Sign the petition--and let your Congresspeople know that if they vote yes on the health care bill, you will vote no on them next time around.

This isn't about good humanitarian people who want reform vs. bad selfish ostriches who just loooove the status quo, as our very own president suggested last night during his extremely revealing, resolutely filibusterish interview with Fox's Bret Baier. Everybody wants health care reform, and it's dishonest to cast the situation in such inaccurate and loaded ways. What it is about: the size of government, the power we give it, and the freedom we lose when we allow government to grow far beyond its capacity to do good work on behalf of the American people.

Weigh in now.

Cleveland spends about $14,000 per student. But the public schools still suck. Only 12 percent are rated by the state as "excellent." More than a third are classified as emergencies. And another third is on "watch" status. The failure of the schools correlates very powerfully with the poverty, violence, and general degradation of the city itself. And that's a representative pattern in cities across the country.

So what is to be done? Plenty--as long as autonomy, accountability, and innovation are the anchors. It's happening already. But not in a widespread way, because that doesn't suit the teachers' unions.

Watch and learn.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is fifteen today. I've had the honor of being attached to the organization--first as the founder of its blog, then as a research fellow--since 2005. During that time, I've seen the organization grow by leaps and bounds in size and influence. ACTA's work on accountability, governance, academic freedom, curricular reform, and more is temperate, non-partisan, consistent, and resolutely commonsensical. As such, it's helping to shape debates about where higher ed should be going--and about how to ensure educational quality, scholarly integrity, and fiscal responsibility across the board.

Get to know ACTA--and read its many reports--at goacta.org.

I've had my skirmishes on this blog with readers who don't see why I have a problem with the government's takeover of health care--or, more broadly, why I have a problem with big and bigger government. It's not that I don't want reform--I do. It's that I don't think this albatross of a bill is going to give us what we need--and that it's a Trojan horse (mixed metaphors courtesy of pre-caffeinated state) for a style of government that should have us all worried. Now, as the health care takeover becomes--almost as an afterthought--a means of securing quite a federal hold over higher ed as well, I wonder what those readers are thinking about.

Here's Peter Wood on why academics--and anyone who cares about free inquiry, quality education, knowledge creation, and all the good stuff that is supposed to happen at our colleges and universities--should be more than worried:

Congressional Democrats have added President Obama’s takeover of the student loan industry to the health care reconciliation bill. It is a troubling development, but not because of the finances. The trouble comes from the specter of federal control of American higher education. “Obama loans” may seem benign but they threaten academic freedom and may compromise the quality of academic programs.

The move by the Democrats forestalls a debate we need to have over who controls this key institution. Since 1965, the federal government has subsidized colleges and universities by guaranteeing loans that students take from private lenders. Obama’s idea is to cut the banks out of the picture as loan-originators and have the Department of Education lend directly to students.

On the surface this so-called “Direct Lending” sounds thrifty. Over ten years the government would “save” billions of taxpayer dollars that would otherwise be spent in fees and subsidies to private lenders. The Congressional Budget Office has slashed the projected savings from $87 billion to $67 billion over eleven years. But that’s still a lot. What’s not to like? And Direct Lending has been in place on a smaller scale for about fifteen years. Lots of colleges already do it and like it. We know it works.

[...]

The federally subsidized student loan system surely stands in need of reform. But “Direct Lending” may well be a cure that is worse than the disease. The main problem is not financial but political. It will make American higher education extraordinarily vulnerable to political interference. Will Congress, presidential administrations, and the Department of Education resist the temptation to misuse their new power? Direct Lending will give the federal government decisive if not quite total control of higher education finance.

t is not as if the federal government has taken a hands-off approach in the past. Consider what happened to men’s teams in sports such as swimming and wrestling. They have been eliminated in most colleges because Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 has been read as requiring equal numbers of men and women in college athletics. The law itself was anodyne: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance..." But one faction read that qualifying phrase, “receiving Federal financial assistance..." and saw an opportunity. They succeeded in transforming Title IX from a law against discrimination into a system of quotas. Too many boys playing college sports? The Department of Education will knock your college off the list of institutions eligible to receive federally-guaranteed student loans. That would be a death sentence for most colleges. In the name of “gender equity,” the government used its financial aid muscle to impose its own agenda on one dimension of college life.

Or consider the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights which has more than once used the government’s financial leverage to foster racial preferences in college admissions and hiring.

But it is not just the Left that has attempted to tell colleges what to do. Under President Bush, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings attempted to change the nation’s college curricula to produce college graduates whose skills mesh better with the needs of business and industry. Discovering that she had no direct say over what colleges teach, Secretary Spellings tried to get the nation’s accreditors to implement her plan for her. She didn’t succeed—but then again, she didn’t have the advantage of having total control over student loans. Direct Lending will change that, and future Secretaries of Education, whether moved by Obama-style progressivism or Bush-style utilitarianism, will have a great deal more power to get their way.

[...]

My biggest worry is that American higher education already tends towards stale conformity. The Climategate scandal provides a dramatic example of how genuine debate was for a period of years shut down in favor of an enforced “consensus” based on social pressure rather than scientific evidence.

