Today the Saint Louis Business Journal published a letter to the editor by John Payne and me (link added):

Editor:

The editorial board recently oversimplified our views on rural broadband access (“It’s a wired world, after all,” Aug. 20 issue). We do not oppose the proliferation of broadband into rural areas, merely the government subsidization of such expansion. Greater broadband penetration in rural areas indeed provides social benefits, but we remain skeptical that those benefits will outweigh cost of millions in taxpayer dollars.

Solutions for extending broadband exist in the private sector. I-Land Internet Services, for example, is expanding broadband into rural western Missouri at no cost to taxpayers. Fifty percent of people living in rural areas already have home broadband Internet service, according to a Pew Internet study released earlier this month. Furthermore, of the people who do not have high-speed Internet, only 6 percent cited a lack of access as the primary reason for not subscribing, compared with 48 percent who find the Internet irrelevant and 18 percent who have usability issues. Eighty million dollars is a very high cost to benefit such a small subset of people.

Christine Harbin, research analyst, Show-Me Institute
John Payne, research assistant, Show-Me Institute

Of additional note, contributors to Show-Me Daily have discussed this issue before.

At around 5:05 this afternoon, I will be on the Mike Ferguson show on 93.9 FM The Eagle in Columbia, talking about government-subsidized broadband Internet access for rural areas. If you are not in Columbia, but would still like to listen to the show, you can listen online — provided you have a fast enough Internet connection. The invitation was extended to me based on this post I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

(Headline reference here, which is meant both to celebrate the Rush concert in Saint Louis this Sunday, and to annoy my colleague David Stokes.)

On Friday, August 20, the Show-Me Institute, along with Liberty on Tour and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), will host an informal panel discussion about recording the police. Recently, individuals in Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts have been arrested for filming either their or others’ arrests. In Maryland, police raided a motorcyclist’s home after he had posted video footage of a traffic stop on YouTube. Anthony Graber, the motorcyclist, faces up to 16 years if convicted of violating Maryland’s wiretap laws. The Illinois legislature has explicitly made it illegal to record an on-duty police officer without his or her permission. A man arrested for filming an arrest in Boston has recently filed suit against the city.

These arrests raise interesting questions of privacy expectations, free speech, differing state laws, and, as Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko has noted, your right to petition the government. This panel discussion is our attempt to explore the issues of liberty at stake, as well as provide the opportunity for anyone who is interested to meet the panelists and to ask questions.

The discussion will begin at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, August 20, at the Show-Me Institute’s office at 4512 W. Pine Blvd in the Central West End of Saint Louis. Please RSVP either by email to info@showmeinstitute.org, by phone to (314) 454-0647, or by commenting on this blog entry.

The event is free and snacks will be provided. However, because Liberty on Tour is traveling across the country, we suggest a $5 to $10 donation to help pay for the group’s travel costs.

Our star-studded panel includes:

• Adam Mueller and Pete Eyre of Liberty on Tour, a project to tour 13 cities in 13 weeks to talk about the principles of voluntaryism. Adam is also a founder of Cop Block, an organization devoted to watchdogging police officers who break the law. Pete Eyre currently works for the Future of Freedom Foundation, which advocates for individual liberty, free markets, private property rights, and limited government. Both Adam and Pete were part of the Motorhome Diaries project.
• Redditt Hudson, of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri. Redditt is a former Saint Louis police officer, and part of his work at the ACLU is to lead workshops that educate people about their rights under the law, including practical advice about how to interact with the police.
• John Payne, a research assistant at the Show-Me Institute, will be moderating the discussion. John has argued for greater transparency and recording of SWAT raids in Missouri, and follows issues of civil asset forfeiture closely.

If you have the time, please drop by, and don’t hesitate to bring questions! The panelists will speak briefly about their perspectives on recording the police, and then we will open up the discussion for questions from the general public. After about an hour of discussion, we will move the group to Sasha’s on Shaw for dinner and drinks.

If you can’t make it, you can send questions you’d like asked to info@showmeinstitute.org, tweet them to @showmeinstitute, or post questions on the event’s Facebook wall. Finally, we will film the discussion and post it online for those who cannot attend.

