Parents Flock to Supplementary Schools

The government schools suck.  That’s true whether you live in the United States or Britain.  And if you are poor, the schools really suck.  So what do you do?

In its December 2006 edition of Civitas Review the British civil society think tank Civitas (pdf) describes its effort to help parents with children trapped in dysfunctional schools.  It is opening “supplementary schools”  A supplementary school is an after-hours school that provides basic 3R instruction.  In fact there are over 5,000 supplementary schools in Britain. 

These families are forced to rely on the resources available within their communities. And these communities are proving innovative and responsive... Civil society has come into its own. So it is social pressure, arising out of the unmet need for better educational opportunities, that has fuelled the burgeoning sector of supplementary schooling.

Civitas first got into the supplementary school business helping Bengali children in London.  But then, according to the Civitas press release, they branched out.

The first two Civitas supplementary schools were thus started for children from ethnic minorities who belong to very strong community groups. However, we would see other youngsters, almost all white, hanging around on the King’s Cross estate, often behaving in an anti-social manner. We were keen to reach out to all these children, regardless of race or religion.

But would their white working-class (British equivalent of white trash) parents be interested?

We were concerned that we might get a poor response from the white working-class parents, but we were amazed by the positive reaction. At the start of the first open evening in October there was a crowd of parents at the community centre gates eager to talk to us. Nearly all expressed great anxieties about their children’s education and were very enthusiastic about the prospect of extra lessons at a low cost.

But now the government is starting to take an interest in supplementary schools.  A charity “ContinYou, a charity that receives most of its funding from the government” has issued recommendations for regulation of supplementary schools.

Civitas wonders: Why does the government have to control everything?

This government, like most governments, regards the voluntary and charitable sector as something to be, if not absorbed or incorporated, at least organised. Governments look out over chaos and wish to regularise and bring order. They do not like the random, transient, associative nature of civil society... Government regulation would bring a premature end to a new and exciting development in civil society. We should do all that we can to make sure this does not happen.

That really is the issue.

But why do we need supplementary schools?  Give us back our schools, government, and we will make them work.

Liberals Trivialize Evil

A constant theme of conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager is clarity.  Let’s agree to disagree, he’ll say, but let’s try to understand exactly why we disagree.

This week Prager is trying to achieve clarity on the meaning of two liberals (or maybe lefties) who have compared their opponents to Nazis.

First, there was Ellen Goodman who in a now famous article compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers.  She writes:

I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

As thousands of conservatives have already noted, to question the authority of a UN panel of experts is not quite the same thing as denying the evil genocide of six million Jews.  Whatever happened to the liberal injunction to “Question Authority?”

Also, there is the little problem that everything with regard to the future is uncertain.  But it is easy to appreciate that a union journalist with lifetime tenure would not understand that.

But Ellen Goodman’s tiresome use of words was mere bagatelle compared to George Soros’s comment up at Davos.  Lefty billionaire Soros said at the World Economic Forum that it was going to be necessary to “de-nazify” the United States.  As reported in the New York Times, he said:

“America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany,” he said. “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process.”

More recently he has backed off, writing in The New Republic of a “bad choice of words.”

For clarity, we have to go to Dennis Prager.

[T]he equation of global warming denial to Holocaust denial trivializes Holocaust denial. If questioning global warming is on "a par" with questioning the Holocaust, how bad can questioning the Holocaust really be? The same holds true with regard to Nazism and the George Soros statement. Claiming that America in the Iraq War is morally equivalent to Nazi Germany in World War II trivializes the unparalleled evil of the Nazis.

 The left has enjoyed remarkable access to the public print ever since the middle of the nineteenth century.  It has abused that access in many ways, not the least in its reflexive habit of calling its enemies evil capitalists and evil fascists.

But now with the internet it has become easier to fight back.

But thoughtful counterattack and exposure of everyday calumny is the least of our project. 

What we really intend is to smash the injustice and the cruelty of the progressive project, to give ordinary people the power and the freedom to run their own lives once again.  We wish to restore to them the power and the freedom taken so ruthlessly by the progressive elite—people like Ellen Goodman and George Soros.

Harvard's 'Rebellious Daughter'

The wonderful thing about being a woman, wrote Agatha Christie, is to wonder what is going to happen to you next.

