Tag Archives: Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell on Charter Schools: Education for Students, Not Unions, by Bob Luddy

Nobody likes being shown up. From Bob Luddy at spectator.org:

To do so, Sowell compares New York City’s charter schools to its public ones. For example, Success Academy (47 New York City schools) and KIPP Academy (15 NYC schools), both public charter schools, have established the best K-12 schools in Harlem and have demonstrated the ability to successfully educate minority students. These charter schools have conclusively proven that minorities and underprivileged students can be educated to the highest standards. This extraordinary success is based on test data from the state of New York and is achieved despite large class sizes of around 30 and fewer financial resources than traditional public schools.

Charter Schools and Their Enemies, Thomas Sowell, book cover

Charter Schools: Educating for Excellence

These charter schools require a high level of discipline from every student and a focus on primary academics, including mathematics, history, science, logic, writing, and thinking skills. Importantly, in these schools there is more time to teach. This means students spend more time on task than those in traditional public schools.

In Harlem, charter schools are often located in the same building as traditional public schools. Sowell compares test data from these schools, which jointly house traditional public school students and charter school students.

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He Said That? 2/26/18

From Thomas Sowell (born 1930), American economist and political commentator, “Live” with Thomas Sowell, The American Enterprise, September 2004:

Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, “What is the point of being a superpower if you can’t do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?” The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.

Removing A Cancer, from The Burning Platform

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2018/01/01/removing-a-cancer/

He Said That? 2/6/17

From Thomas Sowell (born 1930), American economist, turned social theorist, political philosopher, and author, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995):

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

He Said That? 12/17/16

From Thomas Sowell, (born 1930),  American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author, Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy (2014):

Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.

He Said That? 12/6/16

From Thomas Sowell (born 1930), American economist and political commentator, Is Reality Optional (1993):

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

He Said That? 4/18/16

From Thomas Sowell (born 1930), American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995):

Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned—never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.

Obama Versus America, by Thomas Sowell

I had Doctor Sowell for a labor economics class at UCLA. He was one of the three brightest professors I had during college and graduate school. He has written a number of worthwhile books on labor economics, racial problems, and government idiocy, and he writes regularly for the townhall.com website. From his latest on that site:

In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his — denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”

Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a President of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.

Years after the last lynching of blacks took place in the Jim Crow South, India’s own government was still publishing annual statistics on atrocities against the untouchables, including fatal atrocities. The June 2003 issue of “National Geographic” magazine had a chilling article on the continuing atrocities against untouchables in India in the 21st century.

Nothing that happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii, or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the appalling treatment of untouchables in India. And what Obama called “terrible poverty” in America would be called prosperity in India.

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2015/02/04/obama-versus-america-n1951768

To continue reading: Obama Versus America

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