One component of education reform that often gets overlooked is online or virtual learning. In the August-September 2010 issue of Reason Magazine, Katherine Mangu-Ward notes the following:

During the last 30 years, the per-student cost of K-12 education has more than doubled in real dollars, with no academic improvement to show for it. Meanwhile, everything the Internet touches gets better: listening to music on iTunes, shopping for shoes at Zappos, exchanging photos on Flickr.

Education reformers across the nation are listening. In 2000, only 50,000 students were enrolled in online classes. Today, that number is over 1 million. Julie Young of Florida Virtual School (FLVS) set up a system to offer supplemental courses, not replace the curriculum of the public schools. Mangu-Ward explains:

Young doesn’t use the language of reform or revolution. Instead she talks about “doing what’s right for kids.” Yet Florida Virtual School’s model is, in its own way, revolutionary. The school employs 1,200 accredited, nonunion teachers, who are available by phone or email from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week. Kids take what they want, when they want.

K12 Inc., another innovative online education company, provides full-time instruction, allowing students from kindergarten through 12th grade to do their entire school year online.

Students in FLVS have been performing better than students in traditional public schools, surpassing them on both advanced placement tests and state standardized tests in math.

Another benefit of online learning is that it gives students who may not otherwise have the opportunity to go to school an opportunity to receive an education. For example, Dan Lips, former Heritage Foundation Education Policy Analyst , has noted that “virtual and blended-learning programs will enable mass customization in education, allowing students to learn at their own pace in ways that are tailored to their learning styles and interests.”

Unfortunately (and at the same time unsurprisingly), the teachers unions are opposed to giving this choice to parents and student. Mangu-Ward quotes the National Education Association’s official policy statement on charter schools:

There also should be an absolute prohibition against the granting of charters for the purpose of home-schooling, including online charter schools that seek to provide home-schooling over the Internet.

However, as noted by Mangu-Ward, citing Tom Vander Ark:

But “we’re a generation behind where we should be in terms of online tools, platforms and options—a state government caused market failure. Where competition is welcomed, we’ll see innovation.”

The best solution to see improved student performance anywhere in the country is to support policy options that promote parental choice in education. Virtual learning is opening the doors of learning to many students and should not go offline.

Michael Wille is a member of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit: http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm

If the Senate doesn’t ratify New START, proponents of the arms-control agreement fear, then … well, the world will come to end.

The latest warning came from Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation that advocates a nuclear weapons-free world. “A delayed ratification with a close vote would be a blow to U.S. leadership around the world,” he told the Associated Press, “People would doubt the president’s ability to negotiate other agreements.”

More pressure to just “sign the treaty so we can purge the world of nuclear weapons” will be fueled by the premiere this week in Washington and New York of “Countdown to Zero,” a documentary on the threat of nuclear weapons. As one reviewer notes, the “film asserts that the United States and Russia, the entities with the most weapons by far, should lead the other nuclear countries toward a total disarmament initiative.”

The sudden surge of concern over the treaty started with a blast from Mitt Romney, who declared the treaty “Obama’s worst foreign policy mistake.” Sens. John Kerry and Richard Lugar  have both been cheerleading the treaty, as the administration quickly counterattacked. They were later joined by Sen. Carl Levin. But rather allay the concerns, the exchange only raised more questions.

The administration quickly dispatched Defense Secretary Robert Gates to calm Republican concerns. Apparently, that didn’t work. In the latest round of hearings, after U.S. officials stated they weren’t concerned that the Russians cheat on implementing arms control, Sen. John McCain declared, “Well, what this brings to the casual observer’s mind, general, is if it doesn’t have any consequences if they do any cheating, what’s the point in having a treaty?”

In a further sign of panic, there are reports of furious backroom dealings, negotiations, and threats of retaliation from the administration to get enough Republicans to sign on to approving the treaty.

All the pressure to blow past the critics, cut backroom deals, and get the treaty ratified ought to raise huge red flags. New START has had less than half the number of hearings that treaties are normally subjected to. And the pace for approval certainly is trying to outdo any nuclear-arms pact the U.S. Senate has ever considered. Not only is the speed with which it is being pushed through unprecedented, the administration continues to withhold key documents, including the treaty negotiating record.

The arguments that rejecting the treaty will mean disaster bear scrutiny as well.

