A: To avoid the question.
During the White House press conference, when a reporter asked Jay Carney whether the President supported chained CPI, Carney gave the following answer:
Again, as part of a big deal, part of a comprehensive package that reduces our deficit and achieves that $4 trillion goal that was set out by so many people in and outside of government a number of years ago, he would consider the hard choice that includes the so-called chained CPI — in fact, he put that on the table in his proposal — but not in a cherry-picked or piecemeal way. [...]
He has put forward, as a technical change, as part of a big deal—and it’s on the table that he put forward to the speaker of the House. [...] But as part of that deal, a technical change in the so-called CPI is possible and is on offer as part of a big deal.
First of all, the phrase "hard choice" is a political cliché. The President is not agonizing over whether or not to make the choice. Clearly, he wants to but knows that it is unpopular.
Moreover, is there value in the modifier "so-called" other than to create a mild confusion--to distance the President's proposal in name from what it is in substance? You use "so-called" as a modifier when you want to imply uncertainty or perhaps disagreement.
Carney also seems to be trying to assert a difference between chained CPI as a unique policy and chained CPI as a part of the fetishized "grand bargain"; however, he does not frame it as a "concession" to the GOP. Rather than a concession, it is and was an offer.
One cannot claim to be opposed to something as a stand-alone policy but not as a part of a greater deal; one might be weakly opposed or neutral to it and accept it as a concession, but then one would say so. I'm sorry, but sh*t in a sundae is still sh*t. And, my friend, a "grand bargain" is no sundae.
He then continues on to the Orwellian language of "technical fix" and "technical change," deceptive ways of saying "cut." If the President believes in cutting Social Security, he needs to make the case for it in an open debate, and we need to see his position clearly stated. He should affirm, "Yes, I want to cut Social Security." He can give his reasons why. If you have a jug of water and are running low, you can, of course, either pour more slowly or refill; he wants to pour more slowly and should argue why we can't get a refill. I can respect those who at least own their beliefs.
Carney also doesn't address why chained CPI should be under consideration for a larger deal. Why should we impoverish our seniors and veterans for this "larger deal"? Why should Social Security be a part of a deficit-obsessed "grand bargain" when Social Security does not add to the deficit?
Monday, February 11, 2013
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Expertise and the Lack Thereof in Education Policy
Yesterday, the Washington Post ran an essay by a now-retired high school social studies teacher. The teacher specifically focused on the damage that NCLB has done to American public schools by making standardized testing the sine qua non of school success and thereby demoting critical thinking and analytical writing in the process.
The teacher included the following anecdote from a Teacher of the Year winner:
Where do I begin? I spent the last thirty minutes listening to a group of arrogant and condescending noneducators disrespect my colleagues and profession. I listened to a group of disingenuous people whose own self-interests guide their policies rather than the interests of children. I listened to a cabal of people who sit on national education committees that will have a profound impact on classroom teaching practices. And I heard nothing of value. “I’m thinking about the current health-care debate,” I said. “And I am wondering if I will be asked to sit on a national committee charged with the task of creating a core curriculum of medical procedures to be used in hospital emergency rooms.”
The strange little man cocks his head and, suddenly, the fly on the wall has everyone’s attention.
“I realize that most people would think I am unqualified to sit on such a committee because I am not a doctor, I have never worked in an emergency room, and I have never treated a single patient. So what? Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach.”
This highlights all too well the problem with the nation's education policy: that it is crafted by individuals with no background in education whatsoever.
To see this depressing reality in action, just take a look at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Of the 24 Republicans on the Committee, only 1 has any background in education--Virginia Foxx, who was a professor and college administrator.
The Democratic side is a bit better, but hardly exemplary: 6 out of 17 members have a background in education: Rob Andrews, former law professor; Rush Holt, Jr., former physics professor and Assistant Director of the Princeton Plasma Lab; Raúl Grijalva, former school board member and Assistant Dean of Hispanic Student Affairs; Tim Bishop, former provost and admissions counselor; David Loebsack, former political science professor; and Frederica Wilson, former elementary school principal and school board member.
