TAIL TRACK. Barring signal troubles, links to any posts of substance ought to work.

STEAM TRAIN COMING. The Steam Festival in Owosso, Michigan, will have a Famous Visitor.

Unattributed Friends of the 4449 photo via the DeKalb Daily Chronicle.

Although the Southern Pacific is now a Union Pacific property, because 4449 is not part of Union Pacific's stable, it will not operate on the Overland Route. It will transit the Burlington on July 18.The train will leave Minneapolis at 8 a.m., is scheduled to be in Savanna at approximately 2 p.m. and will arrive in Union Station before nightfall. The special passenger excursion will be sharing the rail line with regular freight service, so delays are possible, according to a recent news release.

WHAT PROFIT IN INFRASTRUCTURE? Trains for America recommends an Infrastructurist interview with William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, who notes inter alia that roads are also tax sinks. Go. Read. Understand.

TESTING THAT HYPOTHESIS. Professor Munger has ideas about baseball strategy.

The Reds bring in a righty reliever, to do the righty v. righty thing. This reliever is a wily veteran, David Weathers, with 18 years of major league experience. But (and I like big buts, you know I cannot lie), Mr. Pujols is 9 for 18 lifetime against David Weathers. Just wears him out like an old sock.

To complete the setting, remember that following Mr. Pujols in the lineup is Ryan Ludwick and then Rick Ankiel. Both very good defensive outfielders. But neither of them bats over the "Munger line" (my current weight is 240 lbs; Ludwick is batting .235 and Ankiel is batting .230).

Summary: 8th inning, two outs, you are ahead 3-0, the next two guys in the line-up are in deep slumps. Your bullpen is the best in the major leagues (Cincy has an amazing bullpen).

Do you pitch to Mr. Pujols? It is radical to suggest, but I say: No, you do not. Walk him. Yes, I know the bases are loaded. But. Walk. Him. It's still just 3-1 and neither of the next two batters are likely to do anything except fly out.

Maybe, maybe not.

Tuesday: Yovani Gallardo issues an unintentional intentional walk to Pujols in the first, Ludwick follows with a home run, Cardinals win 5-0.

Wednesday: intentional walk to Pujols in the ninth, putting the go-ahead run on base, Trevor Hoffman works out of it, Brewers win 5-4.

Thursday: the usually dependable Carlos Villanueva is unable to get anybody out in the eighth; the usually dependable Mitch Stetter walks the one man he faces; with first base open, the usually dependable Todd Coffey pitches to Pujols, who hits a two-run double, and he pitches to Ludwick who follows with a home run, Cardinals win 5-1. The Cubs, horrible dictu, have a chance to catch both Milwaukee and St. Louis this weekend.

ENTITLEMENT, OR EASIER COMMUNICATION. There's a new course rule nailed to Newmark's Door.

"No opportunities for extra credit are available. Effort doesn't count; results do."

He was moved to add it after reading an article (in the Madison Capital Times, with local commentary from the University of Wisconsin) with predictable laments about grade-grubbing collegians. The line that set him off was the line that most annoys economists.

If I have explained to my professor that I am trying hard, I think he/she should give me some consideration with respect to my course grade.

That passage, from an otherwise unattributed survey of collegians, possibly one done at California-Irvine, obtained 66.2 percent agreement from a sample of 466 students at an unnamed university that may or may not have been identified in a statistically sound way. It is an annoying line, because inputs do not map into outputs, and collegians are no different from any other population in believing that they're working really hard, no matter the results. (Hard work without focus is overrated. Mules work hard. So do technical analysts.) The accompanying article offers the perception that collegians today are more prone to argue grades than their predecessors.

[Biology faculty associate Sharon] Thoma estimates she received 20 such e-mails this spring out of some 850 students. "They'll typically say, 'I know you said there won't be any grade adjustments, but I worked really hard and I don't feel that the grade reflects the effort I put into the class,'" says Thoma, who stresses most students work hard in class and understand the ground rules. "And so I have a new standard reply: 'I can't quantitate your effort.'"

Quantitate? Substantively, though, that's two percent of the class, possibly the outcome you'd observe by chance, and electronic mail lowers the cost of whining. (I have to count to ten or remind myself it's business when such a whine comes in from somebody who almost never attended class and turned in projects irregularly or at all. I note that electronic mail is not secure although the paper trail is in my office. That's usually the end of the whine.) A grade protest used to involve a visit to an office, or a telephone call. So much easier to key in a gripe and hope for the best.

