Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2007, 06:48:01 AM
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WSJ:
The Culture Gap
By BRINK LINDSEY
July 9, 2007; Page A15
Cut through all the statistical squid ink surrounding the issue of economic inequality, and you'll find a phenomenon that genuinely deserves public concern.
Over the past quarter-century or so, the return on human capital has risen significantly. Or to put it another way, the opportunity cost of failing to develop human capital is now much higher than it used to be. The wage premium associated with a college degree has jumped to around 70% in recent years from around 30% in 1980; the graduate degree premium has soared to over 100% from 50%. Meanwhile, dropping out of high school now all but guarantees socioeconomic failure.
In part this development is cause for celebration. Rising demand for analytical and interpersonal skills has been driving the change, and surely it is good news that economic signals now so strongly encourage the development of human talent. Yet -- and here is the cause for concern -- the supply of skilled people is responding sluggishly to the increased demand.
Despite the strong incentives, the percentage of people with college degrees has been growing only modestly. Between 1995 and 2005, the share of men with college degrees inched up to 29% from 26%. And the number of high school dropouts remains stubbornly high: The ratio of 17-year-olds to diplomas awarded has been stuck around 70% for three decades.
Something is plainly hindering the effectiveness of the market's carrots and sticks. And that something is culture.
Before explaining what I mean, let me go back to the squid ink and clarify what's not worrisome about the inequality statistics. For those who grind their ideological axes on these numbers, the increase in measured inequality since the 1970s is proof that the new, more competitive, more entrepreneurial economy of recent decades (which also happens to be less taxed and less unionized) has somehow failed to provide widespread prosperity. According to left-wing doom-and-gloomers, only an "oligarchy" at the very top is benefiting from the current system.
Hogwash. This argument can be disposed of with a simple thought experiment. First, picture the material standard of living you could have afforded back in 1979 with the median household income then of $16,461. Now picture the mix of goods and services you could buy in 2004 with the median income of $44,389. Which is the better deal? Only the most blinkered ideologue could fail to see the dramatic expansion of comforts, conveniences and opportunities that the contemporary family enjoys.
Much of the increase in measured inequality has nothing to do with the economic system at all. Rather, it is a product of demographic changes. Rising numbers of both single-parent households and affluent dual-earner couples have stretched the income distribution; so, too, has the big influx of low-skilled Hispanic immigrants. Meanwhile, in a 2006 paper published in the American Economic Review, economist Thomas Lemieux calculated that roughly three-quarters of the rise in wage inequality among workers with similar skills is due simply to the fact that the population is both older and better educated today than it was in the 1970s.
It is true that superstars in sports, entertainment and business now earn stratospheric incomes. But what is that to you and me? If the egalitarian left has been reduced to complaining that people in the 99th income percentile in a given year (and they're not the same people from year to year) are leaving behind those in the 90th percentile, it has truly arrived at the most farcical of intellectual dead ends.
Which brings us back to the real issue: the human capital gap, and the culture gap that impedes its closure. The most obvious and heartrending cultural deficits are those that produce and perpetuate the inner-city underclass. Consider this arresting fact: While the poverty rate nationwide is 13%, only 3% of adults with full-time, year-round jobs fall below the poverty line. Poverty in America today is thus largely about failing to get and hold a job, any job.
The problem is not lack of opportunity. If it were, the country wouldn't be a magnet for illegal immigrants. The problem is a lack of elementary self-discipline: failing to stay in school, failing to live within the law, failing to get and stay married to the mother or father of your children. The prevalence of all these pathologies reflects a dysfunctional culture that fails to invest in human capital.
Other, less acute deficits distinguish working-class culture from that of the middle and upper classes. According to sociologist Annette Lareau, working-class parents continue to follow the traditional, laissez-faire child-rearing philosophy that she calls "the accomplishment of natural growth." But at the upper end of the socioeconomic scale, parents now engage in what she refers to as "concerted cultivation" -- intensively overseeing kids' schoolwork and stuffing their after-school hours and weekends with organized enrichment activities.
This new kind of family life is often hectic and stressful, but it inculcates in children the intellectual, organizational and networking skills needed to thrive in today's knowledge-based economy. In other words, it makes unprecedented, heavy investments in developing children's human capital.
Consider these data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, an in-depth survey of educational achievement. Among students who received high scores in eighth grade mathematics (and thus showed academic promise), 74% of kids from the highest quartile of socioeconomic status (measured as a composite of parental education, occupations and family income) eventually earned a college degree. By contrast, the college graduation rate fell to 47% for kids from the middle two quartiles, and 29% for those in the bottom quartile. Perhaps more generous financial aid might affect those numbers at the margins, but at the core of these big differentials are differences in the values, skills and habits taught in the home.
Contrary to the warnings of the alarmist left, the increase in economic inequality does not mean the economic system isn't working properly. On the contrary, the system is delivering more opportunities for comfortable, challenging lives than our culture enables us to take advantage of. Far from underperforming, our productive capacity has now outstripped our cultural capacity.
Alas, there is no silver bullet for closing the culture gap. But the public institutions most directly responsible for human capital formation are the nation's schools, and it seems beyond serious dispute that in many cases they are failing to discharge their responsibilities adequately. Those interested in reducing meaningful economic inequality would thus be well advised to focus on education reform. And forget about adding new layers of bureaucracy and top-down controls. Real improvements will come from challenging the moribund state-school monopoly with greater competition.
Mr. Lindsey is vice president for research at the Cato Institute and author of the just-published book, "The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture" (Collins, 2007).
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Second post of the day:
"The eight Democratic presidential candidates assembled in Washington recently for another of their debates and talked, among other things, about public education. They all essentially agreed that it was underfunded -- one system 'for the wealthy, one for everybody else,' as John Edwards put it. Then they all got into cars and drove through a city where teachers are relatively well paid, per-pupil spending is through the roof and -- pay attention here -- the schools are among the very worst in the nation. When it comes to education, Democrats are ineducable.... [N]ot a one of them even whispered a word of outrage about a public school system that spends $13,000 per child -- third-highest among big-city school systems -- and produces pupils who score among the lowest in just about any category you can name. The only area in which the Washington school system is No. 1 is in money spent on administration. The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Not a single candidate offered anything close to a call for real reform" -- Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.
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Harvard for Free
Higher education is about to change as elite universities decide what to do with their huge endowments.
BY FAY VINCENT
Thursday, December 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
On Monday Harvard said that next year it will substantially increase its financial aid to middle-class students, bringing its actual tuition costs down to or even below that of some state universities. This is possible because of Harvard's--and other universities'--growing financial success, and it is a signal of far-reaching changes that will ripple throughout higher education.
Superb investment returns have been generated by managers of the endowments of some of the elite private universities, including Harvard, Yale, and even of small liberal arts colleges like Amherst and Williams. The endowments of these four institutions range from $1.7 billion at Amherst to $35 billion at Harvard, and the investment managers are getting annual returns well in excess of 20%. This is more than the alumni of any of those institutions could possibly contribute, and by an enormous margin.
In 1970, when I became a trustee of Williams, the endowment stood at about $35 million. Even using constant dollars, the growth in the endowment since then has been astonishing. At June 30, 2007 it had reached approximately $1.9 billion.
Much (but not all) of this growth is due to the major diversification in the investment mixture adopted by trustees of these schools, who realized some 30 years ago that sticking with the ancient formulae of stocks and bonds was no longer prudent. The change came about because the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett, persuaded Grinnell College in 1976 to invest some $13 million in a local TV station that he had identified as a golden opportunity.
Before then, boards at such places worried that nontraditional investments might raise legal issues, or subject them to criticism from alumni. But when the Buffett suggestion turned into a significant windfall of some $36 million for Grinnell in about five years, the rest of the endowment world got the point. I once asked Warren if he had planned to cause such a major switch in strategy. He assured me he had not. "I just saw it as a good buy," he said.
Now, however, these enormous endowments are beginning to raise some fascinating issues for all of higher education. The most obvious issue is whether these schools can seriously claim to have any further need for donations from alumni and friends.
And if, as seems likely, there is much less need for additional giving, does that not mean the administrations of these institutions can operate without the traditional checks and balances of informed alumni? The boards and administrations of the well-endowed schools can safely and proudly proclaim their independence.
In the past, it would have been impossible to ignore alumni. Perhaps an early indication of what I am raising is the recent tussle at Dartmouth over the number of trustees the alumni will be permitted to elect. There the administration has instituted a by-law change that will result in an increase in the number of trustees to be elected by the board, thereby decreasing the power of the alumni.
In the present circumstances, the administration and boards of these schools now control the money because the endowment is managed by internally controlled entities. Accordingly, the most important voice at Yale would have to be the estimable and much-respected David Swenson, who has managed the Yale endowment to astonishing annual returns of over 20% for 10 years. Yale's endowment is about $22.5 billion. What does this mean for the future of governance at Yale? I wonder.
Similarly, these powerful investment returns will change tuition pricing and financial aid--and not just at Harvard. A scholar who follows these matters closely recently told me that he anticipates that the elite private colleges and universities will, in the not-too-distant future, stop charging tuition to any student whose annual family income is below the top 5% of all American families--currently around $200,000.
We already have seen a competition among these schools as of late, with "Free to $30,000" replaced by "Free to $40,000" and now "Free to $60,000." In fact, a recent announcement at Phillips Exeter Academy, that they are offering a free boarding school education to admitted students whose families earn $75,000 or less, raised the stakes for higher education.
If a "Free to $200,000" policy were to be enacted at my alma mater, Williams College, it would cost them only something like $15 million in net tuition revenue out of an operating budget of $200 million. At Harvard, the percentage contribution would be even less. Given the endowment performance at places like Williams and Harvard, they could easily adjust to the loss in tuition revenue. But what about all the lesser-endowed schools that are much more heavily dependant on tuition to maintain their financial stability? How can Fairfield University--where I have served as a trustee--possibly forego tuition to that extent?
What this means is that the cost of the educational Mercedes will be less than the educational Ford. And when Harvard is cheaper than Fairfield, how can Fairfield increase tuition each year, when it will no longer have the umbrella of similar tuition increases being announced by places like Williams and Yale?
I suspect many of us have viewed a four-year college education as a commodity that is priced within a reasonably narrow range. In the past, the Fairfield cost was close to that at Williams. If, as is likely, the big guys drop tuition for all but the richest students, all this will change.
There is another aspect of the financial aid universe that will be affected by these changes in pricing. Currently, there are universities and colleges granting what are known as "merit scholarships." These are financial grants to students who have no demonstrated need.
The Ivies, and many well-endowed institutions, profess only to grant aid based on need. But in the present circumstances, merit grants are being used to tempt talented students away from the Ivies. Some students accept these grants, and decline admission offers at the very elite schools in order to save money for graduate school costs. Thus, Harvard and Williams may be losing attractive students for largely financial reasons. In those cases, the merit offers make money a solid reason to go to a school down the food chain.
If, as is likely, the big guys drop tuition, all this will change, too. And who can blame the elites for using what they have the most of--money and huge endowments.
Because there are so few of these super-rich schools, the effects of their changes in policies will be felt slowly. But like the change in investment strategy Warren Buffett innocently suggested some 30 years ago, the size and growth of their endowments will have significant and not easily anticipated consequences. The ripples of moves made in Cambridge and New Haven will be widely felt.
Mr. Vincent, a former commissioner of Major League Baseball, is the author of "The Only Game in Town: Baseball Stars of the 1930s and 1940s Talk About the Game They Loved" (Simon & Schuster, 2006), the first in a multivolume oral-history project.
WSJ
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Defining Diversity Down
A proposal to make it easier to get into California colleges.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008 12:01 a.m. EST
The world gets more competitive every day, so why would California's education elites want to dumb down their public university admissions standards? The answer is to serve the modern liberal piety known as "diversity" while potentially thwarting the will of the voters.
The University of California Board of Admissions is proposing to lower to 2.8 from 3.0 the minimum grade point average for admission to a UC school. That 3.0 GPA standard has been in place for 40 years. Students would also no longer be required to take the SAT exams that test for knowledge of specific subjects, such as history and science.
UC Board of Admissions Chairman Mark Rashid says that, under this new system of "comprehensive review," the schools "can make a better and more fair determination of academic merit by looking at all the students' achievements." And it is true that test scores and grades do not take full account of the special talents of certain students. But the current system already leaves slots for students with specific skills, so if you think this change is about admitting more linebackers or piccolo players, you don't understand modern academic politics.
The plan would grant admissions officers more discretion to evade the ban on race and gender preferences imposed by California voters. Those limits became law when voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996, and state officials have been looking for ways around them ever since. "This appears to be a blatant attempt to subvert the law," says Ward Connerly, a former member of the University of California Board of Regents, who led the drive for 209. "Subjective admissions standards allow schools to substitute race and diversity for academic achievement."
One loser here would be the principle of merit-based college admissions. That principle has served the state well over the decades, helping to make some of its universities among the world's finest. Since 209, Asian-American students have done especially well, with students of Asian ethnicity at UCLA nearly doubling to 42% from 22%. Immigrants and the children of immigrants now outnumber native-born whites in most UC schools, so being a member of an ethnic minority is clearly not an inherent admissions handicap. Ironically, objective testing criteria were first introduced in many university systems, including California's, precisely to weed out discrimination favoring children of affluent alumni ahead of higher performing students.
The other big losers would be the overall level of achievement demanded in California public elementary and high schools. A recent study by the left-leaning Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA, the "California Educational Opportunity Report 2007," finds that "California lags behind most other states in providing fundamental learning conditions as well as in student outcomes." In 2005 California ranked 48th among states in the percentage of high-school kids who attend college. Only Mississippi and Arizona rated worse.
The UCLA study documents that the educational achievement gap between black and Latino children and whites and Asians is increasing in California at a troubling pace. Graduation rates are falling fastest for blacks and Latinos, as many of them are stuck in the state's worst public schools. The way to close that gap is by introducing more accountability and choice to raise achievement standards--admittedly hard work, especially because it means taking on the teachers unions.
Instead, the UC Board of Admissions proposal sounds like a declaration of academic surrender. It's one more depressing signal that liberal elites have all but given up on poor black and Hispanic kids. Because they don't think closing the achievement gap is possible, their alternative is to reduce standards for everyone. Diversity so trumps merit in the hierarchy of modern liberal values that they're willing to dumb down the entire university system to guarantee what they consider a proper mix of skin tones on campus.
A decade ago, California voters spoke clearly that they prefer admissions standards rooted in the American tradition of achievement. In the months ahead, the UC Board of Regents will have to decide which principle to endorse, and their choice will tell us a great deal about the future path of American society.
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How dumb can we get?
It's bad enough that Americans are increasingly ignorant about science, art, history, and geography. What's frightening, says author Susan Jacoby, is that we're proud of it.
"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble—in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, and low expectations.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ... and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science, and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
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First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper, and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book—fiction or nonfiction—over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing, and videogames.
Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.
Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time—as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web—seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.
No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in The New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."
As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible—and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate—featuring the candidate's own voice—dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.
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The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."
This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic–Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."
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That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism—a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.
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There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.
Susan Jacoby's new book is The Age of American Unreason.
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What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?
Finland's teens score extraordinarily high on an international test. American educators are trying to figure out why.
By ELLEN GAMERMAN
February 29, 2008; Page W1
Helsinki, Finland
High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don't start school until age 7.
Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns among the world's most productive workers.
Finland's students are the brightest in the world, according to an international test. Teachers say extra playtime is one reason for the students' success. WSJ's Ellen Gamerman reports.
The Finns won attention with their performances in triennial tests sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group funded by 30 countries that monitors social and economic trends. In the most recent test, which focused on science, Finland's students placed first in science and near the top in math and reading, according to results released late last year. An unofficial tally of Finland's combined scores puts it in first place overall, says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the OECD's test, known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The U.S. placed in the middle of the pack in math and science; its reading scores were tossed because of a glitch. About 400,000 students around the world answered multiple-choice questions and essays on the test that measured critical thinking and the application of knowledge. A typical subject: Discuss the artistic value of graffiti.
The academic prowess of Finland's students has lured educators from more than 50 countries in recent years to learn the country's secret, including an official from the U.S. Department of Education. What they find is simple but not easy: well-trained teachers and responsible children. Early on, kids do a lot without adults hovering. And teachers create lessons to fit their students. "We don't have oil or other riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have," says Hannele Frantsi, a school principal.
Visitors and teacher trainees can peek at how it's done from a viewing balcony perched over a classroom at the Norssi School in Jyväskylä, a city in central Finland. What they see is a relaxed, back-to-basics approach. The school, which is a model campus, has no sports teams, marching bands or prom.
Fanny Salo in class
Trailing 15-year-old Fanny Salo at Norssi gives a glimpse of the no-frills curriculum. Fanny is a bubbly ninth-grader who loves "Gossip Girl" books, the TV show "Desperate Housewives" and digging through the clothing racks at H&M stores with her friends.
Fanny earns straight A's, and with no gifted classes she sometimes doodles in her journal while waiting for others to catch up. She often helps lagging classmates. "It's fun to have time to relax a little in the middle of class," Fanny says. Finnish educators believe they get better overall results by concentrating on weaker students rather than by pushing gifted students ahead of everyone else. The idea is that bright students can help average ones without harming their own progress.
At lunch, Fanny and her friends leave campus to buy salmiakki, a salty licorice. They return for physics, where class starts when everyone quiets down. Teachers and students address each other by first names. About the only classroom rules are no cellphones, no iPods and no hats.
TESTING AROUND THE GLOBE
Every three years, 15-year-olds in 57 countries around the world take a test called the Pisa exam, which measures proficiency in math, science and reading.
• The test: Two sections from the Pisa science test
• Chart: Recent scores for participating countries
DISCUSS
Do you think any of these Finnish methods would work in U.S. schools? What would you change -- if anything -- about the U.S. school system, and the responsibilities that teachers, parents and students are given? Share your thoughts.Fanny's more rebellious classmates dye their blond hair black or sport pink dreadlocks. Others wear tank tops and stilettos to look tough in the chilly climate. Tanning lotions are popular in one clique. Teens sift by style, including "fruittari," or preppies; "hoppari," or hip-hop, or the confounding "fruittari-hoppari," which fuses both. Ask an obvious question and you may hear "KVG," short for "Check it on Google, you idiot." Heavy-metal fans listen to Nightwish, a Finnish band, and teens socialize online at irc-galleria.net.
The Norssi School is run like a teaching hospital, with about 800 teacher trainees each year. Graduate students work with kids while instructors evaluate from the sidelines. Teachers must hold master's degrees, and the profession is highly competitive: More than 40 people may apply for a single job. Their salaries are similar to those of U.S. teachers, but they generally have more freedom.
Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.
One explanation for the Finns' success is their love of reading. Parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck.
Ymmersta school principal Hannele Frantsi
Finland shares its language with no other country, and even the most popular English-language books are translated here long after they are first published. Many children struggled to read the last Harry Potter book in English because they feared they would hear about the ending before it arrived in Finnish. Movies and TV shows have Finnish subtitles instead of dubbing. One college student says she became a fast reader as a child because she was hooked on the 1990s show "Beverly Hills, 90210."
In November, a U.S. delegation visited, hoping to learn how Scandinavian educators used technology. Officials from the Education Department, the National Education Association and the American Association of School Librarians saw Finnish teachers with chalkboards instead of whiteboards, and lessons shown on overhead projectors instead of PowerPoint. Keith Krueger was less impressed by the technology than by the good teaching he saw. "You kind of wonder how could our country get to that?" says Mr. Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of school technology officers that organized the trip.
Finnish high-school senior Elina Lamponen saw the differences firsthand. She spent a year at Colon High School in Colon, Mich., where strict rules didn't translate into tougher lessons or dedicated students, Ms. Lamponen says. She would ask students whether they did their homework. They would reply: " 'Nah. So what'd you do last night?'" she recalls. History tests were often multiple choice. The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write. In-class projects were largely "glue this to the poster for an hour," she says. Her Finnish high school forced Ms. Lamponen, a spiky-haired 19-year-old, to repeat the year when she returned.
At the Norssi School in Jyväskylä, school principal Helena Muilu
Lloyd Kirby, superintendent of Colon Community Schools in southern Michigan, says foreign students are told to ask for extra work if they find classes too easy. He says he is trying to make his schools more rigorous by asking parents to demand more from their children.
Despite the apparent simplicity of Finnish education, it would be tough to replicate in the U.S. With a largely homogeneous population, teachers have few students who don't speak Finnish. In the U.S., about 8% of students are learning English, according to the Education Department. There are fewer disparities in education and income levels among Finns. Finland separates students for the last three years of high school based on grades; 53% go to high school and the rest enter vocational school. (All 15-year-old students took the PISA test.) Finland has a high-school dropout rate of about 4% -- or 10% at vocational schools -- compared with roughly 25% in the U.S., according to their respective education departments.
Another difference is financial. Each school year, the U.S. spends an average of $8,700 per student, while the Finns spend $7,500. Finland's high-tax government provides roughly equal per-pupil funding, unlike the disparities between Beverly Hills public schools, for example, and schools in poorer districts. The gap between Finland's best- and worst-performing schools was the smallest of any country in the PISA testing. The U.S. ranks about average.
Finnish students have little angstata -- or teen angst -- about getting into the best university, and no worries about paying for it. College is free. There is competition for college based on academic specialties -- medical school, for instance. But even the best universities don't have the elite status of a Harvard.
Students at the Ymmersta School near Helsinki
Taking away the competition of getting into the "right schools" allows Finnish children to enjoy a less-pressured childhood. While many U.S. parents worry about enrolling their toddlers in academically oriented preschools, the Finns don't begin school until age 7, a year later than most U.S. first-graders.
Once school starts, the Finns are more self-reliant. While some U.S. parents fuss over accompanying their children to and from school, and arrange every play date and outing, young Finns do much more on their own. At the Ymmersta School in a nearby Helsinki suburb, some first-grade students trudge to school through a stand of evergreens in near darkness. At lunch, they pick out their own meals, which all schools give free, and carry the trays to lunch tables. There is no Internet filter in the school library. They can walk in their socks during class, but at home even the very young are expected to lace up their own skates or put on their own skis.
The Finns enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, but they, too, worry about falling behind in the shifting global economy. They rely on electronics and telecommunications companies, such as Finnish cellphone giant Nokia, along with forest-products and mining industries for jobs. Some educators say Finland needs to fast-track its brightest students the way the U.S. does, with gifted programs aimed at producing more go-getters. Parents also are getting pushier about special attention for their children, says Tapio Erma, principal of the suburban Olari School. "We are more and more aware of American-style parents," he says.
Mr. Erma's school is a showcase campus. Last summer, at a conference in Peru, he spoke about adopting Finnish teaching methods. During a recent afternoon in one of his school's advanced math courses, a high-school boy fell asleep at his desk. The teacher didn't disturb him, instead calling on others. While napping in class isn't condoned, Mr. Erma says, "We just have to accept the fact that they're kids and they're learning how to live."
WSJ
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Twenty-Five Years Later, A Nation Still at Risk
By CHESTER E. FINN JR.
April 26, 2008; Page A7
Today marks the 25th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk," the influential Reagan-era report by a blue-ribbon panel that alerted Americans to the weak performance of our education system. The report warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." That dire forecast set off a quarter century of education reform that's yielded worthy changes – yet still not the achievement gains we need to turn back the tide of mediocrity.
After decades of furthering educational "equality," the 1983 commission admonished the country, it was time to attend to academic excellence and school results. Educators didn't want to hear this and a generation later many still don't. Our ponderous public-school system resists change. Teachers don't like criticism and are loath to be judged by pupil performance. In educator circles, one still encounters grumbling that "A Nation at Risk" lodged a bum rap.
Others heeded the alarm, though, and that report launched an era of forceful innovation and accountability guided by noneducators – elected officials, business leaders and philanthropists.
Such "civilian" leadership has brought about two profound shifts that the professionals, left to their own devices, would never have allowed. Today, instead of judging schools by their services, resources or fairness, we track their progress against preset academic standards – and hold them to account for those results.
We're also far more open to charter schools, vouchers, virtual schools, home schooling. And we no longer suppose kids must attend the campus nearest home. A majority of U.S. students now study either in bona fide "schools of choice," or in neighborhood schools their parents chose with a realtor's help.
Those are historic changes indeed – most of today's education debates deal with the complexities of carrying them out. Yet our school results haven't appreciably improved, whether one looks at test scores or graduation rates. Sure, there are up and down blips in the data, but no big and lasting changes in performance, even though we're also spending tons more money. (In constant dollars, per-pupil spending in 1983 was 56% of today's.)
And just as "A Nation at Risk" warned, other countries are beginning to eat our education lunch. While our outcomes remain flat, theirs rise. Half a dozen nations now surpass our high-school and college graduation rates. International tests find young Americans scoring in the middle of the pack.
What to do now? It's no time to ease the push for a major K-12 education make-over – or to settle (as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton apparently would) for reviving yesterday's faith in still more spending and greater trust in educators. But we can distill four key lessons:
First, don't expect Uncle Sam to manage the reform process. Not only does Washington lack the capacity to revamp thousands of schools and create alternatives for millions of kids, but viewing education reform as a federal obligation lets others off the hook. Yet some things are best done nationally – notably creating uniform standards and tests in place of today's patchwork of uneven expectations and noncomparable assessments. These we have foolishly resisted.
Second, retain civilian control but push for more continuity. Governors and mayors remain indispensable leaders on the ground – but the instant they leave office, the system tries to revert. The adult interests that rule it – teacher unions, yes, but also colleges of education, textbook publishers and more – look after themselves and fend off change. If three consecutive governors or mayors hew to the same agenda, those reforms are more apt to endure.
Third, don't bother seeking one grand innovation. Education reform is not about silver bullets. But huge gains can be made by schools that are free to run (and staff) themselves, attended by choice, expected to meet high standards, and accountable for their results.
Consider the more than 50 schools in the acclaimed Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) network. We don't have nearly enough today, but we're likelier to grow more of them outside the traditional system than by trying to alter the system itself.
Finally, content matters. Getting the structures, rules and incentives right is only half the battle. The other half is sound curriculum and effective instruction. If we can't place enough expert educators in our classrooms, we can use technology to amplify the best of them across the state or nation. Kids no longer need to sit in school to be well educated.
