Reason Magazine - Topics > Education

Marion Barry for School Vouchers

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:20:00 EDT

Former Washington, D.C., mayor and current D.C. Council Member Marion Barry comes out in favor of school vouchers, provided the money does not come from the existing public school budget. That proviso relieves much of the competitive pressure that otherwise might encourage public schools to improve, but at least Barry acknowledges the desirability of choice and diversity in education:

I support this package [$74 million in federal money for public schools, charter schools, and private school scholarships] because it provides much-needed financial support to all D.C. schools and because it offers parents a choice without hurting public schools. That's a win-win situation. We must make sure that children in the District are given every chance to attend schools that work for them. To do anything else is wrong.

Is it too much to hope that, if voucher-equipped students leave D.C.'s public schools in droves, the reduced enrollment will one day lead to a lower budget? The Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson estimates that "DC public schools are spending about $24,600 per pupil this school year—roughly $10,000 more than the average for area private schools."

Teach Your Children Well...Or Their Parents Will Go To Hell Jail

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:38:00 EDT

Via the AP:

A man ordered by a judge to make sure his daughter hit the books has found himself in jail because she failed to earn a high school equivalency diploma.

Brian Gegner, of Fairfield, was sentenced last week to 180 days in jail for contributing to the unruliness or delinquency of a minor.
He was ordered months ago to make sure his 18-year-old daughter Brittany Gegner, who has a history of truancy, received her GED—something that hasn't happened yet.
Brittany Gegner, who said Monday that she plans to take a required GED test this month, said her father shouldn't be blamed for her failure because she has been living with her mother.
"It was my wrongdoing, not his," said Brittany Gegner, whose fiance and 18-month-old daughter also live at her mother's home in nearby Hamilton. "He shouldn't have to go to jail for something I did."
Her mother agrees.
"Brittany is almost 19 years old now and I think it's unfair to put her father in jail," said Shana Roach. "She's an adult now, and it's not right to rip an innocent man from his home."

More here.

Not sure what to make of this all, but I still think this is a great country and that mandatory education is wrong.

Galt's Gulch & Trust

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:12:00 EDT

NPR reports:

John Allison, CEO of banking giant BB&T, calls Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged "the best defense of capitalism ever written." He says that Rand changed his life, and he's working to ensure that the deceased author isn't left out of the nation's college curricula.
Since 2005, the BB&T Charitable Foundation has given 25 colleges and universities several million dollars to start programs devoted to the study of Rand's books and economic philosophy. In January, the company announced it was donating $1 million to Marshall University in West Virginia.
The money would establish a course dedicated to Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and help create the BB&T Center for the Advancement of American Capitalism on campus.

I'm not sure I see the problem, here. Hell, my alma mater had classes on pornography, the Beatles, and the music of Frank Zappa (note: I consider this a good thing). It would be one thing if BB&T were establishing an entire econ department staffed only with Objectivists. But an elective class on the virtues of capitalism that exposes students to Rand's ideas doesn't seem all that nefarious. Of course, some people disagree:

Rick Wilson, a sociology instructor at Marshall and head of the West Virginia Economic Justice Project, says that Rand's philosophy, objectivism, is based on the view that selfishness is the only moral value.
"[Objectivism] goes against the collective wisdom of the human race, I think, pretty much everywhere," says Wilson. "I think it's a curious interpretation of philanthropy to use corporate money to promote, really, an extreme philosophy."

I'm not sure when it became accepted logic that corporate philanthropies should only fund ideas and causes that are hostile to free markets. But that certainly seems to be the prevailing sentiment in the philanthropy world. And Rand's weaknesses aside, I'd say you could make a pretty good case that capitalism, the economic system that accepts and harnesses self-interest, has served humanity pretty darned well.

Jeff Taylor blogged about a similar Allison gift to UNC-Charlotte last March, and wrote about BB&T's lead-by-example capitalism in 2006.

It's Safe to Read Again at Indiana University

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:24:00 EDT

Remember Keith Sampson, the janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI) who was accused of racially harassing his co-workers by reading a scholarly book about the Ku Klux Klan? When I last discussed the case, IUPUI's Affirmative Action Office had backed off its initial charge—not because Sampson has a First Amendment right to read whatever books he wants at a state-run university but because the office could not determine exactly what he had been thinking while reading the book about the Klan. The implication was that if he ever read another book that a co-worker considered offensive, he could be investigated again and might be subject to disciplinary action if he displayed clearer signs of racial insensitivity than he did the first time around. But in a recent response to a letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), IUPUI Chancellor Charles Bantz suggests the university has seen the light:

I can candidly say that we regret this situation ever took place and that IUPUI takes this matter very seriously. IUPUI is committed to ensuring that its future approach to such matters is consistent with and affirms the long-standing commitment of this campus to the principles of freedom of expression, lifelong learning, and respect for the rights of all members of the IUPUI community. In the near future, IUPUI will be reexamining the campuswide affirmative action processes and procedures related to internal complaints.

This is probably as close to an apology as Sampson is going to get. FIRE notes that IUPUI's reconsideration of its harassment-by-reading theory came only after the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana repeatedly contacted the university on Sampson's behalf.

He 'Enjoyed His Time in the Birth Canal a Little Too Much'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:39:00 EDT

Playing off stories about preschoolers and first-graders facing sexual harassment charges under idiotic "zero tolerance" policies, Rogier van Bakel gives us a preview of the not-too-distant future.

Marxist Profs or Sensitive Students?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:16:00 EDT

Over at the LA Times' Dust Up, reason.tv interview subject and chief skeptic at The Skeptic Michael Shermer and The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's Greg Lukianoff are discussing academic freedom, student indoctrination, and the like. Two snippets:

Shermer: "...Unless they are openly teaching a course entitled, in effect, 'Why Liberals Should Rule the World,' professors have no business introducing their political bias to students. Their job is to teach the curriculum of their subject, not churn out a bunch of Marx-worshiping, Bush-hating, Che Guevara-loving, pinko graduates who will go out into the world woefully ignorant that most Americans think entirely differently from the way they do...."
Lukianoff: "...Is having an opinionated professor really the same as indoctrination? I have seen claims—often from conservative students—that students have a right not to be "harassed" by the left-leaning opinions of their professors. This drives me nuts because if there is one thing conservatives should not be doing, it is legitimizing the idea that merely being exposed to different points of view is the same thing as harassment. Harassment rationales are used to shut down people with dissenting opinions (often the socially conservative, the un-PC, or the merely unlucky) far too often...."

More here. They'll be kicking each other around each week.

reason on campus bias and more here.

Mother Superior State College Jumped the Gun Images*

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:11:00 EDT

Over at Inside Higher Ed, a publication that covers post-K-12 education issues with vim, vigor, and verve, Andy Guess reports on the case of Robert Crandall, a tenured prof at Lake Superior State College who has gotten in trouble for posting offensive content to his office door. LSSC's case, according to a lawyer representing the school, is that the prof has "acted in an unprofessional and insubordinate manner [and] his actions cannot be considered protected speech."

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), co-founded by reason contributors Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, is publicizing the case. Writes Guess:

The first complaints date back to 2005, and the professor, Richard Crandall, was ordered to remove the materials from his door in 2007 (he eventually complied). Items included a photo of Ronald Reagan, pictures mocking Hillary Clinton, a sign posting a "Notice of the Weekly Meeting of the White, Male, Heterosexual Faculty and Staff Association (WMHFSA)," and various cartoons about abortion, Islamic terrorism and other topics. One depicts two hooded women looking over a photo album. One says, "And that's my youngest son, Hakim. He'll be martyring in the fall." The other replies, "They blow up so fast."
The university argues that the postings contribute to a hostile environment and therefore do not fall under First Amendment protections, although such arguments have not fared well historically in the courts. No lawsuit has been filed, but in the past some professors whose cases have been publicized by FIRE have pursued legal action. The university did not respond to requests for comment.
FIRE and Crandall, who could not be reached for comment, point out that other professors at the university are able to post politically charged pictures and phrases on their doors without consequence, presumably because their perspective is liberal or leftist rather than conservative or right-wing.

More here.

Take a look at the images and I think there's a strong implicit case that Crandall is a tool. Some are funny (IMO), some are not, but if I were an undergrad, they'd definitely kind of freak my shit—as did any number of door and office postings by lefty profs back in the day. But general freakage of shit does not seem not to be the issue here, as it really does appear to be the specific content—right-wing, and heavy on the pro-gun, anti-abortion themes—that is cause for complaint.

FIRE has always made a consistent argument (and has defended scholars and the right and the left) that public universities, precisely because they are government-sponsored, are totally bound by the First Amendment in ways that private universities are not necessarily (yeah, yeah, I understand that the line between public and private is totally nebulous given various funding issues ranging from federal research grants to Pell grants, etc).

I agree with that argument, and think that Crandall and all profs should be allowed to put whatever they want on their doors. Indeed, the whole point of going to college may be to expose kids to hostile environments—or, rather, intellectual environments in which they are exposed to all sorts of perspectives and taught to think critically about every aspect of their lives.