Or perhaps, to get the word out that the bar is higher.

Sure, effort is good. But at this rung of the education ladder it's somewhat surprising all students don't realize it's the results that matter. So in an effort to clarify expectations, educators across the UW campus are taking steps to nip potential misunderstandings in the bud, starting with freshman orientation. Additionally, professors are seeking to avoid potential grade disputes by spelling out in class syllabi and on their websites what is expected of students and how grades are determined. Still others are using lecture time early in the semester to further outline expectations.

Start from a population of high achievers out of high school and then mix them with other high achievers. (I won't speculate on where the underachievers went.)

"What strikes me most profoundly is the notion that students -- and I don't know if it's a generational issue or a matter of how kids are trained in K through 12 -- have this strong sentiment that if they work hard enough they should get an A," says Irene Katele, an adjunct professor at the UW who teaches a large undergraduate course each semester on legal studies. "There is a belief that there's a correlation between the effort and the prize."

Allison Wolfe, a UW-Madison senior majoring in psychology, says she's never personally felt she deserved a higher grade in class, but knows people who have. "I agree that some students feel entitled to higher grades. They may have gotten good grades in high school without a lot of effort, and think the effort they put into their college classes is a lot in comparison, when really they haven't established a good work ethic yet. Some people adjust and work harder, and some blame their professors."

It's really about finding those senior non-coms for the introductory classes. That's nice, kid, but this is the fleet.

SPONSORED RESEARCH ISN'T PREDETERMINED. Jim Hu reacts to allegations of confirmation biases in grant-supported research.

Money is fungible, and if my brilliant grant isn't funded - and I've had my share of unscoreds - the funds I didn't get usually go to something reasonable. Sometimes the study section funds turkeys; if we could see the future we wouldn't need reviewers. But the article makes it seem like this is the norm by contrasting some funded projects with some that were not funded or where the PI never applied, with the subtext that the latter were more worthy than the former.

The post clarifies errors the reporter made, something that often happens when journalists cover complicated things, whether those are railway safety appliances or cancer research protocols.

[New York Times reporter Gina] Kolata equates credible with playing it safe, but if you don't have novelty you're also not going to get funded in the current environment. The kind of work being done by Louise Howe seems to me to be a completely appropriate balance of risk against possible future benefits.

Cancer, as Kolata surely knows, is not a single disease. It's also an incredibly difficult problem for a variety of reasons. Nowhere in the piece is the inherent scientific difficulty of the problem mentioned. Kolata sneers at the prevention measures being studied by Appelhans and Cullen, but we know that public health measures can often have larger effects than wonder drugs. Funding prevention is not starving the future Slamons out there; what's hurting their chances is all the other future Slamons whose grants are in the same study sections.

I wonder if how the subjects of Kolata's piece feel about how their work was portrayed.

LITTLE SHARK IN THE BIG WOODS. Tom McMahon has an illustrated fish story involving a bull shark that took a winter swim in Lake Pepin.

TWEAK THE RUNNING GEAR FIRST. I've done some more soldering of sander assemblies, but they're not going on until the running gear is in good working order. The engine truck needs some work. There's no clearance between its rear wheels and the first drivers. That's relatively easy to put right with a drill and some 6-32 brass washers. The pivot for the trailing truck is also under construction.


In the background are the furring strips that will ultimately support the benchwork.

FREQUENCY MATTERS. Trains for America gets involved in a Streetsblog rebuttal to a curious Boston Globe column by Ed Glaeser. The column and the rebuttal deal with the potential, or lack thereof, for high-speed rail in Texas (thickly settled sprawling clusters separated by desert, albeit with potential for really fast running between the clusters). Somehow, though, the conversation turns to the long-distance trains.

President Carter emasculated the network of inter-city passenger trains and cut about 30 percent of the destinations in a single stroke of the pen. Presidents Clinton and Bush have continued a policy of starving Amtrak of the necessary capital for equipment to expand and operate a reasonable national network of so-called “slow” trains.

These trains operate over the trackage of frequently indifferent host railroads and, prior to the economic slowdown, have been subjected to numerous lengthy delays which destroy public credibility for the Amtrak product. The inter-city trains have lacked the political leadership and management support necessary for successful operation.

