It’s no secret that labor union rules impose significant burdens on schools. More than a decade ago Lance Izumi oversaw a rigorous study that examined the impact of 25 years of collective bargaining on the effectiveness of California public schools. It found that rigid union rules put California schools and classrooms in a stranglehold that negatively impact not only day-to-day operations but, most importantly, student achievement.

More recently, Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Success Academy, which is one of New York City’s most successful charter school networks, to talk about how charters are shaking up the education establishment. This eye-opening 17-minute interview, How Eva Moskowitz Outmuscled the Teachers Union, is a must-see for anyone frustrated by the schooling status quo in California and across the country.

Thank you to Lisa Snell, Education and Child Welfare Director at the Reason Foundation, for sharing it. As Reason’s Jim Epstein explains:

In November 2003, Eva Moskowitz, then a freshman member of the New York City Council, held explosive public hearings about how union contracts imposed inane work rules on public schools. The city’s political establishment was astonished.

Mosowitz—a former history professor, public school teacher, and self-proclaimed liberal, whose politics up until that point seemed to resemble those of every other Democratic politician in New York—was sacrificing her political career to take on organized labor. Exposing the consequences of teacher union contracts was a direct affront to the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which wields enormous influence in New York City elections.

Moskowitz didn’t pussyfoot. At one point in the hearings, she even played audio testimony from a whistleblower with a disguised voice. She said that many of her sources declined to appear because they feared union retribution. She also went toe-to-toe with Randi Weingarten, the UFT’s confrontational leader.

Two years later, when Moskowitz ran for Manhattan Borough President, Weingarten and the UFT mobilized against her and sunk her candidacy. So Moskowitz left politics for the time being; if she couldn’t transform the system from within, she would build an alternative to the public schools.

Today, Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy, which is the city’s largest and most successful charter school network. With 32 schools around New York City—staffed by a non-union teaching force—Success Academy posted test results last year that astounded education policy experts.

Moskowitz’s courage and conviction are inspirational, and her example serves as an important reminder of the power individuals have to accomplish positive reforms against the odds.

Elizabeth Warren, recently appointed to a Democratic leadership position in the Senate, explained her priorities: “Wall Street … is doing very well, CEOs are bringing in millions more and families all across the country are struggling,” she said. “We have to make this government work for the American people. And that’s what I will fight for.”

The comment is interesting because it embodies the assumption that government policy actually can improve people’s economic well-being. Many people reading The Beacon would think that the less Elizabeth Warren and her Senate cronies do, the better off we’ll be.

But let’s say she’s right, and government policy actually can improve people’s economic lot. When President Obama came into office six years ago, he was supported by a Democratic House and Senate, so they determined the government’s policies. And while the Democrats have now lost their Congressional majorities, Obama is still the president and the Senate will still be majority Democrat for a few more weeks.

If government policy actually does affect people’s well-being, as Warren implies, we could re-state her comment to say, “Our party has been in power for six years now, and thanks to our policies, CEOs are prospering while families across America are struggling.” Is that an unfair interpretation of what she’s said?

Keeping kids safe at school should go hand in hand with ensuring high-quality academics. The U.S. Department of Education’s record on both fronts has been poor at best.

During the No Child Left Behind era of George W. Bush, parents were supposed to have an Unsafe School Choice Option. Partisan politics and perverse incentives combined to ensure that fewer than 50 schools nationwide ever met Byzantine definitions of an unsafe school each year—so kids most at risk stayed stuck.

Flash forward to the Obama Administration, and things aren’t much better. Under the recently announced Now Is the Time plan, the U.S. Department of Education is throwing some $70 million at schools nationwide, in the coming year alone, for stricter background checks for gun purchases, banning military-style assault weapons, and adding more counselors and resource officers, as well as mental health officials to intervene with troubled youth sooner. Essentially, more government social workers and fewer guns in the hands of law-abiding private citizens are supposed to help keep kids safe at school.

But the politics don’t stop there. In 2010, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced his plans to investigate school districts’ discipline policies through the lens of disparate impact theory. In a nutshell, because students from some minority backgrounds are, overall, disciplined at higher rates than non-minority students, schools or districts must be discriminating against students—regardless of the individual students’ actual behavior. (For a great review, see the Federalist Society’s analysis and background resources here.) As explained in a 2011 briefing report prepared by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights:

The Department’s policy…is that statistically disparate results create a presumption of discrimination that must be rebutted by the school or district with evidence that the school or district has a legitimate educational justification and that there are no equally effective alternative policies that would achieve the school’s educational goals. (p. 1)

What this disparate impact policy shift means is that once the U.S. Department of Education identifies disparate discipline rates based on Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), the burden of proof shifts to the school district or school to justify its disciplinary actions.

