Reason Magazine - Staff

Common Culture

info@reason.com (Cosmo Wenman) — Wed, 01 Jan 1997 00:00:00 EST

The nativists may be restless, but they have little reason to fear immigrants from south of the border--especially if they are afraid immigrants don't want their children to assimilate. "The Importance of Learning English," a survey commissioned by the Center for Equal Opportunity, found that of 600 Hispanic parents from five major U.S. cities, 51 percent consider "learning to read, write, and speak English" the most important educational goal for their children. Twenty- three percent gave "learning academic subjects like math, history, and science" highest priority, while only 11 percent said having their children learn Spanish was their first concern. Just 4.3 percent placed "learning about Hispanic culture" at the top of the list. Parents interviewed in Spanish were actually more likely to say learning English was most important for their children than those questioned in English.

The CEO's report also helps shed some light on who doesn't support bilingual education: The survey found that 63 percent of Hispanic parents believe Hispanic children should be taught English before they are taught Spanish.

Choice Cuts

info@reason.com (Cosmo Wenman) — Sun, 01 Dec 1996 00:00:00 EST

Since 1990, a limited school choice program has allowed about 1,300 low-income students to attend a number of secular private schools in the Milwaukee area. As many as 15,000 may be allowed to participate in the coming year, and religious schools may become eligible to join the program.

Critics, however, have charged that vouchers don't improve education. Drawing on annual evaluations by University of Wisconsin researchers, the American Federation of Teachers' Albert Shanker has claimed that "private schools are not outperforming public schools." The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has announced that "Milwaukee's plan has failed to demonstrate that vouchers...can spark school improvement."

This summer, however, the data and techniques used in the program evaluations became available for the first time to outside scholars--yielding quite different results. In "The Effectiveness of School Choice in Milwaukee: A Secondary Analysis of Data from the Program's Evaluation," researchers from the University of Houston and Harvard University conclude that the Wisconsin evaluations fail a number of standard statistical and procedural measures, ignore a variety of pertinent data sets, and fail to categorize students by such meaningful categories as grade, year of application, and school.

Rather than lumping all students together, the new study compares students who enrolled in the school choice program with a control group of students who wanted to participate but could not, because of limited space. The cumulative effect of several years of enrollment in choice schools is nothing short of impressive, according to study authors Jay P. Greene, Paul E. Peterson, Jiangtao Du, Leesa Boeger, and Chris L. Frazier. If the randomly selected students remained in the choice experiment for three years, their average reading and math scores were, respectively, 3 and 5 percentile points higher than those in the control group. If they stayed for four years, their reading and math scores were, on average, 5 and 12 percentile points higher. Over 80 percent of the students were either Latino or African American.

Putting the results of Milwaukee's voucher program in perspective, the authors note, "If similar success could be achieved for all minority students nationwide, it could close the gap separating white and minority test scores by somewhere between one-third and more than one- half."

Party Lines

info@reason.com (Cosmo Wenman) — Tue, 01 Oct 1996 00:00:00 EDT

For a big government agency, the Department of Agriculture has a decidedly laissez- faire attitude toward telephone use. Indeed, according to a recent General Accounting Office report on telephone abuse and fraud at the USDA, the department, like a number of other government agencies, doesn't even review its bills.

Since the USDA has no idea how many unauthorized long-distance calls are made from its offices, abuse of the system goes largely unchecked. In a review of just a few of the department's phone bills, the GAO found several cases in which employees placed overseas calls to adult "chat" lines in such exotic locales as the Dominican Republic. Employee abuse also turns the agency into a free telephone-relay station: During a four-month period, over half of the roughly 1,200 collect calls USDA employees accepted were fraudulent calls placed by prisoners. Accomplices inside the department patch the calls through to long-distance lines, and the department gets stuck with the tab, reports the GAO. "USDA has been aware of cases of collect calling abuse since 1994, but has not taken adequate action to stop it," says the report.

The USDA is slow to act even when the fraud is an outside job. In one instance, computer hackers infiltrated its phone banks and made between $40,000 and $50,000 worth of international long-distance calls. Although the contractor who installed the agency's voice-mail system acknowledged responsibility for the system's vulnerability, the USDA did not bother to seek reimbursement for the cost of the fraudulent calls. Perhaps the USDA can take heart (and taxpayers heartburn medication) in that it is hardly the only government agency with lax phone security: The Drug Enforcement Administration, for example, doesn't bother to review its phone bills either. Over a period of 18 months, the DEA paid more than $2 million for fraudulent calls placed by hackers.

Feigning Training

info@reason.com (Cosmo Wenman) — Tue, 01 Oct 1996 00:00:00 EDT

In 1982, Congress passed the Job Training and Partnership Act. Now the largest federal employment training program, its goal was to boost the earnings and employment rates of economically disadvantaged adults and youths. It funds a network of federal, state, and local agencies to the tune of $1.6 billion a year. Working through vocational high schools, community colleges, and other community-based organizations, the JTPA annually trains about 1 million participants and helps them find jobs. But according to a new report from the General Accounting Office, the program's results are less than impressive. Despite months of training and placement assistance, JTPA participants rarely earn much more than comparable non-participants, and their employment rates are only slightly higher. In fact, the programs are so ineffective that the GAO "could not attribute the higher earnings to JTPA training rather than to chance alone."

Beastly Burden

info@reason.com (Cosmo Wenman) — Tue, 01 Oct 1996 00:00:00 EDT

The costs of government mandates are often hidden from the people who ultimately pay for them. Earlier this year, the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy began promoting its "Right to Know Payroll Form," a simple tool businesses can use to inform employees of how some governmental burdens affect take-home pay.

The idea is pretty straightforward: Most paycheck stubs already itemize federal, state, and city income taxes, along with the employee's share of Social Security and Medicare taxes. The Mackinac form adds to that list the employer's share of such programs, along with employer expenditures on workers' compensation and unemployment insurance. It also includes estimates of the costs of administering taxes and complying with some of the big-ticket regulations, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family Medical Leave Act.

Employees can see, in plain dollar figures, the additional chunk of cash their company must pay just to keep them on the payroll. The results can be shocking: By Mackinac's calculations, for a worker making $22,000 a year, an employer kicks in an additional $2,640 annually for the various government mandates.

Gov. John Engler has already implemented the form for Michigan's 60,000 state employees, and legislation to require a similar form for state workers seems likely to pass in Ohio. In the few months since its introduction, the form has been adopted by about a dozen private firms, including The Foremost Corporation of America, an insurance company based in Caledonia, Michigan.

Foremost's public relations manager, Ruth Steele Walker, describes the new policy as "a way to present information to our employees, so they can make better informed judgments on political decisions they may make--it gives them a little better idea of what it takes for a company to create jobs."