And yet, given the quality of political discourse (right, left, center) on most campuses, I think I may also want to live in a world where students and professors only meet in open areas devoid of any individualized signage, sort of like where prisoners and visitors meet. Plexiglass dividing walls optional.

[*]: I apologize in advance for this title, which is every bit as tortured as the inmates of Abu Ghraib.

Is College Worth It?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:18:00 EDT

It's a well-circulated claim that a college degree adds about $1 million in lifetime earnings to the lucky B.A. recipient (I even used this in conversation over the weekend).

Now Charles Miller, head of the Dept. of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education says that figure is hyper-inflated:

Substituting some of his own assumptions for those used by the board - including six years of tuition costs (and hence two fewer years of work), private college tuition instead of in-state public tuition, etc. - Miller calculates his own college premium. "[P]roperly using the present value of the lifetime earnings, adjusted for the cost of going to college and the difference in the number of working years, and excluding those graduates with advanced degrees, calculated at the three percent discount rate used in the report," he wrote, "produces a lifetime earnings differential of only $279,893 for a bachelor's degree versus a high school degree!"
He writes: "With clearly questionable assumptions in the analysis traditionally used to prove that ‘education pays,' with the reality of continually increasing costs of college above average inflation, with weak income growth in general, and with the reality of a very narrow economic benefit to the individual with a college education, it is reasonable to conclude that a college degree is not as valuable as has been claimed."

More here, from the always interesting Inside Higher Ed. It's an interesting debate, with a fair amount of stuff riding on the truth.

The School Crotch Inspector

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who think it's perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

It also includes two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, who last fall ruled that the strip search did not violate Savana's Fourth Amendment rights. The full court, which recently heard oral arguments in the case, now has an opportunity to overturn that decision and vote against a legal environment in which schoolchildren are conditioned to believe government agents have the authority to subject people to invasive, humiliating searches on the slightest pretext.

Safford Middle School has a "zero tolerance" policy that prohibits possession of all drugs, including not just alcohol and illegal intoxicants but prescription medications and over-the-counter remedies, "except those for which permission to use in school has been granted." In October 2003, acting on a tip, Vice Principal Kerry Wilson found a few 400-milligram ibuprofen pills (each equivalent to two over-the-counter tablets) and one nonprescription naproxen tablet in the pockets of a student named Marissa, who claimed Savana was her source.

Savana, an honors student with no history of disciplinary trouble or drug problems, said she didn't know anything about the pills and agreed to a search of her backpack, which turned up nothing incriminating. Wilson nevertheless instructed a female secretary to strip-search Savana under the school nurse's supervision, without even bothering to contact the girl's mother.

The secretary had Savana take off all her clothing except her underwear. Then she told her to "pull her bra out and to the side and shake it, exposing her breasts," and "pull her underwear out at the crotch and shake it, exposing her pelvic area." Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between drug warriors and child molesters.

"I was embarrassed and scared," Savana said in an affidavit, "but felt I would be in more trouble if I did not do what they asked. I held my head down so they could not see I was about to cry." She called it "the most humiliating experience I have ever had." Later, she recalled, the principal, Robert Beeman, said "he did not think the strip search was a big deal because they did not find anything."

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that a public school official's search of a student is constitutional if it is "justified at its inception" and "reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place." This search was neither.

When Wilson ordered the search, the only evidence that Savana had violated school policy was the uncorroborated accusation from Marissa, who was in trouble herself and eager to shift the blame. Even Marissa (who had pills in her pockets, not her underwear) did not claim that Savana currently possessed any pills, let alone that she had hidden them under her clothes.

Savana, who was closely supervised after Wilson approached her, did not have an opportunity to stash contraband. As the American Civil Liberties Union puts it, "There was no reason to suspect that a thirteen-year-old honor-roll student with a clean disciplinary record had adopted drug-smuggling practices associated with international narcotrafficking, or to suppose that other middle-school students would willingly consume ibuprofen that was stored in another student's crotch."

The invasiveness of the search also has to be weighed against the evil it was aimed at preventing. "Remember," the school district's lawyer recently told ABC News by way of justification, "this was prescription-strength ibuprofen." It's a good thing the school took swift action, before anyone got unauthorized relief from menstrual cramps.

© Copyright 2008 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

Why Our Children Isn't Learning

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 10:39:00 EDT

Because their educators waste time on crap like this:

To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure.
Instead of calling these schools "underperforming," the Board of Education is considering labeling them as "Commonwealth priority," to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale.
Schools in the direst straits, now known as "chronically underperforming," would get the more urgent but still vague label of "priority one."
The board has spent parts of more than three meetings in recent months debating the linguistic merits and tone set by the terms after a handful of superintendents from across the state complained that the label underperforming unfairly casts blame on educators, hinders the recruitment of talented teachers, and erodes students' self-esteem.
[...]
At a December meeting on how to improve struggling schools in Holyoke, Lawrence, and Springfield, superintendents implored members not to stick them with a label of "chronically underperforming."
"For our teachers, it's a blow," said Wilfredo Laboy, Lawrence superintendent. "It demoralizes staff completely."
Joseph Burke, Springfield superintendent, said that while he is not crazy about any label, he would prefer "priority one," because "It sounds nicer."

In October 2006, John Stossel walked reason readers through the Byzantine process of firing an incompetent public school teacher in New York.

Oprah, Marilyn, Break Through Public-School Industrial Complex

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:09:00 EDT

This escaped my attention at the time, but through the L.A. Times' Tim Cavanaugh-tastic Opinion L.A. blog I see that USA Today recently asked high schoolers across these 50 United States to name the "most famous" non-president Americans since the time of the original illegal immigrant, and here's what they came up with:

1. Martin Luther King
2. Rosa Parks
3. Harriet Tubman
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. Amelia Earhardt
7. Oprah Winfrey
8. Marilyn Monroe
9. Thomas Edison
10. Albert Einstein

Sounds like the exact list I would have made in 5th grade, if you subbed out Parks/Oprah/Marilyn with maybe Pete Rose, Farrah Fawcett and Peter Frampton. Harriet Tubman in particular was someone I idolized at age 9 (due to Runaway Slave being both required reading and totally awesome ... what 9-year-old wouldn't dig an Underground Railroad?), and then never heard about again in the three decades since. Ditto for Susan B. Anthony, minus actually knowing anything about her in the first place.

Though the list probably says far more about the public school system than anything else, it was largely spun as what survey-leader Sam Wineburg of Stanford called "a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story." My favorite part of the USA Today explainer:

"There's a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights," he says.
Yes, but how does he explain No. 7: Oprah Winfrey?
She has "a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin," Wineburg says.

Who would you have included at 17?

"Someone Has To Start Wondering What the F Is Going On."

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EST

Ed Burns is co-creator of HBO's critically acclaimed series The Wire, now concluding its fifth and final season. Burns is also the co-producer of Generation Kill, a forthcoming HBO miniseries based on journalist Evan Wright's book about the first stages of the war in Iraq. Burns is also a Vietnam veteran, a 20-year veteran of the Baltimore police force, and a teacher in the city’s public schools. He’s an outspoken critic of the drug war, the growth of prisons, and the structure, incentives, and organization of police departments.

reason Senior Editor Radley Balko recently interviewed Burns via telephone. Responses should be sent to letters@reason.com.

reason: This season of The Wire focuses pretty heavily on the media. What do you think the media does well when it comes to covering criminal justice issues, and what do you think it does poorly?

Ed Burns: I think a lot depends on who’s doing it. In specific cases, you can do extremely well as a reporter. My problem is more with the basic philosophy of how it’s done. It’s like a laser beam. They cover a specific aspect, or a specific trial, or a specific murder in a way that simplifies things, that makes them very stereotypical. It only takes one sentence to name the victim of a crime and the street where the crime took place. So they’re really only reporting something that we know is going to happen—because the conditions are there to make it happen—but they doesn’t go beyond that. There’s no context in crime reporting. That’s the problem.

reason: Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer has said that the media is at its absolute worst when covering the drug war. Do you agree with him, and if so, why do you think that it is?

Burns: Take just the term “war on drugs.” I mean, they’re not warring on drugs. They’re warring on drug addicts and the users and the small-time dealers. They’re warring on neighborhoods. They’re warring on people who can’t stand up to them. They’re not warring on major dealers.

You can follow it in any city, I don’t care how small it is or how big it is. If the paper is pretty avid about covering who’s getting locked up, you’ll notice that they’re not getting the big guys. They’re not getting the big stakeholders.

I think their whole approach is almost as if they were trying to separate us, trying to separate the classes by saying, “Look what’s happened down there. Look at these people down there, these people and what they’re doing.”

When I was teaching, you’d have a kid in, say, his junior year of high school. And you’d give him a list of things he could possibly do when he gets out. He could be a doctor, lawyer, all this kind of stuff. We’d make one of the options “drug addict,” and there are kids who always check it off.

The media reports as if these kids have all of these options, and they consciously make this decision to become a drug addict, and to risk the consequences of going up to the corner and getting themselves killed. That decision was made for him long before that kid got to be in the 11th grade. A lot of guys don’t even get that far.

