Self-Assured Ignorance? Or Self-interested Disingenuousness?

The Headmistress of The Common Room linked this teacher's attack on homeschooling. If any homeschooling family needed more evidence in defense of their decision to homeschool, Jesse Scaccia unwittingly provides it.

His "top ten reasons why homeschooling parents are doing the wrong thing":...

"10. 'You were totally home schooled' is an insult college kids use when mocking the geeky kid in the dorm (whether or not the offender was home schooled or not). And… say what you will… but it doesn’t feel nice to be considered an outsider, a natural outcropping of being homeschooled."

If true, he's established that some conventionally-schooled kids are pointlessly rude and envious, no more.

"9. Call me old-fashioned, but a students’ classroom shouldn’t also be where they eat Fruit Loops and meat loaf (not at the same time I hope). It also shouldn’t be where the family gathers to watch American Idol or to play Wii. Students–from little ones to teens–deserve a learning-focused place to study. In modern society, we call them schools."

Mr. Scaccia may call the building in which he works a "school", but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If homeschooled kids are so geeky (see point 10, above), as to earn the envy and hostility of his charges (as well as admission to college a year or more ahead of his charges), the memory of yesterday's dinner obviously did not interfere with their education. Mr. Scaccia's "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts" are his personal (ill-considered) idiosyncracies. Is not a one-room schoolhouse a "school"? Wouldn't students who attended a one-room school have taken lunch in the same room they occupied for instruction?

"8. Homeschooling is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, students who get homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) high achieving students out of our schools is a disservice to our less fortunate public school kids. Poorer students with less literate parents are more reliant on peer support and motivation, and they greatly benefit from the focus and commitment of their richer and higher achieving classmates."

In general, taking care of one's self is a generous act. It reduces the burden on caregivers and so allows caregivers to devote their attention to more needy cases. Further, Mr. Scaccia does not limit his indictment, "homeschooling is selfish", by time, yet his evidence, "students who are homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families", implies that, previously, homeschoolers were less wealthy and less educated. So, it was not selfish earlier?

The "peer effects" argument is important; too important to depend on say-so. There is some evidence that the "peer effects" argument works against conventional schools. Chubb and Moe found that schools which practiced "tracking" (by which I believe they meant ability-grouping) outperformed schools which did not. If "peers" may successfully exert their effect from across the hall, why not from the house across the street? Also, peer effects may work against overall system performance if negative peer effects (e.g., point 10, above, the hostility which Mr. Scaccia claims his disciples direct at their intellectual betters, or the pressure against "acting white") outweigh positive peer effects.

"7. God hates homeschooling. The study, done by the National Center for Education Statistics, notes that the most common reason parents gave as the most important was a desire to provide religious or moral instruction. To the homeschooling Believers out there, didn’t God say “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”? Didn’t he command, “Ye shall be witnesses unto me”? From my side, to take your faithful children out of schools is to miss an opportunity to spread the grace, power and beauty of the Lord to the common people. (Personally I’m agnostic, but I’m just saying…)".

In "Schools and Simple Justice: Toward the Dignity of Choice", Boalt Hall Professor of Law John Coons argued that school choice protects parents' right of speech, to speak through their children to their community and to succeeding generations. This argument applies with equal force to homeschoolers. Their "witness" consists of their choice to homeschool, and the children they send into the world. Mr. Scaccia's "witness" consists of...see point 10, above. See also...
Roland Meighan
"Home-based Education Effectiveness Research and Some of its Implications", Educational Review, Vol. 47, No.3, 1995.

"The issue of social skills. One edition of Home School Researcher, Volume 8, Number 3, contains two research reports on the issue of social skills. The first finding of the study by Larry Shyers (1992) was that home-schooled students received significantly lower problem behavior scores than schooled children. His next finding was that home-schooled children are socially well adjusted, but schooled children are not so well adjusted. Shyers concludes that we are asking the wrong question when we ask about the social adjustment of home-schooled children. The real question is why is the social; adjustment of schooled children of such poor quality?"

"The second study, by Thomas Smedley (1992), used different test instruments but comes to the same conclusion, that home-educated children are more mature and better socialized than those attending school." ...p. 277
"12. So-called 'school phobia' is actually more likely to be a sign of mental health, whereas school dependancy is a largely unrecognized mental health problem"....p.281

(Personally, I was raised in no church. I'm a materialist. That is, the only things which require explanation are observations, and the only things which count as explanation are observations.)

"6. Homeschooling parent/teachers are arrogant to the point of lunacy. For real! My qualifications to teach English include a double major in English and education, two master’s degrees (education and journalism), a student teaching semester and multiple internship terms, real world experience as a writer, and years in the classroom dealing with different learning styles. So, first of all, homeschooling parent, you think you can teach English as well as me? Well, maybe you can. I’ll give you that. But there’s no way that you can teach English as well as me, and biology as well as a trained professional, and history… and Spanish… and art… and counsel for college as well as a school’s guidance counselor… and… and…"

Homeschooling parents do not need to know everything; there are these amazing resources known as "books", and programs like Rosetta Stone, and tutors.
btw, I will be seeking work come September. I charge $20/hour (or invite me to lunch and I'll arrive an hour early and provide instruction free--but no teacher or tutor outperforms a loving parent).

"5. As a teacher, homeschooling kind of pisses me off. (That’s good enough for #5.)"

People hate what they fear. Homeschooling challenges the justification for the entire State-school apparatus, and threatens the revenue stream of system insiders. That's good enough for a rebuttal.

"4. Homeschooling could breed intolerance, and maybe even racism. Unless the student is being homeschooled at the MTV Real World house, there’s probably only one race/sexuality/background in the room. How can a young person learn to appreciate other cultures if he or she doesn’t live among them?"

Homeschooling parents have chosen to homeschool, not to move to Mars.

"3. And don’t give me this 'they still participate in activities with public school kids' garbage. Socialization in our grand multi-cultural experiment we call America is a process that takes more than an hour a day, a few times a week. Homeschooling, undoubtedly, leaves the child unprepared socially."

Conventional schools provide bad socialization. See Meighan, above. See also this Marvin Minsky comment on school, this article on artificially extended adolescence by Ted Kolderie, and these charts which I got from a statistician in the office of the Hawaii Attorney General.

"2. Homeschooling parents are arrogant, Part 2. According to Henry Cate, who runs the Why Homeschool blog, many highly educated, high-income parents are 'probably people who are a little bit more comfortable in taking risks' in choosing a college or line of work. 'The attributes that facilitate that might also facilitate them being more comfortable with home-schooling.'

More comfortable taking risks with their child’s education? Gamble on, I don’t know, the Superbowl, not your child’s future."

Socialists just do not get it: "What works?" is an empirical question, which only a competitive market can answer. Professors of Education treat John Dewey as some sort of diety. It always seemed odd to me that Dewey lauded "inquiry" as a model for dealing with life, yet defended the State's (i.e., government's) role in prescribing curriculum. Every decision is a gamble. Aggregation of authority (for curricular decisions, for example) raises the level of risk.

"1. And finally… have you met someone homeschooled? Not to hate, but they do tend to be pretty geeky***."

Meaning, homeschooling works.

House-sitting, Reading, and a Bit of Math

My younger sister and her husband are on vacation from their retirement. This is not to say that they went back to work, but that they have taken their two-year-delayed 25th anniversary vacation to Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Crakow, and points in between. While a friend feeds Bully, my cat, in Honolulu, I feed three cats and two dogs in Honomu.

This time of year, the sun rises around 0530 local time (1530 Zulu) here, over the ocean, casting a long house-shadow upslope toward Mauna Kea and the telescopes. Makai (seaward) the land falls away for 1000 feet, to the East-Northeast. I have always been an extreme lark and rise before the sun, unless some night-owl has led me astray. With no temptations around, it's easy to be temperate, and, nuked cup of yesterday's coffee in hand, I walk the 100 yards to the mailbox for the Hilo Tribune-Herald, then watch daylight spread.

My sister and her husband majored in History, so, as you would expect, books line the walls of this house. Since I had resolved on New Year's Day to read two books for every new one I order and had some catching up to do, I brought from Honolulu Clayton Cramer's rebuttal, Armed America; The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie, to Michael Bellesiles' Arming America; The Origins of a National Gun Culture, Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, Ivar Berg's Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery, and the State Auditor's latest indictment of the Hawaii DOE.

Two down. I read slowly, chewing over things, arguing with the author, and rereading things I do not understand. I recommend Armed America, not only for the major point but for the incidental details (for example, in the early Republic, young teenagers, including free black teenagers, routinely carried guns; legislatures in some frontier slave states required plantation owners to arm their slaves). Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid makes a strong case against foreign aid, but leaves unanswered her pointed question: "Who will bell the cat?" The aid industry, like the education industry, employs a large number of articulate, well-paid people who have a lot to lose in a transformation to a more effective institutional structure.

