Boston Commons

Figures from the Massachusetts department of education show that state charter schools are enrolling large numbers of low-income students.

Of the 20 school districts with the biggest percentages of poor children, 11 are charter schools, according to 2002 figures from the DOE. (Though smaller than most school systems, the state's 42 charter schools are counted as school districts.) In some cases, the numbers show the charter schools have higher percentages of low-income children than their home school system.

Despite serving low-income children, today's Boston Globe charged charter schools with a familiar accusation: "According to 2000-01 state figures, only eight of the 40 charter schools operating that year had the same or more special-education students than the school systems in which they're located."

Considering the percentage of special education students that are over-identified and mislabeled as special education, perhaps a lower special-education count in charter schools should be celebrated. Maybe charter schools actually teach students to read rather than labeling them as special education. They also have a higher rate of students who used to be labeled as special-education, who were able to move out of a disability category, after they made substantial progress.

Monopoly Buster?

Is it just me or am I the only one that finds it ironic that the lead federal prosecutor in the Microsoft antitrust case will now be running New York city schools. You think Joel Klein will turn his monopoly busting, merger-preventing tactics on the New york city schools. Don't count on it.

Reading Failure in Chicago

The problem may be more acute in Chicago but it is representative of special education nationwide.

Special education students in Chicago are concentrated in some of the poorest, lowest-performing public high schools, putting increased burdens on already-stressed schools, a series of reports released today say.

In 11 neighborhood schools, all on academic probation, as many as 38 percent of the students were in special education in 2000, while as few as 3 percent were in special education at some selective-enrollment and charter schools.

Two reasons these poor schools have such a high rate of special-education classification.

1. Special education covers instructional failure. As Schools CEO Arne Duncan explains to the Chicago Sun-Times, "The real answer lies in reducing the number of special education students by improving reading instruction in elementary schools. That population is dominated by learning-disabled students who are slow readers."

2. Reading failure by low-income kids draws in funds from special education and Title I. These Chicago kids offer more proof to the “twofer” funding notion. As long as these kids draw in more money from two large federal programs for reading failure--where is the incentive to fix the problem?

This special education population in Chicago has grown from around 11 percent classified as special education in 1993 to close to 38 percent in some Chicago schools today. Incentives matter. If you make slow readers disabled and then reward schools for that reading failure, it shouldn't be surprising that this population continues to grow.

What I can’t understand is how these schools continually say that these extra special education kids represent a strain on resources. Every labeled kid brings in extra resources over and above that kids per-pupil allotment. The “overburdened” schools admit that they are not serving these kids with extra resources and that they have special-education teacher shortages. So if the money is not paying special-ed teachers or buying more resources—where is it going? Most articles about special education read the same: more special education students continue to burden public schools that lack resources. I’d really like to know where the extra Title I and special education money is going. It defies logic.

Charter School Diversity

I love the charter school movement most for the variety of schools it produces and the alternatives it offers students over standard classroom education.

YouthBuild St. Louis Charter High School offers kids a chance to earn a high school diploma and learn the construction trade.

With at least one-third of St. Louis's 80,000 construction workers expected to retire in the next five years, YouthBuild St. Louis Charter High School is venturing to bridge the gap.

The school was approved in March by the Missouri Board of Education and will be sponsored by the St. Louis Public Schools.

The school, at 1919 South Broadway in the Soulard area, will be an extension of the YouthBuild St. Louis program that has operated here since 1992. Unlike in the past, when the program has offered only a high school equivalency certificate, the new students will earn a high school diploma if they meet the standards.

The St. Louis school is one of two similar charter schools opening in the area this fall. In East St. Louis, the Tomorrow's Builders Charter School will open by mid-September.

Nationwide, the YouthBuild USA organization has helped dropouts and high school students at risk of dropping out in 42 states to earn their high school credentials and move on to construction careers.

The 21st Century Charter School in Indianapolis has defied convention by hiring veteran teachers with more than 20 years experience and has partnered with the Irvington Music Academy:

The Irvington Academy will conduct its classes almost exclusively at 21st Century, which is building music studios as part of the renovation necessary to prepare the former train depot and retail center for use as a school. The fine arts academy also will have a satellite office in the school and plans to offer evening classes open to the public.

