As The Dems Turn (To School Choice)
We’ve been writing a fair amount over the last several months about increasing support for school choice among members of the Democratic Party. The focus has typically been on legislators, but a new report from the Center for Education Reform give a glimpse into possible widespread support among private-schooling Dems and Dem donors in Washington, DC.
The Trustees delves into the political affiliations of board of trustee members of the “ten most prestigious private schools that support the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.” Based on trustees’ total donation amounts to the two major presidential candidates in 2008, or to candidates, party committees, and parties themselves, the report suggests that trustees lean Democratic by a ratio of roughly 9 to 1.
Importantly, only about 37 percent of trustees were found to have made any contributions, so the 9-to-1 ratio doesn’t necessarily mean that trustees overall are similarly skewed. In addition, the underlying assumption seems to be that if the schools participate in the voucher program their trustees support school choice, which doesn’t necessarily follow. A trustee may very well think a school should take some voucher kids but also think the program ought not to exist. And, of course, trustees almost certainly don’t all agree one way or the other.
Those things said, this is yet more evidence supporting an increasingly inescapable conclusion: Democrats — who have historically opposed school choice much more so than Republicans — are finding that they just can’t do it anymore. There is no justification for consigning kids to awful schools.
Of course, members of both parties — or no party at all — who support only small, hamstrung programs still have a lot of thinking to do…
DC Residents Want Private School Choice
As Adam Schaeffer mentions below, a new poll commissioned by the Friedman Foundation and others reports that the vast majority of DC residents are in favor of the DC opportunity scholarships voucher program and are critical of the decision of congressional Democrats, President Obama, and ed. sec. Arne Duncan to phase out the program.
Many on the city council have already voiced their support for the program as well.
This begs a question: Why doesn’t the DC government just create its own private school choice program and save itself a boatload of money in the process?
DC spends about $28,000 per pupil on k-12 education right now. The federal vouchers, at an average of $6,600 each, are rather more cost effective, in addition to producing much better academic achievement after students have been in the program for a few years.
So most folks in DC want it. It would save the city massive amounts of money. And it would do great things for kids.
What are the mayor and the city council waiting for?
It’s Dangerous For Pols to be on the Wrong Side of Overwhelming Support
Any City Council members who aren’t vocally supporting the DC voucher program need to take a good long look at these numbers:
Nearly 75 percent of District residents support the city’s federally funded school voucher program, according to a rigorous, independent poll released today. Widespread support for the program crosses party lines—with 74 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Independents backing the program—and extends across each of the District’s eight wards. . .
Two previous polls have demonstrated local support for the program; in 2007, a Greater Washington Urban League poll demonstrated almost 70 percent support for the federal funding creating the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. A 2008 poll by the national nonprofit Education Reform Now demonstrated equally strong support for the voucher initiative, with 63 percent of D.C. residents supporting school vouchers in general and 77 percent voicing supporting for parental choice in education.
Drivers Use Technology to Fight Snooping by Greedy Government
The Washington Examiner has an encouraging story about how citizens are using high-tech to thwart the speed cameras used by greedy politicians to generate more tax revenue. The bureaucrats assert the cameras are about saving lives, but allow a personal observation to illustrate the gross dishonesty of the government. I have been nailed twice by speed cameras in DC, once on an interstate highway where the speed limit mysteriously dropped to 45 miles-per-hour, and the other time on a major artery with three lanes each direction that inexplicably had a 25 miles-per-hour limit. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyhow), these speed traps had nothing to do with promoting safety and everything to do with steering more cash to the political class:
Area drivers looking to outwit police speed traps and traffic cameras are using an iPhone application and other global positioning system devices that pinpoint the location of the cameras. That has irked D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier, who promised her officers would pick up their game to counteract the devices… Lanier said the technology is a “cowardly tactic” and “people who overly rely on those and break the law anyway are going to get caught” in one way or another. The greater D.C. area has 290 red-light and speed cameras — comprising nearly 10 percent of all traffic cameras in the U.S., according to estimates by a camera-tracking database called the POI Factory. …Photo radar tickets generated nearly $1 billion in revenues for D.C. during fiscal years 2005 to 2008.
Filed under: Law and Civil Liberties; Regulatory Studies
Courts Check D.C. Government — Again.
