Shannon Love

I really like the idea of a voucher based funded school system. I think that long term it offers the best chance of providing high quality education to an increasingly diverse population.

However, transitioning from the current governmental management to private management is a major hurdle. Voucher schools must be able to offer all the same opportunities as the currently established schools immediately even though they are new and untried institutions. This vastly increases the upfront cost and risk of financing such schools.

We need a transitional form of voucher schools that can function as an auxiliary to government schools, while they build themselves up into full-fledged institutions.

The Japanese have an extensive system of private after-hour tutoring schools called juku (for younger students) and yobiko (for high school students). These tutoring schools, often called “Cram Schools” in English, exist to prepare students for Japan’s rigorous entrance exams for high school and college.

Perhaps we could create a similar system here, using vouchers to provide extra instruction after hours. We could start by targeting at-risk students in poor schools and then expand. Such a program would direct resources to motivated students who could really benefit from additional instruction. It could provide another source of income to teachers. The tutoring schools could start out small, perhaps with just one student, and could use private homes, churches, public meeting places or after-hour school buildings. If successful, the tutoring schools could evolve over time into full-fledged, stand-alone educational institutions.

Politically, tutoring schools would be an easier sell. It would be easier to convince parents, teachers and education unions to support a minor change to the system, which would cause more money to flow to students’ education than a major structural change in the entire system.

Here is an over-the-top anti-Kerry ad by The Club for Growth.

I can’t help but think that political ads would benefit enormously by using more humor even it coarsens the debate. I am not even sure humor does coarsens the debate. Humor often conveys the truth better than dry facts.

Via Instapundit comes a link to a post on NRO’s The Corner which asks whether Kerry’s Cold War-era policy stances really tell us anything about how he would fight terrorism. I think Kerry’s Cold War-era policy stances are fair game because they reveal his fundamental model of foreign relations so starkly.

People make decisions based not on the merits of individual cases but by running the facts of each particular case through their existing models. People with different models arrive at different conclusions even if they start with the same set of facts. Even though the War on Terror is substantially different from the Cold War, Kerry still thinks about fighting terrorism using the same fundamental concepts that he used to think about the Cold War.

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A lot of people engage in ethnocentric projection by talking about “The Iraqi Insurgency.” A lot the commentary makes it appear that the insurgents are all part of the same group with the same goals. That is not the case. Like most 3rd-world peoples, the people of Iraq identify weakly with the nation-state in which they live. Their primary loyalties lie with family, clan, ethnic group and religion in that order. The vast majority of insurgents do not fight because they believe it is best for all the people of Iraq, but because they believe it will benefit their own subset of the population. Thinking of the problem in terms of western nationalism or patriotism is a big mistake.

There isn’t one insurgency in Iraq but rather four or five. Each insurgency is attached to a specific ethnic and religious group and each insurgency has its own goals which contradict the goals of the other insurgencies. Only the superficial reporting of the media makes it seem like one big fight. In reality, we have multiple enemies which we can turn against one another.

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Via Instapundit comes this story about the people of Fallujah, and other people in the Sunni triangle, beginning to turn on the foreign fighters who are actually causing most of the bloodshed. This is a recurring pattern in Iraq, and happened most recently in An-Najaf with Al-Sadr’s “militia.”

It may be just an accidental strategy on our part, but allowing this or that group of insurgents to control an area for a period of time seems to have long-term benefits. The locals might imagine that they hate the Coalition and the provisional government, but a few days or weeks of living under the rule of the insurgents seems to provide a stark reality check. The insurgents are thugs and religious extremists, who terrorize and extort the local population and eventually draw down retaliation from the Coalition. The insurgents lose the struggle for hearts and minds through their own brutality.

Iraq isn’t a war about firepower. It is a war about information. The bad guys are a relatively small number of individuals hiding within a large population. Finding them requires that enough of the locals turn on them and reveal their locations. The loss of moral support in the general population, caused by the insurgents’ own behavior when they control an area, drives the collection of the information that we need to neutralize them.

The actions of the insurgents cause the locals to view the Coalition as the lesser of two evils. We win the battle for hearts and minds by default.

(update: related thoughts in this post)