This idea that there are lots of options for these kids and they choose a life on the corner, that’s too simplistic. But it’s the way these things get covered.

reason: We interviewed your co-producer David Simon just before The Wire’s fourth season. He said that though The Wire may be cynical about institutions, it treats its characters with a lot of affection. But the last two seasons seem to have gotten even more cynical. Many of the characters who show promise seem to either succumb to character flaws, or actually get punished for doing the right thing. Are viewers to take anything away from The Wire other than that our major institutions are failing, and there’s little reason for hope?

Burns: Well, I don’t think there’s much reason for hope if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, even though you know it’ll never work. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that if you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle in the opposite direction really doesn’t help. Basically that’s what we’ve done, we’ve gotten on entirely the wrong train, and we keep sprinting down the aisle in the other direction, trying to pretend that if we run fast enough, we can get it together and turn things around. We’re losing more than we’re winning, and there’s no reason for it.

I mean, if you go into West Baltimore, or East Baltimore, or any of these cities in the ghettos and you pick up a stone and you throw it, you’re probably going to hit a nonprofit. They’re all over the place. They aren’t working, because again we’re all on the same, wrong train. The nonprofits are fragmented. The whole thing is fragmented. It just doesn’t work.

So no. I don’t think we’re being cynical. I think we’re being factual. We’ve been fighting the drug war for 30 years. Thirty years of failure. But there’s some reason that we persist in this. What is it? We never explore why that is. But you just can’t spend this much money and get these few results and continue on like this. Someone has to start wondering what the fuck is going on.

reason: Critics have said the city of Baltimore is really the central character in the The Wire. Recently, we’ve seen some interesting developments in violent crime statistics. Large cities like New York and Los Angeles have continued with improvements that started in the 1990s, but smaller and medium-size cities like Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis seem to be getting bloodier. Do you have any theories as to why that might be?

Burns: Yeah, sure, absolutely. I think New York’s murder rate is under 500 this year in 2007 and that’s out of a population of 8 million people. Baltimore’s murder rate was somewhere around 282 for a population of around 600,000 people. So we’re very close to New York just in raw numbers. The reason is that New York has an economy. There’s a vitality there. There are things happening. People have jobs.

In places like Baltimore, Detroit, and Cincinnati, the jobs that were there are gone. The manufacturing-based jobs are gone, and without that kind of job, it’s very, very difficult to jumpstart the economy. There’s no prospect for Baltimore having jobs in the near future. If you look at Baltimore now, what you’re seeing is a very decayed inner core. The east side of the city is being bought up by Johns Hopkins [the university and hospital]. They’re building a biotech park which is going to employ 6,000 people, but of those 6,000 people, you’ll be lucky to get three people who were originally from those neighborhoods. They just aren't qualified.

reason: You've said that too many narcotics police today have developed a gung-ho, cowboy mentality. You traced this trend back to the 1972 movie The French Connection. Could you elaborate?

Burns: Well, it’s just dumb. The Godfather, or The French Connection, which came out in the early '70s, those movies set the stage for both sides of the drug war. In The French Connection, [Detective] Popeye Doyle had this very cynical, harsh, rough, law-breaking type of drug style that sort of set the tone in how street narcotics guys work. Very flippant. What the movie didn’t pick up, and what you didn’t see, is all the intense surveillance and hard work that would go into a drug bust back then. But they put out the idea of this guy who cracks heads, especially in that scene they went and they shook the bar down. That became iconic. And that is the way the cops were afterward. I mean, you’d see white cops in black neighborhoods looking like Serpico, and they’re not undercover. It was just this mindset that took over of how you’re supposed to dress and act and the way you’re supposed to be.

The Godfather had a similar effect on the other side. It basically taught these emerging heroin gangs how to do business, how you set up your structure, with the code and the organization, the way you should have a boss, under-bosses—you know, capos. It got black, inner-city heroin dealers into the same mindset.

reason: How common do you think that is—drug dealers taking tips from the entertainment world? I’ve actually read that some dealers actually get advice from The Wire, particularly when it comes to communication systems they can use to evade police surveillance.

Burns: Well, if they’re looking at what we’re telling them, they won’t be learning much, because the technology has been out there. The Marlo Stanfields of today—those types of guys who I think of as mid-level drug dealers—there are just so many of them. They’re like the salmon going up the river. There’s really no way for law enforcement to stop all of these guys. There’s just too many of them. So the ones who take a modicum of precautions, the ones who are smart enough to stay low key, they’re completely under the radar screen, because it would just take too much work to even figure out who these guys are, and how to catch them. Only the really, really careless ones get caught.

reason: What effect do you think shows like Cops and Dallas SWAT have on police culture and police attitudes?

Burns: I can’t answer that question. I don’t watch any television.

reason: What’s your feeling on the militarization of domestic police departments, particularly as it relates to the drug war?

Burns: I think this whole thing was driven by the concept of numbers. You can quantify numbers, so if you’re in a war and you’re racking up numbers—numbers being arrests—it sets that military tone. Sort of like the way we’ve historically measured the success of wars in terms of casualties. The police departments that work in these hard neighborhoods are basically armies of occupation. Their job is to keep these people suppressed.

In Baltimore two years ago, they locked up 115,000 people from a population of 600,000. Now, let’s assume that they didn’t lock up anybody under the age of 8 or over the age of 70. They didn’t lock up that many white middle class people. That’s an awful lot of people from one particular group getting put behind bars. And many times, they’re getting locked up for things like sitting on the stoop drinking a beer, pissing in the alley, or just jaywalking in the street.

reason: The old “broken windows” theory, right?

Burns: [Laughs] Yeah. James Q. Wilson's trick. It doesn’t work. In fact, what it does do is alienate the police department from the community. So you’re an army of occupation, and because you’ve alienated the community, and you’re not getting any information. That’s a bad situation.

It’s the same thing they discovered in Iraq, oddly enough. Once they got away from the idea of suppression, they started getting much more information from Iraqis. The soldiers and Marines in Iraq basically use many of the techniques developed by law enforcement. They do the same type of searches. They gather the same type of information. They collate it the same way. They use cell phone data. They’re doing everything that law enforcement normally does. But they’re only successful when they’re connected with the people. In Baltimore, they’re not connected to the people because they’ve alienated everyone in the neighborhood.

So when you need to know something, when you need information, where do you go?

reason: What do you make of the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, the street campaign that discourages people from cooperating with police, which seems to have started in Baltimore?

Burns: Well, again, it’s something that’s incidental. It’s a symptom. If the police were connected, if the police were actively involved with the people in the neighborhood, the amount of information they would be getting would be so great that the whole idea of snitching wouldn’t be important. When I was a cop, having informants was a rare thing. They were looked down upon. I had sometimes as many as 50 guys working for me. I didn’t have to go out on the street. I could sit by the phone and just wait for the information to come. But you got that by being decent to people, working with them, helping them out on their little charges, stuff like that. That’s a lot of work and a lot of money comes out of your pocket to keep them happy and cooperative, but the amount of information you get back is profound.

Cops aren’t taught to do that anymore because today it’s all about numbers. You can get a number by just going up on the corner and grabbing somebody and getting a bag off of him. That’s the easy thing. If taking a guy in for drinking a beer on the street is a “1,” and catching the kingpin is a “1,” well, it takes two minutes to catch the guy with the beer can. It could take you two years to catch the kingpin. If numbers is all the department cares about, then the guy who pursues the kingpin is wasting his time.

And it is all about numbers. It’s how they talk, how they rate themselves. The fact that the murder rate in Baltimore stays constantly above the norm would be seem to be an indication that maybe they should try something different. But they’re bankrupt. They don’t have any idea what they need to do because they’re separated from the people. They’re not of the people. You’re policing as an army of occupation, not as police in the community. And that just doesn’t work.

reason: David Simon once wrote that you are “the living manifestation of lost wars,” since you were a soldier in Vietnam, a cop fighting the drug war, and a teacher in the public school system. Do you agree those three wars were or have been lost? Are there any institutional similarities you’ve observed that contributed to those three failures?

Burns: Well, we definitely lost Vietnam. And we lost Iraq. And we’ll lose any war where we allow an insurgency to exist. As for the war on drugs, I don’t think we’ll ever recover from the mindset we’ve gotten into to fight it. The educational system is an absolute and total disaster. And that of course is fueling the drug war, because there are so many kids who have no alternative but to spend their time on the corners.

The failure is institutional because no one sets out to lose these wars. This is dangerous stuff, self-defeating stuff. Education has no relevance. It doesn’t mean anything to these kids because they can’t connect to it. They spend those eight years or nine years in school because they have to. Of course, they have to learn something. And what they learn is how to sit quietly in a corner and make the school become a kind of training ground for the corners. The administration and the teachers basically become surrogate cops. And the kids play through these fantasies with the stand-in “cops” until they’ve tested their mettle enough to go up on the corners and try it with the real guys.

We’ve had 20, 30 years of this stuff, and 20, 30 years of spending billions of dollars on failed systems. And if you go to one of the private schools and see these kids in action and then go to an inner city public school, you can see the chasm. There’s separation even in the way of being, in the way they think, in how they operate. It’s profound, but it’s nothing new. We’ve been doing this for a long time.

reason: What reforms do you think are necessary? What can policy makers do to make public schools more effective?

