Is school choice making some ground?

Markets In Everything

Free online courses with distinguished professors from reputable colleges and universities:

They don't offer degrees but then they don't charge tuition either.

Colleges and universities across the United States are offering free courses online on virtually every subject imaginable, including videotaped lectures by some of their most distinguished professors.

Video-sharing site YouTube recently created a hub called YouTube EDU at youtube.com/edu for the more than 100 US colleges and universities offering free online learning.

HT: Mark J. Perry at Carpe Diem

The Case Against College Entitlements

Reason TV examines Obama's plan to increase subsidies for higher education. The more you subsidize something the more of it you will get. Is that a good thing when it comes to college degrees? At what point does a surfeit of B.A. degrees water down its value?

Dan Mitchell on cutting the Dept. of Education on CNBC

After watching this debate, there is simply no need for a Federal Department of Education. This Carter era bureaucracy needs to end.

Sweden Chooses Voucher Program for Its Schools

The highly socialized nation of Sweden entrusts Milton Friedman’s idea of the voucher system. And guess what? It works.

Charter Schools popular in Harlem

From The Economist:

THOSE who had won whooped with joy and punched their fists. The disappointed shed tears. Some 5,000 people attended April 17th's Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, the largest ever held for charter schools in the history of New York state. About 3,600 applied for 600 available places, and 900 applied for the 11 open slots in the second grade.

The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds.

Despite what United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten tells us about the “failure” of school vouchers and charter schools on Charlie Rose, desperate parents living in one of the toughest parts of New York City are aching for something better for their children than the usual rhetorical pabulum served up by the Teachers Union. In the interview with Charlie Rose, Ms. Weingarten tells Rose that the voucher program in Milwaukee is a failure and that therefore, she insinuates, the system will not work in New York City (Harlem). What she fails to understand or willfully ignores, is that a similar lottery system exists in Milwaukee as in Harlem. For the first eight years of its existence, Milwaukee's program was capped at about 1,500 students, for the next eight it was capped at 15,000. It is currently capped at 22,500 students. By getting local and state governments to kowtow to their powerful lobby, the teachers union effectively rigged the voucher market for difficulties and failure by putting an artificial cap on student enrollment. After all, if we capped the number of cell phones that Apple could sell, there would not only be a shortage of these items, but any excess demand by consumers would have to find other providers for a similar item. Unlike the cell phone market where there are many providers, the education market is dominated by one large monopoly. Students that don’t win the lottery must submit themselves to the local public schools. Additionally, if a charter school wants to expand enrollment, it can not do so quickly and easily due to its restrictive mandate. This is hardly a free-market and most certainly not a fair test of school vouchers or charter schools. The fact that a lottery is used to reward participation in a charter school is proof enough that Ms. Weingarten is being disingenuous and that charter schools are a lot more popular than the teachers union would ever care to admit.

Educational suicide

From the The Times Of India:

In 2006, 5,857 students — or 16 a day — committed suicide across India due to exam stress. And these are just the official figures.

Shimla superintendent of police (crime), Punita Bhardwaj, said incidents of children committing suicide because of examination stress often did not get reported as traumatized parents wanted to keep the issue under wraps.

Anita Naresh, a 16-year-old from Kanpur who swallowed dye last week as she felt she had not done well in her Class X exams, is one of them. Her condition is still critical. A teenager from Chandigarh attempted suicide inside the examination centre but was taken to hospital just in time. Bangalore has witnessed a series of attempted suicides by students denied a hall ticket for a board examination owing to poor attendance.

Comment: In the U.S. this sort of pressure simply does not exist. Our public schools are doing such a lousy job preparing our children for the real world outside of K-12 that just about any real reaction by a student failing a class or an exam would be cause for celebration. Considering that we are spending about $8,700 a year on average per student we do not seem to be getting much value for our money. Countries like Finland are spending less (about $7,500) and their students are considered high achievers on several world-wide measurements.

Tragic events such as are seen in India are not only foreign to our national culture but also completely unimaginable since we have long ago removed any sense of accountability and accomplishment from education. While I would never condone suicide and I believe that the great pressure that Indian children are forced to submit them selves to be extreme. Overall, there is something to admire about a culture that greatly values education and the promise of progress it instills in children. Would it be excellent if Indian society could find a happy balance for its school age children? Absolutely. And it would be quite a leap forward if American children and the educational system that serve them would have loftier goals.