… when compared to public schooling? For the interesting answer to that question, have a look at Jay Greene’s edu blog.

I’m currently attending Cato University — extraordinary academics, so-so athletics — so I’ve neither been able to get to the edublogs in too timely a fashion, nor ruminate extensively on their content. I have, though, managed to get to a few blogs, and couldn’t help but notice a question-and-answer in need of facilitation.

Over at Flypaper — the blog of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation — Mike Petrilli has returned from vacation and not missed a beat in his national-education-standards march. Picking up on a recent Jonathan Alter column dealing largely with crippling teacher-union obstructionism, Petrilli declares that:

if we harnessed the resources we currently spend on our fifty-state system of tests for one common system, we could afford to measure subjects beyond reading and math, online, in a way that encouraged intellectually-challenging schoolwork rather than test prep.

My concern here is not with the money-saving proposition. It’s with the “intellectually-challenging schoolwork” assumption. It goes back to an argument I’ve made many times before, but this time another blogger has brought it up, and one quite different than libertarian ol’ me. Asks Andy Rotherham over at Eduwonk, contemplating the gaming of state tests under No Child Left Behind:

Can someone explain exactly how a national, federal, or “American” in the new parlance, test will be any different? If indeed there is a political pathology out there to make schools look better, regardless of whether they are better, a proposition that seems pretty spot on to me, then how are the politics somehow so radically different at the national level? National test proponents have never really answered this question except to point to the NAEP. But, the NAEP is a no-stakes test right now so it really doesn’t make the point.

Terrific questions, Andy, to which I’d just add: How especially would you expect high-stakes national tests to escape gaming pressures when the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Association of School Administrators, National School Boards Association, and just about every other major education interest group has its headquarters right in the DC area?

I — and I assume Andy — would love to hear the answers to these questions. 

The preschool evangelists will not shrivel before arguments or facts, for they believe. Their faith in preschool is strong and pure.

Just because the short-term gains for low-income students don’t last doesn’t mean they can’t last. If we can just make all preschools high-quality, and then make all elementary schools high-quality, and then make all high-schools high-quality, and then make all parents high-quality … then preschool might sustain something other than negligible improvements.

Perhaps, but almost certainly not.

More likely, if we had all high-quality schools and parents we’d once again find that whether a child learns her letters at 4 instead of 5 doesn’t make one flea-hair’s bit of difference by the time she (hopefully) graduates high-school.

Finland should give the preschool activists pause. It doesn’t, but it should.

Children don’t begin formal schooling until around 7. At first, no surprise, they don’t score as well as many countries who park their kids in classrooms at age 3 or 4. By high school, however, Finland’s students are at the top of the pack internationally, and far outperform the laggard US.

So why this national obsession with preschool? Is it to take the blame off of our ossified government k‑12 system? More money for the teachers unions?

I don’t think Sara Mead and many of her fellow travelers are henchmen for the union bosses.

Perhaps it provides hope to progressives who place their faith in the power of government but have witnessed only an unyielding failure to sustain effective and meaningful reform in the government k‑12 school system.

Perhaps preschool offers a distraction from the despair and fatalism fostered by so obvious a failure of the public sector. A crusade to invigorate the faithful.

Preschool is not our educational salvation, and “reform” of a moribund government k‑12 system is a fool’s errand.

The most certain way to improve academic performance and life outcomes for all students in this country, rich and poor, is to expand educational freedom. Oh, and it would save each state billions of dollars too.

Look for more soon in what will soon be the inaccurately-named Preschool Tetralogy …

The European Commission is an unelected bureaucracy that is slowly but surely seizing powers to govern member nations. This is bad news for national sovereignty and jurisdictional competition, but it also leads to crazy regulations, including proposals to prohibit the British from using acres instead of hectares, banning the traditional preparation of Peking Duck, and detailed rules about the proper size and shape of vegetables. 

But regulatory overkill is just the tip of the iceberg. Far more troubling is the effort to subvert democracy in order to further centralize power in Brussels. The EU Constitution, which would have expanded the powers of the European Commission, was rejected by the voters of France and the Netherlands a few years ago. Rather than shelve the proposal, the European elites renamed it the Lisbon Treaty and said that it no longer was necessary to let the people vote. Fortunately, Ireland still has the rule of law and held a referendum — and the EU Constitution/​Lisbon Treaty was decisively rejected. 

The French President has since asserted that the Irish should vote again (and presumably again and again) until they reach the “right” decision. But perhaps the most Kafkaesque reaction came from a French bureaucrat, who was quoted in Le Figaro stating, “It isn’t about putting pressure on the Irish. We well understand that they have expressed themselves democratically. But so have the other 26!” Only the French could deny their people the right to vote and then claim their voters (and the disenfranchised people in the European Union’s other 25 nations) had somehow expressed their views.

John McCain told the NAACP this morning that after decades of broken promises by the nation’s public school systems it is time to give all parents an easy choice of public and private schools. He is right, so long as he doesn’t propose a private school choice program at the national level.

