Tag Archives: Education

News

New study: voucher program improved odds of poor students graduating by 21 percent

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The Daily Signal reports on the study.

Excerpt:

Private school choice initiatives have become increasingly common across the United States. Far from being rare and untested, private school choice policies are an integral part of the fabric of American education policy.

In the United States today, 56 different school choice policies exist in 28 states plus the District of Columbia, and the number of choice policies has approximately doubled every four years from 2000 to 2012.

The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program remains the nation’s only federally sponsored private school choice initiative. It provides scholarships worth up to $8,000 in grades K-8 and $12,000 in high school to low-income children in D.C. to attend any of more than 50 participating private schools.

When the Opportunity Scholarship Program was launched in 2004, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences selected me to lead the initial government evaluation of this pilot program in parental school choice. Demand for scholarships exceeded supply, so most applicants faced a lottery to determine if they would receive an Opportunity Scholarship, permitting us to use a “gold standard” experimental research design to determine what impact the program had on participants.

Students in our pioneering study graduated from high school at a rate 21 percentage points higher than they otherwise would have as a result of using an Opportunity Scholarship. In scientific terms, we are more than 99 percent confident that access to school choice through the Opportunity Scholarship Program was the reason students in the program graduated at these much higher rates.

But that’s just one program, how about some others?

My research team similarly found the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program significantly increased the rates of high school graduation, college enrollment and persistence in college for the low-income students participating in our nation’s oldest urban private school choice program.

Researchers at Harvard University and the Brookings Institution determined that a privately funded K-12 scholarship program in New York City significantly increased the rate at which black and immigrant students enrolled in college. Increasingly and consistently, researchers are finding that private school choice programs like the Opportunity Scholarship Program enable students to go farther in school.

It is so good for the poor, minority children if we let their parents get money for school tuition directly. We should let parents make the choice about which school is best for their child. But, Democrats oppose school choice, because they want their allies in the teacher unions to be insulated from competition from better-performing private schools.

Look how the Democrats have fought to kill the D.C. voucher program. They talk about helping poor kids, but they don’t really mean it. And note, that article is written by ultra-leftist Democrat Juan Williams, but even he cares more about poor, minority kids getting an education than the Obama administration does.

News

Man uses his own legally-owned handgun to foil carjacking attempt

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Here’s the story from WSB local news.

Excerpt:

An East Point man held a would-be carjacker at gunpoint until police arrived and arrested the suspect, according to Atlanta police.

Hashim Fannin, the car owner, says the attempted carjacking occurred just after he had pulled into a parking spot at the Family Dollar on Marietta Boulevard in northwest Atlanta earlier this month.

Fannin says the man slipped into the passenger’s seat when his doors automatically unlocked.

“He told me, ‘You know what this is,’” Fannin said.  That is when Fannin says he pulled his gun out.

“I asked him to get out the car, probably not in those exact words,” Fannin said.

“I told him no, there’s no leaving, leaving was before you hopped into my car … at this point there is not leaving,” Fannin said.

The car owner kept the suspect, Edgar Horn, 61, at gunpoint face down in the parking lot for several minutes until police arrived.

“You were not trying to rob me,”  Fannin said to the man on cellphone video of the incident.  “Do you just get into random people’s cars … you thought I was your friend …  you thought I was your friend … so you woke up stupid this morning?”

When police arrived, you can see Fannin wave them over, and put his gun down.  The police officer shakes his hand, before putting the suspect in handcuffs.

“Honestly, I look at it like this. That is one less guy I got to worry about bothering my mom when she’s out grocery shopping,” Fannin said.

According to a police report, the suspect was arrested for attempted robbery and entering an automobile.

I keep running into people (mostly women) who don’t understand why it is that law-abiding taxpayers need to be able to carry their own weapons in order to protect themselves and their families. The reason is that there is no time for the police to arrive when you are the victim of a crime. You are on your own. Or, as in the case of Baltimore, the mayor will just instruct the police to give the criminals space to destroy, i.e. – to commit crimes. That actually happens more often than you think in different times and places.