First, there are real alternatives to effective arms control. Former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes recently wrote that critics of “New START do not oppose all arms-control pacts. But they worry that this treaty can lead to more instability in the world, not less. They think there is a better way to achieve arms control. And they are disappointed that the Obama administration negotiated a treaty pegged to yesterday’s problems.”

Second, there is research to suggest that this treaty might actually result in more nuclear proliferation and increase the likelihood of nuclear conflict.

The irony is that the lemming-like support for Obama arms control may actually turn the “countdown to zero” into the “countdown to zero-hour.”

Cross-posted at Big Peace.

If Congressman Peter Defazio (D–OR), sponsor of the End the Trade Deficit Act, had grown up in Kansas instead of Massachusetts, he might have learned a valuable lesson from an association called the Kansas Agri-Women.

In 1978, this group started placing billboards across the state proclaiming, “One Kansas farmer feeds 55 people + YOU.” The Agri-Women regularly had to update their billboards as farmers became more productive. Each year, one Kansas farmer could feed more people than he could the year before.

By 1999, the billboards advertised that one Kansas farmer feeds 128 people—plus you. Eventually, rather than continually having to update the billboards as farmers kept getting better at their jobs, the group changed the text to read: “One Kansas farmer feeds more than 128 people.”

Compare the Agri-Women’s approach to Defazio’s recent lament: “The U.S. has lost 3,718,000 manufacturing jobs since 1998.” But as previous Heritage Foundation studies have shown, those jobs were lost because U.S. manufacturing workers, like the farmers praised by the Kansas Agri-Women, kept getting more and more productive.

After accounting for inflation, manufacturing output was 1.9 percent lower in the recession year of 2008 than in 1998. While American manufacturing workers produced almost as much in 2008 as in 1998, it took fewer of them to do it. A U.S. worker who made about $23,000 worth of manufactured goods in 1998 produced $37,000 in 2008. That’s a remarkable 58 percent increase in productivity.

Instead of celebrating that improvement, Rep. Defazio complains about alleged “U.S. trade policies that have allowed huge multinational corporations to export our industrial manufacturing base.”

Such arguments simply distract policymakers from the real threat to the U.S. manufacturing base: Government policies that make Americans less free.

An op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Robert McDowell, a commissioner of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, warns that a FCC proposal to regulate broadband Internet access could lead to international regulation of the Internet by the International Telecommunications Union. The ITU, a largely autonomous organization that actually predates the United Nations, is the leading U.N. agency for information and communication technology issues.

As McDowell observes, many U.N. member states are opposed to an unregulated Internet and have proposed granting the U.N. oversight of the medium. This possibility threatens the freedom and vitality that has been a large part of the success of the Internet:

Like free trade, free-flowing information promotes freedom itself. Conversely, countries that regulate the Internet more heavily tend to be less free.

State interference with the Web is spreading. From Iran to North Korea, Syria to Thailand, and Afghanistan to Venezuela, nearly all crackdowns are being carried out in the name of local versions of the “public interest.” For instance, the Chinese government released a white paper on its Internet policy in June that included a chapter titled “Guaranteeing Citizens’ Freedom of Speech on the Internet.” Despite its promising title, the section states that “no organization or individual may produce, duplicate, announce or disseminate information” on the Internet that risks “subverting state power,” “damaging state honor or interest,” or “spreading rumors.” Government regulation of the Internet can often become politically motivated.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. has been a lonely voice fending off efforts by governments to tax, censor and otherwise regulate the Internet over the past decade. The U.S. has been able to fend off some of these efforts at meetings like the World Summit on the Information Society simply by opposing them. In this way, the U.N. tradition of working through consensus at international conferences has assisted U.S. efforts to keep the Internet free of undue restrictions. But, as noted by McDowell, the ITU is a different beast. U.S. objections could and, likely, would be overridden by vote in the international organization at the behest of countries bent on controlling the Internet to address their concerns.

In general, the Obama administration has been less protective of the freedom of the Internet than the Bush Administration. This concerning trend is exacerbated by the possibility of ITU oversight of the Internet.

Keeping the Internet free of U.N. oversight is paramount to its continued growth as a catalyst for economic growth and free exchange of ideas. By failing to push back on these initiatives, the U.S. has made freedom on the Internet less sure and increased its vulnerability to political pressure, censorship, and strangling regulation and taxation.

