Abel Keogh ponders the his third grade son being given a (closed) email address.
Apparently some are suspecting that babies can be too fat. Great, something else to worry about…
I wrote the Free State Project off when they chose inferior candidate New Hampshire over superior candidates Wyoming and Montana. But Garrett Quinn says they’re having some success.
Bicycle highways were once the future of transit.
Doug Mataconis and Greg Beato ask whether driverless cars represent a threat to our privacy. Most likely, though I suspect that the threats will come in other forms, even if driverless cars don’t materialize.
I don’t know why I think this as cool as I do, but here are some illustrations of what New York City would look like on other planets. Also, what if Earth had a ring?
Matthew Yglesias makes the pretty obvious, but under-discussed point: Don’t go to college if you aren’t going to graduate. Another way of looking at this is that perhaps we (as a nation) shouldn’t be sending people to college who won’t graduate.
Successful people leave their loser friends behind. Fortunately for me, I have a dearth of successful friends.
David Wogan argues that fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere, while NewScientist looks at wave power farms.
National Journal makes the case for the cost-effectiveness of supersized universities.
Private schools are struggling. A lot of what people used to need private schools, they now have charter schools for.
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In certain corners of the blogosphere it is considered an act of child abuse if you do *not* send your progeny to private schools. The only exception is if you live in an upscale, top-quality school district where the public schools are completely free of the children of proles and, especially, those people.
The blogger Education Realist, a public school teacher, has many things to say about charter schools. Her main concern seems to be that they use public money to benefit small groups of people, and she thinks that the ability to select students acccounts for most of the extent to which charter schools perform better than ordinary public schools. I’m afraid that’s an oversimplification of her views, so here are links to a couple of her posts on the subject:
Why Charters Skim, and Why They Should Stop
The Parental “Diversity” Dilemma
The good tests on the efficacy of charter schools compare the students that win the lottery to go and those who lose the lottery and go. Which is as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as you can find.
I’d be lying if I said my support of charters is contingent on the actual results. Even if it’s entirely lateral, I consider worthwhile to not say say “If you don’t want your kid to go to this school, then move.”
Private schools are struggling. A lot of what people used to need private schools, they now have charter schools for.
To a certain extent, private schooling in a lot of places is really a proxy for Catholic schools and in some places, religious schools run by mainline Protestant faiths. In the case of Catholic schools, the decline of religious to work in the schools for free and the increase in lay teachers has caused tuition to simply become unaffordable for most people interested in that type of education for their children. With Catholic schools in urban areas switching from being the bulwark of the Catholic population from evil Protestant assimilation to the saviour of concerned parents of any religion looking for an alternative to questionable public school districts*, Catholic schools, especially in the 1980s and 1990s were doing relatively decently in urban and some suburban areas. Mind you, by the early 2000s, these schools had become too expensive** for the poor inner-city residents who needed them, and without charter schools, most of these students would have ended up in a public school.
For sampling purposes, my niece attends a charter school, but had said school not existed, there would have been a high likelihood that she attend Catholic school or move in with my mother to make use of our top level school district.
*I know of some really religious Catholics, and they’re homeschooling their children with co-ops with other like minded parents for a fraction of the cost of a Catholic school.
**$4 to 5K for elementary school. $10K or so high school. For those with money, it’s easier to move to a better neighbourhood with good *public* schools.
As a bias note, I am the product of K-12 Catholic schooling, as are a number of my family members born in the US. I have a friend who teaches in a Catholic high school and notes that the declining enrollment has forced schools into taking subpar students who would have never been accepted or kept in the school. Of course, as stories and rumours spreads, it weakens the brand value of the school which is what killed off Catholic schooling in the suburbs where it isn’t seen as first rate education or religious education, but as a de facto reform school for bad kids.
Thanks for the background, David.
Catholic schools just aren’t that common back in Colosse. Nor private schools, except for the prep academy here and there. In large part because of your double-asterisk. It’s easier just to move to a place with good schools.