The federal government will spend almost $82 million in Missouri to expand high-speed Internet access in rural areas. This is no doubt a boon to rural residents who want faster Internet access, but is this really a necessary function of the government? Most people in rural areas can already get high-speed Internet access through satellite connections — although they carry the same limitations as satellite television.

More to the point, if these people deeply desire faster Internet service, they have the option of moving into a decent-sized town and getting a cable or DSL connection. The fact that they don’t indicates that, for the vast majority of these people, living in a rural area is more important than having extremely fast Internet service. Choices involve trade-offs, and if a person chooses to live in a rural area, he should either be willing to forgo high-speed Internet access or pay the market rate for the service. Because I live in Saint Louis, it is easier for me to attend large, public events like Cardinals games and the upcoming Rush concert than it is for someone from Shannon County, but that does not mean the government should subsidize trips to Saint Louis for people from Shannon County. At the same time, I cannot enjoy Missouri’s outdoors as easily as someone from Shannon County, but the government shouldn’t pay for my float trips on Current River.

A person should be free to live where and however he pleases provided he does not interfere with the equal right of others to do the same. It is not the government’s role to subsidize one way of life over another.

Link via John Combest.

In an article published today at Kansas Liberty, Holly Smith used Show-Me Institute’s newest web tool, IDEAS: Interactive Database for Economic Analysis and Synthesis, to analyze Kansas’ tax burden over time. Smith compares many fiscal figures for Kansas and other states in the Midwest. For example, she found that Kansas generated $104.3 from alcoholic beverages in 2007, which is more than its neighboring states. Missouri, in comparison, generated $32.26 million in 2007.

Using the IDEAS web tool, I restricted the selective tax rates on alcoholic beverages for Missouri and Kansas over time, and then exported this information to Excel to produce the following graphs:

Click graphs to enlarge.

Generally, residents of Missouri are taxed less on alcoholic beverages than residents of Kansas are taxed. Specifically, Missouri assesses lower tax rates on beer and spirits, but as of 2005, the state has higher tax rate on wine.

In an effort to encourage or to protest their economic and social situation, people tend to vote with their feet. This is why I included domestic net migration data for Kansas and Missouri in the second graph. The data show that Kansas has experienced negative net migration every year in the last decade (i.e., people are moving out of the state). Missouri experienced positive net migration during this period, except for 2008 (i.e., people are moving into the state).

Although these trends can be attributed to a combination of factors, it may be possible that the higher taxes on alcohol in Kansas influenced some marginal number of people to move out of the state, and the low taxes on alcohol in Missouri influenced people to move into the state.

I encourage our blog readers to play with the IDEAS web tool and determine to which states they would consider domestically migrating.

Today, the Show-Me Institute launched a new online tool that enables users to research economic aggregates, fiscal policy measures, and demographics across states and time. It’s called IDEAS: Interactive Database for Economic Analysis and Synthesis, and it incorporates the work of Laffer Associates.

Using the web tool, users can create their own charts and tables, and have access to a large comprehensive dataset. The data, formatted in a user-friendly way, includes:

• Individual state tax burden profiles
• A tool that allows the comparison of specific tax rates on items ranging from property to income to the glass of wine you may buy after hours.
• A 50-state ranking tool that allows you to customize your comparison, based on the category being taxed or year (starting from 1977). In other words, compare taxes based on location, type, or time.

I encourage our readers to play with the site, and I hope that they find this information as valuable as I do.

The Washington Post recently carried an article by Reason magazine senior editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on the benefits of online education and its even greater potential. It is worth quoting at some length:

Since the Internet hit the big time in the mid-1990s, Amazon and eBay have changed the way we shop, Google has revolutionized the way we find information, Facebook has superseded other ways to keep track of friends and iTunes has altered how we consume music. But kids remain stuck in analog schools. Part of the reason online education hasn’t taken off is that powerful forces such as teachers unions — which prefer to keep students in traditional classrooms under the supervision of their members — are aligned against it.

So children continue to learn from blackboards and books — the kind made of dead trees! no hyperlinks! — rather than getting lessons the way they consume virtually all other information: online. Putting reading materials and lecture notes on the Internet, like many teachers do today, is just the first step; it’s like when, in the early days of movies, filmmakers pointed a camera at a stage play. Kids are still stuck watching those old-style movies, when they could be enjoying the learning equivalent of “Avatar” in 3-D. Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction, not to mention a very nice illustrated series on the Kennedy Center’s ArtsEdge site. [...]