Which brings me to Ivar Berg's Education and Jobs: "...The indirect (i.e., circumstantial) evidence of dollar earnings favored by human capital writers, in urgent and insistent support of claims about the 'social value' of diplomas and degrees, was especially troubling. The theme in these claims was straightforward: better educated Americans earn more because they are more productive, and we know they are more productive because they earn more. Cliches are cliches and may be indulged because they are true; it is the case generally, though, that tautologies are likely to be more than just a tad problematic."

Just a tad. I expect to like this book, too.

The Math?
I. Q: Why does 1530 Zulu (Universal Time) equal 0530 Hawaii time?
A: 360/24=15, so every 15 degrees away from the Greenwich meridian means one hour time difference. Hawaii's longitude is about 153 degrees or so West of Greenwich, so that's 10 hours difference. Add two (0500 Zulu is 7 p.m. Hawaii time, the day before) or subtract ten (1530 Zulu is 0530 Hawaii time).

II. You have seen the teasers for IQ tests: how many triangles in the repeated pattern? I take the things and click "submit", then cancel out when the site wants personal information, but anyway, the formula which relates a level "l" to the number of all up-oriented triangles plus unit down-oriented triangles is a 3rd degree polynomial with leading coefficient 1/6. 1/6 because a hexagon tiles the plane. I'm working on a general formula for down-oriented triangles, but that's more complicated.
Update (2009-06-08-0150 Zulu): Got it, sort of. I have two functions (one for odd and one for even) that yield correct values up to ten levels. The real work will involve demonstrating that these functions yield correct values for the general case.

III. The last kids I tutored (US-born Japanese-Korean and US-born Korean intermediate or high school kids) could do this:

Find "t" such that 187^^t (exponentiation) gives a remainder of 16 when divided by 43and a remainder of 25 when divided by 47.

I guess that this stuff finds application in error-correcting codes, but I do it because it's fun and my students do it because it's easy. It leads to consideration of the Euclidean Algorithm and generalizations of the Chinese Remainder Theorem (generalizations which I do not understand). I have been computing the cyclic subgroups generated by exponentiation of the congruence classes mod a prime, for all primes from 2 up to...well, I don't know when I'll get bored. I finished 61, am not looking forward to 67 or 71, but expect to have fun with 73. Maybe then I'll stop and do something useful, like yardwork.

Bailing Out Government Schools

In "Bailing Out Government Schools", Mary Theroux writes "...government spending on K–12 public education in America is at an all-time high. The national average current expenditure per student is around $10,418". This somewhat understates the US taxpayers' per-pupil K-12 budget. Updated figures only strengthen the author's argument. This table, from the NCES, gives a 2005-2006 total US K-12 "public" (i.e., government) school budget (revenues) of $520.644 billion, and a total enrollment of 49.113 million students. This table gives a 2007 fiscal year total US "public" school budget of $555.336 billion, and this table gives a 2007 fiscal year enrollment of 49.256 million students. Unless I pushed the wrong buttons on this calculator, these numbers imply a US per pupil budget over $11,000.

Okay, "total revenues" differs from "total expenditures" and "total expenditures" differs from "current expenditures", but still...why? Why would "revenues" differ from "expenditures" in an organization which can neither assume debt nor carry over funds? In Hawaii, the State (not the DOE) creates the debt which funds school construction.

Hawaii education reporters (e.g., Loren Moreno, Susan Essoyan) and Hawaii DOE officials (e.g., BOE Chair Garrett Toguchi, Superintendent Pat Hamamoto) regularly understate the Hawaii DOE budget.

Let a equal Hawaii's 2006-2007 school year budget: $2,950,803
Let b equal Hawaii's 2006-2007 enrollment: 180,728

a/b=$16,327 per pupil.

Consider this table. What does the wide variation between States in the ratio of "Facilities acquisition and construction" costs to "Replacement equipment" costs imply? Does this reflect differences in accounting definitions? What does the wide variation between States in the ratio of "Total expenditures" to "Interest on debt" imply?

Thanks to John Ray for the link to the Theroux essay.

Where's the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel?

They missed the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel.

Why School? (Reprise)

I left this comment (with a small modification in this version) at Ken DeRosa's place.

(Ken): "A portion of everyone's taxes goes to schooling the children of others. For those that have children, a portion of taxes goes to educate their own children. So I don't see why at least that portion should not be controlled by the parents so long as it is going to educate their children."
(Dick): "Because it's about everyone's children, not just about 'my' child. The public schools serve a social/acculturation function. Some place no value on the civic/common good. I personally favor open enrollment in all public schools, which would turn every school into a 'charter'. "

We are all public citizens and private individuals. Children in independent or parochial schools are as much "the public" as are children in the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools. Unions, even "public sector" unions, are private 501-c(5) corporations. What you call "the public school system" is a policy which restricts parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' pre-college education subsidy to schools operated by dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel. There is no coherent welfare-economic argument for this restriction.

In abstract, the education industry is an unlikely candidate for State (government, generally) operation. Children vary widely in their interests and abilities. The possible careers they might pursue vary enormously. Systematic expertise in "education" matters far less than local knowledge about individual children's interests and abilities.

Per pupil costs rise as school districts increase in size. Beyond a very low level, the education industry exhibits no economies of scale at the delivery end. The education industry is not a natural monopoly. "Natural monopoly" is the usual welfare-economic argument for State operation of an industry.

Abundant evidence supports the following generalizations:
1) As institutions take from individual parents the power to determine the curriculum and the pace and method of instruction which their own children will experience, overall system performance falls.
2) Political control of school harms most the children of the least politically adept parents.

The "public goods" argument for a State role in an industry implies subsidy and regulation of an industry, at most, not State operation of that industry. The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". Given the argument for subsidies to the sub-adult education industry, the issue then becomes: who best represents taxpayers' interests in determining who shall receive that subsidy?

I reason axiomatically here.
1) Most parents love their children and want their children to outlive them.
2) If you live among people, there are basically three ways you can make a living: (2.1) you can beg, (2.2) you can steal, (2.3) you can trade goods and services for other people's goods and services.
3) Most parents accept proposition 2 and prefer 2.3 for their children.
4) Therefore, most parents want from an education system what taxpayers want from an education system, that children be educated to assume productive lives.

The interests of insiders of the State-monopoly school system differ systematically from the interests of parents and taxpayers. Insiders have a direct interest in inefficient delivery of services. Thus, we see the increase in the span of compulsory attendance and systemic hostility toward self-paced instruction. Teachers need to be needed.

Please read this one page Marvin Minsky comment on school and this article on artificially extended adolescence by Ted Kolderie.

Although vouchers, tuition tax credits, and subsidized homeschooling (as in Alaska) would be large improvements over the State-monopoly school system, for various reasons I prefer a policy I call Parent Performance Contracting.

What he said...

You could just read the linked blogs, but what he said...

Coincidence or applied theory?

You must read The Anchoress. "Coincidence or applied theory" indeed.

Tracks in the Forest

Comments at Joanne's place on merit pay.
Comments at Joanne's place on the Swedish voucher program.
Comments at Joanne's place on school violence.
Comments at Jay Greene's place on the WSJ DC voucher editorial.
Comments at Jay Greene's place on centralization and federalism.
Comments at Ken's place on reform visions.
Comments at Ken's place on President Obama's education policy address.

Chris Matthews confirms his partisanship

"When you left the country in our hands".

He could hardly be more direct.

Chris Matthews makes a decent point about the explosion of spending under Bush II (though it's a wet firecracker compared to President Obama's nuke), but still..."our hands"?

Book Meme

The Headmistress posted the following list, which seems to me to contain fiction--school-assigned fiction--disproportionately. Why so much Dickens and so little Melville? Why Arthur Conan Doyle and not Saki or O. Henry? Among moderns, why Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker and not Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and/or Chinua Achebe? Why on Earth would anyone choose to include Frank Herbert's Dune over Karl Capek's RUR or The War with the Newts? Why Gabriel Garcia Marquez and not Jorge Luis Borges? How 'bout a list of non-fiction classics?

Anyway...
Bold those you have read. Italicize those you intend to read.
My responses, with comments.
Mostly, I'm doing this so my siblings can humiliate me through their vastly greater acquaintance with this canon.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Sorry. I do not like magic).
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (In high school. Magazine publishers paid Dickens by the word, and it shows).
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (A 9-11 Truther before his time).
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (One day).
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I suppose. My wise older sister recommends George Eliot, but then, she likes Dickens, too).
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (A Hindu street vendor in Singapore saw my copy of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and recommended Tolstoy's War and Peace: "Leo Tolstoy is a very pious man.")
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I recommend)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (What's the bid deal with Steinbeck?)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (You'd have to pay me).
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I preferred The Inheritors).
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (Pompous trash).
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (In high school. I liked it at the time. Not anymore).
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ( I recommend).
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (One day, maybe)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Infantile fantasy).
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I recommend).
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (Fluff).
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Teacher Standards Board

They're at it again. The Hawaii Legislature started hearing bills. The fun never stops in the Education committees. Senator Norman Sakamoto serves as Senate Education committee chair.

