Month: September 2007

Categories
politics

Apparent Inconsistencies

The voucher debate has kept educational issues prominent in my brain for quite some time now. Before spending so much time thinking about these issues it was easy to recognize the image of hypocrisy in those who stump for public education and keep their kids outside the public education system.

A far greater percentage of public school teachers around the country — especially in urban areas such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — send their own kids to private schools than does the general public. . .

These people stump for public schooling, opposing systems of school choice. And yet, they choose to opt out of the system they allegedly shore up . . . from competition.

What I find amusing now is that I have publicly declared my position to be the very opposite of those featured in the article above. I favor the very legislation that they oppose as a means to achieve the very thing they advocate (better public schools). While favoring the voucher laws I have also declared that I intend to do what I can to encourage parents not to abandon the public school system and to make the vouchers unnecessary for most parents by improving the schools. I’m sure this is not as interesting to read as it was when the thought struck me that I may be as much a hypocrite in my position as they are in theirs.

Categories
politics

Real Debates

Mike Huckabee has offered to debate Fred Thompson, Lincoln-Douglas style. I think that Fred should accept the offer, but I know lots of reasons why he might chose not to. Mike has nothing to lose. Few people take his candidacy as seriously as they should and the media attention of such a debate would help Mike even if he didn’t trounce Fred. Fred would probably rather pretend that there are only 4 candidates in the race (Huckabee not being one of the other 3).

I think this kind of debate would be helpful to the voters because a Lincoln-Douglas debate tends to help shape the issue in the minds of the listeners. The kind of “debates” that we get among multiple candidates on network television only serve to allow the candidates a chance to try to convince the audience that they best represent the audience, rather than framing the issue to show that they best represent the truth, or the best way forward (depending on the type of issue being debated). Ideally there would be a series of debates on a variety of issues involving different sets of candidates. Each debate should feature only two candidates but each candidate would have debates with a number of other candidates. It would turn the primary campaign into something closer to a tournament allowing us to get to know the candidates (possibly better than we do now) and also helping the voters to get to know the issues instead of just the soundbites.

I hope that Mike gets to have his debate with Fred, or one of the other higher profile candidates, because if he does I am confident that he will prove himself to be every bit the equal of any other candidate. Considering the Fred apparently expressed a desire to have this kind of debate I think he should accept. If he does not I would call it political cowardice unless he manages to arrange for this kind of debate with some better known candidate in the field within the next couple of weeks.

Categories
Local politics

Reality Check

Last night I went to a UDOT open house for the East-West Connector project. This has been informally known as the 1000 South boulevard and was previously part of the Mountain View Corridor project before being broken out into a separate project. I suspect that the people working on this project for UDOT already know this, but they and the public need to recognize and reconcile themselves tot he fact that there is no alternative on this project which will satisfy everybody. Planning and building this road needs to move forward not by compromising to hurt as few feelings as possible, but by building whatever is best in the long-term interests of the area.

That’s easy for me to say since there is no way the road can be built in such a way that it will inconvenience me. It can be built badly to inconvenience everyone, but it cannot be built in such a way that it would inconvenience me particularly. No matter how well, or badly it is built there will be some people who it will inconvenience particularly – the only question is who, how many, and in what ways. Those who are in danger of having to relocate, or of living very close to the new road can do a great service to everybody if they will come with an attitude of “how can we make this the best for everybody,” rather than an attitude of “what will cause me the least inconvenience.”

On the other hand, those of us who will not be directly inconvenienced by this need to be understanding of the fact that this will have some immediate negative consequences on some people. We should take that into consideration when we select an alignment.

I heard someone who lives near some of that land that Lehi City had already preserved for this road who wished that the land owners in the area would refuse to sell so that the road could not be built. I’m sure she recognizes that not building the road is not a feasible option considering our current traffic situation. As a distant neighbor I need to recognize that her wish is normal and rather than telling her to pull her head out of the sand I should help advocate for anything that might make this new road better for her and her neighborhood.

