Education: More Evidence Vouchers Work

Today's WSJ op-ed has a column on the success of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

A report released last week by School Choice Wisconsin, an advocacy group, finds that between 2003 and 2008 students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program had a significantly higher graduation rate than students in Milwaukee Public Schools.

"Had MPS graduation rates equalled those for MPCP students in the classes of 2003 through 2008, the number of MPS graduates would have been about 18 percent higher," writes John Robert Warren of the University of Minnesota. "That higher rate would have resulted in 3,352 more MPS graduates during the 2003-2008 years."

In 2008 the graduation rate for voucher students was 77% versus 65% for the nonvoucher students, though the latter receives $14,000 per pupil in taxpayer support, or more than double the $6,400 per pupil that voucher students receive in public funding.

The Milwaukee voucher program serves more than 21,000 children in 111 private schools, so nearly 20% more graduates mean a lot fewer kids destined for failure without the credential of a high school diploma. The finding is all the more significant because students who receive vouchers must, by law, come from low-income families, while their counterparts in public schools come from a broader range of economic backgrounds.

Expansion of vouchers and broader choice in education could literally transform this country. Students in areas with failing schools would no longer be locked into a losing future. The dynamism brought on by increased choice would bring higher graduation rates to those our current system consistently fails.

Central planners, teachers' unions, and their Democratic enablers will continue to clamor for more money for failed programs or tweaked versions of ones that have failed in the past. Vouchers and choice and increased competition in education (as in everything) would bring higher quality and lower prices and this means more children would be better educated.

Those opposed to choice in education should be ashamed.

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The Tebow Ad

This is what had feminists and anti-lifers all up in arms? Unbelievable.

(h/t the Corner)

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Michael Barone On President Obama's Populism

Lots of this going around lately (populism, that is).

Why has the politics of economic redistribution had such limited success in America? One reason is that Americans, unlike Western Europeans, tend to believe that there is a connection between effort and reward and that people can work their way up economically. If people do something to earn their benefits, like paying Social Security taxes, that's fine. But giving money to those who have not in some way earned it is a no-no. Moreover, like Andrew Jackson, most Americans suspect that some of the income that is redistributed will end up in the hands not of the worthy but of the well-connected.

Last year Mr. Obama and his policy strategists seem to have assumed that the financial crisis and deep recession would make Americans look more favorably on big government programs. But it turns out that economic distress did not make us Western Europeans.

(h/t Scott L.)

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Roger Kimball On Howard Zinn & American History

Pretty accurate, I'd say.

With Howard Zinn, contemporary American academia found its court historian. Zinn, who died January 27 at 87, was like a gigantic echo chamber, accurately reproducing—and actively reinforcing—every left-wing cliché with which the academy has abetted its sense of election these past several decades. . . . Zinn's biography tells us that he was the author of "more than 20 books." But only one matters: A People's History of the United States. Published in 1980 with appropriately modest expectations—it had, I read somewhere, an initial print run of only 5,000 copies—the book went on to sell some 2 million and is still going strong. Its Amazon sales rank as of February 1, 2010, was 7. Seven. That's a number most authors would climb over broken bottles to achieve 30 days after their books were published. Here it is 30 years on.

How to explain such phenomenal success? The publisher had doubtless assayed the book's intellectual merits and proceeded accordingly. Left out of account was the presumption of its political message. The extremity and consistency of that message—that America is and always has been an evil, exploitative country—guaranteed its success among the tenured radicals to whom we have entrusted the education of our children. More to the point, this history "from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated" nudged out all other contenders for the prize of becoming the preferred catechism in American—that is to say, anti-American—history.

(via the WSJ, natch)

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Iraq: The Unapologetic Tony Blair

And with good reason. The logic he and President Bush used to invade Iraq and take down Saddam was sound and based on the best available information.

In the wake of his testimony before yet another UK inquisition, the WSJ cribbed a few of his best quotes and reminded us all of what we knew, what we didn't know, and why Iraq was and remains important.

[...]

Mr. Blair offered a ringing defense of the decision to invade Iraq, and a very different set of lessons for the present. "This isn't about a lie, or a conspiracy, or a deceit, or a deception. It is a decision," Mr. Blair told a packed room that included relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq. "And the decision I had to take was, given [Saddam's] history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over one million people whose deaths he had caused, given 10 years of breaking U.N. resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons program?"

That's a point worth remembering over all the Monday-morning recriminations about "dodgy dossiers" and missing WMD. We have never for a moment believed that the British or U.S. governments deliberately misled their publics over what they thought they knew about Saddam's weapons. Every Western country, including those opposed to the war, believed Saddam had WMD.