Please DO NOT support SB 142 Senate Bill 142, Section I constructs a false history of the Hawaii Teacher Standards Board. It asserts:

1 In 2001, the legislature transferred
2 responsibility for licensing teachers from the department of
3 education to the Hawaii teacher standards board. The transfer
4 was based on recommendations from the Hawaii Policy Group of the
5 National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a national
6 organization with twenty-three partner states, including Hawaii.

First misrepresentation: Participation in NCTAF by individuals or organizations within the State of Hawaii does not make Hawaii a member or partner of NCTAF, any more than churches are members or partners of State governments.

By authorizing the board to assume responsibility for teacher
8 licensing, the legislature sought to strengthen the teaching
9 profession by making the board self-governing and accountable
10 for teachers who obtain and maintain licenses in Hawaii.

Second misrepresentation: In the initial legislation, the Teacher Standards Board was a non-cost bill which proposed a temporary Board, which was to develop licensing criteria for new-hire teachers and then to go out of business. The initial legislation did not empower the Board to revoke licenses of teachers already in service or to charge teachers already in service for the privilege of being less secure in their jobs. 3000 teachers signed a petition against this expansion of the Board's powers.

The initial legislation mandated a nine-member Board, with four members from the HSTA, three from the HGEA, one from the College of Education (the UHPA is an NEA subsidiary) and one member from the Board of Education. Counting the UHPA member, the NEA has a majority on the Board. Counting the HGEA, public-sector unions dominate the Board eight-to-one. This places the public-sector unions in a very convenient conflict of interest situation: any teacher whom the HGEA and HSTA find inconvenient can be terminated through revocation of her license, with no consequent obligation by the union to defend her. It is as though the Legislature has given to a board of lawyers the power to determine which clients lawyers on retainer must defend. Basically, the Teacher Standards Board empowwers the HSTA to renege on its contractural obligation to defend teachers.

The Board's performance standards for teachers required that teachers develop coherent sequences of lessons, that they adapt lessons to individual learning styles, and that they take advantage of spontaneous opportunities for instruction. These are all good ideas, but they are inconsistent, and so cannot qualify as "standards". The Board required that teachers align instruction to the DOE's curriculum content and student performance standards. The "standards" to which this requirement referred were those of the Final Report of the Hawaii State Commission on Content and Performance Standards (the "Blue Book") which the DOE abandoned after three years as complicated, contradictory, and vague. My point here is that the members of the Teacher Standards Board would not know a standard if you dropped one on their toes.

The Teacher Standards Board requires that teachers have degrees from an accredited teacher preparation program. No statistical, empirical evidence supports such a restriction.

The Teacher Standards Board has supported salary enhancements for teachers with National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification. No statistical, empirical evidence supports such a policy.

The Value-Added Achievement Gains of NBPTS-Certified Teachers in Tennessee:
A Brief Report
J. E. Stone, Ed.D.
College of Education
East Tennessee State University

Conclusion:
The findings of this study present a serious challenge to NBPTS's claims regarding its teacher quality standards and certification process. At the very least, they suggest that public expenditures on NBPTS certification and teacher bonuses should be suspended until it can be clearly and independently established that NBPTS certification delivers what it promises.

Abolish the Teacher Standards Board.

Amen

Filched from sweasel.com

Why home school?

At Atlas shrugs, a very good reason.

The Common Room: School Reform and Self-Perpetuating Institutions

The Headmistress collects arguments against a State presence in the education industry: The Common Room: School Reform and Self-Perpetuating Institutions. The State (government, generally) cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". This definition then binds students, parents, real classroom teachers, and taxpayers. The State's current operational definition amounts to "attendance at institutions operated by dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel". Since politicians cultivate allies who support their reelection, and since the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel wields enormous electoral clout, systemic reform will likely not occur as a result of democratic politics. Against this view: budget considerations may compel reform.

Governments at all levels have made more promises than they can keep. Some sort of default will occur. Either the State (government, generally) defaults openly (e.g., raising the age at which people qualify for Social Security, reducing Medicare coverage) or disguises a default by paying debts in devalued dollars. Given the power of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, politicians will most likely put the State-subsidized education industry last in line for budget cuts.

Parents need not and should not wait for politicians to empower parents in their education choices. At least here, in Hawaii, parents may homeschool, and they do not need to sacrifice an income to do so. Nothing in the law requires that parents provide instruction between 1800 and 0030 Zulu time (8:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Hawaii time).

Engineers' Dreams

Tough Choices, Tough Times
I read the executive summary. Sometimes I skipped a bit, as my eyes glazed over.

Consider four categories of sentences in this document:
1. Assertions as to fact
2. Value judgments
3. Inferences (from 1, 2, or 1 and 2)
4. Recommendations.

I agree with some of the assertions as to fact and disagree with others. For example, the authors note the role which expanded opportunities for intelligent women in the civilian employment market played in the decline of talent in the teacher workforce. I agree. They assert that expanded opportunities for minorities played a similar role. This I doubt: the government school school system discriminated against minorities not (as with women) in favor of them.

The authors implicitly equate "education" and schooling. Not ("education" = "schooling"). The authors contend that "education" (by which they mean "schooling") contributes to GDP growth. Not so much. Clear title and contract law, transparent and honest bureaucracy, and simple taxation at low rates contribute far more to GDP growth than does the number of PhDs in Women's Studies and Political Science per 100,000 of population.

The contention that low-skilled jobs will move overseas does not reflect reality. Most of the world's work is grunt-work, and most of this work cannot be done through the internet. Just try have your car washed by someone in Chengdu. The waitress in the Cascade Lodge, in Lutsen, Minnesota cannot do her job from Bombay.

I (mostly) agree with the (largely implicit) value judgments, although once you make them explicit, the problems become clear. Literacy enhances quality of life and productivity. Okay, but are there not decreasing marginal returns to investment in literacy? Where are they, for any particular individual? Can some State bureaucracy determine this any better than can the individual himself?

Make the same objection to mathematical skill, or any particular vocational skill.

The recommendations really raised my hackles. Freeman Dyson called this sort of grand planning "engineers' dreams". The authors recommend a vast expansion of State-supervised formal education at the expense of informal education and training which employers and others undertake on their own.

Step 1
Our first step is creating a set of Board Examinations. States will have their own Board Examinations, and some national and even international organizations will offer their own...A Board Exam is an exam in a set of core subjects that is based on a syllabus provided by the Board....The standards will be set at the expectations incorporated in the exams given by the countries that do the best job educating their students.

Will they now? The authors do not describe the politics which the determination of which countries "do the best job educating their students" will entail.

Students who score well enough will be guaranteed the right to go to their community college to begin a program leading to a two year technical degree or a two-year program designed to enable the student to transfer later into a four-year state college.

So success in school qualifies students for more school? Do the authors aticipate that any students will ever want to exit this treadmill?

Step 4:
Develop standards, assessments, and curriculum that reflect today’s needs and tomorrow’s requirements...

Government direction of investment used to go by the name "industrial policy". It failed. State planners could do no better than non-State actors in anticipating future demands for goods and services. Why expect that investment in human capital differs?

Step 5:
Create high performance schools and districts everywhere — how the system should be governed, financed, organized, and managed...

While you're at it, why not give every commuter a car with a 100 mpg carburetor, every child a flying pony, and your local power company a clean fusion reactor?

The schools would be funded directly by the state, according to a pupil-weighting formula as described below.

Bureaucrats have no clear way to assign weights to various conditions. What weight will they assign to a student who reached age 7 speaking Cantonese or Tamil? Is this a disability? People in China and India do not think so. Plato was not LD.

STEP 6:
Provide high-quality, universal early childhood education For decades, researchers have almost universally concluded that high-quality early childhood education is one of the best investments a nation can make in its young people.

Early institutionalized childhood education does more harm than good. Studies which find a benefit from "high-quality daycare" compare the performance of children of deficient parents who receive high-quality care to the performance of children of deficient parents who do not. This result DOES NOT generalize to the population at large. By analogy: locate 500 people stranded in the Sahara, without foor or water. Divide this population into two groups, Treatment and Control. To people in group T we will give polluted water, spoiled vegetables, and rotten meat. People in group C get nothing. Assess longevity, post-treatment, of both groups. If people in group T live longer, on average, than people in group C, can we assert that polluted water, spoiled vegetables, and rotten meat will enhance the lifespan of people with access to a normal food supply? Advocates for early childcare say "yes". They lie.

Step 7:
Give strong support to the students who need it the most. The Commission’s proposals, taken together, should transform the prospects of disadvantaged
children. The proposal to abandon local funding of schools in favor of state funding using a uniform pupil-weighting funding formula, combined with the addition of $19 billion to the system as a whole, will make it possible, for the first time in the history of the United States, to have an equitable means of funding our schools, while at the same time leveling up the funding of the system as a whole, so that relatively well-to-do districts will not have the incentive to defeat the system that they would have if the existing funds were simply redistributed.

