part of "we."
"In most states, there is no oversight, and no evaluation by anyone of the academic program and of students' progress," Oliver further frets. To show that's bad, he points to a clip of Michael Donnelly of the Home School Legal Defense Association describing his kids dissecting specimens in the kitchen.
"Are kitchens the best lab for this kind of thing?" Oliver asks in horror.
Hard counter surfaces that are easy to clean—sounds pretty sensible. Would he prefer to use the living room coffee table? This is silly. My homeschooled son used the kitchen counter for dissection, too, as well as for chemistry and other science lessons. Lots of families do, as evidenced by an industry selling homeschoolers lab equipment and dissection specimens.
Oliver continues from there, though the discourse never rises above the level of some people I don't like are choosing homeschooling for reasons with which I disagree. He points to the religious nature of some publishers of crappy textbooks (as well as a tiny group of Nazi parents who self-published teaching materials because there was so little demand for Hitler-themed readers), but families can take them or leave them, unlike the spun texts assigned in public schools.
"The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation's deepest partisan divides," The New York Times' Dana Goldstein wrote in 2020 of history textbooks produced for state-level buyers in California and Texas, "customized to satisfy policymakers with different priorities."
Then, Oliver huffs: "In many states parents don't ultimately have to teach their kids anything at all."
Uh huh. A RAND Corporation survey of public school teachers finds that "since 2019–2020 it's become more common for math teachers to skip math content that's covered by their state's math standards." Test scores fell off a cliff in recent years, accelerated by public schools' failures during pandemic shutdowns ("a majority of states saw scores decline for fourth- and eighth-graders in mathematics and reading between 2019 and 2022," according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics). Many schools (we're looking at you, Los Angeles Unified School District) promote underperforming kids anyway, with a nothing-to-see-here attitude. Who isn't teaching "anything at all?"
That public schools can be terrible is obvious from Oliver's joking allusion to his own misery in school, as well as the clip of Victoria, who was so delighted to find "sunshine" in exiting government offerings for DIY education. Victoria is in good company.
"In the first full school year after the onset of the pandemic, K-12 public school enrollment in the U.S. fell by more than a million students," according to an Urban Institute report published in February of this year. "And these enrollment losses persisted through the 2021-22 school year." By contrast, private school enrollment increased by 4.3 percent and homeschool enrollment increased by 30 percent.
"To put this in perspective," adds the Urban Institute report, "in the 22 locations with homeschool data, K-12 public school enrollment fell by 710,513 students while private school enrollment increased by 102,847 students. The corresponding increase in homeschool enrollment was 184,047 students."
Who regulates education? Parents yanking kids from failing public schools and choosing alternatives, like homeschooling, have taken on that regulatory role. They clearly care more about the responsibility than "professional" educators neglecting standards and promoting kids they haven't taught.
The flood of families looking for something better is why John Oliver put on his concerned face over homeschooling. But the flood is also why he has to acknowledge the legitimate concerns of homeschoolers, because the ranks of DIY-educating families have grown beyond early adopters to include people of all sorts of backgrounds and motivations, including some who might watch his show.
That a court jester for self-appointed elites is reduced to fretting over worst-case scenarios among homeschoolers while glossing over public school failures shows just how far battle lines have shifted between families and control freaks who, just recently, pushed to ban the practice.
For an (admittedly aging until I update it) list of homeschooling resources, check here.
The post John Oliver Grudgingly Accepts Homeschooling appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A week removed from Hurricane Maria, only 41 percent of the island of Puerto Rico has potable water, 5 percent has power, and only 11 percent of cell towers are operational. Gas stations are experiencing fuel shortages and endless lines. Most schools have yet to reopen.
However difficult, the cause of all these problems is really quite simple: President Trump's racism.
"Trump's racism is costing lives," tweeted MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski on Saturday. "Trump's Puerto Rico potshots make his racism morally impossible to ignore," read the headline at Philly.com. Same for John Oliver, who called Trump's response to the hurricane "horribly racist."
For the liberal commentariat, Trump's skewering on Twitter of San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz after she held a press conference criticizing the federal response is evidence enough of this president's racism.
"Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico who are not able to get their workers to help," said Trump. "They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort."
For Oliver, this demonstrates that Trump thinks all Puerto Ricans are lazy and should be left to die.
But in the stampede to condemn Trump on the grounds of race, the liberal media have completely overlooked Cruz's actual complaint, and in doing so have given short shrift to actual causes of suffering on the island. Bureaucracy, not bigotry, is causing preventable deaths in her city.
"You are killing us with inefficiency and bureaucracy," said Cruz at that press conference that so irked Trump. To illustrate the point, the mayor held up huge binders of paperwork the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had requested in exchange for aid, saying, "You think that's enough paperwork for FEMA to get their ass moving?"
The burden of federal bureaucracy hangs over every disaster response effort. Federal aid and FEMA dispensation requires reams of documentation which, in turn, requires compliance and comparable paperwork from dozens of agencies and hundreds of labor, environmental, procurement, and anti-discrimination regulations.
As Reason has reported, the burden of regulatory compliance was an ever-present distraction after Hurricane Harvey. State officials were telling local communities after the disaster to "document, document, document." Private citizens were asked to submit pictures of their shattered homes to the state to expedite federal aid.
This also ignores the federal government's awful record as a first responder. One of the biggest issues facing Puerto Rico is its devastated highway system, which is preventing supplies and emergency responders from reaching people across the island.
The Department of Transportation (DOT) has given Puerto Rico a $40 million grant for emergency road repair. The responsibility for the work rests primarily with the Puerto Rico Department of Transportation and Public Works, and the island's various municipalities.
Or take FEMA, which has so far released about $20 million in public assistance. This money is primarily a form of reimbursement local government spending in response to Maria. But getting water, food, and gas to people will still be a primarily local effort, regardless of who is picking up the tab.
Whatever one thinks of the level of federal support for Puerto Rico, it is, by-and-large, not intended to bring immediate relief to storm victims, rather to help them pay the bills afterward. None of this is to say the federal response to the storm has been perfect (it hasn't) or that Trump's tweets about Cruz aren't petty and unhelpful (they are).
But to pin the cause of suffering in Puerto Rico on Donald Trump's purported racism willfully ignores the valid complaints local officials like Cruz are making about the limitations of federal disaster relief and misses much of what is actually happening on the ground there.
The post Is Trump's Racism the Cause of Puerto Rico's Suffering? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During one part of his blistering but ill-informed takedown of charter schools, HBO's John Oliver zeroed in on what he called a track record of financial abuses by charter school executives.
After detailing how the CEOs of charter schools in Florida and Pennsylvania had recently been convicted of embezzling school funds to enrich themselves, Oliver stressed that the two incidents were not outliers.
"In Philadelphia alone, at least 10 executives or top administrators had pled guilty in the last decade to charges like fraud, misuse of funds or obstruction of justice," he said.
The point—or at least of the points—Oliver was trying to make is one that charter school opponents have been pressing for years: Charter schools, even when run as nonprofits, are conduits for greedy capitalists to siphon dollars from the public education system into their own pockets. Oliver is right that there have been some crony capitalists and outright crooks who have been caught using the charter school system to line their own pockets, and those people absolutely deserve to be punished for the damage they've done to public finances and to students' lives.
As a matter of policy, though, we have to ask whether those abuses cancel out all the good charter schools have done for kids and for the public education system as a whole (Reason's Nick Gillespie has a detailed look at all that).
If you think it does, then you'd have to apply the same standard to the traditional public school system—something that few charter critics seem willing to do.
You'd have to consider, for example, that the decade's worth of crimes detailed in Oliver's piece on charter schools are roughly equal to what's happened just this year in the Detroit Public Schools system.
In March, federal prosecutors filed charges against 13 administrators in the Detroit Public Schools for taking bribes and kick-backs as part of a $2.7 million scam. For 13 years, a school supplies vending company run by Norman Shy was submitting fraudulent invoices to the DPS, causing the school system to pay for paper, pencils and other goods that were never delivered to the classrooms, prosecutors said. One of the people charged was Clara Flowers, a former principal who is now an assistant superintendent for the entire district.