The merits of wide-open parental choice — and the basic justice of it —are compelling, but the Constitution mentions neither the word “education” nor the word “school.” Congress and the president simply do not have a mandate to create such a program. More than that, a national private school choice program risks extending pervasive government regulation over private schools from the Potomac to the Pacific, homogenizing the options available to families and thus defeating the entire point of school choice. It is far better and safer for presidential candidates to tout the merits of school choice and encourage their state-level counterparts to put these programs into place. In that way, the varying experiences of the states – the so-called “laboratory of federalism” – can help to identify and eliminate problems in their implementation.

Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (covering Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina) issued a complicated (216-page) and fractured (5–4, with a plethora of concurrences and dissents) decision that turned on one judge joining four colleagues on one issue and four other colleagues on another. Essentially, the Al-Marri case says that the president has the power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the U.S., but that these “enemy combatants” must be given more of an opportunity to challenge their detention in federal court than has been given.

This is a big mess of a decision — right or wrong, no clear guidelines emerge — the substance of which I won’t get into and, in any event, it’s on the fast track to the Supreme Court. What I do want to comment on, however, is the larger significance of the 5–4 splits in this en banc (meaning all the court’s judges review the earlier decision of a three-judge panel) case.

Regardless of the merits of this case — with dueling 5–4 votes on the two main issues it’s obviously a close (and unprecedented) call — this case highlights yet again the disastrous consequences of our broken judicial confirmation process. The court that decided this important case has 15 authorized judgeships, yet only nine judges participated. One judge recused himself for an unspecified reason, one was confirmed too recently, and four crucial slots are vacant. While both parties have done their fair share to poison the confirmation well, Democrats are clearly the ones to blame for the current impasse over judges. President Bush — who in one of his first acts appointed a previously lapsed Clinton nominee, Roger Gregory, to this same court — has named nominees for all four vacancies, but the Senate has refused to act on them. The longest-suffering, District Judge Robert Conrad of North Carolina, will tomorrow have been awaiting an entire year and has not even gotten a Judiciary Committee hearing.

The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has been similarly hamstrung, its ten judges increasingly splitting 5–5 on the important issues of the day while Peter Keisler, the person nominated to the seat John Roberts vacated when he became Chief Justice has been awaiting an up-or-down vote for over two years. (Keisler is the most qualified lower-court nominee since Miguel Estrada, who withdrew his name from consideration after being filibustered ostensibly because Democrats were wary of confirming a conservative Hispanic who would have instantly become a contender for the next Supreme Court vacancy. Keisler is also on record as having opposed the controversial ideological vetting of new Justice Department hires.)

By their (in)action, first as minority filibusterers and now as majority obstructers, Senate Democrats hamper the judicial process and invite messy and inconclusive decisions like Al-Marri.

At the Cato Institute’s Health Policy Studies department we’re not sure which is riskier – being the leading advocate for free market healthcare or this Cavalcade. Nonetheless, we’re glad to present CoR #56. Enjoy at your own risk.

Health Risks

• David Williams knows that air ambulance services are risky but wonders why. While the New York Times blames the hospitals for outsourcing to for-profit industry, Williams questions whether they could do better given their own poor safety record.
• Paul Levy sends the message he never hoped to send after his Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital is responsible for a wrong-site surgery.
• Bob Vineyard becomes a medical astrologist for one day. Tell him your birthday and he’ll tell you your chance of developing schizophrenia, heart disease or cancer.
• Jason Shafrin floats the idea of a new currency for premiums. He thinks you would trade your life for less risk.
• Jim Harper shows us how the risks we take reveal how much we value life.
• Jolyon Patten says there’s a chance that genetically modified (GM) foods are dangerous to your health.
• John Leppard shines a light on the other health insurance problem: physician liability insurance.
• Guest blogger Brian Poncelet at Million Dollar Journey gives a well-researched analysis of critical illness insurance.
• Raag Vamdatt dissects the anatomy of an accident and personal injury policy from Tata AIG General Insurance Company of
  India.
• Vera Lang asks us to look starboard and play it safe on the water.
• Jonathan Pleztke breaks down the Medicare puzzle piece-by-piece.
• Yours truly discusses the risks of letting religion guide health care reform.

Corporate Risks

• Nancy Germond provides managers with a list of strategies to mitigate the risk of “brain drain” at your company.
• Stephanie Balaouras points out that companies often overlook the risk of power outages, which cause more downtime that hurricanes, tornados or earthquakes.
• Leon Gettler cannot understand why companies are ignoring environmental risk.
• Joe Kristan gives a technical explanation of a new IRS ruling on how life insurance premiums and proceeds affect the ability of S corporations to make non-taxable distributions.

Personal Financial Risks

• The Silicon Valley Bogger is worried about the risks of money market funds. Is your $$ safe in one? Read and see.

Ethical Risks

• Jon Coppelman has a gnawing case study in political corruption: Zimbabwe, where the danger of running a legitimate risk management business is more real than the risks you manage.

The Risk of Progress

• SocProf argues that modern progress is making ours a “risk society.”

This might be bad news for the world. But it’s good news for the Cavalcade. There is nowhere to go but up as we progress toward CoR #57 at the Sentinel Effect in two weeks. Until then, happy risk-taking.