How do we know online education will work? Well, for one thing, it already does. Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country. Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses — 39 percent of whom are minority students — score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students…

Moving lesson planning and delivery online can provide students with more supervision, not less, says Michael Horn, one of the co-authors of “Disrupting Class.” It would free teachers, Horn says, “to do hand-holding and mentoring, something which is pretty much impossible in the current model.” After all, where is it written that the babysitter, disciplinarian, lecturer and evaluator must all be the same person? Or even that they all have to be in the same building?

Some online learning models eliminate human interaction, but the vast majority do not. Instead, they connect students and teachers via polls, video, chat, text and good old-fashioned phone calls. The Virtual Virginia program focuses on offering Advanced Placement classes to every student in the state, bringing college-level courses to rural districts and inner-city Richmond, where high-level instruction is difficult to get. Rocketship Education, in San Jose, Calif., brings at-risk elementary students together in a safe, cheap, modular space along with a small staff and hands their studies over to online curriculum for part of each day.

Online education has already become a boon for kids with special needs, the students least served by the traditional system. Education entrepreneur Tom Vander Ark launched Internet Academy, the first online K-12 establishment, in 1995 in part to serve kids with unorthodox education requirements, from serious athletes to children with health problems or learning disabilities.

One of the most successful areas of online education so far is helping kids who have fallen off the educational grid. Companies such as AdvancePath Academics scoop up students classified as unrecoverable by traditional schools and help them complete their education. Some dropout-recovery programs can be found in shopping malls and gyms.

Online education is no silver bullet for Missouri’s educational problems because there is no such thing. Each student is different, and although the traditional models may work well for most (a point I think is debatable), others may experience far more success in a more structured online program that still allows students to move at their own pace. Others could benefit from more independent learning styles like Montessori schools. All these options have their places, and we will be most successful when we allow parents and students find the pedagogical methods that work best for them instead of trying to force hundreds of thousands of individuals into the same boxes.

Sarah Brodsky has written about online schooling several times, and Caitlin Hartsell has also blogged about the issue.

Now that the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program has lost state funding and is charging tuition, it’s an opportune time for the St. Louis Public School District to expand its Virtual School.

Enrollment in the SLPS Virtual School is constrained by the district’s rule that online students spend one or more days a week in a classroom, working with Virtual School teachers in person. This policy is unusual for an online school; most such schools allow children to talk to teachers through video conferencing or by telephone, and require less frequent meetings. If SLPS made weekly in-person meetings optional, it could open enrollment to students who live far from St. Louis.

Another factor that has limited the Virtual School’s growth is its policy that elementary students must be enrolled full-time. Permitting young students to enroll in individual classes would give more children the ability to participate.

The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t want to deliver mail on Saturday anymore. Facing a large budget gap, the USPS is lobbying Congress to allow the agency to deliver mail only five days per week, a cost-cutting measure it has advanced for more than a year.

As I said back in August, the Postal Service’s decline seems to be inevitable. USPS is subsidized not by tax dollars but by regulatory capture: The Private Express Statutes limit private mail carriers from delivering mail to mailboxes and from charging less than $3 to deliver a letter.

Luckily for the USPS, it doesn’t have to compete in a free market, where its work schedule would be drastically insufficient to compete successfully with others. UPS and FedEx don’t have the same regulatory luxury, and consequently have some locations that are open 24 hours a day and on weekends, because that is what customers want. Private delivery companies also price shipments based on distance traveled, which makes more sense than the flat rate that the USPS levies for first-class letters. Mailing a letter to one’s landlord in the next town over has a lower marginal cost for a postal service than mailing a letter to a cousin across the country, but first-class USPS prices don’t reflect that.

