CBA Paper: Government Revenue
Zach and Justin are in their senior year of high school, and so have a few interesting mandatory assignments to complete – a senior project, a senior portfolio, etc.
One of them is a required “CBA paper” for their contemporary world issues class. Apparently CBA stands for curriculum based assessment. Or capabilities based assessment. Or combat body armor.
As I heard them discuss this assignment – the only topic given to all senior students, across the state, this year – I was pretty astounded.
The general subject area is government revenue and responsibility. The specific assignment is:
“Responsible citizenship requires an understanding of how government raises and spends money to implement policies and programs. For this research paper, select a level of givernment (federal, state or local) receiving funding from the 2009 Recovery Act (the economic stimulus). Examine the revenue sources and expenditures related to a particular policy or program.”
The troublesome part of the assignment was this:
“Provide an explanation of who pays for and who benefits from the collection of revenue and expenditures related to the policy or program.”
The assumption is made that it’s all upside, that it’s working wonderfully; the teachers do not want to hear about any issues or failures of the stimulus program. I have a problem with that. If you’re assigning a research paper, shouldn’t you let your student select the position he/she wants to support?
(And, for the record, I have no particular issue with the stimulus package, although I do have problems with much of the pork barrel legislation attached to it. I just have an issue with requiring a pre-determined outcome; it seems like propaganda creation.)
January 25th, 2010
That’s a very thought provoking assignment. More college level work than HS, IMO.
Would it be less troublesome to you if the component read “..who pays for, and who benefits from or is hurt by…the policy or program.”?
January 25th, 2010
Jeri–it sounds to me, unless I’m missing something, that they have to argue both sides of the stimulus package. The wording could be more artful, but it covers not just who “benefits” but also who “pays.” It also seems to me that this is a separate issue from whether the program is successful, i.e. whether the program achieves its goals or whether any social benefits outweigh any social costs (indeed, the focus on revenues and expenditures suggests that social or moral costs/benefits are outside the intended scope of the paper).
I don’t see it as a propaganda exercise at all–it looks to me like it’s a flat fiscally-focused analysis. Students are meant to analyze use of the stimulus package in terms of who receives a financial benefit and who pays the financial cost, not whether it’s smart, good, necessary, etc. The skill being taught/tested, I would think, is the ability to make an impartial analysis divorced from ideological considerations, which would be the exact opposite of a propaganda exercise. (On a tangent, this is why John Yoo deserves to be disbarred: ironically it’s not so much because torture, which he endorsed, is evil (it is, of course), but because his job in writing a legal memorandum was to present a dispassionate analysis of the available caselaw, statutory authority, and similar legal considerations, not to cherrypick motley clauses and phrases to justify what he thought his client wanted to implement as policy–i.e. the problem isn’t merely that his work was immoral, but also that it was incompetent, and would have been just as legally condemnable if he’d written a brief like that about real estate or taxation.)
But maybe I’m missing something.
January 25th, 2010
Geez, the government can’t figure this out and they’re running the program! And now the state wants high school students to take a crack at it?
Well, who knows…maybe one of them will come up with a way to accurately track stimulus money spent.