Shy allegedly paid more than $900,000 in the form of checks, cash and prepaid gift cards to the 13 current and former principals who signed off on fraudulent invoices. While the scam was running, there were persistent stories in the Detroit media about schools running low on supplies and teachers being forced to dip into their own paychecks to cover basic classroom needs. That's a noble thing for any educator to do, but it would be nice if they weren't forced to do it because their principals were helping a vendor get rich off taxpayer money
"To enrich oneself at the expense of school children is bad enough, but to misapply public funds intended to educate kids in a district where overall needs are so deep, funding sources are so strained, and the need for better education is so crucial, is reprehensible and an insult to those educators working every day to make a better future for our children," said David P. Gelios, special agent in charge of the bure FBI's Detroit Division.
As Oliver might put it: "You can say 'that's an isolated incident,' but it isn't."
In June, the former director of grant development for the Detroit Public Schools pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges after she was caught pocketing more than $1.2 million that was supposed to be used for tutoring services. Over the course of seven years, Carolyn Starkey-Darden created multiple fake companies and submitted phony invoices that included false test scores, forged signatures and fake individual learning plans, the Detroit Free Press reported. She will be sentenced in October and could face up to 10 years in prison.
She wasn't even being all that creative about it. One of the fake businesses Starkey-Darden used to pay herself was called "Grants 'N Stuff," the paper reported.
Starkey-Darden's guilty plea was filed just days after former Detroit principal Kenyatta Wilbourn Snapp was sentenced to a year in prison for her role in a separate bribery and kick-back scheme. Snapp pleaded guilty to conspiring to take school funds and laundering money after getting caught taking 11 bribes totaling $58,000 as part of a scam allowing two contractors to get paid for services they never delivered.
None of this is meant to forgive the crimes of charter school executives or suggest that abusing the public purse (and the public trust when it comes to educating kids) is a less serious offense because it happens in other public schools too.
Still, charter schools can be shut down. They can be held accountable in ways that the mainstream public school system will never be. It's better for a student to be forced to leave a bad school because it's being forced to close its doors than for that student to remain in a bad school because it's part of an unassailable institution that will lumber onward no matter how poorly it is run or how many students it fails to educate.
Let's go back to Oliver one more time. He joked about the fact that Philly Magazine has warned parents they should "Google any schools you're looking at to make sure they weren't once unexpectedly shut down or run by a CEO who pleaded guilty to theft."
Sure, parents should check out any school where they might send their children. If that school has a bad history or has been run by a CEO who didn't put students first, parents would be wise to avoid it. That's part of the beauty of the charter school system: if schools are run like that, families can leave and seek a better education elsewhere.
That's exactly what they are doing. In Detroit, for example, more than 55 percent of students are now attending charter schools.
With the recent crime wave in the Detroit Public Schools system, more might make the decision to leave. To paraphrase Oliver, parents in Detroit might want to start googling their local public school to make sure it wasn't previously run by a principal who pleaded guilty to theft.
The post More Detroit Public School Principals Have Been Charged With Crimes in 2016 Than All the Charter School CEOs in John Oliver's Rant appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After taking on corruption and scandal at soccer's main governing body, FIFA, HBO's John Oliver has a new target for ridicule—sports stadiums.
Oliver highlighted the ridiculous amount of public money being paid by cities to billionaire sports owners to build new stadiums on Sunday's "Last Week Tonight"—noting that between 2000 and 2010, cities have paid over $12 billion for 51 new sports facilities.
Part of the reason stadiums are so expensive to build these days is due in part to the insane luxury features owners are adding. As Oliver remarks, stadium designs have gotten so opulent that they "look like they were designed by a coked-up Willy Wonka."
And Oliver isn't being facetious. Just look at the Miami Marlins new $639 million baseball stadium which boasts—among other amenities—an aquarium behind home plate.
As I've reported here earlier, cities rarely see the economic benefits and job growth promised by sports stadium proposals. So why do local governments continue to throw money at these projects? Reason recently sat down with Chapman University professor Joel Kotkin to dispel some of the popular myths of sports stadium projects and why cities continue to be suckers for them. You can watch the interview below which runs about five minutes.
