LibertyVoter.Org

By Corey A. DeAngelis

Corey A. DeAngelis

The evidence is in. Not only do San Antonio charter schools
improve students’ outcomes; they do so at a lower cost to the
public.

Last May, my colleagues and I at the University of Arkansas
found that students in San Antonio charter schools received 20
percent less educational funding than their peers in district
schools. But a just-released study by our team finds that despite
the funding disadvantage, students in San Antonio charter schools
outperform their district school counterparts on math and reading
achievement exams.

In fact, we find that San Antonio charter schools are 35 percent
more cost-effective and produce a 36 percent higher return on
taxpayer investment than district schools.

Let’s make this a bit more concrete. The data show that every
thousand dollars spent on education at district schools translates
to around a $7,500 increase in students’ lifetime earnings. That is
great. But that same thousand-dollar-expenditure produces an
estimated $9,750 in students’ lifetime earnings if allocated to a
public charter school in the city. And that 30 percent advantage is
extremely important considering San Antonio taxpayers spend over
$157,000 for each child’s K-12 education in district schools.

In other words, 13 years of equal funding in charter schools
could produce around an additional $350,000 in lifetime earnings
for San Antonio students.

Let’s magnify the
positive impacts by giving children the same amount of educational
resources, no matter what public school works best for
them.

Of course, this isn’t the only study finding that charter
schools do more with less. In 2014, researchers at the University
of Arkansas found that charter schools across the country were 40
percent more productive, as measured by gains in student
achievement, than neighboring district schools. In addition,
experimental studies by researchers at Harvard University and
Princeton University found that male students that won a public
charter school lottery were less than half as likely to a commit
crime later on in life.

Overall, the scientific evidence suggests that charter schools
improve academic outcomes for students. Researchers from the
University of California San Diego recently completed the most
comprehensive review of the evidence on charter schools to date.
The review concluded that, on average, charter schools helped
students achieve the equivalent of over a month of additional
learning in math, relative to their peers in district schools.
Three experimental evaluations also found that winning a random
lottery to go to a charter school increases students’ chances of
attending college. For example, an experiment published in the
Journal of Labor Economics found that children that won a charter
school lottery in Boston were 13 percent more likely to enroll in a
four-year college.

But the data aren’t the …read more

Source: OP-EDS

By Clark Neily

Clark Neily

Earlier this month, Brooklyn resident Oliver Wiggins received a
$1 million settlement after NYPD officers crashed into his car and
then tried to blame him for the accident by falsely accusing him of
driving while intoxicated.

In 2015, the family of Eric Garner reached a settlement for $5.9
million after police applied a banned chokehold while arresting him
for selling loose cigarettes outside a convenience store on Staten
Island. That same year, families of victims of murders committed
long ago by “Mafia Cops” Louis Eppolito and Stephen
Caracappa settled their cases, bringing the total paid out to more
than $18 million.

Those sums might be anomalies, but the trend is clear. The total
payout for injuries caused by NYPD officers in 2017 was an
unprecedented $308.2 million (up from a “mere” $92.4
million in 2007, and $152 million in 2012). That money didn’t
come out of the pockets of the officers responsible for the
misconduct; the bills were covered by you, the taxpayer.

That’s because police departments nearly always pick up
the tab for damages caused by the officers they employ. Indeed, a
2014 study found that 99.98% of all dollars received by plaintiffs
in civil rights cases against police officers were paid not by the
officers themselves, but by their departments.

Fortunately, there is a better policy that is more fair to
taxpayers — and has the substantial side benefit of creating
strong incentives for police to avoid hurting innocent people.

Like police, doctors have a difficult and stressful job that
sometimes involves making life-or-death decisions under conditions
of uncertainty. But unlike police, doctors don’t expect the
rest of us to pay for their mistakes. Instead, doctors carry
professional liability insurance, which pays to defend them against
malpractice claims and protects them from financial ruin by paying
out damage awards to successful plaintiffs.

If cops had to carry
insurance, the worst offenders would quickly be identified and
charged higher rates. If they failed to clean up their act, they
would eventually become uninsurable and thus
unemployable.

Insurance companies are exceptionally good at identifying risk.
Think about car insurance. The more accidents or speeding tickets a
driver has had, the higher their premiums will be. The same is true
for teenagers, who tend to get in more wrecks than adults and
therefore represent a greater risk to the insurance company.

Instead of spreading those risks among all of their
policyholders, insurance companies charge risky drivers more while
giving a break to their safest drivers, who pay less.

Consider how that could work with police. Most misconduct is
committed by a relatively small fraction of cops. Former NYPD
Commissioner Bill Bratton defended “the …read more

Source: OP-EDS

By Jonathan Blanks

Jonathan Blanks

Too many people are injured or killed as a result of gun
violence in this country. Although the number of gun deaths
has generally declined in recent decades, the
recent spate of spree shootings in schools and concentrated
violence in certain American cities reinforce the necessity that
more can and should be done.

Unfortunately, many of the policies aimed at reducing gun
violence have little or no measurable impact on safety. Some, in
fact, may even inflict other harms while doing so. The unintended
consequences of these proposals serve as a reminder that when it
comes to reducing gun deaths, good intentions aren’t enough.

School shootings, for example, have resulted in wall-to-wall
media coverage. And that, in turn, has led schools to over-react to
perceived threats because parents and their kids feel threatened by
what should be an unthinkable menace. “Active shooter drills,” in
which kids and teachers simulate a response to a school gunman,
have become common in schools around the country.

Too often, the methods
employed to stop gun violence harm far more innocent people than
the underlying threat presents.

These drills are intended to prepare students for the
unthinkable. But the main effect is to repeatedly terrify
schoolchildren.

A Washington Post reporter recently said in an
interview that “kids don’t feel safe” in schools because school
shootings “keep happening over and over.” He recounted stories of
children who were writing out wills during school lockdowns despite
no active shooter in their schools. In Alaska, one school even had
a police officer walk the halls firing blanks, using on the
sound of gunfire to simulate the horrifying stress these situations
create. No wonder kids are scared!

In fact, a student is far more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident
on the way to or from school than from a school shooting.
Disease and severe sports injuries are also rare, yet are much
greater statistical threats to children’s lives than school
shootings. One risk assessment published in the Post
estimated the odds of a public school student being fatally shot
at school on any given day since 1999 at 1 in 614,000,000. It’s
still reasonable to want to make schools safer from shootings, but
schools and parents are traumatizing children in their attempts to
do so.

Meanwhile, most gun violence happens outside of
schools—particularly in cities plagued by violent crime and
gang activity. Yet many of the policies designed to combat urban
street crime are questionably effective, and in some cases they can
even make the public less safe.

Several large metropolitan police departments, for example, have
developed gang …read more

Source: OP-EDS