Revolutionary education reform

Bobby Jindal is going all in to push education reform in Louisiana. Already, New Orleans has the most charter schools in the country with 80% of students enrolled in charter schools. The results have been a marked improvement in how students are doing and a narrowing of the racial gap in student achievement. Now Jindal wants to take those results statewide and he wants to use choice and limits on teacher tenure to totally reform the education system. He is proposing to offer vouchers (or as they're now being called "scholarships") to all low-income student whose school gets a C, D or F grade from state administrators. They could use those vouchers for "private or virtual schools, career-based programs or institutions of higher education" using money from what the state would normally spend on students.

Jindal would increase the number of charter schools statewide to follow the success of New Orleans. And he would take a whack at teacher tenure.

As for tenure, Mr. Jindal would grant it only to teachers who are rated "highly effective" five years in a row, meaning the top 10% of performers. And tenure wouldn't equal lifetime protection: A tenured teacher who rates in the bottom 10% ("ineffective") in any year would return to probationary status. Ineffective teachers would receive no pay raise. Louisiana would also ban the "last in, first out" practice under which younger teachers are dismissed first, regardless of performance.

Of course the teachers unions are all over this. But they're having a harder time trying to argue that parents shouldn't have choice in picking their children's education.

Louisiana Association of Educators leader Michael Walker Jones took to insulting Bayou State parents: "If I'm a parent in poverty I have no clue because I'm trying to struggle and live day to day," said Mr. Jones of parental choice. How's that for faith in self-government?

This just reeks of paternalism. Jindal's message is that parents care enough about their children to look for the schools that will provide the best opportunities for those children. Just watch any of the documentaries such as Waiting for Superman or The Lottery that have been done about the agonies that parents go through as they wait to see if their students will win the lottery to get out of the regular public schools and into a charter. And teachers will have to depend on their performance rather than seniority or tenure to maintain their jobs. What a revolutionary concept for education.

Governor Jindal is pushing for revolutionary education reform on the state level. If his bill passes, we will have a real-life laboratory of democracy to assess whether such reforms, which conservatives have been pushing for years, actually make a difference. The Republicans have majorities in both houses of the state legislature so we can hope that the reforms will pass. Then I imagine that researchers will be keeping their eyes on the results to assess if the reforms make any difference.

Here in my area we're witnessing a small example of how the education blob opposes change. Since the Republicans took over the North Carolina legislature, they loosened the limitations on charter schools. A good friend of mine is involved in the creation of a new charter school, Research Triangle High that sounds as if it will offer marvelous opportunities for students. It will be focused on STEM education, that is science, technology, engineering, and mathematics using experiential learning and giving students opportunities to intern with businesses in the area. The teachers will also be collaborating with teachers around the state to bring their educational techniques to schools that need help with teaching those subjects. It sounds very exciting and a great opportunity for area students. So of course, the existing school system, Durham Public Schools, is furiously trying to block the opening of the school.

“RTHS will function effectively as a de facto private school supported by taxpayers,” reads a draft of the board’s resolution.

Board member Natalie Beyer, who drafted the original resolution, said she’s particularly concerned by what she sees as barriers to low-income students attending the school: the need for at-home technology to utilize a “flipped learning” model in which students listen to lectures at home; a location “away from where students of need live”; and a requirement that students complete at least Algebra I by the end of their freshman year.

Board members are also concerned by what they see as small transportation and nutrition budgets, $22,200 and $16,650, respectively, for 160 students in the 2012-13 academic year.

....“We’ve yet to successfully create separate but equal. We’ve never been able to do that as a society, and that is what this is creating,” said board Vice Chairwoman Heidi Carter, noting that more than 75 percent of DPS students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. “We need [RTHS] to share the burden of educating children with social challenges.”

Board member Leigh Bordley said she’s heard concerns about RTHS from Durham County residents, dismayed by what they see as a re-segregation of schools unfolding in the Wake school system.

“I can’t count the number of people [who have said] if we allow things like this to go forward, we’re deepening the segregation of our own community,” she said.

Blizzard [who wrote the school's charter application] said diversity is important to RTHS and that she’s not worried about the potential for homogeny because “we’re working so hard to that the school is working to recruit from a really diverse and broad student population.”