Unlike private delivery services, the USPS does not face direct competitive pressure, and so has found it difficult to adjust to changing technology and market conditions. This has left the agency well past its prime, if that prime ever really existed. James Bovard pointed out in a review of USPS history that government-provided postal services were originally conceived as revenue generators, and that regulators had to actively stamp out competitors who were providing more reliable, trustworthy services at lower prices:

The early colonists inherited the tradition of government postal monopoly from Britain. In sixteenth-century England, the Tudor monarch outlawed private post in order to hinder communication between potentially rebellious subjects. Later, the monopoly was justified as a revenue raiser for the Crown. But even 270 years ago, private carriers were breaking the law and providing the public with better service than the government:

In 1709, Charles Povey used bell ringers to collect letters, which he delivered anywhere in London for a halfpenny. The Post Office prosecuted Povey, who was convicted and fined, and then it adopted his system for the government service.[2]

Since 1709, not much has changed in how governments run their postal monopolies.

In 1789 the Constitution granted the federal government the right to set up a post office, but it did not prohibit competition from private services. However, the first postal act, in 1792, did effectively outlaw private competition.

The first postage rates were extremely high, as Congress tried to force easterners to subsidize the more expensive service to outlying settlements on the western frontier. As the Postal Service’s official history notes, “Until 1851, the cost of sending a single sheet letter 40 miles was either 6› or 8›. When the letter traveled over 400 miles, it cost 25›. These prices doubled, tripled, or quadrupled with each additional sheet.”[3] In 1843, “it cost 18 1/2› to send a letter from New York City to Troy, New York, but only 12 1/2› to send a barrel of flour the same distance.”[4] The government charged 25› to deliver a letter from Philadelphia to New York.

Henry Wells (later of Wells-Fargo fame) entered the market, charged 6› a letter, and delivered faster.[5] In the Boston area alone, over a hundred private express companies carried the mail. Private companies delivered letters directly to addressees’ homes, while the government still required people to pick up their mail at the nearest post office.

As private business flourished, government postal revenues declined. The postmaster general admitted in 1843 that many people thought the government’s monopoly was “odious,” but insisted that it had to be preserved for the good of the country.[6] In 1845, Congress tightened the laws prohibiting competition and increased the penalties for violators. In 1851, Congress lowered postal rates and began providing a direct subsidy for postal operations.

An 1844 competitor, the American Letter Mail Company, was founded and operated by notable proto-libertarian Lysander Spooner. This competition was so effective and efficient that “The end result was that in 1851 Congress again had to lower the postal rates to a uniform 3 cents” from previous prices “of 18 3/4 cents or 25 cents.” Lawmakers simultaneously put Spooner out of business for good by strengthening the USPS monopoly laws.

The notion that government postal services may have been necessary to provide a crucial public service in the absence of trustworthy private alternatives doesn’t stand up to the historical record, and is even less justifiable in today’s electronic information age, in which private companies are the primary means by which most people send and receive sensitive communication.

Missourians — and the United States in general — would greatly benefit if the USPS lost its monopoly protection so that costs could be reduced through the efficiency of competitive pressure, rather than through elimination of services.

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.

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!”

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.

Here’s something to celebrate in the Missouri budget: The governor cut $24 million that would have subsidized broadband Internet in rural areas.

As state officials have noticed, living in a rural community is different from living in an urban environment. You don’t have all the traffic, noise, and light pollution you’d find in a big city. The flip side is that you don’t have your choice of restaurants just around the corner, or the same opportunities to access the Internet.

The state shouldn’t try to smooth out those differences and give rural residents the benefits of city life. It would be silly to open a state-funded Starbucks on every gravel road so that rural areas would have better access to coffee. Broadband subsidies are an equally bad idea.

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.

Missouri’s law against young people sending text messages while driving is only the beginning. Regulators want to make sure drivers can think about nothing but the road in front of them:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called distracted driving a “hot button” issue for state legislatures and said he’s against all distracted driving, not just cell phone use.

“I don’t care what the distraction is,” he said. “We’re going to set the highest bar possible. There should be no distractions.”

An obvious problem with outlawing all distractions is that we could never enforce such broad controls on drivers’ behavior. That doesn’t dissuade the texting ban’s supporters, who say that whether anyone is ever found to be in violation of a law doesn’t matter. Here’s how an AAA spokesman puts it:

“The benefit of having it in the statute is voluntary compliance, sort of like every other law.”

Perhaps the roads are safer because drivers willingly cooperate with texting bans, but, if so, texting bans are the exception. Most laws are effective because we can prosecute people for breaking them, and thereby deter people from breaking them in the future.

