DebateGate

Excerpts from "Experimenting With School Choice", by Lisa Snell and Shikha Dalmia, about the California school districts of Oakland and Compton:

In short, the two districts have similar student bodies, similar challenges, and—until now—a similar history of failure. But Oakland is beginning to break away from this history, and the reason is the weighted-student-formula program it embraced some years ago and fully implemented last year. Under this program, kids are not required to attend their neighborhood school, especially if it is failing. Rather, they can pick any regular public or charter school in their district and take their education dollars with them; more students therefore means more revenues for schools. Furthermore, as the name suggests, the revenues are "weighted" based on the difficulty of educating each student, with low-income and special-needs kids commanding more money than smart, well-to-do ones. Schools have to compete for funding, but the upside is that they have total control over it. Compton has stuck to a completely different approach that does not involve empowering parents—or decentralizing control to schools. Instead, it has tried to fix its failing schools by mandating "classroom inputs." To this end, all Compton schools over the last few years have been ordered to reduce class size by 12 percent, improve teachers' credentials, adopt a tougher curriculum, and even clean up bathrooms.

[...]

Similarly, Oakland's score on the state's Academic Performance Index—a numeric grade that California assigns to its schools based on the performance of their students on standardized tests—went up by 19 points. Compton, in contrast, gained only 13 points. Yet even this overstates Compton's performance, because almost all of its gains came at the elementary level, where students are not so intractable. Compton's middle schools lost an average of 6 points, while Oakland's gained an average of 16 points. Meanwhile, half of Compton's high schools lost points on the API score—including Compton High, where now fewer than 6 percent of males are proficient in reading, and fewer than 1 percent in algebra. Conversely, Oakland high schools gained, on average, 30 points. Even Oakland's economically disadvantaged and limited-English students have shown major improvements. In 2006, its economically disadvantaged students gained 60 percent more on the performance index than Compton's, and its English-language learners gained 120 percent more.

Whole article at Reason Online.

Excerpted from "Ron Paul, the Real Republican?" by Radley Balko:

When most members of Congress see a bill for the first time, they immediately judge the bill on its merits, or if you're more cynical, they determine what the political interests that support them will think of it, or how it might benefit their constituents. For Paul, the vast majority of bills don't get that far. He first asks, "Does the Constitution authorize Congress to pass this law?" Most of the time, the answer to that question is "no." And so Paul votes accordingly. This hasn't won him many friends in Congress, or, for that matter, his own party. It hasn't won him influential committee assignments or powerful chairmanships, either. Those are generally handed out to the party animals who vote as they're told. An incorruptible man of principle in a corrupt body almost utterly devoid of principle, Paul is often a caucus of one.

[...]

Paul's presence in the race is important because he'll put issues on the table that would otherwise be completely ignored. His presence in the primary debates alone will make them far more substantive and interesting than they've been in a generation. One example is the continuing disaster that is the drug war, which Paul rightly believes to be both immoral and unconstitutional. Paul also opposed the war in Iraq from its inception. Those two issues alone will differentiate him from every other candidate on the stage. But Paul can then swing to the right of every other candidate on federal spending, regulation, the Nanny State, and the growth of government. On these issues, he can reliably and credibly serve as the party's conscience, and browbeat the sitting senators and congressmen running for president for their votes issues like the prescription drug benefit, the surge in federal spending, and the party's complicity in the corrupt earmarking process.

[...]

Ronald Reagan once said that libertarianism is "the very heart and soul of conservatism" (Reagan was great at communicating the princples of limited government, if less great at actually implementing them). Of all the candidates so far declared, only Paul can credibly lay claim to the legacy of the Reagan-Goldwater revolution. How well he does, how long he lasts, and who ends up defeating him will reveal whether there's any limited government allegiance at all still stirring the Republican Party.

So the question is, will Ron Paul be able to influence the Republican campaigns for President or not? Does he bring something to the race for President that we ought to see, or is he the Republican version of Dennis Kucinich, too far out there to be taken seriously? If he is not to be taken seriously, what does this say, if anything, about the Republican Party's supposed commitment to limited government?

These are the Democrats who have definitively announced they are running for President, with the exception of Governor Bill Richardson who is only an exploratory candidate, but may soon officially announce his candidacy.

