The Third Way of public school education

All of the following began while reading Boing Boing. Daria fans will know this story.

Seminole County School District is, apparently, a very interesting place to find one’s education. Recently famous for signing a deal with McDonald’s that would have meant this was each child’s report card:

On the jackets, McDonald’s offered a free happy meal to any student with all A’s and B’s, two or fewer absences, or good behavior in a given academic quarter. Susan Pagan, an area parent, notified the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, and an all-out public-relations battle ensued by early December. According to the campaign, the school district received more than 2,000 calls of protest.

But get this:

Regina Klaers, a spokeswoman for the school district, said in December that the school approached McDonald’s for the sponsorship, not vice versa. For the 10 years prior to McDonald’s sponsorship, Pizza Hut had picked up the tab. During that time, Ms. Klaers said, there were no parental complaints.

One wonders what the report cards looked like, under the sponsorship of Pizza Hut. One wonders why they changed sponsors after 10 years and – critically – whether or not the school approached McDonalds or vice-versa is not the issue: who insisted upon this design for the report cards? The follow-up concern, of course, is whether the parents so concerned offered to work with the County, the School Board and the PTA to work out some other solution to the school’s cash-flow crisis (casino, anyone? But seriously).

Or whether the parents, the community, the local media, or anyone at all marched on the Local and State houses of government, demanding to know just where in hell their multiple local and state income and sales taxes were bloody going.

So, Seminole County schools, already small-time infamous, doubled-down:

Despite concern about pushing advertisements to a young captive audience, the Seminole County School Board agreed unanimously Tuesday to let a Massachusetts company put its daily radio show on school buses.

Bus Radio got the go-ahead to broadcast a program of rock music, FCAT lessons and advertisements to about 4,800 students on 53 buses in a trial run that will go through the end of the school year.

If district officials decide it is a success, they’ll let the company put its radios in the district’s fleet of buses serving more than 30,000 students.

Officials say the radio program will keep students busy so drivers can concentrate on the road. Critics contend that it forces ads on kids who have no alternative but to listen.

…

To help win support, Bus Radio has promised the district six minutes out of each broadcast hour for its own use. Officials plan short lessons to help students pass the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

The district also will get a share of the company’s advertising revenues, although that is expected to amount to only a few thousand dollars a year.

I started shutting down at the idea that there could even be a company such as Bus Radio – although it beats Clear Channel, I guess. It seems not to be offering much in the way of incentive to the school district, though – 6 minutes per hour, and a few thousand dollars per year? In fact, their website boasts an average of 4 minutes per hour advertising, 4 of PSA’s and 52 of music (and other programming). They also offer this:

Today’s AM/FM programming is not designed for kids. Inappropriate lyrics, adult- themed DJ banter, and commercials for products such as alcohol and R-rated movies are pervasive on the AM/FM dial. BusRadio offers a safe alternative to AM/FM radio with daily programming that targets three distinct audiences – elementary, middle and high school students.

BusRadio’s programming gives kids more of the music they want minus the offensive lyrics, with 1/3 the sponsorships per hour of AM/FM and positive safety messages and PSAs (see chart for hourly breakdown).

That cannot be the point, surely – am I an old man for thinking just don’t have that garbage playing? The schools could make more than that just by launching a website, calling it “We Need 10,000 Dollars” and waiting for the local Fox affiliate to notice it. They’d pull more than this per year just from the novelty and plain altruism.

Whipping out my calculator (okay, locating it over on the shelf and returning to the couch with it) and heading over to Mother Jones’ special report on campaign finance:

I work out that, between just the 4 front-runners across the two parties (actually only 3: McCain had no education money), as of the beginning of this year the education sector alone had contributed USD9.7m. By now half a billion has passed through the campaigns of all candidates combined. So as much as I like to give the Seminole County stick over their decision-making (quite justifiably), I can’t pretend it isn’t our priorities that put them in the position in the first place.

Mexico closes main oil ports due to bad weather

Originally found at the Oil Drum. Mexico is 9th in the world’s exporters, but 3rd in terms of US sources of oil.

Mexico closed all of its main oil exporting ports on Sunday due to bad weather, the transport ministry said on its Web site.

…

Mexico’s exports have been repeatedly disrupted in recent months by bad weather that has halted shipments for days at a time and, in some cases, triggered the evacuation of oil rig workers.

This relates to an ongoing discussion I have with people – the price of oil vs. gasoline. The latter has benefitted mightily from the buffer of (a) refining stocks in the US, and (b) refining capacity (demand generating enough monopsony power that the US can get better prices). But US refinery stocks of gasoline haven’t been doing so well (I was too lazy to make a nice graph):

And raw material stocks aren’t performing any better – to the extent that there is little in the way of a buffer.

Data courtesy of the US government’s Energy Information Administration. This data extends only to October 2007 – meaning it does not include 2 more months of probable running-down of those stocks.

So pessimism, basically, is my point – don’t expect those gasoline prices to fall far, too soon.

Mind you, Mexico’s peak has come and gone – its position in the field of US suppliers will most likely do the same (image stolen from the Oil Drum’s Oilwatch Monthly).

We shall see, by and by, what the US Government’s adeptness at Supply Chain Management is like.

Did Thoreau say “simplify” or “gentrify”?

Interesting piece floating around in the Wall Street Journal -

The word “gentrification” conjures up images of once-poor urban neighborhoods invaded by cappuccino bars and million-dollar condos. Now, broad swaths of rural America — from New England to the Rocky Mountain West — are being gussied up, too.