1. Define "need".
2. What "incentive to defeat the system" do "relatively well-to-do districts" have in the current system?

Coulson 1, NYT 0

Education journalism does not get much better than this, sadly.

I observed earlier that Education writers typically subscribe to Jonathan Kozol's false supposition, that inner-city minority school districts receive less support than suburban or rural districts. Journalists endorse other ill-supported theses, about the quality of expertise (professional certification), the effects of class size reductions, the value of "discovery" methods of instruction, and (a recent example), the stimulative effects of school construction spending.

Journalism majors share the cellar with Social Work and Elementary Education majors, when matched against other candidates for grad school admission, on the GRE, LSAT, and GMAT, according to an article by Kenneth Adleman in the Kappan some years back.

Two Cents More

Why is the government in the education business at all? Prompted by Parry Graham...

For those exceptional children and circumstances, I agree that a greater amount of flexibility would likely be beneficial. However, you appear to be arguing that this approach should be extended to all children and parents, replacing the existing structure of formalized K-12 public schooling.

...we return to this question.

The argument does not proceed from exceptional cases to a generalization. I use exceptional cases as stark illustrations of the generalization.

Back up several steps.

The government of a locality is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition). Place industries on a continuum. What part of the continuum from "very likely candidate for State operation" to "very unlikely candidate for State operation" does the education industry occupy? In abstract, the education industry is a very unlikely candidate for State (government, generally) operation.

Why does the State intervene in the education industry at all? This "why?" question has three interpretations: 1) The welfare-economic "why?". What does society gain from a State role in the education industry? 2) The historical "why?". What events coincided with the State's entry into the education business? 3) The political science "why?". What do those politicians who support the State's presence in the education industry gain from their support?

1) See below.
2) Anti-Catholic bigotry.
3) Dedicated lobbying by current recipients of the taxpayers' $500 billion+ per year K-12 education subsidy.

1) We consider the welfare-economic argument for a State role in the education industry here.

The case for subsidy is weak. Given the case for State subsidization of the education industry, the case for State operation of schools for the general population is weaker still.

Please read the introductory section (p 88) in West, E.G.,
Education Vouchers in Principle and Practice: A Survey
The World Bank Research Observer, V12, #1, Feb., 1997.

The education industry is not a natural monopoly. Beyond a very low level, there are no economies of scale at the delivery end of the education business as it currently operates. "Natural monopoly" and "economies of scale" are the usual welfare-economic arguments for State operation of an industry. Even when an industry qualifies as a natural monopoly or exhibits significant economies of scale the case for State operation of an industry is not decisive, and the education industry is not a natural monopoly and, beyond a very low level, does not exhibit significant economies of scale at the delivery end as it currently operates.

Education only marginally qualifies as a public good as economists use the term and the public goods argument implies subsidy and regulation, at most, not State operation of an industry. The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education" but then students, parents, and real classroom teachers are bound by the State's definition. You will have a hard time finding a definition specific enough to guide a bureaucrat whose job it is to assess whether State funds are well spent and yet general enough to encompass all that normal people would call "education". In consequence, policy makers compose restricted definitions which force wildly varying children into a narrow mold. The results are tragic.

Further, State assumption of responsibility for the provision (even through subsidization) of public goods does not eliminate the "free rider" problem at the root of "public goods" analysis. The State is a corporation. Corporate oversight is a public good. Oversight of State functions is a public good which the State itself cannot provide.

I see a semi-plausible case for State operation of schools for some limited subset of the sub-adult population. Compulsory attendance statutes mean little unless some schools must accept students rejected everywhere else. Call these default-option schools "the public schools". Taxpayers do not benefit from policies which give a narrow cartel (the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel) a long-term exclusive position in receipt of the budget dedicated to the operation of these schools. Taxpayers would benefit from a policy which periodically put contracts for the operation of these schools out to bid. Let the NEA compete with the HGEA, the AFT, Edison, The University of Phoenix, and the Catholic Church for these contracts.

Government is not some all-seeing, benevolent God. People do not become more intelligent, more altruistic, better-informed, or more capable (except in their enhanced access to the tools of violence) when they enter the State's employ. Children are not standard. Remote State actors, wielding the blunt instrument of State violence, have little usefully to contribute to the education industry.

Comment at Ken's Place

Ken DeRossa started a little argument. Here's my two cents' worth.

What's the alternative to a market in education services? Perhaps it's better to suppose a range of options on a multidimensional continuum and ask: "What actions can policymakers, teachers, taxpayers, parents, and/or students take to improve the performance of the US (formal) K-PhD. education system?" The answer will depend on the powers available to the person who answers.

The government of a locality is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition). Every law on the books is a threat by the State (government, generally) to kidnap (arrest), assault (subdue), and forcibly inoculate with HIV (imprison) someone, under specified circumstances. People do not become more intelligent, more compassionate, better-informed, or more capable (except by their enhanced access to violence) when they enter the State's employ. The tools available to State actors are violence and threats of violence, and subsidy, extracted at gunpoint from taxpayers.

In the US today, academics design school policy. These academics excelled at school. They have spent their entire lives in school. They imagine that the academic is the highest form of life on Earth and that everyone wants to be a college professor. The curriculum they prescribe and the goals to which they invite students to aspire are foreign to many normal children. Training an artistically or mechanically inclined child for an academic career using a transcript as the incentive is like teaching a cat to swim using carrots as the reward.

Compulsory, unpaid labor is slavery; black or white, male or female, young or old. Compulsion kills motivation. US schools fail because they give to many children no reason to do what schools require. Einstein opposed compulsory attendance at school. Gandhi opposed compulsory attendance at school.

The State-monopoly US school system originated in anti-Catholic bigotry and has become an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded construction and supply contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination. If this is not so, why cannot any student take, at any time, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers' age 6-18 K-12 education subsidy toward post-secondary tuition at any VA-approved post-secondary institution or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified (say, has filed W-2 forms on at least three adult employees for at least the previous four years) employer?

The NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools (the "public" schools) operate for the convenience of administrators, not for the benefit of students. Consider the concept of "a year of Math" or "a year of English Literature". This makes as much sense as "a pound of friendship" or "a meter of exercise". Think on it: measurement of course content in units of time reflects what some administrator imagines a "normal" child can acquire in some amount of time. This indicates systematic indifference to individual differences in ability. That indifference characterizes the cartel's one-size-fits-all methods of operation. And THAT kills motivation.

The education industry is not a natural monopoly. Beyond a very low level there are no economies of scale at the delivery end of the education business. Education only marginally qualifies as a public good as economists use the term and the "public goods" argument implies subsidy and regulation, at most, not State (government, generally) operation of an industry.

Amended (2008-12-21:1741 Zulu) by a one-word substitution ("reflects"=>"indicates") and insertion of "That indifference...operation".

Close to Home (Part II)

High performance education systems will generally exhibit motivated students, well-scripted curricula, and competent instructors. We can play with the concept of "system" here and falsify the assertion that any of these ingredients is necessary. For example, we might collect numerous cases where important discoveries happened by chance, to people who were not seeking them, and call this collection of cases a "system". Quite a lot of learning occurs without any composed curricula or instruction. For example, many people improve their competence at their hobbies or recreations through experience alone. We consider designed educational systems below.

Motivation, curricula, and instruction matter, and interact. Institutional care affects this interaction by displacing parents as instructors with non-parent instructors and by diminishing student and parent control over the selection of curricula. Whether institutional care outperforms informal care or unsupervised play will depend on the relative impact of family arrangements versus institutions on student motivation, curricula, and instructor competence, and on the measure of student performance (e.g., standardized test scores, juvenile crime rates, college acceptance rates, adult lifetime income) used to assess system performance.

Advocates for early childhood education and later formal schooling have an institutional interest in over-estimating the contribution which expertise makes to system performance. While any given system with competent instructors will outperform the same system with incompetent instructors, the following apply to a prediction of the success of policies which displace parents by remote "experts":
1) "Competence" includes the ability to motivate students.
2) The natural bond between parents and children makes parents naturally superior to strangers in this respect
3) In many subject areas, whatever subject-area expertise parents lack exists in books.
4) Compulsion kills motivation.
5) Institutions which derive their their revenues from State (government, generally) sources and bill taxpayers based on student time (per hour or per year) have strong incentives to impede student progress. Effective self-paced curricula would demonstrate the irrelevance of instructors for many students in many subject areas.

Close to home (Part I)

Jenny D looks at early childhood education.

On what theory does it make sense to take children from parents? Early institutionalization of children lowers overall system performance on several measures.

States which compel attendance at age 7 exhibit higher 4th and 8th grade NAEP Reading and Math scores than States which compel attendance at age 6.

