Mississippi’s state legislature is revising a bill that, if passed into law, would allow some traditional public schools to convert to charter schools with certain limitations. Legislators have dubbed this brand of charters “innovative schools.” Here’s how they would work:

An innovative school is a type of charter school but does not divert dollars or students. The concept is simply parents taking an existing school and running it, Brown said. More than 50 percent of the parents would have to agree and the parents would elect a board to run the school.

I don’t think these charters would be as innovative as their name suggests. There are several disadvantages to the “innovative schools” model:

• “Innovative schools” would start out with their student bodies already in place. In comparison, the typical charter school has to market itself from the very beginning. An “innovative school” would face less pressure to try anything new, because students would be enrolled from the start whether it innovates or not.
• Regular charter schools are free to specialize. They can offer programs that don’t interest everyone — like language immersion or career preparation — and enroll students who formerly attended many different schools. “Innovative schools” could only form at the agreement of parents of students who attend one traditional public school. They would have to settle on a safe plan that the majority is happy with.
• Poorly performing schools would be eligible to convert to “innovative schools,” whereas other public schools would not. So, every “innovative school” would have to focus on turning around a bad situation and correcting mistakes. The need to work with multiple grade levels might compound the difficulty. “Innovative schools” could not start with one grade and build up, as many successful charters have done. It would be difficult for any school to innovate while struggling with these challenges.

Mississippi would see more innovation if it were to drop the “innovative schools” idea and instead authorize schools that are more like the charters currently found in Missouri and other states.

I am not writing to commend the Kansas City School District for closing down almost half of its schools or laying off hundreds of staff. I will, however, commend it for being willing to make hard decisions, and these must have been incredibly hard.

I don’t think there is anything more difficult in current public policy debates than the issue of education in big cities. Even the school choice measures I believe in strongly, like charter schools and vouchers, are by no means magic bullets. That being said, the Kansas City School District has changed dramatically during recent decades, and it needed to shrink in order to reflect those changes and efficiently operate itself. The last thing the school district, or any government agency, should do is linger on indefinitely as a jobs program for government workers, whether they are needed or not.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative published another draft of its standards today. The new version is more detailed than the document released a few months ago, and it includes samples of students’ work and a reading list.

I’m impressed by the reading list. Based on the wishy-washy math questions that the initiative holds up as paragons of rigor, I expected the recommended texts to fall somewhere between comic books and Goodnight Moon. In fact, the selections are excellent. I attended a couple of public school districts as a kid, and I was never assigned classics like The Secret Garden or “The New Colossus.” Lots of schools could give their literature programs a boost simply by substituting these texts for whatever they currently ask students to read.

However, the trouble with any national standards, no matter how good, is that no one curriculum is right for everyone. Much as these texts appeal to me, I can imagine situations in which they might be inadequate. For example, an all-boys’ school would have a hard time interesting its students in some of the selections, such as Little Women and Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa. And a magnet school for the gifted would surely need more challenging reading material for second- and third-graders than the works on this list.

The standards’ authors insist that the list won’t cause problems, because it merely provides examples of which kinds of texts are appropriate in general — these particular titles won’t be mandatory reading. That answer is unsatisfactory. Many schools will ignore the authors’ disclaimer and adopt the reading list without modification, either because they don’t want to go to the trouble of finding comparable titles or because they don’t want to risk straying from the standards. When you include a reading list in a national standards document, you have to assume that some schools will follow it blindly — even if their students would have been better served by a different list.

But accepting the authors’ statement that these texts won’t be required for everyone, how will the standards improve education? If schools are free to deviate from the list for good reasons and choose books that would better suit them, then they’re also free to deviate from the list for the wrong reasons and keep their curricula unchanged. Standards that are forced on everyone are too rigid, but standards that schools can dumb down are worthless.

Standards supporters might argue that schools would be free to choose the content of their literature programs, but that guidance from this list would ensure that their selections are complex and challenging enough. The thing is, this list is so good exactly because of the great content of the readings. If a school finds a bunch of books that match the list in reading level, but that make no mention of the American Revolution or the Civil War, then its students don’t gain much from the standards.

It’s impossible for standards to bring schools up to a higher level of academics and allow for individuality at the same time. That’s why I still think Missouri should not adopt the Common Core Standards. But I must commend the initiative for writing up a great list of books.

Are farm-to-school initiatives a response to parents’ and students’ demand for local food? This program coordinator in the Oregon Department of Education doesn’t seem to think so. In her interview with the Oregonian, she talks about local food as if it were something constituents had to be cajoled into accepting. Regarding students, she said, “We’re going to [...] educate students to support those changes in the cafeteria,” implying that students don’t support the changes now and wouldn’t come to support them on their own, even once the new policies are established. This reminds me of the coaching some parents give little kids during holidays: “Tell Grandma how nice the toy is and that you like it soooo much!” If local food preferences bring superior fare to cafeterias, as advocates claim, students should welcome the tastier meals without explicit instructions.