Curiously, the newly appointed President of Harvard, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust. feels the same way.  As Sara Rimer writes:

I’ve always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor — I never would have imagined that. Writing books — I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. — I’m not sure I would even have imagined that. I’ve lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.

As described by Rimer, Dr. Faust fits perfectly into the liberal narrative.  Daughter of white Southern privilege, she rejected her past, marched in civil-rights marches, and became a feminist pioneer in the academy.  You can’t get any better than that.

If life sorta just happened to turn out right for Faust, that’s where happenstance ends.  She is going to make sure that things don’t sort of “just happen” for women at Harvard any more.

Asked Sunday whether her appointment signified the end of sex inequities at the university, Dr. Faust said: “Of course not. There is a lot of work still to be done, especially in the sciences.”

We can be sure that whatever that work is, it will not include “inclusion” for conservatives.  What was true in Boston for the Irish 150 years ago is certainly true in the university today: “Conservatives Need Not Apply.”

School Choice in Sweden: Who Knew?

For the last ten years in Sweden there is only one thing you can say about school choice.  It’s the law.

It must be the best-kept secret in education.  In other words, I never knew about it.  Not until I read about it last week in an article in the London Spectator (reg) that called for liberating schools in Britain.

Naturally, I blogged the article immediately.  But where could I get more information?

Google aside, where would you look?  I know where I would look.  I would look at the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation website.

What a surprise!  The Friedman Foundation has a white paper on the Swedish school-choice reforms, authored by Frederick Bergström and J. Michael Sandström (pdf here).

Here are the basic features of the Swedish reform:

• Independent schools and municipal schools are placed on an equal footing for funding.
• Any group can apply to open an independent school: non-profit, for-profit, religious.
• To get permission to open a new independent school you make an application to the National Agency of Education.  Few applications are turned down.  It is difficult for the local municipality to sustain an objection to a new school.
• No fees may be charged.
• The number of independent schools has quadrupled since 1992/93.  The market share of independent schools is now about 10 percent.
• Competition has improved the municipal schools.
• Teachers are happier in the independent schools.

Teachers are happier in the independent schools.  That could be a very big deal.  As Bersgström and Sandström write:

It should also be clear that teachers have no reason to fear school vouchers. To the contrary, when the choice of employer is not only between different municipalities but also between several independent schools, this seems to benefit teachers. Also, the working conditions in the independent schools appear to be superior to those in the municipal schools. This may be due to a less bureaucratic structure of the former.

 School-choice advocates should pay close attention to this.  We don’t know what is important to US teachers, but the chances are that they would appreciate improvement in working conditions—in the way they are treated—over more material things like money.

Right now teachers are being led by their unions to oppose school reform to the death.

But sooner or later teachers are going to find out from their friends that they might like teaching in an independent school.

Then we will start to see the wall of defiance start to break down.

And then, perhaps, parents in the United States will win the freedom to send their children to the school of their choice.

Profits and People Go Together

You know everything you need to know about Larry Kudlow from his reaction to the recent announcement of ExxonMobil's profits.

ExxonMobil just reported the largest annual profit ever by a U.S. company — a staggering $39.5 billion.

I say congratulations

Well, he would say that wouldn’t he. Kudlow is a Wall Street guy.

You know everything you need to know about Hillary Clinton from her reaction to the news of ExxonMobil’s profits.

At the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee, the senator from New York said, “The oil companies reported the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits and I want to put them in an alternative energy fund.”

Still planning to vote for her?  Think of what she is saying.

“I want to take those profits.” 

Boy oh boy.  After living down her aborted plan to nationalize 14 percent of the nation’s economy she doesn’t seem to have learned anything.

What happened to private property? What happened to limited government?

“I want to put them in an alternative energy fund.”

There’s a lot of malarkey talked about alternative energy.  So far, it is expensive energy favored by, and likely to benefit, only liberals and farmers.  From a practical point of view, just to keep them off our backs, it seems reasonable to give liberals some play money so they can build wind farms in the high Sierras — but not in sight of Ted Kennedy’s compound in Hyannisport.  And why not pay some farmers to grow switchgrass on the High Plains?