A rotating cast of instructors will be at 21st Century every day from 12:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. Topics covered will include basic music and art, in addition to enrichment classes focusing on dance, music, drama and visual arts.

IAFA also plans to offer individual music lessons to students. Hayden said the school is trying to raise $15,000 so every student can take advantage of the lessons at no cost.

The strength of many charter schools is the ability to contract with other community groups for very specific services like music or art--rather than reinventing every enrichment program at the school level.

Local Vouchers

While state-based voucher initiatives may involve too many stakeholders and be difficult to sell, look for more local efforts to pass vouchers. In Camden, New Jersey the city council voted unanimously to ask the state legislature to implement a $6,000 voucher program for the city's 18,000 children.

Celebrity Schoolbuilders

It's not every day that People discusses an actor who supports a pro-privatization school position:

He's handsome. He's funny. He's sexy. So, obviously, you can guess what actor John Cusack is into big-time: pushing private, tax-exempt bonds to build three new public schools in New York City. Okay, so it's not a typical cause celebre. Cusack, 36, attends board meetings of the Schoolhouse Foundation, schmoozes backers and helps cover the group's administrative costs. Scoop asked, Why?

What's your motivation?

I've gotten to the point where I've made some money, I've got a pretty good career, I'm going to continue to make films. What else am I going to do with this celebrity? It feels nice to be able to use it for something other than my own personal career goals.

From the Schoolhouse Foundation website:

The Schoolhouse Foundation is a not-for-profit corporation developed to implement an alternative and cost effective mechanism to address this problem. The Schoolhouse Foundation, in partnership with JP Morgan Chase, will finance the costs of school construction by issuing tax-exempt bonds, the debt service for which will be payable from the rental payments on the lease. After the bonds are paid, the Foundation will lease the property back to the City for $1 year. The Schoolhouse Foundation plans to employ an alternative not-for-profit private sector development model under which new facilities can be financed at attractive rates without impact on the City's debt position. This model also takes advantage of the private sector's ability to expedite site selection and implement best of breed design materials and methods.

Reinventing Economics

Joanne Jacobs has an excellent column at TechCentral Station on teachers who do not understand economics who then teach kids anti-economics.

It's a challenge to reach teachers who are ideologically unprepared to appreciate the market. Teachers do not work in enterprises where it's necessary to satisfy the customer or go out of business. They belong to a powerful union, which sees for-profit as synonymous with for-evil. Every business is Enron. Like biblical literalists who want to teach creationism in biology class, liberal teachers want to teach social justice in lieu of supply and demand.

"What if I don't believe in GDP?" a teacher asked.

Taylor sighs at the memory. "That's a toughie. I can discuss why GDP is a partial measure of social welfare. A lot of teachers at a gut level just don't believe this."

When he introduced the idea that a high minimum wage creates unemployment, a teacher said: "I just don't like to think of it that way."

"Well, OK, says Taylor. "It's a free country. But if you¹re going to teach economics, you have to think about it."

The question is whether teachers will teach economics. "There's a real danger of anti-economics," says Taylor. An unprepared physics teacher may not teach very well, but she's not trying to change physics to fit her preferences. "She doesn't say, 'We're going to invent perpetual motion today'."

AEPP in Philly

I am in Philadelphia for the Association of Education Practitioners and Providers (AEPP) annual conference, which starts Thursday. There should be about four hundred participants representing education companies ranging from mom and pop tutoring companies to Edison, Sylvan Learning, and The University of Phoenix. This year Jack Clegg, Nobel Learning Communities and AEPP's new president, sponsors the conference at the University of Pennsylvania. The conference has a huge variety of panels. I am chairing a panel on special education contracting and I am looking forward to the panels on the Philadelphia experiment.

I plan on devoting some quality time to fresh content this week from the Hotel Windsor in Philly.

Why?

David Kirkpatrick from schoolreformers.com asks the questions that are never asked about the public education establishment.

