Ultimate School Choice

I attended a well funded, well rated, well equipped high school. It was a "good" school. but I managed to get through four years of education achieving honors without learning most of the skills that I would actually need to succeed.

This good school failed to teach me financial literacy, how to find a job, interview skills, sales skills, marketing skills, or any other business skills. I did not learn these skills until my early thirties. This good school failed to teach me anything I needed to know. And the lack of these skills proved costly to me. Very costly indeed.

I'm not saying that every school needs to teach business skills, but parents should have the choice to send their children to a school that teaches business skills, or art, or theater, or science.

I actually don't think that most school choice proposals go far enough. I believe that the free market would be an effective solution. Complete school choice, allowing a broader standard for schools to be created, some of which are not hampered by standardized testing. Each child has a dollar figure attached to them, and parents send their child to the school of their choice, period. The good schools thrive, the poor schools close, leaving a fine building for a better school to open in.

With a diversity of schools, there will be a diversity of admission standards. Some will want test scores. Some will want entrepreneurship. Some will want artistic skills and auditions.
Imagine if a local community of 200 parents could join together to open their own school run by people they choose, teaching the curriculum they prefer. No more neglected schools run by distant boards. Every child the same value. This would be possible because the funding would exist.

Some ask about kids who need special education. Note than many learning disabilities are only disabilities when forced to learn the same way as everyone else. With a diversity of schools and styles, many who would be "behavior problems" or "learning disabled" at a normal school could thrive at a different kind of school environment.

No plan is perfect. Neither is this one. This is not a matter of Democrat or Republican. It's a matter of creating new forms of education for a new economy. Even the best public schools are failing their students, and there must be something better. This is the best I can think of.

Win and Lose By the Rules of the Game

Like him or hate him, if you're an American,
he is your President.

I see a lot of liberals claiming that Trump didn't really win the election because he lost the popular vote. You see this #notmypresident hashtag. And this really bugs me.

I'm not a Trump supporter. I didn't vote for him, and I think his administration will be a negative experience for many people, especially already disadvantaged populations. A lot of the people who are so upset about his election have good reason to be so upset.

But he did win.

Some of this may have its roots in 2000 when there really was shenanigans: votes being "misplaced", miscounted and a legitimate doubt as to who was the legitimate winner. 2016 is not that. The votes are pretty clear, and, under the rules that were in place, Trump won.

Look at it this way. The other American past time, besides half of American convincing itself that the other half will destroy us all every four year, is Baseball. In Baseball, you win by getting the most runs. But what if we have a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees and the score is:

Red Sox - 5 runs, 12 hits
Yankees - 3 runs, 18 hits

You have to touch to hard pentagon thing to score, not the
soft square one. See, I know sports.

I don't know if this scenario is mathematically reasonable, but it's an example, so roll with it. No one would say, "well, the Yankees really should be called the winner because they got the most hits. They got more men on base and maybe even advanced more bases, so they should be the winner."

Of course not. The rules say that the most runs win. If you don't like it, then maybe you should create a new game called Buntball in which the most hits win, and runs mean nothing. But even if you created Buntball, you can't say that the Yankees would have won if they were playing Buntball because you would play Buntball totally differently than you'd play Baseball. You'd be pushing for hits instead of runs, and that's a different strategy.

Same thing in electoral politics. In the Electoral College system, it's by state, so if you aren't going to win a state, you don't compete for the state. You save your resources. In a Popular Vote system, you would compete for every vote, everywhere. Clinton would have needed to campaign in the deep red country. Trump would have been out in upstate New York and Western Massachusetts (not the Pioneer Valley, the rest of it) and Eastern and Northwestern Connecticut.

Would he still have won? I cannot say. But the way the race would be run would be entirely different, so the outcome would be different.

While I hate to say "You lost. Get over it," or more accurately "We lost. Get over it," the fact is that's the case. We lost. Get over it.

That doesn't mean that liberals should just give up and go home and wait for the next election. It means the opposite. It means that we need to stop wasting energy whining about what already happened and put our energy to the changes we can make.

The midterms are 22 months away. It's not too soon to start recruiting and supporting candidates.

Many important decisions are made at the state and local levels. Do you know who your state and local representatives are? That seems like a better investment of energy than complaining about an election gone by.