Burns: Five years ago I couldn’t have given you an answer to that question. But I’ve learned about a program right now in Harlem. It’s been around for 12 years now. It’s called the Harlem Children’s Zone. The basic philosophy is so logical and so obvious. What works in the middle class is that you have input, the healthy positive input into an infant every day of that child’s life, as an infant and as a young child. Somebody’s always there. That’s how we raise our kids, and the success rate is very, very high. There are some failures in the middle class and the upper middle class, but the success rate is high.

That’s what they do in Harlem in the Children’s Zone—with about 35,000 kids. From birth, someone is with that kid until he gets out of college. They’re normal kids—not geniuses or anything—but they will be able to break the cycle of poverty and of drugs in those neighborhoods because those kids are not focused on drugs and poverty. They’re focused on the positive aspects that come from traditionally raising kids where you expect things from them. You tell them how good they are, you boost their egos, and you light the fires under them. That’s how you do it. That’s how it’s done in most middle class homes. I mean, that’s how simple it is. In Harlem, it cost them $4,500 a child.

And in talking with Geoff Canada, who runs the program up there, they’ve had 2,200 different groups—around 2,200 groups that have come to see their program. People who come to watch are impressed and want to go back to other states, to other countries, with the hope of implementing the program. Yet there isn’t another Children’s Zone that I know of anywhere in the country.

reason: Is that from a lack of funding?

Burns: From what Geoff surmises, it’s more about turf. If I come into your turf and let’s say you’re running a rehab center, or you’re running a day care program or whatever, that’s your little fiefdom, you know what I mean? That’s your little piece of the pie. You’re not going to give that up easily. You’re going to fight anything that tries to change that. You don’t want to be beholden to some bigger process, where you’ll then have to belong to something bigger and show results. No one wants to do that because they’re already not showing the kind of results that these types of processes require.

Maybe you’re showing anecdotal results. You know, “I saved this kid but I lost those 20 others.” These kinds of little empires are all over the place, and unfortunately, they have the ears of the politicians. It’s something where you have to almost come in and cut the Gordian knot and just do it. It makes absolute sense, but of course, we’re not focused on this, so we’re focused basically on surviving and shorter-term goals.

reason: You just finished shooting an HBO miniseries based on Generation Kill, Evan Wright’s book on the early stages of the Iraq War. You said earlier you believe Iraq is going to be a failure just as Vietnam was. Did you draw on your experiences in Vietnam at all in that project? Do you see many parallels between the two wars?

Burns: Just knowing the military was a big asset for me in helping to shape the series. The thing about Iraq is that it is the same scenario as Vietnam. There’s an insurgency that’s taken hold in the population, and once that happens, you might as well leave. There’s nothing you can do. And Iraq is getting ready to explode on us. Actually, it’s already exploded on us, but it’s going to continue to explode on us and we’re going to eventually be forced out. Or we’ll retire to these super bases and just try to drain the country of its oil. But we will never win the hearts and minds of those people. Fundamentally that was what we set out to do, to bring democracy to that country.

The same thing happened in Vietnam. These insurgencies are national movements. These people don’t want us in their country. And once that happens, once that mindset’s there, you know you’re in trouble. What we’re doing now is paying the Sunnis not to kill us. That only lasts for so long.

reason: How would you describe your personal politics?

Burns: Liberal. Liberal to radical. I’m pretty fed up with what’s going on.

reason: Is there any concrete policy you can think of that would lead to the more community oriented style of policing you’ve described?

Burns: You would have to change the nature of the institution. You’d have to stop making it a numbers game. Now, how do you do that with people who've been inculcated with this idea that it’s all about numbers? These guys have got computers, they've got charts, they’ve got all this kind of stuff, and it all revolves around locking people up. Clearly, that’s not the way to go. But it's how they sell themselves to politicians, and how they sell themselves to these community relation groups. This stuff is about locking people up.

The police should be focused on the most serious crimes, and in Baltimore the most serious crimes are murder, rape, and robbery. So you try to diffuse the other stuff, but you have to start putting your resources into those. Because if a person kills someone in the neighborhood, the neighborhood knows who did it. If the police don’t catch that person, and that guy’s walking around having beaten a murder, all the police credibility goes out the window.

It’s the same thing if you go up on the corner and you roust an addict while the guy sitting across from the addict has a gun. Everybody in the neighborhood knows he’s got the gun because he’s the bodyguard. And you don’t grab him. The people are thinking, well, maybe the dude is paying the police off. Why else would they grab the harmless addict but not the guy with the gun? Again, the problem is that the police are operating without information, and playing to the numbers. If I’m locking you up for petty stuff, you’re not going to be telling me shit. If I’m locking you up two and three times a month, you’re especially not going to tell me anything.

So how do you change all of this? You change the numbers game. You require police to reconnect with the people, and you start focusing everybody on the major crimes, the ones that make living very, very difficult—murder, rape, and robbery.

Radley Balko is a senior editor for reason.

Hey Teacher! Don't Leave Those Kids at Home.

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:39:00 EST

California's 166,000 homeschoolers woke up last Friday to discover they were leading a life of crime:

"Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children," wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in a Feb. 28 opinion signed by the two other members of the district court.

California's home school policy was blurry and essentially unwritten until now, since the law simply states that all school age kids must attend a full time private or public school, or have a tutor with an formal teaching degree. Homeschoolers filed a little paperwork with the state education department, sometimes dealt with the local school district, and were mostly left to their own devices.

No one's going to wind up in the hoosegow for at home Bible study until after an appeal to the state supreme court is complete, but homeschoolers are, understandably, freaking out.

Naturally, teachers unions love it:

Teachers union officials will also be closely monitoring the appeal. A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said he agrees with the ruling.

"What's best for a child is to be taught by a credentialed teacher," he said.

The second in this week's "we don't need no education" series of blog posts.

Are Guns on Campus Uniquely Dangerous?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:11:00 EST

Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a group that formed in the wake of last year's Virginia Tech massacre, has attracted new support following last month's shootings at Northern Illinois University, which once again revealed the limitations of campus security measures. On Wednesday The New York Times reported on the debate over an Arizona bill that would allow concealed carry on campus. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, at least 12 other states are considering similar legislation. Utah is the only state that already allows guns on campus.

As I said after the Virginia Tech murders, I am sympathetic to the idea that students and faculty members who are licensed to carry guns should be allowed to carry them on campus. "Gun-free zones" clearly do not protect people from gun-wielding maniacs (or ordinary criminals or scary ex-boyfriends) and may well attract them to places where they know their victims will be unarmed. Guns in the right hands can deter attacks or at least cut them short.

The downside of letting people carry weapons on campus is the same as the downside of letting them carry weapons anywhere else: Everyday arguments might escalate into deadly violence, accidents might happen, police (assuming they ever arrived in time) might mistake a law-abiding gun owner for an attacker, drunken gun owners could start whooping it up by wildly firing shots into the air, etc. These are the same arguments that gun controllers deployed in opposing the liberalization of concealed carry laws across the country, and the nightmare scenarios never materialized, even though 39 states now have nondiscretionary permit policies. On the whole, permit holders turned out to be remarkably well-behaved, committing crimes at a lower rate than the general population and rarely doing anything bad enough to lose their permits.

Instead of an increase in violence, adoption of Florida-style concealed carry policies has been followed by a decline in violence. The extent to which that decline can be attributed to more guns in the hands of law-abiding people in public places remains a matter of much controversy. But one thing seems pretty clear: The fears stoked by opponents of concealed carry liberalization were unjustified. Are there good reasons to think their dark predictions about guns on campus will be any more accurate?

[Thanks to KD Sim for the Inquirer link.]

Hey Kids! Leaves That Teacher Alone!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 10:26:00 EST

Who hasn't had a truly awful teacher? My worst teachers were often burnouts, the kind of people who probably started out bright eyed and bushy-tailed, but had gradually been reduced to sleepwalking through their 30-year-old lesson plans waiting for retirement.

Nowadays, American kids have a variety of sites available where they can rate their teachers and warn incoming students to stay away from the lemons.

Not so in France, where a court ruled Monday that rating teachers online was a breach of privacy and an "incitement to public disorder."

"We are totally satisfied by this ruling," said Francis Berguin, the head of the SNES teachers' union. "It is not up to pupils to mark their own teachers and certainly not on a commercial Web site," he told LCI news channel.

While some of the ratings are bound to be motivated by revenge for bad grades or perceived slights--who wouldn't welcome the chance to stick it to harsh graders?--the lawsuit wasn't concerned with accuracy. The union simply decided that minor inconvenience or possible embarrassment for teachers was unacceptable and required restrictions on student speech and commercial enterprise.

The unions may have won for now, but they're fighting a losing battle. "The ranking and evaluation of professionals on the Web is a fundamental principle and a primary motor of the Internet around the world," [Stephane Cola, who co-founded the site] told reporters after the verdict. He's right.

More reason on the havoc caused by teacher's unions here and here. John Stossel on how to fire an incompetent teacher here.