Here's some sample questions:

WHY, if the process is valid, is certification required for those who teach in the public schools but not for the education professors who teach others to teach in the public schools?

WHY does schooling require more certification credentials than any other profession -- to teach at the elementary level, to teach at the secondary level, to be an elementary school principal, to be a secondary school principal, to be a superintendent, ad infinitum?

WHY do so many educators complain about excessive government regulation (about which they are right) but oppose any attempts to enact meaningful deregulation of the system?

WHY do opponents still claim vouchers are unconstitutional after the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled otherwise? Had they won their case would they accept choice supporters saying the Court is wrong?

WHY does the American Civil Liberties Union oppose school choice, when that same 1925 U.S. Supreme Court decision said parental right to determine a child's education is a civil liberty?

Full Funding

The National Governor's Association (NGA) has called for Congress to fully fund special education. Despite the President's Commission on Special Education’s recent report that points out that the 40 percent funding commitment from the federal government was an arbitrary percentage of special education funding. "There is no scientific or particular public policy basis for defining full funding of the federal portion of special education at 40 percent of average per-pupil expenditure," the commission found. According to the commission's executive director Tom Jones, "It is an arbitrary number that is a proxy for the excess cost of special education, (but it) is no more related to average per-pupil expenditure than it is to the proportion of children named Fred."

What the president’s commission really wants states to do is evaluate their true special education costs. The commission wants special education funding increases to be tied to increased accountability and positive outcomes for special education students.

Unfortunately, rethinking special education funding has been roundly denounced from all corners. From the NGA to both houses of Congress, it appears that "full-funding" of IDEA is a done deal.

The Senate plan calls for a 2.5 billion annual increase in Individuals with Disabilities Education Act appropriations, resulting in full funding - or 40 percent of the excess costs of educating special needs children - in six years. The House Republican plan calls for full funding of IDEA in 10 years, including annual increases of just over 1 billion through FY07.

Even the teachers' unions are calling Republican support for full-funding a break through.

My prediction: More federal money will not lead to individual schools actually having more of their special education costs covered--those costs will continue to grow. Instead, more funding will continue to drive special-education over-identification as the financial incentive to expand special-ed grows by a guaranteed amount every year. Incentives matter. And large predictable funding increases will be a huge incentive for growth.

Union Grievances

Good to see that unions continue to protect their members by defending their legitimate grievances.

At issue is landscaping at Roadoan Elementary School done by volunteers and a local company to honor 8-year-old Matthew Barrick, who died in February of a brain aneurysm. The work extended to the grounds of Brooklyn High School.

Hennings and Scott, members of the Brooklyn Classified Employees union, filed a grievance in May because they would normally do such work.

Their supervisor, business manager James Daugherty, rejected the grievance, and an appeal to Superintendent James Garber also failed. The union's position is that the district cut landscaping positions, saying they were not needed, then used volunteers. It maintains that the work by the outside landscaper exceeded the scope of a memorial for Barrick.

Twofers

In Indiana enrollment in special education rose 72 percent over the last twenty years, while general enrollment fell by less than 1 percent. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, for example, almost 70 percent of black students classified with mild mental disability were also in the free-lunch program.

No big surprise here. The analysis concludes that there is a tendency to place children in special education because there are no other options for extra services for these kids. The article neglects to mention a more obvious reason for over-identification. These kids represent a twofer for state and federal dollars. They receive both special education dollars and extra Title I dollars based on their free-lunch status. There are no federal exclusion rules that prevent students from being counted in more than one funding stream. Yet, only one marginal intervention, like a few minutes of extra reading instruction, can satisfy both federal programs. In essence, these kids pull in double funding with few extra instructional services in exchange for the money.

Indifference

As Daryl Cobranchi says, "there are some schools where, apparently, no one cares."

This New York Times editorial is heartbreaking.

I had reason to be worried about this boy. His foster mother said he cried every day before he left for school and begged not to go. She also said he wasn't doing well and that other kids were picking on him.