But to talk of taking oil company profits and putting them in an alternative energy fund — well, that strips the veil of the alternative energy game.  It reveals it for what it is: Yet another Democratic plan for patronage, privilege, and subsidies.

But let’s get back to ExxonMobil.  As Kudlow points out, ExxonMobil made $377 billion in sales; paid taxes of $100 billion; reported profits of $40 billion.

So, for Hillary Clinton, presumably, taxes of 25 percent of sales isn’t enough.

Still planning to vote for Hillary Clinton?

Let’s get this straight.  A corporation that makes a profit is a corporation that is using resources wisely.  A corporation that reports a loss is a corporation that is wasting valuable natural and human resources.

Hillary Clinton wants to turn ExxonMobil’s profit into a loss.

Richard Feynman, Kantian

Last week there was a bit of a flap over global warming.  The lefty Guardian reported, according to Nick Schulz

"Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study."

 Yes, apparently the American Enterprise Institute had actually offered money for papers by scientists on global warming.  The call for papers didn’t actually say that the scientists were expected to act as global-warming “deniers.”

The call for papers by AEI explicitly states that "The purpose of this project is to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC process, especially as it bears on potential policy responses to climate change."

But hey, you think we lefties are dumb or something?  We can read between the lines and detect a conflict-of-interest better than most!

But Nick Schulz took the opportunity to deliver a little homily about the uncertainty of science.  He quoted Richard Feynman:

All scientific knowledge is uncertain.

Not some knowledge.  Not most knowledge.  All knowledge.  So when we talk about a scientific “consensus” on global warming, how exactly does that mesh with the idea that “all scientific knowledge is uncertain?”

This idea about the uncertainty of knowledge began with the doubting of Descartes and reached its modern fortissimo with Kant, who famously asserted that we could never know “things-in-themselves.”  All we can know is appearances.  And the question Kant raised was: Given the limitation of our human senses, how do we know that we are getting the whole story when we sense an appearance?

Significantly, it was shortly after Kant formulated his radical new philosophy that mankind discovered that the visible light with which we look at the world was a tiny octave in the vast “invisible” electromagnetic spectrum.  Then there was that smart Jewish kid from Ulm.  You know what he came up with.

When discovering something as radical as that, it helps to start with the concept that all knowledge is uncertain.

Let us review the Feynman quotation in full:

All scientific knowledge is uncertain. This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important. I believe that it is of very great value, and one that extends beyond the sciences. I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.

Here’s a bit of uncertainty for you.  It appears that sunspot activity is at a thousand year high right now.  It was at a Maunder minimum, with almost no sunspots, back in the 17th century.  Remember?  That was during the Little Ice Age. 

Yeah.  Go ahead and check it out on Wikipedia.

If School Choice Can Work in Sweden...

While we Yanks and the Brits agonize over school choice last-ditch union leaders like Randi Weingarten hiss about people who don’t care about kids.  But the socialist Swedes have gone ahead on school choice anyway. As Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth write:

Those denouncing the [school-voucher] system as the product of discredited right-wing ideology will have difficulty explaining its success in Sweden, arguably the most socialist country in the developed world. School vouchers were proposed in 1991 by its shortlived Conservative government, yet the scheme proved so popular that it has been preserved and expanded by the Social Democrats.

Sweden’s conservatives had no real plans on how to implement school choice.  But it turned out that they didn’t need to.  But they went ahead anyway.

To their astonishment, take-up was huge. They had unwittingly harnessed one of the strongest forces in civil society: parents’ determination to do what is best for their child.

 And now, of course, every government school principal and every government teacher in Sweden knows that a dissatisfied parent can leave tomorrow.  Just like a dissatisfied customer at Wal-Mart.

Freedom to set up a school is enshrined in the Dutch constitution [no kidding!], and today two in three state-funded schools are privately run. This bottom-up approach means more, smaller schools: the average school roll is 200 in Sweden and 190 in the Netherlands. In England it is 890 and rising: closures are running at the level of 120 schools a year.

Think of that.  Lots of little schools all over the place.  Mothers could walk their kids to the school on the corner, and if they didn’t like the nearest school they could go to another one.  What a concept!

Come on America! What are we waiting for?