Winters’ Content Standards — Can they Work?
Marcus Winters offers a clever new national standards proposal in the current Education Week: reward states whose students do well on their own standards _and_ whose standards prove challenging to students from other states. Winters suggests administering each state’s standardized tests to random, nationally representative samples of students to determine how challenging they are. The federal government would then give the greatest amount of funding to states whose students perform well on tests that prove challenging to kids around the country.
This system would be gamed. The way to “win” would be to develop highly detailed, easy, obscure standards. Literature would consist of detailed analysis of the early works of Nathanial Hawthorne, math would focus on theorems not normally covered but not overly challenging, history would focus on seldom-told tales of the host state or the nation or world. The host state would then teach intensely to these specialized standards, knowing that its own students could master them and students in other states — receiving a completely different curriculum — would perform poorly. It would be neither a “race to the top” nor a “race to the bottom,” but rather a “race to the trivial.”
This proposal also suffers the same problem that a single set of national standards would suffer: it would force all students of a given age to march through their state’s curriculum at the same pace, denying the obvious reality that kids of the same age learn the various subjects at different paces. Shackling them together into a scholastic chain-gang is not sound pedagogy.
What is encouraging about this proposal, though, is that it attempts to marshal both competition and incentives in pursuit of improved performance. Clearly, it’s on the right track. But why reinvent the wheel? We already HAVE a system that has proven, over centuries, to be able to effectively combine competition, freedom, and incentives in pursuit of innovation and excellence: the free enterprise system.
School systems organized along free market lines dramatically outperform all others – especially those which are most closely overseen, and run, by the state. We just need to figure out how to bring a free and competitive education marketplace within reach of all students.
Soaring Sales for “Road to Serfdom”
Cato’s new staff writer, Aaron Powell, told me he had recently seen two people on the Washington Metro reading The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek. That prompted me to check the sales figures for Road to Serfdom at Nielsen’s Bookscan. And whattaya know? Sales have increased this year at an even faster pace than sales of Atlas Shrugged. (Atlas sells 10 times as many copies, but the percentage increase over last year is less.)
So far this year the most popular edition of Road to Serfdom has sold 11,000 copies. That compares with 3,000 copies at the same point last year. That’s a 263 percent increase for those of you keeping score at home.
Why? Well, no doubt huge new government spending programs and attempts to massively expand the welfare state send people looking for classic literature that makes the case for liberty and limited government. But what the Marxists call the “objective conditions” can always use a bit of help. And indeed, just as I found in investigating the sales bump for Atlas Shrugged, it looks like an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was instrumental in boosting the sales of The Road to Serfdom.
On February 4, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, now chairman of Freedomworks, published an op-ed in the Journal titled “Washington Could Use Less Keynes and More Hayek.” Sales of Road to Serfdom, which were in the low hundreds each week since the beginning of 2009, more than doubled over the next four weeks. It seems likely that Armey’s op-ed caused the new interest.
Armey didn’t actually mention The Road to Serfdom — he just talked about Hayek and his ideas generally — but when you go looking for Hayek, you’re going to find his most popular book. So maybe we could attribute the sales bump instead to David Henderson’s review of The Road to Serfdom — titled “Still Relevant–Perhaps More So” — in the Spring issue of Regulation. But the Wall Street Journal does have a larger circulation.
Update: This item has been edited to remove proprietary information.
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