The more laws we write restricting drivers’ activities, the less we’ll be able to depend on their voluntary compliance. Drivers won’t pay attention to a laundry list forbidding every activity they could engage in while behind the wheel.

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.

A school district in Michigan finds that partnering with K12, Inc. is beneficial both to students and to the districts’ finances. The director of the district’s virtual academy describes its profitability with candor:

“The district makes money whether we enroll one student or 160,” Prescott said. “K12, Inc. charges a fee for each course. It might be $400 a semester. For a student who takes six classes for both semesters, that’s $4,800 a year. We count that student as full time and we get $7,000 from the state, which nets the district about $2,000 per student.”

I wonder whether the St. Louis Public Schools’ Virtual School, which also contracts with K12, is equally lucrative. I would guess not, because SLPS requires students to meet with a district teacher in person at regular intervals. Those meetings could bring up staff costs.

Given that districts can earn a profit from teaching students online, why don’t more of them form virtual schools? I can suggest a couple of explanations. Most districts probably don’t know much about online courses or what they could gain by enrolling students in them. Until recently, distance learning was the domain of old-fashioned correspondence schools, online charter schools, and state-level virtual schools. Traditional districts weren’t involved. Districts are used to a system in which they get revenue based on how many students are sitting in classrooms. The concept of earning more by sending students to a different environment goes against their experience.

It could also be that some districts view virtual schools as an admission of failure. If students choose virtual instruction over in-class learning, maybe that means that the brick-and-mortar component of the district wasn’t so great all along. I don’t think that’s an accurate analysis, because no single educational method is right for everyone. But I can see how districts might reach that conclusion in a school system of few choices.

The USDA, always eager to tell kids what they should eat, wants to spread its message through a more effective medium than “Know Your Farmer” trading cards. The department is soliciting feedback for a contest to reward creators of online games that teach kids about nutrition.The games must be based on USDA data.

MyPyramid Blast Off Game is the only game I’ve found on the MyPyramid.gov website. It’s cute and colorful, albeit inflexible. Players are supposed to select a day’s menu from a list of foods. The game doesn’t take into account differences in nutritional needs, so every player is scored as an average American. A kid who is lactose intolerant has to choose dairy servings anyway, and a kid with Celiac disease has to add whole grains to the rocket ship’s “diet.” Players see a message that their rocket ship didn’t complete its mission if they go over the recommended calorie limit, even if they go just a few calories past the target with an extra serving of vegetables.

The contest will probably inspire new games that improve on MyPyramid Blast Off. Developers could start from the same premise but add complexity, allowing nutritional targets to vary. There would be no need to solicit personal health information from kids — players could be asked the design menus for hypothetical people. Changing targets would also make the game more fun to play repeatedly. In the current game, once players create menus for themselves, there’s nothing more to do.

I’m less confident that an online game can change a generation’s eating habits. Is it worthwhile for the government to sponsor a nutrition contest that may not have a large effect on public health? As usual, the USDA has lofty aspirations, and I’m left wondering whether we’re all really better off because of its actions.

Charles Murray can’t be pleased with the New York City Department of Education’s plan to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on online SAT prep for public school students. Murray doesn’t believe policy can cause a significant rise in test scores, so he must view this expenditure — or any other program with a similar goal — as a waste of resources.

While I’m generally more optimistic that scores can rise, in this case I agree that student achievement is unlikely to change. A test prep course could help if students are simply unfamiliar with the test, or if they just need a little extra practice with the kind of questions that appear on it. But if low scores reflect a deeper problem, as I suspect they do for many New York students, last-minute test prep won’t make a difference.

The best course of action would be to improve schooling for younger students, years before they take college admissions exams. Then, by the time they get to high school, they won’t struggle with the math and vocabulary found in the SAT.

New York shouldn’t give up on current high school students, but it needs to help them build a stronger foundation of knowledge than what they’ll get from a course on test-taking strategies. The department could stick with the online education model, and instead of explicitly offering free test prep, it could open English or math courses similar to the St. Louis Public Schools’ virtual school. Course materials needn’t teach to the test, although students whose skills improved would do better on test day as a consequence. To preserve the college admissions focus, the department could use a practice SAT to place students into different course levels.