She said the proposed school is interested in collaborating with DPS programmatically, noting that the Contemporary Science Center has long worked with DPS schools to enrich students’ education. Blizzard is also interested in partnering with DPS on resources, infrastructure and transportation, but she said she hasn’t had conversations with the district about a potential collaboration since the school’s application has yet to be approved.

Concerns about students having to take Algebra I by the end of the ninth grade aren’t valid, she said, noting that most North Carolina teenagers already take the course by that point.

Since Pamela Blizzard also helped found the school where I teach, Durham Public Schools is also upset about our school's success.

The school’s application was filed by Pamela Blizzard, executive director of the RTP-based Contemporary Science Center and a founder of Raleigh Charter High School – designated by the state as an Honor School of Excellence since 2005 and a fixture on national rankings like Newsweek’s America’s Best High Schools list.

But those accolades come at the cost of diversity, board members suggested. Data on the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools website shows that Raleigh Charter’s student population in 2010-11 was 73.1 percent white, 13.2 percent Asian, 6 percent black, 2.5 percent Latino and 5.2 percent other. That contrasts with demographics from the same year in the Wake County Public School System: 49.3 percent white, 6.3 percent Asian, 24.7 percent black, 15 percent Latino and 4.7 percent other.

Like all charters in our state, admission to our school is by a blind lottery. Siblings receive preference. The only requirement is that students be able to enter Algebra I in 9th grade which is the minimal goal of North Carolina's math curriculum.

What is striking to me is that the Durham Public Schools, instead of being happy to have an exciting public school opportunity offered for their students, all they can do is complain and try to block the reform. They could embrace the new school and try to work with it. They could encourage their middle school students to apply. Then they see about adopting successful methods. But they'd rather keep the status quo than try to see how experimental reform could offer new opportunities for their area's students.

The more that such reforms as this school or Louisiana's statewide plan, the more that the existing schools are challenged to change and improve. And they're being dragged kicking and screaming all the way.

Cruising the Web

Warren Kozak explodes the myth that Americans are going hungry. There is no evidence of that. And he has some amazing statistics on the fraud going on in food stamps. He says that "two out of three lunches served in schools are free or nearly free." Obviously, that means that many lunches are going to people who are not really poor. Either that or middle class children aren't buying school lunches because the food is so nasty and it is mostly poor children who are getting it. Having had to do duty in school cafeterias, I can believe that.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady notes how the Castro regime clamps down so tightly on media reports out of the country that co-opted journalists will report on supposed reforms in the country but that there is a news blackout on the death of a brave dissident.

NBC might grump about a Romney ad that uses part of a Tom Brokaw broadcast, but they're legally obliged to run it.

The Democrats are so hopeless in their fight against the Keystone XL pipeline that all they seem to have left now is the possibility that the Koch brothers may benefit from the pipeline's construction even if there is no evidence that they have any financial stake in the matter. Just waving around their name seems to be enough for Henry Waxman. Meanwhile, Obama's new best friend, Warren Buffett stands to substantially benefit from the decision not to build the pipeline. Funny how that works.

Mark Steyn has a hilarious riff on Thomas Friedman's use of Castro's criticism of the GOP nomination fight to just slam Friedman's reach for Castro's imprimatur in making fun of the GOP candidates.

Thomas L Friedman, the Bedrock of the New York Times op-ed page, thought this was such a startlingly insightful observation that he opened this week’s drooling paean to globalization with it:

When Marxists are complaining that your party’s candidates are disconnected from today’s global realities, it’s generally not a good sign.

Aside from the minor detail that Marxists have been complaining about the disconnect between pro-market political parties and “global reality” since the original Marxist sat in the Reading Room of the British Library riffing on the internal contradictions of capitalism, I was struck by Mr Friedman’s sparkling way with words. I’m not a credentialed Professor of Prose Style at Columbia School of Journalism or anything, but, for the “it’s generally not a good sign”/”you know you’ve got a problem” cliche to work, doesn’t the bit before it have to be something unexpected or unwanted? “When Fidel Castro’s hailing the GOP platform as just the ticket, it’s generally not a good sign.” That sort of thing.

Instead, Friedman goes on to peddle his usual globalist soft-core erotica, none of which Castro would support and none of which his enslaved people have any access to.

Oh, well. When right-wing loons are complaining that your opening paragraph is entirely disconnected from the rest of the column, presumably Thomas L Friedman takes that as a good sign.

Sometimes, it's just too easy.