Far from delivering an undeserved insult to a well-functioning system, the authors of "A Nation at Risk" were clear-eyed about that system's failings, and prescient about the challenges these posed to America's future. Now that we're well into that future, we owe them a vote of thanks. But our most solemn responsibility is to keep the reform flag flying high in the wind that they created.
Mr. Finn, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is the author of "Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik," published in February by the Princeton University Press.
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WSJ
Amazing Teacher Facts
June 14, 2008
This month 3,700 recent college grads will begin Teach for America's five-week boot camp, before heading off for two-year stints at the nation's worst public schools. These young men and women were chosen from almost 25,000 applicants, hailing from our most selective colleges. Eleven per cent of Yale's senior class, 9% of Harvard's and 10% of Georgetown's applied for a job whose salary ranges from $25,000 (in rural South Dakota) to $44,000 (in New York City).
Hang on a second.
Unions keep saying the best people won't go into teaching unless we pay them what doctors and lawyers and CEOs make. Not only are Teach for America salaries significantly lower than what J.P. Morgan might offer, but these individuals go to some very rough classrooms. What's going on?
It seems that Teach for America offers smart young people something even better than money – the chance to avoid the vast education bureaucracy. Participants need only pass academic muster and attend the summer training before entering a classroom. If they took the traditional route into teaching, they would have to endure years of "education" courses to be certified.
The American Federation of Teachers commonly derides Teach for America as a "band-aid." One of its arguments is that the program only lasts two years, barely enough time, they say, to get a handle on managing a classroom. However, it turns out that two-thirds of its grads stay in the education field, sometimes as teachers, but also as principals or policy makers.
More importantly, it doesn't matter that they are only in the classroom a short time, at least according to a recent Urban Institute study. Here's the gist: "On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers' effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience."
Jane Hannaway, one of the study's co-authors, says Teach for America participants may be more motivated than their traditional teacher peers. Second, they may receive better support during their experience. But, above all, Teach for America volunteers tend to have much better academic qualifications. They come from more competitive schools and they know more about the subjects they teach. Ms. Hannaway notes, "Students are better off being exposed to teachers with a high level of skill."
The strong performance in math and science seems to confirm that the more specialized the knowledge, the more important it is that teachers be well versed in it. (Imagine that.) No amount of time in front of a classroom will make you understand advanced algebra better.
Teach for America was pleased, but not exactly shocked, by these results. "We have always been a data-driven organization," says spokesman Amy Rabinowitz. "We have a selection model we've refined over the years." The organization figures out which teachers have been most successful in improving student performance and then seeks applicants with similar qualities. "It's mostly a record of high academic achievement and leadership in extracurricular activities."
Sounds like the way the private sector hires. Don't tell the teachers unions.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html
"It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable."
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The Declining Value
Of Your College Degree
By GREG IP
A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck.
A college degree may not take you as far as you'd expect. However, WSJ's Jennifer Merritt reports on a few fields where a bachelor's degree still remains a worthy investment.
Just ask Bea Dewing. After she earned a bachelor's degree -- her second -- in computer science from Maryland's Frostburg State University in 1986, she enjoyed almost unbroken advances in wages, eventually earning $89,000 a year as a data modeler for Sprint Corp. in Lawrence, Kan. Then, in 2002, Sprint laid her off.
"I thought I might be looking a few weeks or months at the most," says Ms. Dewing, now 56 years old. Instead she spent the next six years in a career wilderness, starting an Internet café that didn't succeed, working temporary jobs and low-end positions in data processing, and fruitlessly responding to hundreds of job postings.
The low point came around 2004 when a recruiter for Sprint -- now known as Sprint Nextel Corp. -- called seeking to fill a job similar to the one she lost two years earlier, but paying barely a third of her old salary.
In April, Ms. Dewing finally landed a job similar to her old one in the information technology department of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., where she relocated. She earns about 20% less than she did in 2002, adjusted for inflation, but considers herself fortunate, and wiser.
A degree, she says, "isn't any big guarantee of employment, it's a basic requirement, a step you have to take to even be considered for many professional jobs."
MORE DATA
Trends in Education, SalariesFor decades, the typical college graduate's wage rose well above inflation. But no longer. In the economic expansion that began in 2001 and now appears to be ending, the inflation-adjusted wages of the majority of U.S. workers didn't grow, even among those who went to college. The government's statistical snapshots show the typical weekly salary of a worker with a bachelor's degree, adjusted for inflation, didn't rise last year from 2006 and was 1.7% below the 2001 level.
College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only. What employers want from workers nowadays is more narrow, more abstract and less easily learned in college.
To be sure, the average American with a college diploma still earns about 75% more than a worker with a high-school diploma and is less likely to be unemployed. Yet while that so-called college premium is up from 40% in 1979, it is little changed from 2001, according to data compiled by Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank.
FURTHER READING
• Ms. Goldin and Mr. Katz have a new book, "The Race between Education and Technology," that provides a historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century.
• Jared Bernstein is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. For more of his writings, visit the institute's Web site.
• Real Time Econ: College Grads, Incomes Stagnant, Turn Against GlobalizationMost statistics he and other economists use don't track individual workers over time, but compare annual snapshots of the work force. That said, this trend doesn't appear due to an influx of lower-paid young workers or falling starting salaries; Mr. Bernstein says when differences in age, race, marital status and place of residence are accounted for, the trend remains the same.
A variety of economic forces are at work here. Globalization and technology have altered the types of skills that earn workers a premium wage; in many cases, those skills aren't learned in college classrooms. And compared with previous generations, today's college graduates are far more likely to be competing against educated immigrants and educated workers employed overseas.
The issue isn't a lack of economic growth, which was solid for most of the 2000s. Rather, it's that the fruits of growth are flowing largely to "a relatively small group of people who have a particular set of skills and assets that lots of other people don't," says Mr. Bernstein. And that "doesn't necessarily have that much to do with your education." In short, a college degree is often necessary, but not sufficient, to get a paycheck that beats inflation.
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• 'Old Age' on HoldEconomists chiefly cite globalization and technology, which have prompted employers to put the highest value on abstract skills possessed by a relatively small group, for this state of affairs. Harvard University economists Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin argue that in the 1990s, it became easier for firms to do overseas, or with computers at home, the work once done by "lower-end college graduates in middle management and certain professional positions." This depressed these workers' wages, but made college graduates whose work was more abstract and creative more productive, driving their salaries up.
Indeed, salaries have seen extraordinary growth among a small number of highly paid individuals in the financial sector -- such as fund management, investment banking and corporate law -- which, until the credit crisis hit a year ago, had benefited both from the buoyant financial environment and the globalization of finance, in which the U.S. remains a leader.
Richard Spitzer is one of those beneficiaries. He received his undergraduate degree in East Asian studies in 1995 from the College of William and Mary and graduated from Georgetown University's law school in 2001. The New York firm for which he works, now called Dewey & LeBoeuf, has a specialty in complex legal work for insurance companies. There, Mr. Spitzer has developed an expertise in "catastrophe bonds." An insurance company sells such bonds to investors and pays them interest, unless an earthquake, a hurricane or unexpected surge in deaths occurs.
Experts in these bonds are "probably a rarefied species -- there's only a few law firms that do them," says Mr. Spitzer, 35 years old. He typically spends two to four months on a single deal, ensuring that details like timing of payments or definition of the triggering event are precise enough to avoid disputes or default.
MORE FROM CAREER JOURNAL
• In a Sinking Industry? Jump to Another Ship
• Turning That Layoff Into Career CatalystMr. Spitzer's salary has doubled to $265,000 since joining in 2001, in line with salaries similar firms pay.
But not all law graduates are so fortunate; many, especially those from less-prestigious schools, have far lower salaries and less job security. Similarly, some computer-science graduates strike it rich. But their skills are not as rare as they were in the early 1980s, when the discipline took off, and graduates today must contend with competition from hundreds of thousands of similarly qualified foreign workers in the U.S. or overseas.
That helps explain Ms. Dewing's experience. She was raised in a family that prized education. Both her parents went to college on the G.I. Bill, which pays tuition costs for servicemen and some dependents. Four of their six children earned college degrees. In 1979, she earned a bachelor's degree in government and politics from George Mason University in Virginia. Several years later, then a single mother, she decided to get a degree in computer science.
Her first job out of college was with the federal government, earning about $35,000 in today's dollars. "For 16 years I had no trouble at all finding jobs," she said. Earlier this decade she ended up at Sprint designing databases -- a specialty called "data modeling" that isn't widely taught in schools and usually requires hands-on experience.
In 2002 Sprint, reeling from the collapse of the telecommunications industry, initiated a wave of layoffs that eventually totaled 15,000 workers in 13 months, Ms. Dewing among them. She remained in the Kansas City area, posting her résumé on job boards. When recruiters called, she would usually put her expected salary at something close to her old salary. As time went by without an offer she lowered it steadily, to $60,000. She found herself competing for jobs with employees of outsourcing firms brought over from India on temporary visas, such as the H-1B.
A few months ago, Ms. Dewing got a call from a recruiter calling on behalf of Wal-Mart. Company officials pressed her during her interview on how she had kept up her data-modeling ability during her six years away from the specialty. She noted that while at Sprint she had revived the Kansas City chapter of a data modelers' professional association and, long after being laid off, continued to attend its seminars where invited experts would describe the latest advances. She even cited her short-lived Internet café as evidence of how she could solve diverse problems.
When she landed the job, she says, "I felt, 'All right, I'm a professional again.'" Even so, Ms. Dewing has a newfound appreciation for how insecure any job can be and how little a college degree by itself stands for. "There is enough competition for entry-level positions that employers are going to ask, 'What else have you done in your life besides go to college?'" she says. "And in information technology, a portfolio of hands-on experience with programming is a really good thing to have."
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858688764535107.html
For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time
By CHARLES MURRAY
August 13, 2008; Page A17
Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."
You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.
Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.
Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.
The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.
The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough -- four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you're a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.
The merits of a CPA-like certification exam apply to any college major for which the BA is now used as a job qualification. To name just some of them: criminal justice, social work, public administration and the many separate majors under the headings of business, computer science and education. Such majors accounted for almost two-thirds of the bachelor's degrees conferred in 2005. For that matter, certification tests can be used for purely academic disciplines. Why not present graduate schools with certifications in microbiology or economics -- and who cares if the applicants passed the exam after studying in the local public library?
Certification tests need not undermine the incentives to get a traditional liberal-arts education. If professional and graduate schools want students who have acquired one, all they need do is require certification scores in the appropriate disciplines. Students facing such requirements are likely to get a much better liberal education than even our most elite schools require now.
Certification tests will not get rid of the problems associated with differences in intellectual ability: People with high intellectual ability will still have an edge. Graduates of prestigious colleges will still, on average, have higher certification scores than people who have taken online courses -- just because prestigious colleges attract intellectually talented applicants.
But that's irrelevant to the larger issue. Under a certification system, four years is not required, residence is not required, expensive tuitions are not required, and a degree is not required. Equal educational opportunity means, among other things, creating a society in which it's what you know that makes the difference. Substituting certifications for degrees would be a big step in that direction.
The incentives are right. Certification tests would provide all employers with valuable, trustworthy information about job applicants. They would benefit young people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional four-year college. They would be welcomed by the growing post-secondary online educational industry, which cannot offer the halo effect of a BA from a traditional college, but can realistically promise their students good training for a certification test -- as good as they are likely to get at a traditional college, for a lot less money and in a lot less time.
Certification tests would disadvantage just one set of people: Students who have gotten into well-known traditional schools, but who are coasting through their years in college and would score poorly on a certification test. Disadvantaging them is an outcome devoutly to be wished.
No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.
But when so many of the players would benefit, a market opportunity exists. If a high-profile testing company such as the Educational Testing Service were to reach a strategic decision to create definitive certification tests, it could coordinate with major employers, professional groups and nontraditional universities to make its tests the gold standard. A handful of key decisions could produce a tipping effect. Imagine if Microsoft announced it would henceforth require scores on a certain battery of certification tests from all of its programming applicants. Scores on that battery would acquire instant credibility for programming job applicants throughout the industry.
An educational world based on certification tests would be a better place in many ways, but the overarching benefit is that the line between college and noncollege competencies would be blurred. Hardly any jobs would still have the BA as a requirement for a shot at being hired. Opportunities would be wider and fairer, and the stigma of not having a BA would diminish.
Most important in an increasingly class-riven America: The demonstration of competency in business administration or European history would, appropriately, take on similarities to the demonstration of competency in cooking or welding. Our obsession with the BA has created a two-tiered entry to adulthood, anointing some for admission to the club and labeling the rest as second-best.
Here's the reality: Everyone in every occupation starts as an apprentice. Those who are good enough become journeymen. The best become master craftsmen. This is as true of business executives and history professors as of chefs and welders. Getting rid of the BA and replacing it with evidence of competence -- treating post-secondary education as apprenticeships for everyone -- is one way to help us to recognize that common bond.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, "Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality" (Crown Forum).
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FOR some years now, many elite American colleges have been downgrading the role of standardized tests like the SAT in deciding which applicants are admitted, or have even discarded their use altogether. While some institutions justify this move primarily as a way to enroll a more diverse group of students, an increasing number claim that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic success in college, especially compared with high school grade-point averages.
Are they correct? To get an answer, we need to first decide on a good measure of “academic success.” Given inconsistent grading standards for college courses, the most easily comparable metric is the graduation rate. Students’ families and society both want college entrants to graduate, and we all know that having a college degree translates into higher income. Further, graduation rates among students and institutions vary much more widely than do college grades, making them a clearer indicator of how students are faring.
So, here is the question: do SATs predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages? If we look merely at studies that statistically correlate SAT scores and high school grades with graduation rates, we find that, indeed, the two standards are roughly equivalent, meaning that the better that applicants do on either of these indicators the more likely they are to graduate from college. However, since students with high SAT scores tend to have better high school grade-point averages, this data doesn’t tell us which of the indicators — independent of the other — is a better predictor of college success.
Instead, we need to look at the two factors separately. And we can, thanks to the recent experience of the State University of New York, America’s largest comprehensive university system, where I was provost from 1997 to 2006. SUNY is blessed with many different types of campuses, mirroring most of the collegiate options (other than small elite private institutions) that characterize contemporary higher education. The university also collects a gold mine of student data, including statistics on pre-admission academic profiles and graduation rates.
In the 1990s, several SUNY campuses chose to raise their admissions standards by requiring higher SAT scores, while others opted to keep them unchanged. With respect to high school grades, all SUNY campuses consider applicants’ grade-point averages in decisions, but among the total pool of applicants across the state system, those averages have remained fairly consistent over time.
Thus, by comparing graduation rates at SUNY campuses that raised the SAT admissions bar with those that didn’t, we have a controlled experiment of sorts that can fairly conclusively tell us whether SAT scores were accurate predictors of whether a student would get a degree.
The short answer is: yes, they were. Consider the changes in admissions profiles and six-year graduation rates of the classes entering in 1997 and 2001 at SUNY’s 16 baccalaureate institutions. Among this group, nine campuses raised the emphasis they put on the SAT after 1997. This group included two prestigious research universities (Buffalo and Stony Brook) and seven smaller, regional colleges (Brockport, Cortland, New Paltz, Old Westbury, Oneonta, Potsdam and Purchase).
Among the campuses that raised selectivity, the average incoming student’s SAT score increased 4.5 percent (at Cortland) to 13.3 percent (Old Westbury), while high school grade-point averages increased only 2.4 percent to 3.7 percent — a gain in grades almost identical to that at campuses that did not raise their SAT cutoff.
Yet when we look at the graduation rates of those incoming classes, we find remarkable improvements at the increasingly selective campuses. These ranged from 10 percent (at Stony Brook, where the six-year graduation rate went to 59.2 percent from 53.8 percent) to 95 percent (at Old Westbury, which went to 35.9 percent from 18.4 percent).
Most revealingly, graduation rates actually declined at the seven SUNY campuses that did not raise their cutoffs and whose entering students’ SAT scores from 1997 to 2001 were stable or rose only modestly. Even at Binghamton, always the most selective of SUNY’s research universities, the graduation rate declined by 2.8 percent.
The change is even more striking if we compare experiences of three pairs of similar SUNY campuses that, from 1997 to 2001, took sharply divergent paths. First, Stony Brook and Albany, both research universities: over four years, at Stony Brook the average entering freshman SAT score went up 7.9 percent, to 1164, and the graduation rate rose by 10 percent; meanwhile, Albany’s average freshman SAT score increased by only 1.3 percent and its graduation rate fell by 2.7 percent, to 64 percent.
Next, Brockport and Oswego, two urban colleges with about 8,000 students each: Brockport’s average freshman SAT score rose 5.7 percent to 1080, and its graduation rate increased by 18.7 percent, to 58.5 percent. At the same time, Oswego’s freshman SAT average rose by only 3 percent and its graduation rate fell by 1.9 percent, to 52.6 percent.
Finally, Oneonta and Plattsburgh, two small liberal arts colleges with 5,000 students each: Oneonta’s freshman SAT score increased by 6.2 percent, to 1069, and its graduation rate rose 25.3 percent, to 58.9 percent. Plattsburgh’s average freshman SAT score increased by 1.3 percent and its graduation rate fell sharply, by 6.3 percent, to 55.1 percent.
Clearly, we find that among a group of SUNY campuses with very different missions and admissions standards, and at which the high school grade-point averages of enrolling freshmen improved by the same modest amount (about 2 percent to 4 percent), only those campuses whose incoming students’ SAT scores improved substantially saw gains in graduation rates.
Demeaning the SAT has become fashionable at campuses across the country. But college administrators who really seek to understand the value of the test based on good empirical evidence would do well to learn from the varied experiences of New York’s state university campuses.
Peter D. Salins is a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
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Carried over from another thread:
**If a school takes any state or federal money, then they had better be ready to meet some standards that demonstrate that the school isn't just teaching only how evil America, western civilization and any random heteosexual white male is.**
Who sets the standards? State? Federal? County? School district? Teachers? Parents?
How do we then police those standards? Is it not conceivable that this could lead to fluctuations in the quality/content of material being taught, depending on the political climate from year to year? What happens to parents who are not satisfied with the quality of education their child is receiving? What recourse do they have?
I honestly can't think of viable solutions to our current educational crisis. A reworking of the entire system might work, but where to begin?
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Ideally, there should be no federal funding for schools, as it is state/local level issue. How do we make the leap to higher education 2.0? That's a good question I don't have an implementation plan for.
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Right now most parents face a monopsony. Charter schools would end that without spending any more than we currently spend.
Agree with GM about getting the Feds out of education through high school.
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Charter schools are a start in the right direction.
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Michelle and Barack Obama have settled on a Washington, D.C., school for their daughters, and you will not be surprised to learn it is not a public institution. Malia, age 10, and seven-year-old Sasha will attend the Sidwell Friends School, the private academy that educates the children of much of Washington's elite.
APVice President-elect Joe Biden's grandchildren attend Sidwell -- as did Chelsea Clinton -- where tuition is close to $30,000 a year. The Obama girls have been students at the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where tuition runs above $21,000. "A number of great schools were considered," said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama. "In the end, the Obamas selected the school that was the best fit for what their daughters need right now."
Note the word "selected," as in made a choice. The Obamas are fortunate to have the means to send their daughters to private school, and no one begrudges them that choice given that Washington's public schools are among the worst in America.
Most D.C. parents would also love to be able to choose a better school for their child, but they lack the financial means to do so. The Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program each year offers up to $7,500 to some 1,900 kids to attend private schools, but Democrats in Congress want to kill it. Average family income for kids in the voucher program is about $22,000.
Mr. Obama says he opposes such vouchers, because "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." The example of his own children refutes that: The current system offers plenty of choice to kids "at the top" while abandoning those at the bottom.
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excerpt:
What comes through when Mr. Bush is asked about education is how radical his views are. He would toss out the traditional K-to-12 scheme in favor of a credit system, like colleges have.
"It's not based on seat time," he says. "It's whether you accomplished the task. Now we're like GM in its heyday of mass production. We don't have a flourishing education system that's customized. There's a whole world out there that didn't exist 10 years ago, which is online learning. We have the ability today to customize learning so we don't cast young people aside."
This is where Sweden comes in. "The idea that somehow Sweden would be the land of innovation, where private involvement in what was considered a government activity, is quite shocking to us Americans," Mr. Bush says. "But they're way ahead of us. They have a totally voucherized system. The kids come from Baghdad, Somalia -- this is in the tougher part of Stockholm -- and they're learning three languages by the time they finish. . . . there's no reason we can't have that except we're stuck in the old way."
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MSNBC.com
High school held cage fights, records show
Staff allegedly staged 'gladiator-style' brawls for troubled students
The Associated Press
updated 5:54 p.m. CT, Thurs., March. 19, 2009
DALLAS - The Dallas school system was rocked by allegations Thursday that staff members at an inner-city high school made students settle their differences by fighting bare-knuckle brawls inside a steel cage.
The principal and other employees at South Oak Cliff High knew about the cage fights and allowed the practice to continue, according to a 2008 report by school system investigators.
"More than anything, I'm in shock and disbelief — shocked that this could ever occur and shocked that it would be condoned by a professional administrator," said Jerome Garza, a member of the Dallas school board.
The report, first obtained by The Dallas Morning News, describes two instances of fighting in an equipment cage in a boys' locker room between 2003 and 2005. It was not clear from the report whether there were other fights.
Superintendent Michael Hinojosa told the newspaper that there were "some things that happened inside of a cage" and called the fights "unacceptable."
No criminal charges were ever filed, and there was no mention in the report of whether anyone required medical attention or whether any employees were disciplined. A district spokesman would not comment.
The allegations came to light during a grade-fixing investigation that eventually cost the high school its 2005 and 2006 state basketball titles. School officials were suspected of altering students' grades so that they could remain eligible to play for South Oak Cliff, a perennial basketball powerhouse in one of the poorer sections of the city.
In an interview with the Morning News, Donald Moten, who retired as principal last year, denied any fights were held.
"That's barbaric. You can't do that at a high school. You can't do that anywhere," Moten said. "Ain't nothing to comment on. It never did happen. I never put a stop to anything because it never happened."
'Gladiator-style entertainment'
In the report, a teacher was quoted as saying Moten told security personnel to put two fighting students "in the cage and let `em duke it out," according to the report.
The report said a hall monitor, Gary King, told investigators he witnessed the head of campus security and an assistant basketball coach place two students in the cage to fight.
Another hall monitor, Reno Savala, told investigators he came upon two students fighting in the cage "bare-fisted with no head or eye protection." Savala said the assistant coach was watching the fight and broke it up when Savala told him to.
"It was gladiator-style entertainment for the staff," Frank Hammond, a fired counselor who has filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against the district, told the newspaper. "They were taking these boys downstairs to fight. And it was sanctioned by the principal and security."
Hammond did not actually witness any of the fights, according to the report.
Garza, the school board member, said the board should look into whether criminal charges should be filed. He expressed frustration that the allegations were not brought to the board's attention earlier.
"If, in fact, it bears out that this did occur, clearly the administration had a responsibility to inform the board in the proper manner and in a timely fashion," he said.
Dallas police said they have no record of any investigation by the department. The district attorney's office would not comment.
The allegations come about 10 days after law enforcement authorities reported that careworkers at a Corpus Christi institution forced mentally disabled residents to fight each other and recorded the brawls for their entertainment.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29774152/?gt1=43001
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2009 MSNBC.com
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D.C. Vouchers: Better Results at a QUARTER the Cost
Posted by Andrew J. Coulson
The latest federal study of the D.C. voucher program finds that voucher students have pulled significantly ahead of their public school peers in reading and perform at least as well as public school students in math. It also reports that the average tuition at the voucher schools is $6,620. That is ONE QUARTER what the District of Columbia spends per pupil on education ($26,555), according to the District’s own fiscal year 2009 budget.
Better results at a quarter the cost. And Democrats in Congress have sunset its funding and are trying to kill it. Shame on them.
If President Obama believes his own rhetoric on the need for greater efficiency in government education spending and for improved educational opportunities, he should work with the members of his own party to continue and grow this program.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/04/03/dc-vouchers-better-results-at-a-quarter-the-cost/
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April 20, 2009
How Members of the 111th Congress Practice Private School Choice
by Lindsey Burke
Backgrounder #2257
Policies that give parents the ability to exercise private-school choice continue to proliferate across the country. In 2009, 14 states and Washington, D.C., are offering school voucher or education tax-credit programs that help parents send their children to private schools. During the 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions, 44 states introduced school-choice legislation.[1] In 2008, private-school-choice policies were enacted or expanded in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Utah[2]--made possible by increasing bipartisan support for school choice.[3]
On Capitol Hill, however, progress in expanding parental choice in education remains slow. Recent Congresses have not implemented policies to expand private-school choice. In 2009, the 111th Congress has already approved legislative action that threatens to phase out the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), a federal initiative that currently helps 1,700 disadvantaged children attend private schools in the nation's capital.
Congress's Own School Choices
At the same time, many Members of Congress who oppose private-school-choice policies for their fellow citizens exercise school choice in their own lives. Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), the chief architect of the language that threatens to end the OSP, for instance, sends his children to private school[4] and attended private school himself.[5]
Since 2000, The Heritage Foundation has surveyed Members of Congress to determine whether they had exercised private-school choice by ever sending a child to private school. In 2009, this survey was updated for the new Congress. This survey included a new element--whether members themselves had ever attended private school. The new survey revealed that 38 percent of Members of the 111th Congress sent a child to private school at one time. (See Appendix Table A-1.) Of these respondents,
44 percent of Senators and 36 percent of Representatives had at one time sent their children to private school;
23 percent of House Education and Labor Committee Members and nearly 40 percent of Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Members have ever sent their children to private school;
38 percent of House Appropriations Committee Members and 35 percent of Senate Finance Committee Members have ever sent their children to private school; and
35 percent of Congressional Black Caucus Members and 31 percent of Congressional HispanicCaucus Members exercised private-school choice.[6](See Chart 1.)
The survey also showed that 20 percent of Members had attended private school themselves. (See Appendix Table A-2.) Among average citizens, approximately 11 percent of American students are enrolled in private schools.[7] These survey results suggest that Members of Congress are significantly more likely than the general public to choose private schools for their own children and to have attended private schools themselves.