Perhaps their parents are more enthusiastic? From the program coordinator’s description, I don’t think so. She suggests that parents, too, require a lot of education. When asked whether parents are learning about local food, she responds:

Not as much as they could be or should be. [...] They need to go to school lunch and share it with their kids [...] And then parents and caregivers, if they could purchase, serve and talk about Oregon foods with their family, phenomenal.

She would love it if parents could do those things, meaning that they aren’t doing them already. The parents have to be won over. It’s a far cry from, “They are educating me with their phone calls and petitions begging for more local food” — the reply I would expect if local food preferences really were implemented at the behest of parents.

I don’t blame Oregonians for their indifference. After all, as the program coordinator correctly states, local foods are not necessarily healthier than foods from other places. Parents might be more supportive if schools focused on procuring nutritional meals, without regard to locality.

One policy I especially hope Oregon will abandon is the preference that the program coordinator affirms for canned and frozen foods from local sources. Local canned and frozen foods have no nutritional advantage over canned and frozen foods from far away; you can’t argue that one is fresher than the other.

The homeschooling family I wrote about here and here is now featured in the New York Times. The article recounts the events that led the family to leave Germany and seek political asylum in the United States:

Working with a curriculum from a private Christian correspondence school — one not recognized by the German government — they expected to be punished with moderate fines and otherwise left alone.

But they soon discovered differently, he said, facing fines eventually totaling over $11,000, threats that they would lose custody of their children and, one morning, a visit by the police, who took the children to school in a police van. Those were among the fines and potential penalties that Judge Burman said rose to the level of persecution.

Reading these details of their story reminds me how fortunate homeschooling families in the United States are today. Some states impose more regulations than others; depending on where they live, parents may need to hold college degrees, to submit their curriculum for approval, or to agree for their children to take standardized tests. But it’s unheard of for the government to remove children from their homes forcibly and send them to school.

A sign of U.S. homeschoolers’ freedom is that when legislation is introduced that would affect them, the right to homeschool is usually not at question. And, secure in their ability to homeschool, parents can ask states for more than the right to be left alone. For example, homeschooling parents in Utah are currently lobbying for public schools to include homeschoolers in extracurricular activities. In Germany, parents fight to take their children out of the public schools; permission to bring them back for activities is the least of their concerns.

Supporters of homeschooling might point out that homeschooling can become an issue in divorce cases like this one in Missouri that Caitlin Hartsell discussed. It’s true; divorce courts do sometimes order a parent to send his or her children to school instead of teaching them at home. However, these decisions are not comparable to the harassment homeschoolers face in Germany and other countries. If divorced parents disagree about their children’s education, whatever the court ruling is, one parent will end up better satisfied and the other unhappy. Parents who want to send their children to public or private schools can be disappointed by these orders, and parents who want to homeschool are not immune from unfavorable divorce court rulings. What matters for homeschoolers in general is that divorce decisions apply only to individual families, and do not create new policies for everyone else.

A map of the schools and their proposed status, according to the plan released by the Kansas City School District.   Click to enlarge.

Superintendent John Covington has a new vision for the Kansas City School District, and it involves halving the number of schools in the district from 61 to 31 or 30. Initially, the “rightsizing” plan sounds drastic, but Covington is adamant. The school district, which had 75,000 students 20 years ago, now has only has 17,500 students and 50-percent occupancy.

The plan (from what has thus far been released) may bring a much-needed change. By consolidating facilities, the school district can better allocate funds tied up in buildings and redundant administrative costs. The district has faced low test scores and budget deficits, and officials hope that this radical change will improve both. As for the cost:

As it stands, the District receives about $12.8 million net monthly less than what that it needs to sustain operations. Fortunately, the District currently has about $91.2 million in its operating fund to coverage the shortage. The Right Sizing plan will drastically reduce costs and wipe away the $12 million deficit. As with your personal budget, the District’s goal moving forward is to not spend more than the revenue it receives.

Given the reduction in student population, rightsizing looks like it could be a step in the right direction, but a full analysis will have to wait until more details are released.

This article describes neuroscience research that seeks to explain an observed correlation between breastfeeding and higher child IQ scores. What caught my eye was the fact that a Parents as Teachers program in North Carolina helps recruit subjects for the study. Here, a Parents as Teachers educator expresses her approval:

“It’s very interesting and has a lot of validity,” said Marcie Petty, an educator with Parents as Teachers whose office is in Cheatham’s lab. “It makes you think about what your children eat and what they’re taking in.”

Encouraging participation in medical studies goes beyond Parents as Teachers’ mission of promoting good parenting practices. It’s entirely possible to be conscious of what your children are eating without signing them up for research.