With that in mind, I met with his teacher last month. She teaches the most advanced section of first grade at the central Harlem elementary school where the boy is a student. She told me the boy was functioning at a pre-kindergarten level. Unlike the other kids in the class, he couldn't read, write or do simple arithmetic. Since early September, when he entered her class, he hadn't completed even one homework assignment. When he wrote his name, hardly anyone could read it.

Why was this boy in the most advanced class? His teacher told me that when he enrolled in school last fall, a few days late, there was more room for him in her class than in the other first-grade classes. For 10 months, she had handed back the boy's assignments as incomplete — or with a little frown scrawled at the top of the page.

I was stunned. The boy had been sitting in class since September not knowing what was going on. When a little boy is having as hard a time as he was, the teacher or the guidance counselor should have him evaluated so he can be helped. If he had been tested last September and found to be eligible for special education classes, he would have received the special education to which he is legally entitled. Or at least he could have been assigned to a teacher who knew how to teach him to read — and he would not have spent six hours a day, five days a week, for 10 months, being ignored.

Choice and Segregation

Matthew Ladner from Children First America has released a new study on school choice and racial integration. Mathew offers up-to-date information on Michigan’s schools-of choice program.

He explains that "no student, minority or otherwise, has ever transferred into the Detroit public school (DPS) system and that the percentage of white students in DPS has declined from 5.7 percent in 1996 to 4.2 percent in 2000.” This continues a decade long trend of white flight from Detroit schools. “On the other hand, thousands of students have used the schools of choice program to transfer out of the Detroit Public Schools.” During 1999-2000 10,343 students transferred out of DPS. His larger point is that discussions over choice and integration ignore the fact that many school systems are already incredibly segregated. And it is not only different schools that are segregated; sometimes segregation occurs within an individual school.

In third grade my younger sister’s daughter Crystallynn, who was the best reader in her class, for some reason decided to decline to participate in the Sat-9. Later she couldn’t tell anyone why she didn’t answer the test questions. Her teacher almost cried and had a conference with her mom about her behavior. Although Crystallynn received high grades in her class, the next year she was tracked into a different kind of class that my sister and other parents called the “minority class.” Supposedly, this class had all of the lower-achieving Sat-9 students in it. According to Linda and other parents—the less effective fourth grade teacher, who was not as strong on discipline, was also teaching the class. My sister demanded that Crystallynn be transferred into the supposedly higher-performing class with her other friends from the year before. This year Crystallynn took her school tests more seriously and scored high on her 4th grade tests. She has now been accepted to a fine arts magnet program at a different school. Joanne Jacobs recently noted that kids get “tracked” based on their academic performance. She says "stop picking winners in the second grade." My sister’s experience suggests that both public-school tracking and racial segregation are occurring in public schools.

Meaningful Public School Choice

Recent news reports show that superintendents and principals nationwide are resisting the implementation of meaningful public school choice that is called for in the No Child Left Behind Act. School districts are setting very restrictive conditions on when and where parents in the 8,600 failing schools can exercise school choice.

Case in point in today’s Baltimore Sun:

Baltimore school officials said yesterday they will offer 194 places this year for 30,000 students who are in schools designated as low-performing and are eligible to transfer to a better school.

The city, like other school districts around the nation, is required to give parents whose children are in schools that have been classified as "failing" the choice of moving them to another school or providing extra help, such as tutoring after school, on Saturday or with a private company.

The school choice option is being offered for the second year, but this is the first time the federal government has required school districts to provide transportation for students to get to their new schools.

So few spaces are available, according to Chief Academic Officer Cassandra Jones, because schools that the city designated to accept the students were nearly full.

School officials also pointed out that only 22 students took advantage of the option last year. If more than 194 students apply for a transfer, the city school system will randomly select students Aug. 8 and parents will be notified Aug. 12.

Baltimore school officials limited the number of transfers, they said, because they designated only 11 elementary schools -- and no middle schools -- as schools that could receive transfers. Jones said the system decided that only schools that had improved over the past two years, had a combined score of 40 or above on the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program and had space for more students could accept transfers.

Similarly, in a recent Washington Post column, Richard Kahlenberg describes efforts to subvert public school choice in Maryland.