Some years ago a visiting Professor of Education from Canada told me that people at some Canadian university studied the relation between the age of compulsory attendance and school performance. According to this professor (whose name I do not recall), the investigators could not find the upper limit (the point when the performance advantage shifts from parents to institutions) and quit looking when the political implications became overwhelming.

On what theory does transferring control of children from parents to strangers yield a social benefit? Consider three scenarios:

1)If the strangers are also parents and the child to caregiver ratio is one to one, we play musical chairs with children and the theory implies that children will work harder for strangers than for their own parents and that parents will more effectively instruct strangers' children than their own.

2) If caregivers are also parents and the child to caregiver ratio is greater than one-to-one, we are to believe that (over some low range) larger child to caregiver ratios yield better performance than lower ratios. Is that plausible?
3) If caregivers are non-parents, we are to believe that non-parents out-perform parents. Do you believe any of this?

Please read Dahlmia and Snell
"Protect Our Kids From Preschool"
Wall Street Journal, 22-Aug.-2008

Also
Steve Biddulph
"A child-care lesson from Canada"
Sydney Morning Herald, 19-Jam.-2008

A large Canadian policy experiment provides a lesson that might save us much grief in Australia. In 2000 the province of Quebec, populous and progressive, took the bold step of providing universal day care right down to newborn babies, at a cost to parents of $5 a day. It was a well-intentioned attempt to come to terms with a large increase in the number of families where both parents were working, which had almost doubled in 30 years.
Three economists, Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber and Kevin Milligan, seized the chance to evaluate what happened in real time. They had the rest of Canada as a control group, and a large study in place tracking children across the country to provide detailed data on their development. What they found was astonishingly clear cut in a field usually littered with carefully worded reservations and ideologically filtered reporting. The scheme was a disaster.
Evaluated in economic terms, it did not pay for itself; the tax gains from increased workforce participation (the workforce grew by 7.7 per cent) did not make up for the cost of the exercise. Also the system crowded out informal and family forms of care, so that many people simply switched the kind of care they used to take advantage of the massive subsidies.
But the human cost was the most significant. There were marked declines in child wellbeing; on measures of hyperactivity, inattention, aggressiveness, motor skills, social skills and child illness, children were significantly worse off than their peers who remained at home.
The family suffered, too: parent-child relationships deteriorated on all measured dimensions. There was a significant increase in depression rates among mothers and a deterioration in couple relationships among affected parents. None of these changes was minor. The hyperactivity increases were in a range of 17 to 44 per cent; the skills decline was between 8 and 21 per cent; childhood illnesses rose by 400 per cent. The study is littered with adjectives researchers are usually careful to avoid: strong, marked, negative, robust, striking. Yet it did echo, though more strongly, similar findings in the United States, Britain and Europe.
The Quebec policy did so many things right. It mandated many improvements, increasing from one-third to two-thirds the proportion of carers with tertiary qualifications. It supplanted private profit-making centres or took them over, a measure known to increase care quality. It also included and trained in-home carers, or family day carers, as we call them. Yet still the outcomes were dire....
The evidence points to only one possible solution: paid parental leave. When Sweden introduced this 15 years ago, babies and under-twos almost disappeared from its day-care system. This was despite it being acknowledged as the best system in the world, costing 2 per cent of gross domestic product...
In Britain, the policy of the former prime minister, Tony Blair, of building vast numbers of centres has proved an expensive mistake: a younger generation of parents is choosing to stay home and one-fifth of British nursery places stand empty. Under pressure from parents and child development experts, Britain has now introduced paid parental leave...
In the end, paid parental leave is the most equitable way and the best value for money. It is certainly the best for babies. Love, after all, can't be bought.

See "Universal Childcare, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being"
MICHAEL BAKER
(University of Toronto - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER))
JONATHAN GRUBER
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER))
KEVIN MILLIGAN (University of British Columbia - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER))
November 2005 NBER Working Paper No. W11832
Abstract:

The growing labor force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the “crowd-out” of existing childcare arrangements, the impact on female labor supply, and the effects on child well-being. The introduction of universal, highly-subsidized childcare in Quebec in the late 1990s provides an opportunity to address these issues. We carefully analyze the impacts of Quebec’s “$5 per day childcare” program on childcare utilization, labor supply, and child (and parent) outcomes in two parent families. We find strong evidence of a shift into new childcare use, although approximately one third of the newly reported use appears to come from women who previously worked and had informal arrangements. The labor supply impact is highly significant, and our measured elasticity of 0.236 is slightly smaller than previous credible estimates. Finally, we uncover striking evidence that children are worse off in a variety of behavioral and health dimensions, ranging from aggression to motor-social skills to illness. Our analysis also suggests that the new childcare program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships.

See also
San Francisco Chronicle 2005-Nov.-01

The UC Berkeley-Stanford study found that all children who attended preschool at least 15 hours a week displayed more negative social behaviors such as trouble cooperating or acting up, when compared with their peers. The discrepancies were most pronounced among children from higher-income families.
Children from lower-income families lagged behind their peers who didn't attend preschool an average of 7 percentage points on the measure of social behavioral growth. But children from higher-income families lagged 9 percentage points behind their peers. These wealthier children did even worse when they attended preschool for 30 hours or more: They trailed their peers by 15 percentage points...
"It is time to come to grips with what all too many have denied for all too long, namely, that all disconcerting news about adverse effects cannot be attributed to low-quality care, which has been more or less the mantra of the field of child development and the child-care advocacy community for decades," Belsky said.

See Belsky, et. al.
"Are there long term effects of early child care?"
See Wight
Childcare for All? No Thanks

...Professor Edward Zigler, credited as “the father of Headstart” a widespread American preschool program admits “there is a large body of evidence that there is little to be gained by exposing middle class children to early education … (and) evidence that indicates early schooling is inappropriate for many four-year-olds, and that it may be harmful to their development”.

If preschool were truly beneficial in terms of giving children a head start, those places with some form of compulsory preschool should do demonstrably better academically. The evidence does not bear this out.

For example, the two states of America which have compulsory preschool, Georgia and Oklahoma, have the lowest results for fourth grade reading tests in the country.
...
...the longitudinal studies often quoted to argue an academic advantage provided by preschool for lower socio-economic groups, actually also show that this “advantage” disappears by grade three.

But what about the much-touted social benefits of preschool programs? Here again, there is research to refute this. A 2005 Stanford University study reported: “We find that attendance in preschool centers, even for short periods of time each week, hinder the rate at which young children develop social skills and display the motivation to engage in classroom tasks, as reported by their [prep] teachers.”

In 1986, Tizzard and Hughes compared the language environments at home and in preschools in the UK. Their method involved tape-recording the conversations of four-year-old girls at preschool in the morning and again at home with their mothers in the afternoon. They reported:

"We became increasingly aware of how rich this [home] environment was for all the children (working-class and middle-class). The conversations between the children and their mothers ranged freely over a variety of topics.
...
At home the children discussed topics like work, the family, birth, growing up, and death; they talked with their mothers about things they had done together in the past, and their plans for the future; they puzzled over such diverse topics as the shape of roofs and chairs, the nature of Father Christmas, and whether the Queen wears curlers in bed.
...
When we came to analyse the conversations between these same children and their [preschool] teachers, we could not avoid being disappointed.
...
The richness, depth and variety which characterised the home conversations were sadly missing. So too was the sense of intellectual struggle, and of the real attempts to communicate being made by both sides.

The questioning, puzzling child which we were so taken with at home was gone: in her place was a child who, when talking to staff, seemed subdued, and whose conversations with adults were mainly restricted to answering questions rather than asking them, or taking part in minimal exchanges about the whereabouts of other children and play materials."

In all this research, it is difficult to sort out to what extent there is a difference between compulsory preschool programs and optional preschool but it seems that there is enough evidence both to question the push towards compulsory preschool and to throw doubt on the theory that preschool is beneficial for all.

Children at home with their families are not disadvantaged. Indeed they are very likely better off. So if your child does not wish to go to kindergarten, or you do not wish to send them, rest assured that you are not depriving them.

Relationships are the most important part of life. For small children especially, the time spent in the secure home environment is invaluable. Contrary to popular opinion, forcing children to separate from their parents before they are ready to is not necessary...

What Happened to Federalism?

Leave aside the infantile power fantasies of commissar wannabe Louis Gerstner.

What happened to federalism?

The President of the US exercises legitimate authority over three K-12 school systems, the Department of Interior BIA schools, the US DOD schools (for dependents of military employees overseas), and the US State Department's Embassy schools (for State Department employees oveseas). The President needs no more authority than he already has.

All the President has to do to inject competition into the US K-12 education industry is...

1) Require that the BIA schools, the Embassy schools, and the DOD schools develop a sequence of exams which satisfy course requirements at each grade level.
2) Require that they license independent companies and schools to administer these exams to anyone who applies.
3) Require that these schools grant credit to anyone who passes these tests, at any age, at any time of year.
4) Require that all US agencies recognize diplomas earned through the exam process.