Last year, the Supreme Court declared the D.C.’s gun control law unconstitutional (pdf). Now a federal appellate court has unanimously declared that D.C. police’s aggressive ”Neighborhood Safety Zone” (NSZ) checkpoint policy is unconstitutional (pdf).
Under the policy, any vehicle entering an area that has been declared a “Neighborhood Safety Zone” by the city’s police chief can be “stopped for the purpose of determining whether the driver has a legitimate reason for entering the NSZ.”
Here’s an excerpt from the appelate court decision:
We further conclude that appellants have sufficiently demonstrated irreparable injury, particularly in light of their strong likelihood of success on the merits. … The harm to the rights of appellants is apparent. It cannot be gainsaid that citizens have a right to drive upon the public streets of the District of Columbia or any other city absent a constitutionally sound reason for limiting their access. As our discussion of the likelihood of success has demonstrated, there is no such constitutionally sound bar in the NSZ checkpoint program. It is apparent that appellants’ constitutional rights are violated. It has long been established that the loss of constitutional freedoms, “for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.” …Granted, the District is not currently imposing an NSZ checkpoint, but it has done so more than once, and the police chief has expressed her intent to continue to use the program until a judge stops her.
It’s time for Mayor Adrian Fenty to show Peter Nickles, the Attorney General of the city, to the door. Too many of his ideas have proven to be misguided and contrary to law.
School Choice, Not Stalemate
A Washington Post editorial today rightly laments the seemingly insurmountable impasse reached by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the Washington Teachers Union. Actually, scratch the WTU – I mean the American Federation of Teachers, the WTU’s parent organization, which has essentially taken over the negotiations because it thinks giving into much higher pay for somewhat less job security would be a disaster of national proportions. But the union’s stifling full court press isn’t what primarily bothers the Post. It’s that lowly John Q. Public isn’t getting even a crumb of information from the power brokers about major decisions that are all supposed benefit his kids.
But since when did the best interests of kids or the public really matter in public schooling decisions? Sure, parents and regular citizens can vote every few years, but what the heck else can they do? They can’t stop paying the taxes that fund both chancellors and teachers. They can’t form their own union and require teachers and chancellors to negotiate with them. All they can do is complain, and it’s pretty hard to hear them when you’re behind closed doors, arguing with some other guy about which one of you should be king.
And to think, someone thought it was a good idea to kill a program that actually gives parents some power…
Should You Vote on Keeping Your Local Car Dealership?
There are lots of reasons Washington should not bail out the automakers. Whatever the justification for saving financial institutions — the “lifeblood” of the economy, etc., etc. — saving selected industrial enterprises is lemon socialism at its worst. The idea that the federal government will be able to engineer an economic turnaround is, well, the sort of economic fantasy that unfortunately dominates Capitol Hill these days.
One obvious problem is that legislators now have a great excuse to micromanage the automakers. And they have already started. After all, if the taxpayers are providing subsidies, don’t they deserve to have dealerships, lots of dealerships, just down the street? That’s what our Congresscritters seem to think.
Observes Stephen Chapman of the Chicago Tribune:
The Edsel was one of the biggest flops in the history of car making. Introduced with great fanfare by Ford in 1958, it had terrible sales and was junked after only three years. But if Congress had been running Ford, the Edsel would still be on the market.
That became clear last week, when Democrats as well as Republicans expressed horror at the notion that bankrupt companies with plummeting sales would need fewer retail sales outlets. At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., led the way, asserting, “I honestly don’t believe that companies should be allowed to take taxpayer funds for a bailout and then leave it to local dealers and their customers to fend for themselves.”
Supporters of free markets can be grateful to Rockefeller for showing one more reason government shouldn’t rescue unsuccessful companies. As it happens, taxpayers are less likely to get their money back if the automakers are barred from paring dealerships. Protecting those dealers merely means putting someone else at risk, and that someone has been sleeping in your bed.
The Constitution guarantees West Virginia two senators, and Rockefeller seems to think it also guarantees the state a fixed supply of car sellers. “Chrysler is eliminating 40 percent of its dealerships in my state,” he fumed, “and I have heard that GM will eliminate more than 30 percent.” This development raises the ghastly prospect that “some consumers in West Virginia will have to travel much farther distances to get their cars serviced under warranty.”
Dealers were on hand to join the chorus. “To be arbitrarily closed with no compensation is wasteful and devastating,” said Russell Whatley, owner of a Chrysler outlet in Mineral Wells, Texas.
