Phillip W. Magness

The British Honduras Colony: Black Emigrationist Support for Colonization in the Lincoln Presidency

The traditional historical narrative has tended to interpret colonization during the Civil War by simultaneously discounting African-American support for the policy and Abraham Lincolns sincerity in offering it. Challenging these views, this paper examines new evidence of the U.S. governments efforts to enlist the pro-emigration minority of the free black community for a proposed settlement in British Honduras. For a brief period in 1863, black emigrationists including Henry Highland Garnet and John Willis Menard seriously entertained the Lincoln administrations colonization offers, spurred largely by their experiences with racial violence in the USA and the prospect of stronger political rights abroad.

A Paradox of Secessionism: The Political Economy of Slave Enforcement and the Union

Drawing upon insights from public choice political economy and an examination of historical records, this paper posits an explanation for the causes of secession by the original seven members of the Confederacy in 1860–1861. Secession is examined as a Hirschman exit, intended primarily to shore up and secure the waning federal subsidies and enforcement expenditures that had been afforded to plantation slavery in previous decades. Fears over the impending decline of these subsidies and protections explain the decision to withdraw from the Union, even though slavery itself was, legally, “much more secure in the Union than out of it,” to quote Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens. The premises of secession are most evident in southern declarations complaining of the non-enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, the instigation of slave insurrections, and the decline of southern political clout. These emphases suggest the perceived threat to slavery was more readily realized in its legal enforcement than in the oft-emphasized territorial question.

Market-Based Measurement for School Achievement

Over the last thirty years, state governments have paid ever-increasing attention to the results of standardized testing to identify successful schools, rewarding those with better performance by allocating to them a greater share of resources. Although traditional, high-stakes, standardized testing has been shown to be effective at measuring discrete skills or a predetermined list of facts, the overwhelming majority of research into its effectiveness shows not only that these tests fail to measure educational quality but also that their use tends to negatively affect the intellectual development of students in the classroom. This article argues for an alternative mechanism to evaluating school achievement. We claim that a free-market approach to education, one that includes central features of market systems—profits, market entry, price changes, product differentiation, and competition—not only provides a better mechanism than the use of high-stakes testing by which to allocate limited financial resources and motivate academic achievement but also serves as a more accurate tool to measure the quality of school programs. Phillip Magness and Chris W. Surprenant, Market-Based Measurement for School Achievement, Journal of Markets & Morality 22, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 81-98.