New York shouldn’t limit its use of online education to preparing students for one test. We want students to be prepared for the next high school course they take, and for whatever courses they take beyond high school, too.

The FCC issues three classes of licenses to amateur radio operators. The Extra class — the third, and hardest class of license to earn — is a great example of a license with no public safety justification. It’s purely an exercise of government power.

Here’s how the Extra class works: If you pass a test on electronics and radio regulations that covers more advanced material than the test for the Technician and General classes, you get to communicate over portions of the radio spectrum that are off-limits to people who hold only Technician and General licenses. Nothing about those parts of the spectrum makes them need special regulation; they’ve simply been set aside as the province of elite radio amateurs.

Some amateur radio enthusiasts defend the system, saying that the Extra class encourages operators to gain expertise, and that everyone in society benefits from the resulting propagation of knowledge. This argument is similar to the rationale for the DARPA Network Challenge, which was supposed to contribute to our understanding of communications and problem-solving.

I don’t buy the argument in either case. When the government offers an incentive for learning, the people who already have the information or would have learned it anyway step up to claim the prize. This was clearly the result of the DARPA Network Challenge. The federal government offered a $40,000 prize to whoever could find 10 red balloons released around the country, and scholars at M.I.T. — who were already deeply interested in networks — organized a network, found the balloons, and won the contest. We spent $40,000 of taxpayer money (plus however much it cost to administer the contest) to discover that people at M.I.T. are smart.

So it is with the amateur radio licenses. The most motivated operators brush up on their trigonometry and take the test, while others settle for the General class and its fewer privileges. People who weren’t interested in electronics don’t suddenly become scientists when they hear about the Extra class. And even if some operators do learn facts that they wouldn’t have were it not for the exam, there are less coercive ways to achieve that goal. For instance, public libraries or community colleges could offer free classes about radio communications.

The state of Missouri doesn’t grant amateur radio licenses. But Missouri licenses many other activities, and should beware to avoid the FCC’s manner of regulating. Two pieces of advice: First, don’t issue licenses that have no bearing on the general welfare. Second, once you’ve established a licensing requirement, don’t create a license class for people who have learned more or otherwise gone the extra mile. It’s not the state’s job to give them a pat on the back, or to reward accomplishments with special privileges.

This article about neighborhood associations reminded me of a post I wrote earlier in the year, in which I argued that tools like Facebook and Twitter could help local governments communicate with their constituents. The article describes how groups in the St. Louis area use networking sites — or even just email — to organize and share information:

Neighborhood associations used to be built around face-to-face contact — talks on porches, chats over fences, discussions in doorways. Local groups, though, insist that computers and social media haven’t killed the neighborhood association. Just the opposite, they say — it’s a way to stay even closer and to reach more of their neighbors.

Technology doesn’t sever neighborhood ties; it brings new people into the conversation.

Online networking helps neighborhood associations, and local governments could also use technology to increase community involvement. If you sit in on a few city council meetings, you see a lot of the same people every time. Some dedicated citizens don’t miss a meeting, and others attend whenever an issue that affects them comes up for debate. But there’s an entire group of people who are absent. Those are the people who might occasionally want to voice their opinion or learn about government proceedings, if they could stay involved without too much trouble. They don’t read through the newsletters, nor do they mark all the meetings on their calendars. They would benefit from local governments’ updates on networking sites — and local governments would benefit from their presence.

If a software company announced that it would teach, for free, tens of thousands of people how to use its products, people might view that as a ploy to snag customers. Every business wants people to be comfortable with its products so they’ll buy more. The company could put out a press release saying that it wanted to teach people out of the goodness of its heart, but customers might discern a profit motive.

Microsoft has found a solution to this public-relations dilemma: It will conduct the free training, and people will have to go through the Missouri state website to sign up. (The program is coming to other states, too.) Microsoft claims that its selfless intention is to grow the economy.

There’s no good reason for people to go through the government to collect their vouchers for training — they could just as well apply on the Microsoft website. All that this “partnership” with the state accomplishes is that it makes Microsoft look noble. The state should not be recruiting people for this training, just like it shouldn’t give out pizza samples in a grocery store or perfume samples at the mall.

I’ve got nothing against advertising and free training, but don’t ask the government to sign off on it like you’re a Newfoundland seeking official status.

