| Thursday,
November 19, 2009 Thomas Hiltzik in
today's LA Times has written a reasonable description of the California
education system's problems: too much money is being spent on not enough.
http://www.latimes.com/business/
la-fi-hiltzik19-2009nov19,0,5135920.column
It's fairly obvious what the problem is: far from the
principles of transparency and subsidiarity, which would be the only
successful approach to education reform, the state tries to centralize all
decisions and make everything dependent on a central bureaucracy. I covered
some of this in an essay last June,
and that's still worth reading. California's problems began when the courts,
presumably in the hopes of doing good, ordered some equalization of school
district funding: wealthy districts were spending too much, and poor
districts didn't have enough to spend, and the state had to do something
about it. The constitutional basis of Serrano vs. Priest should have been
challenged then and there: I see no compelling reason why the people of a
school district in Paradise, California, should be taxed to increase the
amount that the Los Angeles County Unified School District pays for its
schools.
The result is about what you'd expect. The state bureaucracy
controls the school funding, and mandates how a great deal of it will be
spent, so that Paradise and Los Angeles, the one a small country school
district whose school board actually pays attention -- or did pay attention
-- to school results and what parents say and want, and the other a
monstrous aggregate of inner city and outer suburb and everything in between
whose board will schedule parents three (3) minutes for a meeting at least
six (6) months after an application for appointment, must have the same
policies. Paradise no longer controls either financing nor policies for its
students. LA Unified never had a chance of a policy that would work in both
Studio City and Watts.
I'm a little familiar with Studio City, Watts, and Paradise:
I live in Studio City and although my children did not go to the local
Carpenter Ave. public school, we know teachers there and we know neighbor
children who do go there. I'm not so familiar with Watts today, but
when I was a professor at Pepperdine I daily went to teach at the edge of
Watts, and many of my students were graduates of LA public schools in the
surrounding area. I realize that doesn't sound like the Pepperdine now known
as Malibu U, but in those days the campus was on New Hampshire Avenue just
South of Florence, and I used to walk with my Noon Senior Seminar students
to Broadway and Manchester for hot dogs and ice cream in a perambulatory
class session (about 12 students, generally about half black; it was an
honors pre-law seminar on American Public Law). George Pepperdine founded
his college with the intention of providing quality Christian (Church of
Christ, to be exact) education to those too poor to go to major
institutions, and thus located it in what was then near a number of light
industries and other places where students could get manual labor jobs and
work their way through college. The neighborhood changed over the years, and
Pepperdine thanks to huge grants from a number of wealthy contributors moved
out to Malibu. I didn't go with it. My familiarity with Paradise comes from
their having hired me and Doc Lawler (once well known for his "each one
teach one" literacy program) to go up and examine how well their schools
were doing.
While some of my direct familiarity with Watts and Paradise
is out of date, I do follow results; and it's very clear to me that all of
our school districts have suffered badly from state centralization of
education -- from the abandonment of transparency and subsidiarity. You may
find more about this in
a lengthy answer I gave to a letter about a year ago just after the
election. It too is worth your time.
Transparency and subsidiarity are not fads or cure alls.
They are, however, the necessary and often sufficient condition to many
problems of social governance. They are necessary if we are to avoid the
coming dark age.
Dark Age Ahead
I have repeatedly said: the place to begin education reform
is in the District of Columbia. Congress has the undoubted right to govern
the city in any way it wants to. It has the money: DC spends more per pupil
than anywhere else so far as I know. If there is education expertise in this
world, let it be applied to DC. Let DC show us how things are to be done,
rather than have Washington tell us how things must be done without any
demonstration that their programs and desires will work.
The education crisis is real. The only way out of it is
first to see what the goals of education must be: to educate students, to
have them leave schools ready to be citizens, to get jobs, to do useful
work: some immediately, some after further training, some after a liberal
education, some after a stint in the military, and some only after many
years of University including graduate school. The notion that one form of
education will suffice for all these categories is patently ridiculous. The
notion that eggheads in University Departments of Education know of policies
that will be useful across this nation is at best an unverified hypothesis
facing massive evidence that it is not true.
If the goal of education is to produce useful citizens, why
are we not doing it despite spending far more, now, than ever we did in the
past?