I see two problems with Parents as Teachers recruiting subjects for studies. First, parents may not understand the difference between enrolling in a study and the other activities that Parents as Teachers promotes. Playing and reading helps their children learn; research helps scientists do their jobs. Parents may feel pressured into joining studies that won’t benefit their children one way or the other. They also might feel guilty if they go against the educator’s recommendation to enroll their children in research.

Second, as you know if you’ve read the comments to my last post on breastfeeding, people disagree about the effects of breast milk. Some researchers think breastfeeding is crucial for children’s health; others dispute its importance. No one study can put this question to rest. If Parents as Teachers educators tell parents that a study is valid and that it’s a good idea to participate in it, that could be viewed as an endorsement of the study’s findings.

I’ve never heard of a Missouri Parents as Teachers program suggesting that children join research studies. And, although Parents as Teachers programs are connected by a national organization, they’re run individually by local people, so the fact that a program in another state did something is no indication that it will happen here. Still, people need to know about what the program does in other places, and to consider whether those aspects should be replicated in Missouri or avoided. Any publicly funded programs that go to people’s homes and endorse specific activities need to be closely scrutinized — and that includes Parents as Teachers.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch covers both sides of the urban chicken controversy in this article. In the paragraphs that deal with complaints about unwanted chickens, you could replace the word “chicken” with the name of any other pet. When you allow people to keep animals, some owners will be irresponsible and some will abandon their pets. This is no more reason to outlaw urban chickens than the glut of chihuahuas in California animal shelters is reason to forbid chihuahua ownership.

Unwanted chickens will be kept to a minimum if the birds go to people who seek them out of their own volition. Foisting chickens on reluctant citizens will result in abandoned animals. With that in mind, I’m not in favor of the Maplewood-Richmond Heights School District’s plan to encourage chicken ownership. The district has a goal of convincing 50 families to keep chickens. I’m afraid that if it offers too much encouragement, people who aren’t so excited about chickens are going to give in and adopt them, only to abandon them later. A better goal would be to provide information about chickens to anyone who’s interested, without setting a lower bound for the number of chicken owners.

The district’s on-site chicken coop is a good idea; children can learn a lot about animal life cycles from watching chickens. When I was in elementary school, individual classrooms raised chicks. Building one coop for the whole school might allow for more efficient maintenance, and classes could come one at a time to observe the birds. It also could be more practical to keep chickens on a permanent basis than to order new chicks each year and give them away when school’s out.

A Michigan school district is starting a program it calls “Begindergarten.” The idea is to help prepare preschool-age children for kindergarten through monthly sessions. Each month, parents and students will meet as a group for instruction. Parents will receive packets of reading materials and information about how to continue teaching their children at home.

The district is missing some of the advantages of programs like Parents as Teachers, that send educators into homes. It won’t have the opportunity to observe every child’s daily schedule and family environment. It also won’t be able to watch parent-child interactions very closely or make individualized suggestions.

On the other hand, the district won’t incur the cost of paying people to drive out to every child’s house and spend time with them one-on-one. While I’m skeptical of the assertion that Begindergarten “will not cost the district any money” — even if it’s run by volunteers, there’s at least the expense of photocopying all the materials — it won’t call for anywhere near as much funding as Parents as Teachers.

Some Parents as Teachers programs do minimize home visits as children get older, or place greater emphasis on group programs. It would be wise for more of the Missouri programs to move in this direction, because Missouri doesn’t have the resources to give every child the ideal home visiting program through age five. Parents as Teachers will have to consider whether the most costly aspects of its model are truly necessary for all the children it serves, or whether something like Begindergarten would be good enough for older children.

This is probably a little more radical than most of us would hope for, but still quite interesting. The news of a school district in Rhode Island firing every teacher comes to us via a former intern, and (personally speaking) one of my favorite Democrats, Calvin H.

Needless to say, I think the changes we need in Missouri require less dramatic action than this, but if this is what they had to do in Rhode Island, I hope it works out. Improving the school, not protecting jobs, is the ultimate goal of sensible education policy — and, if you read the article carefully, it sounds like up to half of the staff will likely be hired back anyway.

The Christian Science Monitor describes a Farm to School program in Vermont that encourages local meat consumption. This student has gotten the message (emphasis mine):

“I think it’s really good because we get healthier here than at my old school, and we get more fruits and vegetables and local meat,” says fourth grader Morgan Jones.

The district bought meat from a local farmer, spending an additional $1 per pound above the price it would normally pay.

As Farm to School expands to include products like meat or cheese, it gets harder for supporters to justify the program as anything but protectionism. The appeal of local fruits and vegetables is easier to relate to. Anyone’s who’s eaten delicious fruit right off the tree can sympathize with activists’ support for local produce. (At least, we can sympathize in the early fall and late spring. Activists still have to explain how local produce is superior during the rest of the school year, when very few fruits or vegetables are harvested. Many will say to preserve the local food in the fall — but is locally preserved food really better than food that was preserved somewhere else, or shipped in fresh?)