All you need to know about the Palestinians' real attitude toward peace with Israel is the fact that Palestinian TV aired praise of the two men who killed an Israeli family of five including two children and a three-month old baby.

Joe Scarborough tells a story about Newt Gingrich's leadership as Speaker that is quite similar to one that Tom Coburn told in his own book. The story isn't so much that Gingrich tried to intimidate some members of his caucus, but that he did so in service of increasing spending on congressional committees, not exactly the image he hopes to promote today.

Ross Douhat has a well-argued column today about the coercion used by the Obama administration against religious organizations requiring them to offer health insurance plans that cover procedures that they condemn.

Critics of the administration’s policy are framing this as a religious liberty issue, and rightly so. But what’s at stake here is bigger even than religious freedom. The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.

The Catholic Church’s position on contraception is not widely appreciated, to put it mildly, and many liberals are inclined to see the White House’s decision as a blow for the progressive cause. They should think again. Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.

The more the federal government becomes an instrument of culture war, the greater the incentive for both conservatives and liberals to expand its powers and turn them to ideological ends. It is Catholics hospitals today; it will be someone else tomorrow.

The White House attack on conscience is a vindication of health care reform’s critics, who saw exactly this kind of overreach coming. But it’s also an intimation of a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.

Here's a nice story about how the actress, Sonja Sohn, who played Kima on "The Wire" has been trying to give back the same sorts of young people depicted living in no-hope environments.

John J. Pitney, who is a conservative, explains why Newt Gingrich would lose in a debate with Obama.

George Will has a great column about how willing Barack Obama is to take a command approach to domestic affairs.

Obama, aspiring to command civilian life, has said that in reforming health care, he would have preferred an “elegant, academically approved” plan without “legislative fingerprints on it” but “unfortunately” he had to conduct “negotiations with a lot of different people.” His campaign mantra “We can’t wait!” expresses progressivism’s impatience with our constitutional system of concurrent majorities. To enact and execute federal laws under Madison’s institutional architecture requires three, and sometimes more, such majorities. There must be majorities in the House and Senate, each body having distinctive constituencies and electoral rhythms. The law must be affirmed by the president, who has a distinctive electoral base and election schedule. Supermajorities in both houses of Congress are required to override presidential vetoes. And a Supreme Court majority is required to sustain laws against constitutional challenges.

“We can’t wait!” exclaims Obama, who makes recess appointments when the Senate is not in recess, multiplies “czars” to further nullify the Senate’s constitutional prerogative to advise and consent, and creates agencies (e.g., Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board and Dodd-Frank’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) untethered from legislative accountability.

Like other progressive presidents fond of military metaphors, he rejects the patience of politics required by the Constitution he has sworn to uphold.

No wonder progressives from Woodrow Wilson onwards have bemoaned the backwardness of the Constitution since it makes their attempt to impose whatever nostrums they decide are good for us.

Reuters is upset that they published a hit piece on Marco Rubio that turned out to be chockfull of inaccuracies and mistakes. The question is why they would have been interested in such an article in the first place. And why didn't they check with Rubio himself before they published it? It wasn't like this was breaking news that had to be rushed to press without time to check it. And the whole point of the article was supposed to be that Rubio couldn't be a VP nominee because he was behind on his mortgage, although that was one of the errors of the piece. Huh, that is supposed to be a disqualifier?

James Q. Wilson has a great essay about why we shouldn't be blaming the rich for income inequality.

In other words, the country has become more prosperous, as measured not by income but by consumption: In constant dollars, consumption by people in the lowest quintile rose by more than 40 percent over the past four decades.

Income as measured by the federal government is not a reliable indicator of well-being, but consumption is. Though poverty is a problem, it has become less of one.

The real story is the poor.

Poster boy for what the teacher unions have wrought

The New York Post has a sadly believable story about how one New York city teacher has been raking in the big bucks even though he hasn't been allowed in a classroom for a decade.

Deemed a danger to kids, the typing teacher with a $10 million real estate portfolio hasn’t been allowed in a classroom for more than a decade, but still collects $100,049 a year in city salary — plus health benefits, a growing pension nest egg, vacation and sick pay.

Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo can call for better teacher evaluations until they’re blue-faced, but Rosenfeld and six peers with similar gigs costing about $650,000 a year in total salaries are untouchable. Under a system shackled by protections for tenured teachers, they can’t be fired, the DOE says.