To some extent, that's a continuation of transportation policy from the diversion of mail and express to air in the late 1960s and the act of destroying the network in order to save it that the 1970 legislation establishing Amtrak committed. The Western transcontinental railroads offered a flagship train, sometimes a one-night-out service from Chicago to California, and one or more supporting trains, which generally operated on a schedule that differed from the flagship by about twelve hours. That pattern filled a deficiency in the current network.

Long distance Amtrak trains provide essential service in towns like Minot, Texarkana, and Meridian. Since most routes have only one train, half of the service area is reached in the dead of night (like Little Rock) and is essentially unserved.

Tell me about that Little Rock. There used to be additional Eagles, also hitting Texarkana, as well as service to Memphis and Oklahoma City on the Rock Island line. The Empire Builders call on Minot by night. The Western Star made it by day (and there used to be a network of trains in the Minnesota and Red River corridor). Additional trains on the long-distance routes would enhance the productivity of the existing trains.

Because long distance trains operate over long distances (clever turn of a phrase, huh?) and stop in many smaller towns, some seats are unoccupied on a longer basis than would be the case on a commercial airliner. Professional analysts of such things inform me that long haul trains experience a type of bell cure for traffic intensity. The highest loads are often in the middle of the route.

Only enthusiasts are likely to ride the Empire Builder or the Southwest Chief end to end. Minot to Grand Forks or Fargo (for Crookston) to St. Cloud or Topeka to Lawrence, particularly at college holidays, will produce the bulk of the ridership. (I bet there's something similar on the Trans-Siberian, although I don't know if anyone goes away to college at Akademgorodok any more.)

Greater frequency of long-distance trains will make those trains more useful, as well as offering better connections to the corridor trains, another point I've been repeating. That's a point advocates of the renewed Rockford train service have yet to grasp.

But Genoa officials say it’s not about Genoa versus Belvidere. Instead, it's a regional project, with the possibility of serving all of DeKalb County, including Northern Illinois University, the only state university without passenger rail service.

“This isn’t a Genoa appeal,” [Genoa mayor Todd] Walker said. “Genoa is not getting this railroad in a vacuum. This is a win for the entire area.”

The resolution states that the route following Canadian National through Genoa is $11.5 million, or 37 percent, cheaper than the route through Belvidere, and its operating cost would be $100,000 less annually. The study says its ridership would be 39 percent higher than the alternative Belvidere route, and it would service all of DeKalb County, which has double the population of Boone County.

Also, it would be easier to implement because it would only have to negotiate one railroad, as opposed to the Belvidere alternative, which would use rail lines from Metra, Union Pacific and Canadian National.

Rent-seeking is fun. But making a case for Northern Illinois University providing a lot of student traffic for one Amtrak train a day, through Genoa, is a stretch. The Genoa train station is a shorter bus ride from the University only because Elburn officials haven't opened a street connection that's only four blocks from Highway 47, and the Elburn line offers hourly trips on weekdays and a memory-pattern schedule on weekends, into Chicago. An extension of the Elburn line to DeKalb is still ten years away ... it's always ten years away.

ALLOCATING SCARCE RESOURCES. Lynne Kiesling puts together a link-rich post on health care policy. The key point:

On a related note, Doug Bandow writes at Cato @ Liberty about Uwe Reinhardt on health care. Commenting on criticisms of government-provided health care’s rationing of services, Reinhardt points out that rationing is a fundamental function of markets too. He’s technically correct, from a static neoclassical perspective — given a set of resources and unlimited wants, our budget constraints necessitate rationing, and in markets price signals interact with our subjective individual preferences to enable us to allocate our resources optimally.

That, however, presupposes that individuals have resources to allocate.

Put another way, and from a Hayekian perspective, who is doing the rationing matters. With government mandates, bureaucrats do the rationing. With a market for health insurance and health care services, individuals do the rationing. Apply the knowledge problem here as Hayek did to the failure of central planning, and you see the analogy that I think is apt.

Just as individual planning generates superior static and dynamic outcomes relative to central planning, individual rationing generates superior static and dynamic outcomes relative to central rationing, because of the knowledge problem and heterogenous agents with diverse preferences and private knowledge of their own preferences. It also honors the precepts of individual liberty.

I suspect, however, that advocates of a government-paid health care system will draw parallels to Anatole France's bridges. Tonight, however, I was listening to an Extension 720 debate on the nature of the government's participation. The proposal taking shape in Congress is for a government insurance company to compete with the private insurers. But one of the guests on the program suggested there were effectively two private insurers, Blue Cross and somebody else, in Illinois. Introduce the government, create a triopoly. With differentiated products, there's no equilibrium ... it's not only physics that has three-body problems.

THE STRESSES OF SUMMER. I suspect that somewhere there's a baseball pundit observing, "If somebody had told you in March that the Brewers would be leading the division on the Fourth of July you would have been delighted." Perhaps so, but does the road have to be so arduous?

"There was an article about the GM and the leftfielder," [field manager Ken] Macha said, "and I'm in the boat."

Not only that, but it was a rowboat in shark-infested, roiling waters and the manager had no paddle.

Whether the Milwaukee Brewers are in that vessel just before the break is a matter of perspective. They are 12th in the National League in hitting, 13th in pitching, ran a Tigers-Twins-Giants-Mets-Cubs gauntlet down a starting pitcher or two and are somehow hanging around the Central leader board with the St. Louis Cardinals in town.

The team has a knack for getting to the top of the standings and then frittering the lead away, which raises fan anxiety. The Central Division will make for interesting watching, with six teams at or above 0.500, and the Brewers gaining ground tonight on St. Louis and separation from Chicago and Cincinnati.

THE MANDARINATE. Robert S. McNamara, 1916-2009. Harvard Business. The Edsel. Vietnam. The World Bank.

Richard Nixon or Sarah Palin might play to the resentments of people who lack the stellar credentials and influential connections. That does not invalidate those resentments.

A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION. Disaster movies involving trains generally involve implausible failures of safety appliances. So it was with The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (New York subway trains once prosaically identified by their station of origin and start time) and so it probably is with the 2009 remake (I have no plans to encourage the producers). I'm not sure, based on the pre-release publicity, whether I will encourage the producers of a forthcoming remake of Red Dawn. The 1984 original, conceived late in the Brezhnev era, made many a leftist reviewer sputter with anger, although it was spot-on in skewering what a later era would recognize as politically correct pieties. With all the other good stories waiting to be told, what is Hollywood's revealed preference for remakes of bad stories revealing?

INDEPENDENCE DAY. Suitable music from the Wurlitzer Band Organ at Knoebels Grove.

FIDDLY BITS. A seven-coupled locomotive has fourteen sanders, none of them using commercially available parts, in a configuration that's different in existing pictures from that on existing diagrams.


These are twelve of the fourteen connections to the two sand domes. The valves and delivery pipes come next. I'll probably get the running gear in better order before installing the sanders, as installing and removing the boiler from the frame with detail parts attached has a deleterious effect on the detail parts.

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS. In a non-scientific poll at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 90 percent of respondents assert the Cubs have a better pitching staff than the Brewers.

BLUE STAR MOTHER. Runner's World interviews Governor Palin.

Runner's World photo by Brian Adams.

(Via Power Line.)

CONTEMPLATING TRADEOFFS. In The Wall Street Journal, George Newman contemplates some health care policy commonplaces.

- "The cost of health care rises two to three times as fast as inflation."

That's like comparing the price of hamburger 30 years ago with the price of filet mignon today and calling the difference inflation. Or the price of a 19-inch, black-and-white TV 30 years ago with the price of a 50-inch HDTV today. The improvements in medical care are even more dramatic, leading to longer life, less pain, fewer exploratory surgeries and miracle drugs. Of course the research, the equipment and the training that produce these improvements don't come cheap.

(Via Betsy's Page.) That's a regular feature here, where the argument is that if it's available at a positive price when it wasn't available at any price previously, it's a cost reduction.

There are several other points, some more defensible than others.

- "Shifting funds from health care to education would make for a better society."

These two services have a lot in common, including steadily rising cost. What is curious is that this rise in education costs is deemed by the liberal establishment smart and farsighted while the rise in health-care costs is a curse to be stopped at any cost. What is curiouser still is that in education, where they always advocate more "investment," past increases have gone hand-in-hand with demonstrably deteriorating outcomes. The rising cost in health care has been accompanied by clearly superior results. Thus we would shift dollars from where they do a lot of good to an area where they don't.

