Costs and Benefits of Domestic Violence Laws
Years ago I was doing the dishes. My wife and I had had an argument; or I should say were having one since it apparently was not resolved quite to my wife’s satisfaction. Don’t ask either one of us what it was about. My wife, in a mood, closely observed the job I was doing and proceeded to comment on what a very shoddy job it was. This, mind you, was not the trunk of our argument, rather a branch, a minor offshoot of the main dispute. I was also in a mood. So, by the third comment involving a dinner plate in my hand I turned and flipped it to an unoccupied corner of the kitchen where it shattered in a most satisfying way. “There,” I said, “that one’s done well enough I think.” She glared at me for a few seconds, then stalked out of the kitchen leaving me to finish the dishes and clean up the breakage in peace.
Partisan School Boards
In Jefferson County, the thirteenth-largest school district in the U.S., the education of nearly one-hundred thousand students is controlled by a five member, volunteer school board selected in a “non-partisan” election. Not that these folks have no agenda, political leanings, or party affiliations. Rather, those preferences are carefully hidden from voters by an officially sanctioned process that pretends to absolute neutrality, but in fact exacerbates the worst aspects of special interest campaigns.
Ten Years After: The Denver Teachers' Contract and School Reform
This paper compares the Denver teachers’ contract critiqued in this writer’s issue paper published in February of 1990 (How Union Contracts Block School Reform: A Denver Case Study) with the current contract which incorporates the system of collaborative decision making (CDM) committees that began in 1991. The paper places the contract and its evolution in the context of both recent developments and the theories advanced in John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe’s Politics, Markets and America’s Schools.
