Crackonomics

On the whole, I'm sympathetic to DC Schools Chancelor Rhee's intiative to shutter 23 DCPS schools. It doesn't make sense for a district that's experiencing long-term enrollment decline, including losing almost 30 percent of students to charter schools, to waste millions of dollars on maintaining a bigger physical infrastructure than it needs. The chancellor and Mayor Fenty had a series of neighborhood meeting yesterday to discuss the planned closings, with many of the attendees voicing their displeasure. And I have to say, while I don't actually agree, this is pretty funny and astute:

"It's like crackhead economics," Jarumi Moore, a Francis Middle School seventh-grader, said at the Wilson Building of the closings plan. "They're thinking short term. We're thinking long term."

Get that kid into an AP econ class! He can write a study calculating the marginal change in the implied discount rate people apply to the resale value of their personal possessions when selling them feed a crack habit at various stages of addiction, and compare that to long-term deadweight loss of public goods resulting from ill-advised education policies that pump up approval ratings at the expense of systemic reform. He'll be the next Roland Fryer. Seriously, I don't think I would have had anything nearly so clever or smart to say in the 7th grade about anything not involving comic books or Larry Bird; there are a lot of bright kids like this in DCPS and we need to get them a better education.