To be sure, government-run schools are not the beacons of equality they purport to be. In fact, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) reported that it handled a record-breaking number of complaints from 2009 through 2012 compared to any previous four-year period, nearly 29,000 (pp. 6-7). More than half of those complaints (54 percent) concerned students with disabilities. Research has long shown that minority and non-native speaking students are disproportionately identified as learning disabled. The OCR also reports that it handled a significant number of complaints in which minority students denied equal access to high-quality educational opportunities (pp. 26-28).

So it should come as no surprise that minority students—African-Americans in particular—are disciplined differently. According to the OCR:

African-American students represent 18 percent of students in the 2009–10 CRDC sample but 35 percent of students suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once, 39 percent of students expelled, and 36 percent of the students arrested on public-school grounds.  Hispanic students are one-and-a-half times more likely to be expelled than their white counterparts. Additionally, in districts that showed at least one expulsion under zero-tolerance policies, African-Americans represent 19 percent of enrollment but 33 percent of the students expelled. …

In fiscal years 2009 through 2012, OCR launched 20 proactive investigations in schools with significant racial disparities in discipline based on data from the most recent CRDC. Additionally, during the last four years, OCR received more than 1,250 complaints brought by parents, students or other concerned individuals about possible civil rights violations involving school discipline systems. (pp. 28-29)

But the “solutions” proposed by federal education bureaucrats simply perpetuate racial discrimination. As Investor’s Business Daily reports:

Minneapolis Public Schools have adopted racial quotas in discipline to settle an investigation by Obama’s diversity cops for alleged discrimination. So much for equal protection under the Constitution.

Ending a two-year probe by Education Department’s office for civil rights, Minneapolis has agreed to stop suspending black students for infractions that would still get whites suspended.

Every suspension of an African American must now be reviewed by the superintendent, according to the federal agreement.

Instead of being punished, unruly black kids will be put into “restorative talking circles,” where teachers will examine their own “cultural misunderstandings.”

White kids who act up won’t get off so easy. …

“I and all of my staff will start to review all nonviolent suspensions of students of color — especially black boys — to understand why they’re being suspended so we can help intervene with teachers,” explained MPS Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson, who is running the new “equity policy” through something called the Office of Black Male Student Achievement.

If you think that sounds a bit racist, you’re not alone. …

But the Obama regime, which sees racism behind every corner, blames biased teachers and administrators for the disparity — even though Johnson is black.

Minneapolis is just the latest target of the regime’s war on school discipline. The Education Department has aggressively investigated several other major school districts across the country for what it thinks are too many suspensions of black students.

They too have “reformed” their discipline codes to get the race-baiting educrats off their backs and safeguard their federal funding.

Closer to home, several California school districts are already in the throes of the Obama Administration’s discipline “reforms” and are having to contend with the ensuing chaos. As IBD continues:

Take San Diego. Just weeks after adopting similar racial discipline quotas, San Diego public schools have witnessed an explosion of violent assaults.

At its premier charter school, Lincoln High, students report daily fights now, mostly involving black kids. In the past month, there have been several arrests, including one involving a butcher knife, according to local reports. Victims have been hauled off by ambulance.

This result mirrors spikes in student crime in Los Angeles after the school superintendent followed federal orders to reduce suspensions of African-Americans.

“Last week I was terrified and bullied by a fourth-grade student,” a teacher at an urban Los Angeles Unified School District school said. “The black student told me to ‘back off, bitch.’ I told him to go to the office and he said, ‘No, bitch, and you and no one can make me.'”

Complained another LAUSD teacher: “We now have a ‘restorative justice’ counselor, but we still have the same problems. Kids aren’t even suspended for fights or drugs.”

Violence is still a problem in Oakland, Calif., schools after officials substituted counseling for suspensions on similar orders from the Obama regime.

If you think Obama is a lame duck and that his executive actions are meaningless, think again. His policies have dangerous consequences.

Rather than pursue yet another failed federal “solution,” parents should be empowered to enroll their children in any school they wish. Parental choice—far more than any government mandate—would introduce powerful incentives to ensure all students are disciplined fairly. If not, parents would be free to take their children—and their associated education funding—to schools that did.

Having to compete for students and funding would also make schools prioritize order and discipline instead of the feds’ latest fad-for-cash scheme.

Expanding parental choice, not federal overreach, is a far more effective approach to combat racially motivated discipline practices, and it wouldn’t compound existing racism with yet more racism.

