P E Y T O N W O L C O T T |
| h o w w e t a k e b a c k o u r c h i l d r e n ' s e d u c a t i o n -- o n e p e r s o n , o n e q u e s t i o n , o n e s c h o o l a t a t i m e . Copyright 1999-2006 Peyton Wolcott |
| Modern Minutemen: Jim Fedako |
| Former professional cyclist and Peace Corps volunteer, prolific writer--and school board member Blog: http://antipositivist.blogspot.com |
| Samples of recent articles |
| Jim Fedako |
| Quality is a Market Notion by Jim Fedako [Posted on Friday, April 07, 2006] For generations, products have advertised themselves as "new and improved." We are too quick to dismiss this phrase as a promotional boilerplate. The market really does generate unrelenting improvements in our living standards. Meanwhile, the public sector is forever promising to improve its services and products but every attempt creates only conflict and eventual stalemate. For example: the proposed solution to the ills of public education is for government to raise the quality of teachers by increasing salaries and certification requirements. The belief is that a better workforce will lead to better educational outcomes and an improved economy. Of course the adjective better has no agreed upon definition. Every pressure group and political faction has its own definition of better. Mostly these disparate definitions contradict each other. Regardless, the call for better continues to grow louder each election cycle. There are perceived ills in the free market too — not ills in the same sense as discussed above, but ills in that all consumers have wants that are unmet. The argument for better can be applied to any sector of the economy. Better factors of production are always sought since acting man desires improvements in consumer goods; improvements that are reflected in increased selection and quality, as well as lower price. In this case, the adjectives better, improved, and increased can go undefined since they are subjective value judgments of each individual consumer. No one needs to define them in literal terms; the actions of consumers define those terms as ends that are either satisfied or unsatisfied. More importantly, acting man does not need government bureaucrats or commissions to codify such terms for quality. The entrepreneur knows he matched the market definitions of better, improved, and increased simply by looking at his profit-and- loss statement at the end of each accounting cycle. That better factors are not simply added to each and every recipe — the directions for producing desired goods — is explained in one simple word: scarcity. Scarce factors have to be correctly employed in the production of the most sought-after ends. Any other application leads to accounting losses and financial ruin for the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have more solutions to the unmet wants of man than capital goods. Capital goods are required in the creations of factors of production, which are themselves required in the production of consumer goods. Using resources to produce goods other than those most wanted leads to economic losses, as does using goods inefficiently to produce most-wanted goods. Consumers buying and abstaining from buying along with double entry bookkeeping provide guidance for the allocation of factors of production. The socialist utopian belief that the burden of scarcity can be lifted with the correct utilization of current capital and factors of production is still prevalent. The line of thought goes that once the altruistic and omniscient bureaucrat grabs the reigns of the economy and guides the factors to their correct application, scarcity will fade away and the Land of Cockaigne will appear on the horizon. But this is not reality. Scarcity will always be with us as long as man's desires exceed his ability to satisfy them. Of course, once scarcity is lifted, once all desires are met, society will meet the same fate as the ants in an Uncle Milton's Ant Farm: it will quickly die off. At any given point in time, each factor is limited. Successful entrepreneurs recognize this and direct scarce resources to the most pressing needs. Government, on the other hand, recognizes no concept of scarcity. It only sees one side of the equation, or only one result of its actions. Government functions counter to Hazlitt's admonition to see the unseen; to look for secondary effects of any proposed action. It's important to employ resources and factors where they will have the greatest effect. The successful entrepreneur would not use a high- quality diamond in a simple industrial process when a low- quality one would work fine. A CEO would not place his or her CFO in the company cafeteria to run the register simply because a $10 cash-versus-sales shortfall was being reported on a daily basis. To employ a highly skilled and hence scarce resource to chase the odd $10 would be wasteful and inefficient. Human qualities are indeed scarce resources. No one would suggest that Joe Paterno would be most efficiently employed as a high school junior varsity coach. Would Joe Pa be effective? Of course he would. Would it be the best use of such a quality resource? Of course not. Many less experienced coaches could achieve the same result, though those same coaches could not generate Joe Pa's lifetime college win record. The same goes with other scarce resources. Would Mises have generated the greatest bang for the buck teaching eighth grade economics? Would the resource known as Bill Gates be most efficiently employed as a ninth grade business teacher? How about Einstein as an AP physics instructor? It depends on who you ask. The socialist utopians truly believe that a Mises, a Gates, or an Einstein would be most efficiently employed in the classroom. They have no concept of scarcity of human qualities and have adopted Trotsky's vision of all men rising to the height of Goethe and beyond. A utopian's fantasies do not allow him to see