Private-school choice is a popular practice among both congressional Republicans and Democrats. Thirty-eight percent of House Republicans and 34 percent of House Democrats have ever sent their children to private school. In the Senate, 53 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of Democrats have exercised private-school choice for their children. Thirty five percent of Congressional Black Caucus Members have sent a child to private school. Only 6 percent of black students overall attend private school.[8]
Members' Educational Backgrounds
In 2009, Heritage also surveyed private-school attendance by the Members of Congress themselves. Many were beneficiaries of a private secondary education. Seventeen percent of responding Senators and 20 percent of responding Representatives attended private high schools. Overall, 20 percent of Members of Congress attended private school, nearly twice the rate of the American public. Specifically, 20 percent of responding Senate Democrats attended private school, as did 13 percent of Senate Republicans. Similarly, 21 percent of House Democrats attended private high school along with 20 percent of House Republicans.
The 2009 study examined two facets of school choice: 1) whether Members of Congress practiced private-school choice for their children, and 2) whether they were themselves beneficiaries of a private secondary education. Some Members attended private school and also chose that option for their children. Of respondents who themselves went to private school and had children, 64 percent chose to send a child to private school.
Policy Implications
The 111th Congress will have the opportunity to enact policies that give parents greater ability to choose the best school for their children. Specifically, Congress could reform major programs like No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to give states the option of using federal funding to give parents vouchers to send their children to a private school of their choice. In addition, Congress could support private-school choice by expanding education savings accounts and reforming other social programs to allow greater parental direction.
One opportunity to maintain and expand private-school choice would be by reauthorizing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. The D.C. School Choice Incentive Act of 2003 provided additional funding for public and charter schools in Washington, D.C. The act also created the OSP, the first federally funded school voucher program in the country. Through the OSP, low-income children are awarded tuition scholarships worth up to $7,500 to attend private schools. In the current 2008-2009 school year, the program is helping more than 1,700 children attend a private school of their parents' choice.
Recent legislative activity in Congress is threatening the future of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. In March, President Obama signed into law the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 (H.R. 1105), which requires reauthorization by Congress as well as authorization by the D.C. City Council in order for the OSP to continue.[9] So, without a reauthorization vote by Congress, children would no longer be able to receive scholarships after the 2009-2010 school year, ending the successful program. As the omnibus legislation was considered by the Senate, Senator John Ensign (R-NV) offered an amendment that would have struck the reauthorization requirement. The amendment was voted down in the Senate 39-58.[10] According to the Heritage Foundation's survey of Congress, Senator Ensign's amendment would have been approved if Members who exercised school choice for their own children had voted in favor of the amendment. Congress is expected to consider reauthorization this spring.
Why Congress Should Support Private School Choice
Across the country, state and local policymakers are increasingly enacting private-school-choice programs. Eleven states and the District of Columbia now offer voucher programs, and seven states offer scholarship tax credits.[11] Private-school scholarship programs benefited approximately 171,000 children in 2008--a growth of 89 percent since 2004.[12] Recent experience suggests that school-choice policies are gaining momentum in state legislatures across the country. From 2007 to 2008, 44 states introduced school-choice legislation, and in 2008, both Georgia and Louisiana enacted school-choice measures.[13] In Georgia, a new scholarship tax credit encourages businesses and individuals to make donations to non-profit groups that award private-school scholarships. In Louisiana, a school voucher program is helping low-income children in New Orleans attend private schools.[14]
Parental Demand for School-Choice Programs. Many parents recognize the benefits of being able to choose a school that best fits their child's academic needs, and school-choice programs are popular as a result. In the nation's capital, there were four applicants for each available slot in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program since the program began in 2004; nearly 20,000 students participated in Milwaukee's voucher program in 2008; and in Florida, more than 19,000 students with disabilities are currently attending private schools of their parents' choice through McKay Scholarships, which provide vouchers to attend any public or private school in the state.[15] Members of Congress also recognize the positive benefits of school choice, evidenced by the fact that they have sent their own children to private schools at a rate far exceeding that of general public enrollment in private school.
Improved Family Satisfaction. Parents who are able to exercise school choice for their children report being more satisfied with their children's school and education than parents whose children attend an assigned public school.[16] Parents of children attending a chosen public school--in districts offering public-school choice or with public charter schools--or private school are also more satisfied with the teachers, academic standards, and discipline, compared to parents of children in an assigned public school.[17] In Washington, D.C., the OSP has produced similar results. Parents of children receiving scholarships report increased satisfaction with their children's school and overall academic experience. Parents reported positive changes in their children's outlook on learning, improved homework habits, and the ability to make a choice in their children's education as the reasons for their high levels of satisfaction.[18] Parents of children enrolled in school-choice programs are satisfied with their experiences and feel that their children are safer in school and excel academically.[19]
Improved Academic Achievement. School choice improves student learning.[20] Studies of school-voucher programs have shown that children benefit academically from the opportunity to attend a private school.[21] Students enrolled in the popular D.C. OSPimproved academically and achieved higher reading levels than students who had not been awarded a voucher.[22]
Encouraging Public School Improvement. School choice boosts improvement in public schools through competition. Research has shown that competition spurred by school choice has had a positive effect on public education in Arizona, Michigan, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.[23] School choice programs demonstrate that parents want more from public schools, improving the overall effectiveness of public education.[24] When families are provided with a choice in their children's education, public schools are pushed to offer a product that meets their needs and are no longer able to stay in business by virtue of existing as the only educational game in town.
Supporting Private School Choice in the 111th Congress
Members of Congress have the opportunity to protect and expand private-school choice during the 111th Congress. To begin, Members can--and should--support the reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program to continue to give low-income families in the nation's capital the power to choose a safe and effective school for their children. If all of the Members of Congress who either attended private school or chose a private school for their own children support the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, its reauthorization will be assured.
Average citizens and Members of Congress alike have shown that they value the educational opportunities that school choice provides, and that they recognize the importance of a safe and effective education for their children. This is especially true for Members of Congress, many of whom learned this lesson early when they enjoyed their own private education. The 111th Congress has embraced school choice in practice--with 44 percent of the Senate and 36 percent of the House having ever sent their children to private school. Furthermore, 21 percent of Senators and 20 percent of Representatives attended private high schools themselves.
While Members of the 111th Congress have embraced school choice for their own families, they should also support policies that give other families the opportunity to choose their children's schools. All families should have the opportunity to send their children to a school that is safe and offers a quality education.
Lindsey Burke is a Research Assistant in the Domestic Policy Studies Department at The Heritage Foundation. Gregory Markle and Leigh Sethman, Heritage Foundation interns, contributed to this paper.
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Appendix
Methodology
As of April 1, 2009, there were 531 filled congressional seats. Due to four pending races at the time of survey collection, Congress did not comprise a full 535 members. In the Senate, 58 Democrats and 41 Republicans comprised the 99 elected members at the time of this survey. One disputed race in Minnesota between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman was unresolved. In the House, 254 Republicans and 178 Democrats comprised the 432 elected members. Three seats were vacated by Presidential appointments, and had yet to be filled at the time of publication. The seats of President Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Kristen Gillibrand, who resigned from the House to fill the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton, and Hilda Solis, who was appointed as Secretary of Labor, remain unfilled and account for the three-Member discrepancy in the House.
In addition, there are currently two Independents in Congress--Senator Joseph Lieberman (CT) and Senator Bernie Sanders (VT). Both Senators caucus with Democrats, so for the purposes of this survey, they are counted as Democrats.
The Heritage Foundation conducted two separate surveys to determine how Members of Congress practice private-school choice for their children and to determine the private-school-choice history of the Members themselves. For both surveys, Members were informed that their names and identifying characteristics would remain anonymous.
Methodology relating to how Members of Congress practiced school choice for their children. Information on where Members of Congress sent their children to school was gleaned from previous iterations of the Heritage survey, when available, and from calls placed to the offices of new and returning Members of the 111th Congress. Prior responses were combined with new information to obtain the highest response rate possible. To obtain information on whether Members of Congress sent their children to public or private school, three methods were employed in the 2009 survey: 1) placing calls and e-mail inquiries directly to congressional offices, 2) conducting open-source searches on the Internet, and 3) using information from previous Heritage surveys.
Members were specifically contacted if they were part of the freshman class of the 111th Congress; had provided a "no" answer in previous versions of the Heritage survey, meaning they had not yet sent a child to private school; or had in previous versions of the survey indicated that their children were not yet of school age (in those cases, Heritage later contacted the Members again). After these categories of Members were contacted by phone, open-source searches were conducted in order to obtain any missing information. Open-source searches included Member biographies, Members' congressional Web sites, campaign Web sites, and newspaper articles.
Between February 13 and March 13, 2009, The Heritage Foundation contacted the staff of new Members of the 111th Congress and existing Members from whom a previous survey response had not been obtained. Staff were asked whether the Member had children and, if so, whether those children had at any point in their elementary and secondary education attended private school. Members were classified as having exercised private-school choice if they had sent at least one child to private school at any point in time. Using this methodology, which included calls and e-mails placed to congressional offices, information from previous versions of the Heritage survey, and information gleaned from open-source searches, the response rate for the survey was 87 percent for Senators, and 81 percent for Representatives, with an overall response rate of 82 percent for the entire Congress. This response rate was higher than the 2007 survey response rate of 72 percent for Senators and 69 percent for Representatives.[25]
Methodology concerning where Members themselves attended secondary school. The private-school background of the Members themselves was obtained primarily through open-source searches, which included Member biographies, Members' congressional Web sites, campaign Web sites, and newspaper articles, in combination with calls and e-mails to congressional offices. Members whose information was unavailable publicly were contacted by phone or e-mail and asked if they had attended a public or private secondary school.
Not every Member of Congress responded to the Heritage survey, and for some Members there was no public information. In total, information was available for 416 of 531 Members of Congress, representing 78 percent of Congress.
[1]"School Choice Yearbook 2008-09," Alliance for School Choice, 2009, at http://www.allianceforschoolchoice.org/UploadedFiles/ResearchResources
/Yearbook_02062009_finalWEB.pdf (March 30, 2009).
[2]Ibid.
[3]In Arizona, an expansion of the corporate tax credit was enacted under a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature; in Louisiana, a voucher program for students in New Orleans was enacted under a Republican governor and a Democratic legislature; and, in Pennsylvania, an expansion of the earned income tax credit was made possible under a Democratic governor, a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate. From "School Choice Yearbook 2008-09."
[4]Glenn Thrush, "Ensign Gets Personal with Durbin," Politico, March 10, 2009, at http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0309/Ensign_gets
_personal_with_Durbin_.html (March 31, 2009).
[5]"Biography," U.S. Senator Richard J. Durbin, at http://durbin.senate.gov/aboutrjd.cfm(March 31, 2009).
[6]For a full breakdown of survey statistics, see the methodology in the Appendix.
[7]Evan Feinberg, "How Members of Congress Practice Private School Choice," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2066, September 4, 2007, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/bg2066.cfm.
[8]"Outlook," Council for American Private Education, December 2001, at http://www.capenet.org/Outlook/Out12-01.html(March 31, 2009).
[9]Text of H.R. 1105, Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009, at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-1105(March 31, 2009).
[10]"S.Amdt. 615: To strike the restrictions on the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program," at http://www.govtrack.us/
congress/amendment.xpd?session=111&amdt=s615(March 31, 2009)
[11]"School Choice Yearbook 2008-09."
[12]Ibid.
[13]Ibid.
[14]Ibid.
[15]Ibid.
[16]Dan Lips, Jennifer Marshall, and Lindsey Burke, "A Parent's Guide to Education Reform," The Heritage Foundation, 2008, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/upload/EducationReform-web.pdf.
[17]Ibid.
[18]Lindsey Burke, "D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program: Study Supports Expansion," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 2297, February 18, 2009, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/wm2297.cfm.
[19]Thomas Stewart et al., "Family Reflections on the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program," School Choice Demonstration Project, University of Arkansas, January 2009, at http://www.uaedreform.org
/SCDP/DC_Research/2009_Final.pdf(March 31, 2009).
[20]Lips, Marshall, and Burke, "A Parent's Guide to Education Reform."
[21]Patrick J. Wolf, "School Voucher Programs: What the Research Says About Parental School Choice," Brigham Young University Law Review, No. 2 (2008).
[22]Shanea Watkins, "Safer Kids, Better Test Scores: The D.C. Voucher Program Works," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 1965, June 20, 2008, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/wm1965.cfm.
[23]Lips, Marshall, and Burke, "A Parent's Guide to Education Reform."
[24]Dan Lips, "School Choice: Policy Developments and National Participation Estimates in 2007-2008," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2102, January 31, 2008, at http://www.heritage.org/Research
/Education/bg2102.cfm.
[25]Feinberg, "How Members of Congress Practice Private School Choice."
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/bg2257.cfm
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Here's a quiz: Which of the following rejected more than 30,000 of the nation's top college seniors this month and put hundreds more on a waitlist? a) Harvard Law School; b) Goldman Sachs; or c) Teach for America.
Getty Images
Teach for America CEO Wendy Kopp.
If you've spent time on university campuses lately, you probably know the answer. Teach for America -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. More than 11% of Ivy League seniors applied, including 35% of African-American seniors at Harvard. Teach for America has been gaining applicants since it was founded in 1990, but its popularity has exploded this year amid a tight job market.
So poor urban and rural school districts must be rejoicing, right? Hardly. Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide, or a little more than one in 10 of this year's applicants. Districts place a cap on the number of Teach for America teachers they will accept, typically between 10% and 30% of new hires. In the Washington area, that number is about 25% to 30%, but in Chicago, former home of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, it is an embarrassing 10%.
This is a tragic lost opportunity. Teach for America picks up the $20,000 tab for the recruitment and training of each teacher, which saves public money. More important, the program feeds high-energy, high-IQ talent into a teaching profession that desperately needs it. Unions claim the recent grads lack the proper experience and commitment to a teaching career. But the Urban Institute has studied the program and found that "TFA status more than offsets any experience effects. Disadvantaged secondary students would be better off with TFA teachers, especially in math and science, than with fully licensed in-field teachers with three or more years of experience."
It's true that only 10% of Teach for America applicants say they would have gone into education through another route, but two-thirds stay in the field after their two years. One program benefit is that its participants don't have to pass the dreadful "education" courses that have nothing to do with what they'll be teaching. Those courses are loved by unions as a credentialing barrier that makes it harder to get into teaching.
Some districts may be wising up. Mississippi's education superintendent has asked Teach for America to double the size of its 250-member corps in the poor Delta region and is encouraging local superintendents to raise hiring caps. Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has also sharply increased the percentage of corps members among its new teachers, to 250.
But why have any caps? Teach for America young people should be able to compete on equal terms with any other new teaching applicant. The fact that they can't is another example of how unions and the education establishment put tenure and power above student achievement.
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The Harlem Miracle
DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 7, 2009
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.
That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, but weren’t selected.
They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.
Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.
Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying — literally and figuratively.”
These results are powerful evidence in a long-running debate. Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue that schools alone can’t produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on broader issues like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued that school-based approaches can produce big results. The Harlem Children’s Zone results suggest the reformers are right. The Promise Academy does provide health and psychological services, but it helps kids who aren’t even involved in the other programs the organization offers.
To my mind, the results also vindicate an emerging model for low-income students. Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.
To understand the culture in these schools, I’d recommend “Whatever It Takes,” a gripping account of Harlem Children’s Zone by my Times colleague Paul Tough, and “Sweating the Small Stuff,” a superb survey of these sorts of schools by David Whitman.
Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.
They also smash the normal bureaucratic strictures that bind leaders in regular schools. Promise Academy went through a tumultuous period as Canada searched for the right teachers. Nearly half of the teachers did not return for the 2005-2006 school year. A third didn’t return for the 2006-2007 year. Assessments are rigorous. Standardized tests are woven into the fabric of school life.
The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours?
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I use to make failed restaurants work. Nowadays I make failed civil service institutions work. This guy makes failed schools work. I'd sign up with him in a heartbeat.
The Instigator
By Douglas McGray, New America Foundation
The New Yorker | May 10, 2009
[Education Secretary] Duncan revealed that he was interested in committing several billion dollars of the education stimulus package to a Locke-style takeover and transformation of the lowest-performing one per cent of schools across the country. . . "You seem to have cracked the code," Duncan told Barr.
Steve Barr stood in the breezeway at Alain Leroy Locke High School, at the edge of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, on a February morning. He's more than six feet tall, with white-gray hair that's perpetually unkempt, and the bulk of an ex-jock. Beside him was Ramon Cortines--neat, in a trim suit--the Los Angeles Unified School District's new superintendent. Cortines had to be thinking about last May, when, as a senior deputy superintendent, he had visited under very different circumstances. That was when a tangle between two rival cliques near an outdoor vending machine turned into a fight that spread to every corner of the schoolyard. Police sent more than a dozen squad cars and surged across the campus in riot gear, as teachers grabbed kids on the margins and whisked them into locked classrooms.
The school's test scores had been among the worst in the state. In recent years, seventy-five per cent of incoming freshmen had dropped out. Only about three per cent graduated with enough credits to apply to a California state university. Two years ago, Barr had asked L.A.U.S.D. to give his charter-school-management organization, Green Dot Public Schools, control of Locke, and let him help the district turn it around. When the district refused, Green Dot became the first charter group in the country to seize a high school in a hostile takeover. ("He's a revolutionary," Nelson Smith, the president and C.E.O. of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said.) Locke reopened in September, four months after the riot, as a half-dozen Green Dot schools.
"Last year, there was graffiti everywhere," Barr said. "You'd see kids everywhere--they'd be out here gambling. You'd smell weed." He recalled hearing movies playing in classroom after classroom: "People called it ghetto cineplex." Barr and Cortines walked to the quad, where the riot had started. The cracked pavement had been replaced by a lawn of thick green grass, lined with newly planted olive trees.
"It's night and day," Cortines said.
In the past decade, Barr has opened seventeen charter high schools--small, locally managed institutions that aim for a high degree of teacher autonomy and parent involvement--in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, as well as one in the Bronx. His charter-school group is now California's largest, by enrollment, and one of its most successful. Green Dot schools take kids who, in most cases, test far below grade level and send nearly eighty per cent of them to college. (Only forty-seven per cent of L.A.U.S.D. students graduate with a high-school diploma.) As of 2006, Green Dot's standardized-test scores were almost twenty per cent higher than L.A. Unified's average, and, adjusting for student demographics, the state Department of Education grades their performance a nine on a scale of one to ten; L.A.U.S.D. schools rate only a five.
Barr himself has a colorful reputation. He drives a decommissioned police car, a Crown Victoria with floodlights, which he bought from a friend, the former Fox executive who launched the network's reality show "Cops." ("It's faster than anything on the road," he told me, and when he wants to change lanes "people move out of the way.") He met his wife, an Alaskan radio reporter twenty years his junior, at a Burning Man festival seven years ago, and married her in Las Vegas three weeks later. And this is how he talks about working with what is arguably the country's most troubled big-city school system: "You ever see that movie 'Man on Fire,' with Denzel Washington? There's a scene in the movie where the police chief of Mexico City gets kidnapped by Denzel Washington. He wakes up, he's on the hood of his car under the underpass, in his boxers, his hands tied. Denzel Washington starts asking him questions, he's not getting the answers he wants, so he walks away from him, and leaves a bomb stuck up his ass." Barr laughed. "I don't want to blow up L.A.U.S.D.'s ass. But what will it take to get this system to serve who they need to serve? It's going to take that kind of aggressiveness."
Green Dot's ascent stems mostly from Barr's skill as an instigator and an organizer. Outrageous rhetoric is a big part of that, and it's not uncalculated. "It takes a certain amount of panache to call the head of the union a pig fucker," Ted Mitchell, the president of the California State Board of Education, said. (Those weren't Barr's words exactly.) "Steve has this 'Oh, shucks, you know me--I can't control my mouth' persona. It allows him to get away with murder." But, Mitchell points out, "he's a public curmudgeon and a private negotiator." And he has built Green Dot to be a political force unlike anything else in the world of education. For instance, Barr runs the only large charter organization in the country that has embraced unionized teachers and a collectively bargained contract--an unnecessary hassle, if his aim was to run a few schools, but a source of leverage for Green Dot's main purpose, which is to push for citywide change. "I don't see how you tip a system with a hundred per cent unionized labor without unionized labor," he said.
First period at Locke was ending. Kids swarmed the halls, shoving and laughing and posturing and flirting for every last second of their five minutes of freedom. Barr was quiet with Cortines, almost solicitous. Cortines, for his part, seemed eager for peace. After years of failed attempts to fix Locke, nobody could ignore how much Green Dot had accomplished in a matter of months.
Another fight between Barr and L.A.U.S.D. seemed inevitable, though. After Cortines left, Barr said, "Ray and I have had conversations about Fremont High School," another large troubled school, in South Los Angeles. But Cortines, he knew, was hesitant. "I've been clear that we can talk," Cortines told me later. "I can't necessarily deliver. I still think we have to look at the evidence from Locke." Data like test scores, graduation rates, and student retention won't be available until later this year.
Barr doesn't want to hear it. "Nobody can tell me that a small, autonomous, well-funded school, where the parents are involved, where accountability is put on that staff, is not the right way to go," he said. "We get along really well, but I get fucking impatient."
Cortines didn't know that Barr was already planning his next assault on the district, one he described to me as "Armageddon." He planned to target five to ten of the largest, worst-performing schools in Los Angeles, and then submit a hundred charters for new schools to be clustered around them. Then he would give the district a choice: it could either dissolve most of the central bureaucracy, and turn over hiring, firing, and spending decisions to neighborhood schools, or surrender leadership of the schools to Green Dot. If the district refused both options, Barr would open his new schools and begin stealing thousands of students, and the millions of dollars in funding that follow them. "If I take ten Locke High Schools, they can't survive," he said.
But, just weeks after Cortines's visit to Locke, Barr got a call from the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. He flew to Washington, D.C., at the end of March, for what he expected to be a social visit. At the meeting, Duncan revealed that he was interested in committing several billion dollars of the education stimulus package to a Locke-style takeover and transformation of the lowest-performing one per cent of schools across the country, at least four thousand of them, in the next several years. The Department of Education would favor districts that agreed to partner with an outside group, like Green Dot. "You seem to have cracked the code," Duncan told Barr.
Duncan was interested in the fact that Barr was targeting high schools, not elementary or middle schools. "The toughest work in urban education today is what you do with large failing high schools," Duncan told me. These schools get less study and less attention from charter groups and education reformers, most of whom feel that ninth grade is too late to begin saving kids. "Teach for America, NewSchools Venture Fund, the Broad Foundation--all these folks are doing extraordinary work in public education," Duncan said. "Nobody national is turning around large failing high schools."
When Barr got back to Los Angeles, he told me, "We're being asked, 'Could you guys do five schools in L.A. next year? Could you expand beyond L.A.?' If you'd asked a month ago, 'What about Green Dot America?,' I would have said, 'No way.' But if this President wants to get after it I'm going to reconsider."
***
Barr opened his first school in August of 2000, at the edge of Lennox, a poor, mostly Spanish-speaking community near Los Angeles International Airport, under a landing path. The local high school, Hawthorne, was a few miles away. "Where the Beach Boys went," Barr said. "Now it's a dropout factory."
He announced plans for the school at a middle-school gymnasium crowded with families. "I told the parents, 'When you come to this school, seven thousand dollars follows you' "--the rough sum that California paid a charter school to educate a child. " 'That's your money. I will treat that like tuition.' " He promised them a school that was safe, local, and accountable. He said he'd need their help. And he gave everyone his home phone number and said that they could call him anytime. By the end of the night, he had a hundred and forty kids committed to his ninth-grade class. Suddenly, he said, "I started shaking."
"I'm standing in front of these parents, who have no money--all they have is their kids," he recalled. "And they're trusting me. I didn't have a facility yet, and I didn't have a staff. It was February, and school was opening in August. I walked out to the parking lot and threw up."
Opening a school was an unlikely move for Barr. He had done fundraising for California politicians, helped organize the Olympic-torch relay before the 1984 Summer Games, and spent three years as an on-air television reporter. He co-founded Rock the Vote, and worked on Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign. But he'd never thought much about education. In fact, he'd been a mediocre student.
Barr was born in 1959, just south of San Francisco, and lived with his mother in Monterey, near the military base, where she worked as a dental assistant and a cocktail waitress. When he was six, he and his younger brother spent a year in foster care. Later, they made their home in a trailer in Missouri, before moving back to California.
In school, Barr was a good athlete, and popular. Every teacher knew his name. His brother, Mike, was quiet and overweight. Mike tried playing in the band for a while. ("Why do you give the chubby kid a tuba?" Barr asked, sighing. "Do you know how hilarious it is seeing a chubby kid try to get on the bus with a tuba?") But soon Mike got lost in their large high school. Steve graduated, and went on to the University of California at Santa Barbara. Mike dropped out, and never really settled into an adult life. Eventually, he was in a motorcycle accident. After a series of surgeries, he lost his leg. He won a settlement, but that attracted the wrong friends. "You take a poor kid who has problems and give him a lot of money . . ." Barr said. When Barr was thirty-two, Mike died of a drug overdose. His mother died shortly afterward, and Barr began to drift.
He discovered charter schools by accident. When President Clinton went to San Carlos to visit California's first charter school, Barr tagged along, and encountered the school's founder, Don Shalvey, and a Silicon Valley businessman, Reed Hastings, who had just founded Netflix. Shalvey and Hastings were about to draw up a ballot initiative that would increase the number of charter schools in California. Barr decided to help. "He came out of nowhere," Hastings said. And he brought a very different approach. He persuaded them, for instance, to try to make peace with the California Teachers Association. "He helped us realize we were perhaps overly simplistic in demonizing the union as the enemy," Hastings said. "It turned out C.T.A. was open to a stronger charter law."
As Barr worked on the campaign, he started to think about his own years in school, and his brother's. High school, he decided, was the point where their lives diverged. When the charter-school measure passed, he broke up with his girlfriend, moved out of their apartment, gave up his convertible, and rented a decrepit place in Venice, sight unseen. He moved in on Christmas morning, to a room strewn with needles, vomit, and feces. "I'm thirty-nine, I'm alone," he said. "Merry fucking Christmas." He tied his chocolate Lab, Jerry Brown, in the corner, put on the Harry Belafonte album his mother used to play every Saturday morning, when they did chores together, and scrubbed the apartment.
