Governor Romer's Nanny State
Governor Romer says he wants to make Colorado the best place to raise a child. According to a January 12 Rocky Mountain News story, he believes that more support for new parents, universal access to health care for young children, family-friendly workplaces, more effective support systems for teen parents and quality child care will achieve […]
Denver's Road to Ruin
The citizens and taxpayers of the Denver metropolitan region have shown their willingness to fund numerous imaginative public works and civic improvement projects over the past decade. Denver International Airport, at a cost of nearly five billion dollars, leads the list. But don’t forget the Colorado Convention Center, Coors Field, and Elitch’s. Then there’s the proposed new Ocean Journey aquarium and a new Broncos stadium. All of these imaginative projects were (and are being) sold to the public using questionable economic assumptions. Citizens were promised that by investing our tax dollars many economic benefits would accrue to the entire region.
End Compulsory Schooling
As education is currently provided in the state of Colorado, and throughout the United States, one key fact is inexplicably overlooked: all the big decisions about how a child will be educated are made by someone other than the parents of that child. It is government that determines the significant elements of children’s education. Parents are shunted to the sidelines, where they are expected to be little more than cheerleaders supporting the decision-makers. In a society dedicated to the virtues of family life, this most salient feature of education should be, to say the least, suspect. Two ill-considered government policies make the system possible: compulsory tax-financing of schools and compulsory attendance. That combination of compulsion and learning also should be suspect. This paper will discuss why compulsory attendance should be abolished and education decisions left to parents and children.
Outcome Based Education: How the Governor's Reform…
The last third of this century has seen a fundamental shift in the way we determine educational quality. Previously, the conventional wisdom judged quality in terms of inputs: intentions and efforts, institutions and services, resources and spending. In the past several years, however, there has been an increasing focus on outputs: goals and ends, products and results, with a focus on core academic subjects. The primary question asked is less often “How much are we spending?” and more often “What are our children learning, and how well are they learning it?”
