Ian Underwood, Author at Granite Grok

A standard for school standards

April 3, 2019 Ian Underwood

Recently, I sat listening to a speaker talk about the need for ‘better standards’ in schools. He talked a lot about what students need to know when they graduate from high school, with a lot of emphasis on literacy, mathematics, and what he called ‘general knowledge’.

Hard to argue with that, but as I listened, I noticed that two crucial requirements were missing. And as far as I can tell, they are missing from every school standard or subject standard that I’ve ever seen. They are (1) priority, and (2) independence.

Democracy or constitutional republic?

March 27, 2019 Ian Underwood

The electoral college is in the news again. Some presidential candidates are calling for the Constitution to be amended to get rid of it. A growing number of states are taking steps to require the distribution of their electoral votes be determined by the national popular vote, which would amount to the same thing.

I just mention it because conversations about this topic frequently lead to someone proclaiming that we have a constitutional republic, and not a democracy, as if that’s a meaningful distinction.

The Voluntary Exclusion Party

March 22, 2019March 22, 2019 Ian Underwood

In a previous post, I considered the question: How can people who prefer safety to freedom coexist with people who prefer freedom to safety?

I discussed a way in which a political party could directly provide single-payer services to the people who want them, instead of focusing on gaining control of government in order to ‘provide’ them even to people who don’t want them.

Today I’d like to consider a related question: How can people who want to follow different moral codes coexist with each other?

The Single-Payer Party

March 19, 2019 Ian Underwood

In a previous post, I considered the question: How can people who prefer safety to freedom coexist with people who prefer freedom to safety? The former are always going to be tempted to accomplish their goals by gaining control of the levers of government, in order to force the latter to go along with their agenda.

But what if they could get what they want, without doing that? Because they surely can, if they’ll just do one simple thing.

The J’s have it

March 15, 2019March 15, 2019 Ian Underwood

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a couple of things that John F. Kennedy said. The first is:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

I’m reminded of this whenever people (increasingly) talk about the possibility of, and even the ‘need for’, some kind of civil war in the United States, as a remedy for our unfortunate habit of using politics and law, not to codify areas of widespread agreement, but to force submission in areas where there is substantial disagreement.

F-Corporations

March 13, 2019 Ian Underwood

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and now that the Democrats are casting (some might say flailing) around for ways to make society ‘more fair’, it might be the perfect time for someone to try to introduce the appropriate legislation.

What is a constitution for?

March 12, 2019 Ian Underwood

If you’re looking for a single image that sums up what a constitution is for, and why it’s important to follow one, a good candidate is Ulysses passing the Island of Sirens.

From ESAs to EARP — An exercise in accurate naming

March 12, 2019March 12, 2019 Ian Underwood

Confucius said that the first step towards wisdom is to call things by their right names. It’s a good rule to live by. If you misname something, you won’t really be able to think about it correctly, because you’ll be thinking about what it’s called, rather than about what it is. On the other hand, if you name something very accurately and precisely, many of the straw man arguments against it can’t gain any traction.

Let’s apply this reasoning to ESAs, or Education Savings Accounts, and see where it takes us.

Red Flag Laws — The Missing Testimony

March 11, 2019 Ian Underwood

Unfortunately, a nagging case of pneumonia caused me to miss the opportunity to come to Concord to testify against the proposed Red Flag Law. But here’s what I would have said.

Don’t hold the line. Get rid of it.

April 11, 2019March 10, 2019 Ian Underwood

Someone smart — maybe it was Epictetus, or Mark Twain — said that what matters isn’t what happens to you, but what you learn from what happens to you.

So, what’s happening to us now?

Well, we have a truckload of anti-gun bills moving towards passage by the legislature, and we’re depending on a pseudo-Republican governor to veto them, and hoping that his vetoes won’t be over-ridden.

And what should we be learning from this?

Well, in some stories about vampires, a vampire can’t come into your house unless you invite him. It turns out that the same is true about anti-gun bills. And we need to learn to stop inviting them.

What we can learn from the Cursive Wars

March 2, 2019March 2, 2019 Ian Underwood

The debate over whether to include cursive in the curriculum has flared up again, this time in Nashua. It can be instructive to look at the arguments that people put forth in favor of teaching cursive — but not because it’s important whether cursive is actually taught in schools. (Spoiler: It’s not.) The arguments are instructive because of what they say about the underlying thought processes of the people putting them forward.