A year and a half later, he opened Animo Leadership Charter High School, near Lennox. (He said that in Spanish animo can mean "courage" or "valor," but he prefers a Mexican surfing buddy's translation: "Get off your ass.") He hired five of his seven teachers straight out of college and rented classrooms at a night school. When one of the teachers quit in the first couple of weeks, he replaced her with his office manager. Barr worked mostly without pay for the next few years, spending the last of his savings and his brother's settlement, and doing such damage to his finances that Costco revoked his membership. He pitched in a lot himself. "Maybe the most fun I had was going to test-drive school buses," he said.
And he starting a surfing club. "There were a handful of kids at the school who were really fricking cool but weren't being reached somehow," he said. "There was a kid named Ricky. He was smart, charismatic. All the girls loved this guy. There was another girl named Stephanie, who I think had a crush on Ricky." They agreed to find twenty-five kids who would show up before school, at 6 A.M.
"We were driving to the South Bay, Manhattan Beach. It was real quiet," Barr recalled. "Halfway out there, one of the kids said, 'Mr. Barr, do you have to know how to swim to surf?' " Half the kids couldn't. Barr put his head in his hands and laughed.
"The Manhattan Beach school system, they actually have surfing in gym class, so you have all these blond-haired, blue-eyed kids in the water," Barr continued. "And here come these kids from Lennox. The Lennox surf team." He mimicked a slow, tough walk. "Their gear's a little off, you know, they're all Latino, and a couple of black kids. I remember them getting triple takes."
At the end of its first chaotic year, Barr's school beat Hawthorne High School in every measurable outcome. "When the scores come out, I have to call Shalvey"--Barr's charter-school mentor--"and ask him, 'Are they good?' " Barr said. " 'Cause I don't fucking know. I don't know how to read test scores." The night school eventually moved, and Animo Leadership took over the entire campus. Last year, U.S. News & World Report ranked it among the top hundred public high schools in the country.
***
A pair of skinny Latino boys with shoulder-length hair cruised down Locke's breezeway on their skateboards. Zeus Cubias, an assistant principal, turned and glared. It was a few minutes after the last bell, and the two kids had swapped their uniform polos for black band T-shirts.
"What did I tell you? Don't act the fool," Cubias said sternly, as the boys picked up their skateboards. He turned to the taller boy. "Especially when you're wearing a Guns N' Roses shirt. Don't embarrass the shirt." The boy laughed. "Next time, I'm taking boards," Cubias said.
Cubias is compact and athletic, with floppy hair, a tidy beard, and three earrings. "I'd be doing the same thing when I was a kid," he admitted. He grew up just a few blocks down the street, and graduated from Locke, class of '92. He showed me his freshman yearbook. "Here's the Jheri Curl mullet," he said, flipping through the faces. "Ghetto business in the front, ghetto party in the back. And here's me, sporting my own mullet."
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The high school opened in 1967, two years after the Watts riots. Named for Alain Leroy Locke, the country's first African-American Rhodes Scholar, it was set on a twenty-six-acre plot near the edge of the neighborhood, and was meant to be a symbol of rebirth. But by the time Cubias was a freshman, jobs and middle-class families had disappeared; the school, like the neighborhood, became infamous. Security guards with metal-detecting wands would interrupt class to spot-check boys.
As a freshman, Cubias landed in remedial and English as a Second Language classes. "I had a Spanish name," he said. Most Latinos in Watts were recent immigrants, and there were so many kids, and so few counsellors, that it was hard to keep everyone straight. Locke had grown huge. Los Angeles went more than thirty years without building a new high school, even as the city's population swelled; schools like Locke, meant for about fifteen hundred kids, doubled their enrollment, packing classrooms and erecting cheap, prefabricated units in their parking lots. Cubias ditched class a lot and got bad grades. But a substitute covering his English class thought he seemed out of place and recommended him for an honors class. When he showed up the first day, he recalled, he met a girl with black hair and ojos tapatíos--almond-shaped eyes--who carried a novel wherever she went. He was smitten. "I had heard about kids who read books, but they were, like, mythical," Cubias said, laughing. He asked a counsellor to give him the same class schedule as the girl, and in that instant he passed from one world to another. She took all honors classes, on her way to graduating as valedictorian.
"These poor high schools, you have an Advanced Placement track, and the teachers only believe in triage, so they put the kids who have a chance in that track," Barr explained. "It's built on the back of the other three tracks."
Cubias ended up scoring a 5 on his A.P. calculus exam, which no Locke student had ever done before, and went to the University of California at Santa Barbara. Even before he left Locke, he knew that he wanted to come back and teach there. "Now, I'm bilingual, and a math teacher, with a University of California certification," Cubias said. "In this district, I'm gold." But when he first went downtown to apply for a teaching position and said that he wanted a job at Locke he was told, "You don't have to teach there. You're qualified to teach at this place, or this place, or this place."
The interviewer thought she was doing him a favor. "These schools like Locke and Fremont and Jordan, they just get the leftovers," Cubias said. Locke would have substitutes covering unfilled teaching positions well into the school year. New hires were often uninspiring and unprepared. "Damn the day the University of Phoenix started offering teaching credentials," he added.
In the spring of 2007, a rumor spread through the school. Teachers and parents were summoned to a community meeting at the middle school down the street. The room was packed. Cubias took a seat near the front. The superintendent at the time got up to speak. He said that the district was interested in handing over leadership of Locke High School to a charter organization, Green Dot.
For Cubias, this was worse than neglect--to be abandoned by the district and relegated to some white guy he'd never met. "We'll see about that," he said.
***
The sudden announcement stunned United Teachers Los Angeles, the neighborhood, and Locke's staff, even the principal. Almost immediately, the superintendent began shying away from the deal. Barr had learned by now to have a backup plan ready. If the district refused to give him Locke, he'd just open a bunch of Green Dot schools in Watts and take the kids.
Green Dot had become more professional since Barr's early days at Animo Leadership. But it had also become more radical. When case-study writers from Harvard Business School asked Barr to describe the inspiration behind Green Dot's model, he didn't cite other schools; he named the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He hired an opposition researcher to investigate Green Dot and see what enemies might use against him. He started a citywide group called the Los Angeles Parents Union, an activist alternative to the Parent-Teacher Association, in the hope of mobilizing foot soldiers for Green Dot's escalating war against the district. He even put a school-board member on his payroll--"a mole," Barr said--to report back on closed meetings. Judged purely on test scores, or scholastic reputation, another group, Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, is probably the premier charter-school-management organization in Los Angeles. "They're brilliant about academics," Barr said. But, as a political organization that happens to run great schools, Green Dot is unique.
As Barr became more political, he began to worry about the limits of the charter movement. "There's this cult around charter schools," Barr said. "They're not even close to being the answer." Opening a new school like Animo Leadership takes an enormous amount of effort and money. Barr has to find a big building in the right neighborhood, and convert it into classrooms, and fill it with new teachers and administrators, and sell the idea to parents and community leaders. This is all before any public dollars arrive. Four years after Barr started Animo Leadership, he had a nice school of about five hundred students. But that barely registered in a district with around seven hundred thousand. Barr began to covet district schools with thousands of students. (Locke had almost three thousand.) "We were trying to figure out how to get out of the charter-school business, and how to get into the helping-schools-transform business," he said.
Barr tested a new strategy at Jefferson High School, a place that is much like Locke, a few miles to the north. In 2005, over the course of a year, he met with the superintendent to try to negotiate a deal to transform the institution into a series of small autonomous schools. When talks broke down, Barr hired a field staff from the neighborhood. They worked out of a housing project across the street from the school and collected ten thousand signatures from local parents. When the district still balked, Barr gathered a thousand parents and marched to L.A.U.S.D.'s central office, towing the paperwork for five new Green Dot schools in little red wagons. Jefferson remained an L.A.U.S.D. school. But the following fall more than half of its incoming freshmen entered the lottery for a spot at one of Barr's schools. "When Green Dot was able to walk into a neighborhood, build strong coalitions with neighborhood groups, and begin to drain the school, I think that sent a shock wave through the system," Ted Mitchell, the president of the State Board of Education, said.
Barr was ready to do the same thing at Locke. "What I didn't foresee was the teachers rising up," he said. A group from the school--Zeus Cubias and a few others--sent word that they wanted a meeting. Barr agreed to meet them at a nearby community center. Fifty or sixty teachers sat on one side, in a semicircle; Barr sat alone, facing them.
"Locke is a cash cow," he explained to them. It attracted more state and federal funding than schools in richer neighborhoods--"money-that's-thrown-at-a-failed-school kind of money," he said. "According to our analysis, only about sixty per cent of that money makes it into the classroom."
A gigantic district like L.A.U.S.D. has layer upon layer of bureaucracy. Locke had two full-time employees who painted over graffiti. Bathroom monitors were contractually limited to bathroom-related supervision. Locke often came in well under budget, yet students still shared textbooks, because the surplus was locked up in some unnecessary line item. Byzantine chains of accountability made it almost impossible to isolate problems and fix them.
"There was yelling back and forth," Barr said. "A lot of the time I just sat there, let them work their shit out. A young Latino math teacher, big guy, fucking six foot five, he broke down and started crying." The teacher feared that although Green Dot might get more kids to college, the most vulnerable kids, the hardest cases, might slip away. It's a big knock against charter schools--sometimes fair, sometimes unfair--that only a traditional public school teaches all kids. "We bombarded him," Cubias said. Barr came back with the same answer again and again: "How will it be worse than what you have now?"
Even if they agreed about the district's ills, many teachers worried about Green Dot's contract. At around thirty pages, it would be only a tenth as long as their contract with L.A.U.S.D. "Union contracts are written in response to bad systems," Barr said. (A. J. Duffy, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, counters, "Our view of a decent contract is it will provide longevity of teaching staff." Too many charter schools, he argues, churn through young teachers.) Green Dot offered no tenure and no lifetime benefits. But salaries would be about ten per cent higher; it spends more than sixty per cent of its staff budget on teacher salaries, a good deal more than L.A.U.S.D., Green Dot claims. Green Dot's union--affiliated with the statewide teachers' association rather than with the more defensive one in Los Angeles--would protect them from arbitrary dismissal. And Barr promised teachers more freedom in the classroom. At his schools, the principals lay out firm curricular guidelines, in keeping with California state standards and Green Dot benchmarks, but teachers are free to huddle, and decide what to teach and how to teach it, for the most part, as long as students pass quarterly assessments.
"After about five and a half hours, one teacher said, 'Let's face it, the only time the district comes out here is when a kid gets killed,' " Barr recalled. "Another teacher said, 'And the only time our union comes out is when Green Dot's mentioned.' Somebody said, 'What can we do?' "
Barr explained that California lawmakers had created an option for schools to abandon the district for a charter arrangement if at least fifty per cent of tenured teachers vote to secede. "We'd be interested in that," Barr said.
Barr had a stack of petition forms sent to the school. Cubias, an English teacher named Bruce Smith, and the principal, Frank Wells, began circulating them. Barr wasn't sure he had the votes. Locke's young teachers were mostly untenured and ineligible. The older faculty tended to be deeply skeptical of what Barr was selling. "A lot of these teachers have been on the front lines during the whole demise of our public education system," he said. "Now, every year or two, there's some new reform. You get reform fatigue: 'Oh, God, another God-damned bright idea from the business world.' " Out of a total tenured faculty of seventy-three, Barr needed thirty-seven votes to take the school. That meant all the eligible younger teachers and a decent number of the older ones. Smith and Wells started canvassing between bells. "It was a sneaky inside job, but there was no other way to do it," Smith said.
District administrators were furious. They sent school police to find Wells and escort him off school property. But it was too late: Barr's allies had the signatures. Two days later, television crews gathered across the street for a press conference. Kids milled around and stared. Smith sneaked into a bathroom to write a speech. "I've got security guards carrying walkie-talkies, saying, 'He's walking down the hall,' " Smith recalled. "I'm pretty nervous." He hid in a stall, and scribbled notes for his remarks on an index card: "Do what we're doing: take back your schools."
Within days, the district and the teachers' union counterattacked. "To take over a whole school--it was scandalous!" Karen Wickhorst, a French teacher and, at the time, a site representative for United Teachers Los Angeles, recently recalled. "A big public school! It was so underhanded."
The district banned Barr from the school and summoned teachers to a meeting. Duffy, the union president, and the district's regional administrator addressed the teachers. "They scared the shit out of everyone," Barr said. Seventeen teachers revoked their signatures.
Barr set up a war room at Green Dot's offices. He wrote the number "17" on a whiteboard. Organizers mapped out the teachers who had rescinded their votes--their issues, their biases--as well as new teachers they might swing. "It was like chasing down Senate votes," Barr said. He got up at five, and met teachers at a doughnut shop before school. He went to their houses for dinner, and showed up at church on Sunday. Allies would sneak him onto the school grounds through a back gate, and he'd hold court in a gym teacher's office.
They got all seventeen votes back--but not one more. And Barr began to look ahead. "After the press conference, a dozen different schools contacted me," he said. They were ready to lead their own insurrections. "If I'd been prepared, I could have run the table," Barr said.
Some of his closest confidants, though, worried that even one big high school might be too many. "Most people around him, including me, said, 'Oh, man, Locke is going to kill you,' " Reed Hastings, of Netflix, said. "Creating new schools is easy politics. It's ribbon-cutting, it's new opportunities. Taking over a school--it's district property, those are union jobs. I was afraid he would put in a lot of effort and not succeed. Or he'd get the conversion done and the difficulty of running the school would overwhelm him. And if he did a bad job it would be a black mark for everyone."
***
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A tall girl, her hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, reached up to tape a bright hand-painted poster ("Valentines Day Candygrams") above a row of lockers.
"You're showing your butt crack," a boy walking by said.
"So? Everyone has one."
"I don't."
"Idiot." She rolled her eyes. The boy looked back over his shoulder and grinned.
Locke's hallways are now filled with these handmade signs--for dances, tryouts, movie nights, college tours. They used to be banned; kids would vandalize them. Instead, there was graffiti. "Everywhere you walked," Shannan Burrell, a junior, said. "About six out of ten, it was gang tags."
Shannan is curvy and baby-faced, with rosy brown skin. Her hair was in a bright-purple wrap. She lived nearby, with her mother, in a yellow house, close enough to walk to school in the morning (keeping quiet, looking straight ahead) but outside Locke's immediate neighborhood, which was a good thing. "It's dirty," she said. "Gangbangers out 24/7." She wears a necklace that spells out the name "Jerome" in curling, glittering script. He was her best friend, before he was shot and killed around the corner, when she was in ninth grade. "It was random," she said softly. "He was a schoolboy, for real."
When she entered Locke, three years ago, she liked it. "It was fun--wandering around the halls, around the campus," she said. "Just wilding out." She'd drop into classroom after classroom, looking for friends. "Like 'Come outside real quick,' " she said, laughing. "Quick" usually meant for the rest of class. "And we wouldn't just go to our lunch--we'd go to all of them," she said. "Why are we going to go to class if nobody ever says nothing?" But in her sophomore year she started getting in fights. "I felt like, at Locke, you have to earn your reputation," she explained. "And I earned mine, after like my third fight. But then, after that, it seemed like girls wanted to challenge me. So it got worse." She fought once or twice a week. Her grades were terrible.
She was eating with the football players, in the shade of the quad's only tree, when the riot began. Suddenly, everyone around her was fighting. A boy she'd never seen before punched her. "I wanted to cry, bad," she said. "But it ain't inside me to cry." Instead, she fought back. A few weeks later, she left her mother's house and moved in with her adult sister, about an hour away. But in the fall she decided to go back to Locke. She'd heard that there were going to be changes.
Old-timers and union loyalists who left Locke after the takeover insisted that Green Dot would find a way to weed out problem kids. Others, such as Cubias, worried that uniforms and the promise of tougher discipline would simply keep bad kids away. But teachers and administrators went out into the neighborhood to visit hundreds of parents and students and encourage them to reënroll. Eighty-five per cent of Locke students returned. (In a normal year, only seventy per cent would come back from summer break.) That meant hundreds more than either Green Dot or the city had projected.
"When I got to school, I was laughing at everyone else--I was, like, 'Ha, you got on a uniform,' " Shannan said. "They're, like, 'Ha, you got on a uniform, too!' " Green Dot split the incoming ninth grade into five new small schools, like the schools around Jefferson. Three of them ended up in buildings off campus; the other two were in Locke's prefabricated units, walled off by tall black fences. Then they split the upper three grades into two academies, one for each wing of Locke's original building. Each school had its own bell schedule, its own lunch period, its own entrance, and its own color polo shirt. Shannan drew white.
Locke's teachers were all dismissed and asked to reapply. Only about thirty per cent got their jobs back. Shannan's English teacher, Mr. Sully, was one of them. "He just, he a nice teacher," she said. "He keep you on your toes. If you ain't doing something, he'll make you do something." Dozens of kids told me this--that teachers make them do stuff now, whether they want to or not. Almost immediately, Shannan stopped ditching. For one thing, she couldn't get away with it anymore. ("They don't play," she said.) She stopped fighting, too.
Sully passed a new novel out to Shannan's class--"a book called 'The Bluest Eye,' " Shannan said. She was unimpressed with the cover and the first page. "I was like, 'Mr. Sully, this book about to be stooopid.' And he said, 'What did I say?' And I said, 'O.K., I won't use "stupid," but this book is about to be not interesting.' He sat me down and had a strong conversation with me." She agreed to give it a few pages. Then the character Claudia, a fighter, made her first appearance. "I hear her talk about beating up a girl name Rosemary, a little white girl. I was like, 'Oh, I'm going to read this!' " She giggled. "It's turned out to be a good book," she said. "That's the funny thing."
"There is no secret curriculum-and-instruction sauce at Green Dot at all," Don Shalvey said. "Steve hires good people. They're just doing old-school schooling."
Shannan doesn't like every class. Physics, she said, is boring. So is a test-preparation and college-readiness class, mandatory for most Green Dot students. But she tries to do the work now. When I asked her why, she thought about it for a long time. "Honestly, it didn't matter how you did before," she said. "Wasn't nobody really looking at Locke kids"--meaning to go to college. That's not true, of course, but it felt true to Shannan. "Now, if I make a bad grade, I'm like, 'Please, can I make it up?' "
There are problems that Green Dot can't fix on its own, however. According to Cubias, at least forty per cent of Locke's students come from single-parent households. "Another fifteen per cent are in foster care," he said. Green Dot requires parents to get involved at school, a minimum of thirty-five hours a year, but they can't make every parent a good influence. (Recently, after a girl tangled with a classmate, an assistant principal called the girl's mother, and when the woman showed up she started screaming at the other student.) Security can stop neighborhood gangs from tagging the halls or hoisting couches up to Locke's roof, which was a hangout last year, but they can't keep gangs out of kids' lives.
I made plans to attend classes with Shannan the next day, but when I arrived at her first-period class, English with Mr. Sully, she wasn't there. I called her house after school. The phone line was dead. (Her mother, a quiet, serious woman, has been out of work for at least two years. Her father has been in jail since around the time Shannan was a toddler.) When we finally talked, her voice was so flat that I didn't recognize it.
"I'm not going to be in school this week," she said. "I have to take care of family business."
"Did someone get hurt?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Was it a car accident or something?"
"Much worse," she said. "It's not something I want to talk about." Several days passed before she returned to classes.
There remain problems to address inside Locke, too. Fall semester was difficult. "We made so many mistakes," Cubias said. September was almost wholly devoted to coping with the crush of unexpected students. Administrators struggled to find good teachers who were still on the job market. Clubs and activities suffered. "It's hard to see incremental changes," a new principal, Veronica Coleman, said. "That turned into some low-level frustration for both students and teachers."
Sully told me that Locke is significantly calmer, and administrators are more present. And Green Dot got rid of the teachers who did little for students. But the takeover also chased away some good, experienced staff. Locke's overwhelmingly new and mostly young faculty members are learning how to work together. Sully still has problems with chronic truancy. He still sees kids out of uniform. And when Locke's test scores, their first since the takeover, come back this fall they are almost certain to be the lowest among Barr's schools. Sully guesses that the school might see a small bounce, but anything more than that would surprise him. Kids in Locke's upper grades have spent as many as three years in one of the city's worst academic environments. And, for the first time at a Green Dot school, there is no lottery process for admission. There is no waiting list. Locke is serving every kid in the neighborhood, including ones whose parents, in another neighborhood, would never research alternatives to the big traditional school. "Every child who is in his other schools is there because they have an advocate," Cortines said. "Not so at Locke. They took the whole population."
Even security remains a challenge. Green Dot blanketed the schoolyard with guards from a private security firm, club-bouncer burly, carrying handguns and pepper spray. Gangs have nowhere near the profile they once did, and fights, once a daily occurrence, are rare. Still, in mid-April, a student was shot, across the street, just before first period. And guards have occasionally displayed a heavy hand. Twice this year, they pepper-sprayed students; in both cases, Cubias said, they should have been able to cool the kids down before it came to that, but they were trained to secure facilities, not to supervise adolescents.
Yet, when I wandered around campus during lunch periods and between classes, looking for disgruntled kids, I never found any.
"The whole atmosphere is different," a Latino boy, sketching graffiti in a notebook, said. "The teachers pay more attention to you."
"You actually get through the lessons you're supposed to get through," Jamie, an African-American girl with straightened swept-back hair, said, as she picked at French fries with her friend Andrea.
"I noticed that, too," Andrea said.
"Last year, my grades got so bad--I got four D's! My will to get good grades improved," Jamie said.
"Will Locke be perfect?" Cortines asked. "I don't care. If they make mistakes, they'll find a way to do things differently. What we do in regular schools is keep doing the same thing, even if it doesn't work."
***
Barr is always talking about "the tribes." Union leaders and reformers, in his view, spend too much time fighting one another instead of finding common interests. Charter groups and unions agree on limiting central bureaucracy, giving teachers fewer students and more freedom, and concentrating funds in the classroom, but they mostly go at each other over tenure and the right to unionize. Ultimately, Barr's project isn't about fixing one broken school; he thinks he can resolve that impasse. His grander ambitions, as much as Green Dot's experience in Watts, are what brought him to Arne Duncan's office in March.
Duncan asked Barr what it would take to break up and remake thousands of large failing schools. "One, you have to reconstitute," Barr told him--that is, fire everyone and make them reapply or transfer elsewhere in the district. "Arne didn't seem to flinch at that," he said. "Second, if we can figure out a national union partnership, we can take away some of the opposition." Duncan asked Barr if he could persuade Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, to support the idea. "I'd love to do that," she told Barr, but she also expressed concerns. "She said, 'I can't be seen as coming in and firing all these teachers.' " So they talked about alternatives, like transferring teachers or using stimulus money for buyouts.
Cortines has also agreed in principle to a partnership in Los Angeles. "We'll find out very quickly what he thinks a partnership is," Barr said. "I think a partnership is Locke, period." Federal money, Barr noted, and an alliance with the national union "will force Mr. Duffy"--the U.T.L.A. president--"to come along." Green Dot could take over as many as five Los Angeles schools in 2010, and maybe more.
This month, Barr expects to meet again with Weingarten and her staff and outline plans for a Green Dot America, a national school-turnaround partnership between Green Dot and the A.F.T. Their first city would most likely be Washington, D.C. "If we're successful there, we'll get the attention of a lot of lawmakers," Barr said.
There are risks for Barr in this kind of expansion. It will be months, and maybe years, before there's hard evidence about what Green Dot has accomplished at Locke. And that one takeover put a real strain on the organization. "If they were to take over another high school in Los Angeles, they could handle that," Steve Seleznow, the deputy director of education for the Gates Foundation, said. "I'm not sure they have the capacity to do five at once." Then he paused. "I'm sure Steve has the appetite for it," he added, and laughed. Barr's impatience and his willingness to overextend himself are a bigger part of Green Dot's institutional culture than any theory of education.
In the meantime, Barr and his supporters continue to campaign. On a recent morning, outside 135th Street Elementary School, in Gardena, near Watts, a gregarious woman with a streak of gray through her black curls, wearing a Los Angeles Parents Union sweatshirt, passed a sheet of paper to a young Latino man in a Sears Appliance Repair jacket. He was accompanied by two little girls with matching Hannah Montana backpacks. "Would you like to sign a petition to transform Perry Middle School and Gardena High School?" she asked. She waved down a car that showed no sign of stopping, and bent over at the window when it did. "Do you have time to sign my petition to transform Perry Middle School and Gardena High School?" she asked. Immediately, the driver pulled over. Organizers are now in many neighborhoods, targeting elementary schools, telling parents that they have time to blow up and rebuild their middle schools and high schools before their kids enroll.
Everyone signed up. It's like that whenever she goes out. "People know something is wrong," she told me. "But they think it's their kids. Or it's their neighborhood. Or it's because they're poor. If we have to, we'll build a whole bunch of little charters around the school and take the students," the woman said, loud enough for half the block to hear. "We're going to get the change one way or another."
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2009/instigator_13230
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May 31, 2009
Oppression Liberators Need not Apply
George Joyce
This is a job announcement from the website of one of America’s top inner-city public charter schools located in Oakland, California (no kidding):
“AIPCS is always in search of teachers and staff who are smart, ambitious, and
motivated to teach inner-city youth. We are looking for hard working people who
believe in free market capitalism to join our family at AIPCS.
“AIPCS believes in setting a high standard for ALL students regardless of race, ethnicity, language, economic standing, etc.”
“Multi-cultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots, and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply.”
“If you believe ‘hard work’ is the key to academic success for minority students, poor students, and all other students, we encourage you to submit the following documents by fax or email.”
Let me get this straight. An inner-city public charter school job announcement specifically discriminates against the following applicants: socialists, multiculturalists, “ultra liberal zealots, and college-tainted oppression liberators.”
Takes your breath away doesn’t it? In a time when white conservatives have been viciously abused for merely thinking along these lines, the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland openly and courageously protects its young students from America’s mostly harmful liberal educrats. The result is a flourishing academic environment that produces some of California’s top scores and manages to send its students to places like MIT and Cornell.