Yesterday I blogged on President Obama’s ill-conceived and statist call for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the Internet so as to prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs), companies like Comcast, Time Warner, and AT&T, from charging differentially higher fees to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other broadband “hogs” for subscribers’ access to online content. Here are some additional thoughts.

Because Google and other content providers will likely undermine the monopoly powers of today’s cable-based “gatekeepers” in the near future, it seems odd that “net neutrality” lately has become a clarion call of Barack Obama’s failed presidency. Moreover, the issue is hardly new.

The source of today’s online bottleneck can be traced back to local and regional government authorities, who quickly recognized the benefits (to them personally) of creating and granting exclusive franchises to one ISP that would, for the term of the contract, be a monopolist. (Government officials can extract more rents if they negotiate with only a handful of contestants.) Given that only one ISP would “win” the right to provide online content to local customers, the local monopolists also recognized a benefit of exclusive franchises: They would have the freedom to discriminate against some content suppliers by adding extra fees for privileged access.

So, a simple solution to the absence of net neutrality is readily available: Foster competition between ISPs.

Some people might raise the objection that, in this realm, robust competition for consumer dollars is unlikely because the suppliers of connections to the Internet are “natural monopolists”. In fact, ISPs are not “natural monopolists” as some commentators would have us believe. They are local government-granted monopolies. (Even Frederic Scherer, the author of the influential textbook Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance, wrote that such claims of “natural monopoly” are “trumped up.”) Competition between ISPs nowadays is a contest for the favors of mayors and city councils who ultimately will determine who will win the exclusive franchise; it is not competition for the business of paying customers.

If public policy were to encourage competition between ISPs at the local level, the debate about net neutrality would die in short order because each of the rivals would have incentives to provide content at the lowest possible price.

President Obama released a video on Monday, November 10, asking the Federal Communications Commission to adopt rules that would keep the Internet what it always has been – “free and open.” The buzzword is “neutrality,” meaning that no telecom company or internet service provider (ISP) would be allowed to discriminate against some content providers by charging differently higher fees for delivering text or video recordings to consumers.

In other words, the “pipes” forming the Internet’s backbone would be treated like a “common carrier” and, like any other older economy service delivery platform (public utilities supplying your electricity and natural gas, railroads, and motor carriers), they would be required to provide access to all users on substantially equal terms. Neutrality in cyberspace means that broadband “hogs” (think Netflix or Amazon Prime’s video streaming service) would pay essentially the same fees to reach subscribers that other content providers pay.

Because this issue is still in the FCC’s hands, no one can know for sure what rules the agency will adopt. One important question, though, is: will neutrality apply to wireless services or only to cable-based ISPs, such as Comcast, Time Warner, and AT&T? In addition, will failure to preserve the status quo slow down the speed at which Internet connections and broadband capacity expand (because ISPs won’t be able to shift more of the expansion costs onto the “hogs”)? And what exactly is wrong with ISPs wanting to charge content providers higher prices for more bandwidth and faster, more reliable downloads?

More certain, however, is that regulations requiring “net neutrality” will end up benefiting the large, established ISPs. Incumbent firms have gained from “common carrier” regulation throughout U.S. history. As a matter of fact, the FCC predictably will be captured (if it has not already been) by the very companies President Obama wants to regulate “in the public interest.”

The president’s call to action sounds eerily similar to demands for federal railroad regulation that ultimately led to the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. Until it was put out of business in the early 1980s by President Jimmy Carter, the ICC allowed the railroads and, later, motor carriers and pipelines to charge prices exceeding competitive levels, thereby trying its best to protect the carriers’ profits at consumers’ expense.

The FCC’s chairman, Tom Wheeler, says he prefers a nuanced approach to net neutrality. “What you want,” he told representatives (i.e., lobbyists or rent seekers) from Comcast and other major industry players, “is what everyone wants: an open Internet that doesn’t affect your business…. What I’ve got to figure out is how to split the baby.”

Expect news soon that the baby is on life support or on the way to its funeral. When a politician or regulator claims to have consumers’ best interests in mind, hold on to your wallet.

For elected officials eager to find a real problem to fix, here’s a big one that’s seldom mentioned during campaign season: American courts and prisons are plagued with injustices and inefficiencies. One of the main culprits, according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Bruce L. Benson, is their guiding principle: an emphasis on offenses against the state, instead of infringements against an individual’s right to be secure in his or her person and property. Americans would therefore enjoy more justice at less cost if victims’ rights to restitution were moved for the forefront.

Benson puts forth this bold thesis in his recent article in The Independent Review, “Let’s Focus on Victim Justice, Not Criminal Justice”, and he defends this claim with the same rigor and erudition that made his books The Enterprise of Law and To Serve and Protect landmark contributions to the literature on private law enforcement and dispute resolution.

