Week of September 3, 2001
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

GOOD SITES: If you enjoy this site, here are a couple of recommendations for further reading: First, check in a couple times a week at Joanne Jacobs' me-zine, Readjacobs.com. Joanne, a former San Jose Mercury News columnist, is writing a book on the founding of a charter school and focuses her site particularly on education news, with a leavening of other subjects—all with no-nonsense approach and an eye for the absurd. Second, check in every few hours at Glenn Reynolds' new InstaPundit site. I know Glenn has a real job (as a law professor), but he seems to do nothing but post new stuff—all of it interesting. [Posted 9/9.]

EDUCATION HISTORY: An interesting sentence appears in a routine Dallas Morning News article about the architecture contract for a new building for the city's arts high school: "Booker T. Washington opened in 1922 as Dallas' first black high school and became an arts magnet in 1976."

In other words, before 1922, blacks living in the Dallas area could not attend public high school. And Dallas was larger and richer than most other places in the region. This is the sort of basic historic information about life in the South that people from other parts of the country simply don't comprehend. When your immigrant ancestors were packing the schools of New York and Chicago, their counterparts in the South had no such opportunities. Outside of urban areas, which were few and far between, there weren't even many schools for whites. According to my late grandparents, who admittedly were not educational historians, there were only three high schools (two public, one private) for whites in Georgia when they were in school in the early 1920s. I suspect that they missed a few—surely Savannah had a high school—but we're still talking about numbers you can count on your fingers.

On a related note, Jonathan Rauch argues in his latest column that blacks who were forced to attend segregated schools should get reparations. It's an interesting and provocative argument. On the same issue, I'm eagerly awaiting Richard Epstein's forthcoming article on in Daedalus. [Posted 9/9.]

LUCKY FOOLS: My latest New York Times column, on the importance of "lucky fools" to a dynamic economy, is here. [Posted 9/6.]

MORE HOME SCHOOLING: In response to my earlier posting mentioning them, Wright Sullivan sends the following detail about his family's experience with home schooling:

Home schooling continues to be great for our family.

There is a huge "socialization" myth, that socialization is a service provided free of charge by our public schools, and that no child grows up whole without it. That is the objection I hear most often to homeschooling. It is simply bunk.

Before we homeschooled, the public schools wasted enormous amounts of our children's time, and lack of supervision created a disruptive and stressful environment.

Now they have far more activities with other children, but they can choose to do them on their own terms. If there is a rude or mean child they don't want to be around, they don't have to, reducing anxiety and distraction. If there is an area of the arts or sports they want to excel in, they have more time and opportunity to do so. If they want to travel during the school year, we'll go, provided their assignments are complete.

Why do homeschoolers have more time? In a word, efficiency. One impediment for public school students is a huge amount of homework. In our experience, public schools don't seem to teach much (or teach well) during the school day, so they pile on the homework, expecting kids to spend three or four hours learning at home in the evening. This leaves little time for extracurricular learning or playing with their siblings and friends. In our case, homeschool is simply a more efficient learning environment.

Consider the establishment line: "Homework" is good but "homeschool" is bad. Go figure.

Many resources are available to homeschooling parents, including complete curriculums with daily lesson plans, textbooks, and assignment grading. We use one from The Calvert School (Baltimore MD) for our younger children, and one from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Independent Study High School for our tenth-grader. They return their assignments by mail to be individually graded, and the tenth-grader takes exams (often essay tests) at our local library, proctored by the librarian.

We have a homeschool orchestra, as well as theater classes specifically for homeschoolers. There are even homeschool cooperatives for technical subjects like math and science, which allow parents uncomfortable teaching those subjects to get help, while still giving them control over their children's learning environment.

Our tenth grader is even taking biology and English at a local university, getting both high school and college credit simultaneously, and getting a taste of a serious education....

I find it remarkable and wonderful that we actually have the freedom to homeschool, thanks to the efforts of the tenacious homeschool pioneers who forced the issue in court over recent decades. I am also convinced that the excellence of many homeschool students (as exemplified by the winners of the National Spelling Bee, National Geography Bee, and International Math Olympics) will provide one more lever exerting pressure on our public schools to reform.