The legal profession, unsurprisingly, dominates--6 out of 17 Democrats and 7 out of 24 Republicans--as it probably does every Committee. Attorneys are very knowledgeable about many things, but education policy will not likely be one of them.
The teacher included the following anecdote from a Teacher of the Year winner:
Where do I begin? I spent the last thirty minutes listening to a group of arrogant and condescending noneducators disrespect my colleagues and profession. I listened to a group of disingenuous people whose own self-interests guide their policies rather than the interests of children. I listened to a cabal of people who sit on national education committees that will have a profound impact on classroom teaching practices. And I heard nothing of value. “I’m thinking about the current health-care debate,” I said. “And I am wondering if I will be asked to sit on a national committee charged with the task of creating a core curriculum of medical procedures to be used in hospital emergency rooms.”
The strange little man cocks his head and, suddenly, the fly on the wall has everyone’s attention.
“I realize that most people would think I am unqualified to sit on such a committee because I am not a doctor, I have never worked in an emergency room, and I have never treated a single patient. So what? Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach.”
This highlights all too well the problem with the nation's education policy: that it is crafted by individuals with no background in education whatsoever.
To see this depressing reality in action, just take a look at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Of the 24 Republicans on the Committee, only 1 has any background in education--Virginia Foxx, who was a professor and college administrator.
The Democratic side is a bit better, but hardly exemplary: 6 out of 17 members have a background in education: Rob Andrews, former law professor; Rush Holt, Jr., former physics professor and Assistant Director of the Princeton Plasma Lab; Raúl Grijalva, former school board member and Assistant Dean of Hispanic Student Affairs; Tim Bishop, former provost and admissions counselor; David Loebsack, former political science professor; and Frederica Wilson, former elementary school principal and school board member.
The legal profession, unsurprisingly, dominates--6 out of 17 Democrats and 7 out of 24 Republicans--as it probably does every Committee. Attorneys are very knowledgeable about many things, but education policy will not likely be one of them.
Drones and the Morality of the Technology of Warfare
Rather than going into questions of the morality, constitutionality, or international legality of the White House’s targeted killing operations (Surprise! I find them to be immoral, unconstitutional, and flagrantly illegal in the face of international law, but that’s for another time), I would like to address the specifics of drone warfare, namely the relationship between unmanned aerial vehicle weaponry and the morals of technology and of warfare.
One must, however, take the point of caution to note that those operating the UAVs are members of the CIA rather than the armed forces, a troubling sign of the militarization of a purportedly civilian agency. However, one must look at warfare as warfare, so our frame will be that of the armed forces, who will likely accelerate the use of UAVs.
We, especially in the United States, often praise soldiers for their willingness to put their lives at risk for something larger than self. That self-transcending entity may either be the collective (“the American people”; “the American nation”), a representation of an ideal (“democracy,” “freedom,” “liberty”), or a possession of the collective (“our freedoms”). Regardless, the locus of the praise is the act of self-sacrifice; we associate such a willingness to die with honor and valor.
What we often ignore is that the willingness to die is only one half of the act of war: the other is the willingness to kill. As drone warfare removes the element of self-sacrifice from war—as the individual operating the joystick does not put his/her life in danger, we are left with the act of killing alone. No one, I suspect—or at least I hope, finds anything morally heartening about “Our soldiers are over there murdering in order to protect us.” But that is what it is.
When you remove the costume of self-sacrifice from the spectacle of war, all with which you are left are the bad acting, the faulty direction, the stilted dialogue, and the meandering, interminable plot that seems to go nowhere because the writer had neither the courtesy nor the foresight to build in a conclusion.
One must, however, take the point of caution to note that those operating the UAVs are members of the CIA rather than the armed forces, a troubling sign of the militarization of a purportedly civilian agency. However, one must look at warfare as warfare, so our frame will be that of the armed forces, who will likely accelerate the use of UAVs.