Focusing on “victim justice” would be easier to achieve, Benson also argues, if society were to embrace the full-scale privatization (not government “contracting out”) of security services, investigations, pursuit, prosecution, adjudication, and sentencing. “The result would be relatively efficient compared to punishment by imprisonment, which imposes huge costs on taxpayers and wastes large amounts of resources in the form of idle prisoners’ time,” Benson writes.

Moreover, privatizing each step—from crime prevention to restitution collection—would likely reduce crime. First, victims would have stronger incentives to report offenses, knowing that their chances of collecting full restitution were greatly improved. Second, recidivism would likely decline because some offenders needing to work off their debts would learn job skills that are in greater demand than those promoted in today’s prisons.

Related:

Audio: Bruce Benson on Crime in the U.S. (The Katherine Albrech Show, 10/23/14)

Prison Break: A New Approach to Public Cost and Safety, by Erwin A. Blackstone and Simon Hakim (Independent Policy Report, 6/30/14)

[A version of this post first appeared in the November 11, 2014, issue of The Lighthouse. For a free subscription to this weekly newsletter of analysis and announcements from the Independent Institute, enter your email address here.]

The National Security Agency has come under intense scrutiny over the past several years for its warrantless wiretapping and other surveillance tactics. Members of the public have been the subjects of surveillance, as well as a over 120 world leaders, including close U.S. allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Knowing this, the backlash against the NSA may not seem so shocking.

It may be a surprise, however, to learn that the tools and techniques used by the NSA are also being used by state and local law enforcement. In the most recent issue of The Independent Review, my coauthor Chris Coyne and I discussed the origins of domestic surveillance in the United States in “Perfecting Tyranny: Foreign Intervention as Experimentation in State Control.” In particular, we discuss how one can tie the early incarnations of the NSA to U.S. interventions abroad. We argue that once new social control techniques are developed, they permeate throughout the larger system through changes in technology, the skills of workers, and alterations in the broader structure of private and public industry.

One example of how new social control techniques spread domestically is illustrated by the development and use of a device called a “Stingray” or a “cell site simulator.” The Stingray, about the size of a large toaster oven, simulates a cell phone tower, tricking the software in cell phones into transmitting information like the phone’s location and other identifying information. A cadre of federal agencies use these devices in the name of combatting terrorism. In addition to the NSA, the FBI, Secret Service, ICE, ATF, branches of the military, and U.S. Special Operations Command are all known to use Stingrays.  The devices allow users to track the movements of a suspect, learn who an individual is contacting, and where they are going.

But the Stingrays have not just been used by federal authorities to “track terrorists” as originally intended. Instead, these devices have seen extended use by state and local law enforcement to track common criminals.

We can debate the merits of tracking everyday criminal suspects with this technology. But consider that these devices don’t impact only the intended target. They also obtain information from other phones in the surrounding area. According to one report by the ACLU,

 “Even when police are tracking a specific suspect, stingrays sweep up information about large numbers of bystanders who happen to be nearby; if stingrays yell out “Marco,” the mobile phones in the area reply, “Polo.” The result is that police gather the electronic serial numbers and other information about phones, as well as the direction and strength of each phone’s signal, allowing precise location tracking. Stingrays can also gather information about people’s communications, such as which phone numbers they call. Because we carry our cellphones with us virtually everywhere we go, stingrays can paint a precise picture of where we are and who we spend time with, including our location in a lover’s house, in a psychologist’s office or at a political protest.”

The most recent reports discuss the use of Stingray technology in Washington, D.C., but it is clear the devices are used throughout the country (you can click the map below for the interactive version).

What’s more disturbing is that the use of the Stingrays is shrouded in mystery.  Local agencies are required to sign non-disclosure agreements with federal authorities before buying a Stingray. As a result, very little information is known about how local police actually use this powerful tracking equipment. Attempts to compel the release of said information have been subverted by the aforementioned non-disclosure agreement.

State and local authorities often cite “combatting terrorism” in the homeland as justification for obtaining more powerful equipment and increasing their stock of materials. This idea of combatting terrorism is often accepted by the general public. It’s important for us, then, to examine whether or not these methods are actually effective. In most cases, they are “effective” only in that they grossly erode personal privacy.

In response to this, people often say, “I don’t care if they track me. I’ve got nothing to hide. If they catch one bad guy it’s worth it.” But what they fail to realize is that, as these types of activities spread, the “bad guys” become the general public. This attitude erodes the critical checks and balances placed on all levels of the government. As the case of the Stingray illustrates, we may be giving up our right to privacy, without the ability to know who, when, and how our rights are being violated.