Let competition between Sylvan Learning Centers, the Kumon Institute, and the University of Phoenix drive the cost of a K-12 education down to the cost of books and proctoring exams.

The President exercises legitimate authority over five post-secondary institutions, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, the Air Force Academy in Boulder, Colorado, the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, and the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York. The Federal government needs no more authority over US colleges or taxpayers' wallets than it already has, to transform the US post-secondary education industry.

All the President has to do to make college affordable is...

1) Require that the service academies develop a sequence of exams which satisfy course requirements for some limited set of undergraduate majors.
2) Require that these schools license independent companies and schools to administer these exams to anyone who applies.
3) Require that these schools grant credit to anyone who passes these tests, at any age, at any time of year.
4) Require that all US agencies recognize degrees earned through the exam process.

Let competition between Sylvan Learning Centers, the Kumon Institute, and the University of Phoenix drive the cost of a college degree down to the cost of books and proctoring exams.

US taxpayers spend over $500 billion per year to operate the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's K-12 schools (the "public" schools). This is a fraction of the total cost. A larger cost is the opportunity cost to students of the time they labor, unpaid, as window-dressing in the massive make-work program we call "public education". It does not take 12 years to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State provision of History and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers would be (is, in totalitarian countries). The opportunity cost of school falls most heavily on children of poor and minority parents.

A further cost of the US State-monopoly school system is the opportunity cost to society of the lost innovation which a competitive market in education services would generate.

If school is not an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, what is the objection to credit by exam? If it is fraud for a mechanic to charge for the repair of a functional motor and if it is fraud for a physician to charge for the treatment of a healthy patient, then it is fraud for a school district to bill taxpayers for the instruction of a student who does not need our help.

Control Freaks

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell speculated that socialism may originate in a hypertrophied sense of order. Elsewhere ("Inside the Whale", "Raffles and Mrs. Blandish"), he suggested that a preference for authoritarian politics originates in vicarious sadism. In either case, some people find the fantasy of commanding millions of lives and billions of dollars irresistibly attractive. Today (2008-Dec.-01), we have an example from the Wall Street Journal, where Louis Gerstner recommends policies which will degrade the performance of the US pre-college school system.

He recommends:...

1) Set high academic standards for all of our kids, supported by a rigorous curriculum.
2) Greatly improve the quality of teaching in our classrooms, supported by substantially higher compensation for our best teachers.
3) Measure student and teacher performance on a systematic basis, supported by tests and assessments.
4) Increase "time on task" for all students; this means more time in school each day, and a longer school year.

This will make things worse.
1) Humans are not standard.
(a) A "standard" is a unit of measurement. Academic standards are to academic growth what measuring rods are to physical growth. Platinum yardsticks will not make children taller. Academic standards will not make children smarter.
(b) What "rigorous curriculum" should "all kids" pursue? Einstein opposed compulsory attendance at school. He argued that compulsory schooling kills motivation. Einstein was right.
2) "Merit pay" is an invitation to a protracted and losing argument. See Myron Lieberman's discussion of the issue in The Educational Morass. Unions object and administrators do not want the additional work nor the dissension it would cause. Who determines which teachers qualify for merit pay? Which subjects? Uniform pay scales produce over-paid teachers in over-supplied subjects (History, English, Biology) and under-paid teachers in shortage areas (Math from Alg. II onwards, Chemistry, Physics, Electronics Shop, some foreign languages).
3) We can assess student performance in Math and Physics. In English or foreign languages we have tests which reliably measure vocabulary and grammar, but that's about it. Literature? History? Art? Forget it.
4) Compulsory, unpaid labor is slavery. Compulsion kills motivation. More compulsion will further degrade overall system performance.

It does not take 12 years to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State provision of History and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers would be (is, in totalitarian countries).

"What works?" is an empirical question which only an experiment (a competitive market) can answer.

The US State-monopoly school system delivers wretched performance at high cost because it is a State-monopoly system. The education industry is not a natural monopoly. Beyond a very low level there are no economies of scale at the delivery end of the education industry as it currently operates. Education only marginally qualifies as a public good as economists use the term and the "public goods" argument implies subsidy and regulation, at most, not State operation of an industry.

The Common Room: FLDS November 22

Please read this: The Common Room: FLDS November 22. I hope you have been following the Common Room commentary on the FLDS case.

As an aside, UH Professor Meda Chesney-Lind and other experts appeared on an Olelo TV broadcast of a Hawaii Senate informational briefing on the overrepresentation of aboriginal Hawaiians in Hawaii prisons. I did not sit through the entire broadcast. None of the experts who spoke in the interval which I saw mentioned the role of compulsory attendance statutes in generating social maladjustment. Compulsory attendance statutes inflict the same trauma as that anticipated by the Headmistress/Zookeeper, to a degree determined largely by the length of the separation from family (shorter is better), the degree of difference between parents' culture and academic culture (closer is better), and by the age of the child (older is better).

Vast and Malign

John Hinderaker at Powerline asks: "how many other "educators" share Ayers' perspective and values, but have never bombed anything and don't happen to be friends with the President-elect? That number is huge. No one is tracking their influence on our youth, but isn't it obvious that the influence of leftists in our public and private schools is both vast and malign?"

To some of us, yes. Beyond the impact of State-worshipful Professors of Education and their disciples in government-operated K-12 schools, the phrase "vast and malign" describes the entire apparatus and impact which compulsory attandance statutes and tax subsidies generate.

On the Bright Side (Updated)

Politicians want to get elected. They also want to get reelected. This second consideration imposes limits on their departures from the mean voter position, even when, as in the case of President-elect Obama and the current Congressional Democrats, they have a mendacious press covering (for) them. President Obama may initiate beneficial changes in some policies, from political considerations, out of genuine sympathy, or out of ideological motivation.

Where might President Obama improve on current US policy? Below, I offer a few wild guesses, and fond hopes.

US interests would be served by a greater distance between US policy and Israel. So also may Israeli interests be better served. Opponents of the welfare state understand the argument that welfare is a trap, that welfare damages recipients. This applies to foreign aid, including military and political support for Israel.
Update: Not to be...The Dear Leader does not understand "distance".


A phased stand-down from the war on drugs. Please. The current policy fills prisons with non-violent "criminals" who have done no more harm to themselves or to others than have the patrons of the corner bar. The current policy corrupts law enforcement and misdirects law-enforcement resources. The current policy enriches opponents of friendly governments in Afganistan, and Columbia. I see no indication that President Obama will promote a relaxation of drug prohibition, but he has far fewer ties to the social conservatives who support drug prohibition.

Immigration lowers the price which employers must pay for labor. The Wall Street Journal and large employers support open borders. Public sector unions (teachers and social workers) benefit from the work created by the younger immigrant population. Competition with cheap immigrant labor harms most the people at the bottom of the income ladder. Before the advent of widespread public-sector unionization, Democrats favored restrictions on immigration. How President Obama will weigh these and other considerations, he alone knows.

President Obama went to Punahou, an elite independent school (their Math program stinks). Current policy in most US States restricts parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' pre-college education subsidy to schools operated by dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel. Political control of school harms most the children of the least politicaly adept parents. American Black voters supported Obama's candidacy. How will he weigh their support against the support of public sector unions? He alone knows. Most likely, he would prefer to spend a lot of money in a vain show of concern, but this option may not be available, if tax revenues fall.

What's In Store

President Obama will fail.

This prediction takes no insight at all. President McCain would have failed. Although socialism fails more spectacularly the more thoroughly politicians implement it, and President Obama and the Democratic Congress will aggregate more resources and authority into Federal hands than would have a President McCain, a quite spectacular failure will happen in the next four to eight years, guaranteed. I refer to the impending bankruptcy of entitlement programs and private pensions. President Bush attempted to address a part of this problem with his proposal to privatize part of Social Security. The Democrats in Congress, who prefer to issue IOUs to the Social Security Administration and use FICA revenues as additional discretionary (their discretion) funds, scuttled this effort. The gap between FICA and other tax receipts, on the one hand, and Medicare, Social Security, and other Federal obligations, on the other, will grow. The first baby boomers (post-WWII births) turn 65 in 2010.

The Federal government assumed partial responsibility for private pensions, with tax exemptions for company-funded pensions and retirees' medical care. Companies found it cheaper to purchase labor with promises of payment in the future than to pay for labor out of current revenues. Like politicians, they made more promises than they can keep. Bet on it: politicians will commit tax revenues in support of underfunded pension obligations for large companies like United Airlines (already happened), GM, Ford, and other dying giants.

What do you do when you have made more promises than you can keep? You have no choice. You break some of them. In this case, the default will come in two forms: direct and indirect. The direct default will come in at least two models: a legally-mandated gradual rise in the age at which one can collect benefits (insurance company executives would have gone to prison for this 50 years ago) and reductions in the care for which the government will pay. The indirect default will take the form of inflation. The government will keep its dollar-denominated promises in inflated, devalued, dollars.