Although AIPCS started out in the late 90’s with a multicultural and Native American motif its lagging performance changed when the school was taken over in 2000 by Ben Chavis, a Lumbee Indian who tossed out the “basket weaving” in his words and decided to go traditional. In a recent Los Angeles Times story, Chavis demonstrates little patience for teachers who make the classroom an ideological bully pulpit instead of a place where the kids come first:
"You think the Jews and the Chinese are dumb enough to ask the public school to teach them their culture?"
Chavis, in other words, has exposed a nasty little secret the liberal educrats would like to keep well-hidden. Here it is: compassionate teachers are those who are hard on their students and who train the kids to be independent and successful. Selfish teachers are those who arrest the development of young minds by using the classroom to affirm their own political beliefs. In short, one group thinks about others and the other group thinks about power.
Thomas Hobbes, in his great work Leviathan, once explored in chilling detail the relationship between self-interest and what some might claim is “compassion.” In the Age of Obama, it might behoove Americans of all colors to think about the two sides of this very volatile and often destructive coin.
Hat Tip: lucianne.com
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/05/oppression_liberators_need_not.html at May 31, 2009 - 01:47:41 PM EDT
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BbyG is right; it is an excellent article in this morning's LA Times. Here is a link to the entire article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-charter31-2009may31,0,7064053.story
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Saving Milwaukee’s Best
By the Editors
Milwaukee is home to America’s most vibrant school-choice program: More than 20,000 students participate, almost all of them minorities. They have made academic gains and boast higher graduation rates than their peers in public schools. They even save money for taxpayers. Inevitably, Democrats in the state capital are trying to eviscerate the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
They’ve wanted to gut school choice for years, at the behest of teacher-union patrons who believe education should be a government monopoly. Until recently, Republicans have stood in the way. That changed following last year’s elections. Now, for the first time since the advent of school choice in Milwaukee two decades ago, Madison is a one-party capital. The governor, Jim Doyle, is a Democrat. Members of his party control both the state assembly and the state senate. School choice is in their crosshairs.
Last week, the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee approved a series of auditing, accrediting, and instructional requirements that will force successful voucher schools to shift resources away from classrooms and into administration. Several schools will have to comply with new bilingual-education mandates, even though many immigrant parents choose those schools precisely because they emphasize the rapid acquisition of English instead of native-language maintenance.
Lawmakers also propose to strip funding for school choice. With the value of each voucher reduced, private schools will see their payments fall. Meanwhile, public schools will watch their budgets increase by hundreds of dollars per student. This is on top of what is already a startling financial asymmetry: Taxpayers currently hand over $13,468 per student to Milwaukee Public Schools, compared to just $6,607 per student in the school-choice program. In 2008 alone, school choice saved the public almost $32 million, according to Robert M. Costrel of the University of Arkansas. Since 1994, the figure is $180 million. The savings would be even larger if more students used vouchers.
At the National Press Club last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that he opposed school choice: “Let me explain why. Vouchers usually serve 1 to 2 percent of the children in a community. . . . But I don’t want to save 1 or 2 percent of children and let 98, 99 percent down.” It was a bizarre statement: Why not simply let more than 1 or 2 percent enjoy the benefits of school choice? In Milwaukee, they actually do. It’s the largest urban school-choice program in the country, dwarfing the size of the one in Washington, D.C., whose de-funding by congressional Democrats has drawn so much criticism. Roughly one in five of Milwaukee’s school-age children receive vouchers. All of them must fall below an income threshold. Researchers say that the program is beginning to show systemic effects. In other words, it doesn’t merely help its participants. It also gives a lift to non-voucher students because the pressure of competition has forced public schools to improve.
Sometimes onerous regulations are at least well-intentioned blunders. Not these. The enemies of school choice in Madison know exactly what they’re doing. In the name of “accountability,” they attack the quality of voucher schools with deadly precision. The goal is to make them as mediocre as the public schools they routinely outperform — and to leave parents, once again, without a choice.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWI0Y2ZiNGEzMzU0MGVhMDBjNzZhYTc1OTA3NGEwZGU=
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We Don't Need No Education
Obama wants to make college grants into an entitlement. Bad idea.
Michael C. Moynihan | June 5, 2009
Ask random members of the professoriate at my alma mater, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and many will confide that too many people—not too few, as recently suggested by President Barack Obama—are attending college these days. This opinion is impolite and impolitic (perhaps, in the context of the American university, we should say "un-PC"). But years of furtive conversation with academics suggest it is commonly held. And one can see why. To the professor with expertise in Austro-Hungarian history, for instance, it is unclear why his survey course on the casus foederis of World War I is a necessary stop in a management-level job training program at Hertz.
This is not to say that some Americans should be discouraged from participating in a liberal arts education. As the social scientist Charles Murray writes in his book Real Education, "Saying 'too many people are going to college' is not the same as saying that the average student does not need to know about history, science, and great works of art, music, and literature. They do need to know—and to know more than they are currently learning. So let's teach it to them, but let's not wait for college to do it."
Take this bullet point, proudly included in a November 2008 press release from the Boston public school system: "Of the [Boston public school] graduates from the Class of 2000 who enrolled in college (1,904), 35.5 percent (675 students) earned a degree within seven years of high school graduation. An additional 14 percent (267 students) were still enrolled and working toward a degree." In a news conference celebrating these dismal numbers, Mayor Tom Menino called for a "100 percent increase" in the number of city students attending college, though offered no suggestions on how to ensure that those students actually graduate or are properly prepared to handle undergraduate studies. Besides, if 14 percent of those enrolled are still ambling towards a degree after eight years, is Menino convinced that the pursuit of a university education was the right decision for these students, rather than, say, vocational training?
Alas, these numbers are not uncommon. (They're often worse in other major American cities.) Citing a recent study by two education experts at Harvard University, former Secretary of Education Margret Spellings sighed, "The report shows that two-thirds of our nation's students leave high school unprepared to even apply to a four-year college." Nevertheless, a huge number of these students are matriculating to four-year universities, incurring mountains of debt, and never finishing their degrees.
The devalued undergraduate degree is one thing when the people doing the devaluing have privately financed their education. It is quite another when the federal government foots the bill. While America debates the merits of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the nationalization of General Motors, and how to fix a broken health care system, the Obama administration has been quietly planning a massive expansion of the Pell Grant program, "making it an entitlement akin to Medicare and Social Security." Read that sentence again. As we spiral deeper into recession and debt, our dear leaders in Washington are considering the creation of a massive entitlement akin to the expensive, inefficient, and failing Medicare and Social Security programs.
According to a report in The Washington Post, Obama's proposals "could transform the financial aid landscape for millions of students while expanding federal authority to a degree that even Democrats concede is controversial." It is a plan that has met with outspoken—though likely toothless—resistance from Republicans. Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, suggested that the president reform existing entitlements before creating new ones. And, as noted in the Post, Obama is facing resistance from his own side of the aisle as well, with Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) expressing skepticism towards both the price tag and the necessity of such an expansion.
Beyond the massive cost of expanded Pell Grants, Ohio University economist Richard Vedder argues that, historically, "it is hard to demonstrate that enhanced federal assistance has either significantly expanded college participation or brought about much greater access to higher education by those who are financially disadvantaged." If the idea is expanded into an entitlement, Vedder sees rising demand for higher education leading to significantly higher costs. "When someone else is paying the bills, costs always rise."
With more than 40 percent of students who enter college dropping out before graduation, Vedder's suggestion that "a greater percentage of entering college students should be attending community colleges, moving up to four year universities only if they succeed well at the community college level," seems sound. But the idea pushed by President Obama that, regardless of a student's career aspirations, secondary education is a necessity in 21st century America, ensures that an undergraduate education will become a required (very expensive) extension of every high school diploma.
To the average high school senior, the American university has become an institution that one simply must slog through to reach a higher salary. As one college dropout recently told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "I am determined to finish my degree. A high school job isn't cutting it these days." The former student, the reader is told, simply wants "to do something else with her life," though it is unclear just what that something else is. Perhaps she'll figure that out after getting the degree.
As Charles Murray observed in The Wall Street Journal, "Our obsession with the BA has created a two-tiered entry to adulthood, anointing some for admission to the club and labeling the rest as second-best." But not to worry. If Obama's plan for a secondary education entitlement is foisted upon us—the final cost of which remains anyone's guess—we might soon have a one-tiered system where everyone is second-best.
Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor of Reason.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/133973.html
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Well said.
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I Have to Admit, I Was Wrong
Posted by Andrew J. Coulson
I’ve just discovered that my calculation of DC education spending per pupil was wrong, and I have to publish a correction.
I wrote back in March that total DC k-12 spending, excluding charter schools, was $1,291,815,886 during the 2008-09 school year. That still appears to be correct. But to get the per-pupil number I divided total spending by the then-official enrollment count: 48,646. It now turns out that that number was rubbish. PRI’s Vicki Murray just pointed me to this recent DCPS press release that identifies a new audited enrollment number for the same school year: 44,681 students.
If that number excludes the 2,400 special education students that the District has placed in private schools, then DC’s correct total per pupil spending is $27,400.
If the new audited enrollment number does include the students placed in private schools, then DC’s correct total per pupil spending is $28,900.
Hmm. Let me think. What was that average tuition figure at the private schools serving DC voucher students….? Oh yes: $6,600, according to the federal Department of Education.
In case you don’t know, that’s the program in which, after three years, voucher-receiving kids are reading two grade levels ahead of their public school peers — also according to the Dep’t. of Education (see the linked study, above).
It is also the program that President Obama has doomed to die, because of the, uh…, because, um…, why did he do that again?!?!
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/06/26/i-have-to-admit-i-was-wrong/
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Taxpayers pay about 30k per student for a terrible education. An alternative is proven far better at roughly 1/5 the cost. And we can't win this argument??!!
Figuring an average class size of 25, we are using up taxpayer money at the rate of about $725,000 per classroom. We should be able to get a good union teacher for that. Can't really see any room for waste or abuse (sarc.)... :-(
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Deep thought inspired somewhere in my readings the past couple of days - maybe it was here.
Obama and the leftist machine contend that healthcare would be better if we spent less. Let's apply same principle to education!
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By STEPHANIE SIMON
The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much faith belongs in American history classrooms.
The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state's social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.
Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.
Associated Press
Don McLeroy, a member of the Texas State Board of Education.
"We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.
Three other reviewers, all selected by politically moderate or liberal members of the board, recommended less-sweeping changes to the existing curriculum. But one suggested including more diverse role models, especially Latinos, in teaching materials. "We have tended to exclude or marginalize the role of Hispanic and Native American participants in the state's history," said Jesús F. de la Teja, chairman of the history department at Texas State University.
Social studies teachers from Texas are meeting this summer to write new standards. They can accept, reject or modify the six reviewers' suggestions, all of which were made individually. The teachers' recommendations are sent to the 15-member board of education, a conservative-dominated body that has authority to revise standards.
The three reviewers appointed by the moderate and liberal board members are all professors of history or education at Texas universities, including Mr. de la Teja, a former state historian. The reviewers appointed by conservatives include two who run conservative Christian organizations: David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a group that promotes America's Christian heritage; and Rev. Marshall, who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God's judgments on the nation's sexual immorality. The third is Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.
Discuss
Have there been any curricula debates in your communities? Have you ever looked at your children's history texts? Discuss the issues with other readers in WSJ's Juggle blog.
The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America's founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man's fall and inherent sinfulness, or "radical depravity," which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.
The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good -- and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart.
"America is a special place and we need to be sure we communicate that to our children," said Don McLeroy, a leading conservative on the board. "The foundational principles of our country are very biblical.... That needs to come out in the textbooks."
But the emphasis on Christianity as a driving force is disputed by some historians, who focus on the economic motivation of many colonists and the fractured views of religion among the Founding Fathers. "There appears to me too much politics in some of this," said Lybeth Hodges, a professor of history at Texas Woman's University and another of the curriculum reviewers.
Some outside observers argue that curriculum analysts should be trained academics. "It's important to have trained historians establishing the framework," said David Vigilante, associate director of the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The conservative Christian reviewers, in turn, are skeptical of the professional historians' emphasis on multiculturalism, views stated most forcefully by Mr. de la Teja but echoed by Ms. Hodges. Reaching for examples of achievement by different racial and ethnic groups is divisive, Mr. Barton said, and distorts history.
The standards that the school board eventually settles on won't dictate day-to-day lesson plans; that is up to individual teachers. But they will offer clear guidelines for educators -- and also for publishers.
Nearly every state has its own curriculum standards, and there are scores of social studies texts to choose from at most grade levels, so what happens in Texas won't necessarily affect other states. But the Texas market is huge, so most big publishers aggressively seek approval from the board, in some cases adopting the majority's editing suggestions nearly verbatim.
While the battle in Texas is just heating up, the tug-of-war over how to present history dates back nearly 150 years, said Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University professor of education. A single paragraph in a third-grade text might seem insignificant. But it is a powerful symbol, he said, "because schools remain the most important venue for teaching our kids who we are."
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/07/25/video-why-california-really-really-needs-race-to-the-top-funds/
Liberals are smart.
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Mission Not to Accomplish
July 28, 2009
By Michael Rizzo
In his first State of the Union Address, President Obama boldly asked for every American to commit to obtaining an additional year of higher education or training. He also set a goal that by 2020, “America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” There are two problems with this education plan. First, we have already achieved it. Second, even if we were not already the world leader in higher education attainment, it is far from clear that we would want to be.
OECD data seem to indicate that the U.S. no longer is the world leader in the share of its population obtaining a college degree (trailing Canada and Japan). However, at 29.4 percent, the percentage of Americans aged 25 or older with a college degree has never been higher (this trend holds for blacks and Hispanics, albeit at lower levels). Twenty years ago the share was below 20 percent – so our increase during that time has been nearly 50 percent. The U.S. is making substantial progress in educating its population at the postsecondary level. What is the problem?
Apparently, other countries are making progress at an even faster rate. U.S. improvement was only 15th best among 22 advanced countries whose group average increase was 75 percent since 1985, including Portugal, Austria, Spain, Korea, Italy, and Ireland – which have each doubled their college attainment rates. For a variety of reasons the OECD data report higher educational attainment than data from other sources. Economists Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee have extensively studied cross-country data, made adjustments for attainment by age and differences in the higher education systems across countries, and have found that the college attainment rate in the United States was over 50 percent larger than in the next most educated country, Korea. One reason for such dramatic differences is that the over-65 population in the U.S. is far more accomplished than their counterparts across the world – the OECD data look only at the 25-64 year old cohort.
Country 2000 College Attainment Rate 1985-2000 growth
US 30.3% 49%
Korea 19.1% 120%
Australia 16.9% 36%
Belgium 16.0% 84%
New Zealand 16.0% 37%
Japan 15.0% 50%
Canada 14.3% 39%
Finland 13.4% 68%
Greece 13.1% 58%
Sweden 13.1% 36%
Netherlands 12.5% 60%
Denmark 12.2% 16%
Germany (since 1990) 11.0% 41%
Ireland 11.0% 100%
Norway 11.0% 83%
UK 10.8% 50%
France 9.4% 74%
Spain 9.2% 130%
Switzerland 9.1% 36%
Austria 8.6% 169%
Italy 8.3% 118%
Portugal 6.0% 186%
Source: Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee and author’s calculations
Education in a Vacuum
Discussions about attainment statistics typically proceed under the inauspicious assumption that they are relevant. Rarely mentioned are reasons why such goals are important, and whether securing more higher education in particular is the best way (or even a good way) to achieve certain goals.
Is the president’s goal to increase the output and productivity of the American economy beyond what it would otherwise be? If so, then expanding the pool of graduates might do the trick if the number of Americans receiving a college diploma was the sole causal factor in determining economic growth. Alas, it is not. Education is but one of many ingredients in a mysterious growth recipe. Producing valuable goods and services requires the “right” mix of physical capital, labor skills, technological advances, institutions (such as secure property rights, the rule of law, customs and mores that promote trust, and so forth) and more than a sprinkle of luck. This mix differs across countries and over time and the recipe is wholly unknowable to any individual or group of individuals – in fact there is no recipe to follow. Every professional and lay social scientist to ever walk the face of the earth has gone to his grave trying to solve the mystery of growth – I do not expect any in our generation to enjoy a better fate.
More education has to be a good thing. After all, receiving more schooling can’t make you less productive, right? Education is like exercise, reading, spending time with one’s children, and sleeping – each of these is good for you. It is obvious that dedicating more attention to each of these is good. It is obvious … and wrong – for both individuals and societies as a whole.
While investing in each of these likely generates enormous benefits when starting from scratch, at some point each additional unit invested generates fewer benefits than the one before it – just as eating that fourth doughnut brings you less satisfaction than did the second. What if these so-called “diminishing returns” never set in for education? In a world of scarce time and resources, they must, albeit indirectly. Dedicating more resources to the production of educated workers must come at the expense of resources dedicated to creating other important capital goods, institutions, or consumption goods. An individual cannot dedicate 24 hours in a day to everything, nor can society dedicate all of its resources to everything. Put another way, if merely leading the world in educational attainment is desirable, why not aim to have every American receive a college degree? Better yet, why not aim to have every American earn a Ph.D.?
Is Education Necessary?
Leaving aside the possibility that higher education serves only a signaling function there is still room to ask the question: is education a necessary condition for economic achievement? A good deal of economic evidence points to a strong positive relationship across countries between educational attainment and economic growth. Given the small sample sizes involved in these studies and the difficulty of controlling all the factors influencing growth I would not stake much money defending these findings. To illustrate just one difficulty, were you to collect data on the time people spent on Facebook I am sure it would show up as a strong positive in growth estimations.
There are notable exceptions to the received wisdom. Several African countries made commitments to education since 1970 that were comparable to the countries with successful growth stories from that time, with no considerable economic growth to speak of. Hong Kong became one of the wealthiest regions in the world before it began any substantial investments in education. Within the United States there is a surprisingly small correlation between “economically dynamic states” and the level of educational attainment. In fact, the rank order correlation between how dynamic the state’s economy is and its share of bachelors degrees is only 0.34. While clearly some of the most dynamic states such as Massachusetts and California have terrific educational systems, other dynamic states such as Oklahoma, while short on college graduates, use some of the other “ingredients” mentioned above to promote their development. To be clear, I am not arguing that education is not important. What this does show is that neither is it a guarantee of success, nor lack of it a guarantee of failure.
Education and Human Capital
Education qua education is not a bad thing. It is nonetheless a mistake to conflate formal education with accumulating relevant human capital – the bundle of skills, experience, discipline, etc. required for an individual to produce things of value (broadly considered).
Colleges indeed develop social skills, help individuals identify with peers, and inculcate productive behavior – particularly important for students that did not grow up in an environment conducive to these habits. However, college also contains a considerable consumption component (this is no longer the exclusive domain of elite four-year colleges), and as information technology continues to advance at a breathtaking pace, so too does the opportunity for individuals to acquire important human capital outside of the academy. Despite the dizzying array of colleges, the forgoing factors might give one pause before urging the masses of Americans to attend college as the best way for them to accumulate human capital. These same factors are making it increasingly likely that the super-talented will eschew such formal training in favor of more customized real-life education.
Suppose that education is synonymous with human capital accumulation. Focusing on average educational attainment still makes the erroneous assumption that a year of additional education to every citizen increases the stock of human capital the same for each citizen, and also overlooks the possibility that changes in the quality of different levels of educational attainment may be more or less valuable investments than sending more people to college. For example, improving the stock of useful knowledge might be better accomplished by encouraging existing college graduates to obtain advanced degrees, with no change in high school graduate behavior. Alternatively, it might mean the same aggregate level of college completions, but changing who goes to college and who does not. It would be a wondrous coincidence if having lots of Americans complete four years of formal higher education was the appropriate way to increase the stock of human capital in America.
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
There are practical obstacles to reaching the president’s goal. Despite the measured and well publicized benefits of going to college, one-third of high-school graduates never attend, and roughly 50 percent of those that do attend actually remain until completion. To those of us who have taught large introductory courses (even in highly ranked universities) these figures are unsurprising. Aside from the considerable difficulty many of my students have writing, a number of them have basic vocabulary difficulties – as words such as scrutiny, anomaly, ascertain, isolate and mitigate continue to vex them.
It is a mathematical fact that as we expand college enrollments beyond what they are today, the average quality of students will go down. And while evidence is very strong that the current returns to receiving a college degree are quite large, increasing the supply of college-educated labor (everything else constant) puts downward pressure on these returns. Are political leaders and the educational establishment prepared for this, particularly if these trends -- by significantly increasing the enrollment of poorly prepared students at non-elite colleges -- increase the advantages of attending a prestigious college?
As enrollments increase, so too will financial pressures at most colleges. Student demand has recently surged in the U.S. and despite the fact that real state expenditures have been increasing at healthy clips over that time, per student expenditures have not kept pace. Proposals on the table to expand educational attainment include refundable tax credits and an expansion of Pell Grants – but these present a problem for many state colleges and universities in the form of an unfunded type of mandate. While they may help students afford college attendance, tuition and fees reflect only a small portion of the total cost of educating students at even the lowest cost colleges. Institutions with little excess capacity may find themselves in an increasingly difficult financial position particularly if they face political pressure to keep tuition low. Such supply issues are commonly overlooked in proposals that focus on expanding access on the demand side.
Skinning the Cat
The U.S. is already the world leader in its financial commitment to higher education – dedicating almost three percent of GDP to the sector (a share that has been rising, not falling, over time). Spending more might make sense, but rarely in these discussions does one encounter the question, “At what cost?” Does it make sense to sacrifice more and better carpenters or professional baseball players just to lead the world in college completions? Perhaps I am overplaying that hand. But there are many ways for individuals and societies to improve their human capital and productivity without relying on political forces to put more people through college.
Migration is one of the most powerful ways for an individual to augment human capital. International immigration vividly demonstrates this – a poor person living on $2 per day who migrates to the United States to accept a minimum wage job would experience a 20-fold increase in living standards just by moving here. Migration within the United States from areas with low-capital and low-productivity toward areas with more capital and higher productivity will have a similar effect. If the U.S. wishes to raise its average education levels, it would be far cheaper to simply encourage more immigration of educated workers from abroad. While such a move would undoubtedly alleviate some of America’s Social Security and Medicare problems, its low savings “problem” and its inner-city problems, it is a political non-starter.
Incidentally, that the rest of the world is “catching up” to the U.S. in educational attainment is cause for celebration, not alarm. For American consumers (we are all among them) this will mean access to innumerable new medicines, literature, advanced materials, etc. no less than if Americans were creating them. As the world grows wealthier and more connected, the market for American sourced goods and services is dramatically extended, as is the number of ideas for Americans to capitalize on – expanding opportunities for Americans without a formal education. Japanese auto-maker Toyota, for example, plans on producing its hybrid Prius here in the United States. Is this reason to worry about Japanese educational attainment surpassing ours?
Michael Rizzo is a lecturer in economics at the University of Rochester. He notes: “At the risk of being accused of taking away the party punch bowl, readers should know that I stand to benefit a great deal if more Americans partook in the college experience since I teach large numbers of introductory and intermediate economics students for a living.”
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/07/28/rizzo
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I didn't watch the speech but the word is that it generally positive and motivational. Congrats to our district and principal for their decision to not interrupt the day with it.
This could go under glibness, but we won't see the same speech to adults in America tellinig them they can all make a valuable contribution etc. instead of telling them the rich could pay more and then we would have more money to spend on them...
From the speech: "I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. "
- Which means fighting selfish Republicans to get bigger funding increases and greater federal government control over your local schools.
To any smug liberals out there: Since education is not a federal power, YES, I find that political and offensive.
If he was doing everything he could for the worst districts instead of for the teachers' unions he would support school VOUCHERS, IMHO.
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School Safety in Washington, D.C.: New Data for the 2007-2008 School Year
by David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D., Don Soifer and Dan Lips
WebMemo #2609
As American students head back to school, many parents will worry about their children's safety at school during the upcoming year.[1] School safety will likely be a top concern of families living in Washington, D.C.
This WebMemo is a summary of a CDA Report by The Heritage Foundation and Lexington Institute that presents an analysis of 911 calls originating from schools in D.C. for the 2007-2008 school year, the most recent full school year for which data were available.
School Safety by the Numbers
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education reported that 11.3 percent of D.C. high school students reported being "threatened or injured" with a weapon while on school property during the previous year--a rate well above the national average.[2] A 2009 evaluation published by the U.S. Department of Education reported that 17 percent of the parents of the first cohort of children participating in the program listed school safety as their most important reason for seeking a scholarship.[3]
The CDA Report found:
In D.C. public schools, there were 912 incidences of violent crime, 1,338 incidences of property crimes, and 1,250 other incidences;
In D.C. charter schools, there were 17 incidences of violent crime, 28 incidences of property crimes, and 37 other incidences; and
In D.C. private schools, there were 28 incidences of violent crime, 131 incidences of property crimes, and 73 other incidences.
School Safety in the District of Columbia
To help policymakers and the public understand the issue of school safety in D.C. schools, The Heritage Foundation submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) requesting records of crime incidents in D.C. public, private, and charter schools.[4] The MPD filled this request by providing 911 tape data of calls for crime and emergency incidents at the addresses of D.C. schools. The data presented in this WebMemo are limited to crime-related incidents reported to the MPD during the 2007-2008 school year, excluding the summer months. The figures reflect the level of crime-related incidents reported to the police during all hours of the day and night during the 2007-2008 school year.
Incidents of Crime Reported at Schools
While this data set shows that the police department responded to many fewer calls to charter and private schools, this information should be interpreted with caution, and readers should be careful to understand the differences among public, charter, and private schools when drawing comparisons.[5]
Public Schools. During the 2007-2008 school year, 3,500 incidences of crime were reported to the MPD from D.C. public schools. These incidents occurred during all days and times during the school year.
The 912 violent incidents (1.9 violent incidents per 100 students) included one homicide.[6]
Simple assault, the most prevalent type of violent incident reported, accounted for 648 reports (1.3 per 100 students). In addition, there were 114 aggravated assaults (0.2 per 100 students).
There were 1,338 incidences of property crime reported (2.9 per 100 students).
The most prevalent property incident was theft, of which there were 446 reported incidents (1.0 per 100 students).
There were 1,250 incidents of other crime-related activities, including 461 reported incidents of disorderly conduct (1.0 per 100 students).