Strip for the Principal

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:00:00 EST

This month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is scheduled to rehear a case involving an Arizona eighth-grader who was strip-searched by school administrators enforcing a "zero tolerance" drug policy. The ACLU, which today filed a brief on the student's behalf, describes the search:

Savana Redding, an eighth grade honor roll student at Safford Middle School in Tucson, Arizona, was pulled from class on October 8, 2003 by the school's vice principal, Kerry Wilson. Earlier that day, Wilson had discovered [drugs] in the possession of Redding's classmate....Under questioning and faced with punishment, the classmate claimed that Redding, who had no history of disciplinary problems or substance abuse, had given her the [drugs].
After escorting Redding to his office, Wilson presented Redding with the [drugs] and informed her of her classmate's accusations. Redding said she had never seen the [drugs] before and agreed to a search of her possessions, wanting to prove she had nothing to hide. Joined by a female school administrative assistant, Wilson searched Redding's backpack and found nothing. Instructed by Wilson, the administrative assistant then took Redding to the school nurse's office in order to perform a strip search.
In the school nurse's office, Redding was ordered to strip to her underwear. She was then commanded to pull her bra out and to the side, exposing her breasts, and to pull her underwear out at the crotch, exposing her pelvic area. The strip search failed to uncover any [drugs].
"I was embarrassed and scared, but felt I would be in more trouble if I did not do what they asked," said Redding in a sworn affidavit following the incident. "The strip search was the most humiliating experience I have ever had."

The punch line: The drugs in question were ibuoprofen pills—prescription-strength, 400-milligram pills (equivalent to a couple over-the-counter Advil caplets), but nothing anyone would or could use to get high. Then again, it's much easier to overdose on ibuprofen than on marijuana, so maybe the administrators have their priorities right.

A three-judge 9th Circuit panel did not go quite that far, but last year it did say Redding's Fourth Amendment rights were not violated by the search. The judges ruled that the vice principal had "reasonable grounds" to believe the search would discover evidence that Redding had violated the school's ban on possession of prescription drugs. They also concluded that the search was not excessively intrusive. On March 24 the full court will hear arguments urging it to reconsider.

Obama: The More Things Change...

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:06:00 EST

D.C. Examiner columnist Melanie Scarborough goes to the man's website to figure out his plans for America. Some high-spendin' samples:

» “Obama will make college affordable for all Americans.”
» “Obama will quadruple Early Head Start and increase Head Start funding. Obama will also provide affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.
» “Obama will double funding for after-school programs.
» “Obama will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society.
» “Obama will create a fund to help people refinance their mortgages and provide comprehensive supports to innocent homeowners.
» “Obama will create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund to develop affordable housing in mixed-income neighborhoods.
» “Obama will create 20 Promise Neighborhoods in areas that have high levels of poverty and crime and low levels of student academic achievement … which provide a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth violence prevention efforts and after-school activities, to an entire neighborhood from birth to college.
» “He will provide at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, and ensure that Iraqis inside their own country can find a safe haven.
» “Obama will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion.”

......Obama plans to meddle in minutiae, such as radio programming in Topeka (“An Obama presidency will promote greater coverage of local issues and better responsiveness by broadcasters to the communities they serve”)...

Legacies of Injustice

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

College-bound high school students do not always lose their chastity before graduation, but they certainly lose their innocence. Nearly every senior who has gone through the admissions mill can recount stories of peers with outstanding academic records—class valedictorians with stellar SATs and perfect GPAs—who were passed over by top colleges while others with far more modest credentials got the nod. The New York Times reports that Harvard turned down 1,100 applicants with perfect 800s on the math SAT this year. Yale rejected several with perfect 2400s on the three-part SAT exam. Princeton said no to thousands with 4.0 GPAs.

To many frustrated parents, one word de-scribes the admissions process at America’s elite universities: arbitrary. But that’s not the word admissions officials use, as I discovered two summers ago when I toured a dozen or so East Coast campuses with my son, a high school junior at the time. Asked what kind of grades and scores made kids competitive for their schools, officials in university after university insisted, as if reading off the same memo, that the review process was “holistic,” “comprehensive,” or “individualized.” Grades, we were repeatedly told, “are only one among many factors we consider.”

Another such factor is race. Nearly every selective college, public and private, gives a sizable edge to underrepresented minorities. Before the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the University of Michigan’s undergraduate admissions criteria in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), the school relied on a complicated rating system that awarded points for several personal and academic factors, including skin color. Black and Hispanic candidates automatically got 20 points. A great essay counted for only one point; a perfect SAT score, a mere 12.

But as Justice Clarence Thomas observed in his dissent in a companion case, race is not the only factor that distorts college admission decisions. “The entire [college admission] process is poisoned by numerous exceptions to ‘merit,’ ” he noted.

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Golden exposes those other exceptions in his 2006 book The Price of Admission. Golden shows that elite schools routinely hand preferences to athletes; to the children of faculty, celebrities, and politicians; to “development cases” whose fabulously wealthy parents offer hefty donations up front; and, above all, to the offspring of alumni. Universities expect the parents of these “legacy” candidates to contribute to their coffers after their children are admitted.

Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, told Golden that at one Ivy League school only 40 percent of the seats are open to candidates competing on pure educational merit. According to a 2005 study by the Princeton sociologists Tom Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, in 1997 nearly two-thirds of all these non-race-based preferences at elite universities benefited whites, even though whites comprised less than half of all applicants that year.

We have a vigorous national movement to eradicate racial or minority preferences, at least in public universities. In 2006 Michigan became the third state in the country after California and Washington to approve a ballot measure imposing a constitutional ban on the use of race in admissions at state-run schools and in government hiring decisions. And this year the author of all those bans—Ward Connerly, a black California businessman—is stepping up his crusade. He has launched petition drives in Oklahoma, Missouri, Colorado, Nebraska, and Arizona to put similar measures before voters in November.

But there’s no comparable effort to get rid of legacy preferences. Even more troubling, many prominent opponents of racial preferences greet suggestions to get rid of legacies, the mother of all preferences, with a perfunctory nod—or a gaping yawn.

It shouldn’t be that way. Legacy preferences are the original sin of admissions, the policy that fundamentally compromises fair, merit-based standards. Universities can’t in good conscience tip the admission scales for the more privileged and then ask the less privileged to compete solely on merit. What’s more, eliminating race while keeping legacies will make the admissions process less fair, not more fair, because it will open up minority slots to competition by whites but not vice versa.

Legacy preferences are an especially terrible idea for tax-supported public universities, since they make it possible for rich, white, and less qualified kids to take seats that are at least in part supported by the tax dollars of poor, minority families. Private schools, of course, should be free to admit whomever they want, and it is therefore tempting to ignore their use of legacies. But there are few genuinely private schools in America anymore, thanks to the enormous amount of federal funding they accept. And setting public policy aside: Just as a matter of propriety, should there be room for legacies at institutions that market themselves as bastions of meritocracy? The use of legacies by the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons of the world dilutes the standards of excellence they pretend not merely to uphold, but to embody.

Who Cares About Legacies?
With only a few exceptions, both the right and the left have ignored legacy preferences. Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) has promised to do everything in his power to end legacy admissions if he becomes president. But for the most part liberals have picked up the anti-legacy mantle only in retaliation against efforts to eliminate racial preferences. Local activists forced Texas A&M and the University of Georgia to abandon legacy preferences, for example, after these universities stopped using race in admissions. Otherwise, liberals seem quite willing to tolerate legacies, presumably because they make it easier to advocate countervailing preferences for their favored groups.

Given that dynamic, you might expect the opponents of racial preferences to go on the offensive against legacy preferences. But if liberals have been opportunistic about legacies, conservatives have been paralyzed.

In part, that’s because they’re genuinely divided on the issue. Ward Connerly, like Justice Thomas, regards legacies as a fundamental violation of a fair, merit-based standard. He prodded the University of California, where he is a regent, to abandon them in 2000, four years after California voters banned racial preferences. But Terry Pell, who heads the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), the outfit that engineered the lawsuit against the University of Michigan’s race-based admissions, has never fought against legacies. Neither has Stephan Thernstrom, who has co-authored several books attacking racial preferences. “Legacy is a far more complicated issue than race,” insists Thernstrom, who once served on Harvard’s admissions committee.

Conservatives in Pell and Thernstrom’s camp argue that racial discrimination is in a class apart, given this country’s history of slavery and segregation. What’s more, they say, legacy preferences are just not as big a problem as racial preferences, quantitatively speaking. Further, they produce huge benefits for universities that racial preferences don’t. Above all, to the extent that legacies are practiced by private rather than public universities, there are no easy or desirable legal cures that aren’t worse than the disease.

The last argument is their most powerful one, but it is hardly grounds for ignoring the issue. There are ways to address the issue of private universities’ legacy preferences—and racial preferences—that don’t involve lawsuits or government action. But the other arguments for why legacies aren’t a public policy problem are simply disingenuous and suffer from the same ideological blind spots that afflict defenders of racial preferences.