We, especially in the United States, often praise soldiers for their willingness to put their lives at risk for something larger than self. That self-transcending entity may either be the collective (“the American people”; “the American nation”), a representation of an ideal (“democracy,” “freedom,” “liberty”), or a possession of the collective (“our freedoms”). Regardless, the locus of the praise is the act of self-sacrifice; we associate such a willingness to die with honor and valor.
What we often ignore is that the willingness to die is only one half of the act of war: the other is the willingness to kill. As drone warfare removes the element of self-sacrifice from war—as the individual operating the joystick does not put his/her life in danger, we are left with the act of killing alone. No one, I suspect—or at least I hope, finds anything morally heartening about “Our soldiers are over there murdering in order to protect us.” But that is what it is.
When you remove the costume of self-sacrifice from the spectacle of war, all with which you are left are the bad acting, the faulty direction, the stilted dialogue, and the meandering, interminable plot that seems to go nowhere because the writer had neither the courtesy nor the foresight to build in a conclusion.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Great Quotes from History: Ancient Chinese Edition
I am currently reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The following quote, from the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi (whose philosophy Mohism was a competitor of Confucianism), really struck me:
"To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize, and yet when it comes to the greatest crime--waging war on another state--they praise it!...
If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it is white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish black and white....So those who recognize a small crime as such, but do not recognize the wickedness of the greatest crime of all--the waging of war on another state--cannot distinguish right and wrong."
Image from www.english.eastday.com
"To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize, and yet when it comes to the greatest crime--waging war on another state--they praise it!...
If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it is white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish black and white....So those who recognize a small crime as such, but do not recognize the wickedness of the greatest crime of all--the waging of war on another state--cannot distinguish right and wrong."
Image from www.english.eastday.com
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Are "God" and "Supreme Being" the Same?
According to Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre
for Anthropology and Mind, young people are predisposed to
believing in a supreme being because they assume that everything was created with a purpose.
His discussions with The Telegraph as well as the newspaper's own language equate "supreme being" with "God." Are they the same, though?
The word "supreme being" is a much more general term, one befitting of sociological or anthropological study. Scholars of the sociology of religion regularly employ the term when studying and categorizing religious groups and practices. The term "supreme being" places the observer of religious activity on the outside, in a position of neutrality regarding the existence or non-existence (and definition) of the supreme being in question.
"God," however, is a theological concept. When we in the Western world say the word "God," we think of the monotheistic deity of the Abrahamic tradition--God/Yahweh/Allah. The capitalized word "God" refers to a personal deity that intervenes in human history despite remaining ultimately unknowable. "God" is a non-neutral term; the use of the word "God" injects the observer into the affairs of the community under study.
In his interview with The Telegraph, Barrett said, "If we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God." He cannot claim that these individuals would believe in "God" as interpreted through doctrine or as represented in Western culture; he can only substantively claim that a belief in a higher being--however so defined or understood--exists.
If one has a pluralistic view of religion (or universalistic--although the terms are opposite, they imply the same frame here), then one will believe that God is the same as any other society's "supreme being." However, to equate them is an act of religious, not scientific interpretation.
His discussions with The Telegraph as well as the newspaper's own language equate "supreme being" with "God." Are they the same, though?
The word "supreme being" is a much more general term, one befitting of sociological or anthropological study. Scholars of the sociology of religion regularly employ the term when studying and categorizing religious groups and practices. The term "supreme being" places the observer of religious activity on the outside, in a position of neutrality regarding the existence or non-existence (and definition) of the supreme being in question.
"God," however, is a theological concept. When we in the Western world say the word "God," we think of the monotheistic deity of the Abrahamic tradition--God/Yahweh/Allah. The capitalized word "God" refers to a personal deity that intervenes in human history despite remaining ultimately unknowable. "God" is a non-neutral term; the use of the word "God" injects the observer into the affairs of the community under study.