Liberals are desperate to bully or chide the rest of the country into accepting massive new taxes to support the recent federal spending surge. Many opponents who resisted the spending on the grounds that it increased the budget deficit are now being called deficit chickens because they oppose the tax hikes needed to pay for all that spending. This is a particularly nauseating development as the charge comes from those whose actions prove they care not one whit about the nation’s finances. Nauseating or not, however, there is no reason to cave to such frail bric-a-bracs.

Even under normal circumstances, at just over 18 percent the federal tax burden is already too high. Opponents of even higher taxes need to keep this in mind, just as they need to remember that the excessive budget deficit for 2010 and in the following years is not the result of a shortfall in revenue but is due instead entirely to an attempt by Obama and friends to increase the size of government substantially and permanently. Whereas federal spending as a share of our economy is typically just above 20 percent, under Obama’s budget it hits 25.1 percent, according to his own numbers, and stays around 23 percent for the balance of the decade.

Those who fight tax increases are not weak or hypocritical about the budget deficit. The deficit is dangerously high and must come down, or else we risk a fiscal crisis, as a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report makes clear. But there is a higher priority than reducing budget deficits caused by excessive spending, and that is to protect taxpayers from the insatiable appetite of the federal Goliath. Lower taxes would allow individuals to keep more of their own property. It’s their money, not the government’s money on loan or bequest.

Lower taxes generally mean a stronger economy. The favorite tax hikes of the big government brigade like higher taxes on capital income and higher tax rates on small business are precisely those that would do great harm to the economy now and in the long run.

Lower taxes also mean that, deprived of sustenance, the federal Goliath must go on a diet. Spending will have to come back toward historical levels to avert the crisis of which the CBO warns. This would be a victory for the economy, for workers, and for individual liberty.

Lower taxes are evidently what the American people want, which is especially galling to the tax-increase crowd. If the proponents of higher taxes really thought the American people agreed with them and wanted higher taxes, the hikers would not hesitate to bring legislation to the floor of the House to jack up those taxes to fund even more government spending. Why, then, has the imperial Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–CA) not brought the bill to the floor of the House? Why has no Senator brought such an amendment or bill to the floor of the Senate.

Why? Because the American people would ship them to the dustbin of history in one election. And that is why the Democratic leadership has said it will deal with the expiration of the 2001/03 tax relief after the election—so the voters won’t know how much the Democrats intend to contravene the American will when voters go to the polls. They say there’s no secret plan to raise taxes. They’re planning on it. They’re trying to keep it a secret. Who’s really the chicken now?

You can buy a lot of car for $41,000. A BMW. A Mustang GT convertible. Even a Mercedes. Or you could shell out for a brand-spanking-new electric-powered Chevy Volt and do your part to “save the environment.” Government-owned General Motors is counting on the government to encourage you to do the latter.

According to a New York Times report, GM spokesman Greg Martin said in an e-mail:

Policy makers can do their part to speed the market acceptance of these vehicles as part of a much broader energy policy that sends a market/economic signal that places a premium on fuel efficiency. Could a carbon price be a part of such a policy? Yes. As well as consumer tax incentives.

Those tax incentives are already coming to bear, at least for the Volt. Barron’s reports that with a federal subsidy, the Volt’s price could be as low as $33,500, after a $7,500 tax subsidy financed by the American taxpayer under President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill. That might sound a bit more affordable, but the subsidy masks the true $41,000 cost. If you contrast that with other new offerings (take the highly fuel efficient, $13,320 Ford Fiesta, for example), that’s a steep price.

But your bottom line doesn’t matter to the eco-left. For them, less isn’t more. More is more. More regulations. More taxes. Less money in your pocket.

What additional energy costs might you expect to see from this Congress? Take the Waxman-Markey jobs-killing environmental legislation. According to Heritage research, the bill would cost a typical family of four $829 per year in additional energy-based utility costs, increase gasoline prices by 58%, and increase average household electric rates by 90 percent.

There are other ways your tax dollars are being spent to bring electric cars to market. Apart for the government offering tax incentives to encourage you to buy electric vehicles, the U.S. government has also shelled out $2.4 billion in grants for advanced battery and vehicle manufacturing. The government may be a major consumer of those vehicles, and it may foot the bill for creating infrastructure needed to charge them. The kicker? Even with all that money being spent, electric cars may not succeed, at least according to one electric vehicle battery manufacturer. The New York Times reports:

One battery manufacturer, Boston-based A123Systems, has received hundreds of millions in government aid to set up a new plant in Livonia [Michigan]. Les Alexander, the company’s general manager of government solutions, said federal spending on manufacturing and research is helping, but “if we do not have the vehicles being built, or customers buying those vehicles, it’s a risk that this industry will go away.”