Lemon socialism mixed with pork barrel politics! Could it get any worse? Don’t ask: after all, this is Washington, D.C.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Selflessly Giving…to Themselves
I wasn’t going to write about this because it is purely anecdotal, but Chris Edwards’ post on the generous compensation of federal employees, and the constant denial of that generosity by those employees’ representatives, inspired me to ingore my reservations.
A couple of days ago, I was driving through the streets of D.C. and ended up behind what appeared to be a new, black Jaguar. Now, trailing a Jag wasn’t all that extraordinary — D.C. is home to a lot of fancy cars. What was extraordinary was the wholly inconsistent declaration printed on the frame of the status symbol’s license plate: “Proud to be a social worker.”
It seemed wholly inconsistent, I should say, except, again, fancy automobiles are common on the streets of D.C., even though the District is supposed to be a city populated with “public servants.” So this public-serving D.C. driver was perhaps out of the ordinary for his implied candor, but is no doubt far from alone in serving himself at least as much as he’s serving others.
Of course, systemic evidence like Chris presents on federal workers, or I present on teacher compensation, indicates much more conclusively than my automotive observations that public-service-as-a-synonym-for-sacrifice is largely a political myth, a narrative repeated by public employees to win your sympathy while they grab for your wallet. Which is not to say that social workers, teachers, federal bureaucrats, etc., aren’t motivated to help others – no doubt many are – but like all of us, they’re also highly motivated to help themselves. And since their compensation comes through politics, it is making the public believe that they live tough, self-sacrificial lives that is, ironically, the key to their living the Good Life.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
MD Taxpayers Should Still Fear the Turtle
I dread my morning commute, largely because of awful D.C. traffic, but also because I never know when I’m going to hear something on the radio that’s (1) going to anger me, and (2) force me to alter my day’s plans so I can lay the smack down on some education report that begs for clarification.
Today, (2) happened, with a reporter from the Washington Business Journal touting a new study on the University of Maryland, College Park — Maryland’s flagship public university — as cause for Marylanders to be ecstatic about the taxes they pay to support the school. According to the WBJ’s online article about the report, the Free State gets $8 back for every $1 taxpayers “invest” in UMCP — a clear winner!
Um, not so fast, WBJ! These kinds of too-good-to-be-true impact studies are usually just that — too good to be true. There are often many problems with them, but most important is that unless the analysts looked at opportunity costs — what would have been produced by the tax dollars had they been left with taxpayers — there is no way to say that Marylanders should be eternally grateful for having to fear the turtle. It is entirely possible, as economist Richard Vedder has demonstrated, that taxpayers would have gotten a better return had they kept their money rather than having to hand it over to students and profs.
Of course, before I posted this objection, I had to check out the report to see if it is forthcoming about opportunity costs. Unfortunately, despite the university touting the findings yesterday and the WBJ reporting on them this morning, all I could find was the 2008 impact report, both looking on the site of the group that commissioned the study — the University of Maryland College Park Foundation — and the outfit that conducted the research. As a result, I can’t say with absolute certainty that the 2009 study doesn’t consider opportunity costs. If the 2009 report is like 2008’s, however, Marylanders have no cause for rejoicing. There’s zero reason to believe that they wouldn’t have been better off if they had just been able to keep their hard-earned ducats.
School Choice Going, Going, Gone Bipartisan (In Some States)
The USA Today takes note of the fact that support for school choice is growing among Democratic, often black, politicians:
While vouchers will likely never be the clarion call of Democrats, they’re beginning to make inroads among a group of young black lawmakers, mayors and school officials who have split with party and teachers union orthodoxy on school reform. The group includes Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and former Washington, D.C., mayor Anthony Williams.
I’d only add that this broadening support is hardly limited to black Democrats, and that support for education tax credits is spreading even more quickly among Democrats. And while choice might never become a Democratic “clarion call,” it just might become the new consensus among serious education reformers in both parties.
For instance, a Democrat-controlled and, I assume, mostly white legislature in Rhode Island passed a donation tax credit. And Democratic governor and legislature in Iowa raised their tax credit dollar cap by 50 percent in 2007. The paper mentions black mayor Corey Booker’s support for school choice in New Jersey, but the white, former Democratic state party chair, and current state Senator Ray Lesniak is also pushing for a donation tax credit bill.