In his interview with The Telegraph, Barrett said, "If we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God." He cannot claim that these individuals would believe in "God" as interpreted through doctrine or as represented in Western culture; he can only substantively claim that a belief in a higher being--however so defined or understood--exists.
If one has a pluralistic view of religion (or universalistic--although the terms are opposite, they imply the same frame here), then one will believe that God is the same as any other society's "supreme being." However, to equate them is an act of religious, not scientific interpretation.
Bad Ideas Never Die: The Return of the Vouchers
We've seen some increased attention to school vouchers the past few days, with Michelle Rhee praising them in the Daily Beast as a way to sell her new book or Eric Cantor using them as a sign of a "softer" side to the GOP. The voucher idea never really went away since it was popularised by neoliberal hero Milton Friedman; as we know all too well, bad ideas never die.
So let me devote some time to the case against education vouchers, a corporate reform proposal that seeks to undermine the mission and functioning of the public education system.
Many of the arguments which I will outline are targeted against the replacement of the public education system as a whole with a school voucher system. Some voucher proponents do not claim to support such total replacement; however, the intellectual roots of the movement lie in just that. Milton Friedman’s main contention, in Capitalism and Freedom, was that the financing of schools should be divorced from their administration. He did not believe that the state should be in control of the administration of any school and that education should be governed by market principles. School voucher proponents do not support creating a separate funding stream above and beyond that which currently goes to public education; rather, the funding for vouchers inherently reduces that allocated to the public school system as a whole.
Before going into my more detailed objections, let me raise what is perhaps the most basic objection: that vouchers would not improve education for all students. Charter schools do not perform better than public schools as a whole; sometimes, they perform worse, sometimes the same, and sometimes better. Consequently, shifting to privately run (but publicly financed) education would not yield benefits in improved instruction. Do vouchers help students in isolated instances as Michelle Rhee highlighted in her piece in the Daily Beast? Yes, they very well can. However, they do not improve the quality of the education of the rest of the students in the community who may not have the ability to travel to a farther school or may feel more comfortable staying in their neighborhood. Taking funds away from the public schools to finance the vouchers would not only not improve the public schools, but it would likely hurt them through deprivation of resources. A properly democratic education reform should benefit all students, not just a select few.
The wide income gap in the United States is often the elephant in the room in corporate education reform discussions. As public schools are financed primarily through property taxes, affluent neighborhoods tend to have better schools. Let's look at my home metro area of Philadelphia for instance. In 2008-09, Lower Merion spent $15,484.33 per student on instruction, and almost 95 percent of its high school graduates planned to go to a two- or four-year college. Philadelphia, where the rate of child poverty is 33%, spent only $6,345.26 per student, and only 49 percent planned to pursue higher education.
Let's return to the main point, i.e. the inherent flaws of the voucher system (in no particular order):
(1) Operating Costs/Capital Improvement: There is more to a school than just instruction as one must take into account the cost of the building and grounds and their maintenance. The operating funds for a private school—like a private university—come in part from an endowment, grown from years of fundraising. A voucher system, consequently, would put public schools at an immediate disadvantage, especially if the voucher is only designed to cover instruction (as it likely would). Who would pay for capital improvement?
(2) Means Testing: Milton Friedman, one of the earliest proponents of school vouchers, believed that, ideally, such vouchers should only be given to children whose parents could not otherwise afford the school tuition. Consequently, the transformation of the public education system into a voucher system will provide a slippery slope into means testing, in which a child’s eligibility to receive such state support for education will depend on his/her parent’s income. Means testing brings in additional bureaucracy, making the system run even less smoothly, and the threshold at which people would start receiving school vouchers would likely be pushed lower and lower. Means testing destroys the universalistic nature of the American public school system, which is the reason for its purported (but never yet fully realized) role as an equalizing force.