One thing to advocate for, which won’t help her neighborhood now but will help other neighborhoods in the future, is a more comprehensive master plan for the city which will preserve transportation corridors earlier and be more strict in adhering to the master plan. Initially Lehi City had planned for this road to run at 700 South. The result is that 700 South is much wider than it needs to be for a 25 MPH road. If they had set the speed limit higher (40 or 45 MPH) people would not have placed houses right on the road and they would have been able to use the original route

Categories
politics

My Position on Vouchers

I have stated that vouchers have potential benefits to our education system and also that they do not address the core issue that is leading our education system down the path of crisis. So here is my position on vouchers.

The bills that we are going to vote on are flawed – most bills are. That being said, I will support vouchers at the ballot box and then I will work to improve the public education system. The virtual monopoly of our public schools in the arena of primary education is not beneficial to our society. That monopoly must be challenged. Only as it is challenged will we give our educational administrators the incentive to root out the inefficiency and manipulation that are pervasive in the current system.

Despite any claims to the contrary, the public education system is not designed to educate. It is designed to measure. It measures things like how many hours a child sits in the classroom – which is not related to how much they learn. I have a friend who has chosen home school because she was told that her son was in danger of not advancing to the next grade because of the number of absences he had that year. This was without regard to the fact that this child was at or near the top of his class in every academic measure of performance. Those measures meant nothing next to the butt-in-seat time where he was flirting with the legislatively imposed rules of what constituted acceptable attendance. The public education system also spends large amounts of money on academically unnecessary things like upgrading high-school athletic facilities while complaining about lack of funds. (That is just one example of spending that is completely unrelated to academics.)

Our standardized tests are more academic in nature, but the emphasis on such testing encourages the employment of every intellectual pump-and-dump scheme that can be found. Teachers do not want to lose their jobs so they teach to the test without regard to any retention after the test is administered. This is because teachers are graded (formally or informally) on a bell curve. The result is that some percentage of teachers are going to fail and some percentage are going to pass regardless of whether the entire system is getting better or getting worse. Such a norm-referenced mindset works well in the media because people understand it, but it does not work well in improving the system. I honestly believe that most teachers are interested in improving the minds of their students, but if they lose their jobs they can’t do that. Their jobs are not based on how much their students learn, but on how much their students remember on the day of the test as compared to other students. That kind of environment will eventually wear out most well intentioned people so that they either leave, become complacent, or resign themselves to the flaws in the system.

My assertion that a quality education can be had only based on parental involvement suggests one of the risks of vouchers, or any other escape from the public school system. When provided with an easy alternative, most involved parents are likely to abandon the public school system because other options (home, private, charter) do not carry all the baggage that weighs down the public education system. This leave the public schools worse off than before because it will be left to care only for those students who come from homes where parents are not involved and where there is no culture of learning. (Voucher opponents use this fact to accuse supporters of engaging in class warfare because the culture of learning is less prevalent among the poor – who’s parents are not generally as well educated as the rich.) Because of that risk, I will actively encourage people, including myself, to avoid using vouchers to leave the public schools unless it is absolutely necessary.

The educational bureaucrats must know that we have the option to leave, and that we are interested enough to vote for change. Once we have made that known we must show them that we are willing to work with them, for the good of everyone, to improve the public schools. (Utah Rattler stakes out a similar position.) We must demonstrate that leaving them to deal with those who have the least support is not our objective, just as living off our taxes and raising their own paychecks should not be their objective. (Admittedly I do not think that is the objective of most administrators, but who can resist the chance to give themselves a pay raise when their colleagues keep reminding them about how hard they work.)

Categories
life pictures

Crazy Storms

Most of the people in Utah know about the crazy storms that we have had the past 2 days (mostly yesterday). I thought I would share just two pictures showing the results in our yard.

Sunflowers after a windstorm

These are our sunflowers. They were already bending under the weight of their ripening heads, but they were over 9 feet tall. I’m surprised to see that two of them are still standing.