The model case is Florida. When the Florida legislature passed its education tax credit program to fund private school choice in 2001, only one Democrat supported the measure. Last year, the state legislature expanded the program with the votes of one third of statehouse Democrats, half the black caucus and the entire Hispanic caucus.
In the past few weeks, nearly a third of Senate Democrats and half of House Democrats voted to significantly expand the program’s revenue base. Virtually all Republicans did the same, and Republican Governor Crist is expected to sign the bill soon. In all, 43 percent of state Democratic legislators in Florida voted in favor of education tax credits.
The toothpaste is out, and the teachers unions can’t put it back in with all the dues money in the world.
Do I Agree with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan?
Well, sort of. From today’s USA Today:
Duncan recently acknowledged D.C.’s woes, calling its public schools “a national disgrace.” But he added: “We have to be much more ambitious for ourselves and have higher expectations — we have to help every child in D.C. The answer is not vouchers for a few. It’s massive change, massive reform for all, absolutely as quickly as possible.”
Yes! They are a disgrace, and we do need quick, massive change from the current government-run system!
So Secretary of Education Arne Duncan supports broad-based education tax credits or a massive expansion of the DC voucher program, right? What radical change! He is the heroic reformer everyone says he is!
Oh . . . wait . . . by “massive reform for all, absolutely as quickly as possible,” he means another pipe-dream 5-year plan to brow-beat a huge, unwieldy, and ossified government school bureaucracy into thriving mediocrity while killing a voucher program that actually brings immediate improvements to the more than 1,700 students who won the lottery for educational opportunity in the District.
Way to set your ambitions so high, Arne!
New Doherty Book Review
There is a new review of Brian Doherty’s book, Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle over the Second Amendment, over at The American Spectator.
The review captures the uphill battle that the Heller litigants faced in the District of Columbia:
When an employee on the Taxicab Commission once suggested that taxicab drivers be able to arm themselves for self- defense, a spokesman for then mayor Anthony Williams said, “The proposal is nutty, and obviously, it would not be entertained seriously by any thinking person.” After D.C. readjusted its laws in the wake of Heller so that guns were no longer prohibited but regulated to the point of making ownership exceedingly difficult, Mayor Adrian Fenty justified it thusly: “I don’t think [the people of D.C.] intended that anybody who had a vague notion of a threat should have access to a gun.” Apparently the mayor doesn’t know or doesn’t care that once a threat is real, it’s probably too late to go through all of the city’s regulatory hoops.
Cato held a book forum for the event, which is available here. Also check out Reason TV’s videos of Brian discussing this historic legal battle, both before and after the decision came down.
Vouchers and Violence
The front page of the tabloid Washington Examiner blares
Violence mars students’ days
Weapons, assaults common at area schools
Now I know that headlines have to be short to fit the space. But a more accurate headline would read
Weapons, assaults common at government-run schools
Fights, sexual assaults, and deadly weapons, described in the article as happening “almost once a day at some area high schools,” are almost nonexistent at private schools. Which is why it’s such a shame that the small number of District of Columbia students who have been granted a voucher to escape the D.C. public schools are going to lose that lifeline if the Democratic majority in Congress gets its way. I once proposed in the Washington Post:
The D.C. school board should declare an educational emergency and offer a voucher good in any private or public school in the District to every student who is assigned to a school that has had a shooting or stabbing or more than one weapon confiscation in the past year, whether on school property or on school buses.
I called it the “voucher trigger provision,” but the Post went with the more sober title “A Right to Safer Schools.”
But the policy shouldn’t be restricted to D.C. students. The Examiner article is in fact not about the D.C. schools; it’s about the suburban schools in Maryland and Virginia. Suburban kids would also benefit from more choice, including the choice to move from dangerous to safe schools.
Amazing Coincidences
The coincidences that occur in Washington, D.C. are truly extraordinary. According to the Washington Post:
The headquarters of Murtech, in a low-slung, bland building in a Glen Burnie business park, has its blinds drawn tight and few signs of life. On several days of visits, a handful of cars sit in the parking lot, and no trucks arrive at the 10 loading bays at the back of the building.
Yet last year, Murtech received $4 million in Pentagon work, all of it without competition, for a variety of warehousing and engineering services. With its long corridor of sparsely occupied offices and an unmanned reception area, Murtech’s most striking feature is its owner — Robert C. Murtha Jr., 49. He is the nephew of Rep. John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has significant sway over the Defense Department’s spending as chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.