the world as it is. His epistemology is invalid so his beliefs and conclusions are errant. Mises said that only a handful of any generation has the abilities to advance economic knowledge, and indeed he was correct. But to coerce the best and brightest to become primary and secondary teachers is to rob future generations of essential knowledge. The same can be said of the use of tax dollars to guide such geniuses into the primary and secondary classrooms by raising the incomes of teachers above their marginal product. The unhampered free market correctly allocates resources to their best use. Interventionism changes the allocation so that resources are applied to uses that are not beneficial to a society. Government loves to create roadblocks to entry into fields of choice. Human energy unleashed: $25 Raising teacher certification standards above that required by the desires of man simply creates shortages where none should exist. Attracting the best and brightest with too-high salaries — salaries above their marginal product — or by creating shortages (real or perceived) succeeds only in raising the cost of education; it does nothing to solve the ills of a government-run education system. Because of this, education is best left in the hands of the free market. Under a free market, the allocation of scarce human qualities and knowledge will be matched to the desires and wants of man. Public school math teachers, gym teachers, librarians, etc., would be paid exactly what they produce; no more, no less. Should the desire for knowledge garnered in a ninth grade business class exceed that of the desire for faster and cheaper personal computers, Gates would find his most remunerative employment in the classroom. Otherwise, keep the Miseses, Gateses, and Einsteins of the world out of primary and secondary classrooms, and keep government out of education. We will all be better off. |
| Believe in Government, Believe in Me by Jim Fedako www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/fedako1.html If you believe that Government provides the solutions, then you have to believe in me. As a member of an elected board of education I have been granted the power to mandate solutions to local education and health issues, real or perceived. My qualifications: I was elected to my position by receiving sufficient votes to beat enough of the other candidates. I was not elected by a majority, more like a plurality of the 25% or so residents who chose to vote in that election. Not much of a mandate, but I will take what I can get. You see, once ensconced on the board, the fact that close to 85% of the residents in my district of voting age either voted against me, or decided my election was not worth their time, carries no weight. The power vested in my position, and now in me, by Ohio state law does not depend on unanimity of support. It does not even depend on majority support. All I needed was to be the marginal vote-getter in an off-year election and the board seat was mine. Interestingly, the same folks who would never accept my omniscience as a friend, neighbor, or community member, accept my omniscience as an elected official. Of course these folks don't consciously acknowledge my omniscience, but they do subscribe to the omniscience of the governmental body, the school board in this instance. It is as if the board as a whole attains a higher plane of reason where the whole is multiples of the sum of the parts. In reality, most board members are simply parents trying to make the best decisions for their own children. Certainly they pray that they are right, but they do not subscribe to their omniscience at home, just in the board room. Based on lots of research and agonizing internal reasoning, or simply the result of my then-current whim and fancy, I get to make decisions that affect the lives and future of other’s children. All it takes is for an article in an education periodical or posting on a web site to catch my attention and I could be advocating the next nuttiness in your life. Should someone suggest that children today are overfed and under-exercised, I could be writing the new policies, procedures, and guidelines that mandate each child eat nothing but organic carrots at lunch and perform sets of jumping-jacks at their desks on the hour, every hour. Sound far-fetched? Well, it’s not. Every crazy idea has both advocates and enablers. The advocates push the issue while the enablers nod their collective heads in approval. It really does not matter if the enablers truly agree with the advocates since the enablers will never call the advocates into question. The lovers of Liberty try to make a stand but find their voices lost in the sea of feel-good, collective consensus-building. The crazy idea then ends up before the board and I get to decide. Will whim and fancy, or research and reason, be my guide? You never can really tell. So I get to decide on the issue while you get to fear the results as the occasional band of roaming morons spray paint SUVs, demand that KFC play Mozart in their slaughterhouses – yes, the chicken we eat must be slaughtered somewhere, and protest McDonalds and Wal-Mart as evil incarnate. These are products of a system that I get to run based on my world-view, or the world- view that piques my interest at any given time. And I get to change with the winds, not so much based on political pressures, but based on the ideas or ideals that I believe today that all children must believe tomorrow. As my views flutter in the wind, new advocates arrive on the scene and the increase of crazy ideas reaches hurricane speeds while the enablers bob their heads in accelerating unison. The problem is that local government is simply comprised of friends, neighbors, community members, who you generally appreciate but whose views on very personal matters, such as parenting, are not always the same as yours; just as you do not always agree with the parental