Spend Less, Get More: Is This a Problem?
Arizona spends less than the national average on K-12 education. It also gets above-average results. A Tucson newspaper columnist thinks that the below-average spending level is a problem.

In his defense, he's not the only one with this odd fixation. It's a widely held belief: what counts in education is not outcomes, but inputs.

Why is thinking about education so, well, ignorant about economics? The fault lies in part with an education system that doesn't teach economics. Another reason is the belief that the laws of economics don't apply to education. Good intentions are all that matter.

Of course, we know where good intentions can lead ... right to the U.S. being near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries in educational performance. (permalink)

The U.S. Becoming a Nation of the Less Educated?
Is the U.S. actually becoming a nation with less education? The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education says so.

"If current trends continue," it warns, "the proportion of workers with high school diplomas and college degrees will decrease and the personal income of Americans will decline over the next 15 years."

Granted, having a BA in English lit isn't a great qualification to serve up coffee, but the Center expects that high school graduation rates will decline as well. One way of measuring the economic effect: a 2 percent decline in inflation-adjusted per-capita income by the year 2020.

Changing demographics and the achievement gap are largely responsible.

Just another reason to introduce competition, choice, and a diversity of players into the delivery of K-12 education. Private schools and public charter schools have a record of helping close the achievement gap.

Labels: Charter schools, Education, School choice

(permalink)

Nothing Like a Conservative in a Liberal Newspaper.
The dominant newspaper in the state of Minnesota, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, sports a token conservative among its opinion columnists. It has now joined the blogosphere by, among other things, putting Kathleen Kersten's writings up in a blog format.

The public, in return, appears to have embraced the idea, with vigorous participation in the comments section of each post. (permalink)

Choice School Students Say: He's Throwing Away My Dream.
Policy recommendations based on rational thought are good. Emotional appeals that have rational thought behind them are even better.

Milwaukee has had a limited version of parental choice in education for about a decade now. You have to live in Milwaukee and be under a certain income level, but if you qualify, you get a voucher to send your child to a participating school.

The number of students who could participate in the program has been capped by law, and in the last year there was a lot of political action over raising the cap.

The group called School Choice Wisconsin was instrumental in getting the cap increased. They did a great job of adding some grassroots advocacy to the policy arguments.

I highly recommend the following commercial. Make sure to watch it until the end. It's a Quicktime file, 5MB.

http://www.schoolchoicewi.org/library/comealong.cfm

See more commercials here: http://www.schoolchoicewi.org/library/commercial.cfm

Labels: Education, School choice

(permalink)

Like Public Transit? Then Try it for a Day.
Yesterday I was reminded why public transit is not a large part of our transportation mix.

In the early afternoon, I went to pick up a friend at the airport. There were a lot of cars, many more than usual, on the entrance road. As I drove closer to the parking ramps, it was obvious that this was not an ordinary day. There was a queue extending far out from the entrance to the garage.

After trolling at 3 miles an hour, I came up to someone who was handing out information cards, directing me to the other terminal. I thought, “Well, I can give her a call on the cell and say ‘Take a cab, please,’ or I can think of this as an adventure and drive over to the other terminal and take the shuttle back.

I opted for the adventure. It was appalling and yet fascinating.

I had been to the other terminal only once, and wondered how traffic went between the two. There must be some airport-only road, I thought. But I could not find it, and as I followed the signs, I was quickly back out on the interstate. I called my friend. No answer.

So I drove over to the other terminal, found a parking spot, and looked for the promised shuttle bus.

As I walked across the parking ramp, I saw the bus, one level down. “Wait!,” I thought. It did.

The bus was packed, and I was happy to not be carrying any luggage.

Of course, my next sentiment was “Time’s wasting! Let’s go!”

In a few minutes the bus did roll. I stood on the steps near the back door to get a good look at the surroundings. I had never been to this part of the airport, and wondered what was going on. I was especially interested in finding the on-airport road between the two terminals.

Instead, next thing I know we are heading … back to the interstate.

No secret passage way. I was disappointed.