Robert Murtha said he is not at liberty to discuss in detail what his company does, but for four years it has subsisted on defense contracts, according to records and interviews. He said Murtech’s 17 employees “provide necessary logistical support” to Pentagon testing programs that focus on detecting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats, “and that’s about as far as I feel comfortable going.” Giving more details could provide important clues to terrorist plotters, he said.
Murtha said he does not advertise being the nephew of John Murtha and considers it “unfortunate” that some will unfairly assume Murtech received its federal contracts because of his uncle’s influence at the Pentagon.
“If we’re not doing our job well, we wouldn’t be doing our job,” he said. “I’m successful at the work I do because of the skill sets I have. . . . You don’t know how good someone is unless you work with them.”
A spokesman at Murtha’s office did not return calls seeking comment. The lawmaker, a former Marine, has said in the past that he is proud of his family’s service to the military and the government.
Over the years, John Murtha has proudly claimed credit for using his Appropriations Committee seat to steer hundreds of millions in Pentagon work to companies in his district, many of them fledgling enterprises run by campaign contributors. His influence also may be seen in the military improvements at the Johnstown airport that bears his name. The little-used commuter airport doubles as a wartime preparedness facility for the Pentagon after $30 million in improvements.
Murtha’s power has had beneficial effects within his family. His brother, Robert C. “Kit” Murtha, built a longtime lobbying practice around clients seeking defense funds through the Appropriations Committee and became one of the top members of KSA, a lobbying firm whose contractor clients often received multimillion-dollar earmarks directed through the committee chairman.
Of course there is no relationship between Rep. John Murtha’s position and the taxpayer money collected by his relatives. Still, it is amazing how things like this just seem to happen when Capitol Hill gets involved.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Rally for School Choice in the District
Congress and the Obama administration issued a death sentence for the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program. That means more than 1,700 students could be forced out of good schools into the dangerous, failing, and expensive DC public school system.
Everyone who cares about these children and school choice should head to Freedom Plaza this coming Wednesday, May 6th from 1:00 – 2:00 pm for a rally to demonstrate support for these children and educational freedom. Hundreds of parents and children are coming to stand up and be heard, and they need all the support we can provide . . .
Arne Duncan Wins the Chutzpa Award . . .
Arne Duncan has an op-ed in the WSJ today headlined, “School Reform Means Doing What’s Best for Kids: Let’s have an honest assessment of charter schools.”
So how about an honest assessment of how the DC voucher program is doing?
I guess I won’t hold my breath, since Duncan already neglected to bring the findings to light during the debate in Congress and then he tried to bury and spin away the positive results when they did come out. And then he needlessly prevented 200 poor kids from enjoying good schools for at least next year.
President Obama and Duncan’s unwillingness to address the facts show that they have been hypocritical and dishonest on education.
I can’t say it any better than Juan Williams did:
By going along with Secretary Duncan’s plan to hollow out the D.C. voucher program this president, who has spoken so passionately about the importance of education, is playing rank politics with the education of poor children. It is an outrage . . .
This reckless dismantling of the D.C. voucher program does not bode well for arguments to come about standards in the effort to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. It does not speak well of the promise of President Obama to be the “Education President,’ who once seemed primed to stand up for all children who want to learn and especially minority children.
And its time for all of us to get outraged about this sin against our children.
Duncan: “I’m a big fan of choice and competition”
How does U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan live with what must be some of the most painful cognitive dissonance in the history of mankind? I mean how, fresh off of doing all he could to make even more untimely the untimely death of the D.C. voucher program — and opposing private school choice generally — could Duncan say this in a new Time interview:
I’m a big fan of choice and competition, and in our country, historically, wealthy families have had a lot of options as to where to send their children. And families that didn’t come from a lot of money had one option — and usually that option wasn’t a good one. The more options available, the more we give parents a chance to figure out what the best learning environment is for their child.
How could Duncan say all this great stuff about competition and maximizing choice right after what he’s done to private school choice – which maximizes options for the very poor who have typically had none – in the nation’s capital? It is simply impossible to reconcile the words and actions.