If this pre-filed bill becomes law, red-light cameras will be with us forever. H.B. 1229 would send all revenue from the cameras to school districts. Anyone who opposes cameras at intersections would then appear to be an enemy of education.

Oregon Connections Academy (ORCA), an online charter school, received an “Outstanding” rating from the Oregon Department of Education for its students’ test scores. That’s the highest rating that the Department of Education gives schools. ORCA is, by the state’s evaluation, one of the best public schools in Oregon.

In any other state, I would expect new students to enroll in a great charter school like ORCA. But this is Oregon — not a welcoming place for charters in general, or for online schools in particular. Additional students can’t enroll in ORCA, because a law that became effective this past summer capped ORCA’s enrollment at 2,574 students.

The ostensible purpose for the enrollment freeze was to give legislators time to study online schooling. I say, study it all you want — but, in the meantime, let new students enroll and do some studying of their own.

When online schools in Oregon used technology to compete with traditional districts, legislators responded that the virtual schools shouldn’t accept new students until the state can study the matter further. Yet when an Oregon district uses the Internet for crisis management, it’s celebrated as innovative. No one calls for the district to suspend the program and subject it to scrutiny.

In Missouri, the virtual school teaching academic subjects to a couple thousand students is cut from the budget because it’s seen as an unnecessary cost, but the state plans to distribute more than 24,000 vouchers for an online program that teaches people to use Microsoft Excel. The governor explains why:

“I’m proud that the state of Missouri is teaming up with Microsoft to provide cutting-edge, in-demand training that will help our citizens compete in the 21st-century economy,” Gov. Nixon said.  “The world has gone digital, and it’s vital that Missourians have the knowledge and skills to land and keep the jobs of tomorrow. For folks seeking a new job, or looking to brush up their skills, Elevate America will be a tremendous resource.”

The Show-Me Institute will be hosting a blogosphere event on Nov. 21 for established bloggers, as well as new and prospective bloggers. There will be training, panel discussions, and a panel presentation from the the Motorhome Diaries folks! It’s free, and will be a lot of fun. If you’re interested, check out the flyer posted below.

Keep government honest.
Want to know how?
Learn from the best and meet bloggers
from throughout the state, and across the country.

As more cuts are made at mainstream news media outlets, there are fewer reporters keeping tabs on what local and state government officials are doing. Increasingly, bloggers have stepped up to break stories, or call attention to issues that are being ignored. The Show-Me Institute is hosting its first blogosphere event to help train and support both Missouri bloggers who are working to help keep government transparent, and citizens who want to learn how.

Presenters include Saint Louis’ most prominent bloggers and social media practitioners, Saint Louis media, and an editor of the award-winning TexasWatchDog.org.

On Saturday, there will be training sessions in investigative reporting, social media, blogging, videography, and documentary-style reporting. Panelists will hold discussions about the tradeoff between immediacy and accuracy, how to effectively use social media, and the future of traditional and online media.

What: The Show-Me Institute’s first blogosphere event
Date: Saturday, November 21, 2009
When: 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
How much: Free with RSVP
Location: Sheraton Hotel, 7730 Bonhomme Ave. Clayton, MO 63105

Complimentary breakfast and box lunch provided, complimentary parking. Please RSVP.

The goal of the Show-Me Institute’s blogosphere event is to empower any person interested in advancing government transparency through factual reporting. Please feel free to forward this invitation to others who may be interested in attending.

To RSVP:
by email: Jason.Hannasch@showmeinstitute.org
on Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/ygog9ku
with Twitter: tweet a reply to @MOPolicyPulse
by Phone: contact Jason Hannasch at (314) 726-5655

The Show-Me Institute (SMI) is a nonpartisan and nonprofit think tank that addresses major public policy issues facing Missouri from a free-market perspective. We publish scholarly research on the potential for applying free-market principles to six areas of public policy: taxes, education, health care, red tape, privatization, and corporate welfare.

Continue reading "Calling Missouri Bloggers!" »

Edspresso links to this essay by Hope Frick, a virtual school student in Pennsylvania. She’s written an articulate explanation of why she chose to attend a virtual academy. You have to sympathize with her frustration at the responses she gets when she tells people about her school. Frick is absolutely right that online high schools should be accepted as mainstream.