That’s one expensive ride for what could be a very short trip.

The State Department is sorely upset about July 28 headlines in The Washington Post and The Washington Times about a recent Department report on Russian noncompliance with several existing and past arms control treaties and how the Russian record could derail Senate approval of the new arms control treaty with Russia, which is called New START. It seems, however, that the State Department cannot keep its story straight.

According to a report in Foreign Policy’s online journal The Cable, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller asserts that Russian non-compliance with New START’s predecessor treaty, called simply START, was about minor technical issues. On the other hand, a State Department official speaking off the record is quoted as saying, “As far as State is concerned, cheating in any form would be a huge issue … so it absolutely would be something we would take very seriously.”

So which is it? Are some instances of Russian noncompliance with arms control agreements just minor concerns and of little significance, or are they all treated as a “huge issue”? It seems that for the State Department the answer depends on which argument is most expedient in justifying Senate consent to the ratification of New START. Blatant contradictions in the pursuit of New START entry into force need not apply.

Clearly, the Senate should ignore attempts by the State Department to “spin” the story about its own report. The obvious contradictions by State officials give it no choice in any event. Senators should read the report, including its classified portions, and attempt to answer for themselves the following question: Does the Russian record regarding arms control compliance provide confidence that the entry into force of New START cannot be manipulated by Russia in ways that damage or weaken the security of the U.S. and its allies?

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Ruth Marcus uses “quack medicine” to describe conservatives’ support for extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Yet she commits her own economic malpractice.

Ms. Marcus asserts that the tax cuts devastated tax revenues by pointing out that “tax revenue fell from 21 percent of GDP in fiscal 2000 to 17.5 percent in 2008. (I’m leaving out the recession-induced plunge, to under 15 percent this year and last.)”

This cherry-picked data is highly misleading. Her starting point (2000) was a year in which revenues reached their post-war record due in part to an untenable stock market bubble. Her end point (2008) occurred during a recession that began in December 2007. To blame that entire revenue  drop on the 2001/2003 tax cuts completely ignores the bursting of the stock market bubble as well as the recession.

In reality, tax revenues since 1960 have remained close to their 18.0 percent of GDP average. The late 1990s boom and bubble were a temporary exception. Yes, the 2001/2003 tax cuts played some role in keeping revenues below their historical average for most of the 2000s, but the country was also recovering from a recession at that time, too. By 2007—the year before the current recession—healthy economic growth spurred in part by the tax cuts pushed revenues back up to 18.5 percent of GDP.

The budget situation has certainly deteriorated. The $5.6 trillion surplus that had been originally projected for the 2002–2011 period has been replaced with an actual $6.1 trillion deficit. Yet Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data shows that the tax cuts caused just 14 percent of that swing. The vast majority of the fiscal decline was caused by surging spending (by both Presidents Bush and Obama) as well as the economic factors described above.

Moving forward, 100 percent of the long-term rise in deficits is caused by rising spending. Even if all the 2001/2003 cuts are extended and the AMT is patched, the CBO still projects revenues to exceed its historical average of 18.0 percent of GDP by 2020. The deficit is projected to soar 6 percent of GDP above its historical average because spending will rise 6 percent of GDP above its historical average (according to a current policy baseline). Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and net interest costs are responsible for nearly all of this growth.

As a deficit hawk, Marcus should focus on the actual source of rising long-term deficits—rising entitlement spending—rather than blame the tax cuts for a spending problem.

The aim of releasing thousands of classified documents on the Afghanistan war on the WikiLeaks Web site was apparently to undermine American public support for the war. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said he wanted the world to see the “true nature of the war” and equated the WikiLeaks Afghanistan archive with the release of the secret files of the East German police following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But an initial look at a handful of the thousands of released reports reveals no shocking information but rather a mix of both operational battlefield information and unverified spot reporting, the credibility of which is impossible for the average U.S. citizen to determine.

Commentators are essentially using the so-called “Afghanistan War Diaries” to re-emphasize their own positions on the war. The reports provide details and context on the day-to-day conduct of the war, but they are only pieces of information that do not lend themselves to sweeping generalizations about the efficacy of the overall war effort.