.... Since the DOE closed the teacher holding pens in June 2010, those facing disciplinary charges were scattered to offices and given tasks such as answering phones, filing and photocopying.

But Rosenfeld and six others whose cases have long been closed are “permanently reassigned.” Rosenfeld reports to the Division of School Facilities, which maintains DOE buildings, in a warehouse in Long Island City.

Asked what work he does, Rosenfeld laughingly told his friend, “Oh, I Xeroxed something the other day.”

Rosenfeld could have retired four years ago at 62, but his pension grows by $1,700 for each year he stays — even without teaching. If he quit today, his annual pension would total an estimated $85,400.

“Why not make it bigger?” the friend said.

Rosenfeld will also get paid for 100 unused sick days when he leaves.

New York has no mandatory retirement age for teachers.

Meanwhile, charter schools have the ability to get rid of bad teachers, not just those accused of inappropriate behavior with children, but those who can't teach. No wonder the teacher unions despise charters.

Good news on the Santorums' daughter

Best wishes to the Santorum family for the continued recovery of their daughter Bella from pneumonia. It is amazing that she is even alive now considering that she was born with a genetic anomaly that usually means a baby won't survive more than a week. Having had a baby with a related condition who didn't last two days, my heart and admiration goes out to the Santorum family for their love and care for their daughter.

Live by the debate, die by the debate

If the main argument for Newt Gingrich to win the GOP nomination so that he could paste Obama in the Fall debates, last night's debate in Florida blew a big hole in that argument. Newt was whiny, poorly informed about his own finances, angry, and overall just off his game. Mitt Romney scored several body blows when he was able to retaliate against Gingrich when Newt charged him with investing in Fannie and Freddie and Romney was able to take advantage of his oppo research and tell Gingrich that he had also invested the same way. Better than that, Romney was able to make a forceful defense of his wealth and investments. Of course, any time that Romney is talking about his millions and blind trust, it's not the best, but at least Romney didn't seem apologetic of his wealth and was able to give an explanation of the importance of investors.

Romney also won the immigration debate. Newt mysteriously kept focusing on grandmothers and Mitt shut him up by saying that our problem is not 11 million grandmothers. In fact, in answering Gingrich's attacks, Romney was able to give a full-throated argument in favor of legal immigration while contrasting those who want to come here legally with those who have bypassed the legal process. Romney succeeded in making the pro-legal immigration argument that so many conservatives seem to forget to make.

Granted, Romney seemed weak when he didn't know what was in his own attack ad. Not the best evidence of his executive leadership of his own campaign, but most people recognize that those ads are made and a loop of the candidate's voice saying he approved the ad is tacked on afterward. However, any discussion of whether or not Newt made a statement that could have been inferred to say that he considered Spanish the language of the ghetto is not good for Newt. And he did make that statement and later issued an apology in Spanish for what he said so the ad is mostly true.

And then we had about a ten-minute detour to talk about colonizing the Moon. And once again Gingrich's science-fiction-inspired aspirations seemed out of touch with the real concerns of people.

The real revelation of the debate was how well Santorum did. He totally nailed Romney on the similarities between Romneycare and Obamacare. And he made the connection to why this is important - Romney is going to be hobbled going against Obama in the general election in making the arguments against Obamacare when Romney enacted such a similar program.

That was one of Romney's weakest moments in all the debates. And then he told Santorum, "It’s not worth getting angry about," Well, a lot of people are extremely angry about Obamacare and Santorum is right to be angry even though I didn't think he sounded angry, but dynamic and right. And Romney didn't have an answer. In that exchange he reminded conservatives of why we've been suspicious of him the entire time.

Santorum was also great when he said that Wolf Blitzer should move on beyond the tit-for-tat arguing between Newt and Mitt. He came off as above-the-fray and more focused on the real issues people care about. Gingrich tried to take the lifeline, but Romney was able to taunt him to coming back to the same unappealing arguments. It made Gingrich look bad, but mostly it made Santorum look good.

The real question that raised was why Gingrich was the one who had risen to the top as the chief non-Mitt when Santorum is so much stronger. I wouldn't be surprised if Newt's numbers tumbled and Santorum's rose, but it's probably too little too late for Santorum. He might not have been my first choice, but it's a shame that he languished at the bottom while such candidates as Bachmann, Cain, Perry, and now Gingrich rose up in the Whack-a-Mole efforts to find a non-Mitt. Any surge by Santorum now would most likely help Mitt by once again dividing up the non-Mitt vote and Santorum doesn't have the money or organization to compete in the remaining states. Mostly, Santorum has been hurt by the image of being such a loser in his last Senate campaign. And having that big L over his head is not what voters are looking for in going against Obama.

