StefanClaypool.com

This week, I subscribed to a magazine for the first time in five years. The magazine was National Review, the de facto publication for thoughtful conservatism and a shining beacon of light on the right for more than sixty years. Why am I posting about it? Because I didn’t subscribe to the print edition. I subscribed on my iPad.

National Review made the bold decision to embrace Apple’s subscription service and offer its product in on a new media platform. It’s not a completely independent edition of the venerable publication – in fact, it’s simply a high-quality PDF of the printed version – but it is in no way dependent on outdated models of publishing. Unlike The New York Times, let’s say, which has built its cost structure to incentivize users to subscribe to its print edition ($8.75 a week for unlimited digital subscribers vs. $7.40 a week for home delivered print AND unlimited digital) , National Review has embraced the benefits of digital publishing and distribution, and is giving its readers every reason to do the same. A one-year digital subscription costs $19.99, as opposed to a $29.50 print subscription, or nearly $120 for twenty-four individually purchased issues. (For comparison, NYT digital costs $1.25 per digital edition, while NR costs 83¢. NYT with print costs $1.05 per issue. Not trying to compare NYT and NR by content, but rather the ways they are using pricing to incentivize digital subscriber behavior.)  Even better, by using Apple’s subscription service, National Review allowed me to opt out of sharing my personal data. That means that I won’t be sold as a product to any cause that wants to send me their mail (or more accurately, send my trashcan their mail). That’s something that would be worth paying more for – and I’m paying less for it.

This is my first experience with Apple’s subscription system. It took less than a minute to do. I don’t know if National Review is going to make enough through this process to justify shifting more of its resources to digital, but if there are more users like me out there to whom the ease of the process and the lowered price makes a difference, then the publisher has a good chance of making up in volume what it gave up in price. And that’s a very good thing for National Review, for Apple, for the future of publishing, and for users like me.

I’m going to propose a radical idea here: our education system is not underfunded. It’s poorly funded.

There is a sizable contingent that believes the surest way to increase the quality of education in American schools is to increase teacher salaries. The thinking goes that if a teacher’s pay is on the same scale as a lawyer’s or a doctor’s, then a greater percentage of intelligent, capable people with gravitate to the field and students will be the beneficiaries.

With all due respect to the fine men and women who are genuinely gifted educators (and I was lucky enough to learn from a couple myself), this notion fundamentally misunderstands the forces already at work to determine teacher’s salaries and misjudges the relationship between a good teacher and good students. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that students, parents, schools, and governments across the country have no idea what a good teacher is actually worth, or even what constitutes a good teacher to begin with.

Some will contend that a good teacher is invaluable. Ridiculous. Any individual who trades a skill or commodity in a marketplace has a value determined by the rarity of the skill or commodity and the desire of the potential customer – in short, by supply and demand. Determining that value is far more difficult when outside forces interfere with the functions of the market. In this instance, the primary culprits are teachers’ unions, whose primary motivation for decades has been to secure greater pay and benefits for their members, even at the expense of school districts’ budgets. By artificially driving up prices across the board, rather than allowing the market to determine the value of each individual educator, teachers’ unions are interfering with the only mechanism truly capable of identifying what good educators are worth.

The qualifier “good” is particularly important in this case, as a more market-like system would inevitably result in some teachers receiving significantly higher compensation than others, even within the same school. Unions would cry foul, of course, but this is how individuals’ value is determined in every other sector of the American economy. Everyone brings a certain set of competencies and experience to the table, and they are compensated accordingly by organizations that can benefit from the application of those competencies. Why should educators be any different? And if the market were allowed to determine the value of a good teacher, and if compensation reflected this value, then the result would be not only a wider range of salary between good and bad teachers, but also a greater incentive for bad teachers to improve themselves, and for good teachers to maintain a high level of performance. It would be as if they were – gasp! – employees!

I believe that the market is the only tool that can properly determine the value of a good teacher, with one condition: we must determine what constitutes a good teacher. This, I believe, is the single biggest challenge facing the American education system, and one few people seem to ready to acknowledge. In a country of 300 million people in vastly different economic and social situations, how does one establish a baseline for what an educator should be? Test scores are insufficient – tests are easy to game, easy to teach to, and reflect neither creativity nor lateral thinking (with a few exceptions). Nor can we rely on intangibles – teachers who will make students feel good, who “inspire” them, Dead Poets’ Society-style, but without corresponding results.

So Ron and Vivian Schiller are out at NPR. This comes in the wake of controversial decisions – such as the firing of opinion journalist Juan Williams for having the audacity to share his opinions – and a public relations… well, let’s call it a snafu. While being videotaped by colleagues of James O’Keefe – he of the YouTube videos that brought down ACORN – Ron categorized Republicans as being “radically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamentally Christian,” before launching a full-throated attack on the “radical, racist, Islamaphobic Tea Party people.” He followed these comments with criticisms of the “Zionist coverage” that supposedly dominates the rest of the media before explaining the obvious intellectual superiority of liberals to conservatives. Having insulted the taxpayers that unwillingly fund their operation, Ron and Vivian were, to all appearances, politely fired.

Ignoring the irony of a YouTube video bringing down the heads of one of America’s great establishment media organizations, I have trouble believing this will have a great long-term impact on the way NPR is run. NPR’s bias is not the result of the Schillers’ influence, and their departure will not result in a profound shift in ideology. The truth is that NPR will always lean left. NPR produces news coverage favorable to liberals because it knows that if elected, liberals will protect NPR funding. By the same token, liberals protect NPR funding because NPR produces coverage favorable to liberals, thus increasing their chances of being elected. It’s an obvious conflict of interest, far more so than corporate funding of private news organizations. Consumers at least have an impact on the financial success or failure of private news firms. They exert no such control over publicly-funded entities like NPR.

So while it’s refreshing to see the Schillers given the boot, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll suddenly be treated to fair and balanced news coverage. For NPR, there’s simply too much at stake to go down that road.

From Monday’s post:

I expect that over the next two or three days, we’ll see yet another pivot along the lines of [...] “Conservative commentators need to be banned from the airwaves so that their vile proclamations can’t poison the minds of sane, forward-thinking people.”

I knew I could count on you, James Clyburn:

The shooting is cause for the country to rethink parameters on free speech, Clyburn said from his office, just blocks from the South Carolina Statehouse. He wants standards put in place to guarantee balanced media coverage with a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, in addition to calling on elected officials and media pundits to use ‘better judgment.’

Looking at the publication date on that post (January 10th), it seems that this pivot was ahead of schedule. Sigh…

Credit where credit’s due, though: the President implicitly called out members of his own party last night by rejecting the correlation between political rhetoric and the actions of a madman:

And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let’s remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy – it did not – but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.

Well said.

From the Weekly Standard:

There has been no shortage of individuals and institutions that have sought to capitalize on the shootings in Tucson. Add Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to that list.

This afternoon Sanders sent out a fundraising appeal, seeking to raise money to fight Republicans and other “right-wing reactionaries” responsible for the climate that led to the shooting

Having lived in Vermont when Sanders was elected and seen up-close the kind of Senator he is, this is sadly unsurprising.