decisions of those closest to you – your parents and siblings. In fact, one of the easiest ways to end a family reunion in anger is to begin telling siblings how to raise their children. In addition, even if I possessed the latest research on education and had advanced reasoning skills, as an elected official, a member of government, the best I can offer is my opinions and beliefs, and I am wrong more often than right. Education research is based on standards that can never match consumer desires, and all opinions and beliefs of that research are nothing more than an individual’s bias. Without a free market and real consumers driving the education system, expect waste and inefficiencies; failures. But give us, your school boards, power and we will decide; we will indoctrinate as we see fit, based on our own biases or those biases fed to us by educationist organizations. But society must allow parents to raise and indoctrinate their children as they see fit, not as the unionized wing of government sees fit. Thomas Jefferson believed that it was far better to suffer the occasional fool than to create a school system that offends fathers, and mothers. I assume that the majority of parents would opt for their own decision- making skills if pushed to decide, but I may be wrong. Why do so many people have such little faith in their own parenting, and their neighbors' parenting, that they truly believe that without a unionized labor force inculcating children, nothing of value will ever be learned? Are we really at the point where the future of civilization is in the hands of the public school education monopoly? Maybe preschool should start right after birth so that parents have no adverse influence on their children. And, why do residents feel that I can make the decisions for their children that they would not allow to be made by members of their own family? The answer is that they have accepted collectivism in the form of government as the solution. Whereas our forebears rebelled against such paternalism – or do-gooder nanny-ism – the current generations have come to accept government in all facets of their lives. We allow the schools to dictate our children’s future and simply assume that the schools are always rights. We allow the local health department and schools to decide what goes in our children’s lunch boxes and accept that mandate as correct. How in the world did my election to the board cloak me in the cape of omniscience and allow me to be more enlightened than regular folks? Karl Marx and the other socialists and communists saw little need for the family and other institutions; they believed that they knew better. Gramsci, the Italian socialist, believed that socialism would win in the end if it based its means on a strategy of long-term goals; a Fabian approach. Why fight in the streets when the damage can be done by destroying families and institutions? In many ways, we have allowed socialist collectivism to be the main outcome of public education. The schools create the environment that nurtures the advocate and encourages the complacency of the enabler. It is really no wonder that the collective body, the school board, is assumed to be omniscient while the individual board member, in his non-board role, is simply considered one in the crowd. Don't simply sit back and be a silent enabler, stand for freedom against the aggressions of the advocator. And remember, if this is so, that the schools and all other local governments are always right, that simply means that I am always right. And even I do not agree with that. |
| Background, in Jim's own words I have been in the computer field for 15 years, plus one year public school teaching in south Texas (Harlingen CISD) and another year teaching in Jamaica with the US Peace Corps, and I am a former professional cyclist. I am currently serving in my seventh year on the Olentangy Local School Board, Delaware County, Ohio. Shelly, my wife of 17 years, and I have four home-schooled children. I have always run on the platform: education, accountability and community. I am a strong proponent of all three. Lately, the main issue has been community, specifically the rights of parents with regard to their own children's education. Parents, and community in general, continue to get pushed out of the educational process by staff members. These staff members believe that they are more capable in guiding children than the children's own parents. I bristle at that belief. |
| About Ludwig von Mises Von Mises, who died in 1973, was a forceful proponent of the free market and Liberty. He was a product of the Austrian School of Economics, a school of economics founded on the belief that private property rights allows individuals to form a well-ordered society. Government should exist for the sole purpose of protecting property, and any governmental intervention outside of this leads to a less-ordered society. The Mises Institute (www.mises.org) was created to further the works of Mises and his protege, Murray Rothbard. Mises was a believer in logic as the basis for economics. He built his system of economics on the foundation of individuals acting based on their own subjective preferences, each human is an individual that has wants and desires different from any other human. That idea stands opposite the current fashion of economics built on statistical correlations -- the positivist or empirical view. Mises conclusions lead to the knowledge that inflation is the result of governments creating money or extending credit. The positivist or empirical view simply analyzes data and arrives at incorrect conclusions. In this case, the conclusion that inflation is simply the result of consumer demand. The two conclusions lead to drastically different solutions. Mises said government needs to stay out of the economy while the other side said more interventions are required. That last 100 years has shown who is right, and who is wrong, as each new government intervention creates new and worse problems. |
