Month: July 2016

FBI Director James Comey has just recommended that Hillary Clinton not be subject to criminal prosecution for using poorly secured private email servers while secretary of state.

This isn’t to say that Comey went easy of the presumptive Democratic Party nominee. He called here “extremely careless” in how she handled information (including more than a half-dozen “top secret” emails) and stressed that “this is not to suggest that an individual in similar circumstances would not face” charges.” Rather, the widely respected Comey said that in his view, it was unlikely that any sort of criminal case would win a conviction, as they need more proof of malicious motive.

From USA Today:

The FBI recommended Tuesday that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should not face criminal charges over her use of private e-mail as secretary of state, even though she and aides were “extremely careless” in handling classified information.

Though there is evidence Clinton acted improperly—and may have been hacked—no prosecutor would bring a case because there is no evidence she acted intentionally, FBI Director James Comey said.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Fox News personality and author Juan Williams laments the sorry state of the nation’s K-12 education system. He’s right to do so. Every year, we spend more public money and more resources per student and, overall, we see no increase in test scores or outcomes.

“Millions of black and Hispanic students in U.S. schools simply aren’t taught to read well enough to flourish academically. For them, the end of the school year marks another lost opportunity, another step toward a life of blunted potential,” writes Williams. “According to a March report by Child Trends, based on 2015 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 21% of Hispanic fourth-grade students were deemed ‘proficient’ in reading. This is bad news. A fourth-grader’s reading level is a key indicator of whether he or she will graduate from high school.”

The news isn’t good for white students, either. ‘Only 46% of white fourth-graders—and 35% of fourth-graders of all races—were judged ‘proficient’ in reading in 2015,” Williams notes. Despite spending more money on education and more time in the classroom, U.S. kids rate average compared to students from other industrialized nations.

So, what to do? The first thing to do is not to spend more money. We’ve been doing that for decades and it hasn’t helped to bump scores (and, one assumes, knowledge or skills) upwards. Check out the chart by the late Andrew Coulson of Cato. In the 40 years between 1970 and 2010, the total cost of educating a kid from kindergarten to senior year of high school more than doubled, while scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) stayed flat. You can’t fill an busted bucket.

One answer that has been road-tested for going on 25 years now is the charter school, which are publicly funded schools that get a fraction of the typical per-pupil money given to traditional schools in exchange for the freedom to experiment with different sorts of programs and curricula. Charters are not in any way guaranteed revenue—they must draw students based on reputation and interest. Opponents of charters, which include teachers unions and a wide assortment of liberal groups such as People For The American Way (PFAW), point to studies which show that charters on average don’t outperform residential-assignment public schools. And just for fun, PFAW tries to throw in a scare about state-financed religion, accusing charters of “robbing our public education system of urgently needed funds, and sending taxpayer money to unaccountable private and religious schools.”

That’s a dodge, however. Charters aren’t private and they certainly aren’t unaccountable (they need to keep students coming back and all have internal and external oversight boards). But more importantly, they do produce better outcome for students. As University of Arkansas education professor Jay P. Greene argues, when you actually look at specific students via “randomized control trials” (RCTs), charters clearly help disadvantaged students do much better. RCTs allow researchers to isolate the effect of going to one school over another. In urban areas such as Chicago, Boston, and New York, RCTs found that charters decreased achievement gaps between minority and white students by as much as 86 percent. Go here for more specifics on the major RCTs that have been done, but here’s Greene’s conclusion:

When you have four RCTs – studies meeting the gold standard of research design – and all four of them agree that charters are of enormous benefit to urban students, you would think everyone would agree that charters should be expanded and supported, at least in urban areas.  If we found the equivalent of halving the black-white test score gap from RCTs from a new cancer drug, everyone would be jumping for joy – even if the benefits were found only for certain types of cancer.

If we want less tragedy in our lives—or, more specifically, in the lives of minority kids—charters represent a proven way to make things better.

