Every year I find myself reading some number of articles calling for an end to summer vacation–the practice of giving kids a summer break from school. The argument is typically made with an appeal to the the “summer learning loss” or “summer slide”, the tendency for kids to learn less during the summer than they do while in school, or even to regress academically. Adding further fuel to the argument is the tendency for the achievement gap, the difference in academic performance between higher and lower income students, to expand during the summer months. Opponents of summer vacation deem it an anachronism from a more rural, less air-conditioned age, and think we ought to do away with it altogether. Today, I seek to challenge these views.
Tag: USA
Americans Still Don’t Know What Sequestration Is
I haven’t been doing much writing about the US economy lately, in part because there’s been no substantive movement on the issue politically since sequestration went through. All we’ve gotten lately are some retread hopey changey speeches from Obama and threats of future government shutdowns from congressional republicans. Nonetheless, these are the first signs that we will soon be having more unproductive fights about the economy with potentially devastating consequences for growth, so I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled. And, lo and behold, I stumbled on a little poll from Gallup.
Continue reading “Americans Still Don’t Know What Sequestration Is”
How to Fix the Voting Rights Act
Back in June, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to strike down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Through negligence, I never got around to writing about it. Today, however, the Department of Justice has decided to attempt to circumvent the court’s ruling, asking a federal court to require the state of Texas to get federal clearance before it makes changes to its voting laws. This is as good a segue as any into discussing the quality of the court’s ruling and how the rest of the state ought to respond to it.
Mitch Daniels and Howard Zinn
Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, one-time speculative presidential candidate, and current president of Purdue University has been accused of attempting to use his office to influence the ideological content of Indiana’s classrooms so as to silence dissenting opinions. Specifically, he is accused of attempting to prevent schools from using A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, a deceased academic. Daniels did indeed attempt to prevent the book from being taught in schools, as he freely admits–was this morally permissible of him?
Oregon’s College Funding Scheme
In the state of Oregon a new mechanism for funding university studies has been proposed. The scheme is called “Pay It Forward“. The idea is that instead of charging students tuition to go to universities, the state will fund their education and then extract payment after the degree is finished as a percentage of their income. For a student with a bachelor’s degree, the expected repayment would be 3% of income for the following 20 years. This presents a very different alternative to the university funding system presently in force throughout the United States, so let’s dissect it. Would Pay It Forward make Oregon’s university system better than it presently is? Is it the ideal alternative, and if not, in what respects does it differ from that ideal?
Benjamin Studebaker 