| Comments heard along the way (with responses) "Lovely Bones is a work of literature." The supporter of some of the books on Olentangy Liberty's mandatory reading lists claim that the books are true works of literature. If those books are works literature, so is this blog, along with every keystroke and pencil scratch that I have every made. "They are on the New York Times Best-Seller List!" So what. They are not on any college's list of expected readings for in-coming freshmen - at least no list I have every seen. "It's censorship." No, it's selecting a list of appropriate books. As the woman in the June 30, 2006 Dispatch article notes, she is making Lovely Bones available to her family members. That is still her right and privilege. You can still borrow the book at district libraries and all county libraries, and the book is available at Wal-Mart and Barnes and Nobles, etc. That's a very strange application of the concept of government censorship, and a very weak understanding of the First Amendment - as written and intended, not as applied by activist courts. "A few pushy parents are getting too involved in the schools." State law in Ohio dictates that parents are stakeholders and thus equal partners in the school system, though some staff see otherwise. Some parents who complained in the past were harangued and insulted when they wanted less-offensive selections added to required reading lists. Now parents have banded together and are demanding to be heard; that is their right. "Stop being such a religious fanatic and get a life." Not a very nice way to greet your customers, but it is a very powerful way to get parents to back-off from demanding to be involved in their children's education. Keep in mind that a government-run monopoly will never accept its community as an equal partner. "Our staff knows best." Really, and this is the reading list they created. Aren't students supposed to be reading the books that will prepare them for college? It would appear from the mandatory list that students are supposed to be reading the top ten list from Oprah and NYT. As one commentator noted, "It is as if some teachers and librarians are working to ban the classics." "Kids should read these books as they are very interesting." Ok, go ahead and borrow or buy the books and give them to your own children, just don't force them on other's children. Remember, the flip-side of censorship is indoctrination. The supporters of this list can have their own children read the books, but that is never enough. They DEMAND that your children read them also. In fact, staff has stated that the reason they don't like parental permission slips for controversial - vile - materials and presentations is that "the parents who say no are the ones whose children really need to view/read the materials." Huh? What makes a unionized labor force, and tax-supported administration, believe they have the right to overrule you in such personal matters? The cry of "censorship" always follows the drive to stop indoctrination. (If you want to see the heart of the indoctrination efforts, check back later for updates from the platform debates from the NEA annual convention courtesy of Mike Antonucci of the The Education Intelligence Agency.) Besides the error correction noted in the July 1, 2006 edition of the Dispatch, another error is the claim that this is simply an issue for one Christian parent. In fact, this is an issue for 70 to 100 parents initially involved, a true cross-section of our community, whose children were effected by the list. The list of concerned parents continues to grow. Who knows what is best for your children? You, the parent, or someone else? I believe it's you, others do not. They are not concerned about their own children's minds, they are concerned about your child's mind. And that concerns me. note: Some say I'm too critical of all teachers. I would agree if only a few would stand up to this nonsense and be heard. As none have now or in the past, I have no option other than to consider these issues fully supported by the staff. Please, somebody, prove me wrong! |
How we take back our children's education: one person, one question, one school at a time. |
AASA - American Association of School Administrators ASA - Association of School Administrators CSD - Consolidated School District DOE - Department of Education ES - Elementary School HS - High School ISD - Independent School District JHS - Junior High School MS - Middle School MSM - Mainstream media NSBA - National School Boards Association NSPRA - National School Public Relations Association PS - Public School(s) SBEC - State Board for Educator Certification SD - School District Sup't - Superintendent TAKS - Texas Assessment of Knowledge & Skills TASA - Texas Association of School Administrators TASB - Texas Association of School Boards TASBO - Texas Association of School Business Officials TEA - Texas Education Agency TEKS - Texas Essential Knowledge & Skills USD - UnifiedUnited School District |
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Separatists in India's north-eastern state of Manipur have shot six male teachers in the leg for allegedly helping students cheat in exams. Two women teachers were beaten with sticks for the same offence, the rebels of the Kanglei Yana Kan Lup group said. The teachers were abducted from their homes after an exam on Thursday. The rebels said the teachers took up to 5,000 rupees ($110) for helping students cheat and warned of further punishment if the cheating continued. The Kanglei Yana Kan Lup (KYKL) is one of many separatist groups fighting Indian administration in Manipur. It said it abducted the eight teachers from their homes in and around the state capital, Imphal, because of reports they had taken bribes. --By Subir Bhaumik - BBC |
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