While a major Afghanistan war funding bill still managed to pass Congress earlier this week, the anti-war drum beat is unmistakable. Even some conservatives are succumbing to the defeatist attitude that it is impossible to succeed in Afghanistan. This is highly unfortunate. Stabilizing Afghanistan and ensuring it does not again become a global terrorist hub is the surest way to guard against another type of 9/11 terrorist strike on the U.S. homeland.

General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO forces, just released a new set of counterinsurgency guidelines for coalition forces on the ground in Afghanistan that call on the troops to “fight hard” but “be a good guest.” He is following through with the sound counterinsurgency strategy first laid out by General Stanley McChrystal last year.

It would be a mistake to give up on the war effort now, just as thousands of additional forces and civilian resources are pouring into the country and before the talented General Petraeus—who is largely responsible for turning the Iraq war around three years ago—is given a chance to succeed. Rather than taking the anti-war bait, Americans should support our dedicated troops in the field, focus on protecting vital U.S. national security interests, and avoid getting caught up in the current Wikisteria.

But no amount of pause by states and localities could ever possibly satisfy the Obama administration, its amnesty allies, and activist judges like Bolton. In a textbook case of judicial activism, Judge Bolton rewrote the Arizona law to her own needs, invented her own facts and ignored clear federal law. President Jimmy Carter appointee and immigration law professor at Yale Law School Peter Schuck told The New York Times: “She rushed to judgment in a way I can only assume reflects a lot of pressure from the federal government to get this case resolved quickly.”

The Obama administration’s case against Arizona sought to preemptively stop enforcement of Arizona’s new immigration law. The legal term for this is a “facial challenge,” and federal precedent is clear that facial challenges “must be careful not to go beyond the statute’s facial requirements and speculate about ‘hypothetical’ or imaginary cases.” But that is exactly what Judge Bolton did. First, she ignored Section 2(B) of the law as written and completely ignored the section’s first sentence that required an officer to have “reasonable suspicion” that a person was in the country illegally before their immigration status should be checked. Then, she invented a completely hypothetical case about a Chilean dog walker detained by a completely fictional Sheriff Smith. Finally, despite the fact that 8 U.S.C. §1373 clearly requires the federal government to “respond to an inquiry by a…State, or local government agency, seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual,” Judge Bolton concluded that the Obama administration’s decision not to enforce this provision was as good as rewriting the law itself.

Taken alone, the White House’s behavior on this issue is troubling enough. But put into the broader context of the first 18 months of this Administration, a truly pernicious pattern emerges. First, there was the Obama Justice Department’s decision to dismiss voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party. Then there was the Obama administration’s use of TARP to bail out its union allies in what bankruptcy law scholars have called “so outrageous and illegal that until March of this year [2009], nobody even conceptualized it.” Then there was the Obama administration’s shakedown of BP in the White House’s Roosevelt Room. Less than a week later after a federal court found its first oil drilling ban to be “arbitrary and capricious,” the Obama administration issued a second oil drilling ban that was wider and killed even more jobs than the first.

Americans cannot be cowed by the Obama administration and its La Raza and MALDEF allies.  Giving into bullies only encourages their behavior. Finally this lawsuit should be a permanent reminder to everyone who wants to call themselves a conservative that any and all claims about an amnesty deal are complete fiction. La Raza and MALDEF will fight every enforcement measure in any such deal tooth and nail while administrations like this one will simply choose not to enforce them. Meanwhile, the amnesty provisions would be instantaneous and permanent. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has vowed to fight this decision all the way to the Supreme Court, and she deserves support.

Quick Hits:

• Citing a depressed real estate market, high unemployment and wary consumers, the Federal Reserve said Wednesday that economic activity had started to slow.
• Vice President Biden told USA Today yesterday that despite 18 months in office, the Obama administration’s Afghan policy is still developing.
• White House budget director Peter Orszag used his last speech as a White House adviser to attack Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) “Roadmap for America’s Future.”
• While President Obama is telling voters that Democrats are on the side of the little guy, not the Wall Street brokers, celebrities and chief executives, he is also hosting $30,000 a person fundraisers at places like the Greenwich Village townhouse of Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
• Saying he is relieved to tell his side of the story, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is expected to fight House Ethics Committee charges that he failed to follow the tax laws while chairman of our nation’s tax law writing committee.