(3) Education for Profit: school voucher system would likely stimulate the growth of for-profit elementary and secondary schools much in the way as we have seen the rise of for-profit universities. For-profit colleges are notoriously corrupt, failing to provide students with the educational attainment or career potential that they promise. Moreover, if we accept the idea that primary and secondary schools should be training people with the critical thinking skills necessary for informed citizenship, then we should be wary of allowing for-profit institutions to control this process. Likewise, one could not be sure that the voucher would go toward instruction rather than toward profit; surely, no one would run a for-profit school if not expecting the latter.
What would the presence of for-profit education companies do to the education system? Consider the following scenario.
A for-profit school runs a marketing campaign to get students to transfer and pushes out all of the competition in a community. Now that its monopoly has been secured, it spends little of money gained through vouchers on actual instruction and pockets much of the money for profit. However, parents no longer have a choice because the for-profit school is the only one within a reasonable commute. What would the government do? The government cannot shut down private enterprises, so the school would be able to continue to exist. And there would be no other school in the area to provide the better education the students deserve.
(4) Curricula: As we established, one of—if note the—prime purposes of primary and secondary education is the provision of the knowledge and critical thinking abilities necessary for an informed citizenry. Under a voucher system, state funds would likely support schools that oppose the scientific consensus on evolution and climate change or teach whitewashed or revisionist histories to suit ideological or theological ends. The oversight over curricula that exist in a public education system would no longer exist. One wonders whether the religious conservatives who want vouchers for their schools would be as eager to see state funds going to schools that preach Marxism or anarchism.
(5) Church-State Separation: A common and warranted criticism of vouchers is that they would provide state funding to religious schools, thus violating the separating of church and state. Rhee, in the Daily Beast article mentioned above, tries to refute this criticism by making an analogy to Catholic-affiliated hospitals, which can take Medicare or Medicaid funds. Catholic hospitals, although they are overseen by Catholic leadership (often with nuns or priests on the board), are not religious corporations and are not parts of a parish. Parochial schools are administratively linked to a specific parish. Catholic-affiliated hospitals do not preach doctrine even if doctrine may influence their practices. Religiously affiliated universities, which might receive federal funds through Pell grants, also differ from parochial schools in that, again, they are not administratively tied to a parish or diocese (or other geographically defined religious community). Seminaries, on the other hand, are often directly connected to religious institutions, and state funding should not go to the training of clergy.
(6) Tyranny of the religious majority: A voucher system could easily fail to protect minority rights. Take, for instance, the example of a town that is heavily Catholic. Under a voucher system, much of the education money would likely to go to a parochial school. However, what would happen to the non-Catholic population? They might not be a large enough group to support a non-religious school because of the market pressures pushed onto the schools and may end up having to attend the parochial school. The state would then be paying for the indoctrination of a single faith upon those of other faiths.
(7) The Flaw of the Market Model: The intellectual roots of school vouchers lie in the application of the market principle to education. Voucher proponents celebrate the role of “choice” and “competition” in schools in order to provide each student. However, if we believe that every child deserves the best possible education, how can there be “choice” or “competition”? Shouldn’t every school provide an equally excellent educational program?
When determining whether a good should be public or private, a key consideration is whether individuals’ relation to the good is one of quality or one of quantity. The difference between educational needs, like health needs, is a function of quantity, or intensity: the number of hours devoted to tend to the needs of each individual to reach their peak understanding/health. The difference is more that of intensity than that of style or expression. The public sector focuses on needs; the private sector focuses on preferences. Granted, the distinction is not rigid; housing is an example of a need shaped by preference. That, of course, is why the housing market is a market but that the government provides aid for people to own or rent homes if they cannot afford to do so. The market, thereafter, allows each individual to pursue self-expression after his/her general needs have been met.
If one wants an element of choice in education, one can look to school board elections, in which the community has a choice about who has control over the direction of the school.
So let me devote some time to the case against education vouchers, a corporate reform proposal that seeks to undermine the mission and functioning of the public education system.