 Fence hit by pool

This is our fence, which we just put up this year. The wind caught a plastic pool in our backyard and blew it around the house and into the fence. The toprail is bent and will have to be replaced, and we have to  pour more cement around the gatepost so that it can be secure again.

It could have been worse – we could have lost our trees like the four trees that were downed in our church parking lot.

Categories
politics

Vouchers and Public Education

My views on education have been a topic of regular discussion for many years with my wife and her family. She grew up in a family where all the children went to a very expensive private school. (It’s very expensive now, I don’t actually know what it cost back then.) My father-in-law has a PhD in education, three of his children have masters degrees in education (including my wife), I have a masters degree in education and I started a PhD myself before I decided that it would not be worth the debt I would incur to get it. On top of that, every one of my wife’s siblings has done some form of home schooling or charter schooling for their children at one time or another (some still are and others are not).

Through all the years of discussion my views on what is most important to the education of our children has been utterly static. I have always argued that a child could get a quality education in public school, private school, charter school, or home school (they can also get a lousy education through any of those avenues). The common thread to a quality education is parental involvement combined with a culture at home which values learning. There are times when an exceptional teacher can provide a surrogate in the absence of parental involvement, but that is outside the scope of what we can expect of them. A school which has a culture that values learning can compensate to a degree for students where the culture at home is not very supportive of learning.

Parental involvement is not simply a matter of joining the PTA or doing your child’s homework for them. It requires that you know your child. It requires that you know what they are doing and what is expected of them. It requires that you know their teacher and school environment (that’s easy with home school). It requires that you work with the school to achieve the results you desire.

A culture in the home that values learning must be cultivated – it does not spring up without work. A culture that values learning must differentiate between homework and learning. It must value learning even when it is not related to school or grades. It must not place awards before effort. It must also recognize effort when there are no external awards. A school in which the prevailing culture in student homes is one that values learning will be more likely to have a culture at school where learning is valued. Without the appropriately supportive culture at homes, schools will find it almost impossible to create that culture at school. All the head-start programs and other educational techniques or classroom gimmicks cannot make up for a school culture where learning is not valued.

So where do vouchers fit into all of this? Vouchers cannot replace parental involvement, nor create a culture that values learning. They can provide a vehicle for parents who are involved to exercise greater control over the formal education of their children. They might even serve as an invitation for parents who are not involved to get more involved in the education of their children. Those are the potential benefits. The potential risks are that they may be one more way that parents may choose to separate themselves from the education of their children as they shift the burden of responsibility from public school teachers to private school teachers. That will certainly be the case for those who do not understand, or refuse to accept, their central role in creating a successful partnership for educating their children.

Categories
politics

More Voucher Debate

I talked about flawed/unbalanced arguments related to vouchers in Pick Your Poison. As more and more is written the issue fails to get clearer. However, one point that I cited (made by the anti-voucher camp) involves throwing out numbers to prove their point without backing up their numbers. In this case it was “the average cost of private school tuition is $8000/year so a $2000 voucher wouldn’t help lower income people cover the cost.” (no, that was not a direct quote.)

I now have the pro-voucher counter-argument which also throws out numbers without fully backing them up:

The lower a family’s income, the higher the voucher amount—from $3,000 down to $500. Clearly, this benefits low- and middle-income families more than wealthier families.

According to a Utah State survey of private schools, the average tuition for kindergarten through eighth grade is just $3,800. As much as $3,000 of that would be covered by a voucher, leaving a difference that could be managed by nearly any family.

So are vouchers up to $3000, or only $2000? And what is the average cost of private school tuition? ($3800 is less than half of $8000 so the difference cannot be ignored.) At least the pro-voucher group cites a “Utah State survey of private schools.” I’d like to see a link to the survey.

The anti-voucher numbers link to a Salt Lake Tribune article, but when I read the article those numbers never appear. The $8000 figure never appears, it only states that private school tuition ranges from $2200 to $15000 per year. There is a “snapshot of private school tuition in Utah” that shows 7 schools with tuition between $2200 and $5000 per year and 7 schools with tuition between $6000 and $15000 per year. I notice that 3 of the schools have tuition of $8000 per year, but that includes Catholic schools which are not eligible for vouchers because they discriminate based on religion in the admissions process. If the $8000 average is based on calculating the cost of the 14 schools listed (which may or may not be representative) then it should be noted that the outliers on the high end drastically skew the results.