In May county school officials grudgingly announced a plan to implement the No Child Left Behind Act by paying transportation costs for as many as 800 elementary school students to transfer from low-performing, low-income schools to higher-performing public schools. Under Montgomery's program, 10 schools that were failing to meet state standards were paired with 10 high-performing schools chosen because they have extra space and are located nearby. For example, students at Rosemont Elementary in Gaithersburg (which ranked 591st out of 834 elementary schools in the state on standardized tests) could transfer to Cold Spring Elementary in Potomac (which ranked 10th). To prevent "creaming," federal guidelines required that low-income and low-performing students be given priority to transfer.

When the program first was announced, some middle class parents in receiving schools appeared nervous about the prospect of their children rubbing shoulders with low-income children, but school officials put on the full court press to discourage student transfers. During the application period, school spokesman Brian Porter told the Potomac Gazette, "If we had our druthers, we would not be doing this program. We're doing everything possible to keep the families at their home schools." In school literature on the transfer program, officials emphasized that students who stay in their "home school" receive extra benefits, such as full day kindergarten and smaller class size in the early grades, which are not available in higher-performing schools.

These examples mirror public school-choice restrictions nationwide. Restrictions include claims that all schools are too crowded, short windows of opportunity for parents to exercise choice (1-3 weeks per year), and outright restrictions on which schools can participate in public school-choice programs.

Restricting school choice to only higher-performing schools may also be detrimental to the point of public school choice. Real public choice would allow the poor-performing schools to compete with better performing schools. For example, perhaps parents in higher-performing schools might like to take advantage of all-day kindergarten programs in the lower-performing schools. The only way to give parents true public school choice is to actually open up all public schools in a geographic region until the point they are filled to capacity. If there are waiting lists at the individual school level—these can be decided by lottery for that particular school—just like is common with waiting lists for charter schools.

And by limiting school choice to higher-performing schools, districts will take away the primary incentive for poor performing schools to change their behavior. If these schools are going to lose the students anyway—there is less of a reason to work towards better school-level performance.

Michigan’s “Schools of Choice,” program offers a useful example of how poorer-performing schools change their behavior when they are faced with competition from higher-performing schools. Low-performing schools in Detroit have been forced to rethink their programs and curriculum in order to retain students and attract new students. If the low-performing schools were barred from Michigan’s open-enrollment program, they would have had less of an incentive to improve their schools. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has extensive coverage of Michigan’s schools-of-choice program.

The bottom line is that for public school choice to be meaningful, school districts must offer parents the most public school choices possible. Unfortunately, recent school district behavior makes this interpretation of the No Child Left Behind Act’s school choice provision seem unlikely.

Blaine Amendments

State constitutions in 47 states still restrict state legislatures from approving voucher money for "sectarian" private schools under a provision known as the Blaine Amendment. After the Blaine Amendment -- which sought to prevent public money from falling into the hands of private Catholic schools -- failed in Congress in 1875, many states simply amended their own constitutions to adopt the language.

Compulsory Preschools

My friend Darcy Olsen, President of the Goldwater Institute, takes on the push for European style compulsory preschool in Arizona and nationwide.

It's the pits. Arizona's preschool and day care system is loosely regulated and chronically underfunded. We need a state board for school readiness to plan, coordinate and administer the system.

Or so a handful of self-professed child advocates argue.

The truth is that children's scores have been climbing steadily upward on tests of IQ and kindergarten readiness for generations. U.S. Department of Education data show most pre-kindergartners now have the social and academic building blocks for achievement. Ninety-four percent recognize numbers and shapes and can count to 10. Ninety-two percent are eager to learn, and all but 3 percent are healthy.

Some people still insist that we copy Europe's state-run system. "It's staggering how far ahead European countries are in investing in this type of education," said a Committee for Economic Development spokesman in a recent Arizona Republic story.

Are preschoolers in Europe really better off? In France and Spain, 90 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds attend preschool. Yet by age 9, the earliest age for which comparison data are available, American children outperform those students and nearly all of their European counterparts on reading, math and science tests.

Who should be copying whom?