Many of the arguments which I will outline are targeted against the replacement of the public education system as a whole with a school voucher system. Some voucher proponents do not claim to support such total replacement; however, the intellectual roots of the movement lie in just that. Milton Friedman’s main contention, in Capitalism and Freedom, was that the financing of schools should be divorced from their administration. He did not believe that the state should be in control of the administration of any school and that education should be governed by market principles. School voucher proponents do not support creating a separate funding stream above and beyond that which currently goes to public education; rather, the funding for vouchers inherently reduces that allocated to the public school system as a whole.
Before going into my more detailed objections, let me raise what is perhaps the most basic objection: that vouchers would not improve education for all students. Charter schools do not perform better than public schools as a whole; sometimes, they perform worse, sometimes the same, and sometimes better. Consequently, shifting to privately run (but publicly financed) education would not yield benefits in improved instruction. Do vouchers help students in isolated instances as Michelle Rhee highlighted in her piece in the Daily Beast? Yes, they very well can. However, they do not improve the quality of the education of the rest of the students in the community who may not have the ability to travel to a farther school or may feel more comfortable staying in their neighborhood. Taking funds away from the public schools to finance the vouchers would not only not improve the public schools, but it would likely hurt them through deprivation of resources. A properly democratic education reform should benefit all students, not just a select few.
The wide income gap in the United States is often the elephant in the room in corporate education reform discussions. As public schools are financed primarily through property taxes, affluent neighborhoods tend to have better schools. Let's look at my home metro area of Philadelphia for instance. In 2008-09, Lower Merion spent $15,484.33 per student on instruction, and almost 95 percent of its high school graduates planned to go to a two- or four-year college. Philadelphia, where the rate of child poverty is 33%, spent only $6,345.26 per student, and only 49 percent planned to pursue higher education.
Let's return to the main point, i.e. the inherent flaws of the voucher system (in no particular order):
(1) Operating Costs/Capital Improvement: There is more to a school than just instruction as one must take into account the cost of the building and grounds and their maintenance. The operating funds for a private school—like a private university—come in part from an endowment, grown from years of fundraising. A voucher system, consequently, would put public schools at an immediate disadvantage, especially if the voucher is only designed to cover instruction (as it likely would). Who would pay for capital improvement?
(2) Means Testing: Milton Friedman, one of the earliest proponents of school vouchers, believed that, ideally, such vouchers should only be given to children whose parents could not otherwise afford the school tuition. Consequently, the transformation of the public education system into a voucher system will provide a slippery slope into means testing, in which a child’s eligibility to receive such state support for education will depend on his/her parent’s income. Means testing brings in additional bureaucracy, making the system run even less smoothly, and the threshold at which people would start receiving school vouchers would likely be pushed lower and lower. Means testing destroys the universalistic nature of the American public school system, which is the reason for its purported (but never yet fully realized) role as an equalizing force.
(3) Education for Profit: school voucher system would likely stimulate the growth of for-profit elementary and secondary schools much in the way as we have seen the rise of for-profit universities. For-profit colleges are notoriously corrupt, failing to provide students with the educational attainment or career potential that they promise. Moreover, if we accept the idea that primary and secondary schools should be training people with the critical thinking skills necessary for informed citizenship, then we should be wary of allowing for-profit institutions to control this process. Likewise, one could not be sure that the voucher would go toward instruction rather than toward profit; surely, no one would run a for-profit school if not expecting the latter.
What would the presence of for-profit education companies do to the education system? Consider the following scenario.
A for-profit school runs a marketing campaign to get students to transfer and pushes out all of the competition in a community. Now that its monopoly has been secured, it spends little of money gained through vouchers on actual instruction and pockets much of the money for profit. However, parents no longer have a choice because the for-profit school is the only one within a reasonable commute. What would the government do? The government cannot shut down private enterprises, so the school would be able to continue to exist. And there would be no other school in the area to provide the better education the students deserve.