NICHE ARTICLE: What great readers I have! You send money, you send ideas, you send links, you send videotapes of Ally McBeal, and now reader Robert Burnham has not only found but scanned and emailed to me my lost Forbes ASAP article about online niches. (See item below.) You can read it here. [Posted 9/5.]

TREND OR COINCIDENCE? As regular readers (and astute observers) know, you can support this site by making payments via the Amazon and PayPal boxes to the left, or, if you write me for the address, a check. Over the last couple of weeks, PayPal payments and checks from readers have surpassed Amazon contributions. Why? Who knows? It could just be a random coincidence. Or maybe PayPal is hitting critical mass. Regardless of payment vehicle, I thank all of you who contribute to help keep the site going. [Posted 9/5.]

ABOUT TIME: I've finally had time to explore the new White House website. After nearly eight months in office, it looks like the Bush administration finally has its online act together. While I didn't look for anything esoteric, it did pass the basic test: You can find Vice President Cheney's April 20 speech to the Associated Press with just a couple of obvious clicks. I guess I can now take that once-impossible-to-find speech off this site. The real test will be how quickly they post the president's speeches. Up till now, it's been easier and hours faster to get copies of major addresses from news organizations rather than from the primary source. [Posted 9/5.]

HOME SCHOOLING: In the immortal words of Buffy Summers, shortly after she was kicked out of high school for excessive vampire slaying, "What about home schooling? You know, it's not just for scary religious people anymore." That's pretty much the theme of Wendy McElroy's latest Foxnews.com column. McElroy cites a federal study that finds that 850,000 school children, 1.7 percent of kids between 5 and 17, were studying at home in 1999. And religion-based disagreement is no longer the primary reason for parents, mostly mothers, to teach their own kids. "The most commonly stated reason in the 1999 survey was to provide 'better education' (48.9 percent) with 'religious reasons' coming second (38.4 percent)," writes McElroy. "The parents do not trust the public school system to impart basic skills and knowledge to their children."

This trend will only grow. As parents become more educated, their expectations for their children's education rise, and their willingness to defer to less-educated, and often unresponsive, "educators" falls. If the choice is between a bad public school and an expensive private school, the cost of having one parent (usually, but not always, the mother) stay home and teach the kids goes way down. From the foregone salary, you subtract both taxes and tuition costs. Plus, not every community offers high-quality private schools, which makes home schooling even more attractive.

After I wrote about my South Carolina schooling, readers Wright and Laurel Sullivan, who live in the Upstate, inquired about where exactly I'd grown up, adding the following note: "Last year we yanked our three kids (15, 12, 8) out of the horrid public schools here and began home-schooling them, strictly for reasons of educational quality. It has gone well."

The more people who home school their kids, the more normal the practice becomes and the more support structures develop, making it easier for still more parents to teach their kids at home. McElroy, like many commentators, assumes the rise of home schooling reflects "the ongoing decline in public education." That's surely a factor. (My high school didn't produce stories like this one, which Wright Sullivan also sent me, in the late '70s.) But much greater, I think, is that quality that was tolerable 25 years ago is no longer acceptable to well-educated parents—and there are more of them than ever. [Posted 9/4.]

NICHE PLAYERS: Several readers have sent this Business Week story on how niche publications are thriving online. The story focuses on publications like World Net Daily and Belief.net that offer alternatives to the usual mass media. It makes sense that a new medium would best serve underserved markets, but that connection comes as a surprise to many observers. Concludes writer Jane Black:

After all, these sites fulfill the original promise of online-content pioneers. Think back to when the Web was young: The ideal was to create a bevy of niche sites for fly fishers, hot-air balloonists, even Jell-O wrestlers — all maintained and paid for by aficionados. The niches would offer finely targeted audiences for advertisers and slowly draw dollars from mainstream publications.

The dot-com boom distorted that original vision with grandiose national e-zines that have almost all ended badly. For a handful of those who stuck to their niches, though, things are working out just fine.

Of course, defining a "niche" is somewhat subjective. The New York Times is definitely a niche publication, slicing off an audience by education, affluence, lifestyle, and politics. That's the key to its national success, though also the source of its aggravating blind spots—especially when the Times pretends to carry "all the news that's fit to print." Those blind spots, in turn, create market opportunities for others. [Posted 9/4.]