Meat, on the other hand, has no local advantage at any time of year. There’s no such thing as a hamburger picked fresh off the cow. Meat has to be preserved and prepared no matter where it comes from. Its quality depends on factors like the health of the animals and how safely the meat was handled.

It would be great if Missouri districts could resist this Farm to School trend and refrain from insisting on local meat. Districts should shop around for the safest meat at the best price — and not settle for whatever meat happens to be raised nearby.

A member of a school board in Madison, Wis., has noticed that it pays for districts to set up online schools. The board member deplores the fact that these schools enroll students from outside districts (an act he refers to as “poaching”):

The legislature has created a system that sets up very strong incentives for a school district to contract with some corporate on-line operation, open up a virtual charter school, and set about trying to poach other districts’ students.

He then compares the ACT scores of his district’s students with the scores of an online school’s students. Fewer of the online school’s students took the ACT, and the average score of those who did was about one point lower than the district’s average.

The board member’s use of the word “poach” brings to mind hunters entering a forest illegally and shooting deer. That can’t be what he means, so lets look at the second definition. According to Dictionary.com, “poaching” can also mean “any encroachment on another’s property, rights, ideas, or the like.” Unless the board member has his own definition of the word, it seems that he views students as his district’s property and thinks other schools need permission to educate them anywhere else.

I’m sure the students who attend online schools don’t see themselves as being poached. They know they don’t belong to any school district. Taking online courses is their decision. And while the board member won’t acknowledge that online schools give students a choice, if it weren’t true, there would be no point in comparing test scores as he does in his essay. Telling people that your district has better scores than a competitor makes sense only if students can act on that knowledge and choose for themselves.

The complaints about poaching make the district look defensive and vulnerable. Districts that are doing well don’t panic when someone else offers online education. St. Louis County districts aren’t accusing SLPS of foul play because it enrolls a few of their students in its Virtual School. It would be silly for the districts to get upset when the vast majority of families prefer their brick-and-mortar schools to the SLPS Virtual School.

The board member’s emotional response may indicate that his district is threatened by the online option. Instead of pointing fingers, the Madison Metropolitan School District should consider opening an online school of its own.

As we saw in Columbia, Missouri school districts that search in vain for local food to serve are getting a lesson on “where their food comes from.” I’ll give you a hint: It’s not from the Midwest. Indiana is now running into the same problem:

Indiana school districts are lagging behind the rest of the country in procuring locally grown fruits and vegetables for students.

It turns out that buying local food just isn’t practical for Indiana districts:

“I don’t know what local farmers could grow that could last through a school year, but it would be nice if they could,” said Joanne Baierwalter, food service director for Muncie schools. “Potatoes, maybe, but where would you store them? Who would deliver them?”

Some local food advocates would respond that districts should buy up every local produce item when it’s harvested, then carefully preserve it to serve when school is in session. I’m left wondering: When did districts get out of the business of educating kids in order to become canneries?

A school district in Florida found itself on the Drudge Report after it used stimulus funds to buy iPods. The iPods, which the district will give to parents in exchange for completing a survey, cost $350,000.

That’s a small sum compared to the $1.25 million the Jennings School District spent on hand-held computers for students. Most of those computers ended up in storage. Jennings is now selling some of the devices for a fraction of what it paid, and it plans to distribute others to graduating students over the course of a few years.

It would be wiser for Jennings to emulate the Florida district and give away whatever computers it can’t sell, as soon as possible. If the district gives them all out at once, recipients may be able to find some use for them. If it waits to hand them out to graduates in a couple of years, they’ll be completely obsolete. By then, graduates won’t want to do anything with the computers — except maybe to display them with their caps and gowns as mementos.

There’s no need to attach a survey; just get rid of the devices. But if Jennings does give them to survey participants, I can imagine what a common response will be: “Stop wasting money on gadgets that students don’t use!”

A Parents as Teachers program in Alabama has started a “baby bucks” program to reward parents for what it considers to be appropriate decisions:

Parents of children up to age 36 months are eligible to earn “baby bucks” when they make good parenting choices, such as participation in child-development programs for family events.

Parents can also earn “baby bucks” through other actions, like signing up for WIC assistance or allowing Parents as Teachers into their homes. The “baby bucks” are redeemable for items such as diapers, toys, and clothes, which are donated to the Baby Bucks Boutique.

I spoke with a representative from the Alabama program who confirmed that “baby bucks” is open to all parents with children in the eligible age range. Although Parents as Teachers obviously can’t enroll wealthy families in WIC, parents at all income levels can earn “baby bucks” in various ways.

“Baby bucks” are not given only to families that couldn’t afford baby items on their own — kind of like the entire Parents As Teachers model, which isn’t means-tested. A program that starts out as free for all parents, so that it’s not a welfare program for the few, can turn into a welfare program for everyone.