We have a system of higher education that is highly vulnerable to such groupthink. If we add to that an arrangement of institutional funding that has no practical firewalls against being turned to ideological purposes, we face the likelihood of serious damage to the quality of American higher education.

Are these well-founded worries? Am I taking alarm at a measure that is really just a common sense step toward better government stewardship of an expensive program? I am not an especially humble critic, but sure, I could be wrong. I have been painting the picture in primary colors. But here’s the thing. I am raising questions that really ought to be examined thoughtfully by our legislators and not just brushed aside in a slapdash effort to get the bill on the President’s desk by the end of this week. I don’t think anyone in Congress intends the sort of consequences I have been describing. They just haven’t thought much about how higher education actually works. My point is that Direct Lending creates a huge opportunity for mischief, and the mischief-makers will figure that out soon enough.

The reason that Direct Loans are being bundled into the reconciliation bill is that the Democratic leaders of Congress reckon that they do not otherwise have the votes to get it passed. When it comes to health care, the Democrats defend this parliamentary maneuver by saying that, over the last year all the arguments have been heard and weighed, and that it is at last time to act. I don’t find that a very compelling argument for health care, but be that as it may, the same cannot possibly be said about Direct Loans. This is a dramatic restructuring of higher education finance with implications far beyond the dollar amounts, and yet it has received barely any public notice at all.

Note to students: Don't take on tremendous debt to pay for college. Go to a school you can afford and work your butt off to make sure you don't fall between the cracks and you get the courses and the guidance you need. Be focussed and purposeful. Make it work--and shed any latent fixation you may have that if it's not private and costing $50K a year, then it's not a good school.

Beekeeping has long been banned in New York City. Deemed too dangerous for city life, the gentle, sweet honeybee has been lumped in with hyenas, tarantulas, cobras, dingoes(!), and other animals the city doesn't think people living in close proximity to one another should be allowed to keep. It's been a bad rap for the honeybee, and has been tough on urban beekeepers, who have stuck to their hives despite the risk of a $2000 fine if they are caught.

Now, though, New York City is rethinking the ban on honeybees, and may even be about to do the right thing:

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s board will take up the issue of amending the health code to allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Health department officials said the change was being considered after research showed that the reports of bee stings in the city were minimal and that honeybees did not pose a public health threat.

The officials were also prodded by beekeepers who, in a petition and at a public hearing last month, argued that their hives promoted sustainable agriculture in the city.

A ban, of course, has not deterred many New Yorkers from setting up hives on rooftops and in yards and community gardens, doing it as a hobby, to pollinate their plants or to earn extra income from honey. Although the exact number of beekeepers in the city is unknown, many openly flout the law. They have their own association, hold beekeeping workshops, sell their honey at farmers' markets and tend to their hives as unapologetically as others might jaywalk, blaming their legal predicament on people’s ignorance of bees.

"People fear that if there's a beehive on their rooftop, they'll be stung," said Andrew Cote, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, which was formed two years ago and has 220 members.

"Honeybees are interested in water, pollen and nectar," he said. "The real danger is the skewed public perception of the danger of honeybees."

I started a hive last year, and it was an amazing experience. Unfortunately, a curious raccoon knocked the hive over very early in the season, killing lots of bees and harming the queen's health so badly that she never became the top-speed egg layer that queen bees have to be if hives are to survive.

A honeybee lives about six weeks. She dies having worked herself to death. The queen is responsible for laying at a rate that ensures that the hive population will grow into the tens of thousands throughout the season--thus producing enough honey for the winter, and, if you are lucky, for you to harvest and eat. A damaged queen, if not recognized early and replaced, guarantees a failed hive. We learned that the hard way last year, replacing the struggling queen too late, and watching our hive dwindle and die out entirely by mid-summer. I can't tell you how sad it was--and I am not someone who likes insects. But I fell in love with those bees, and I was never stung.

This spring, we are trying again. Instead of beginning with package bees (a starter kit of several thousand workers plus queen, delivered through the mail in a buzzing, sticky box that makes for fun conversation with the UPS man), we are going to start with a "nuc colony" from an apiary nearby. A nuc colony amounts to five frames of drawn comb filled with brood, honey, pollen, etc., plus the workers, plus their queen. You place them in your hive deep alongside five more empty frames, and let them go. If all is well, they'll fill up those five frames, and fill up ten more in another deep, and then start making honey especially for you by the end of the summer.

All in all, it's a more secure way to establish a hive, because you aren't asking a very few tired, mailed bees to start from scratch with an unproven queen. You get a small but already successful colony, and all they have to do is adjust to their new surroundings and take off.

We should get the call to come pick up our nuc in a month or so. I've been on the edge of my seat for weeks. This year's nectar is beginning to flow, and on sunny days wild honeybees are already going nuts in the rosemary and heather flowering around the house. I watch them up close, and they buzz around ignoring me, moving from flower to flower, drinking the nectar and filling their little leg pockets with pollen. Then they fly back to their hollow tree--precise location unknown--unload their pollen pockets, regurgitate the nectar, and hand it over to other workers who will make it into honey by doing lots more eating and regurgitating. Then the bees fly back out to keep working the same flowers, until the nectar is gone.

I'm guessing most people don't know honey is processed bee vomit. Does it matter?