Delivering on a campaign promise, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans to introduce legislation next spring that will legalize the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana for recreational purposes. In the meantime, a government-appointed Task Force on Marijuana Legalization and Regulation is supposed to hammer out the details, addressing the questions posed by a discussion paper it published last week. Although the paper gives no firm answers, it suggests that Canada’s regulatory regime could be stricter in some ways than the rules adopted by the four U.S. states that allow recreational use of marijuana but looser in others. Here are some of the major issues the paper covers:

Production. Based on Canada’s experience with licensed home cultivation and government-controlled production of medical marijuana, the task force concludes that “neither approach would be in the public interest in the context of the larger numbers of users expected in a legalized market.” In other words, “some form of private sector production with appropriate government licensing and oversight” will be necessary to supply recreational consumers.

Distribution. The task force suggests that recreational marijuana, like medical marijuana, might initially be distributed exclusively through the mail (an option that is not allowed in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, or Alaska) but concedes that “allowing for some ability for the sale of marijuana to occur in a legal, regulated retail environment may be required in order to provide an alternative to the current illegal sellers that exist in certain Canadian cities.”

Minimum purchase age. The paper says “the science indicates that risks from marijuana usage are elevated until the brain fully matures (i.e., when someone reaches about age 25).” But it also notes that Colorado et al. all picked a minimum purchase age of 21 (as did the backers of legalization initiatives that are expected to be on the ballot in five other states this year), which corresponds to the alcohol purchase age that prevails throughout the U.S. In Canada, by contrast, the drinking age ranges rom 18 to 19.   

Marketing. The task force says “the early experiences of Colorado and Washington State suggest very strongly that the Government should take steps to avoid the commercialization of legalized marijuana, including the active promoting and marketing of marijuana, leading to widespread use.” Those steps include “advertising and marketing restrictions to minimize the profile and attractiveness of products.” It’s not clear that the limits would go further than the rules adopted by Colorado et al., although Canadian regulators have more legal leeway to restrict speech in the name of child protection and public health.

Taxes. The task force warns that “the use of taxation and pricing measures to discourage consumption must be properly balanced against the need to minimize the attractiveness of the black market and dissuade illegal production and trafficking.”

Edibles. “It is understood that individuals may choose to create marijuana products, such as baked goods, for personal consumption,” the paper says. “However, consideration should be given to how edibles are treated in the new regime in light of the significant health risks, particularly to children and to youth.” No U.S. state where marijuana is legal has banned edibles, although Colorado recently imposed limits on the shapes of THC-infused treats, a symbolic measure that soothes the sensibilities of legislators without reducing the likelihood of accidental consumption.

Potency limits. “Higher concentration products have added risks and unknown long term impacts, and those risks are exacerbated for young people, including children,” the task force says. “Given the significant health risks, maximum THC limits could be set and high-potency products strictly prohibited.” No U.S. state has imposed such a limit so far.

Consumption locations. The task force says “consumption of marijuana could be restricted to private residences.” Then again, “the system may need to be pragmatic to respond to the demand for venues to consume marijuana outside the home in order to avoid proliferation of consumption in all public spaces.” To address that concern, “consideration could be given to identifying—and strictly limiting and controlling—allowable sites for use by adults.” No U.S. state explicitly allows marijuana consumption outside the home, although some Colorado jurisdictions tolerate it and regulators in Alaska have left the door open to cannabis clubs.

Marijuana-impaired driving. The paper says “the government could establish an offence of driving while having a specified concentration of THC in the blood, similar to the offence of driving with a blood alcohol level.” It does not mention that the science supporting such a standard, which Colorado and Washington have adopted, is much weaker than the science linking blood alcohol concentration to impairment.

Summing up the discussion paper, which carries the cautious title “Toward the Legalization, Regulation and Restriction of Access to Marijuana,” National Post columnist Kelly McParland writes:

If anyone thought the breezy support for recreational pot offered by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the campaign trail would translate into neighbourhood “dispensaries” peddling a rich and varied assortment of products to passing clients, they will be deeply disappointed. The plan looks much more likely to be about control, policing and regulation. Fun has nothing to do with it. 

The nine-member task force, which is chaired by a former health minister and includes five doctors, takes a “public health” approach, which in theory should consider the pleasure that people get from consuming intoxicants but in practice almost never does. Still, regulation aimed at minimizing morbidity and mortality is an improvement on uniform criminalization (which remains in place, even for possession of small amounts, until the new legislation is enacted), and it may ultimately prove more friendly to consumers than McParland expects—not because public health busybodies care about fun per se but because consumers do, and their demands must be taken into account by anyone hoping to replace the black market with something better.