The sound of gunshots was reported in 49 incidents.
Public Charter Schools. During the 2009-2010 school year, 82 incidences of crime were reported to 911 from D.C. charter schools. These included:
17 reported violent incidents (0.08 per 100 students), all of which were simple assaults;
28 incidents of property crime (0.1 per 100 students);
21 thefts (0.1 per 100 students), the most prevalent type of property incident;
Three incidents of disorderly conduct (0.01 incidents per 100 students); and
Two reports of gunshots.
Private Schools. During the 2009-2010 school year, 232 incidences of crime were reported to 911 from D.C. private schools. These included:
28 violent incidents (0.16 per 100 students);
14 simple assaults (0.09 per 100 students), which were the majority of the reported violent incidents;
131 incidents of property crime (0.77 incidents per 100 students);
58 thefts (0.35 per 100 students), the most prevalent type of property incident; and
30 incidents of disorderly conduct (0.17 per 100 students).
School Choice and School Safety
One strategy for improving students' ability to attend safe schools is to give families the opportunity to choose which schools their children attend. Since 2004, thousands of low-income children living in the District have attended private school thanks to the federal D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides scholarships worth up to $7,500 for private school tuition to qualifying students.
However, Congress and the Obama Administration have taken several steps that threaten to end the program. For example, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter notifying the families of 216 students who had recently been admitted to the scholarship program that their children would no longer be eligible for scholarships.[7] The department's decision to withdraw these scholarships forced these low-income families to find new schools for their children for the upcoming school year. Many will likely have no choice but to attend the assigned public schools in their neighborhoods.
The Heritage Foundation obtained a list of the 70 public schools to which these students have been assigned since the Department of Education withdrew their Opportunity Scholarships. Overall, these 70 schools for the 2007-2008 school year had many reported incidents of violence and crime.
The MPD received reports of 2,379 crime-related incidents from these schools, including 666 violent incidents (2.7 per 100 students), of which one was a homicide.
Simple and aggravated assault was the most prevalent violent incident, consisting of 555 reported assaults (2.3 per 100 students).
The schools reported 855 property-crime incidents (3.5 per 100 students), including 278 thefts (1.1 incidents per 100 students).
There were also numerous reports of other crime-related incidents, including 306 incidents of disorderly conduct (1.3 per 100 students) and 43 reports of gunshots.
What Policymakers Should Do
The CDA Report supports previous evidence that school crime and violence are problems for many students in the nation's capital. District and federal policymakers should ensure that all children have access to a safe learning environment. Policymakers, school officials, and the MPD should study the best practices of the safest schools and implement the most effective strategies for reducing violence and crime throughout the District.
In addition, Congress and D.C. officials should expand school choice and give more families the power to choose safe and effective schools for their children. For example, Congress and D.C. policymakers should reauthorize and expand the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This should include allowing new students to receive scholarships so that more disadvantaged children can attend private schools.
At the same time, the District of Columbia should maintain its strong charter school law, authorize infrastructure and support for charter schools, and encourage the growth of its safest and most successful charters.
David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Analyst in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation. Don Soifer is Executive Vice President of the Lexington Institute. Dan Lips is Senior Policy Analyst in Education in the Domestic Policy Studies Department at The Heritage Foundation.
[1]In 2007, a Gallup national survey found that 24 percent of responding parents feared for the safety of their oldest child while at school. See Gallup News Service, "The Divide Between Public School Parents and Private School Parents," September 7, 2007, at http://www.gallup.com/poll/28603/divide-between-public-school-parents-private-school-parents.aspx (August 13, 2009).
[2]U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2008, table 4.2, April 2009, at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/crimeindicators/crimeindicators2008/tables/
table_04_2.asp (August 6, 2009).
[3]School safety was the second-most-cited reason after school quality. See Patrick Wolf et al., "Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts after Three Years," U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, March 2009, at http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/2009
4050/pdf/20094050.pdf (August 6, 2009).
[4]For more information, see Shanea Watkins and Dan Lips, "D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program: Improving Student Safety," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 2437, May 13, 2009, at http://www.heritage.org
/research/education/wm2437.cfm.
[5]First, different policies for handling security may partially explain the varying levels of reported crime by school type. For example, the MPD has responsibility for security for D.C. public schools, while charter schools and private schools in the District of Columbia have different arrangements for the provision of school security, including contracting with private security providers. Second, school administration can influence the level of crime and disorder that occurs in schools. Schools that provide students with understandable rules, accompanied by appropriate rewards and sanctions, appear to have less disorder. Lastly, criminogenic (risk) factors may explain differences in reported incidents of crime at these schools. Charter and private schools may be located in safer neighborhoods than D.C. public schools. In addition, the students enrolled in charter and private schools may have behavioral characteristics that are markedly different from those of students attending public schools.
[6]The single homicide was committed at Moten Elementary School on Wednesday, October 3, 2007. At approximately 9:54 a.m., police were called to the scene after a body was found near the rear of Wilkinson Elementary School, where Moten Elementary School was located. See press release, "Homicide in the Rear of Pomeroy Road, SE," Metropolitan Police Department, October 3, 2007, at http://newsroom.dc.gov/show.aspx/
agency/mpdc/section/2/release/11937/year/2007 (August 12, 2009).
[7]Editorial, "Presumed Dead," The Washington Post, April 11, 2009, p. A12, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009
041003073.html (August 19, 2009).
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/wm2609.cfm
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THE RUBBER ROOM
The battle over New York City’s worst teachers.
by Steven Brill
AUGUST 31, 2009
One school principal has said that Randi Weingarten, of the teachers’ union,“would protect a dead body in the classroom.”
n a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
“You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you’ve lived with it,” says Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.
Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. “Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence,” Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room’s “Handle with Care” poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, “entitled to every penny of it.” She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she “loves children.”
“Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own,” Scheiner said. “There was no need to push anyone out.” Like ninety-seven per cent of all teachers in the pre-Bloomberg days, she was given tenure after her third year of teaching, and then, like ninety-nine per cent of all teachers before 2002, she received a satisfactory rating each year.
“But they brought in some new young principal from their so-called Leadership Academy,” Scheiner said. She was referring to a facility opened by Klein in 2003, where educators and business leaders, such as Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, hold classes for prospective principals. “This new principal set me up, because I was a whistle-blower,” Scheiner said. “She gave me an unsatisfactory rating two years in a row.Then she trumped up charges against me and sent me to the Rubber Room. So I’m fighting, and waiting it out.”
The United Federation of Teachers, the U.F.T., was founded in 1960. Before that, teachers endured meagre salaries, tyrannical principals, witch hunts for Communists, and gender discrimination against a mostly female workforce (at one point, there was a rule requiring any woman who got pregnant to take a two-year unpaid leave). Drawing its members from a number of smaller and ineffective teachers’ groups, the U.F.T. coalesced into a tough trade union that used strikes and political organizing to fight back. By the time Bloomberg took office, forty-two years later, many education reformers believed that the U.F.T. and its political allies had gained so much clout that it had become impossible for the city’s Board of Education, which already shared a lot of power with local boards, to maintain effective school oversight. In 2002, with the city’s public schools clearly failing, the State Legislature granted control of a new Department of Education to the new mayor, who had become a billionaire by building an immense media company, Bloomberg L.P., that is renowned for firing employees at will and not giving contracts even to senior executives.
Bloomberg quickly hired Klein, who, as an Assistant Attorney General in the Clinton Administration, was the lead prosecutor in a major antitrust case against Microsoft. When Klein was twenty-three, he took a year’s leave of absence from Harvard Law School to study education and teach math to sixth graders at an elementary school in Queens, where he grew up. Like Bloomberg, Klein came from a world far removed from the borough-centric politics and bureaucracy of the old board.
Test scores and graduation rates have improved since Bloomberg and Klein took over, but when the law giving the mayor control expired, on July 1st, some Democrats in the State Senate balked at renewing it, complaining that it gave the mayor “dictatorial” power, as Bill Perkins, a state senator from Manhattan, put it. Nevertheless, by August the senators had relented and voted to renew mayoral control.
One thing that the legislature did not change in 2002 was tenure, which was introduced in New York in 1917, as a good-government reform to protect teachers from the vagaries of political patronage. Tenure guarantees teachers with more than three years’ seniority a job for life, unless, like those in the Rubber Room, they are charged with an offense and lose in the arduous arbitration hearing.
In Klein’s view, tenure is “ridiculous.” “You cannot run a school system that way,” he says. “The three principles that govern our system are lockstep compensation, seniority, and tenure. All three are not right for our children.”
randi Scheiner says that her case is likely to be heard next year. By then, she will have twenty-four years’ seniority, which entitles her to a pension of nearly half her salary—that is, her salary at the time of retirement—for life, even if she is found incompetent and dismissed. Because two per cent of her salary is added to her pension for each year of seniority, a three-year stay in the Rubber Room will cost not only three hundred thousand dollars in salary but at least six thousand dollars a year in additional lifetime pension benefits.
Scheiner worked at P.S. 40, an elementary school near Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town. The write-ups on Web sites that track New York’s schools suggest that P.S. 40 is one of the city’s best. I spoke with five P.S. 40 parents, who said that Scheiner would have had nothing to “blow the whistle” about, because, as one put it, the principal, Susan Felder, is “spectacular.”
Scheiner refused to allow me access to the complete file related to her incompetence proceeding, which would detail the charges against her and any responses she might have filed, saying only that “they charged me with incompetence—boilerplate stuff.” (Nor could Felder comment, because Scheiner had insisted that her file be kept sealed.) But Scheiner did say that she and several of her colleagues in the Rubber Room had brought a “really interesting” class-action suit against the city for violations of their due-process and First Amendment rights as whistle-blowers. She said that the suit was pending, and that she would be vindicated. Actually, she filed three suits, two of which had long since been dismissed. And, a month and a day before she mentioned it to me, the magistrate handling the third case—in a move typically reserved for the most frivolous litigation—had ordered Scheiner and her co-plaintiffs to pay ten thousand dollars to the city in court costs, because that filing was so much like the second case. This third case is pending, though it no longer has a lawyer, because the one who brought these cases has since been disbarred, for allegedly lying to a court and allegedly stealing from Holocaust-survivor clients in unrelated cases.
It takes between two and five years for cases to be heard by an arbitrator, and, like Scheiner, most teachers in the Rubber Rooms wait out the time, maintaining their innocence. One of Scheiner’s Rubber Room colleagues pointed to a man whose head was resting on the table, beside an alarm clock and four prescription-pill bottles. “Look at him,” she said. “He should be in a hospital, not this place. We talk about human rights in China. What about human rights right here in the Rubber Room?” Seven of the fifteen Rubber Room teachers with whom I spoke compared their plight to that of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay or political dissidents in China or Iran.
It’s a theme that the U.F.T. has embraced. The union’s Web site has a section that features stories highlighting the injustice of the Rubber Rooms. One, which begins “Bravo!,” is about a woman I’ll call Patricia Adams, whose return to her classroom, at a high school in Manhattan, last year is reported as a vindication. The account quotes a speech that Adams made to union delegates; according to the Web site, she received a standing ovation as she declared, “My case should never have been brought to a hearing.” The Web site account continues, “Though she believes she was the victim of an effort to move senior teachers out of the system, the due process tenure system worked in her case.”
On November 23, 2005, according to a report prepared by the Education Department’s Special Commissioner of Investigation, Adams was found “in an unconscious state” in her classroom. “There were 34 students present in [Adams’s] classroom,” the report said. When the principal “attempted to awaken [Adams], he was unable to.” When a teacher “stood next to [Adams], he detected a smell of alcohol emanating from her.”
Adams’s return to teaching, more than two years later, had come about because she and the Department of Education had signed a sealed agreement whereby she would teach for one more semester, then be assigned to non-teaching duties in a school office, if she hadn’t found a teaching position elsewhere. The agreement also required that she “submit to random alcohol testing” and be fired if she again tested positive. In February, 2009, Adams passed out in the office where she had to report every day. A drug-and-alcohol-testing-services technician called to the scene wrote in his report that she was unable even to “blow into breathalyzer,” and that her water bottle contained alcohol. As the stipulation required, she was fired.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the U.F.T. until this month (she is now the president of the union’s national parent organization), said in July that the Web site “should have been updated,” adding, “Mea culpa.” The Web site’s story saying that Adams believed she was the “victim of an effort to move senior teachers out” was still there as of mid-August. Ron Davis, a spokesman for the U.F.T., told me that he was unable to contact Adams, after what he said were repeated attempts, to ask if she would be available for comment.
In late August, I reached Adams, and she told me that no one from the union had tried to contact her for me, and that she was “shocked” by the account of her story on the U.F.T. Web site. “My case had nothing to do with seniority,” she said. “It was about a medical issue, and I sabotaged the whole thing by relapsing.” Adams, whose case was handled by a union lawyer, said that, last year, when a U.F.T. newsletter described her as the victim of a seniority purge, she was embarrassed and demanded that the union correct it. She added, “But I never knew about this Web-site article, and certainly never authorized it. The union has its own agenda.” The next morning, Adams told me she had insisted that the union remove the article immediately; it was removed later that day. Adams, who says that she is now sober and starting a school for recovering teen-age substance abusers, asked that her real name not be used.
he stated rationale for the reassignment centers is unassailable: Get these people away from children, even if tenure rules require that they continue to be paid. Most urban school systems faced with tenure constraints follow the same logic. Los Angeles and San Francisco pay suspended teachers to answer phones, work in warehouses, or just stay home; in Chicago they do clerical work. But the policies implemented by other cities are on a far smaller scale—both because they have fewer teachers and because they have not been as aggressive as Klein and Bloomberg in trying to root out the worst teachers.
It seems obvious that by making the Rubber Rooms as boring and as unpleasant as possible Klein was trying to get bad teachers to quit rather than milk the long hearing process—and some do, although the city does not keep records of that.
“They’re in the Rubber Room because they have an entitlement to stay on the payroll,” says Dan Weisberg, the general counsel and vice-president for policy of a Brooklyn-based national education-reform group called the New Teacher Project. “It’s a job. It’s an economic decision on their part. That’s O.K. But don’t complain.” Until January, Weisberg ran the Department of Education’s labor-relations office, where, in 2007, he set up the Teacher Performance Unit, or T.P.U.—an élite group of lawyers recruited to litigate teacher-incompetence cases for the city.
“When we announced the T.P.U., the U.F.T. called a candlelight vigil”—at City Hall—“to protest what they called the Gotcha Squad,” says Chris Cerf, a deputy chancellor, who, like Klein and Weisberg, is an Ivy League-educated lawyer. “You would think candlelight vigils would be reserved for Gandhi or something like that, but you could hear this rally all the way over the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Randi Weingarten is unapologetic. “We believed that the way this Gotcha Squad was portrayed in the press by the city unfairly maligned all the teachers in the system,” she says. Weingarten, who was a lawyer before becoming a teacher and a U.F.T. officer, is a smart, charming political pro. She always tries to link the welfare of teachers to the welfare of those they teach—as in “what’s good for teachers is good for the children.”
Cerf’s response is that “this is not about teachers; it is about children.” He says, “We all agree with the idea that it is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent person be imprisoned. But by laying that on to a process of disciplining teachers you put the risk on the kids versus putting it on an occasional innocent teacher losing a job. For the union, it’s better to protect one thousand teachers than to wrongly accuse one.” Anthony Lombardi, the principal of P.S. 49, a mostly minority Queens elementary school, puts it more bluntly: “Randi Weingarten would protect a dead body in the classroom. That’s her job.”
“For Lombardi to say that,” Weingarten said, “shows he has no knowledge of who I am.”
hould a thousand bad teachers stay put so that one innocent teacher is protected? “That’s not a question we should be answering in education,” Weingarten said to me. “Teachers who are treated fairly are better teachers. You can’t have a situation that is fear-based. . . . That is why we press for due process.”
Steve Ostrin, who was assigned to a Brooklyn Rubber Room fifty-three months ago, might be that innocent man whom the current process protects. In 2005, a student at Brooklyn Tech, an élite high school where Ostrin was an award-winning social-studies teacher, accused him of kissing her when the two were alone in a classroom. After her parents told the police, Ostrin was arrested and charged with endangering the welfare of a child. He denied the charge, insisting that he was only joking around with the student and that the principal, who didn’t like him, seized upon the incident to go after him. The tabloids ran headlines about the arrest, and found a student who claimed that a similar thing had happened to her years before, though she had not reported it to the police. But many of Ostrin’s students didn’t believe the allegations. They staged a rally in support of him at the courthouse where the trial was held. Eleven months later, he was acquitted.
Nevertheless, the city refused to allow him to return to class. “Sometimes if they are exonerated in the courts we still don’t put them back,” Cerf said, adding that he was not referring to Ostrin in particular. “Our standard is tighter than ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ What would parents think if we took the risk and let them back in a classroom?”
Ostrin’s case may be vexing, but it is a distraction from the real issue: how to deal not with teachers accused of misconduct but with the far larger number who, like Scheiner, may simply not be teaching well. While maintaining that the union in no way condones failing teachers, Weingarten defends the elaborate protections that shield union members: “Teachers are not . . . bankers or lawyers. They don’t have independent power. Principals have huge authority over them. All we’re looking for is due process.”
Dan Weisberg, of the New Teacher Project, independently offered a similar analogy for the other side: “You’re not talking about a bank or a law firm. You’re talking about a classroom—which is far more important—and your ability to make sure that the right people are teaching there.”
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By now, most serious studies on education reform have concluded that the critical variable when it comes to kids succeeding in school isn’t money spent on buildings or books but, rather, the quality of their teachers. A study of the Los Angeles public schools published in 2006 by the Brookings Institution concluded that “having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.” But, in New York and elsewhere, holding teachers accountable for how well they teach has proved to be a frontier that cannot be crossed.
ne morning in July, I attended a session of the arbitration hearing for Lucienne Mohammed, a veteran fifth-grade teacher. Mohammed, unlike most teachers sent to the Rubber Room, agreed to allow the record of her case to be public. (Her lawyer declined to make her available for an interview, however.) She had been assigned to P.S. 65, in Brooklyn’s East New York section, and was removed from the school in June of 2008, on charges of incompetence.
Mohammed’s case was the first to reach arbitration since the introduction of an initiative called Peer Intervention Program (P.I.P.) Plus, which was created to address the problem of tenured teachers who are suspected of incompetence, not those accused of a crime or other misconduct. P.I.P. Plus was included in the contract negotiated by Klein and Weingarten in 2007. The deal seemed good for both sides: a teacher accused of incompetence would first be assigned a “peer”—a retired teacher or principal—from a neutral consulting company agreed upon by the union and the city. The peer would observe the teacher for up to a year and provide counselling. If the observer determined that the teacher was indeed incompetent and was unlikely to improve, the observer would write a detailed report saying so. The report could then be used as evidence in a removal hearing conducted by an arbitrator agreed upon by the union and the city. “We as a union need to make sure we don’t defend the indefensible,” Weingarten told me. Klein and Weingarten both say that a key goal of P.I.P. Plus was to streamline incompetency arbitration hearings. It has not worked out that way.
The evidence of Mohammed’s incompetence—found in more than five thousand pages of transcripts from her hearing—seems as unambiguous as the city’s lawyer promised in his opening statement: “These children were abused in stealth. . . . It was chronic . . . a failure to complete report cards. . . . Respondent failed to correct student work, failed to follow the mandated curriculum . . . failed to manage her class.” The independent observer’s final report supported this assessment, ticking off ten bullet points describing Mohammed’s unsatisfactory performance. (Mohammed’s lawyer argues that she began to be rated unsatisfactory only after she became active with the union.)
This was the thirtieth day of a hearing that started last December. Under the union contract, hearings on each case are held five days a month during the school year and two days a month during the summer. Mohammed’s case is likely to take between forty and forty-five hearing days—eight times as long as the average criminal trial in the United States. (The Department of Education’s spotty records suggest that incompetency hearings before the introduction of P.I.P. Plus generally took twenty to thirty days; the addition of the peer observer’s testimony and report seems to have slowed things down.) Jay Siegel, the arbitrator in Mohammed’s case, who has thirty days to write a decision, estimates that he will exceed his deadline, because of what he says is the amount of evidence under consideration. This means that Mohammed’s case is not likely to be decided before December, a year after it began. That is about fifty per cent more time, from start to finish, than the O.J. trial took.
While the lawyers argued in measured tones, Mohammed—a slender, polite woman who appeared to be in her early forties—sat silently in one of six chairs bunched around a small conference table. The morning’s proceedings focussed first on a medical excuse that Mohammed produced for not showing up at the previous day’s hearing. Dennis DaCosta, an earnest young lawyer from the Teacher Performance Unit, pointed out that the doctor’s letter was eleven days old and therefore had nothing to do with her supposedly being sick the day before. The letter referred to a chronic condition, Antonio Cavallaro, Mohammed’s union-paid defense counsel, replied. Siegel said that he would reserve judgment.
Next came some discussion among the lawyers and Siegel about Defense Exhibit 33Q, a picture of Mohammed’s classroom. The photograph showed a neatly organized room, with a lesson plan chalked on the blackboard. But, under questioning by her own lawyer, Mohammed conceded that the picture had been taken, in consultation with her union representative, one morning before class, after the principal had begun complaining about her. The independent observer’s report had said that as of just a month before Mohammed was removed—and three months after the peer observer started observing and counselling her, and long after this picture was taken—Mohammed had still not “organized her classroom to support instruction and enhance learning.”
The majority of the transcript of the twenty-nine previous hearing days was given over to the lawyers and the arbitrator arguing issues that included whether and how Mohammed should have known about the contents of the Teachers’ Reference Manual; whether it was admissible that when Mohammed got a memo from the principal complaining about her performance, her students said, she angrily read it aloud in class; whether it was really a bad thing that she had appointed one child in her class “the enforcer,” and charged him with making the other kids behave; whether Mohammed’s union representative should have been present when she was reprimanded for not having a lesson plan; and whether the independent observer was qualified to evaluate Mohammed, even though she came from the neutral consulting company that the union had approved.
When the bill for the arbitrator is added to the cost of the city’s lawyers and court reporters and the time spent in court by the principal and the assistant principal, Mohammed’s case will probably have cost the city and the state (which pays the arbitrator) about four hundred thousand dollars.
Nor is it by any means certain that, as a result of that investment, New York taxpayers will have to stop paying Mohammed’s salary, eighty-five thousand dollars a year. Arbitrators have so far proved reluctant to dismiss teachers for incompetence. Siegel, who is serving his second one-year term as an arbitrator and is paid fourteen hundred dollars for each day he works on a hearing, estimates that he has heard “maybe fifteen” cases. “Most of my decisions are compromises, such as fines,” he said. “So it’s hard to tell who won or lost.” Has he ever terminated anyone solely for incompetence? “I don’t think so,” he said. In fact, in the past two years arbitrators have terminated only two teachers for incompetence alone, and only six others in cases where, according to the Department of Education, the main charge was incompetence.
Klein’s explanation is that “most arbitrators are not inclined to dismiss a teacher, because they have to get approved again every year by the union, and the union keeps a scorecard.” (Weingarten denies that the union keeps a scorecard.)
Antonio Cavallaro, the union lawyer, admitted that the process “needs some ironing out.”
Dan Weisberg says that because of the way cases are litigated by the union it’s impossible to move them along. He notes that, unlike in a criminal court, where the judge has to clear his docket, there is no such pressure on an arbitrator. One of Weisberg’s main concerns is the principals, who have to document cases and then spend time at the hearings. “My goal is to look them in the eye and say you should do the hard work,” he says. “I can’t do that if the principal is going to be on the stand for six days.”
Daysi Garcia, the principal of P.S. 65, is a Queens native and is considered by Klein to be a standout among the principals who attended the first classes of the Leadership Academy. She told me that, despite the five days she had to spend testifying, and the piles of paperwork she accumulated to make a record beforehand, she would do it again, because “when I think about the impact of a teacher like this on the children and how long that lasts, it’s worth it, even if it is hard.”
he document that dictates how Daysi Garcia can—and cannot—govern P.S. 65 is the U.F.T. contract, a hundred and sixty-six single-spaced pages. It not only keeps the Rubber Roomers on the payroll and Garcia writing notes to personnel files all day but dictates every minute of the six hours, fifty-seven and a half minutes of a teacher’s work day, including a thirty-seven-and-a-half-minute tutorial/preparation session and a fifty-minute “duty free” lunch period. It also inserts a union representative into every meaningful teacher-supervisor conversation.
The contract includes a provision that, this fall, will allow an additional seven hundred to eight hundred teachers to get paid for doing essentially no teaching. These are teachers who in the past year—or two or three—have been on what is called the Absent Teacher Reserve, because their schools closed down or the number of classes in the subject they teach was cut. Most “excessed” teachers quickly find new positions at other city schools. But these teachers, who have been on the reserve rolls for at least nine months, have refused to take another job (in almost half such cases, according to a study by the New Teacher Project, they have refused even to apply for another position) or their records are so bad or they present themselves so badly that no other principal wants to hire them. The union contract requires that they get paid anyway.
“Most of the excessed teachers get snapped up pretty fast,” Lombardi, the principal of P.S. 49, says. “You can tell from the records and the interviews who’s good and who’s not. So by the time they’ve been on the reserve rolls for more than nine months they’re not the people you want to hire. . . . I’ll do almost anything to avoid bringing them into my school.” These reserve teachers are ostensibly available to act as substitutes, but they rarely do so, because principals don’t want them or because they are not available on a given day; on an average school day the city pays more than two thousand specially designated substitute teachers a hundred and fifty-five dollars each.
Until this year, the city was hiring as many as five thousand new teachers annually to fill vacancies, while the teachers on the reserve list stayed there. This meant that, in keeping with Klein’s goals, new blood was coming into the schools—recruits from Teach for America or from fellowship programs, as well as those who enter the profession the conventional way. Now that New York, like most cities, is suffering through a budget crisis, Klein has had to freeze almost all new hiring and has told principals that they can fill openings only with teachers on the reserve list or with teachers who want to transfer from other schools.
Even so, the number of teachers staying on reserve for more than nine months is likely to exceed eleven hundred by next calendar year and cost the city more than a hundred million dollars annually. Added to the six hundred Rubber Roomers, that’s seventeen hundred idle teachers—more than enough to staff all the schools in New Haven.