The New Green Dress Code

February 28, 2019February 28, 2019 Ian Underwood

At first, I thought this was yet another bogus AOC meme, but apparently she really said it.

Remember the epic idea that set this country in motion?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

A government created to protect your rights is supposed to be ‘in charge’ of you in the same way that your gardener is ‘in charge’ of your garden. They work for you, not the other way around.

Schools: Seeing problems as opportunities

February 21, 2019 Ian Underwood

In response to this piece at the School Funding Shell Game site, one visitor asked for some specific examples. That makes sense. It’s one thing for people to finally recognize that obsessing over school spending is preventing us from improving student achievement. But that realization leaves a vacuum: If we stop doing that, what should we … Read more

Crime Extinguishers

February 20, 2019 Ian Underwood

I was talking with a friend recently, and we got to discussing the merits of various firearms. When I showed him the revolver that I was carrying that day, he expressed surprise that I would have a gun with me all the time.

He asked if that didn’t mean that I was ‘living in fear’. So I asked him if he had a fire extinguisher in his home. He said yes, of course. I asked if that meant that he was living in fear. Or was he just recognizing that if something unlikely but potentially terrible occurs, it’s good to be able to deal with it on your own until help arrives?

Anti-Gun Bills: The Short View

February 11, 2019February 11, 2019 Ian Underwood

I don’t believe that the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have any interest in protecting rights that they don’t think are important — in particular, the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, whether against criminals, or against the state. But I do believe that they are interested in power — that is, … Read more

Anti-Gun Bills: The Long View

February 18, 2019February 11, 2019 Ian Underwood

The first thing to be said about all of the firearm-related bills being considered in Concord is that they take the wrong approach toward the goals sought by their sponsors. The right approach would be to amend the New Hampshire Constitution to declare that not all persons have the right to defend themselves, to claim that self-defense is a privilege, to change the definition of ‘persons’ to something like ‘persons who don’t scare us’, and so on.

But until such changes have been made, any fifth-grader can see that these bills conflict with the New Hampshire Constitution. It takes a constitutional scholar to miss that.

Stop the insanity

February 7, 2019February 4, 2019 Ian Underwood

If there’s anything that we should have learned over the last half century, it’s that spending more money on schools does nothing to improve student achievement, and that there is no correlation between the amount spent and the results obtained.

And if there’s anything that we should have learned during the two decades since the Claremont decision, it’s that even making every district into a ‘rich district’ does nothing to improve student performance.

These results shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. We’ve been focusing all our attention on money, and very little on what we’re doing with the money. It’s almost as if we think that something will work better if we pay more for it, or if we take the money out of a different pocket.

Daddy, why do we have taxes?

February 4, 2019 Ian Underwood

Percy Blakeney recently made the argument that ‘the proper function of taxation is to raise money for core functions of government’.

The first problem with this is that it ignores the fact that there are lots of other ways in which money can be raised, apart from taxation: Principally user fees, but also penalties, sales of goods and services, donations, raffles, and so on.

So it might be more precise to say that ‘The proper use of taxation is to raise money for core functions of government only after all other avenues have been shown to be ineffectual’.

But there’s still a problem.

Money can’t buy love. Or education.

December 20, 2024February 2, 2019 Ian Underwood

Our representatives in Concord are currently discussing how much money school districts require, where that money should come from, and how it should be collected.

But three simple graphs are sufficient to demonstrate decisively that money is not the issue.

The first graph shows that since 1970, tripling school spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) has had no effect on student achievement:

Educaid

January 29, 2019 Ian Underwood

Over time we’ve developed a method for dealing with situations where (1) we don’t want poor people to be denied access to something essential, (2) we don’t want tax money to be wasted on substandard products or services, and (3) we don’t want poorer people to subsidize richer people.

That method works like this. Poor people demonstrate that they can’t afford to pay for X. We let them choose a private provider of X, who meets basic standards, and we give them money that can be spent only on X.

If X is medical care, we call that Medicaid. If it’s heating oil, we call it LIHEAP (the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program). If it’s food, we call it SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Food Stamps, or EBT cards). If it’s housing, we call it Section 8 (the Housing Choice Voucher Program). And so on.