Affluent retirees and other high-income types have descended on these remote areas, creating new demand for amenities like interior-design stores, spas and organic markets. For many communities, it’s the biggest change since the interstate highway system came barreling through in the 1960s and 1970s.

With the Internet allowing people to work from almost anywhere, the distinction between first and second homes has become blurred. Many people are buying retirement property while they’re still employed. Millions of soon-to-retire baby boomers, say demographers, will propel this trend for years to come.

“What we’re seeing is a class colonization,” says Peter Nelson, an associate professor of geography at Middlebury College and an expert on rural migration. “It really represents a shift in the nature of the economy from a resource-extraction economy to an aesthetic-based economy.”

For me, the word ‘gentrification’ conjurs up images of the death of niceness about Newtown, Sydney. Opinions differ (probably not amongst Sydney Uni alumni, though). Graphically, for the US (click for the story/larger version):

Here’s a “con”:

Today, Valley County is attracting newcomers from as far away as New York and Sydney. They’re putting up second and third residences costing well over $1 million — price levels once reserved for the few waterfront properties.

In recent years, developers have snatched up land for $100,000 an acre in some cases, or 40 times what it fetched as farmland. Though home prices here are declining as in other parts of the nation, houses still cost about 60% more than in 2004.

And a “pro”:

The influx of money is creating new jobs in hotels and restaurants as traditional industries like farming and timber fade out. Tamarack ski resort in nearby Donnelly helped super-charge growth in the area. Opened in 2004, the resort, the nation’s newest downhill ski destination, is expected to cost about $1.5 billion when fully completed in a decade or so.

Retail sales in the Valley County area increased 30% between 2003 and 2005, according to local research. New members in the McCall Chamber of Commerce include a jewelry store and two art galleries.

Ultimately, such a phenomenon as this is neither good nor bad, necessarily. George Monbiot supplied what is still the best indictment against owners of second, rarely-occupied, homes. As mentioned above said people can easily afford to drive the costs of housing up (and, more importantly, beyond the range of affordability of those living and working in the townships for generations), while simultaneously starving local businesses of steady patronage. That is a bad (not for nothing did Monbiot call such people Britains Most Selfish).

Here’s a different perspective. Consider this detail:

One indicator of rural gentrification: An increase in residents’ total dividend, interest and rent income. That measurement, tracked by the Commerce Department, is a sign that new residents — usually retirees — are living off their investments rather than salaries.

Coupled with the line about internet penetration in the US, working from home, etc. This is a different locus of optimality: Jim Kunstler’s argument(s) about down-scaling regional and local economies. That makes this phenomenon a good one: if people leave cities for rural communities sure, they will probably use a car more often – but, odds are, their food won’t.

On aggregate, if – as it appears to me – we’re seeing an initialisation of economic devolution, that fits in well with the Kunstler universe. We shall see, by and by: water and energy use is another issue (particularly as schools, hospitals, etc. develop): if this is an initialisation of erstwhile-rural urbanisation, those gains will all be wiped out.

Economic uncertainty to dominate Davos

From today’s Financial Times:

The hot ticket at Davos last year was the “dialogue in the dark” event, when delegates at the World Economic Forum were plunged into complete darkness to experience the loss of sight. This seems an apt metaphor for the blindness of the world’s elite to the fragility of the global financial system.

Unlike the Financial Times itself, of course, whose writers all saw this coming from miles away…

To continue.

With the state of the financial world having seen a dramatic turnabout in the past year, WEF organisers have staged a series of high-profile debates on financial stability and banking risk, and there will be a flurry of senior bankers in attendance, ranging from JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon to Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein – as well as some of the newly appointed Wall Street chief executives such as John Thain at Merrill Lynch.

…

They will be joined by a clutch of senior European policymakers – such as Jean Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank and many European finance ministers – allowing a flurry of transatlantic behind-the-scenes debate about global policy responses to the credit crunch before next month’s crucial meeting of the Group of Seven finance ministers and the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

…

Another notable swathe of attendees – which marks a contrast with earlier years – comes from the sovereign wealth funds, and other manifestations of the cash that continues to swirl around Asia’s exporters and the oil-rich Gulf. Officials from the China Investment Corporation and Dubai International Capital, for example, will all be in attendance – and a planned debate on their investments could be a highlight of the meeting.

Indeed, sovereign wealth funds could overshadow one topic that was prominent at last year’s event: the role that private equity now plays in the global economy. For while the Harvard professor Josh Lerner is due to release a landmark report on the sector – which was commissioned at last year’s Davos event – the turn in the credit cycle means that buy-out funds are no longer generating so much fear.

It would appear, then, that the days of Davos meeting concerning themselves with what to do about the world’s poor and the world’s problems are over, for now. We have our own problems – the poor are on their own. I should be very surprised if these rooms of wealthy elite are brimming with debate over the Copenhagen Consensus.

This, specifically, was actually worrying (for me):

Another sign of the shift in sentiment is the inclusion of a new set of topics on this year’s agenda: competition for global commodity resources. For the first time Davos is staging a series of debates about food supplies – a topic that could generate lively debate given the recent sharp rise in many agricultural commodity prices, and the political challenges this is generating in emerging economies.

Yes, that’s the OECD core of economic power, getting together to trade notes on securing the world’s stockpiles of commodities. Meaning the developing world is probably about to fall about another century behind.