“American public schools are in the middle of a crisis,” the New York Times‘s Natalie Kitroeff says in the November 11 episode of Times podcast The Daily. “There aren’t enough students to fill their classrooms. In some cities, enrollments have been shrinking so dramatically that officials say they have no choice but to close schools en masse.”

Interviewing Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh, who co-authored an article on the topic (also describing the situation as a “crisis”) in May, Kitroeff asks Mervosh to to “help us understand the scope of …. the enrollment problem in public schools today and why this problem matters or should matter to us.”

Mervosh offers several answers:

First, funding is tied to student numbers, and reductions don’t scale well to desired class sizes and teacher numbers, or to maintaining “magnet” and “specialty” schools as student numbers decline.

Second, schools tend toward segregation by race and class (despite decades of supposed remedies for such segregation), and parents get upset when there are fewer options that cater to their preferred  segregation schemes.

Third (but obviously tied to the aforementioned segregation), the obvious response to fewer students is fewer schools, and “closing schools is one of the most unpopular things you can do in education.”

When someone asserts a “crisis,” the natural interpretation goes with the negative definition per WordNet: “an unstable situation of extreme danger or difficulty.”

That negative definition is fairly modern. The previously prevailing definition was more along the lines of “a crucial stage or turning point in the course of something.”

Yes, declining student enrollment in government schools is a “crisis” in the second sense … but it need not be one in the first.

Why is that enrollment decreasing?

The biggest factor at this point is that Americans are simply having fewer kids than we used to, a trend that seems likely to continue.

A second factor, not as large but growing, is that more and more parents are choosing private education and homeschooling over the government version.

The number of POTENTIAL government students has been decreasing since 2007, when birth rates began falling. That was the beginning of the turning point, the “crisis.” Private education and homeschooling are increasingly reducing the number of ACTUAL government students as well.

Will some people experience negative effects from this “crisis?” Yes.

Parents may have to make some difficult choices about where, how, and from whom their kids will receive education.

Fewer potential teachers and administrators will have jobs waiting for them if they choose to major in education in college.

These are the kinds of problems that markets are very good at dealing with. Government monopolies, not so much. We should push our politicians to move toward separation of school and state and letting the market do its thing, instead of just closing/consolidating specific facilities, reducing hiring quotas, and trying to keep the government education gravy train rolling.

But even within the context of “public” schools, Kitroeff and Mervosh seem to miss the gigantic silver linings in this ongoing student enrollment decline.

Fewer students and fewer facilities mean lower costs.

Dilapidated schools can be closed, sold, and put to productive use by the private sector.

Instead of hiring and retaining MORE teachers, government school systems can get selective and insist on BETTER teachers.

Taxpayers can keep more of their money, using that money to improve both the educations and the general living conditions of their children.

Just kidding on that last one. If politicians spend less of your money on schools, they’ll just spend more of your money on other, probably equally dysfunctional, activities.

But it’s a start.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On July 14, by a vote of 308 to 117, the US House of Representatives passed the “Sunshine Protection Act,” which would end our twice-yearly ritual of “springing forward” and “falling back” by making “Daylight Saving Time” the permanent national standard for timekeeping.

Getting that done seems to be one of president Donald Trump’s priorities — one of his few such priorities with which I wholly agree. Unfortunately, the US Senate recessed before voting on the law and it’s unclear whether they’ll get around to it before January and the seating of a new class of Senators.

Various polls show the public broadly in support of ending the “spring forward / fall back” nonsense, but not necessarily in agreement on whether the standard should be “Standard Time” or “Daylight Saving Time.” I’ve seen good arguments from both sides. My own position is: Pick one and make it happen.

For whatever reason, such measures always seem to bog down in Congress. Unable to decide which direction to go in, they always end up punting and putting us through another year of those annoying clock changes.

There’s a third way for Congress to go about exercising its Article 1, Section 8 power to “fix the standard of weights and measures” that’s simple and sensible.

Of course, Congress hates simple and sensible things, but my proposal comes with a sweetener: It would let them permanently abdicate part of the aforementioned power in a way that no longer subjects them to pressure or blame in the matter.

The first part of the proposal is to make “Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)” the national standard.

UTC is, per Wikipedia, “a weighted average of hundreds of atomic clocks worldwide” that is “currently within about one second of mean solar time at 0° longitude, the currently used prime meridian, and is not adjusted for daylight saving time.”

