Don’t get me wrong. I think this actually sounds like a very interesting and productive course I would have liked to have taken when I was in college. There is something unique and exciting about doing productive and meaningful work as opposed to the normal and seemingly endless term papers which end up in the trash or stuck in a folder at the end of the year.
But as I read about the reports these undergraduate students at the University of Iowa are preparing at the request of lawmakers, I naturally stumbled over one line.
The organization has produced reports ranging from textbook costs to eminent domain to homeschooling to absentee and early voting. Last year, the class pulled together at least a dozen reports. press-citizen.com
And I naturally want to know if they are certified. Is a one credit hour preparatory seminar really enough training? Can one professor really provide adequate oversight of these students who are being given the power to sway legislators by the reports they provide?
These are undergraduate students at a state university preparing the very documents which will determine how the state approaches topics as important as property rights and the educational rights of families.
Certainly I have at least as many formal qualifications to home educate my children as these students have to research the topic on behalf of the state, right?
What a perfectly horrible idea. I wish there had been some reassurance offered in the article about how legislators don’t really take these reports seriously.
I’d turn this around. Concerned, well-read and research savvy parents seems just as able to draft well thought out policy papers as a bunch of undergraduates. And we come with the advantage of years of work, budgeting and paying our own way through life.
I am actually somewhat heartened by the internet uproar over CPSIA. There have been some very well researched essays amongst the commentary.
This worries me. I’m not as worried about the qualifications of the students (although that is an issue), as the influence of the professor. What sources does he steer them to, how do his influences affect what is used, what isn’t and how much weight the information is given.
At least when an interest group submits a report, you know their biases. Here, you have no idea which way the data is being shoved. And the data is always being shoved.
As Mark Twain said, “There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Jumping off what April said above, I’ve also heard it said: Stats don’t like. People that use them do.
~Luke
As long as the outrage is equal opportunity! These kids already have more academic qyakifications to provide policy recommendations and reports (and certainly more qualified supervision) than those getting all the airtime for the agenda they recommend, in Washington this week — the 13-year-old little boy who spoke at CPAC, Joe the Plumber, Rush Limbaugh, etc.
Actually, I have no outrage. Personally, I believe everyone has the right to address the government with their ideas and proposals and we shouldn’t need any particular qualifications. These are college students. I believe a lot of these reports prepared by various organizations are prepared largely by interns, anyway.
And the name of the institute, not the intern, gets stamped on the final product.
Wouldn’t it be rather novel, however, if legislators contemplating new laws would talk first with those whom the laws will affect? The CPSIA thing could have been avoided with some public discussion before it was passed and such discussion may have resulted in a law that both protected consumers and the so-called cottage industry.
As a rule, Americans know too little about what is going on in government, and referring research to various interns, etc., without opening the process up for discussion does not help.
My concern is not lack of academic skill, but lack of life experience which I would think to be imperative in making these kinds of evaluations. Even older non-parents seem strikingly naive when talking about parenting-related topics. There are just too many intangibles that they don’t grasp.
Now you’re talking. . .
This is my neck of the woods and this worries me. I am not convinced that Iowa politicians are particularly interested in public discussion. It is probably nicer for them to rely on a report from disinterested undergrads than it is to engage in a conversation with members of the public that feel strongly about legislative agendas that will affect them. When I mentioned education issues, my State rep suggested I run for school board. The fact that we no longer really have local control (they adopted a model core curriculum that was quietly made mandatory last year–affecting all public and accredited non-public schools) and that the State Department of Education controls the competent private instruction regulations seems a bit lost on him. Also, the parents I talk to don’t seem to know much about what is going on with the local schools or possible legislation that may affect their children. If they opened things up for discussion, perhaps more people would know what is going on and weigh in on the matter. It seems public opinion is an unpleasantness to be avoided rather than seen as a necessary part of representative government.
My hope would simply be that if these students actually do even just a minimal amount of research on homeschooling, then there’s nothing to be concerned about. Show me just one study which shows any true negative effects of homeschooling.
Assuming they focus first on the actual research out there which has already been done — and not just on hearsay and wild opinions — then they’re off on the right foot. Then, say, they do some research of their own, comparing homeschoolers’ SAT scores to the average, and evaluating the education and training level of their parents. The conclusions SHOULD be obvious.
The negative opinions about homeschooling tend to be kneejerk reactions based on biased opinions resulting from limited exposure to isolated, non-typical cases. When you actually do some research, it’s really, really difficult to have any kind of negative conclusions.
The only potential downfall, as has been pointed out, would be if the professor started them down a particular path. For instance, starting with looking at the cases of child abuse that were “hidden” under the guise of homeschooling. Even so, I would HOPE that there would be at least ONE intelligent-thinking kid in the class who would say “well hey, I knew a kid when we were in grade 3 who was being horribly abused and nobody knew and he was in public school, so how does that logically connect?”
Here’s the IPRO report on Homeschooling:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ican/Papers%202007/Homeschooling.pdf