Nothing to brag about

Region’s schools good, but other places are getting better

Let's not pat ourselves on the back very hard for having six of the top 10 high schools in the state here in the northwest corner, at least according to U.S. News and World Report. The far more important trend is that Northwest Arkansas' best schools lost ground when compared to the rest of the nation.

I'm proud of the region's schools and credit them for a lot of our success. See my column of Jan. 31. I also don't think we're slipping. Others are catching up, though. In part, that's because the better you are, the harder improvement becomes. It's also true that its harder to bring everyone along as your student population gets bigger.

Our highest-ranking high school, Haas Hall in Fayetteville, ranks 175th in the nation. That's down from 137th last year. Bentonville High School fell from 580th to 886th. Rogers High School is barely in the top 1,000. Heritage High School in Rogers dropped out of the top 1,000.

This matters because people can leave. Most of the people living in Northwest Arkansas now don't come from here, for instance. The growth we're so proud of is also proof that we live in a fluid, mobile society. That mobility works in all directions. If there's a better place to raise their kids, people will leave here and go there.

Have we peaked? If so, did we peak too soon?

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place," as the Red Queen once said to Alice. Biologists even have a theory named after this scene, the "Red Queen hypothesis." Organisms must constantly adapt, evolve and proliferate just to survive against the competition, all while living in an changing environment. So perhaps we're running as fast as we can. If so, we should worry that we're still falling behind.

Speaking of Darwinism, somebody asked Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, to prove the big capital gains tax cut approved in the last legislative session would create jobs. That question came in a forum hosted by Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. Collins replied that if the tax cuts didn't work as advertised, the Legislature should reconsider them.

Now, offering to revisit a tax cut if it doesn't deliver the promised benefits is a whole lot easier said than done. Still, I know Collins well enough to believe he's sincere. He has enough confidence in his policy to accept the consequences. That's refreshing in a thoroughly bipartisan way. Kansas on one end and Chicago on the other could use some of that.

I also happen to think letting capital flow to the people who use it is a fine idea -- as long as they aren't bailed out at the expense of the rest of us when they make terrible decisions. Capitalism should be red in tooth and claw, straight out of Darwin. If you want to avoid the full consequences of that, then have the government save the economy in a crash. But let the capitalists who were too clever for their own good and who took stupid risks lose control of their businesses. Seize the crashing businesses and sell them to the highest bidder. That way, those businesses would be taken over by capitalists who showed prudence and wisdom, who stayed out of the crash. In short, bring the market back in deciding who's a leader and who's a failure. Let it decide who survives and who doesn't. That would do more good than Dodd-Frank oversight ever will.

Many years ago, I read a book that quoted to a young financier on Wall Street. The thing he loved about his job was that it didn't matter who your daddy was or how long you're firm had been a leading one. If you made the wrong decision, the market handed you your rear end on a platter. We learned in 2008 just how far from true that has become.

Sincere as I believe Collins' offer to be, the deck is stacked in the tax cut's favor. We are recovering from a recession. It's not inevitable that things will be better for the next few years, but they probably will. Still, it's nice that somebody acknowledged that some return on the investment is expected. After all, isn't getting a return on investment the very thing "job creators" are supposed to be good at?

Commentary on 05/16/2015

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