Gingrich got his wish to have a debate with an audience that could react and cheer. Unfortunately for him, he delivered his worst debate performance in the entire long march of all these debates. He was defensive and whiny for most of the debate. Mostly, he just seemed angry that he was getting attacked. Does he think that Obama would be gentler on him than his fellow Republicans? He got better at the end, but by then it was too late.

He even tried his signature bombast against the media moderator and got posterized by Wolf Blitzer who fought back and told Gingrich he should be willing to stand by the attacks on Romney that he himself has been making on the campaign trail. Forget Gingrich's claims to be the master debater to go up against Obama; he lost to Wolf Blitzer. That can't be a good thing for a candidate whose main selling point is that he can vocalize conservatives' anger at the mainstream media.

Romney has gotten stronger in having to fight back attacks that Obama will certainly be making if Romney should win the nomination. It also probably raised his negatives, but that was going to happen anyway. And those candidates who have lost, except for Santorum, have come off looking worse than when they started campaigning. Perhaps that might be a salutary lesson for future possible candidates looking to raise their visibility by a hopeless run for the nomination.

Cruising the Web

Thomas Sowell laments the "presumptuous ignorance" of those in government who think they know how to run a business.

John Taylor explains how important it is for us to have a stable long-term economic policy that would let business people know what to expect and to make plans within rules that follow principles of economic freedom.

Yuval Levin points out how the self-contradictions within Obama's State of the Union reveal how Obama doesn't really believe the moderate, even conservative platitudes, he uttered. Once again, he is putting on a mask to hide what he really believes. Instead of listening to him, look at what he has actually done. Veronique de Rugy has more on the self-contradictions and confusion in Obama's speech. For example, he excoriated the idea of government bailouts while touting the benefits of auto bailouts. And of course he was deceptive in his bragging on how well GM is now doing. And then he had the nerve to say that what was happening in Detroit could happen in other cities such as Pittsburgh or Raleigh. As a resident of Raleigh, I can say that we don't wish to emulate Detroit. For Obama, a government handout is not a handout if he's the one handing it out. For him, fairness is what he determines it to be instead of some objective standard.

What type of idiots work in the National Park Service who seem to believe that there is a First Amendment right to camp out on public land at public expense contrary to express laws that forbid such camping out?

Mona Charen is not happy with the message that South Carolina sent that nothing matters as much as a candidate's ability to bash the media.

This fierce antagonist of liberalism -- the roaring lion who tells John King and Juan Williams where to get off -- confessed that in meetings with Bill Clinton "I melt when I'm around him. After I get out, I need two hours to detoxify. My people are nervous about me going in there because of the way I deal with this."

"His people" ought to be even more nervous now. I know I am.

Here's a moment of history - Jane Addams' Hull House is closing and filing for bankruptcy. It has been around since 1889. We just studied this in my AP US history class. Of course, it operated much differently now than it did back in Addams' day. Today it depended on government spending for the services it provided and many of its workers are unionized.

John Hinderaker covers the story of a Democratic operative in Iowa who has been arrested for trying to pretend to be the Republican Secretary of State to falsely implicate him in supposed unethical behavior in office. It sounds like something very dirty was going on among Democratic operatives in Iowa.

Hugh Hewitt and Scott Johnson point to this story in the Orlando Sentinel about how the DNC and its union allies are running ads n Florida attacking Romney. Apparently, they've concluded that Gingrich would be a weaker opponent to face in the Fall so they're trying to help him out. The model for this could be Richard Nixon whose campaign committee worked to help George McGovern get the 1972 nomination. This tactic could rebound to help Romney portray himself as the one the Democrats fear most just as Newt Gingrich is probably helped by Nancy Pelosi slyly hinting that she knows something devastating about him that she's not telling us.

Newt Gingrich is now claiming that he "helped create 27 million jobs because he's taking credit for jobs created after the Reagan tax reform and the 1996 welfare reform. The man's hubris knows no bounds. I guess he shares the Obama idea that government is the entity that creates jobs.