The teachers’-union contract comes up for renewal in October, and Klein told me that he plans to push for a time limit of nine months or a year for reserve teachers to find new positions, after which they would be removed from the payroll. “If you can’t find a job by then, it’s a pretty good indicator that you’re not looking or you’re not qualified,” he said.
n Chicago, reserve-list teachers are removed from the payroll after ten months. Until December, the head of the Chicago school system was Arne Duncan, who is now President Obama’s Education Secretary. Duncan has consistently emphasized improving the quality of teachers by measuring and rewarding—or penalizing—them based on performance. “It’s my highest priority,” he told me.
Leading Democrats often talk about the need to reform public education, but they almost never openly criticize the teachers’ unions, which are perhaps the Party’s most powerful support group. In New York, where Weingarten is a sought-after member of Democratic-campaign steering committees, state legislators and New York City Council members are even more closely tied to the U.F.T., which has the city’s largest political-action fund and contributes generously to Democrats and Republicans alike. As a result, in April of 2008 the State Legislature passed a law, promoted by the union, that prohibited Klein from using student test data to evaluate teachers for tenure, something that he had often talked about doing.
Scores should be used only “in a thoughtful and reflective way,” Weingarten told me. “We acted in Albany because no one trusted that Joel Klein would use them to measure performance in a fair way.”
Reformers like Cerf, Klein, Weisberg, and even Secretary Duncan often use the term “value-added scores” to refer to how they would quantify the teacher evaluation process. It is a phrase that sends chills down the spine of most teachers’-union officials. If, say, a student started the school year rated in the fortieth percentile in reading and the fiftieth percentile in math, and ended the year in the sixtieth percentile in both, then the teacher has “added value” that can be reduced to a number. “You take that, along with observation reports and other measures, and you really can rate a teacher,” Weisberg says.
In a speech in July to the National Education Association, a confederation of teachers’ unions, Duncan was booed when he mentioned student test data. But he went on to say that “inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules . . . put adults ahead of children. . . . These policies were created over the past century to protect the rights of teachers, but they have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets.”
Duncan’s metaphor was deliberate. He was referring to “The Widget Effect,” a study of teacher-assessment processes in school systems across the country, published in June by the New Teacher Project and co-written by Weisberg. “Our schools are indifferent to instructional effectiveness,” the study declared. Under the subhead “All teachers are rated good or great,” it examined teacher rating processes, and found that in districts that have a binary, satisfactory-unsatisfactory system, ninety-nine per cent of teachers receive a satisfactory rating, and that even in the few school districts that attempt a broader range of rating options ninety-four per cent get one of the top two ratings.
The report lays out a road map for “a comprehensive performance evaluation system,” and recommends that for dismissals “an expedited one-day hearing should be sufficient for an arbitrator to determine if the evaluation and development process was followed and judgments made in good faith.” Lucienne Mohammed’s lawyer spent the equivalent of a day disputing whether she should have been familiar with her training materials.
In seven years, Klein has increased the percentage of third-year teachers not given tenure from three to six per cent. Unsatisfactory ratings for tenured teachers have risen from less than one per cent to 1.8 per cent. “Any human-resources professional will tell you that rating only 1.8 per cent of any workforce unsatisfactory is ridiculous,” Weisberg says. “If you look at the upper quartile and the lower quartile, you know that those people are not interchangeable.”
The Rubber Rooms house only a fraction of the 1.8 per cent who have been rated unsatisfactory. The rest still teach. There are fifty Rubber Roomers—half of one per cent of all New York City teachers—awaiting removal proceedings because of alleged incompetence, as opposed to those who have been accused of misconduct.
“If you just focus on the people in the Rubber Rooms, you miss the real point, which is that, by making it so hard to get even the obvious freaks and crazies that are there off the payroll, you insure that the teachers who are simply incompetent or mediocre are never incented to improve and are never removable,” Anthony Lombardi says. In a system with eighty-nine thousand teachers, the untouchable six hundred Rubber Roomers and eleven hundred teachers on the reserve list are only emblematic of the larger challenge of evaluating, retraining, and, if necessary, weeding out the poor performers among the other 87,300.
hile Mohammed’s hearing was lumbering on in June, the newsletter of the Chapel Street Rubber Room, in Brooklyn—where Mohammed had spent her school days since 2008—was being handed out by two of its teacher-editors. They were standing under a poster of the room’s mission statement: “TRC”—Temporary Reassignment Center— “Is a Community.” The newsletter’s banner exhorted its readers to “Experience. Share. Enrich. Grow.” Articles included an account of a U.F.T. staff director’s visit to Chapel Street and an essay by one of the room’s inhabitants about how to “quit doubting yourself,” entitled “Perception Is Everything.”
The walls of the large, rectangular room were covered with photographs of Barack Obama and various news clippings. Just to the right of a poster that proclaimed “Bloomberg’s 3 Rs: Rubber Room Racism,” a smiling young woman sat in a lounge chair that she had brought from home. She declined to say what the charges against her were or to allow her name to be used, but told me that she was there “because I’m a smart black woman.”
I asked the woman for her reaction to the following statement: “If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”
“That sounds like Klein and his accountability bullshit,” she responded. “We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children.” After I told her that this was taken from a speech that President Obama made last March, she replied, “Obama wouldn’t say that if he knew the real story.”
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But on July 24th President Obama and Secretary Duncan announced that they would award a large amount of federal education aid from the Administration’s stimulus package to school systems on the basis of how they address the issue of accountability. And Duncan made it clear that states where the law does not allow testing data to be used as a measure of teacher performance would not be eligible.
Duncan has fashioned the competition for this stimulus money as a “Race to the Top,” offering four billion dollars to be split among the dozen or so states that do the most to promote accountability in their schools. “That could mean five hundred million dollars for New York, which is huge,” Weisberg says. “But New York won’t be able to compete without radical changes in the law.” Such changes would have to include not only the provision forbidding Klein to use test scores to evaluate teachers (which Weisberg is most focussed on) but also provisions, such as those mandating teacher tenure, that are at the core of the teachers’-union contract. Klein has already come up with a debatable technical argument that the testing restriction won’t actually disqualify New York from at least applying for the money (because the restriction is about using test scores only for tenure decisions). Still, having that law on the books would obviously undercut an application claiming that New York should be declared one of the most accountable systems in the country—as would many provisions of the union contract, such as tenure and compensation based wholly on seniority.
We’ll soon see whether the lure of all that federal money will soften the union position and change the political climate in Albany. If it does, Bloomberg and Klein—who are determined reformers and desperate for the money—would have a chance to turn the U.F.T. contract into something other than a straitjacket when it comes up for renewal, in October. The promise of school funds might also push the legislature, which controls issues such as tenure, to allow a loosening of the contract’s job-security provisions and to repeal the law that forbids test scores to be used to evaluate teachers. If the stimulus money does not push the U.F.T. and the legislature to permit these changes, and if Duncan and Obama are serious about challenging the unions that are the Democrats’ base, the city and the state will miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in education aid. More than that, publicly educated children will continue to live in an alternate universe of reserve-list teachers being paid for doing nothing, Rubber Roomers writing mission statements, union reps refereeing teacher-feedback sessions, competence “hearings” that are longer than capital-murder trials, and student-performance data that are quarantined like a virus. As the Manhattan Rubber Room’s poster says, it’s the children, not the teachers, who are fragile and need to be handled with care. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill?currentPage=all
ILLUSTRATION: RICHARD THOMPSON
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After I was thrown out of private school :wink: I wound up in public school in NYC and this article reminds me deeply of my two years in the public school system. IMO the article does not exagerate.
I would only add more about the political powere of the UFT.
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'Creaming" is the word critics of charter schools think ends the debate over education choice. The charge has long been that charters get better results by cherry-picking the best students from standard public schools. Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found a way to reliably examine this alleged bias, and the results are breakthrough news for charter advocates.
Her new study, "How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement," shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale. Because there are more applicants than spaces, New York admits charter students with a lottery system. The study nullifies any self-selection bias by comparing students who attend charters only with those who applied for admission through the lottery, but did not get in. "Lottery-based studies," notes Ms. Hoxby, "are scientific and more reliable."
According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.
Charter students are also shrinking the learning gap between low-income minorities and more affluent whites. "On average," the report concludes, "a student who attended a charter school for all of the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English."
The New York results are not unique. In a separate study, Ms. Hoxby found Chicago's charters performing even better than the Big Apple's. Using the same methodology, other researchers have seen similar results in Boston.
Charters are also a bargain for taxpayers. Nationwide on average, per-pupil spending is 61% that of surrounding public schools. New York charters spend less than district schools but more than the national average because, unlike district schools, they generally have no capital budget and must pay rent from operating expenses.
Little wonder President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are pressuring states to become more charter-friendly. Why the Administration can't connect the dots from the evidence to other effective school choice reforms, such as vouchers, can only be explained by union politics. Caroline Hoxby has performed a public service by finally making clear that "creaming" is a crock.
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In conjunction w/ Crafty's piece posted above, it ought to be clear that throwing money at education isn't the answer. It's interesting to note that Duncan isn't the only one in BHO's admin who is trying to stifle debate by calling all arguments that do not conform with his preferred course "tired."
Duncan’s NCLB Reauthorization Push Shows Extreme Tunnel Vision
Posted by Andrew J. Coulson
In a major speech to be delivered today, education secretary Arne Duncan will call for an end to ”‘tired arguments’ about education reform” and ask for input in crafting a ”sweeping reauthorization” of the federal No Child Left Behind act. His decision not to openly debate the merits of reauthorization — to simply assume it — guarantees the tiredness and futility of the discussion.
Americans have spent $1.85 trillion on federal education programs since 1965, and yet student achievement at the end of high school has stagnated while spending per pupil has more than doubled — after adjusting for inflation. The U.S. high school graduation rate and adult literacy rates have been declining for decades. The gap in achievement between children of high school dropouts and those of college graduates hasn’t budged by more than a percent or two despite countless federal programs aimed at closing it.
The secretary himself acknowledges that after more than half a century of direct and increasing federal involvement in schools, “we are still waiting for the day when every child in America has a high quality education that prepares him or her for the future.
In light of the abject and expensive failure of federal intrusion in America’s classrooms, it is irresponsible for the Secretary of Education to assume without debate that this intrusion should continue. Cutting all federal k-12 education programs would result in a permanent $70 billion annual tax cut. Given the stimulative benefits of such a tax cut it is also fiscally irresponsible for the Obama administration to ignore the option of ending Congress’ fruitless meddling in American schools.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/09/24/duncans-nclb-reauthorization-push-shows-extreme-tunnel-vision/
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/24/school-indoctrination-video-retrieved/
If you don't want to have your kids indoctrinated like this, you must be raaaaaAAAAAAaaaaaaaacist!
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Chart of the Day — Federal Ed Spending
Posted by Andrew J. Coulson
The debate over No Child Left Behind re-authorization is upon us.
Except it isn’t.
In his recent speech kicking off the discussion, education secretary Arne Duncan asked not whether the central federal education law should be reauthorized, he merely asked how.
Let’s step back a bit, and examine why we should end federal intervention in (and spending on) our nation’s schools… in one thousand words or less:
(http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/wp-content/uploads/Fed-Spend-Ach-Pct-Chg-Cato-Andrew-Coulson.jpg)
While the flat trend lines for overall achievement at the end of high school mask slight upticks for minority students (black students’ scores, for instance, rose by 3-5 percent of the 500 point NAEP score scale), even those modest gains aren’t attributable to federal spending. Almost that entire gain happened between 1980 and 1988, when federal spending per pupil declined.
And, in the twenty years since, the scores of African American students have drifted downard while federal spending has risen stratospherically.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/09/30/chart-of-the-day-federal-ed-spending/
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The New Untouchables Sign in to Recommend
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 20, 2009
Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.
There’s something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.
In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.
A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.
“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”
This problem will be reversed only when the decline in worker competitiveness reverses — when we create enough new jobs and educated workers that are worth, say, $40-an-hour compared with the global alternatives. If we don’t, there’s no telling how “jobless” this recovery will be.
A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.
That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.
As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”
Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”
Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.
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Union blocks teacher bonuses
By Edward Mason | Wednesday, November 18, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Local Coverage
Photo by Matthew West
Grinchlike union bosses are blocking at least 200 of Boston’s best teachers from pocketing bonuses for their classroom heroics in a puzzling move that gets a failing grade from education experts.
The Boston Teachers Union staunchly opposes a performance bonus plan for top teachers - launched at the John D. O’Bryant School in 2008 and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Exxon Mobil foundations - insisting the dough be divvied up among all of a school’s teachers, good and bad.
“It’s insanity,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the nonpartisan Pioneer Institute. “They’re less concerned about promoting the interest of individual members than maintaining control over their members.”
The incentive program pays Advanced Placement teachers $100 bonuses for each student who passes the test, and up to $3,000 a year for meeting other goals. Students also can also receive $100 for passing.
“(The union) is standing in the way of innovation,” school Superintendent Carol R. Johnson told the Herald. “I think we have to realize we can’t do business as usual. . . . We have to be willing to make changes and give kids the opportunities they need.”
The program also pays for after-school study sessions for AP classes, which can count toward college credit and which some universities use to evaluate applicants.
The incentive program - part of a series of innovations Boston Public Schools wants to roll out - includes drawing outside money to the city’s cash-strapped schools to boost academic performance.
Union head Richard Stutman bristled at criticism he doesn’t have his members’ interest at heart. “We’re not taking money away from teachers,” Stutman claimed.
He also objected to the suggestions his union is a foe of school reform, insisting he backs the incentive program - so long as the bonus goes to all teachers, not just AP instructors.
“There’s no one solely responsible for the development of these students,” Stutman said. “They should all share in the money.”
But by thwarting performance bonuses, the union is hurting students, argued Morton Orlov, president of the Massachusetts Math and Science Initiative at MassINSIGHT, the business-backed group that administers the bonuses.
Orlov said the 10 state schools that accept the bonuses saw a 39 percent increase in students who passed the AP exam.
“You can think of this as smart money,” Orlov said.
Ligia Noriega, headmaster at the Excel High in South Boston, wants the bonus program at her school.
“These incentives push people to work a little bit harder,” Noriega said. “We have to start thinking outside the box.”
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1212771
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Head Start’s Impact Evanescent — HHS Study
Posted by Andrew J. Coulson
HHS has finally released the second installment of its series of studies on the persistence of Head Start effects. Its finding (see page xiv): virtually all academic effects disappear by the end of 1st grade. There is only one positive statistically significant finding out of eleven academic outcomes measured, the size of that effect is minuscule by recognized standards (it’s half way between zero and what most social scientists consider “small”), and the confidence in the finding is low by recognized standards. (Many authors would categorize it as “insignificant” rather than “significant” — it’s only significant at a 90% confidence interval, not the more common 95% confidence interval).
We have spent more than $100 billion on the program to date (ballpark estimate from Table 375 here) and HHS’s own research shows that its results diminish to essentially nothing by the end of the first grade.
There are other government education programs whose effects actually grow substantially over time, and that are comparatively economical. Consider the federal DC voucher program. Just a year or two after switching from public to private schools, the effect of the private schooling was not big enough to rise to the level of statistical significance. But by their third year in private schools, the evidence was clear that voucher-receiving students were reading more than two grade levels above a randomized control group that stayed in public schools. This program, as I’ve previously documented, costs 1/4 as much per pupil as DC spends on public education: about $6,600 vs. $28,000.
But Congress, and particularly Democrats, have defunded the DC voucher program while raising spending on Head Start. President Obama is at the forefront of this travesty. If you weren’t already jaded and disgusted by education politics and its domination by employee unions opposed to educational choice, start now.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/01/13/head-starts-impact-evanescent-hhs-study/
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LAUSD's Dance of the Lemons
Why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible
By Beth Barrett
published: February 11, 2010
Editor's note: After this article went to press, LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines announced that the district plans to substantially cut back on granting lifelong tenure to inexperienced teachers.
Several years ago, a 74-year-old Dominguez Elementary School fourth-grade teacher was having trouble controlling her students as her abilities deteriorated amid signs of "burnout." Shirley Loftis was told by Los Angeles Unified School District administrators to retire or be fired, and she did retire, but hardly under the school district's terms.
The principal at Dominguez, Irene Hinojosa, recalls how she spent three years documenting Loftis' poor teaching skills and inability to control 10-year-olds. "From the minute I observed her, she basically didn't seem to have the knowledge of the standards and how to deliver them," Hinojosa tells L.A. Weekly. "I had her do lessons on the same standard over and over again, and children did not get it. On simple math concepts [such as determining perimeters and area] — over and over, she didn't know how to deliver."
Each September, a new crop of children quickly caught on to the fact that Loftis had lost control. Full-on classroom fights flared up. One child beat another with a backpack, and others threw objects — even a chair, Hinojosa says. Teachers at Dominguez Elementary began reporting incidents to Hinojosa, who moved Loftis' class from a bungalow to a room across from her office. That way, the principal reasoned, she could intervene in the chaos a bit faster.
When parents in the Carson neighborhoods around Dominguez Park got wind of the troubles, some sought to transfer their children. A handful succeeded, but Hinojosa says every child "righteously deserved to be moved out. ... The kids totally disrespected [Loftis] by the end. It was a lost year for them."
But Loftis won a ruling in her favor by the state Commission on Professional Competence, a powerful arbitration panel of two educators and an administrative-law judge who can prevent California schools from firing teachers. The panel agreed in 2002 that the district had "grounds for dismissal" of Loftis. But, panel members essentially argued, Loftis had taught at the school for 23 years, and administrators had shown bias in pursuing her while not taking enough steps to do something about her burnout. District officials embarked on a long Superior Court appeals process, but the judge agreed with the arbitration panel that Loftis could perform another LAUSD job — like training teachers.
After five years, district lawyers decided to stop their costly fight and agreed to settle, paying Loftis' attorneys' fees of $195,000 on top of $300,000 that Loftis earned during the dispute to work away from children — in a job in the administration.
"We chased that case forever," says LAUSD Associate General Counsel Kathleen Collins, a young and effervescent lawyer who is something of an anomaly inside LAUSD's toe-the-line executive offices downtown. "It was my first case, and I felt like, 'This can't be the way things work.'"
Loftis, now 83, could not be reached for comment, and a United Teachers Los Angeles representatives declined to comment. But her associates described her as an articulate, highly energetic woman who seems far younger than her years. Of the epic battle she lost to Loftis, Collins says, "You can only have passion for so long" before the obstacles force you to give up.
Principal Hinojosa thought that because she is younger than the previous principal, she had the energy required to oust a tenured educator. Instead, she learned, "It is so difficult to dismiss or discipline veteran teachers."
Los Angeles Unified School District, with its 885 schools and 617,000 students, educates one in every 10 children in California. It also mirrors a troubled national system of teacher evaluations and job security that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says must change. Recent articles in the Los Angeles Times have described teachers who draw full pay for years while they sit at home fighting allegations of sexual or physical misconduct.
But the far larger problem in L.A. is one of "performance cases" — the teachers who cannot teach, yet cannot be fired. Their ranks are believed to be sizable — perhaps 1,000 teachers, responsible for 30,000 children. But in reality, nobody knows how many of LAUSD's vast system of teachers fail to perform. Superintendent Ramon Cortines tells the Weekly he has a "solid" figure, but he won't release it. In fact, almost all information about these teachers is kept secret.
But the Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
During our investigation, in which we obtained hundreds of documents using the California Public Records Act, we also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining.
The Weekly was able to obtain the names of all seven teachers targeted for firing, and the names of the 32 who received big settlements of $40,000 to $195,000, and the data showing the size of the group forced into retraining — 466 teachers during the past three years — only after extensive efforts. Nor is the public allowed to see student test scores by classroom — closely guarded and potentially explosive data. Education experts say the secret classroom data shows how bad teachers significantly harm children, producing students with markedly lower test scores as compared to other classrooms on the same hallway.
In the rare instances — fewer than once a year — where the district tries to dismiss a teacher because of performance, each battle wends through a tangled arbitration and court system.
In pursuing a firing, school officials rely on a teacher's formal classroom evaluations and, sometimes, disciplinary write-ups, to file an "accusation and statement of charges," which lays out an educator's teaching problems. The teacher can then ask for a decision on his or her case from the Commission on Professional Competence, a panel convened by the state Office of Administrative Hearings. Either side can appeal the outcome of that hearing in California Superior Court, and, ultimately, in higher courts.
It cost the district roughly $3.5 million to try to fire seven teachers because of the cost of hiring outside lawyers with special expertise, administrative overhead, paying ongoing salaries for each teacher during the lengthy legal battles, and other expenses. Documents show only one instance in the past 10 years in which an LAUSD teacher accepted his firing and left without a fight or big payment.
Just a few blocks from LAUSD's skyscraper headquarters, Los Angeles City Hall's approach to firing public employees provides a stark contrast to protections enjoyed by teachers, also public employees. Despite civil-service protections, City Hall fires from its 48,000-plus workforce of garbage, parks, street-services, engineering, utilities and other employees more than 80 tenured workers annually. During the past decade, in which LAUSD fired four failing teachers, 800 to 1,000 underperforming civil service–protected workers were fired at City Hall. City Personnel Department General Manager Margaret Whelan says nobody is paid to leave. She was dumbfounded that LAUSD is paying to dislodge teachers, saying, "That's ridiculous. I can't believe that. Golly, it makes no sense. Some are not even mediocre, they're horrible."
Caprice Young, founder of the nonprofit California Charter Schools Association, was LAUSD school board president until 2003. She saw, behind closed doors, what the public can't: the "dance of the lemons," a term that broadly describes controversial tactics LAUSD utilizes to cope with tenured teachers who can't teach but, under the current system, cannot be fired. Those tactics include not only paying them to leave, but quietly transferring bad teachers to other, unsuspecting schools or repeatedly and fruitlessly "retraining" them while they continue to teach, sometimes harming the educations of thousands of children.
Young believes the inability of the schools to oust poor L.A. teachers is playing a key role in L.A.'s emergence as an epicenter of the charter-school movement. "One year with a bad teacher puts a kid a year, or two, behind the other kids," Young says. "If a parent sees their child has a lemon teacher, if they can get them into another school, they will."
A. J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, has a view of the situation that might startle some. The belief that it's hard to oust underperforming LAUSD teachers is nothing more than an "urban legend," Duffy claims. "There is a mechanism to ask for the removal of teachers ... they have chosen not to do it. Part of it is the bureaucratic nonsense that goes on in the district."
According to confidential settlement agreements obtained by the Weekly under the California Public Records Act, the school district goes to great lengths to avoid the formal steps for firing teachers. Not only has LAUSD paid 32 tenured teachers more than $1.5 million to leave, but the LAUSD school board, which says it is reform-minded, allows these teachers to leave with clean records, and with no hint that they took a payout under pressure. The deals are so hush-hush, in fact, that the Weekly has discovered that one teacher, Que Mars, who taught math at Chester W. Nimitz Middle School, is still listed in LAUSD's substitute-teacher pool after taking a $40,000 check — to stop teaching in L.A.
The bottom line, attorney Collins says, is that "in other professions, if it's not working out, it's easy to get rid of employees." But in the LAUSD, "if you have a poor-performing teacher in the classroom with 30 kids year after year, that's a lot of kids impacted. You can't get fourth-grade back."
Dan Basalone, an enthusiastic father of five with a boyish face, retains a boundless interest in education despite 48 years with LAUSD. He blames Superintendent Ramon Cortines and LAUSD's elected school board for the fact that Los Angeles is markedly behind other major cities in education reform, but he believes Cortines and the board can change. It all depends, he says, on "how strong they are."
A retired official with the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, a union representing school principals, Basalone wants to see tenured teachers evaluated with public, transparent and clearer standards. Teacher "evaluations should be publicly discussed," he says. "If you have to negotiate [with UTLA], so what? Doing nothing and saying it's a bad system just means you're not willing to bite the bullet. Until you put some ideas out there, you don't know what the possibilities are."
Duffy, the union's pugnacious president, a speed-talker with a talk-radio temperament who enjoys publicly sparring with Cortines and the administrators, is a key reason why UTLA is one of the nation's most steadfast teachers-union holdouts, resisting reforms that are gaining acceptance by teachers unions in places like New York City and, more locally, Long Beach.
Duffy has put as much time in the system as Basalone. He sees things very differently. He blames the difficulties in identifying and getting rid of poor L.A. teachers on bureaucratic "nonsense," such as administrators who are improperly trained, bogged down by paperwork and don't have time to conduct meaningful teacher evaluations. Duffy deplores the "witch hunt" against teachers by a "rotten, corrupt system" in which, he says, principals can give teachers bad evaluations merely because they speak up during meetings on such issues as whether to buy teaching materials instead of new furniture. However, Duffy did not provide evidence of that claim to the Weekly.
Basalone says, "These people are rewarded for bad teaching. The bottom line is money and politics." Yet Duffy says most teachers do a solid job, and that if he had a child who was stuck with a failing teacher, he'd be down at that school "demanding change."
But it is extremely difficult to find out whether a teacher is failing. The Weekly was only able to gain access to extensive details about all seven rare "performance cases" in which the district tried to fire teachers because those disputes ended up in court. Critics say these seven cases are the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of other L.A. teachers hand out busy-work, show movies during most class periods, sleep, don't show up on Fridays, or consistently churn out kids who score well below the rest of the school in core subjects like math, science, reading and English.
California Charter Schools Association's Young and other education analysts say the obstacles to identifying and ousting these teachers stem from the 1970s, when popular but not particularly competent teachers were named as principals while top teachers with deep academic backgrounds got fired for failing to toe the line. In the backlash that followed, critics say, new laws and regulations made it increasingly hard to fire a California teacher.
Today, an L.A. teacher who gets a below-standard classroom evaluation can, and often does, file a grievance through UTLA. In many cases, an initial negative evaluation by a principal is then heavily rewritten, or even withdrawn, by district officials. Nothing happens to teachers who have at least two "below-standard" evaluations upheld after the grievance process is completed. Asked why this is the case, Duffy changes the subject, choosing instead to talk about insufficient school funding.