To put it a different way:  Under UTC, absent any locally imposed “offsets,”  clocks show the same times in Los Angeles, London, Lisbon, and Lviv.

At first, it might seem kind of weird that your 9am shift in New York now starts at 2pm (better yet, just plain 1400), even thought it’s the same “time of day.”

But you’d get used to it, and it would actually make scheduling phone calls, Zoom meetings, etc. with participants currently living across multiple “time zones” much easier. Three people in Boston, Berlin, and  Beijing wouldn’t have to “convert time” to know when to show up for a conference.

The second part is to make the change a constitutional amendment, proposed by 2/3 of both houses of Congress and ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures. Proposed text:

“Effective as of midnight on January 1, [of the year after ratification], the government of the United States shall utilize Coordinated Universal Time in all official operations and communications, without application of daylight saving or other offsets. The states may, effective as of midnight on January 1, [of the year after ratification] adopt such timekeeping standards as their legislatures or people may direct.”

Upon ratification, Congress would be off the hook. The matter of timekeeping schemes would no longer be their problem to solve. I strongly suspect that most states would similarly move to UTC, but that’s up to them.

My  proposal comes with a second sweetener: “National security.” Military commanders in one “time zone” would no longer have to coordinate time differentials with  commanders in other zones when planning operations. The “time” at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri would be the same “time” as at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait and at Naval Facility Okinawa.

My personal position remains the same: Pick a single, not semi-annual, timekeeping scheme and implement it instead of just arguing about it.

The current scheme, especially the “spring forward” part, costs us money (more than half a billion dollars in lost productivity) and lives (via spikes in car accidents, workplace injuries, cardiac events, and suicides).

We can, and should, do better. It’s time to.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

At “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918,  guns officially fell silent across Europe and World War One came to a military end (the political finish came in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles).

The following November 11, the winning nations commemorated the final ceasefire with the first “Armistice Day” events

Not celebrations as such, mind you: The observances were — and in some countries at least partially remain — somber remembrances (the UK now calls November 11 “Remembrance Day”) of 20 million dead in “the war to end all wars,”  driven by sentiment against ever returning to that kind of carnage.

That sentiment, unfortunately, proved insufficient to prevent World War 2 and hundreds or thousands of subsequent deadly conflicts, which is bad enough.

Worse, though, is what America did with “Armistice Day.” In 1954, Congress replaced the traditional “Armistice Day” observance with a celebratory “Veterans Day.”

Instead of mourning war, we now celebrate warriors. Parades. Air shows. Political speeches. Free meals, drinks, haircuts, etc. for veterans.  A lot of “thank you for your service” to everyone identifiable as a veteran of the US armed forces; quite a bit of mutual back-slapping among those of us who “served.”

To me, the best way to celebrate veterans would be stop making so many of us — especially, but not only, of the dead, maimed, traumatized, and homeless varieties.

Since the first Armistice Day, the US has fought a second “world war” and countless smaller wars — declared and undeclared — around the globe, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of foreigners’ lives.

The US armed forces maintain a global network of military bases, remain bogged down in the Middle East after a quarter century of the “global war on terror,” and have now been at on-again, off-again open war with Iran for a year-and-a-half.

The US government constantly rattles its saber, actively seeks excuses to militarily intervene in other countries’ internal affairs and international disputes, and fuels even the wars it doesn’t actively participate in with foreign aid and arms sales.

Two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler tallied up the cost in his book, available free online, War is a Racket: “Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”

None of that is worth celebrating. It’s a cost, not a benefit.

The US armed forces’ oath of enlistment binds future “veterans” to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Even if one accepts that as a worthy goal, when’s the last time it actually turned out to be the job?

Not during my lifetime, at least that I can think of, and I turn 60 the day before “Veterans Day.” The war I fought in was premised on kicking one tyrant out of Kuwait so another tyrant could return and rule again. Constitution? Nowhere in sight.

Commemorating “Armistice Day” — and making that commemoration a call for peace and a rejection of the American war racket — makes far more sense to me than celebrating “Veterans Day.”

If we want to thank veterans “for their service,” the first step is to bring them home and stop letting politicians put them in morally bankrupt jeopardy of life and limb.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY