http://www.bethechangeinc.org/…

• Nine-year-olds growing up in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities.
  Does this include children attending private schools? Stating the effect without an understanding of the cause means wasted resources treating symptoms. Could it not be that the war on drugs, which harms low-income communities more, combined with welfare and other government disincentives, combined with the general inefficiencies of government provided education are the sources of these sad statistics and therefore should be the focus?
• Only 31% of fourth graders are proficient in reading. Low-income students do half as well.
  See above. I’d also recommend reading John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, Mary Ruwart’s Healing our World, and Samuel Blumenfeld’s Is Public Education Necessary?
• As many as fifteen million students have no place to go after school.
  You can blame some of this on the war on drugs and the welfare state which has split apart families. On a more abstract note I would focus on the Federal Reserve System [PDF]. The federal government through the Fed through inflation taxes all users of Federal Reserve Notes without their supposed consent or knowledge. It hurts those who receive lower or no increases in their income the most. As inflation increases so do prices and do so ahead of any increases in income. Slowly wealth is stripped away requiring individuals to work more and/or longer to bring home the same amount. No longer can an average family survive on a single salary.
• Teens who do not participate in after school programs are nearly three times more likely to skip classes or use marijuana or other drugs, drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
  Is it that teens who participate in after school programs are less likely to do those things because they are participating or simply because those who tend to participate just don’t. Could it be that those who are not interested in after school programs are also the same ones who have issues with the school curriculum?
• The hours between 3-6 p.m. on school days (referred to by law enforcement officials as a “danger zone”) are the prime time for violent juvenile crime.
• More than 1.2 million children drop out of school each year. The cost is more than $312 billion in lost wages, taxes, and productivity over their lifetime.
• Only 70% of students in the U.S graduate from high school. In the nation’s urban schools, the dropout rate is fifteen percentage points lower. Those who do graduate high school will, on average, read and do math at the level of eighth graders in high-income communities.
• Only 1 in 10 students in low-income communities will graduate from college.

• Since its founding, 17,000 people have participated as Teach For America corps members, teaching and affecting over 2.5 million public school students.
• Since its founding in 1988, City Year’s 10,400 corps members have served 1,060,000 children, completed 16 million hours of service, and engaged more than 1,015,000 citizens in service.
• According to a study by The Urban Institute, high school students taught by TFA corps members on average performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors.
  If that’s the case why don’t they teach the “far more experienced instructors”? Wouldn’t that be more efficient? Are they teaching a general curriculum or teaching to the state-required end-of-course exams? Are they comparing general instruction to specific tutoring?
• A study by Mathematica Policy Research in 2004 randomly assigned students within the same schools to teachers both from TFA and traditional certification programs. It found that students taught by TFA teachers performed better in math and science as those taught by non-TFA novice teachers.
  Again, if the goal is helping the children why wouldn’t they be teaching those running the certification programs? Perhaps they do but it’s not something I’ve heard from them.
• One study shows that first-, second- and third-graders tutored by AmeriCorps members gained seven to fourteen percentile points in reading scores compared to their peers.
• AmeriCorps members in Education Works help inspire students to improve attendance, helping low-income schools to keep students coming to class for an average of 20 more days per year than other neighborhood schools.
  I have no doubt that showing a student more attention and giving the direct encouragement would increase attendance. But how does the Education Works members compare to Big Brother Big Sister and other organization which are private and perform effectively the same service? 20 days is huge but 20 more days to from what?
• By focusing its efforts on standardized test preparation, the AmeriCorps program Admission Possible helped students raise their ACT scores by an average of sixteen percent.
  This is a meaningless value. Teaching to tests is not education.
  
• AmeriCorps members working for College Summit help low-income students apply to and enroll in college. One study found that 80% of College Summit students got into college, compared to less than 50% of their peers. Aren’t guidance counselors and parents supposed to do this? As with above shouldn’t these College Summit members be working with counselors and parents so that the labor can be distributed?
  
• National service programs give students who did not complete high school a chance to finish their education. Since 2002, almost 5,000 AmeriCorps members in the program YouthBuild USA have earned their GED. Many of these GED recipients were previously incarcerated.
  Doesn’t the federal prison system already provide prisoners with the ability to get a GED and take college courses? Seems to me that AmeriCorps was used by these young people as an outlet from their situation at home. Likely it helped them but these programs should be provided by private institutions which would direct the participants labor toward things the community would need instead of what bureaucrats want.

This morning I met a few bloggers though one in particular I’ve had some more extensive discussion with was Julia Rocchi of the Case Foundation. She’s blogging at their site SocialCitizens.org/blog. I’m glad to see some of my criticisms were noted by her on the post “questioning service.”

Voluntarism can be a great thing and the inhabitants of the United States are these most generous people in the world. State involvement taints this. While the service itself is not mandatory (for the moment) the taxes used to fund these state run projects makes all tax payers participants regardless of whether or not they agree with the way it’s being spent. And given the governments track record on thriftiness we may as well hand out cash on the sidewalk. Yes, that same argument may be said about all tax money utilization. I would argue that’s one of the reasons to oppose taxation in general (and that it’s theft). Government incentivized voluntarism, isn’t. Just as welfare is not charity. The government is taking money from one individual in order to pay another to “serve.” True voluntarism is completely from oneself. It is the “altruistic” (non-tangible selfishness) spending of time, money, labor, and skill.

As I’ve mentioned so often before, there is what is seen when the government promotes these projects and that which is not seen. What does not get seen is the potential lost because of government incentivizing individuals away from their free market path. The investments which would have been made with the money which was taxed away. The capital which would have been created due to those investments in the private sectors need to serve the customers. The jobs that were never created, the businesses never started. Many may scoff at these suggestions but that’s why it’s the problem of the seen and not seen.

As government grows, and we all know it does, more and more resources will be taken from the tax payers to be thrown around by politicians at their whim until such time that we have a near complete centralized control of resources. At which point our society will crumble.

Those who advocate more government involvement in anything let alone voluntarism need to take a serious look, both practically and morally, at what they ask for. Does government interference in the market lead to lesser or greater standard of living? Does the threat of violence, which is how government functions, not negate the good they intend to perform with the money and capital obtained?

Society would not accept as a defense from a theft that he was robbing John in order to feed Paul who’s starving. Society should also not accept that defense when the government uses it.

For those interested in this topic I recommend reading:

• The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
• Healing Our World by Mary J. Ruwart <== this one in particular for liberal leaning individuals.
• The Market for Liberty by Linda and Morris Tannehill
• and other works by those at Mises.org including Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, John Taylor Gatto, Robert Murphy, Henry Hazlitt, Lew Rockwell, etc.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

In this dependency case (Welf. & Inst. Code, § 300), we consider the question whether parents can legally “home school” their children. The attorney for two of the three minor children in the case has petitioned this court for extraordinary writ relief, asking us to direct the juvenile court to order that the children be enrolled in a public or private school, and actually attend such a school.

The trial court’s reason for declining to order public or private schooling for the children was its belief that parents have a constitutional right to school their children in their own home. However, California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children. Thus, while the petition for extraordinary writ asserts that the trial court’s refusal to order attendance in a public or private school was an abuse of discretion, we find the refusal was actually an error of law. It is clear to us that enrollment and attendance in a public full-time day school is required by California law for minor children unless (1) the child is enrolled in a private full-time day school and actually attends that private school, (2) the child is tutored by a person holding a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught, or (3) one of the other few statutory
exemptions to compulsory public school attendance (Ed. Code, § 48220 et seq.) applies to the child. Because the parents in this case have not demonstrated that any of these exemptions apply to their children, we will grant the petition for extraordinary writ.

California’s Provisions for Compulsory Education of Minor Children Article IX, section 1 of California’s Constitution states: “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement.”

“In obedience to the constitutional mandate to bring about a general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence, the Legislature, over the years, enacted a series of laws. A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare. [Citation.] The Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 [45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070, 39 A.L.R. 468], held that: ‘No question is raised concerning the power of the state reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils; to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare.’ [¶] Included in the laws governing the educational program were those regulating the attendance of children at school and the power of the state to enforce compulsory education of children within the state at some school is beyond question. (Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 [43 S.Ct. 625, 628, 67 L.Ed. 1042, 29 A.L.R. 1446]; Ex parte Liddell, 93 Cal. 633, 640 [29 P. 251].”

This is pretty creepy. Sounds like something you’d expect to hear from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Soviet Russia. How far we’ve come from from the idea that free and independent individuals lead to free, independent and prosperous nations. I really need to read John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

Writes Ryan Hainlen:

This is directly out of my 6th grade sister’s history book. (And she has a test over it tomorrow.) “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, terrorism became a major threat to world peace. In 2003, U.S. military forces invaded Iraq. They were sent to prevent Iraq from using chemical and biological weapons. … The United States has protected innocent civilians or helped bring peace to a war-torn region.”

People, Places and Change: An Introduction to World Studies
Holt, Rinehart and Winston
page 103

I’ve often argued that the governmet has throughout the ages of “public” education has been not simply been pushing the normal national bias history but has actively been ‘educating’ in the ways of those in power. I think this proves my argument. I’ve heard good things about John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education but I’ve yet to read it.