Actually those 14 schools average out to $7000 per year, and if we toss the 3 that cost over $10000 per year and the catholic schools that can’t accept vouchers anyway the average goes down to $5000 meaning that more than half the tuition is covered by vouchers for the lowest income people at more than half the schools in the list. I did not intend for this to be a pro-voucher argument, but I find that the numbers from the anti-voucher side are totally unreliable so far. The figures they cite don’t appear in the article they reference and the numbers shown in the article they reference actually come closer to the pro-voucher numbers than the numbers published by the anti-voucher group.

The best arguments against vouchers seem to be the arguments that don’t depend on numbers – arguments about philosophy and personal opinion. These are valid arguments to make, but if the anti-voucher crowd wants to focus on bogus numbers instead they deserve to lose on this issue.

So far this has been a discussion about the arguments being made on the voucher issue. My personal stance on the issue is rather unique. I will be attempting to codify it in some understandable way. Stay tuned . . .

Categories
culture

Quality Argument

Here is why I love to read The Utah Hornet’s Nest – he writes about “Why I Oppose Vouchers” rather than resorting to writing about “Why voucher supporters are trying to sacrifice your children for money.” We can always use more solid examples of “what I believe and why” on both sides of any argument to replace some of the “what can I say to bully people into believing me (or voting for me or the issue I am promoting).”

Categories
National politics

Power Struggle

This is nothing new in politics (power struggles in general or this one in particular) but it is starting to get more press coverage – the question is, “Who controls the nomination process – the states, or the parties?” The struggle is most public among the Democrats as their candidates have now promised to honor the Party primary calendar. The Republicans are dealing with the very same issue but without the same level of publicity. The struggle between the parties and the states seems to be a direct result of a struggle among the states to gain influence in the candidate selection process. I am left to wonder how the traditional set of early states was initially established? Was that set by the parties, or by the respective states? (Can anyone enlighten me on that?)

In my mind the parties should not control the process. On the other hand, they are choosing representatives for their respective parties so they should have control of how those representatives are chosen. I believe that experience had led the parties to value a process where they largely mimic each other through the primary cycle. (I’m not sure exactly why that is although I have a few guesses) While I believe that states should be able to choose how and when they participate in the primary selection process I’m not convinced that voters win when the primary season is pushed so far in advance of the general election. Imagine if the candidates for the election of 2000 were chosen in mid 1997 and then had 9/11 occur in mid 1998. We could find that the candidates we had chosen were ill suited to our new reality. (I know that’s an extreme example – almost too ridiculous to comprehend, but you can’t miss my point) There’s always a certain amount of risk that changes will occur between the primary selection and the final vote, but the earlier we push the primaries the greater that risk becomes.

What do other people think? Who should control the primary schedule? What would the ideal schedule look like (in general terms)? Is the current reshuffling power-struggle good, bad, or neutral for voters and the country?

Categories
politics

Good Advice

Political columnists don’t generally offer advice that is generally applicable to life. One exception to that comes from Doug Giles (writing about Larry Craig):

To heck with public opinion and what people will think. Focus rather on the inevitable mano-a-mano that you will one day have with God (and He can’t be buffaloed). Let that pending appointment guide thee to get real with yourself, your family, and the public.

Imagine what life would be like if everyone took that attitude when making decisions.

Rather surprisingly this ties into something I thought of in Sunday School today. The lesson was on obedience:

An angel of the Lord appeared unto Adam, saying: Why dost thou offer sacrifices unto the Lord? And Adam said unto him: I know not, save the Lord commanded me. (Moses 5:6)

My thought on that was that Adam remembered what had happened the last time he disobeyed. He did not intend to be coerced into disobedience, as Eve had been, just because he did not know the reason for the commandment.