A Small Problem?
Legacy preferences, like racial preferences, are repugnant because they reward not individual virtue or accomplishment, but an accident of birth that has no relevance for a college education. Moreover, just because they aren’t linked with an egregious history of racial abuse does not justify turning a blind eye to them. India has a far uglier record of discrimination by caste than race. Yet no one would argue that it ought therefore to concentrate only on eradicating caste discrimination and treat race as a non-issue.

It is true that the use of legacies is mainly limited to undergraduate programs in the more selective public and private schools. Racial preferences, on the other hand, pervade every aspect of every school—from undergraduate and graduate admissions to faculty hiring and promotion. Moreover, according to a 2007 paper by Princeton’s Douglas S. Massey and Margarita Mooney of data from 28 elite universities, while 77 percent of minorities had standardized test scores below the institutional average, about 48 percent of legacies did. In rare exceptions, such as Middlebury College, legacies actually scored higher than the institutional average.

How far below average do those legacies and minorities score? It’s impossible to get up-to-date, nationwide data on the subject, given the universities’ secrecy, but the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the social scientist Charles Murray reported one telling piece of information in their 1994 book The Bell Curve. In 1990, the average student admitted to Harvard scored 697 on the verbal SAT and 718 on the math section. By comparison, legacies scored 674 on verbal and 695 on math—a 47 point difference. Combined minority scores hover at about 100 to 150 points below the institutional average.

What’s more, even when universities lower admission standards for legacies, they don’t lower them as much as they do for minorities. As mentioned before, the Michigan point system used to award 20 bonus points to under-represented minorities—the equivalent of boosting a 3.0 GPA to a 4.0. By contrast, it handed only four points to children of alumni.

But such statistics don’t tell the full story. Given how intense the competition is for the nation’s most selective schools, even seemingly small differences in scores translate into significantly higher rates of acceptance for legacies over “unhooked” candidates—admissions lingo for those who don’t qualify for any preferences.

According to the October 1996 Brown Alumni Magazine, 40 percent of legacy applicants were accepted to Brown University, as opposed to 19 percent of the total applicants. The Office of Civil Rights similarly found in 1990 that children of alumni were twice as likely to be accepted at Harvard over more qualified students who did not get legacy or athletic or any other preferences. And a study by the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Virginia-based think tank, found that at the University of Virginia, after controlling for test scores, grades, and other academic credentials, a legacy candidate had 4.3 times higher odds of admission than non-legacy applicants in 1999.

Universities claim that legacy status is never a major or decisive factor in their admission decisions. It’s only used, they say, as a tie-breaker among otherwise comparable candidates. That’s what they claimed about racial preferences too, and that turned out to be false. Indeed, it is hard to really know how much weight universities award to legacies given their stubborn refusal to reveal their admissions data or even talk about their admission policies. (University of Michigan officials, for instance, declined repeated requests to discuss this issue.) But why do legacies deserve any edge, big or small?

Racial preferences, at least originally, were meant to remedy discrimination—both historic and current—against blacks. What is the justification for favoring the offspring of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alumni? Unlike many inner-city kids, they grow up in families with a strong pro-education ethos. They have access to the finest public or private high schools in the country. Their parents can spring for tutors, standardized test preparation courses, and even consultants to help them write essays and complete their college applications. “These are kids who grow up with every privilege,” notes Connerly. “They don’t deserve any additional advantage.”

Moreover, though the policy of using legacy as a “tie-breaker” among equivalent candidates sounds innocuous, it has perverse consequences for one group in particular: Asian Americans. Asians don’t benefit from racial preferences because they are not considered underrepresented minorities. And they don’t benefit from legacy preferences because they tend to be the children of first-generation immigrants. Espenshade, the Princeton researcher, found that while legacy and athletic preferences offset the effects of racial preferences on whites, they compound them for Asian Americans.

According to Espenshade’s regression analysis of data from a dozen selective colleges, on a 1600-point SAT scale, being black and Hispanic adds up to an advantage of 230 and 185 extra SAT points respectively. The preference for legacies translates into an edge of 160 points. By contrast, being Asian American represents a 50 SAT-point disadvantage.

The CIR’s Pell, however, argues that the legacy problem is “self-correcting.” Racial preferences have become so ideologically embedded that universities will never abandon them unless forced to by courts or voters, Pell maintains. But as the ethnic mix of the broader population changes so does the composition of the student body. A generation later, then, so will the composition of the beneficiaries of legacy preferences.

But the problem with legacies is not that they never adjust to shifting demographics. It is that they slow the process of adjustment. Legacy policies protect groups that are already in, at the expense of those that are trying to break in.

Practical Benefits?
Conservatives pride themselves on being sensible realists, not starry-eyed utopians eager to stamp out every form of social injustice regardless of consequences. This tendency partially explains their squishiness on the legacy issue. On the one hand, they don’t dispute that legacy admissions border on institutionalized nepotism—rewarding children for the accomplishments of their parents and relatives. On the other hand, enforcing a strict merit-based standard seems a tad fanatical given all the practical benefits of legacy policies for universities.

One purported benefit is that legacies are an important source of funding for universities. Not only do more legacies donate to universities, they donate in greater amounts. For instance, according to the Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, 65 percent of legacy parents contributed to the university’s 2006 capital campaign, compared with 41 percent of non-legacy parents. Moreover, legacy parents on average coughed up $34,759 each whereas non-legacy parents gave only $4,070.

All in all, legacies alone account for over 30 percent of the private donations to most elite colleges. “If mild preferences to legacy students allow universities to maximize their income, is that so objectionable?” asks Thernstrom.

Without such donations, universities claim, they could not invest in high-quality faculty and facilities and remain competitive. Even more important from the standpoint of social justice, universities say they couldn’t maintain need-blind admission policies. These policies allow colleges to admit students purely on academic grounds—and then offer financial aid to anyone unable to afford the roughly $50,000 per year it costs in tuition and living expenses to attend a top-notch university these days. Without legacy contributions, such aid would supposedly become more difficult, and elite campuses would truly become playgrounds of the rich.

But Thernstrom and Pell don’t buy arguments from social utility when it comes to racial preferences. Like other conservatives, they insist that universities that want to help inner-city minorities need to find race-neutral ways that don’t selectively dilute academic standards for some groups. Nor do they believe that the educational benefits of a diverse student body are real or big enough to justify giving minorities a leg up.

Yet they uncritically accept the business and social case for legacy preferences. And it is far from clear that universities lack “legacy-neutral” tools to—as Thernstrom puts it—“maximize their profits.” They could conceivably rake in more money by auctioning off a certain number of freshmen seats every year to the highest bidders. But elite universities would never entertain a scheme like that, because it could cost them their “elite” reputations. It would expose precisely how much they are diluting their admission standards for how many and for how much. This kind of information would erode their aura of selectivity—the very thing that makes them attractive to legacies and everyone else.

Connerly, after spending years on the University of California board, is not convinced that alumni will stop contributing to their alma maters if their kids don’t get preferential treatment. Indeed, as Golden noted in The Price of Admission, Caltech is able to tap alumni money without offering any edge to their children. For instance, Caltech in 2001 obtained a $600 million pledge—the largest gift in the history of higher education at the time—from Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel, neither of whose two sons attends the university. Caltech’s commitment to high standards and excellence is a core part of its sales pitch to raise money from alumni and non-alumni alike.

Golden offers other examples, albeit isolated ones, of schools that have built sizable endowments through business strategies that don’t rely on legacy preferences. Cooper Union, a highly prestigious and selective art school in New York that offers a free education to everyone admitted, for decades lived off income generated through its investments in real estate. Berea College, a small college in Kentucky exclusively targeted toward low-income kids, has accumulated a startlingly large endowment by making its progressive credentials a selling point to potential donors: It is the South’s first inter-racial, co-educational college and was founded by an abolitionist minister. Its mission is to educate and uplift impoverished Appalachian families.

Legacy money doesn’t seem to boost the presence of low-income kids on elite campuses by subsidizing their educations, either. The schools that get the most legacy money—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—are among the worst when it comes to the economic diversity of their students. In his 2005 book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel reported that among the top 40 schools, Princeton and Harvard are ranked at 38th and 39th, respectively, when it comes to such diversity, and Yale 25th.

For a contrast, look at Caltech. It is the nation’s most meritocratic private university that eschews all preferences, and it is among the 10 most economically diverse schools. Nor is it hard to understand why. Admissions are a zero-sum game with many candidates vying for a finite number of seats. The crucial determinant of economic diversity on campus therefore becomes not how much largesse legacies expend on poor kids but how many seats they take away from them.

If elite colleges were serious about offering equitable access to genuinely talented students, they could find business models that don’t involve legacy preferences. If they have not done so, it is because the government won’t—and market forces can’t—hold them accountable.

Is There Any Rationale for Legacies at Public Schools?
The core mission of taxpayer-funded public universities is not to conduct research, promote economic growth, or correct broader social problems. It is to expand higher education opportunities. That, at any rate, is what the general public believes: Respondents in a 2003 survey conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education overwhelmingly picked “offering a general education to undergraduates” as the top priority among 21 different roles that public universities could play.

Taxpayers perceive different public universities as fulfilling this educational mission in different ways. They regard land-grant universities as catering to rural kids, urban universities to commuters who can’t live on campus, community colleges to students not served by traditional four-year colleges.