(4) Curricula: As we established, one of—if note the—prime purposes of primary and secondary education is the provision of the knowledge and critical thinking abilities necessary for an informed citizenry. Under a voucher system, state funds would likely support schools that oppose the scientific consensus on evolution and climate change or teach whitewashed or revisionist histories to suit ideological or theological ends. The oversight over curricula that exist in a public education system would no longer exist. One wonders whether the religious conservatives who want vouchers for their schools would be as eager to see state funds going to schools that preach Marxism or anarchism.
(5) Church-State Separation: A common and warranted criticism of vouchers is that they would provide state funding to religious schools, thus violating the separating of church and state. Rhee, in the Daily Beast article mentioned above, tries to refute this criticism by making an analogy to Catholic-affiliated hospitals, which can take Medicare or Medicaid funds. Catholic hospitals, although they are overseen by Catholic leadership (often with nuns or priests on the board), are not religious corporations and are not parts of a parish. Parochial schools are administratively linked to a specific parish. Catholic-affiliated hospitals do not preach doctrine even if doctrine may influence their practices. Religiously affiliated universities, which might receive federal funds through Pell grants, also differ from parochial schools in that, again, they are not administratively tied to a parish or diocese (or other geographically defined religious community). Seminaries, on the other hand, are often directly connected to religious institutions, and state funding should not go to the training of clergy.
(6) Tyranny of the religious majority: A voucher system could easily fail to protect minority rights. Take, for instance, the example of a town that is heavily Catholic. Under a voucher system, much of the education money would likely to go to a parochial school. However, what would happen to the non-Catholic population? They might not be a large enough group to support a non-religious school because of the market pressures pushed onto the schools and may end up having to attend the parochial school. The state would then be paying for the indoctrination of a single faith upon those of other faiths.
(7) The Flaw of the Market Model: The intellectual roots of school vouchers lie in the application of the market principle to education. Voucher proponents celebrate the role of “choice” and “competition” in schools in order to provide each student. However, if we believe that every child deserves the best possible education, how can there be “choice” or “competition”? Shouldn’t every school provide an equally excellent educational program?
When determining whether a good should be public or private, a key consideration is whether individuals’ relation to the good is one of quality or one of quantity. The difference between educational needs, like health needs, is a function of quantity, or intensity: the number of hours devoted to tend to the needs of each individual to reach their peak understanding/health. The difference is more that of intensity than that of style or expression. The public sector focuses on needs; the private sector focuses on preferences. Granted, the distinction is not rigid; housing is an example of a need shaped by preference. That, of course, is why the housing market is a market but that the government provides aid for people to own or rent homes if they cannot afford to do so. The market, thereafter, allows each individual to pursue self-expression after his/her general needs have been met.
If one wants an element of choice in education, one can look to school board elections, in which the community has a choice about who has control over the direction of the school.
Diction Matters: Reading Between the Lines in Political Speech---Sequestration Edition
The White House Press Secretary, in commenting on Republican proposals for replacing sequestration, made the following remark:
"It’s a series of measures that basically say that seniors, middle-class families, disabled kids and others will solely bear the burden of buying down the sequester while the weathiest get held harmless." (emphasis added)
The key word there---and in so much of the administration's statements on the issue--is "solely." What they mean, then, is that it is perfectly okay, in their minds, to make seniors, middle-class families, and disabled children partially bear the burden of corporate greed, military adventurism, and Wall Street recklessness. That, as I see it, is also unacceptable.
"It’s a series of measures that basically say that seniors, middle-class families, disabled kids and others will solely bear the burden of buying down the sequester while the weathiest get held harmless." (emphasis added)
The key word there---and in so much of the administration's statements on the issue--is "solely." What they mean, then, is that it is perfectly okay, in their minds, to make seniors, middle-class families, and disabled children partially bear the burden of corporate greed, military adventurism, and Wall Street recklessness. That, as I see it, is also unacceptable.
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