Monday, March 07, 2005

SURPRISE! HOME-SCHOOLED KID WINS SPELLING BEE

A Sacramento home-schooled student will proceed to the next niveau after his successful spelling of that word -- meaning "level" -- helped crown him champion of the 22nd annual California Central Valley Spelling Bee. Sixty-two students in grades 4 through 8 competed in Wednesday's event at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center in Sacramento. Jason Loucks' victory marked the first time a home-schooled student has won the regional nine-county contest and sends the sixth-grader to Washington, D.C., where he'll compete for the national crown from May 29 to June 4.

Loucks, 12, held off Shelby Smith of Leroy F. Greene Middle School from her bid to repeat as the regional champion. Smith, a South Natomas resident, finished second after the two struggled to string two correct word spellings together in the final round. Some of the missed words included: hartebeest, verdolaga, pterography and mignonette. "A lot of times I just totally guessed," Jason said of the final gut-wrenching words that were not in the list of words the 62 competitors prepared from.

While home-schooled students had prior success at the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee, officials with the regional contest said this might be the leading edge of things to come. Jennifer Loucks, who helped quiz her son, said the family wasn't out to prove anything. "Maybe it validates home schooling as a viable option to traditional schooling," Loucks said. "We didn't come here with anything to prove. We chose home school because that is what God wanted for our family."

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GOVERNMENT MAKES COLLEGE EDUCATION MORE EXPENSIVE

One of the most important lessons anyone can learn about politics is that when government sets out to accomplish some objective, it often winds up doing the opposite. Rent control, for example, is supposed to help the nonwealthy who want urban housing, but the effect is to diminish both the quantity and quality of rental housing available for them.

With that in mind, let's consider federal student-aid. Congress has established a variety of grant and loan programs (budgeted this year at some $73 billion) that were supposed to help make college more affordable to millions of nonwealthy families. As the cost of attending college has risen, politicians have increased the amount of aid available. The trouble is that by doing so, the government gives colleges an incentive to further increase tuition.

That is the conclusion of many economists who have studied the financing of higher education, including Hillsdale College professor Gary Wolfram, in a newly released Policy Analysis published by Cato Institute. His study, "Making College More Expensive: The Unintended Consequences of Federal Tuition Aid," argues for phasing out all federal financial aid in favor of increased reliance on voluntary approaches.

"Basic economic theory," Wolfram writes, "suggests that the increased demand for higher education generated by the Higher Education Act will have the effect of increasing tuitions. The empirical evidence is consistent with that-federal loans, Pell grants, and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students at our nation's colleges and universities."

But wait-isn't federal financial aid supposed to enable students to catch up to the rising cost of college? That may be what parents and politicians think; but to college administrators, more money for students means more money to be captured for their never-ending plans. There is no point at which their desire to spend more is satiated, so there is no point at which the paying parties can ever catch up. Thus ever more aid is needed.

While government financial aid makes going to college more affordable in the short run for students who qualify for it, those programs have also helped to make college less affordable in the long-run for everyone. They especially harm middle-class students who don't qualify for government aid and who must therefore borrow more heavily than they might have had to otherwise. (I say "helped" because college costs would certainly have risen anyway, as more private wealth becomes available to pay the escalating tuition and fee charges. The existence of government aid has pushed them higher than otherwise.) Gushers of federal aid encourages colleges and universities to add more degree programs (often of questionable academic or employment value), to hire more faculty and administrators whose services were not previously needed, and to expand into fields having at best a tangential relationship with education. The spending spiral naturally leads to demands for still more financial aid because college is becoming "too expensive," but more aid just leads to still higher college costs. It's classic political deception. Voters think that a government program is helping to bring about a supposedly desirable outcome ("making college affordable") while it actually benefits only a small interest group - those who run and work for institutions of higher education.


More (much more) here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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