And this article questions whether France's policy of providing state education from age 2 yields positive benefits.

Florida Voucher Tests

Via Homeschooling Revolution

Jeb Bush clarifies whether Florida voucher students must participate in state testing.

Opportunity scholarship students must take the FCAT grades 3-10. The information on the test goes only to the parent and is not published. Private schools are not graded. The majority of students in private school are using the McKay scholarship. They don't have to take the test. The corporate tax credit students don't have to take the test either.

Jeb Bush

Michael has a bad mother

Vodkapundit questions the argument in today's Washington Post piece against vouchers because some kids (in this case Michael) have bad parents.

That’s right – parents who care enough to want their kids to do better shouldn’t be allowed to, because other parents won’t get that involved.

Therefore, everyone should suffer through the status quo and nothing should ever change. The point that strikes me about this Washington Post column is that Michael's life is really bad with or without vouchers. The author should have at least made a stronger argument that the current public school system is helping Michael and that Michael would somehow be more at risk if vouchers took resources away from the public school. However, she can't because this child's life can't be improved using the public school system--with or without school vouchers.

And this WAPO column ignores the mounting evidence from places like Milwaukee and Edgewood, Texas that competition from vouchers have made the public schools much more competitive. Whether it's charter schools in Phoenix or public school choice in Detroit--in every case the quality of the public schools abandoned by the fleeing students is going up not down.

Boys Club

Nationwide boys are twice as likely to be placed in special education according to a new Boston Globe analysis.

The more subjective the diagnosis of the student, the wider the gender gap, records show. In Massachusetts schools, boys are slightly more likely than girls to be identified with hearing or vision problems, and 11/2 times as likely to be retarded. But boys are twice as likely to be labeled with a learning disability, and more than three times as likely to be called emotionally disturbed.

Overall, 1.9 million girls and 3.8 million boys were classified as special education in 2000, according to numbers compiled by the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

Miami Vouchers

Miami-Dade officials said at least 68 students from five Miami inner-city schools filed for vouchers as of the Monday deadline. The Florida Department of Education had a higher count -- 92 -- who called its voucher hot line and said they wanted to attend one of the program's 35 participating private schools, the majority with a religious affiliation.

The district said 208 of the 4,585 eligible students -- less than 5 percent -- decided to leave the five schools, which last month received their second F in four years on the state accountability grades. Of those, 140 -- double the number of voucher students -- chose to transfer to better-performing public schools in their local areas.

What the Miami-Herald fails to explain is the short timeline that parents had to apply for vouchers or public-school transfers. The school grades were released in early June. Then parents were notified of their eligibility for vouchers by mail. Parents had about 10 days to meet the school-voucher deadline. I'm surprised that even 200 parents were able to get it together in such a short window of opportunity.

California Dreaming

1009 California schools have failed to meet state academic standards for two consecutive years. Parents of students who attend these schools will now have the option, under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, to choose and attend a higher-performing school in their district.

Joanne Jacobs points out that in most places this public school choice is meaningless. "In most districts, the good schools have no empty seats. The kids will remain stuck -- unless they get vouchers sufficient to pay private school tuition or new charter schools are created."

Schools in California are notorious for rejecting school transfers due to overcrowding.

There are more than 8,000 schools nationwide that have been designated as failures. One important caveat about the "number" of failing schools in each state is that state criteria for what constitutes a failing school is not equivalent. It depends on what each state counts as "adequate yearly progress." There is a wide variation in state standards for improvement. If a state has a low number of failing schools--it might be more of a reflection of low standards than high-performance by that state's schools. An analysis of the definition of failing schools on a state-by-state basis would give a more accurate picture of which states are being truthful about their school failure rates. It is possible that a failing school in one state might be a low to moderate performing school in another state.

Michigan, with 1,500 failing schools, might be a case in point.

"I don't think we're ashamed of the number," T.J. Bucholz, spokesman for the state Department of Education told the Lansing State Journal. Bucholz says the numbers are due to the state's tough academic standards.