The best outcome which voters could ever have expected was transparency: an actuary, accountant, or market-oriented economist as President (or some politician who would take actuarial advice seriously) and a majority in Congress of the same orientation. Instead we got a President Obama, Senate President Biden, Majority Leader Reid, and House Speaker Pelosi, who either (a) suffer severe delusions about the resources available to the State or (b) know better and hold office for the graft they can skim from the system as it falls around them.

My advice? Plant a garden and work off the books.

Corruption as naive socialism

It's official: a majority of Americans are socialist.

An ancient Chinese curse goes: "May your children live in interesting times." The next four or eight years will be...interesting.

After the fall of the Evil Empire, a few journalists located and interviewed geriatric American Stalinists who defended the cause regardless of the abundant evidence of failure. They were not alone. The Soviet leadership needed 70 years of failed 5-year plans to conclude that socialism did not work, and then they followed the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachhs' advice and botched the transition to a market economy. Journalists report that, even today, some ordinary Russian citizens express approval of Stalin's rule. Indoctrination works and the faith of one's childhood is hard to shake. Whatever your religion, the persistence of other religions must compel you to recognize that intelligent people can maintain delusional beliefs against contrary evidence for decades.

Here we are, as of 2008-November-5, facing a corrupt socialist as President-elect. How long will the delusion, that we can prosper by picking each others' pockets, last? I cannot see how Congressmen who pad appropriation bills with earmarks can believe that their work benefits ordinary taxpayers, but so long as voters elect the most promising politicians, politicians must continually expand the role of the State. Naive and/or mendacious journalists helped create this mess, but I blame another villain. Thanks to the State-monopoly school system, Americans learned nothing from the collapse of communism.

Console yourself with these words of wisdom from H. L. Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

I'm gonna plant something edible, and buy a couple of guns before the law changes.

Cute. The spell checker allows "gonna".

The Argument, continued (more)

V
Dear Sir,

Perhaps I should accept as much agreement as we have achieved and leave it at that. You have approved homeschooling when parents homeschool in the belief that they can provide a better education than can standard schools. You accept the legality of homeschooling. You see vouchers as offering an escape from wretched inner-city schools.

This discussion suffers from a lack of definition. "Education" has no simple definition which accords with normal use. In Hawaii, "homeschool" has an operational definition: legally, whatever parents do with their children after they file an application to homeschool and withdraw their children from school, subject to the condition that no court finds them (parents) guilty of educational neglect. I tutored a Korean immigrant child from third through sixth grade and continued to advise him after. His parents withdrew him from school after seventh grade and homeschooled him. This meant that they went to work and Eugene sat in on university Math classes and studied on his own. He took the GRE (Math) at 16 and got accepted into the graduate program before he turned 17.

To continue our argument...

Indoctrination

One reason you have given for your opposition to homeschooling is that you want State-mandated indoctrination (evolution by natural selection, US History) of other people's kids, so it's not a question of whether kids receive indoctrination but of who decides what indoctrination they receive. Given ideological conformity among College of Education professors, successful indoctrination of the entire population seems to me more likely to occur through State intrusion into the education industry than through a hands-off policy.

"The terrifying thing about modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past, every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted because of 'human nature', which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that human nature is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows. The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern state. The radio, press censorship, standardized education and the secret police have altered everything. Mass suggestion is a science of the last twenty years, and we do not know how successful it will be." --George Orwell-- Review of Russia under Soviet Rule by N. de Basily" (Essays, George Orwell, Knopf, 2002).

"One has only to to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, State-controlled education, and so forth, to realize that 'the truth is great and will prevail' is a prayer rather than an axiom." --George Orwell, Review of Power; A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell.

The market in education services

"What works?" is an empirical question which only an experiment can answer. Millions of homeschooling parents applying their unique local knowledge of their own children's interests and aptitudes will generate more information than will schools which march all students through a standard curriculum at a uniform pace. You may object that this feature of current schools is not necessary. I see two problems with this objection:
1) The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education", and then students, parents, teachers, and taxpayers are bound by this definition.
2) Internal bureaucratic imperatives drive standardization. The uniformity we see is not a coincidence.

The assertion that in homeschooling "you have one or at most two teachers" does not describe many homeschooling situations. Many homeschooling parents hire tutors, or send their kids to classes (Foreign Language, Art, Craft). Expanded legal room to maneuver would widen this range. Legally enforced, the opposition to homeschooling becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (homeschooling is narrow so it must be restricted).

Market failure

The government of a locality is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality. People do not become more intelligent, better-informed, more altruistic, or more capable (except to the extent that they have access to violence) when they enter the State's employment rolls. Wherever markets fail, governments fail also, except in the few cases where monopolistic control of violence is beneficial (war, crime reduction).
Pareto equilibrium versus Kaldor-Hicks equilibrium? How did this enter the discussion? We were discussing the market as an information-generating mechanism. Absent compulsory attendance laws, homeschooling parents are the free marketplace of ideas.

Education budgets

I do not see the point of using percent of GDP as a measure of education costs. Of course the US could afford to spend more on the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools. We could pour billions down other ratholes as well. Bill Gates undoubtedly spends a smaller fraction of his income on food than I do. Is he therefore malnourished? Basic literacy and numeracy contribute to economic growth. Above this rather low level of education, State support of school is just as likely to be a drag on the economy. Legal treatment of property and capital, transparency (anti-corruption), and the tax system matter more than percent of GDP devoted to education.

Not(school=education)

You write: "Most of us think that it isn't a particularly bad thing that kids have to get an education...". Under current law, children "have" to attend school. If school is a means to the end of education, since homeschoolers typically outperform conventionally schooled children, both on standardized tests of academic achievement and on measures of social adjustment, why would you not prefer homeschooling?

Slavery

Compulsory, unpaid labor is slavery. Compulsion and compensation are matters of degree. Compulsory attendance laws require compulsion, obviously. Children, especially very small children, will work their hearts out for the love and approval of parents. Schools cannot match this compensation, and it's very dangerous for them to try. Later, self-directed study is self-motivated and internally rewarded. Compulsion kills motivation, as Einstein observed.

School as an impediment to education

The success of some schools (e.g., magnet schools with voluntary enrollment) does not rebut the generalization that compulsory attendance and the uniform pace and the standard curriculum stifle the development of many kids. The complexity of some jobs in modern society (e.g., engineering, surgery) indicates to me that society would benefit if some kids started specialized training earlier. Did you read that Marvin Minsky comment on school which I linked earlier? Here is another advantage of homeschooling.

Balkanization

The way to teach tolerance of diversity is to tolerate diversity.

Teachers versus parents as taxpayers' agents

Parents are more reliable agents. Raw numbers of abuse cases are not informative. By analogy, more humans die at the hands of other humans than are killed by sharks, but I'd rather walk the length of Kalakaua boulevard at midnight 100 times than swim the mouth of Pearl Harbor at midnight once.

Teacher certification is a joke. It does not screen child molesters and does not certify subject-area competence.

Standards

The system generated these corrupt standards and the more resources taxpayers pour into it, the greater the payoff to insiders to corrupt the standards. The most reliable education standard is the parent standard: "do I want my child in that school?"

Expertise

Have you read any doctoral theses in Education? I have. They are...rhymes with "theses". Whole Language did not fall to criticism from other experts "in the field", it fell to criticism from professors of Psychology and Linguistics with tenured positions in prestigious universities. Pure "argument from authority". The argument was correct, but the authority was all that mattered to the idiots in Colleges of Education.

Justifying homeschooling

Every law on the books is a threat by the State to kidnap (arrest), to assault (subdue), and to forcibly inoculate with HIV (imprison) someone, under specified circumstances. Seems to me, it's the advocates of violence who bear the burden of proof.

This post updated with the observation on the difference between "school" and "education".

The Argument, continued

My comments in italics. Dilan Esper's in bold type.

IV.A,B

Your goals do not match your means. I suggest that they are mutually exclusive.

People normally advocate for multiple principles, and since these principles are not restatements of each other, they differ and must inevitably involve trade-offs in some circumstances and occasionally conflict. For example, honesty and compassion are both virtues and do not inevitably conflict, but sometimes they do (what do you say when the Nazis come to your door and ask if you're sheltering a Jew?). That's okay, but "everyone must learn X" and "people should learn to tolerate differences of opinion" seem to me to conflict pretty directly from the start. As I wrote earlier, the way to teach tolerance of diversity is to tolerate diversity.

You wrote: "Look, the cure for indoctrination is to have a diverse educational environment with lots of teachers, not one teacher at home who has no professional certification and thus is LESS likely to be able to avoid indoctrinating the student."

As Milton Friedman once said: "I'm on your side, but you're not". The cure for indoctrination is to have a diverse educational environment, where millions of parents, applying their unique local knowledge of their children's interests and aptitudes, determine for their own children the course, the pace and the method of instruction. Again, homeschooling parents have chosen to homeschool, not to move to Mars. Their children will inevitably encounter others.
That depends. Some parents ensure homeschooled kids socialize with a wide variety of other kids. Other parents have homeschooled kids only socialize with other kids who are homeschooled. And, of course, on the extreme end you have religious groups like the FLDS which actively prevent their kids from interacting with anyone who might disagree with them. But further, you miss my point about indoctrination. If you have a kid who is indoctrinated by teacher A, it's really useful for him to have teachers B, C, D, E, and F, who have different views, and then the next year for him to have teachers G, H, I, J, K, and L. At homeschooling you only have one or at the most two teachers, and there is therefore a much greater chance of successful indoctrination. Indeed, one reason some people homeschool is precisely because they WANT to indoctrinate their kids.

Further, as I previously observed, your preferred means do not yield your stated ends. Laws in every US State compel attendance at school, yet the American public does not exhibit a high level of scientific or historical knowledge. As an aside, here, evolutionary arguments apply directly to economic policy. I have not read Herbert Spencer, but I have read that "progressive" (i.e., socialist) critics misrepresented his position. This would not be the first nor the last time that has happened. Unless you approve waste and fraud, you should welcome the institutional evolution which competitive markets promote...
Markets are good at what they do, but there's plenty they don't do well. And Darwinian competition, especially, is a very brutal way of achieving many social goods. Essentially, Pareto-optimality is a heck of a lot better than Kaldor-Hicks optimality. In any event, your position is a curious one coming from someone who is defending parents who choose NOT to expose their children to a free marketplace of ideas.
...Society as a whole benefits when inefficient suppliers of education services fail.

Last I looked, no country on the planet spent as much per student-year as the US. Switzerland is the only other country in contention. Further, according to John Gatto, this statistic vastly overstates the Swiss school system's burden on taxpayers, since Switzerland allows apprenticeships after 6th grade.
Those numbers are misleading. You need to look at percent of GDP. We can afford to spend much more than we do, just like other countries do.

All schools which rely on compulsory attendance statutes to generalte their enrollment suck, some more than others. Compulsory, unpaid labor is slavery.
That's an interesting position, but you are never going to get any traction with it outside of extreme libertarianism. Most of us think that it isn't a particularly bad thing that kids have to get an education. In any event, by your definition, homeschooling parents (and other parents who have their kids do any sort of work) are also enslaving their kids. Remember, the 13th Amendment prohibits private slavery, not only governmental slavery. Your argument proves too much.

Students work, unpaid, as window-dressing in a massive make-work program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel. School is a huge waste of time.
Again, Beverly Hills High School, or Boston Latin, or many other public schools, are not wastes of time.

It does not take 12 years to teach a normal child to read and compute.
Depends. It takes a lot more than 12 years to gain expertise in any complex human endeavor in a modern technological society.

Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classtroom. State provicion of History and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers would be (is, in totalitarian countries).
Again, this is just not an argument that is going to sell outside of extreme libertarian circles. Lots of non-totalitarian, reasonably democratic countries teach history and civics, and there's all sorts of good reasons why we would want people to have a common base of knowledge on these subjects. I can only imagine how Balkanized society would become if we didn't do this.

The principle-agent problem:

Parents, as a class, are more likely to represent taxpayers' interests than are government employees (or, in a voucher-subsidized competitive market, school employees) as a class, for the reasons I gave earlier. Yes, there are incompetent, indifferent, and/or abusive parents, but there are incompetent, indifferent and/or abusive teachers, so the issue is: which group, in aggregate, yields the greater benefit/cost ratio?
Teachers. They are certified, regulated, evaluated, supervised, and accountable to parents and taxpayers. Parents, in contrast, are very hard to regulate, because of entirely correct and understandable concerns about interfering in the parent-child relationship. To pick a nice example of this, very few teachers have been caught sexually abusing elementary school students. However, parents and caretakers who are close relatives are responsible for the vast majority of sexual abuse of elementary school-age children. Why? Because a teacher who did that is much easier to detect and prosecute.

Considering the superior performance of homeschoolers, the wretched performance of conventional schools, and the observed seasonal (i.e., school related) variation in juvenile arrests for assault, drug possession, and drug promotion, and of juvenile hospitalizations for human-induced trauma, I'd say there's no contest. Gandhi opposed compulsory attendance at school. Einstein opposed compulsory attendance at school.
That doesn't mean they were right; also, 21st Century America is different than early 20th Century America or the colonial Raj.


The system's origin in anti-Catholic bigotry, and the role of bigotry in it's survival.

The victims are different (poor and minority kids), but the result is the same. The system imposes enromous costs on people who have least to start with. Currently, wretched instruction in State-monopoly schools and the lost opportunity to learn vocational skills on the job impose lethal (quite literally) costs on poor and minority kids trapped in wretched schools. The systematic institutional lobotomization of bright children of poor minority parents gives mediocre children of high-SES parents an advantage in the contest for admission to elite colleges and professional schools.
We are clearly failing to educate minorities in this country. That's the single best argument for vouchers. I would also note, however, that relatively uneducated urban poor, working class minority parents are the least likely to be able to homeschool their kids successfully. More broadly, though, the fact that we are failing minorities doesn't really connect with the claimed anti-Catholic origins of public schools. You clearly like that talking point, but it doesn't have any modern relevance to our current problems.

Economies of scale

Across the US, the coefficient of correlation(mean district size, $/pupil) is positive. Within States, the coefficient of correlation (%20K+dist, $/pupil), where "%20K+dist" is the fraction of total State enrollment assigned to districts over 20,000 enrollment, is positive. Across the US, within States, the coefficient of correlation (enrollment, $/pupil) is positive in all but three or four States with five or more districts over 20,000 enrollment (or 15,000 enrollment, depending on which year of the Digest of Education Statistics you use).

State level standards are bogus. Some years ago, I took the grades which the Education Trust gave to States for ttheir curriculum standards, converted them to numbers on a 0-to-4 point scale, and computed (EXCEL did the work, actually) the coefficient of correlation between standards and NAEP 8th grade Math composite scores. It is negative.

Teacher standards are bogus. Apply the EXCEL correlation function to the Digest... table on credential requirements. Across the US, the higher the fraction of districts in a State which require a Ed degree or Praxis test for teacher applicants, the worse the State's NAEP 8th grade Math performance.
Look, there are good arguments as to why one could claim that standards that are in place NOW are bogus. That hardly is the same thing as saying that the government could not impose SOME standards that are not bogus. Indeed, you conceded in an earlier e-mail that there is some room for, e.g., testing. So I don't think you really deny that there are probably ways to come up with better standards than we have now.

Expertise

Professors of Education are not experts. Please read Diane Ravich, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform. These are the people who gave us Whole Language reading instruction, discovery methods in Math instruction, portfolio assessment, block scheduling, and countless other lunatic fads.
That's just anti-intellectual claptrap. Look, experts come up with bad things. The Harvard educated US foreign policy establishment came up with the Vietnam War. That doesn't mean that Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara are idiots who don't know anything about international relations. It's also worth noting that a lot of the criticism of such "fads" also came from other academics in the field. You see, that's how academia works. People hypothesize. They publish. Other academics criticize. We get data. We revise hypotheses. And we lurch forward towards the truth. Now this isn't your beloved Darwinian natural selection, but it is a tradition that is equally as theoretically grounded-- the scientific method. One of the most dangerous ideas to take hold among right wingers and libertarians is the idea that intensive study and expertise is meaningless, that experts should not be believed, and that anyone can do anything as well as an expert can. That's completely bogus. Experts can be wrong, which is why we have a process for correcting error. But expertise is also extremely worthwhile. Indeed, the scientific method, i.e., scholarship, produced the very Darwinian theories that you are enamored with in the economic arena.

In conclusion

I often encounter people who suport compulsory attendance laws with the assertion that "it's important that everyone learn X" (for some X). For some, X is democratic values. For some it's mathematical and scientific literacy or diversity or global citizenship or environmental awareness. What I find strange is that they must see that X varies widely and that I see no reason why they should suppose that their particular X will win the political contest for priority. Also, this compulsion to centralize is either quite explicitly anti-democratic or there is little reason to suppose that the result of aggregation of curriculum decisions and resources would be superior to the aggregate result of millions of individual parents' decisions.
There's still a big difference that you are eliding between requiring people to go to school and centralizing everything. There's a heck of a lot of local control, there are debates about whether there should be more or whether we need more federal and state standards, and there is also a process for opting out through charter schools and a live debate about vouchers. That encompasses a whole spectrum of approaches to the issue of centralization. And establishing that there may be some problem with federal imposition of education policy-- or even state policymaking-- does not prove that we should go to homeschooling. There's plenty of levels where one can place the relevant controls, at varying levels of centralization. You'd have to prove that there is no level where they could be placed that did not result in the claimed harms of centralization before this argument could be used to justify homeschooling.