But the important point was never so much about what Saddam did or did not possess so much as it was about what he intended. And as Mr. Blair pointed out Friday, "What we now know is that he [Saddam] retained the intent and the intellectual know-how to restart a nuclear and a chemical weapons program when the inspectors were out and the sanctions changed, which they were going to do. . . .

"Today we would be facing a situation where Iraq was competing with Iran, competing both on nuclear weapons capability and competing more importantly perhaps than anything else . . . in respect of support of terrorist groups. . . . If I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our own security is better, with Saddam and his two sons out of office and out of power, I believe indeed we are."

Mr. Blair was no less clear-eyed about the threat posed today by Iran and its nuclear program, against which he counseled that the international community had to take a "very hard, tough line." Iranian interference was a large reason why the Iraq war "very nearly" failed. Iran remains a sponsor of terrorism and a cause of instability from Afghanistan to Lebanon. The lesson from the Iraq war isn't to avoid action for fear of unanticipated consequences, which are inevitable in any war. It is to take action to prevent the most foreseeable of disasters, namely the combination, in a single regime, of fanaticism, links to terrorism and nuclear weapons.

"The decision I took—and frankly would take again—was, if there was any possibility that he [Saddam] could develop weapons of mass destruction, we would stop him," Mr. Blair told the commission. Listening to him, we are reminded why he ranks with Margaret Thatcher as a pre-eminent statesman of postwar British politics, an achievement unlikely to be matched by the Lilliputians who seek to embarrass him.

Polite British academic company (including my supervisors, etc.) requires that I keep my admiration of Blair (at least on this point) to myself. The shroud of semi-anonymity (at least enough that I can plausibly deny and they can plausibly ignore) allows my full confession of guilt here: I reluctantly endorsed the decision to invade all the way back when (when all the Democrats voted for it and the public heavily supported it) and stand by that decision now.

Things could and would be a heck of a lot worse.

(h/t Scott L.)

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Down With Public Service Unions

I wrote about these leaches a week ago. They're on the WSJ Op-Ed page radar again. And with good reason:

As we can see from the desperate economic and fiscal woes of California, New Jersey, New York and other states with dominant public unions, this has become a major problem for the U.S. economy and small-d democratic governance. It may be the single biggest problem. The agenda for American political reform needs to include the breaking of public unionism's power to capture an ever-larger share of private income.

Eventually these public service unions kill the host. See above-mentioned NY, NJ, & CA.

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ConSource: Good News For People Who Love America & The Constitution

Got an email this morning from a good friend of mine who helped found ConSource, the post-partisan effort to collect and digitize primary source documents related to the creation of the American Constitution. It seems a heretofore unknown/identified early draft of the Constitution has been found by Lorianne Updike-Toler, also a friend of the blog.

(It would be more accurate to say that she's a friend of the blog's author as I have no idea what she thinks of the blog as such.)

Anyway, here's the story:

Researcher Lorianne Updike Toler was intrigued by the centuries-old document at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

On the back of a treasured draft of the U.S. Constitution was a truncated version of the same document, starting with the familiar words: "We The People. . . ."

They had been scribbled upside down by one of the Constitution's framers, James Wilson, in the summer of 1787. The cursive continued, then abruptly stopped, as if pages were missing.

A mystery, Toler thought, until she examined other Wilson papers from the Historical Society's vault in Philadelphia and found what appeared to be the rest of the draft, titled "The Continuation of the Scheme."

[...]

"This was the kind of moment historians dream about," said Toler, 30, a lawyer and founding president of the Constitutional Sources Project (www.ConSource.org), a nonprofit organization, based in Washington, that promotes an understanding of and access to U.S. Constitution documents.

"This was national scripture, a piece of our Constitution's history," she said of her find in November. "It was difficult to keep my hands from trembling."

As other researchers "realized what was happening, there was a sort of hushed awe that settled over the reading room," Toler said. "One of them said the hair on her arms stood on end."

Two drafts of the Constitution in Wilson's hand had been separated from his papers long ago. One of them included the beginning of still another draft and was apparently seen as part of a single working version, instead of a separate draft.

Toler said "The Continuation of the Scheme," including its provisions about the executive and judiciary branches, completes that draft, making it a third.

As always, if you're interested in learning more about or supporting the efforts of ConSource, please click the link.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me atlybberty@gmail.com.

Story Of An American Sniper

In February's Vanity Fair.

Very very cool.

(h/t Scott L.)

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It Could Be Worse; We Could Be France

Here in the good ol' US of A, we give civilian trials to foreign terrorists responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans. And we allow failed (panty) bombers the right to remain silent.

But it could be worse; we could be France.