I don’t know of any Parents as Teachers programs in Missouri that offer material incentives for participation and parenting decisions. But if you’re not enthusiastic about publicly funded programs giving out stuff in exchange for approved parenting behavior, keep in mind that this is a direction that Parents as Teachers can go.

The New York Times‘ Room for Debate blog asks whether Chinese instruction will take hold in American schools or whether interest in the language is just a passing fad. A few of the respondents dismiss the apparent upswing in the popularity of learning Chinese. They describe American culture as indifferent to foreign languages, and blame this on a lack of state directives. For example (emphasis mine):

I believe the main reason for this disparity is that foreign languages are treated by our public education system as less important than math, science and English. In contrast, E.U. governments expect their citizens to become fluent in at least two languages plus their native tongue.

Another panelist laments the fact that “unlike Europe, the U.S. has no coherent strategy for making our society bilingual.”

I suspect European countries’ policies are a reflection of their citizens’ interest in languages, rather than the cause. Europeans have ample reason to study languages; they all live within a short distance of other countries where different languages are spoken. As Norman Matloff notes in his response to the Room for Debate question, Americans who live close to the border with Mexico show more enthusiasm for learning Spanish than do their fellow citizens to the north.

Could it be that although proximity to foreign language speakers can spark people’s interest, policies are what really make them use other languages? If that’s the case, I’d be hard pressed to explain what happened in Ontario, Canada, where a ceremony was conducted in English a few weeks ago. That was despite French’s status as an official language of Canada, and despite the French-language public school boards and community colleges that are established throughout the province. When a language isn’t useful to people, policymakers who promote it are wasting their time.

The United States shouldn’t order everyone to learn languages, but the education system should give opportunities to become bilingual to people who are interested. Magnet schools and charter schools are good environments for language specialization, as are the optional language-immersion programs offered by some traditional districts. (Examples in Missouri are Academie Lafayette, the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools, and the Kansas City School District’s Foreign Language Academy.) Parents who want their children to have a lot of foreign language exposure can enroll them in these schools.

If Chinese language education is to continue growing, more people must be free to choose schools that teach it. Policymakers who are worried about American students learning English only ought to try to make it easier to open new language-immersion choice schools.

The Jennings School District bought more than 2,500 hand-held computers back in 2006. Now, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, the district is getting rid of them. They were purchased with high hopes:

Students could use them to graph math equations, take notes, draw charts, and even, coupled with external probes, measure temperature and pH.

The north St. Louis County school district, now with about 3,100 students, bought one machine for each third- through 12th-grader.

Jennings made two mistakes when it bought all those devices. First, it didn’t have a specific purpose for the technology. The things students could have done with the computers, like taking notes and studying equations, were tasks they could do already with pencils or calculators. Teachers aren’t going to adopt new technology when the old technology does the job just as well. It’s no wonder most teachers said they didn’t use the computers and don’t intend to use them.

Second, the district bought the computers for too many students. It would have made more sense to introduce the devices to one grade, and wait for results before giving them to other grades.

Districts can easily get carried away by dreams of quick technological fixes, so I don’t blame Jennings for being so ambitious. What’s puzzling is that Jennings doesn’t seem to have learned from what happened. The district plans to get rid of the devices by giving them away to graduating students over the course of several years, even though the devices are almost obsolete and will probably be worthless in a year or two. It’s like Jennings can’t give up on its expectation that students will use the computers — if not in school, then after they graduate.

Jennings should sell the computers once and for all. And remember the moral of the story: More gadgets aren’t always better.

In the comments section to this article about Parents as Teachers, some Columbia Daily Tribune readers are brainstorming ways to limit eligibility to the program, to make the most of its remaining funding.

I agree that the program provides too many services for free to too many people, but not all suggestions for limiting it struck me as good ideas. One plan in particular that I think would be unsuccessful is restricting the program to children who are lagging behind in their development.

An argument for Parents as Teachers that I find persuasive (although not sufficient justification for free services to the wealthy) is that helping at-risk children when they’re young can prevent problems and save tax dollars later on. Parents as Teachers couldn’t do that if only children with below-average development were let in. That’s because the younger children are, the easier it is for their development to be considered satisfactory; not much is expected from a newborn baby. But when children are a few years old, they need to have passed several milestones to still be on track. The effect of screening by development would be to keep out most babies and bring children into the program years later, after their developmental problems have surfaced. Programs like Parents as Teachers shouldn’t look for children who are already behind, but for children who are fine now and likely to fall behind later.

Furthermore, “normal” means different things to different people, and there is some subjectivity involved in diagnosing developmental delays. In this radio interview, a representative from Parents as Teachers talks about the possibility that doctors and Parents as Teachers educators might disagree about whether a child has a developmental problem. (I can readily believe that such differences might arise, because Parents as Teachers educators don’t need to have any medical background and their training consists of short seminars and distance learning.) Who would have the final say in determining whether a child is eligible? And there’s still the question of which mothers should get home visits before their babies are born.