There is something problematic, even oxymoronic, about the very idea of “elite” public universities whose doors are by definition shut to the vast majority of taxpayers who fund them. If they must exist, they should exist to serve academically gifted kids. Thus the only defensible admission policy for these universities is one that allows all gifted kids an equal shot at admission.

This is precisely what legacy and other preferences don’t allow. They reduce the fate of applicants to the discretion of admissions bureaucrats, eliminating clear-cut standards applied equally to all. Preferences replace the rule of law with the rule of men.

There are no good legal tools to mount court challenges against legacies in either public or private universities. The Constitution requires public entities to award everyone “equal protection under the law.” But when a student tried to use this guarantee to mount a legal challenge against legacy preferences, she failed: In Rosenstock v. Governors of University of North Carolina (1976), an out-of-state applicant who was denied admission to the University of North Carolina argued that preferential treatment for in-state residents and children of alumni violated her right to equal protection. The court ruled that the state had no compelling interest in barring discrimination on the basis of alumni status, even at a public university.

But if the courts can’t or won’t ban legacy preferences, state voters certainly can. The simplest way to do so would be to append them to Connerly’s ballot initiatives banning “race, gender, color, ethnicity, and national origin” preferences. Even the CIR’s Pell acknowledges that it would be entirely appropriate for state voters to ban legacy preferences at public universities.

Connerly considered doing just that when drafting Proposition 2, the ballot amendment that banned racial preferences in Michigan in 2006. But he ultimately dropped the idea, he says, because constitutional amendments ought to be reserved for things that are “sacred for now and forever.” He wasn’t sure that alumni preferences were in that category.

But a further reason, some people close to Connerly admit, was that including legacies risked alienating whites in addition to blacks, making it harder to pass the initiatives. Strategically, it made more sense to deal with the two issues separately, reserving the ballot amendment process for race while looking for other ways to address legacies. Yet beyond Connerly’s own personal crusade against what he calls “fat cat preferences” at the University of California, there has been almost no action on a national level against legacies.

If voter bans against legacies won’t work, another way to force public universities to adhere to a stricter version of merit might be by requiring them to post—and adhere to—straightforward admission criteria like universities elsewhere in the world do.

For instance, Oxford, one of Britain’s most prestigious universities, states unambiguously on its website precisely what scores and grades applicants need in order to gain admission. U.S. kids, it notes, need a combined SAT score of 2100 or a composite ACT score of 32 to 36—comparable to what kids from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland need. In order to remain true to its mission of creating an intellectually rigorous academic environment, Oxford, at least on paper, maintains the same admission standards for British students as for applicants from elsewhere. By contrast, it is accepted practice for elite American public universities to lower the bar for in-state students. To the extent that the tax contributions of the parents of these students fund the universities, they certainly deserve a break over out-of-state students. But that break ought to only involve lower tuition fees, not lower standards.

Openly publishing admissions criteria ensures transparency in the admissions process and serves as a sort of guarantee to prospective students that those who score below these minimum requirements won’t be admitted ahead of those who do.

Connerly could use the contacts and machinery he has built in various states in the course of pursuing his anti–racial preferences amendments to push admission reform laws requiring public universities to set open and objective admissions standards. Universities will no doubt wail about the loss of academic freedom. But the rule of settled and transparent laws is no loss to freedom. It would only hem in the discretionary power of bureaucrats who wield it in an arbitrary way to offer access for their own self-serving purposes.

What About Market Forces?
There is a strong civil libertarian argument against applying such laws to private universities. Such schools ought to be allowed to admit whomever they want for whatever reason they want, as part of their right of voluntary association. Some schools might exercise this right for pernicious ends. But just as tolerating odious speech is essential for the sake of protecting broader freedoms, so, arguably, is tolerating odious forms of voluntary association.

This thinking has restrained conservatives from challenging racial preferences at private schools, even though they have powerful legal tools to do so. For instance, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars racial discrimination by any school that receives federal funds—a category that includes practically every private university given the ubiquity of federal research grants, scholarship aid, student loan guarantees, and countless other forms of direct and indirect financial assistance. Yet Michael Greve, former executive director of CIR, told the ABA Journal some years ago that his organization had no plans to go after private universities for racial preferences—a policy that his successor, Terry Pell, also adheres to. If Harvard, Stanford, and Yale want to discriminate for any reason, Greve said, that’s their business.

It is conceivable that laws requiring public universities to set open and objective admission standards might help trigger industry-wide change, including at private schools. But why hasn’t the higher education industry reformed its own admission practices? The market appeal of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton rests on the impression that getting through their door puts you in a league of intellectual superstars. If these schools dilute their standards—if they turn away incandescent intellects in favor of the merely bright with good family connections—how are they still able to maintain their luster? In a functioning marketplace, you would expect more Caltechs to emerge: Elite schools that market their uncompromising adherence to standards of excellence to snag students interested in being part of a true meritocracy. In the process, they would force Harvard and others to either reform their admission practices or relinquish their niche.

So far, instead of elite schools losing their niche, smart kids are losing their shot at an elite education. “Higher education is the only industry that is rewarded for turning away customers,” observes Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University.

There are both demand and supply reasons for this peculiar state of affairs. The demand for colleges with established reputations is artificially inflated, notes Vedder, because of the absence of any meaningful metrics of educational quality, leaving students with nothing but the prestige factor to go by. Meanwhile, instead of accommodating this demand by expanding their supply, colleges have every incentive to ignore it: Their ranking in the annual U.S. News and World Report college ratings depends in large part on their “selectivity”—on what percentage of applicants they reject.

U.S. News’ near-exclusive focus on inputs rather than outcomes when ranking universities perverts the admissions process in an even more direct way. One of the factors in its ranking is the extent of alumni giving, which is supposed to indicate alumni satisfaction with the education they received. Though this sounds reasonable, in practice it hands universities one more incentive to dole out more legacy preferences to shake down its alumni—and avoid a search for less compromising fundraising alternatives.

If market forces seem unable to hold elite universities accountable, it is because prospective students don’t have good information about their educational outcomes to truly gauge whether these colleges are worth six figures. “Competition succeeds only to the extent that customers…can define success in some legitimate way in order to establish a standard and reward those who best achieve it,” Derek Bok, Harvard’s president from 1971 to 1991, has noted. “In education, at least at the university level, this ability is lacking.”

So what did Bok—whose wife, the philosopher Sissela Bok, has written an entire book decrying institutional secrecy—do to make more information available to “customers” as Harvard president? Nothing. In fact, he tenaciously resisted repeated calls to reveal Harvard’s admissions and other data.

Bok’s reaction is typical. In 2003, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) tried to pass a mandate requiring both public and private universities to reveal their admissions data and show how many legacies they were admitting. Political pressure from universities killed the plan. Earlier this year, they opposed the recommendations of a commission convened by Education Secretary Margaret Spelling. The commission wanted all universities to report, among other things, their graduation and retention data.

Vedder, an ardent free-market advocate who served on that commission, is sympathetic to concerns about extending the government’s reach into private universities. But he also argues that these universities are only nominally private, given the enormous amount of federal research subsidies and student aid they receive. “If we are going to drop planeloads of money to these universities,” he asks, “why is it unreasonable to require them to report some basic information?”

Can Meritocracy Prevail?
Universities resist not just outside efforts to force more transparency, but also efforts from within the industry itself. Over the last decade, two serious efforts have emerged in the higher education marketplace to measure “outcomes”—the quality of education that colleges provide. In 2000, the Pew Charitable Trust and Indiana University launched the annual National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which polls students about their college experience and, based on this feedback, ranks each college against its peers. Meanwhile, the Council for Aid to Education has developed the Collegiate Learning Assessment survey (CAL). While the NSSE measures only subjective student opinions about their college experience, the CAL actually offers extensive exit exams to students to measure what they have actually learned.

Making information about student satisfaction and learning available to consumers might revolutionize the way they make decisions about colleges. But elite colleges, having little incentive to have their reputation questioned by actual data, have refused to participate in either survey.

America’s fundamental promise is that individuals ought to control their destiny through hard work and talent, not arbitrary accidents of birth. Legacy preferences are no less damaging to this promise than racial preferences. Those who oppose race as a factor in admissions but ignore legacies open themselves to accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy. But, worse, to the extent that they succeed in dismantling race while leaving legacies intact, they risk putting in place a less—not more—fair admissions system.

As their battle against racial preferences heats up this year, they need to open another front against legacy preferences. The U.S. Constitution and courts do not offer ready weapons for the new battle. But that hardly justifies laying down arms without a fight.

There are plenty of ways at the state level to stop the use of legacies at public universities, from constitutional bans to state mandates requiring more transparent admission policies. Government can’t ban private universities from using preferences, legacy or racial or any other, without running afoul of the Constitution. But that doesn’t mean that moral suasion can’t be used to prod them toward fairer admissions policies. Public outrage recently forced Harvard to give up its early decision program. The program, which overwhelmingly benefited the rich and connected, effectively lowered the bar for students who applied early and promised to accept its admission offer.