But of course the goal of the education system has little to
do with education at all. The goals of the education system are determined
by Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy,
and in fact the education system is one of the most powerful data sets
confirming the Iron Law.
Transparency and subsidiarity. A Watts school district
controlled by Watts -- taxes and policy -- would have far less money per
pupil than is spent there now -- and I would wager that it would have far
better schools. And whether it does or not, we can be very certain that a
Sherman Oaks school district given control of both the finances and policies
of its local schools would produce better schools than it has now -- and
spend less money on them.
There used to be three enormous examples of the futility of
centralized planning of massive activities: NASA, the Soviet System of
Agriculture, and the American system of education. NASA is trying to change
as it shrinks, and one change was Dan Goldin's attempt to decentralize. The
Soviet system of collective farming vanished with the other central planning
of that failed empire. The American system of education remains, grows more
powerful, and accomplishes less every year; and attempts to 'reform' it
consist of even more centralization.
Somewhere we ought to try transparency and subsidiarity.
Until we do we sow the wind. The whirlwind will be a Dark Age. Dark Ages are
not times in which we simply cannot do things we used to be able to do: they
are times when we have forgotten that we ever could do them, that they ever
could be done. We sow that wind.
Dark Age Ahead
===========
The University Students in California are out protesting the
tuition: they assert their right to have someone else pay for their
education.
That is worth a long essay and a number of questions. I got
my education in a state university system: indeed I went to the University
of Washington because I was legally a Washington state resident due to my
parents then residing in the then Territory of Alaska -- Alaskans were
Washington state residents, since Alaska was an economic colony of Seattle
at the time. I couldn't afford a private university, and I was running
out of the GI Bill which had paid my way through much of the University of
Iowa where I was certainly not a resident. Long story. My point is
that I can hardly denounce the state university system in this country.
But whether given the new and enormous costs of state
universities -- see the Iron Law of Bureaucracy for many of the reasons why
-- and the enormous expansion of that system (California used to have a
system in which the Universities had tiny elite undergraduate programs and
were mostly graduate schools, and the State Colleges were undergraduate
schools with little graduate school activity -- but that got thrown out in
the name of diversity and equality, and now there's no sane allocation
system.
But the students had to be dispersed by riot police. And
it's not over. That's education for you.
The solution is to admit fewer students to the expensive
education systems, and expand the cheaper ones. But that won't happen. It
would make too much sense.
Transparency and subsidiarity... That is, keep
the State centralized university system, scale it to what can be afforded,
and give the local state colleges to their local districts, to control and
to finance as they can and will. But that is not likely to happen.
===========================
The Senate version of the health care bill changes the definition of a
primary care physician to include LVN and Physician Assistant. I'm not
entirely sure this is a bad thing, but I am quite certain it need not be in
a national law.
Subsidiarity and transparency...
=============
Outlook Tip for November 18
2009 (office 2010 beta)
Welcome to Outlook Tips, your source for daily tips
on using Outlook effectively.
Outlook Tips: Office 2010 Beta
November 18 2009
The public beta is now available at
http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx
You’ll need a live id (passport) and answer a short
survey to get to the download page.
I highly recommend users not install it on their
“production” system. If you ignore this advice, install the 32bit version,
especially if you use add-ins or sync with devices. Existing add-ins will
not work with the 64bit version. There is a good chance they will work
with the32bit build.
For best results, uninstall your current version of
Outlook and make a backup copy of any PST in your profile. The old profile
should work ok, but you should consider making a new one.
If you use the Outlook Connector uninstall it before
installing it beta. Outlook should offer to download the new connector for
you. If not, make a new profile and add the Hotmail/Live account to it.
This should bring up the offer to download the new connector. Once
installed, it will work with the account in the old profile.
Bonus tip: Look on the File tab for Options and
Account settings.
Diane Poremsky Outlook-tips.net
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=================
Kindle for PC in action on tablets, handhelds.
<http://jezlyn.wordpress.com/2009/11/10
/my-tablet-pc-is-now-a-kindle/>
<http://www.umpcportal.com/2009/11/
kindle-for-umpc-now-available-hands-on/>
<http://www.appscout.com/2009/11/
test_drive_amazon_kindle_for_t.php>
<http://www.bulldogsolutions.net/VerisignInternetDefense/
VSN11192009/frmRegistration.aspx?bdls=22305>
--- Roland Dobbins
=============================
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