Seated near me was a woman wearing the uniform of a pilot or first officer. She was looking at what appeared to be a schedule. I feared for her passengers, who might be delayed because their pilot was trapped on a bus that was stuck on the highway.

The five minutes that seemed more like 15 passed and we were back at the main terminal. The bus disgorged its passengers, and I looked around for signs of where to go next.

Down the steps I go, thinking that in a hundred yards or so I would see the familiar entrance to the baggage claim area, where cattle call meets flying-bus depot.

Instead, the only logical thing to do was to follow the sign pointing to a tram.

Oh great. This is my multi-modal day. Drive a car. Take a bus. Take a tram. Reverse. Oh well, it was all part of the appalling adventure.

Why is it that train-like vehicles and airports are programmed with the voice of a British woman? Is it to suggest bureaucratic efficiency, the well-oiled wheels of the transportation empire?

The tram ride was two minutes, four at most. I left the tram and looked, seeing way off in the distance the familiar corridor to baggage claim.

I made my way to baggage claim and found my friend. We waited for her luggage to appear. It took about 15 minutes, and in that time, we discussed the security review regime she had been through.

By contrast, two weeks ago I traveled three hundred miles to a conference. I drove. No need to rush to the airport to hurry up and wait in a security line. No need to remove my shoes. No need for someone to rummage through my suitcase.

Eventually my friend’s luggage arrived, and we walked to the tram. “Isn’t big city living great,” I mused. “All these connections.”

We rode the tram till its destination, and then found the bus to get back to the other terminal. My friend’s suitcase must have weighed 55 pounds. She struggled to get it up to the stairs of the bus; I gave her some last-second help.

We stood in the aisle, and I held the bag against my legs, lest it become a bowling ball knocking someone over.

Once off the bus, we looked around for an elevator to the second level of the parking garage. One sign said “Employee elevator.” There was no way I was carrying a 55-pound bag 50 feet up four staircases. After some wandering around we came across a public elevator, took it to the second floor, found the car, and drove off.

Total time: 2 hours. Time that I could have spent had I arranged to meet my friend at the curb? An hour. The extra hour? Tuition in the school of life.

FUN WITH LIGHT RAIL
Later that day I drove my car to the latest and greatest hope of urban planners, the light rail station. I use it to go downtown once a week to tutor English-language learners. I could drive, but have thought that it would be more convenient to not have to drive and find a parking spot, especially during baseball season. But this day I was beginning to wonder if that was such a smart idea.

On days with a lot of rail traffic (that is, baseball games), there’s an attendant at the station. He means to be helpful, but he gets in the way. I don’t need anyone to tell me to push this button and get my ticket in that slot, and he just slows me down by demanding that I answer some questions and let him guide me through the purchase process that I’ve got down cold.

I just missed one train, and had to wait for the next. Oh yes, here’s a problem of using public transit: you have to stand and wait. Outside. In the cold. And wind. And rain.

The train came, I boarded, and then encountered other, shall we say, features of public transit.

A woman in the seat behind me was sniffling. I tried to not notice. A guy across the aisle was talking to someone, in a voice that resonated, about how he hated every holiday except Halloween. (Great. Shall I expect a spell?)

I tried to ignore Mr. Halloween, but couldn’t. So I walked down the car, and sat next to a seat that a guy had just given up in anticipation of the next exit. The cigarette smoke from someone’s clothing hung in the air. Meanwhile, two women were yakking away.

Great. Disease-carrying passengers, loud louts, and cigarette smoke. I love how public transportation brings us all together, don’t you?

Once I left the train, I still had to walk 8 blocks to reach my destination. Oh yes, that’s another limitation of public transit: it often doesn’t offer door-to-door service.

Contrast all this with automobiles: leave when you want. Listen to the music you want (or don’t). Steep in your own airborne germs. Go door-to-door. Aside from that initial shock of entering the vehicle cold, stay toasty warm the whole time.

All this suggests that I hate public transit. Not necessarily. For a while I lived in the Chicago area, and used it a lot. A monthly pass was much less than paying for a commuter parking lot, and the volume of cars on the road would have made each trip unnerving. But I still walked an hour each day, between train station and home and office.