The post John Oliver Thinks Public Money for Sports Stadiums Sucks Too appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Dear Good People of the U.S. who want to stop The Bad Things from Happening: Great! I, too, want to stop The Bad Things from happening. Most people do. But we have got to talk about this impulse to accomplish good things by simply making all the bad things into federal crimes. It's an easy-to-stumble-upon—aka lazy—solution that ultimately fails us all, even when the actions in question are undoubtedly unsavory.
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver is the latest to succumb to this regulatory red herring. In a lengthy segment yesterday, Oliver endorsed a new federal bill that aims to combat "revenge porn," the term du jour for any posting or sharing of sexually explicit images without the depicted's consent. (As University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks notes, the term "revenge porn" is imprecise because "while a number of cases do involve bitter exes whose express purpose is to harm or harass their former partners, many perpetrators don't know their victims at all. A more accurate term is non-consensual pornography, defined as the distribution of private, sexually explicit material without consent.") The not-yet-introduced legislation, called the "Intimate Privacy Protection Act," is a pet project of Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who says she'll bring the bill in the House within the next few weeks. It would make the posting or sharing of non-consensual pornography a federal crime.
Yet states can and have been introducing their own laws criminalizing "revenge porn," some of which even strike the right balance between protecting privacy and civil liberties. And private platforms, such as Twitter and Reddit, have also been taking steps to stem the flow non-consensual porn, with Google announcing last week that it would allow people to petition for such images' removal from search results. What is gained by bringing the heavy hand of federal prosecutors into this?
Victims can be just as well served by private or state efforts to thwart the spread of their images. And perpetrators can be rebuked just fine in state criminal or civil courts—without taking up space in our already woefully overcrowded federal prisons or wasting the resources of federal investigators. Let's leave the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to matters of actual homeland security and cross-state criminal enterprise, not chasing down 22-year-olds who text their girlfriends' photos to friends or the random Redditer who decided to download a porn pic that it turns out wasn't meant to be shared.
"The law would carve out exceptions for the 'bona fide public interest,'" Oliver assured us, joking that "if, say, a public figure like Anthony Weiner texted his penis around, we could all still enjoy that story."
But outside of "bona fide public interest" cases, publications and social-media platforms where users post non-consenual porn could be held criminally liable for those users posts—contra Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act.
Federal law currently grants Internet service providers and online platforms legal immunity for most content posted by third parties, with exceptions for child pornography, copyright infringements, and—as of last month—sex-trafficking ads. Though the specifics of Spier's bill are not yet available, it seems it would add yet another category of offense for which sites such as Twitter, Google, or Reason could be criminally charged should someone use the site for those ends.
"Frequently, almost inevitably, statutes that try to do this type of thing overreach," Matt Zimmerman, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told U.S. News about similar legislation Rep. Spier pushed last year. "The concern is that they're going to shrink the universe of speech that's available online," as Internet companies, fearing federal liability, become quick to remove any content about which someone complains.
Franks claims that a federal revenge porn law is needed "to signal society's acknowledgement and condemnation of this serious wrongdoing." But federal law has serious consequences, not just for criminals but for also in terms of economic costs, resource allocation, and civil liberties. It's far too significant to treat as some sort of political sermon or public service announcement.
The post John Oliver Wants to Make 'Revenge Porn' a Federal Crime. Why That's a Terrible Idea appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former Daily Show guest host John Oliver's funny news show, Last Week Tonight, debuted last night on HBO. Overall, I thought it was pretty good—smartly written, consistently amusing, with a good mix of targets. One of those targets was Cover Oregon, the Obamacare insurance exchange that the folks in the Beaver State tried to set up.
I say tried because last week it was confirmed they had failed completely: No one ever signed up online, and the state announced that it was giving up on the expensive tech project, which had been awarded hundreds of millions in federal grants, and joining the federal health exchange.
Here's the segment:
Only one minor complaint: The $248 million figure Oliver's bit provides for the state's federal exchange funding is low. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Oregon actually recieved a total of just more than $300 million in federal grants.
The post John Oliver's New Show Slams Oregon for Its Failed Health Exchange appeared first on Reason.com.
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