Although I hope Parents as Teachers will end its free home visits to families that don’t need help, it shouldn’t use developmental screenings to determine which people to serve.

The L.A. Times reports on the disagreement that is holding up a proposed Hebrew-language charter school in California. The school promises to teach languages (Hebrew and a few others), not religion, but some people still think it would violate separation of church and state. Here’s a quote by an opponent of the proposed charter from a previous article:

“By requiring the students study Hebrew, I think you’re effectively limiting (who would apply),” said Dennis King, a former Hart school board member of 20 years. “So it’s sort of an ethnic school. It’s a school that appeals to a particular culture. . . . I suspect 95% of the kids will be Jewish.”

I hope this way of thinking doesn’t become prevalent in Missouri, because I’m happy about the growth of language-immersion charters here and I’m afraid the argument could be used against them as well. The St. Louis Language Immersion Schools have suggested the possibility of opening new schools in the future. Would they be barred from opening a Japanese school because many students would be Buddhists, or an Arabic school because many Muslims would apply?

As long as the school does not promote religion, there’s nothing wrong with teaching a language that’s associated with a religious group. Public schools do it all the time; Ladue teaches Hebrew, and Bunche teaches Arabic. If public schools can teach these languages for an hour or two a day, charters should be able to focus on the same languages and teach them in more depth.

I’m not convinced by some economists’ assertions that offering merit pay and bonuses doesn’t make employees more productive. One of the economists professing that opinion is Dan Ariely, who describes his research in Wired. Here are some of the tasks he asked his subjects to perform:

We asked them, for example, to assemble puzzles and to play memory games while throwing tennis balls at a target.

When the subjects were offered big rewards, they did poorly on the puzzles.

I have no doubt that Ariely and his collaborators ran their experiments under rigorous laboratory conditions, but it’s a stretch to conclude from them that merit pay is bad. What goes on in the laboratory is far removed from day-to-day classroom activities. Good teaching depends more on verbal and interpersonal skills than on hand-eye coordination. And a controlled experiment with tennis balls is of necessity finished within minutes, whereas teaching takes place over the course of many months. The long work of establishing a rapport with students and building knowledge isn’t comparable to putting a little puzzle together.

To learn the true effects of bonuses and incentives, it’s better to look at studies that examine how real teachers in schools respond to merit pay.

Diner’s Journal writes that the proposed increase in federal spending on school lunches disappointed many advocates, who had hoped for a steeper rise in funding. By itself, the increase won’t allow schools to change their menus drastically:

Quick calculations show that at best, the president’s plan might offer less than 20 cents more per school lunch.

Schools can still improve the meals they serve, but they’ll have to find other ways to pay for better food. Schools might raise money specifically for their cafeterias, or they could divert resources from things they’ve been paying for that are less important than lunch. Some schools have already succeeded; this charter school, for one, spends a few dollars more on each student’s lunch than the typical public school. The Maplewood–Richmond Heights School District is another example of a school that changed its lunch offerings without federal help. The district was able to add fresh produce to its meals using a grant from a nonprofit organization.

Not every district needs to transform its cafeteria food. In some districts, the lunches aren’t great, but students live in households that can afford to send bag lunches if they choose. Other districts may decide that something else is holding back student achievement and that all resources should be focused on solving that problem before any additional money is diverted to making lunches tastier.

Districts that do want to spend more on food should accept the fact that they won’t receive unlimited appropriations from the federal government. They need to be frugal, and to buy the food they want at the cheapest price. They need to look for foods that are both nutritious and inexpensive. They can’t afford to squander money on pricey fads like “local” or “sustainable” food.

In an article about Massachusetts’ new law requiring certain preschools and day care centers to teach children how to brush their teeth, the New York Times quoted a teacher who opposes the regulation:

“I don’t want someone’s hand in my child’s mouth,” said Sarah Brodsky, a teacher at First Path Day Care in Watertown and mother of 4-month-old Noah. “It’s a little too much” government intervention, Ms. Brodsky added.

I’m not the Sarah Brodsky in this article, although we do have the same name and her quote is basically what I would have said. She’s right; the decision of whether to incorporate teeth brushing into the school day should be left to preschools and day care centers.

The new law is an intrusion into preschool management, and the fact that parents can opt out is little consolation from a preschool director’s point of view. Every preschool now has to set up sinks and take time away from other activities in order to brush teeth, all while keeping track of which students’ parents opted out. Preschool teachers are sure to hear complaints from parents if one child sticks someone else’s toothbrush in his mouth, or if an opted-out child inadvertently gets into the toothpaste. Those kinds of mix-ups are unavoidable when you have a bunch of little kids brushing their teeth at the same time.

I hope Missouri won’t follow Massachusetts’ lead and mandate teeth brushing in day care centers. But now that I think about it, I don’t know whether the in-school dental care policy would catch on in Missouri — people would probably demand taxpayer-funded home visits!