Transit works relatively well in Chicago. More so in New York. But even then, it represents a minority of all trips in the metropolitan area. How many people would like to live in a region as densely populated as these two?

Transit systems can be reasonably clean and appealing, but only at enormous costs that far outstrip comparable expenses of a road system. (Think of the Washington DC/Virginia/Maryland metro, giant earmark to the capital region from the nation’s taxpayers.)

As my little adventures showed, there’s a lot left to be desired with transit. I suspect that many people support it for someone else—let’s get those other people off the road.

Labels: Transportation

(permalink)

Star-Tribune on Minnesota Taxes: True But Misleading
The Minneapolis Star Tribune looks at recent changes in Minnesota's tax rates and collections. It notes that Minnesota's highest earners have received a larger benefit from tax cuts and other changes in the tax laws than anyone else.

The article falls into the same trap that many discussions of tax systems do, however. Under so-called progressive rate (endorsed, no doubt, by the Star-Tribune), tax cuts, unless they explicitly engage in redistribution, will benefit higher-income people more than anyone else. After all, they're carrying a larger, and disproportionate share of the burden to begin with. So, for example, giving everyone a 10 percent tax cut will mean that higher-income taxpayers, already paying more in taxes, will receive greater benefits.

That's not a bad thing--unless your goal is to use the tax code as a tool of social engineering. Not that idea is unknown in the land of 10,000 Scandinavian semi-socialism. (permalink)

California Rejects Another Preschool Proposal.
California, the trendsetting state, takes a step back from universal preschool.

Writes K. Lloyd Billingsley, for the Pacific Research Institute, "On Tuesday, 61 percent of California voters improved the state's educational and fiscal prospects by rejecting Proposition 82, an expensive government pre-school measure of dubious merit that would have raised already high taxes and expanded state power."

Citing a number of previous ballot measures that were disregarded by state officials, he wonders if the program will be implemented anyway.

Meanwhile, Billingley's associate, Xiaochin Claire Yan, explains Why Voters Did the Right Thing:

The program designed by Prop. 82 lacked components that were critical to the success of preschool programs in other cities. It also didn’t help that Rob Reiner had to resign from the state preschool commission due to allegations of questionable use of classroom funds to help the campaign on 82.

Labels: Education

(permalink)

Capitalism Cures Sick People.
The latest addition to our reading list is The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care.

David Gratzer, author of the book, has practiced medicine in both the U.S. and Canada. So he knows the limits of both the socialized medicine of Canada and the semi-socialized medicine of the U.S. As the subtitle of the book makes clear, Gratzer doesn't recommend the Canadian cure.

This point was driven home yesterday at a conference held by the Citizens' Council on Health Care. Not only did I enjoy the presentations of the panelists, but after the event I met an M.D. who fled the failing system up north. He reports that in Thunder Bay (a city on Lake Superior, north of Duluth), 40 percent of the people do not have a primary care physician. In that system, this is a serious problem. (permalink)

Blogger Where Art Thou?
One small pleasures of visiting other policy nerds is that you can actually find someone who has read your blog.

Learning from the policy experiments in the 50 states is the primary goal of such encounters, but the bonus is the occasional "Oh, I read your blog!"

My work has been published in newspapers and other dead-tree media, so the thought of being identified as an online writer is still something of a novelty.

Blogging is a common yet unusual activity. It's as common as calling up the local radio station and putting in the proverbial two cents. It can be as anonymous (or pseudo-anonymous) as the CB radio craze of the 1970s. Yet it's also fairly uncommon; I suspect that the party of serious, topic-oriented bloggers (rather than those who write stream-of-consciousness, this-is-what-I-ate-for-breakfast) number no more than 5 percent of the U.S. population.

If you look at this page, you'll see that entries are sporadic. If you look in the archives, you'll find periods when there is one, two, or more entries per day.

Folks talk about blogging burnout, and that's one factor. But another, happier factor is the uptick of other, more visible, and lucrative projects.

So while the PolicyGuy blog may be suffering from declining production, the PolicyGuy blogger is going strong.

(When I ran this entry through the spell-check function of blogger, it flagged blog as an unknown word!) (permalink)