Unless, that is, the words don’t really mean what the words, to a normal person, really mean. And to Duncan — like lots of political creatures – they don’t. He offered those gushing words of love for choice and competition in response to a question about charter schools, and in continuing to answer the question went right into this:
To me it’s not about letting a thousand flowers bloom. You need to have a really high bar about whom you let open the charter school. [You need] a really rigorous front-end competitive process. If not, you just get mediocrity. Once you let them in, you need to have two things. You need to give those charter operators great autonomy — to really free them from the education bureaucracy. You have to couple that with very strong accountability.
And finally, it is clear how Duncan twistedly reconciles both killing school choice and competition, and loving school choice and competition: It is all about who is doing the choosing. If schools and potential schools have to compete for the approval of government — of the same smarter-than-thou, bureaucratic apparatchiks who have given us atrocious public schools for decades — then that’s competition Duncan can embrace. But compete based on the approval and demands of the people the schools are actually supposed to serve, the people most interested in schools performing to high standards? In other words, compete for the approval and business of parents, especially without the choices first being fully vetted and approved by parents’ government betters? Well, that just shouldn’t be any choice at all!
TLJ: Holder Advocates Some Constitutional Principles
I’m a long-time reader and fan of TechLawJournal. Dogged reporter David Carney produces an amazing amount of content about technology-related goings-on in Washington, D.C. and the courts. Subscription information is here.
I also appreciate his editorial style, which often betrays a dose of concern for civil liberties and healthy skepticism about power. A wonderful example follows, reprinted with permission:
Holder Advocates Some Constitutional Principles
Attorney General Eric Holder gave a lengthy speech at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York in which he discussed the role of law in “our current struggle against international terrorism”.It was a plea for adherence to Constitutional principles. However, it was as significant for what he said — about detention of people in places like Guantanamo Bay — as for what he did not say — about interception of communications and seizure of data.
He spoke with specificity about Guantanamo Bay, detainees, and the history of American treatment of detained soldiers and citizens.
But, he said nothing that suggested an intent to reverse, or halt, the deterioration of Constitutional protection of privacy and liberty interests in the context of new communications and information technologies.
Holder (at right) said, “And so it is today, at the beginning of a new presidency, as we face a world filled with danger, that we must once again chart a course rooted in the rule of law and grounded in both the powers and the limitations it prescribes.”
He said that “we will not sacrifice our values or trample on our Constitution under the false premise that it is the only way to protect our national security. Discarding the very values that have made us the greatest nation on earth will not make us stronger — it will make us weaker and tear at the very fibers of who we are. There simply is no tension between an effective fight against those who have sworn to do us harm, and a respect for the most honored civil liberties that have made us who we are.”
This statement could equally apply to government surveillance activities. But, he did not say so. Perhaps Holder intends to speak in a similar speech about surveillance at a later date. Or perhaps, he does not, and his concern for Constitution rights is selective and does not extend to surveillance.
He did make one statement that may pertain to electronic surveillance and data. He said that “many national security decisions must by necessity be made in a manner that protects our ability to gather intelligence, investigate threats and execute wars”.
He did not reference the state secrets privilege, or the government’s assertion of it in legal proceedings involving warrantless wiretaps.
On April 3, 2009, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a motion to dismiss and memorandum in support [36 pages in PDF] in Jewell v. NSA, a case against the NSA, DOJ, Holder and officials, arising out of the NSA’s warrantless wiretap program.
The DOJ asserts the state secrets privilege, sovereign immunity, and other arguments, to evade litigation of this case on the merits.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) stated in a release that “These are essentially the same arguments made by the Bush administration”.
This case is Carolyn Jewell, Tash Hepting, et al. v. National Security Agency, et al., U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, D.C. No. C:08-cv-4373-VRW.
Ed Black, head of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), stated in a release issued in response to Holder’s speech that “It’s disturbing that instead of helping investigate the extent of spying by the Bush administration, the new administration is not just defending those policies, but taking them a step further. In its April court brief (Jewel v. NSA), the Obama DOJ argued that the government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying and even that it can never be sued for violating federal privacy laws with surveillance techniques. Those arguments sound more like ‘1984′ than 2009.”
Black continued that “President Obama appreciates more than most people how the Internet can be used as a tool to allow greater participation in a democracy. That same tool could also be the greatest innovation for surveillance and repression in the wrong regime. Defending practices like this sets a dangerous precedent down the road and makes it easier for a government to expand the programs from surveilling terrorists to surveilling political opponents.”