I’ve made my case against Parents as Teachers, and I suggested that the program limit eligibility to poor families. That idea was roundly rejected in the comments, on the grounds that Parents as Teachers would become another welfare program that taxpayers have to support but can’t benefit from. My answer to that is: It already is a program that many people have to pay for but can’t benefit from. Infertile couples and single people with no prospects of having children soon have to help pay the more-than-$1,000-per-family price tag for home visits to wealthy parents. And the Parents as Teachers educator doesn’t do anything your pediatrician couldn’t do just as well. You could spend a lot of time with a pediatrician for $1,000+.

This is a popular program that participants feel they gain a lot from, so I realize my opinions aren’t going to change how it’s run. That being the case, I wish people would stop making statements like this one in a letter published in the Post-Dispatch:

Studies have shown that parents who take part in Parents as Teachers are more involved in their child’s school once the child starts kindergarten.

Well-off parents who care about their kids will be the first to sign them up for programs like Parents as Teachers, and they’ll also be the most likely to be active in their kids’ schools. We can’t infer any causal relationship there as long as Parents as Teachers continues its current eligibility policy.

Anyone following the cyberbullying issue should read this article in the Columbia Missourian. (Thanks to Combest for the link.) The article reports on a proposed bill that would require all public school districts to write policies about online bullying.

The bill’s sponsor doesn’t see any drawbacks to it:

“I feel like this bill has the support of everybody,” Wilson said. “It’s simple, and it’s the right thing to do.”

The sponsor’s intentions are unimpeachable, but her bill still deserves to be challenged and debated. In particular, I see one potential down side to it: Passing such a bill could make people feel like the government had fixed something, when in reality little would change.

For one thing, the bill would apply only to public districts. I wouldn’t suggest expanding its reach; the state should not tell private schools which policies to adopt. But what if a student from a private school bullies a student from a public school, or vice versa? Or, what if someone’s cousin comes for a visit from out of state and bullies the neighborhood kids? How would districts’ anti-bullying policies help in those situations? Many instances of bullying wouldn’t fall under any district’s policy.

Furthermore, the bill just tells districts to write something down on a piece of paper. It’s not guaranteed that districts will enforce their policies well enough to prevent online bullying. Bullying can be difficult to detect and stop, because bullies usually harass their victims away from adults’ supervision. A district can’t track down all the emails and text messages that students send to each other, so the new policies probably wouldn’t affect communications between students as much as districts might want them to.

Few policy issues are as as uncontroversial as the idea that the federal government should provide some kind of national defense. Realizing that funding the military is almost universally considered to be a federal obligation, advocates of other policies try to piggyback on that popular support by associating their programs with defense or comparing their concerns to a battlefield.

The latest example is this essay in the Huffington Post by Debra Eschmeyer, Media Director of the National Farm to School Network. Eschmeyer argues for a direct link between school lunches and national security:

Do tater tots, pizza, and soda rise to the level of calling in Janet Napolitano or David Petraeus? Oddly, yes, because the National School Lunch Program was originally created to promote “nutrition in the national defense,” as a solution to young men who were unfit for service in WWI and WWII. The lunch line was actually designed to prepare soldiers for the front lines. (And sadly, 27 percent of the population for military service today are too obese/overweight to serve).

Eschmeyer then turns her attention away from history and calls for a “fight” against poor nutrition.

Is Eschmeyer correct that we need better cafeteria food to keep out foreign invaders? I don’t think so. There are many other factors that prevent people from joining the military, such as criminal records, lack of education, and health problems that are not related to food (including poor eyesight, mental illness, and others). It’s worth noting that the report Eschmeyer cites about military service recommends expanding preschool education in an effort to improve graduation rates, but makes no mention of school lunches.

Fortunately, we don’t need a large percentage of the population to defend the country right now, so it doesn’t really matter that so many people can’t serve for one reason or another. Problems like obesity don’t determine whether we have a military, but which people are employed by it. As a country, we can still enjoy the benefits of national defense. The only people who lose out when the army excludes lots of overweight people are the overweight people who want to serve. And if someone wants to join the armed forces but is barred by weight, he can make nutritional or other lifestyle changes to improve his fitness. In this sense, overweight people are in a better position than others who are disqualified, because it’s possible for them to bring their weight down to military standards through their own initiative.

The fact that a small percentage of the population is eligible for military service can be a good thing, depending on how you look at it. It means that we are living in such a peaceful time in history that our military can afford to be selective, excluding people who don’t have quite enough education or whose weight is just a little higher than the ideal.

The defense argument for better school lunches doesn’t pass inspection. If states like Missouri think kindergartners don’t eat enough vegetables, they shouldn’t frame that as a national security crisis. There’s no need to call in the federal government — or to call forth the militia.