On Thursday, a court outside Paris will rule on a claim lodged by one Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. Better known as Carlos the Jackal, the 60-year-old Venezuelan was the Osama bin Laden of the 1970s and 1980s. On behalf of Palestinian and various Marxist-Leninist causes, Ramírez organized and carried out a series of notable terrorist attacks. The French finally nabbed him from a Sudanese hospital in 1994 and jailed him for life for the murder of two French policemen and a Lebanese informant. Carlos the Jackal now spends his time invoking his rights under the French constitution.

In the case before the court in Nanterre, he and long-time lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who also married him, are suing a French production company for the right to review and "correct and edit" a forthcoming made-for-TV film about him entitled "Carlos." Ms. Coutant-Peyre alleges the filmmakers are out to "demolish Carlos." Her client wants to protect the intellectual property rights to his name and "biographical image." The court has taken this case seriously enough to hear it.

A lawyer for the film company, Film en Stock, asked the Libération daily in Paris, "How could we possibly tarnish the image of Carlos when he himself claims to have killed some 2,000 people?" There's also the small matter of a right to free press and speech that should, one would assume, shield the filmmakers from a litigious terrorist.

I suppose Carlos is thinking about starting a line of t-shirts in the mold of mass murderer, Che Guevara. You know the ones, with Che's "iconic" image, worn by idiots and hipsters everywhere.

These "revolutionary" shirts are like the Nazi Swastika and Soviet hammer & sickle to me--symbols of murder, terrorism, & tyranny. I resent anyone and everyone who wears such things--whether they do so in be-clowning ignorance or knowing full well the murderer Che was or, alternatively (in the case of the hammer & sickle), the many millions who died as a result of communist ideology, thus revealing themselves to be mentally sick.

Words and symbols matter, dear reader. Look through your clothing and be sure you're not unknowingly wearing & espousing belief in a system or person responsible for death and destruction.

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On Obama's 'Partisan, Condescending' State Of The Union Speech

Marc Thiessen was lead writer on President Bush's last two SOTU speeches. He offered his critique of Obama's speech at The Corner and in today's WaPo.

Listening to President Obama's speech, I could not help wondering how different this night would have been had Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's bomb not malfunctioned. Four weeks ago our country was the target of a catastrophic terrorist attack. But for the grace of God, Northwest Flight 253 would have crashed into downtown Detroit, killing thousands. Yet just a month later, it is an afterthought for this president. His only mention of the failed attack was a passing reference that he was responding with "better airline security."

Worse, the president's brief discussion of terrorism focused not on what he was doing to defend the country but was, rather, a vigorous defense of himself. His first words on the subject were a chastisement of those who would dare criticize his handling of terrorism, declaring that "all of us love this country" and warning his Republican critics to "put aside the schoolyard taunts about who is tough." It's all about him. No acknowledgement of how close we came to disaster or praise for the brave passengers who subdued the terrorist. No, only this message for his critics: If you question the wisdom of telling a captured terrorist "you have the right to remain silent," you are really questioning the president's patriotism and engaging in childish taunts.

The fact is, the American people have real concerns about Obama's approach to terrorism. They do question the wisdom of eliminating CIA interrogations, closing Guantanamo Bay, bringing the terrorists held there to this country, putting Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and his cohorts on trial in civilian courts, and giving captured terrorists Miranda rights after 50 minutes of questioning. Instead of acknowledging these concerns, Obama dismissed them. It was strange, defensive, arrogant -- and un-presidential.

I'm also bothered that Iraq & Afghanistan get such short shrift from this President. I read a lot of military blogs and try and keep on top of what's happening in those places. One of the things that comes across a lot is how frustrated members of the military are with the fact that many Americans both don't know and don't seem to care about what's happening to them wherever they are.

Part of the reason for this has got to be the complete lack of attention given to them by President Obama and the Democrat party. And this was reflected in Obama's SOTU last night.

Ps. Yes, I am also annoyed by the arrogant, lecturing tilt of his head when he speaks.

UPDATE 2:34pm GMT: If you need a palate cleanser, here's President Ronald Reagan's SOTU in 1988. (via Orin Kerr @ The Volokh Conspiracy)

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Rep. Paul Ryan & 'The Party Of No' Re-Present Their Plan To Restore America's Economic Awesomeness

And solve health care, Medicare, Social Security and tax reform.

Seriously, the Democrat party would rather carry on referring to the GOP as the "party of no" (hence the headline) rather than consider Republican proposals like the one put forward by Rep. Ryan.

And that's fine. Let them. Independents and conservatives know better. I'm still holding out hope that the Democrats double down on this health care disaster of theirs and lose big this November.

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