I apologize if this has been covered elsewhere, but I have given up on reading every discussion thread here.

Bank of America has, in California only as I understand it, decided to try a program whereby people without a credit history or Social Security numbers can qualify for credit cards if they have a checking account with the bank for three months and no overdrafts, a government-issued taxpayer ID number, and an initial deposit of $99. A lot of people seem to be having a fit over this, insisting it is an amnesty program for illegal immigrants and/or a money laundering program for drug dealers and terrorists. So, what is your opinion? Is it a good idea or a bad idea? Should Bank of America be applauded or punished? And please explain your reasons.

Before I head out, here is a link to an interesting, but short, article over at TCSDaily. Check it out, discuss amongst yourselves, and I'll look forward to seeing what you had to say when I get back.

"Plato's Republic or Milton Friedman's Market?"

Over at Economist.com there is a nice article about bribery appropriately titled "How to grease a palm". Of most interest to me were the end of the article and the article's accompanying graph.

Jakob Svensson, an economist at Stockholm University, has cut through cultural stereotypes to search for hard data on corrupt economies. He has found that socialist and recently socialist economies show higher levels of corruption than others. Among the factors he has tested for correlation with corruption is the overall education level of the adult population. A second is openness to imports (measured by imports as a proportion of GDP), which is linked with opportunities for smuggling. A third is freedom of the press (as ranked by Freedom House, a civil-liberties watchdog), on the hypothesis that independent journalists will expose, and thereby curtail, corruption. The fourth is the number of days needed to start a business, a proxy for the number of permits required, and therefore red tape. Mr Svensson found clear correlations between all these variables and the overall level of corruption.

Among the many factors that determine the level of corruption in a country, one stands out. Whether it takes the shape of an American congressman dispensing a $2 trillion budget or a horde of petty officials administering a Bible-sized rulebook, where there is a lot of government, there is a lot of bribery. Corruption thus offers yet another confirmation of the dictum attributed to Thomas Jefferson that “the government is best which governs least.”

SOURCE: Economist.com

The article seems to cover bribery to and from representatives of government. How any of this relates to things like payola that occur almost exclusively within the non-government sector of society I don't know. But then whether or not payola is on the same level as the bribery discussed in the article is open to debate.

... a libertarian supporter of capitalism suggesting that happiness is a more important pursuit than money.

What is the point, say I? Would my life change in any significant way if I had, say, twice as much money as I now have? I already enjoy as good a car, house, TV, computer, food, entertainment, travel, etc. as I want. Greater wealth would not change my life in any significant way along any of these margins. I already have enough money to leave to my kids without spoiling them.

The whole thing at the other end of this link.

Last summer a pair of students attending Hollymead Elementary School in Albemarle County, Virginia, wanted to advertise their church's Vacation Bible School in the school's "backpack mail" (a school program of distributing info about school related events and the like by putting folders of fliers into student backpacks). The school initially refused, but someone contacted Jerry Falwell's Liberty Council, and after a letter from the Liberty Council, the school relented and allowed the VBS advertising.

Which brings us to the Pagans. A Pagan group from a Unitarian-Universalist church has received permission to advertise “an educational program for children of all ages (and their adults), where we’ll explore the traditions of December and their origins, followed by a Pagan ritual to celebrate Yule.” Apparently a number of Christian parents are displeased with the decision. And the school is now considering not allowing material promoting religious events or groups in backpack mail.

I am left wondering how long it will be until some parent or other becomes upset that the school won't allow their child(ren) to advertise some Christian event.

More on this story at the end of this link and this link. Warning: both links go to biased versions of the story. The first one leads to the Americans United for Separation of Church and State blog. The second leads to a WorldNetDaily article. The WorldNetDaily page does include a copy of the Pagan ad. Oddly enough, the WorldNetDaily article does not mention the Liberty Council, saying instead School Board chairwoman Sue Friedman is blaming a decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Maryland.

Of course, this is why we need more separation of church and state, not less. No Christian fliers and no Pagan ones either. Then the Christian parents won't have to worry about having Paganism pushed on their children. Pah ha ha ha ha. Sorry, it's just hard to drum up concern for Christians worried about other people proselytizing. And I say that as someone who regularly attends church.