The German family that fled to Tennessee in search of freedom to homeschool has been granted political asylum. They can stay in Tennessee and continue to educate their children as they choose — although, as I’ve written before, if they want to see really great homeschooling laws, they should check out Missouri.

Here’s another reason that allowing alternative teacher certification in Missouri was a good idea: Teachers who are anxious about math can transmit that attitude to their students, who may then lose confidence in their ability to learn math. Specifically, a study has found that girls who were taught by female teachers with math anxiety were more likely to believe that boys are better at math. The girls who formed that opinion also earned a lower average score than their peers on a math test. The difference in scores did not appear at the beginning of the year, before the students had been influenced by their teachers.

Alternative teacher certification is a good way to fill the teaching force with people who are both knowledgeable about math and comfortable with it. Proponents of alternative teacher certification have long highlighted the knowledge that teachers bring to the classroom. Obviously, a teacher with little math background won’t have the same level of expertise as someone who’s worked in a math-intensive field. But this study shows that a teacher’s feelings toward her subject are also important. A teacher who hasn’t developed confidence by using math can change how students think about their potential to learn. And that could prevent them from learning from other teachers later on.

While this study focused on negative effects of teachers, it would be interesting to see whether teachers can inspire previously reluctant students to like a subject. Can a confident teacher turn around students’ attitudes and make them enthusiastic about math and science?

A group of homeschooling parents in Oregon have applied to form a charter school. They want to continue homeschooling, and to use the charter for in-school resources and to meet weekly with a teacher.

Given Oregon’s track record on charters, I’m not expecting the idea to be approved easily. And I actually hope the district turns down this proposal. I see a few problems with it:

• The charter would give each student $1,000 to use for their education. Families’ ideas of educational purchases vary so widely that this is sure to lead to conflicts or allegations of misuse. What if a family thinks a golf lesson is physical education but the charter doesn’t?
• It seems extravagant to establish a school resource center for a couple hundred families who won’t spend much time there. People could just go to a public library and access most of the books, maps, or CDs that the charter would provide.
• If students in the homeschool charter perform poorly on state tests, other people might view that as an indictment of all homeschoolers. An unsuccessful homeschool charter could provoke stricter regulation of other homeschoolers who were never involved with it.

I would support a charter for homeschoolers if it were structured more like a part-time school. Students could attend the school two or three full days a week, and it could assign homework for them to do with their parents on the other days. Rather than give students money to spend, the school could lend them computers, musical instruments, or other things they need for their studies. Students would still get to spend lots of time at home, but it would be clear to everyone that the charter was a real school and not just a place to stop by for an hour.

Is a part-time charter a good idea for Missouri? Charters can form in St. Louis and Kansas City, so out-state homeschoolers won’t have this option. St. Louis families that want to combine homeschooling and public education are already free to choose the SLPS Virtual School. There might not be enough demand for a homeschooling charter there. That leaves Kansas City. I can imagine homeschooling families in Kansas City forming a charter, especially if they participated in the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program and are looking for something to take its place. However, the charter idea won’t go very far if homeschoolers are satisfied with existing homeschool coops and don’t want help from the state.

Missouri intends to give only half of its Race to the Top grant, should it receive one, to districts. The rest would pay for expanding high-speed Internet access.

When a state plans to spend a large portion of Race to the Top grant money outside of schools, that’s a sign that the Department of Education is offering too much money.

One objection to open enrollment is that districts would have trouble accommodating changing numbers of students. I explained in this post why open enrollment needn’t hamper districts’ planning; one reason is that districts could limit the number of additional students they’d accept. In my argument that open enrollment wouldn’t do any harm, I neglected to point out that open enrollment could actually make planning easier for some districts. In particular, districts like Ladue that are experiencing enrollment booms and space shortages would benefit from a policy that allows students to transfer out.

As more people move into the Ladue district, class sizes go up and its schools have to scramble to find space. Some of that enrollment growth is inevitable, because Ladue has a good reputation. But the problem could be mitigated if students were able to choose schools in neighboring districts. Not every family that moves into Ladue does so for education; some choose a house in Ladue for other reasons, and would prefer a school that’s less crowded. Those people wouldn’t mind transferring their children to nearby districts. Other parents originally moved in for the district’s academics, but after class sizes reached a certain point, they no longer thought it was worthwhile to stay. They would also choose to transfer under open enrollment.

Under the current system, people with the preferences I just described can’t send their children to a different school unless they sell their houses and move. That’s a time-consuming process, and many would consider it a last resort in today’s real estate market. So, people stay put and keep their kids in the district, contributing to the crowding problem.

This is not to say that if Missouri institutes open enrollment, everyone would flee Ladue. Rather, some families that care about class sizes would send their children to other districts — perhaps just for a few years, while Ladue acquires more space. Open enrollment would act as a safety valve so that enrollment doesn’t increase faster than Ladue can open new classrooms.