Joanne Jacobs Rules

Joanne Jacobs is keeping track of all the voucher buzz and much more. She links to a great Moira Breene take down of a New York Times school voucher editorial.

I really don't know where to begin or end with this, but I'm curious to know what kind of education the author thinks "the Constitution intended" public tax money to underwrite. He or she later makes the argument that public schools have a claim on the resources, good students, and involved parents that the voucher system will siphon away, so obviously it's not the limitation in choice of types of non-public schools that's the real issue here. Since the public schools in question were failing long before vouchers could provide this escape siphon, one concludes that this editorializer believes that "the Constitution intends" that public tax money should underwrite failing public schools.

And I particularly liked her point about the classic argument that only involved low-income parents will take advantage of school choice:

You knew you weren't going to get out without having to listen to this particular argument, which I already commented on above. Put aside for the moment the highly questionable "it's all about money" line. I've heard many variations of the above, and the really ugly thing about them all is the insistence that ambitious low-income parents must be made to sacrifice their children's chance at an education and a future to somebody else's troubled or neglected children, or somebody else's ideology. I'm sure you've come across this variant - that it is terribly unfair that only the children of the "uninvolved" parents will be left in the failing schools. In other words, we know the schools are bad, even the previous presence of concerned parents didn't change that, and since, with this new system, some kids are still going to be flushed down the toilet, we will fight it tooth and nail and demand that involved parents give us theirs to flush into the sewer, too.

Drugs in Schools Revisited

Skip Olivia, Policy Analyst for the Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism writes:

I've been enjoying your site for some time, and just thought I would offer a quick insight into this morning's decision. I was fortunate to be at the Court this morning for the decision, and I saw a lot of very enthusiastic people leaving the Court and rushing to their cell phones to proclaim the good news. One gentleman just started yelling into his phone "5 to 4! We did it! We did it!"

I was pleased with the ruling, as were my bosses. But I think one thing that has been overlooked in today's media orgy over vouchers is the disgraceful ruling of the Court on the Oklahoma drug testing case. That was actually the decision I had gone to the Court to see this morning, and while I was not surprised with Justice Thomas's opinion, it was nonetheless a bitter pill to swallow. On the plus side, the continued denial of students rights will provide an even greater impetus for the school choice movement.

And today Reason Express offers this take on the Supreme Court drug ruling:

Cup Runneth Over

The Supreme Court gave school administrators a green light to give their students drug tests despite little evidence that those populations are riddled by drug abuse.

Justice Clarence Thomas's opinion for the court makes it clear that schools are allowed to do just about anything to a student just as long as it is couched as a way to make the school safer.

"A student's privacy interest is limited in a public school environment where the state is responsible for maintaining discipline, health, and safety," Thomas wrote.

Thomas added that "the nationwide drug epidemic makes the war against drugs a pressing concern in every school."

But at no point did those arguing for increased testing claim that the populations they want to test -- in the case before the court, a girl who wanted to join a school singing group was first required to give a urine sample -- pose a threat to the health and safety of other students.

Were drug users running rampant at a school, causing all manner of discipline and security problems, a drug test would presumably not be needed to identify them. So the group the court explicitly wants to target is students who have been exposed to drugs yet are not threats to school operations.

Only the mighty drug bogeyman could possibly justify such overkill. Otherwise, if school administrators came to the court warning that Freemasonry posed a threat, the justices would immediately jump to determining just which set of students should be polygraphed. No need to find any actual harm; inchoate fear will do.

The usually squishy American Academy of Pediatrics, in a friend-of-the-court brief, noted that the harm of widespread drug testing of students will be hard to see, but potentially very real. Imagine a shy, introverted kid who lets a few hours in the wrong backseat or basement deter him from joining a club or activity he really loves. Will that make the school healthier, or more dysfunctional and dangerous?

In any case, when prospective members of the chess club cue up, cups in hand, they can be sure that their ritual public humiliation will help preserve social order.

Reason editor-n-chief, Nick Gillespie, also offers his take on the Supreme Court drug decision in Piss Take.

In more ways than one, the U.S. Supreme Court has emphatically helped to pave the way for America's kids to vacate the nation's public schools.