It's a non sequitur as a policy commonplace, and it detracts from the article. There are, as regular readers know, better uses for the resources that have gone to education than the uses revealed preferred by school boards and university administrators. On the other hand, education and medicine are activities in which the Baumol "cost disease" hypothesis has some bite: a practitioner may have more drugs to choose from, but it takes as long to do the inoculation as it did in the one-shot-treats-all era; a teacher may have more techniques to choose from, but it takes as long to review a paper as it ever did.

- "The cost of treating the 45 million uninsured is shifted to the rest of us."

So on Monday, Wednesday and Friday we are harangued about the 45 million people lacking medical care, and on Tuesday and Thursday we are told we already pay for that care. Left-wing reformers think that if they split the two arguments we are too stupid to notice the contradiction. Furthermore, if cost shifting is bad, wait for the Mother of all Cost Shifting when suppliers have to overcharge the private plans to compensate for the depressed prices forced on them by the public plan.

- "A universal plan will reduce the cost of health care."

Think a moment. Suppose you are in an apple market with 100 buyers and 100 sellers every day and apples sell for $1 a pound. Suddenly one day 120 buyers show up. Will the price of the apples go up or down?

These two points don't cohere. On the one hand, the author is taking advocates of government health care to task for an internal inconsistency: uninsured people go to the emergency room where taxpayers pick up most of the tab, which makes the number of uninsured irrelevant. On the other, he's suggesting that the uninsured don't go to the emergency room, but they'll show up at some clinic once taxpayers pick up all of their tab? That's not well reasoned. Perhaps, though, there is a different tradeoff. The advocates of government health care suggest that routine exams might preempt more expensive treatments the emergency room discovers. (That's what Health Maintenance Organizations were supposed to do, but I digress.) On the other hand, government-as-single-payer has a lot in common with coal-mine-as-single-employer or state-liquor-store-as-single-stockist. Lowering costs by depressing wages implies reduced output.

- "U.S. companies are at a disadvantage against foreign competitors who don't have to pay their employees' health insurance."

This would be true if the funds for health care in those countries fell from the sky. As it is, employees in those countries pay for their health care in much higher income taxes, sales or value-added taxes, gasoline taxes (think $8 a gallon at the pump) and in many other ways, effectively reducing their take-home pay and living standards. And isn't it odd that the same people who want to lift this burden from businesses that provide health benefits also (again, on alternate days) want to impose this burden on the other firms that do not offer this benefit. What about the international competitiveness of these companies?

That's a more cleanly worded version of the argument I offered here.

WHAT ONCE TOOK THE TET OFFENSIVE. It was well into the Johnson Administration before Walter Cronkite lost confidence in the Great Liberal Hope of the era. We're not six months into the Obama Administration, and Helen Thomas (via Insta Pundit) has joined Jay Leno in the disaffected.

NO INDOCTRINATION. The recently-concluded O Scale National Convention used the student center at Towson University. The default academic ethos was on display, should modelers have looked for it.


There are program notes.


Sometimes I feel sorry for people in Student Affairs, including the various rubrics of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism, as irony impairment must be part of the job description.

A RESTRICTED FIELD. The subtitle of Robert Frank's The Economic Naturalist's Field Guide is Common Sense Principles for Troubled Times. A more accurate subtitle might be Democratic Party Commonplaces from the New York Times. Book Review N^o. 19 will be short, and convey my disappointment. Professor Frank's Economic Naturalist projects for principles students are a genuine improvement on the state of the art (the idea builds on the Handy Dandy Guide, more commonly used in middle and high school). Although the book includes a few columns about the more inspired projects, most of the content, which is a collection of those Times columns in any event, focuses on positional arms races, winner-take-all-markets, and a smattering of behavioral economics, particularly those results most useful for Democratic Party court intellectuals. I can't fault Professor Frank for focusing on areas of economics in which he has made solid contributions, and I don't object to putting a collection of related columns into book form. I do object to describing the collection as something other than it is.