“The Obama administration had the courage to change policy on the treatment of terrorism suspects and how they were treated and sometimes tortured”, said Black. “But the abuse of the privacy rights of millions of U.S. citizens is a greater long term threat to the rule of law and the Constitutional rights of all Americans. The failure to allow the full investigation of the surveillance abuse by both the government and major collaborating industry giants would be a tragic betrayal by an administration so many were looking to for greater honesty, openness, and respect for all citizens’ constitutional rights.”
Week in Review: Successful Voucher Programs, Immigration Debates and a New Path for Africa
Federal Study Supports School Vouchers
Last week, a U.S. Department of Education study revealed that students participating in a Washington D.C. voucher pilot program outperformed peers attending public schools.
According to The Washington Post, the study found that “students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school.” In a statement, education secretary Arne Duncan said that the Obama administration “does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation.”
Why then did the Obama administration “let Congress slash the jugular of DC’s school voucher program despite almost certainly having an evaluation in hand showing that students in the program did better than those who tried to get vouchers and failed?”
The answer, says Cato scholar Neal McCluskey, lies in special interests and an unwillingness to embrace change after decades of maintaining the status quo:
It is not just the awesome political power of special interests, however, that keeps the monopoly in place. As Terry Moe has found, many Americans have a deep, emotional attachment to public schooling, one likely rooted in a conviction that public schooling is essential to American unity and success. It is an inaccurate conviction — public schooling is all-too-often divisive where homogeneity does not already exist, and Americans successfully educated themselves long before “public schooling” became widespread or mandatory — but the conviction nonetheless is there. Indeed, most people acknowledge that public schooling is broken, but feel they still must love it.
Susan L. Aud and Leon Michos found the program saved the city nearly $8 million in education costs in a 2006 Cato study that examined the fiscal impact of the voucher program.
To learn more about the positive effect of school choice on poor communities around the world, join the Cato Institute on April 15 to discuss James Tooley’s new book, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.
Obama Announces New Direction on Immigration
The New York Times reports, “President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.”
In the immigration chapter of the Cato Handbook for Policymakers, Cato trade analyst Daniel T. Griswold offered suggestions on immigration policy, which include:
- Expanding current legal immigration quotas, especially for employment-based visas.
- Creating a temporary worker program for lower-skilled workers to meet long-term labor demand and reduce incentives for illegal immigration.
- Refocusing border-control resources to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country.
In a 2002 Cato Policy Analysis, Griswold made the case for allowing Mexican laborers into the United States to work.
For more on the argument for open borders, watch Jason L. Riley of The Wall Street Journal editorial board speak about his book, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders.
In Case You Couldn’t Join Us
Cato hosted a number of fascinating guests recently to speak about new books, reports and projects.
- Salon writer Glenn Greenwald discussed a new Cato study that exa
mines the successful drug decriminalization program in Portugal.
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- Dambisa Moyo, author of the book Dead Aid, spoke about her research that shows how government-to-government aid fails. She proposed an “aid-free solution” to development, based on the experience of successful African countries.
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Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics
What’s the Job of the Institute of Education Sciences?
I don’t have much to add to Andrew’s post on Russ Whitehurst’s defense of Arne Duncan. Even with what Whitehurst wrote, I simply don’t buy that Duncan didn’t know of the D.C. voucher evaluation’s results, or even its very existence, while Congress was debating the program’s fate a little over a month ago. But, unfortunately, the reality is that neither I nor anyone else will probably ever get a clear look inside the black box of who really knew what, when, in the Department of Education.
So suppose the secretary really was totally clueless. What does this say about the value of the Institute of Education Sciences, the division of the Education Department responsible for the report? IES received the evaluation results in November and released the report on April 3. Clearly, it had the results well in advance of congressional action on the program. That leaves only a few reasons why it wouldn’t have released the findings — or even something characterized as “expedited” or “preliminary” — in time to inform congressional debate:
- IES employees hadn’t sufficiently scrutinized — or perhaps even looked at — the report several months after they had received it.
- IES had scrutinized the report and couldn’t push out the results because of strict adherence to rigid bureaucratic procedures.
- For political or other reasons, IES purposely sat on the results.
None of those, quite simply, are acceptable answers given the job of IES as stated clearly on the Department of Education’s website:
The mission of IES is to provide rigorous evidence on which to ground education practice and policy.
Mission disturbingly not accomplished, IES.
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