Most of all, we need policies to strengthen market accountability. We need to end the cartel-like character of the higher education industry, where private universities can keep consumers in the dark about their admission practices and educational product and still charge exorbitant prices without worrying that a competitor will emerge to challenge their market dominance with a cheaper and better product. An honest and straightforward recognition of the dangers of legacy preferences will go a long way toward bringing about such reforms.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation.

Not Hot for Teachers

info@reason.com (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

In a Winter 2008 City Journal essay, "School Choice Isn't Enough," the Manhattan Institute's Sol Stern, a well-known critic of progressive education, former editor of the radical left magazine Ramparts, and previously a strong supporter of school choice, says that school vouchers are a failed experiment and competition has not led to public school improvement.

He argues that the school choice movement needs "a realistic Plan B for the millions of urban students who will remain stuck in terrible public schools?" His suggestion is to focus on instructional reform as the best way to improve public schools for the urban poor. This is significant to the school choice fight because Stern is abandoning a central theme of the choice movement: "Competition lifts all boats."

Instead, Stern offers us a vision of centralized top-down content management as the next panacea for education reform. Stern insists that an "instructionist" approach, which focuses on content standards and accountability, is a better route to school reform.

Stern cites Massachusetts as an exemplary example for other states to follow. He credits "instructionists" that "pushed the state's board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam," with much of the student achievement success in Massachusetts.

Stern talks up the "Massachusetts miracle," where the state scored first in the nation in the latest 4th and 8th grade math and reading on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the nation's report card for student achievement and standardized benchmark for every state. The state's average scores on the NAEP have also improved at far higher rates than most other states. However, there is a more nuanced explanation for the uptick in student achievement in Massachusetts. We might ask, "Miracle for which students?"

To be sure, having the highest scores in the nation and highest gains on the NAEP, as Massachusetts does, is an admirable achievement. For a fuller picture of what is happening, however, Education Week's 2008 Quality Counts report for Massachusetts offers more context. Quality Counts notes Massachusetts ranks very low in terms of progress on the student achievement gap between low-income and higher income students. Massachusetts ranks 46th and 50th for the poverty gap—the difference in NAEP scores between students eligible for the free-lunch program and non-eligible students. In 4th grade NAEP reading scores, for example, Massachusetts has a 29.1 point gap compared with the national average of 26.8 points. In fact, the reading gap in Massachusetts has grown by almost 3 points between 2003 and 2007 on the NAEP. For 8th grade NAEP math scores, the state has a 31.4 gap compared to the 26 point national average.

In Massachusetts, middle class and wealthy children have clearly benefited from a focus on content and standards. However, it is less clear how this curricular focus has benefited the most disadvantaged students in the state, who are now being left even further behind.

Other data underscore Massachusetts' ongoing struggle with the most challenging students. According to Standard & Poor's, Boston's 2007 reading proficiency scores on state standardized tests show that white students in Boston scored 67 percent proficient while black students scored 35 percent proficient, Hispanic students scored 35 percent proficient, and economically disadvantaged students scored 37 percent proficient. Every disadvantaged group in Boston has a larger achievement gap in 2007 than in 2004. Across the state the gap is similar. Seventy-six percent of non-disadvantaged students are proficient in reading while 42 percent of economically disadvantaged students are proficient—a 34 point gap, two points larger than in 2004. For low-income and disadvantaged students, then, Massachusetts' instructional reforms have proven far less than miraculous.

A second important point about Stern's advocacy for instructional reform is that other states that have undertaken similar efforts have not seen a Massachusetts-style pay-off in test scores. If content-based curriculum were a panacea, California and Indiana should, like the Bay State, be showing much larger gains on the NAEP. The 2008 Quality Counts report gives Indiana and California an "A" on standards and accountability. Both these states have had a very intensive curriculum and standards-based approach, very similar to Massachusetts, over the last decade.

Yet this focus on strong content and accountability has not translated into large student achievement gains. Indiana has produced a respectable seven-point gain in 4th grade math on the NAEP between 2003 and 2007. However, reading scores have remained flat. And like Massachusetts, Indiana's poverty gap remains large with higher-income students being largely responsible for any gains.

Since Indiana ranks first in the nation in terms of content standards, we should expect to see a stronger effect on student achievement for disadvantaged students as well as advantaged ones. In urban cities in Indiana such as Indianapolis, the achievement gap has widened not narrowed in recent years. Beating the Odds, a May 2007 report by the Council of the Great City Schools, details how urban school districts have closed their achievement gaps in the past six years. In Indianapolis, the most disadvantaged students have lost ground since 2001. The achievement gap in reading on the I-Step for low-income 8th graders was 36 points in 2001; five years later it had grown to 45 points. About 75 percent of white students passed the English portion of the I-Step exam in 2006, compared with 48 percent of black students and 51 percent of Hispanic students.

In California, content standards and standards-based reform have had essentially no effect. California ranks near the bottom, 45th and 48th in 4th grade reading and math on the NAEP. The Quality Counts report ranks California 49th in terms of the "poverty gap" with a 30 point gap in 4th grade reading scores between low and high income students. The fact that California and Massachusetts rank similarly, 49th and 50th respectively, should give everyone pushing an "instructionist approach" pause, considering the demographic differences between the two states. Quality Counts ranks Massachusetts first on their "chance for success" index which includes variables like family income, parental education level, and parental employment. Massachusetts ranks 5th in the nation in terms of family income with 75 percent of parents earning more than 200 percent of the poverty level, while California ranks 39th. Massachusetts also ranks number one in the nation in terms of parent education with more than 60 percent of parents earning a college degree. In California only 38 percent of parents make it through college. The point of all this is that Massachusetts, a high income state, where 90 percent of parents are fluent in English, and 60 percent are college educated has just as large of an achievement gap as California which ranks 51st in terms of English fluency for parents, and 39th in terms of parent education. An "instructionist" approach has not closed the achievement gap in either state.

The bottom line is that content-based reform has not been a panacea in California or Indiana or even Massachusetts. Students with wealthier and higher-educated parents are thriving under a strong standards-based regiment. But content standards have had little impact on one of the most intractable of education dilemmas. It has not closed the achievement gap between lower and higher income students, where not even 50 percent of these students score proficient in reading or math.

That's the major reason why school reformers shouldn't place too many eggs in the "instructionist" basket. Families still need school choice. Public schools, especially in low-performing urban districts, still need competition, which gives students a right of exit to higher performing schools and gives public schools an incentive to improve in order to keep students enrolled.

Stern is too quick to dismiss the impact of school choice on urban school districts. Stern's best case for dismissing the effects of school choice on public schools is Milwaukee, where public schools face competition from vouchers and charter schools. Yet in Milwaukee, test scores have been slowly moving up in every grade since 2004. Reading proficiency for all students is up by seven points on state tests since 2004. It is up by six points for blacks, eight points for Hispanics, and up by seven points for economically disadvantaged students. In addition, the achievement gap has been shrinking. For example, Hispanics have closed the achievement gap in reading proficiency by 10 points with their white counterparts since 2004. While perhaps not revolutionary change, Milwaukee's data do not seem enough to throw in the towel on the entire school choice movement.

Stern is also overly dismissive of the impacts of robust public school choice programs where money is attached to the backs of children. He claims that in New York City the "Bloomberg administration and its supporters are pushing markets and competition in the public schools far beyond where the evidence leads." Considering that 2007 was the first year that any market reforms were implemented in New York City on a district-wide basis, it is yet to be determined what the future effects of these reforms might be.

In California, Oakland Unified has seen rapid improvements for disadvantaged students on multiple performance measures under its New York City-style school choice plan. In 2003-04, for instance, the city's high schools offered 17 advanced placement classes; last year, the district offered 91. About 800 high school students studied first-year physics last year -- nearly triple the number taking the course in 2003-04. Since 2003, the number of graduates qualified to enter the University of California and California State University systems has nearly doubled.

In 2006 Oakland had the highest student achievement gain of the 30 largest districts in California. Oakland has also shrunk the performance gap for low-income students in 4th grade reading who qualified for the free lunch program. They went from a 45 point gap to a 25 point gap between 2002 and 2006.

To date there have been very few school choice programs that have offered public schools real competition in terms of actually losing students or dollars. Yet as more districts have higher concentrations of students enrolling in various school-choice programs, we may yet get to test the important idea that "competition lifts all boats." Until then, it's wrong to bet on instructional reform becoming a cure-all for disadvantaged students left behind in terrible public schools.

Lisa Snell is the director of education policy at Reason Foundation.

I Just Don't Dig On Swine, That's All

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:20:00 EST

News from Great Britain:

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency's awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.

The digital book, re-telling the classic story, was rejected by judges who warned that "the use of pigs raises cultural issues".

I haven't read this version of The Three Little Pigs, but if it bears any resemblance to the story we all know then Muslims should love it. The villain attempts to adopt a haraam diet; he is foiled by structural integrity. Surely the Prophet (PBUH) would approve.

Granted, that's not the only problem the government had with the story:

The judges also attacked Three Little Cowboy Builders for offending builders.

But not, apparently, for offending cowboys. It's the last acceptable prejudice.

Bonus clip: