Even though he is no longer with us, I think Milton Friedman should still be offered a seat at the healthcare summit going on in Washington D.C. right now.  Maybe in his absence we can just play this video…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPADFNKDhGM]

This morning on NPR, Steve Inskeep interviewed Senator Richard Durbin regarding the healthcare legislation currently before Congress.  The conversation moved towards the potential use of the reconciliation strategy that would allow congressional democrats to pass healthcare legislation with a mere 51 votes in the Senate.

After some generalities were discussed, Inskeep asked a very direct question: Even knowing that the majority of Americans are opposed to this legislation, will you pass this using reconciliation? 

His response: I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Seriously?  Inskeep, not satisfied with the answer, asked the question again.  This time Durbin basically said that Americans may be scared of it now but the legislation will benefit them in the end.

Wow.  Regardless of how you view healthcare reform, this is a problem.  Is this the attitude we want our elected representatives to have? This is a problem that is true on every level of government and is particularly of interest in Kentucky right now as the 2010 General Assembly is under way.  Take the time to learn about what is going on in Frankfort and contact your representative to tell them how you feel about legislation that is important to you.

– Central Falls wasn’t fooling

We reported a few days ago that the Central Falls School District’s superintendent was unable to get teachers to agree to an improvement plan and was planning to fire all the teachers in the district’s Central Falls High School.

Now, the Central Falls Board of Education has voted to do precisely that – firing every teacher in their dismally performing high school – apparently reading out every one of the school staff members’ names individually during the process to leave no doubt what so ever about the action.

This dramatic vote actually came shortly after union folks from across the state, and even outside Rhode Island, descended on Central Falls in a noisy, rancorous rally.

Apparently, the Central Falls Board just had enough of horrendous dropout rates and lousy test scores, so even teacher-attempted intimidation didn’t work.

The board was also unimpressed when teachers refused salary increases of $3,400 to do the extra things needed to try to turn the failing school around. Teachers demanded three times as much as the district could afford.

While teachers are screaming, the Central Falls Board has some pretty impressive backup in its corner.

One of those backers is Rhode Island’s Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist.

Gist moved swiftly on new federal guidelines which tagged Central Falls High as one of her state’s very lowest performers. Gist told the impacted districts and schools that they had until March 17 to decide which federal reform model they wanted to use. When the Central Falls teachers turned down a reform model that would have preserved their jobs, the local board and superintendent were forced to take more drastic action.

More support for the board’s action comes from a really high-powered source.

The Rhode Island News says U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan applauded the local board for “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids.”

I don’t know if Rhode Island applied for Race to the Top funding, but if they did, I would suspect the action in Central Falls will give the state a huge boost in the competition.

Meanwhile, some Kentucky schools founder along pretty much on a par with Central Falls High, but despite all the noise about reform, Kentucky hasn’t displayed anything like the determination in Rhode Island to have teachers either get on board with real reforms – or get out.

That lack of commitment might come back to bite us when Secretary Duncan starts to hand out those Race to the Top funds in the next few weeks.

The Constitution is quite clear: The federal government should have limited power over the states.

Click here to listen to the 90-second audio commentary.

A new report shows students who took advantage of Milwaukee’s school voucher program had a high school graduation rate 12 points higher than the public schools in that city posted. That works out to be 18 percent better than the city school’s 65 percent grad rate.

The report says that over 3,000 more students would have graduated from public schools if they had matched the voucher students’ performance.

Aside from the obvious social benefits, the research indicates that higher rate could have generated an additional $21.2 million in personal income and $3.6 million in extra tax revenue if it had actually occurred.

Furthermore, while Milwaukee pays $6,442 per pupil for each voucher, that is less than half the $14,011 spent in the Milwaukee Public Schools.

Thus, “bang for the buck” from the voucher program is astronomical.

The Kentucky Freedom Digest is a publication that has been circulating in a small circle for a few months now.  Recently the Digest launched a great new website.  The site contains information, updates, an event calendar, links to liberty minded organizations, and many other tools for the true liberty movement in Kentucky.

This site is a great resource, stop on by and take a look!

The Indianapolis Business Journal reports that charter school students in the city increased test scores by nearly 7 points last year on Indiana’s standardized test, called Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress-Plus. In contrast, students in regular public elementary schools in Marion County only improved by 1.5 points and the county’s high school students actually had a slight score decline.

The news report also expresses concerns about the fiscal condition of the charter schools, which, ironically, is largely due to tardy payments from the Indiana state government.

Meanwhile, don’t expect such good news in Kentucky. We don’t even allow charter schools.

Before getting into this, I want to make it clear that I am keeping an open mind on the new ‘Common Core’ education standards that Kentucky just adopted – especially because so far we’ve only seen drafts. More work is still expected before the final version releases, perhaps in April.

But, I can’t help noting that others are neither so cautious, nor confident. Heat is starting to come from a fairly broad spectrum of viewpoints.

Today, Education Week reports (subscription?) that two critical reports have just been issued on the Common Core standards.

One study comes from the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research in Massachusetts and the Pacific Research Institute. It is written by Ze’ev Wurman, who helped write California’s math standards, and by Sandra Stotsky, who helped with the very excellent and highly regarded education standards in Massachusetts. Both authors spent a lot of time in the trenches of the standards issue. Their comments should not be idly dismissed even though those comments are obviously based on a recent draft of the Common Core Standards rather than the final, still to be delivered, version.

The second report comes from the Texas Education Agency (TEA). Texas is one of the two states that refused to join the Common Core initiative. Some of the findings in the news release from the TEA say the Common Core Standards don’t include the following, which are in the Texas standards now:

• Analyze works of literature for what they suggest about the historical period and cultural context in which they were written;
• Use effective reading strategies to determine a written work’s purpose and intended audience;
• Identify and analyze the audience, purpose, and message of an informative or persuasive text;
• Geometric reasoning that makes connections between geometry, statistics and probabilities;
• Connecting mathematics to the study of other disciplines by using appropriate mathematical models in the natural, physical and social sciences.

The National School Boards Association also has chimed in, raising questions about what it sees as excessive federal pressure to adopt Common Core or something similar. Is Kentucky selling its rights as a state to the feds?

Again, I retain an open mind on the Common Core Standards, and I am hopeful they will be a good improvement on Kentucky’s past, very disjointed and overly broad education policy. Certainly, some very credible groups like the College Board and ACT, Incorporated have been involved.

But, we also need to keep our eyes open. Rushing into these particular standards before they are even finalized may not be a wise move.

We’ve commented already on the big scandal in Pennsylvania where a school district allegedly used special software in loaner computers to spy on students at home.

The software in question allowed remote access of the laptops’ webcams, and, perhaps, internal microphones, as well.

Now, it turns out the same sort of software was loaded in over 2,000 computers issued to students in McCracken County schools (subscription).

Paducah Sun reporter Bill Bartleman reports that the school district is removing the software, but even that process raises questions. The district is doing that by remote control, as well. Clearly, if the district can remove the software on its own – remotely – then it probably can install something else remotely, on its own, as well.

The existence of such software places tremendous responsibilities – and temptations – on the IT department in a school district. How would anyone know if a rogue IT person decided to do a little recreational snooping, say maybe on the laptop of the school prom queen?

For that matter, with schools loaning computers to teachers, it might be that cute young teacher just out of college who is getting some unwanted attention, too.

Or, if school loaners went to local board members, maybe they have been getting a little unauthorized monitoring just to see how they plan to vote on some pending issue.

In any event, the ‘snoopware’ issue in Pennsylvania may be a problem elsewhere – like right here in Kentucky.

It’s going to be very interesting to see what, if any, laws were violated and how this all plays out in general.

I really don’t get this.

Today, WFPL Radio reports that Speaker of the Kentucky House Greg Stumbo again stated – as he did a few days ago – that we can cut two days from the Kentucky public school year without any real problems.

The VERY SAME DAY, the House Education Committee votes out House Bill 154, which will create a pilot program in something like 20 or 30 schools which will ADD 300 hours to the school year – somewhere around 50 more days!

So, at the very same time the House leader says we can cut school days, the education committee under his jurisdiction says we need to add more – a lot more – at least in a number of schools.

I don’t see how we can afford HB 154, not even as a pilot. We certainly could never scale this up to cover every school in the state.

Furthermore, the idea that some public school students would get such an enormous disparity in education time probably runs headlong into legal issues with the equal rights provisions of the US Constitution and similar state-level statutes.

I should point out something else. One of the criticisms we hear against charter schools is the claim that the methods they use can’t be scaled to regular public schools. Well, double ditto for adding 50 extra school days to every school in Kentucky. That’s just not going to happen. So, what’s the point of a pilot that can’t be turned into a system-wide program?

By the way, charter schools can do, and are doing, a lot of what I heard discussed in the committee meeting a lot cheaper.

And, we could probably start far more charter schools over time than we could ever add to a 300-hour pie in the sky pilot program.