There is one thing that bothers me about the essay. I’ve highlighted it in the following quote:

Approved by the state, cyber schools enable students from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade to gain a public school education from their homes.

Frick refers several times to state approval and regulation, implying that government involvement is key to virtual schools’ success. Now, it’s true that many good online schools are run by states or strictly regulated, but states are closely involved with public brick-and-mortar schools, too — and the results aren’t always stellar. That’s not to say that they’re all bad, just that there’s a lot of variation, despite the government authorization they have in common. We have to conclude that factors other than state approval cause the difference in outcomes.

The real test of a school’s quality, be it online or brick-and-mortar, is whether students learn from it and parents are satisfied. Given that thousands of students voluntarily choose virtual schools over other options, I’d say they’re doing well by those measures.

The Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MoVIP) is offering additional courses at the high school level through the National Repository of Online Courses Network. When I first saw the news, I was thrilled because I’ve long thought that the online school covered too few subjects. Then I read through the press release and noticed that the new courses were already available to anyone for free at hippocampus.org.

MoVIP is not bringing students any content they didn’t have access to before. This move is comparable to including a free online dictionary in a virtual English course. There is a potential benefit: MoVIP will direct some students to resources that were out there on the Internet, but that they wouldn’t have looked for on their own. Still, adding these courses does not represent a substantive innovation, which is perhaps why there’s no mention of the news on the MoVIP website.

Facebook recently introduced a Gross National Happiness Index, which measures the relative overall happiness of Facebook in the United States per day. It’s based on the number of positive and negative words that people use to update their status messages. The graph of the index over time is unsurprising — users are happier on holidays and sadder on days in which celebrities die.

In a blog post dated today, a Facebook representative explains:

We adapted a collection of positive and negative emotion words built by social psychologists. Examples of positive or happy words include “happy,” “yay” and “awesome,” while negative, or unhappy words, include “sad,” “doubt” and “tragic.”

Although I find this index to be very interesting, I have some questions about its methodology and its accuracy.

First, this index does not account for the overall happiness of people who do not use Facebook. The population that does use the site is not representative of the general population; Facebook users have been demonstrated to be more affluent.

Why does the graph indicate that people are happier on Thanksgiving than on Christmas? Is that because people typically say “Happy Thanksgiving” and “Merry Christmas?” Plus, holidays are more highly trafficked than others, since people are home from work. If the Y-axis is a simple summation of the status updates (is it?), then this extra traffic would exaggerate the quantity of overall happiness.

Furthermore, the accuracy of this index depends on the genuineness of the status updates. Do status updates accurately reflect the relative value of a person’s sentiment? I am skeptical. On my own profile, I recently posted:

Chrissy Harbin loves her new coffee maker !!!!

But did I really? If I won the lottery, how many exclamation marks would I have to use to demonstrate my relative excitement? Did I unintentionally inflate the level of gross national happiness that day?

Recently I returned to The Story of Stuff Blog to see what had transpired since I last wrote about The Story of Stuff in May. I learned that Annie Leonard is planning to release a follow-up video in November, with more videos to come. The biggest news, from my point of view, is about the ongoing promotion of The Story of Stuff to schools:

We’re developing a two-week educational curriculum—aligned to national standards, with a strong focus on critical thinking—that provides teachers with a fuller set of tools to help students consider and debate the message of The Story of Stuff.

The deferential nod to “national standards” and “critical thinking” notwithstanding, the fact remains that The Story of Stuff presents a controversial and one-sided view of how a market economy works. It’s regrettable that this is taught as fact in the public schools.

Leonard acknowledges that The Story of Stuff promotes her opinions, but she says that students are free to disagree and debate her argument’s merits. I might see her point if teachers showed both The Story of Stuff and a documentary from a competing point of view (perhaps something from Free to Choose Media!), then held a discussion. However, when a school adopts this as a curriculum for two straight weeks, it goes way beyond showing a short documentary. It’s one thing to discuss a cartoon; it’s another matter entirely to challenge the curriculum.

I’m reminded of the presidential address back in September. Apart from the Department of Education’s curriculum, the speech was much like any other speech that politicians have given in schools. The questions and activities recommended by the government, which presupposed that students would be inspired by the speech, were the aspect that many critics found troubling.