One remarkable aspect in the recent fall in global oil prices is that Saudi Arabia has not cut production to prop them up.  Much of the speculation about why the Saudis have sat by passively and allowed the oil price decline has been that they are trying to undermine higher-cost producers in the US and Canada.  A decline in oil prices will make some of that production uneconomical.

While American producers will see their profits fall as oil prices decline, American consumers benefit from lower gas prices.  Meanwhile, the oil price decline will hit Russia much harder than the US.

After the Russian intervention in Ukraine, both the US and EU announced economic sanctions against Russia.  Those sanctions have had a minimal effect on the Russian economy, whereas the decline in oil prices poses a much larger threat.  The Russian economy has been slow to advance in the decades since the Cold War, and has become increasingly dependent on natural resource exports for financial support.  The decline in oil prices will hurt.

Among various economic threats thrown back and forth as a result of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, Russia has threatened to cut off energy exports to Ukraine and the EU, and the economic impact of lower oil prices makes Russia more dependent on that revenue, and so less likely to actually follow through and cut off its exports.

I’d be hard-pressed to claim that pressuring Russia is the reason the Saudis have stood by and allowed global oil prices to fall.  They may well have in mind undercutting high-cost American producers, as news analysts have suggested, and lower oil prices also puts pressure on Iran, which may help stabilize the Middle East.

Whatever their motives (and they may be many), it is easy to see that the decline in global oil prices, facilitated by the passive Saudi response, hurts Russia far more than the economic sanctions imposed by the US and EU.

The lesson I draw from the Republican victories in the 2014 election is that people want less government.  Since 2009 the number of Democratic Senators fell from 58 to 45, the number of democratic House members fell from 256 to 192, and the number of Democratic governors fell from 28 to 18.  I’m not the first to observe that these big Democratic losses are directly related to the unpopularity of President Obama’s big government agenda.

But wait… didn’t he come in with a mandate?  Both the House and Senate went Democratic in 2006, prior to Obama’s election, and he ran as a big government candidate, more or less.  Actually, I’d say less.  He ran on a platform of “hope and change,” an anti-Bush campaign.  He was running against what he called “the eight failed Bush-McCain years,” rather than running on his own platform.  Yes, he talked about health care reform, but mostly, he campaigned against Bush (who. at that point, wasn’t running for anything).

It appears that Bush’s waning popularity in his second term was also a sign of opposition to big government.  Bush initiated two wars and a major Medicare expansion, turned a budget surplus when he took office into a substantial deficit when he left, and completely eroded any notion of fiscal conservatism.  In 2000 he appeared to be a principled supporter of limited government.  By 2006, when the Congress turned Democratic, he appeared to be a big-spending foreign interventionist.

Remember a few limited government promises Obama did make on the campaign trail: end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and close the prison in Guantanamo.  Those promises sounded good to American voters, but six years later, they haven’t materialized.

There is more here than just the idea that presidents grow unpopular after six years in office.  Both Bush and Obama generated voter backlash because of their big government policies.  The problem is that for both Republicans and Democrats, the people who run for office are people who believe the government can solve our problems.  If people really do want to curb the power and influence of government, the best thing they can do is vote for divided government and hope for gridlock.  That’s what voters did.

Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the most thrilling event of my lifetime: when oppressed individuals came together and laid claim to their birthright of liberty.

Also known as “The fall of the Berlin Wall.”

It wasn’t supposed to have happened this way. “Everyone” knew the Soviet Union was the strongman. The intellectuals dismissed historian Robert Conquest’s portrayal of a corrupt and tyrannous system, and Paul Craig Robert’s prescient exposure of the myth of central planning. Communism was the darling of the western cultural elites.

And yet the change came from no political “messiah,” no elections, no liberating army.

It was simply the full flowering on an idea: individuals latching onto the idea “We are free,” and rejecting the message “You are slaves.” They withheld their consent to be ruled. Their rulers blinked, and utterly collapsed—morally bankrupt.

While those brave souls celebrating at the Berlin Wall may not have appreciated fully the idea that each of us is born with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, they embraced the idea enough to peacefully topple the modern era’s most powerful tyrant.

Ought not we as heirs of the Declaration of Independence find it so much easier to claim our birthright and turn back incursions on our liberties?

The State and its claims are just ideas. Liberty is the better one.

Spread the good news, be a shining example of how one lives in community with free and equal people, seize every opportunity of standing and speaking against claims against our liberty. Let’s live purposefully, topple every “Berlin Wall” erected against freedom, and unleash the full flowering of human potential in peaceful, prosperous, and free societies everywhere.