Black with gun holds white criminal for cops
Black guy with gun holds white criminal for cops

I like that the cop shook his hand, too. That would only happen in America.

Meanwhile, in the socialist, feminist United Kingdom, there is not only a ban on handguns, (with a consequent doubling of violent crime in the years following the ban), there is also a ban on righteous masculinity of any kind.

Look at this story from the UK Telegraph:

Police reprimanded a nine-year-old boy for using a broken ruler as a sword in a playground games of “knights and dragons”.

Kyron Bradley was spoken to by officers at George’s Bickley CE Primary School, Bromley, Kent.

His mother Natasha, 27, is reported to have burst into tears when she learned the news.

Two days earlier, she’d gone into school to meet with the head teacher following complaints Kyron had used a broken ruler in the playground as a weapon.

During the meeting, Ms Bradley, a carer, said her son, a Year 4 pupil, explained he had been playing a chasing game with two other boys involving pretend swords.

[…]Ms Bradley said she thought the matter was closed following the initial meeting with the headteacher until she was told the police had been asked to speak with Kyron on April 29.

That story is hat-tip Dina, who does encourage boys and men of all ages to fight against evil with force. And good for her, that’s getting increasingly rare among women these days.

Polemics

Economist Walter Williams explains how to not be poor

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Economist Walter Williams
Economist Walter Williams

Here is his article on wealth and poverty on Creators.

First, there is no real poverty in the United States:

There is no material poverty in the U.S. Here are a few facts about people whom the Census Bureau labels as poor. Dr. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, in their study “Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor”, report that 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have one or more computers. Forty-two percent own their homes. Poor Americans have more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France or the U.K. What we have in our nation are dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state.

Second, the “poverty” is not caused by racism, but by poor choices:

The Census Bureau pegs the poverty rate among blacks at 35 percent and among whites at 13 percent. The illegitimacy rate among blacks is 72 percent, and among whites it’s 30 percent. A statistic that one doesn’t hear much about is that the poverty rate among black married families has been in the single digits for more than two decades, currently at 8 percent. For married white families, it’s 5 percent. Now the politically incorrect questions: Whose fault is it to have children without the benefit of marriage and risk a life of dependency? Do people have free will, or are they governed by instincts?

There may be some pinhead sociologists who blame the weak black family structure on racial discrimination. But why was the black illegitimacy rate only 14 percent in 1940, and why, as Dr. Thomas Sowell reports, do we find that census data “going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery … showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940”? Is anyone willing to advance the argument that the reason the illegitimacy rate among blacks was lower and marriage rates higher in earlier periods was there was less racial discrimination and greater opportunity?

Third, avoiding poverty is the result of good choices:

No one can blame a person if he starts out in life poor, because how one starts out is not his fault.

If he stays poor, he is to blame because it is his fault. Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. It turns out that a married couple, each earning the minimum wage, would earn an annual combined income of $30,000. The Census Bureau poverty line for a family of two is $15,500, and for a family of four, it’s $23,000. By the way, no adult who starts out earning the minimum wage does so for very long.

Fourth, what stops people from making good choices is big government:

Since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, the nation has spent about $18 trillion at the federal, state and local levels of government on programs justified by the “need” to deal with some aspect of poverty. In a column of mine in 1995, I pointed out that at that time, the nation had spent $5.4 trillion on the War on Poverty, and with that princely sum, “you could purchase every U.S. factory, all manufacturing equipment, and every office building. With what’s left over, one could buy every airline, trucking company and our commercial maritime fleet. If you’re still in the shopping mood, you could also buy every television, radio and power company, plus every retail and wholesale store in the entire nation”. Today’s total of $18 trillion spent on poverty means you could purchase everything produced in our country each year and then some.

Walter Williams is one of my two favorite economists, the other being Thomas Sowell. By sheer coincidence, they both happen to have grown up poor, and they both happen to be black. They understand what causes poverty very well. I recommend their books to you if you want to understand poverty, too.