MORE NAMES: Reader John Pierre LeBlanc sends in the following comment on my item about building names: "You're correct about how people forget the origins of a building's name. In return for a rather large donation, the City of Toronto agreed to rename the O'Keefe Centre to the Hummingbird Centre for the Arts. When the deal was announced, the usual suspects were crying fowl (pun intended) about corporations usurping our heritage, blah blah blah. One fact that they all conveniently forgot was the source of the building's original name: It was built with a grant from Carling-O'Keefe (now part of Molson), the country's third-largest brewery. On second thought, maybe the original name IS more in keeping with our heritage..." [Posted 9/4.]

READERS VS. IOMEGA: Readers certainly do hate Iomega drives. Here are a couple of samples from the mail you sent after I wrote about my computer woes :

Bummer about your backup drive. Iomega is known for bad service. I once inadvertently erased the necessary software that came with an Iomega Jaz drive. Iomega wouldn't let me download replacement software, or purchase the software on diskette or CD for a nominal price; instead they wanted me to buy a whole new cartridge with software on it and pay suggested retail price of a cartridge ($130). It was like making me buy a new car when all I needed was one tire. That experience taught me that it's risky to deal with them because they'll squeeze customers who don't have alternatives. I avoid their products now, and I'm sure I'm not alone -- maybe one reason why IOM stock is trading around a buck.

Meanwhile my Microsoft trackball conked out on me, I telephoned MS, they sent me a replacement immediately and without hassles. Microsoft's service makes buying their products a low-risk proposition. They have a clue and will continue to prosper.

In my experience, Iomega's products are trash. I'm personally boycotting them. They also stiffed me (and few 100-thousand others) on a $50 rebate. There was a class-action suit, and Iomega settled.

If you value your sanity, for God's sake, stay away from their ZIP drives.

You have a bully pulpit, so if you also have a crummy experience with Iomega, I suggest you let 'em have it. Don't accept a lot crashes and a ratty time with your computer.

BAD REVIEWS: Before I wrote a book, I never noticed how slap-dash so many reviews are. Often you can't even be sure the reviewer read the whole book, much less understood it. This carelessness doesn't just apply to 800-page biographies or Serious Non-Fiction like The Future and Its Enemies. It's not limited to negative reviews—or to podunk publications.

Consider the review in Sunday's New York Times Book Review of Sandra Tsing Loh's A Year in Van Nuys. The book is a very funny and insightful semi-fictionalized memoir. It examines the angst of hitting middle age as a moderately successful writer in a world in which even the most successful (whoever they are) have trouble getting attention: There is no center these days, no way to fully "make it," but we all think someone else has found the secret. The book is comic, it is easy to read, and it is short. I read it in an afternoon. We're not talking Hegel here. We're not even talking David McCullough.

So what explains reviewer Mark Athitakis' ignorance of the book's contents? In his review, he describes Sandra as 35, when she is 36 through most of the book. Passing 35 is a Big Deal, the onset of middle age in a milieu where everyone is looking for "young, fresh" talent. But maybe that sort of detail is easy to overlook—despite the chapter titled, "Now We Are Thirty-Six"—or maybe her birthday was hard to work into Athitakis' paragraph.

Sandra's husband is not a minor, easily forgotten detail. He is a major, major character. And, lest you think they're just shacking up, the book includes an entire article on their wedding, which Sandra writes as an assignment for a rapidly declining website. To say in the NYTBR that "Sandra knows she ought to concentrate on getting married..." pretty much declares, "after the first chapter I mostly just looked at the pictures." Athitakis liked what he read, but apparently not enough to pay attention.

Slap-dash reviewers flourish because that no one ever calls them on their carelessness. Authors are warned not to, and most readers don't bother. Editors haven't read the books and have to trust the reviewers' care. So the slap-dashers go right on grinding out more and more reviews, exercising greater influence than their more careful, less prolific colleagues.

Buy A Year in Van Nuys, read and enjoy it, and then re-read the review and ask yourself, "How did this end up in America's most influential book review?" Then imagine what they do to difficult books. [Posted 9/4.]