The Gateway Objectivist 

The monthly newsletter of the Gateway Objectivists, St. Louis, Missouri 

The June meeting will feature our next Journal Club on Saturday, June 17, at 8 p.m. The meeting will be at the home of Joy & Jeff Kiviat. Call (314) 469-2723 for directions. For those of you who have not been to a past Journal Club, here is how it works: Everyone selects one or two recent Objectivist, libertarian, economic or philosophic journals and gives a short (10 minutes) summation with a discussion of the most interesting articles. By having Journal Club periodically, everyone gets to learn about a variety of recent events and studies that have been published. Even if you don't have any interesting articles to present, you're still welcome to listen and join the discussion.

At our last meeting, Joy Kiviat presented "Could School Choice Save St. Louis?" Her lecture looked at how poor public schools affect the city as a whole. Joy's examination of St. Louis was motivated by a similar study of Baltimore by the Calvert Institute for Public Policy. She first looked at the problems in the city, why people are leaving for suburban areas, and what the current state of public education is in the city. Nationally, 10% of students attend private schools. In St. Louis City, this figure is 26%. Additionally, 24% are bussed to County schools as part of 1981's Voluntary Transfer Program. Not surprisingly, one-third of public school teachers send their own children to private schools.

By citing surveys and statistics, Joy showed that the programs enacted (and billions spent) in the last 30 years have failed to reverse the problems of the public schools.

What can reverse the situation? Allowing parents to choose which school is best suited to their needs and educational philosophy, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of current public schools. In St. Louis, two-thirds of parents said they would move their children to private schools if they could afford it. More than 90% of minority parents support public scholarships (vouchers). Many students currently enrolled in private schools are using funds from private scholarships. Applications for charter schools opening this fall have far exceeded the number of openings, some even before the charters were approved.

Unfortunately, Joy has found that powerful opposition and resistance to change have kept St. Louis on the road to decline. Hopefully, the charter schools available this year are the first step toward giving parents a choice on how their children are educated.

In Other School Choice News

Last month, 10 students in East St. Louis, Illinois, became the first charter school graduates in the St. Louis area. All but one of the students who enrolled last fall in the Southern Illinois University East St. Louis Charter School received a diploma. Many of them had dropped out or had problems while attending East St. Louis High School. With such great demand for enrollment in the charter schools opening this fall in St. Louis, a couple of the schools are already expanding to allow more students to attend.

In addition to waiting lists for students, teachers are lining up to work at the new schools. Each of the schools has said that there are at least three or four qualified applicants for each teaching position. "Education is first, last and always a business. If it's run like a business it can be done profitably," says David Brennan, an Ohio industrialist who started White Hat Management, which manages 11 successful charter schools in Ohio. The schools, targeted at drop-outs and at-risk students, take in $10 million in government funding annually.

Atlas Update

Screenwriter Susan Black has been hired and is working on writing the screenplay for TNT's Atlas Shrugged miniseries. Full Context reports that roughly three quarters of the story will be cut out of the script.  An official Atlas Shrugged movie website, www.atlasshrugged.com, is in the works and should be available soon. In the meantime, unofficial sites are popping up. One is currently available at www.missliberty.com/FilmAtlas.html.

The movie has already been added to the Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB), which, for each movie, provides a list of other movies you may enjoy. The top recommendation on the Atlas Shrugged page: The Full Monty.