I propose a more technical point as well. In Professor Frank's various meditations on positional arms races, he suggests that additional gold prospectors are probably socially inefficient, as new prospectors derive some of their wealth from beating existing prospectors to deposits that would likely be discovered anyway. That's not an unreasonable approach to valuing an exhaustible resource. He then goes on to compare the prospectors with hedge fund managers, suggesting, once again, that new hedge fund managers derive some of their wealth from beating existing managers to assets that would likely be discovered anyway. I'm not sure I accept that, as hedge fund managers can differ in their management style, and perhaps a few more contrarian managers deriving their wealth from doing some genuine hedging might have diminished the bubbles that give economists lots of work. That he compares hedge fund managers with creative writers is telling (in identifying a social loss with collegians getting into the positional arms race in finance rather than following their creative instincts) -- he hasn't ruled out the possibility of additional composers, directors, or writers profiting by beating existing creatives to tunes or stories that would likely be written anyway. That he says nothing at all about the crafts of research or teaching is also telling: didn't a Cornell professor come up with positional markets and with naturalist projects that could have occurred to a Harvard professor? And thus back to one of my pet themes: the solution to some positional arms races is to augment the supply of positional goods, such that the status of having them is buried under so many of them. (Where is the status in a computer these days?)

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

EXPEDITING THE SCOOTS. Summer is construction season on the railroads, and Union Pacific and Metra are triple-tracking several choke points on the Galena Division.

Completion of the third main line on the route will provide capacity to keep trains moving. Installing two universal crossovers will close a 15-mile gap between crossovers on the line, increasing the use of multiple tracks to bypass rail congestion. An upgraded rail signal system will allow trains to safely operate closer together and improve train flow.

While there are no current plans to increase overall train volume on the west line, other trains will be able to operate while commuter trains are in stations as a result of the upgrades.

These improvements will result in up to a 50 percent reduction in passenger and freight train delays, Metra on-time performance will improve, and overall grade crossing gate downtime will improve by at least 11 percent. Communities also will see fewer trains parked for extended periods of time.

Cold Spring Shops sources suggest that additional passenger trains are a possibility, in order to encourage some riders to use the Union Pacific in preference to the Burlington line, which is used to capacity even with three tracks throughout and an impressive mix of express and local trains at the rush hours. Additional crossovers on the Galena Division would permit similar services on that line, with turnback trains at Wheaton, for instance, in addition to the existing turnback trains at Elmhurst.

The project also includes what the carriers describe as enhanced station safety, including illuminated signs at the pedestrian crossings that will display ANOTHER TRAIN COMING messages when another train is coming. As if the distracted, cell-phone yakking, too-stressed-to-wait casualties in the making are going to notice that message. It's really simple, people. If the crossing protection is working, WAIT. It's not smart to walk in front of your train, even if the doors are still open, and it's risky to walk behind your train without verifying that the tracks are clear. Any track at any time in either direction ...

WHEN FINANCIAL AID FOLLOWS STUDENTS. The state's financial troubles have a diffused effect on universities.

Illinois students asking for financial assistance from the MAP [Monetary Assistance Program] Grant program may have to look elsewhere.

The Illinois General Assembly’s “50 Percent Budget” will cut $275 million in financial aid to Illinois college students to bridge the state’s $9.2 billion funding gap if passed, according to the state budget.

The budget calls for a 75 percent reduction in MAP scholarships that will affect 145 thousand low-income students in Illinois, according to Governor Pat Quinn’s statement on his Web site. The reduction counts for $242 million in financial assistance.

“MAP Grants are need-based grants and may be used for tuition and mandatory fees only,” according to the NIU Student Financial Aid Web site.

Five thousand students at NIU receive MAP grant money and cutting the grants could lead to a bad scenario at NIU where some students won’t be able to afford the cost of the university, NIU President John Peters said.

The MAP grant cuts “could wipe out a whole cohort of our neediest students,” he said.

The Monetary Assistance Program is a sore point with many administrators in the state universities, who view it as a subsidy to competing private universities. That's unlikely to stop the public and private universities from making common cause to restore the money.

WITHOUT COMMENT. Dallas considers daytime curfews for adolescents.

Home-schooling families were prominent among the roughly 80 people at a city-council hearing Wednesday, and also organized a protest outside City Hall on Monday. Doreen Fisher, a Dallas mother who homeschools her two young children, said she is also concerned about the impact of fines on low-income families.

"I was raised poor," she said. "I know if I had come home with a $500 fine because I skipped school to get a tan for the prom, it would have been catastrophic."

I'm not sure whether the social-justice sensibilities of the homeschooler or the loss of the concept of truancy is the greater astonisher.