Diane Pappas, LAUSD associate general counsel, says her office's five attorneys only work part-time on efforts to oust bad teachers. She also questions whether California's Office of Administrative Hearings, which has the power to resolve firing cases that public school teachers decide to contest, could handle the workload if the LAUSD school board bit the bullet and decided to target dozens of the worst teachers.
Currently, although LAUSD is the nation's second-largest school district, just two LAUSD "teacher-performance cases" are before the state's Office of Administrative Hearings, a quasijudicial tribunal that adjudicates or mediates 14,000 public-sector disputes annually involving 1,400 state-, county- and city-government entities.
"We'd [pursue more firings] if we had more resources," Pappas says. But the state OAH "can only handle so many with their staffing issues, too. They have a time line to follow. You couldn't, even if you wanted to do 100 [firings] at a time. The system can't adjust."
Not true, says Jeffrey Young, spokesman for OAH, noting the sheer size of OAH. He says the agency could easily ramp up if LAUSD sent it significantly more teacher-firing cases to adjudicate. In fact, says Young, "I believe we could handle anything."
Cortines likes to point to California state law as one of his big hurdles, saying he talked to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in late January about crafting a law that makes it easier to oust subpar tenured teachers. Cortines says "competence" rather than seniority should be the chief criterion in keeping teachers, complaining that, "The [California] laws are not on the side of the school systems. No one is the advocate for the children and family. All [the laws] are written to protect adults" — tenured teachers.
But at the same time, Cortines, along with former LAUSD superintendents Roy Romer and David Brewer, has not tried to create a well-funded legal unit within LAUSD dedicated to moving out bad teachers.
When principals do make a very rare effort to fire an underperforming teacher, examples such as that of former teacher Roque Burio serve as vivid reminders of the severe problems they will face.
Burio had taught at two schools before becoming a science teacher at San Pedro High School in 2001. But after he arrived, documents show, school administrators began to notice his shortcomings. Burio got five "below-standard" teaching evaluations — an exceedingly high number — in just four years.
The district alleges that Burio frequently told students that because his class was inquiry-based, "teachers do not teach." That theory became "his mantra," recalls San Pedro Assistant Principal Jan Murata. "He was unable to adapt or to change."
Principals and administrators said he failed to engage his students, lectured without apparent objectives and did not ensure that the children had textbooks. In one lab assignment, he told his pupils to record the behavior of live animals, but purportedly failed to bring animals to class. Students could look at pictures of animals in books instead, and "figure it out," Burio allegedly told them. When students complained, Burio allegedly taunted them, saying he'd "buy a fish" and dig in his backyard for earthworms. Only four of his 29 students tried to write up his odd assignment. (Burio, who disputes many of the claims, could not be reached for comment despite the Weekly's repeated efforts to contact him both directly and through UTLA.)
Murata launched what became a disheartening six-year process of repeated evaluations, weekly observations, regular parent meetings and costly re-training undertaken by personal mentors, with the aim of improving Burio's skills. When the district decided to fire him, many parents, though angry, did not want to complain in writing. "Parents believe the teacher should know what [he's] doing. It's very difficult," Murata says.
Jackie Bebich, a science program booster president at San Pedro High School, says parents often feel helpless to intervene, even as the damage to children mounts: "There are 200 kids per year" in just one high school teacher's classes, "so over five years, that's 1,000 kids affected."
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Last year, LAUSD gave up trying to fire him, and paid Burio $50,000 to quietly leave, one of 32 such cases in the past several years. The district agreed to include no finding of wrongdoing if he agreed never to work for LAUSD again. Then, last fall, Murata says, Burio contacted her — requesting a letter of recommendation for a job. She declined.
Angry principals and administrators, like the retired Basalone, say there is "no excuse" for LAUSD's practice of waiting for teachers to fail five evaluations, as with Buria, before trying to fire them. Robert Bilovsky, principal at Berendo Middle School, says it's "ridiculous. ... Why have an evaluation system if you're not going to use it?" Duffy says the district is at fault if a teacher with five below-standard evaluations is allowed to remain in the classroom.
Clearly feeling the sting of recent criticism for failing to fire teachers accused of sexual and physical misconduct, Cortines, in an interview with the Weekly, says that he recently ordered principals to begin dismissal proceedings against tenured teachers after just two consecutive below-standard evaluations.
"I've cut that out," Cortines says. But when asked for a copy of the new policy, district officials referred the Weekly to a December press release stating Cortines' concerns that 175 permanent and certificated teachers got a below-standard "Stull" rating last year, while 48 others failed two evaluations. The vague press release does not lay out a new policy, such as identifiable steps Cortines is taking to oust teachers who fail more than two evaluations.
When a teacher gets a below-standard Stull evaluation — named after a lawmaker who in 1971 authored California legislation requiring checks of educators' work — that teacher participates in a rehab program called Peer Assistance and Review, as did Burio and Loftin. The program, engineered by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa when he was a state assemblyman in 2000, is supposed to improve schools by pairing failing teachers with mentors — often retired teachers with many years of experience.
By some accounts, PAR is a miserable failure. Under the confidential program — a secrecy feature that teachers unions insisted on — not even school principals can find out if their subpar teachers are improving. District officials admit to the Weekly that only about one-third of teachers pass the training.
Moreover, as happened with Burio at San Pedro High, principals must keep these substandard teachers in the classroom during the retraining. There are no particular consequences if a teacher does not improve.
"The intent of the law is to help an ineffective person become better," Basalone says. "It doesn't mean I can stay ineffective."
According to previously undisclosed data obtained by the Weekly, three anonymous LAUSD teachers have taken the retraining five times in the past three years, 18 have taken it four times, and 45 three times. Parents do not know, and cannot find out, the names of these 66 teachers who are repeatedly recycled through the PAR program. Another 400 teachers were required to enter the program once or twice during the past four years. The state program costs $1.4 million per year, mostly to pay for 50 personal mentors in LAUSD.
Marsha Oh-Bilodeau, the district's PAR coordinator, says the names are kept confidential to encourage teachers to participate without embarrassment. But the secrecy appears to go well beyond protecting feelings. LAUSD lawyers refused to release to the Weekly the names of any of the 466 teachers in question — without a court order.
Duffy sees a possible conspiracy afoot in the data obtained by the Weekly. He says many of the 466 teachers who have gotten retraining and mentoring could have been pushed into the program by "vindictive" principals out to inflate the numbers to make it seem as if the LAUSD has big teaching problems. Duffy could provide no documents or data to back up his claim.
But Judith Perez, president of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, which represents 2,300 school principals, administrators and retirees, says the district is allowing "frequent fliers" and this repetitive retraining is "a disservice to children." She wants to see consequences. "Many of the people who go through the process do improve, but the problem is the frequent fliers," Perez says. "There should be something that happens next."
John Bowes, head of the Office of Staff Relations under Cortines, and part of an internal task force charged by the school board with improving teacher performance, concedes that LAUSD has no hard rule for when to initiate firing procedures — in part because it prefers a "supportive" rather than a "gotcha" mentality. Bowes, a buttoned-down rising star under Cortines, says, "It really reflects the idea that teaching is a craft to be developed and it's an art that's refined by teachers over time."
There's a good reason why downtown administrators seem squeamish about evaluating underperforming L.A. teachers. Gail Hughes, Bowes' predecessor, says that during the 2008 school year, UTLA filed 650 formal grievances on behalf of teachers alleging contract violations. Roughly 300 of those grievances were filed by teachers who got negative classroom-teaching evaluations.
School principals, Hughes says, know that if they negatively review an L.A. teacher's abilities, "just about everyone who gets a below-standard Stull grieves it" — and the principal gets caught in a lengthy, often bitter process. Records show that of 16,235 LAUSD teachers evaluated in 2008, 1,321 were considered below standard in classroom ability. Only a small fraction of those 1,321 received a formal, negative Stull rating. In some cases, the principals simply did not want to get in a nasty fight.
If science teacher Burio represents educators who are repeatedly retrained and then paid large sums to leave, math teacher Mars represents what former administrator Basalone calls the "classic" dance of the lemons.
Mars taught at six schools, but at Nimitz Middle School — his fifth — administrators accused him of deficiencies that could have led to his dismissal. Among those allegations, in 2002 Mars retaught "the same lesson" to students eight times — right in front of Nimitz Principal Frank Vasquez, who was conducting classroom observations. The principal recalls, "He just didn't teach. He did the same thing every day. He confronted kids and pushed them out of the classroom. We wrote him up, and wrote him up, until one day he pushed a kid out of the class" and down some steps.
Vasquez said Mars was "placed" at Nimitz by LAUSD and there was nothing the principal could do. Vasquez says, "We tried everything. We had coaches go in and help him out. PAR tried to help him out." The fallout hit children who were struggling to learn math from Mars. "The kids didn't learn anything, and they didn't respect him."
Mars says his last two positions, at Nimitz and, before that, Gage Middle School, were forced on him, and represented "the biggest hell" of his life. "I didn't even know what was happening to me," says Mars, whose voice trembles as he refers to the school district as "worse than the Mafia."
Mars adds, "You don't know how tough it is. The kids will eat you alive." But he says he's afraid that if he tells his side of the story, his retirement and benefits could be in jeopardy when he turns 53, in two years. (Collins, the attorney, says his claim is absurd, and that LAUSD would not target protected speech — a sure way to lose a major lawsuit.)
Rather than fighting a probable five-year, $500,000 effort to fire Mars, after transferring him repeatedly, LAUSD paid him $40,000 to quit in March 2005.
Little wonder, then, that Vasquez was stunned to hear from the Weekly that despite all this, Mars remains in the school district's substitute-teacher pool. "Oh, wow!" Vasquez blurted out. In fact, when the Weekly spoke to Mars (a phone interview), the children in his substitute-teaching class could be heard in the background.
Superintendent Cortines says he recently banned the repetitive transfer of "lemons." But there is no way to verify if Cortines' ban is working, or if it was even implemented, because the practice unfolds entirely in secret. Nobody, including parents, can currently find out if a newly arrived teacher was sent to a school under a forced transfer.
Of the 34 teachers paid sizable settlements by LAUSD to quit teaching — the 32 such as Mars and Burio who took secret payouts rather than fight, plus two others who fought their firings for years — the Weekly tracked down employment records for 22. Those 22 accounted for more than 70 transfers between schools. It is not known how many of those were forced transfers.
One of those transfers was Howard Schonberger, a teacher who got repeated below-standard evaluations before being paid $90,000 to leave his job at Berendo Middle School, near Olympic Boulevard.
Schonberger benefited from the fact that the small legal unit at LAUSD was already busy juggling a firing case the district badly wanted to win — that of Pinewood Elementary School teacher Colleen Kolter. According to district documents, between May 2003 and October 2005, while teaching at the Pinewood grade school, in Tujunga, Kolter racked up four notices of unsatisfactory service and three below-standard Stull evaluations from a newly reassigned but veteran principal, Ada Munoz-Yslas.
Munoz-Yslas says that Kolter, a thin woman in her mid-50s, went for days without teaching anything and resisted advice from the pricey math and literary coaches sent in to retrain her. "When I started there, almost immediately, people came up to me to complain about the things that had been happening: parents, students, teachers," says Munoz-Yslas, now the principal at Van Nuys Elementary School. "Lack of classroom management, safety issues, not meeting the education needs of students. ... There was a lack of following and implementing the curriculum. A lack of planning."
Teaching assistants and others tried to salvage the children's wasted year. Yet the mystery is that during the eight years prior to Munoz-Yslas' arrival, LAUSD never put Kolter on the dismissal track — even when furious and fed-up parents took their children out of Pinewood altogether.
The state Commission on Professional Competence found that Kolter sometimes had "an unsteady gait and was using slurred speech," once requiring a small child to support her. Records show that Kolter argued that LAUSD failed to force her to take sick leave to deal with her "bipolar disorder and depression." But the competence panel said she was fired because "at bottom, it appears she cannot teach." Kolter could not be reached for comment, and her attorney, Lawrence Trygstad, whose firm is used by UTLA to represent teachers facing dismissal, declined to comment.
Kolter's firing is one of LAUSD's exceedingly rare and clear-cut dismissal victories in the past 10 years. Yet by the end of that struggle, LAUSD had spent a staggering $305,576 on private attorneys who helped the district's legal staff in the fight to get rid of her.
LAUSD is not as aggressive as New York City, whose school district employs eight attorneys solely to remove bad teachers, and places underperforming teachers in the district's infamous "rubber rooms" — offices away from children, where they earn full salary to do nothing during their job disputes.
But in Los Angeles, under Romer, Brewer and now Cortines, because LAUSD pays just a handful of attorneys to work only part-time on such cases, the small legal unit was nearly overwhelmed by pursuing Kolter at Pinewood Elementary while handling Schonberger's dismissal. As attorney Collins explains, because of Kolter's decision to wage an extensive battle to keep her job, and LAUSD's equally passionate determination to prevent that, "we were completely swamped. We would have had [to pay] outside counsel, our fees, [Schonberger's] salary — and then there was our normal caseload."
Records obtained by the Weekly describe how, in 2004, Schonberger received a below-standard Stull evaluation and low marks for his teaching skills, inability to engage students in problem-solving and failure to establish rigorous learning goals at Fairfax High School.
Parent Orly Beyder recalls how her daughter, Michelle, now a photography major at San Francisco State University, came home upset about how little her class was learning. "He was ... not interested in the kids. He didn't seem to enjoy teaching," Beyder recalls. Beyder met with Schonberger, worried that her daughter's education was at risk. But he was not willing to talk it through with Beyder. "He was just a snotty teacher in our meeting," she says.
Beyder instructed her daughter to keep her head down, reminding her, "He's the teacher."
Beyder adds, "I know it's very hard to be a teacher and to teach high school, but I don't think teachers like that should teach."
Two years later, after Schonberger was reassigned to Berendo Middle School, distict officials say 104 eighth-grade students protested his teaching by signing a petition accusing him of directing insults and sexually charged remarks at them.
Schonberger has a markedly different view. In an odd phone interview with the Weekly, he identified himself and insisted he had been railroaded. The following day, he called the Weekly back, claiming that a person familiar with his story had impersonated him during the first interview. He then essentially repeated the claims from the previous day, that he was scapegoated by administrators, who sided with parents rather than supporting a tough teacher keen on delivering a good education and discipline to unruly kids.
Schonberger also claimed that as an untenured, green teacher at Fairfax High, he was targeted by administrators. But the record shows the opposite: that they granted him lifelong tenure after just two years of classroom experience, as LAUSD does with the vast majority of teachers.
He also painted the 104-signature petition against him as having been orchestrated by a small group of Berendo Middle School students, scoffing, "Kids will do anything to mitigate their own failure and behavior." Schonberger only accepted the $90,000 settlement, he says, because "I felt I was done being Don Quixote, I was fighting windmills, a monolithic administrative hierarchical entity at odds with its stated purposes to educate and socialize students."
Berendo Principal Bilovsky leaves no room for doubt as to how he views Schonberger, saying, "There's always the question, 'Would you want your child in someone's classroom?' I wouldn't have felt comfortable with that."
In a culture like LAUSD's, where getting fired is virtually impossible, the small group of teachers who were fired or took large payments to leave appear to share a strong belief that each of theirs was the one special case driven by biased principals or unfair rules. Among those is Raye Shibasaki, a former first-grade teacher at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park, who received three notices of unsatisfactory services. She ultimately settled for an $80,000 payment to leave.
Leticia Ortega, a parent as well as a middle-school teacher for LAUSD, recalls how she took her own son, Arturo, out of Shibasaki's class after he was repeatedly bullied and she could not get Shibasaki to step in. Ortega says veteran teacher Shibasaki was disorganized and overwhelmed, yet Shibasaki complained she wasn't getting help from the district.
In fact, documents show, Shibasaki was given plenty of help — a literary coach and access to a paid mentor. "Obviously it was not the right career for her," Ortega says.
District officials say 15 parents demanded to have their children taken out of her class. Allegations include that she failed to teach first-grade fundamentals like the difference between levers and wheels, couldn't control 6-year-olds and lost track of a small boy who vanished on her watch and made his way home on foot, unsupervised.
Shibasaki describes almost the opposite experience. She tells the Weekly the allegations were "idiotic" and driven by administrators who disliked her as a person and evaluated her "subjectively." She says administrators gave her the toughest first-graders and insufficient support, yet she concedes that expensive, paid teaching coaches repeatedly tried to help her.
She quotes a sentiment that Duffy and UTLA officials have made into something of a motto: "It's so subjective, and getting rid of teachers should never be subjective."
Perez, the Associated Administrators president, says principals need more specific training to deal with tenured teachers who should not be in the classroom, and more clout in recommending which of the new ones should not get tenure at the two-year mark.
Los Angeles' situation is in stark contrast to nearby Long Beach, where Superintendent Christopher J. Steinhauser has long required extensive vetting before granting lifelong tenure to teachers. Long Beach is substantially ahead of Los Angeles in such teacher-quality reforms — and in student achievement. "If they're not great teachers, we work to release them," says Steinhauser. "That's really important."
In Los Angeles, as reported recently in the Los Angeles Times, new teachers get tenure virtually automatically unless their principal objects. Yet the Times report showed that few principals are actively engaged in reviewing green teachers before giving them the nod for lifelong tenure — a failing Cortines says he is out to change.
President Barack Obama has begun pushing for tougher evaluations of teachers, tied to their classroom test scores, and for direct comparison of teachers with their colleagues along the same hallway. As those and other reforms aimed at teacher quality begin to find acceptance in other parts of the nation, however, it seems a stretch to imagine LAUSD, the district so big it educates one in 10 California children, joining in.
"The power of the union [and] the California Teachers Association in this state has definitely tipped the balance in favor of protecting the incompetent teacher," says Collins. Somehow, she says, "Parents and students need to know they have a voice."
Duffy disagrees with her assessment, saying, "The vast majority of teachers are doing a good job. I can't begin to tell you how many vindictive principals there are."
Retired Principal Dan Basalone would like to see one reform above all: an end to the secret negotiations between UTLA and the school district, closed to parents and the public, through which the current system for firing underperforming teachers has been crafted over the years. He points to the practice known as the dance of the lemons, the secret payouts to persuade teachers to go away, and the anonymity granted to teachers who repeatedly fail PAR retraining and mentoring.
A vastly different way to evaluate and make teachers accountable is required, he says, and it "should be negotiated publicly. All of it should be in the sunshine."
http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-11/news/lausd-s-dance-of-the-lemons/
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The 77 Percent Effect
Is the ‘Race to the Top’ program really working as intended?
Cynics have argued that the Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” (RTT) program has distracted attention from the need to address unsustainable state budgets. Such cynicism has been deemed unfashionable by Obama-administration allies, cash-starved state and local officials keen to stay in the administration’s good graces, and editorial writers eager to say nice things about our earnest education secretary, Arne Duncan. The Kumbaya chorus has even been swelled by conservative voices, including those of David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Much of this pro-RTT enthusiasm has been driven by the fact that the program has (in theory) changed the way the federal government and the states do business. We are shifting from a model driven by aid formulas toward one focused on transformation and performance — or so I’ve been told. I’ve been assured that this shift is already affecting the thinking of state governments, as evidenced by their RTT applications.
The administration has not been shy about its claims on this count. It has celebrated its self-proclaimed effort to “take on business as usual” and revolutionize the shape of federal education funding. The president has declared it his aim that “instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform.”
As a longtime advocate of using federal education dollars to support state and local reformers and not just subsidize the status quo, I have been eager to verify these happy reports. Have states indeed ditched the usual calculations based on bodies and budgetary health and begun letting reform policies determine their funding requests? After gorging on $100 billion in formula-driven stimulus aid last year — aid that yielded no reform but aimed expressly to subsidize the status quo — did states succeed at crafting reform-centric budgets?
Well, my colleague Daniel Lautzenheiser and I ran some numbers. It turns out we can figure out almost everything we need to know about how much RTT funding a state asked for if we look at only two things, neither of them related to the state’s RTT application. The first is state student enrollment, and the second is the size of a state’s reported 2010 budget shortfall. Those two figures allow us to predict with 77 percent accuracy how much money a given state requested in its RTT application.
The simple correlation between student enrollment and the size of the RTT request was an eye-popping .83 (a 1.0 would mean the numbers marched in perfect lockstep). This suggests that, whatever the ins and outs of their actual proposed reforms, states’ requests were largely a product of headcounts. Even more interesting, the correlation between the 2010 budget shortfall and the (seemingly unrelated) RTT request was a cool .63.
Missouri, looking at a $770 million budget shortfall, happened to request $743 million. Nebraska, trying to make up a $150 million shortfall, put together a proposal that seeks $123 million. Then there are the big states, which, bleeding cash, wildly disregarded the Department of Education’s guidelines for budget requests. California, eyeballing a staggering shortfall in the tens of billions, asked for $1 billion. New York, wrestling with a shortfall of more than $15 billion, asked for $831 million.
These results should lead us to question what all the hefty consultant fees and late-night grant-writing really amounted to. Moving forward, the Obama administration’s claims about the impact of RTT and the intentions of winning states ought to be met with sensible scrutiny.
— Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MzQ3YTVmOTA4ZDY4NDkwZGQ3MjY1ZmJjOTRkNDE5MzA=
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http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/texas-removes-thomas-jefferson-from-teaching-standard/19397481
March 12) -- Widely regarded as one of the most important of all the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson received a demotion of sorts Friday thanks to the Texas Board of Education.
The board voted to enact new teaching standards for history and social studies that will alter which material gets included in school textbooks. It decided to drop Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.
According to Texas Freedom Network, a group that opposes many of the changes put in place by the Board of Education, the original curriculum asked students to "explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present."
AP
The Texas Board of Education is dropping President Thomas Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.
That emphasis did not sit well with board member Cynthia Dunbar, who, during Friday's meeting, explained the rationale for changing it. "The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based," Dunbar said.
The new standard, passed at the meeting in a 10-5 vote, now reads, "Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone."
By dropping mention of revolution, and substituting figures such as Aquinas and Calvin for Jefferson, Texas Freedom Network argues, the board had chosen to embrace religious teachings over those of Jefferson, the man who coined the phrase "separation between church and state."
According to USA Today, the board also voted to strike the word "democratic" from references to the U.S. form of government, replacing it with the term "constitutional republic." Texas textbooks will contain references to "laws of nature and nature's God" in passages that discuss major political ideas.
The board decided to use the words "free enterprise" when describing the U.S. economic system rather than words such as "capitalism," "capitalist" and "free market," which it deemed to have a negative connotation.
Serving 4.7 million students, Texas accounts for a large percentage of the textbook market, and the new standards may influence what is taught in the rest of the country.
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THE latest evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest and most extensive system of vouchers and charter schools in America, came out last month, and most advocates of school choice were disheartened by the results.
The evaluation by the School Choice Demonstration Project, a national research group that matched more than 3,000 students from the choice program and from regular public schools, found that pupils in the choice program generally had “achievement growth rates that are comparable” to similar Milwaukee public-school students. This is just one of several evaluations of school choice programs that have failed to show major improvements in test scores, but the size and age of the Milwaukee program, combined with the rigor of the study, make these results hard to explain away.
So let’s not try to explain them away. Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers — measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.
It should come as no surprise. We’ve known since the landmark Coleman Report of 1966, which was based on a study of more than 570,000 American students, that the measurable differences in schools explain little about differences in test scores. The reason for the perpetual disappointment is simple: Schools control only a small part of what goes into test scores.
Cognitive ability, personality and motivation come mostly from home. What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school.
As an advocate of school choice, all I can say is thank heavens for the Milwaukee results. Here’s why: If my fellow supporters of charter schools and vouchers can finally be pushed off their obsession with test scores, maybe we can focus on the real reason that school choice is a good idea. Schools differ in what they teach and how they teach it, and parents care deeply about both, regardless of whether test scores rise.
Here’s an illustration. The day after the Milwaukee results were released, I learned that parents in the Maryland county where I live are trying to start a charter school that will offer a highly traditional curriculum long on history, science, foreign languages, classic literature, mathematics and English composition, taught with structure and discipline. This would give parents a choice radically different from the progressive curriculum used in the county’s other public schools.
I suppose that test scores might prove that such a charter school is “better” than ordinary public schools, if the test were filled with questions about things like gerunds and subjunctive clauses, the three most important events of 1776, and what Occam’s razor means. But those subjects aren’t covered by standardized reading and math tests. For this reason, I fully expect that students at such a charter school would do little better on Maryland’s standardized tests than comparably smart students in the ordinary public schools.
And yet, knowing that, I would still send my own children to that charter school in a heartbeat. They would be taught the content that I think they need to learn, in a manner that I consider appropriate.
This personal calculation is familiar to just about every parent reading these words. Our children’s education is extremely important to us, and the greater good doesn’t much enter into it — hence all the politicians who oppose vouchers but send their own children to private schools. The supporters of school choice need to make their case on the basis of that shared parental calculation, not on the red herring of test scores.
There are millions of parents out there who don’t have enough money for private school but who have thought just as sensibly and care just as much about their children’s education as affluent people do. Let’s use the money we are already spending on education in a way that gives those parents the same kind of choice that wealthy people, liberal and conservative alike, exercise right now. That should be the beginning and the end of the argument for school choice.
Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.”
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Lotta signs pointing to Illinois being the next California where budget commitments will overwhelm income streams. Here's a scary little table that shows IL's top 100 retired school admins likely have close to a billion dollars in retirement pay coming their way:
http://www.theneweditor.com/index.php?/archives/11438-You-Thought-California-State-Pensions-Were-Out-Of-Control-Wait-Until-You-See-This-Top-100-List-of-School-Administration-Pensions-From-Illinois....html
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http://reason.com/archives/2010/07/20/teachers-unions-vs-online-educ
Reason Magazine
Teachers Unions vs. Online Education
Kids live on the Internet. Why aren’t they learning online too?
Katherine Mangu-Ward from the August-September 2010 issue
I know a 3-year-old who’s a master of online multitasking. Give him an iPhone, and he’ll cheerfully chat you up while watching YouTube cartoons or playing an alphabet game. In 2010, toddlers start consuming digital information not long after they’ve started consuming solid food.
Now take that kid, tack on a handful of years, and drop him into a classroom. A child who was perfectly content with a video stream, an MP3, and a chat flowing past him is suddenly ordered to sit still, shut up, and listen while a grown-up scrawls on a blackboard and delivers a monologue. And school is even worse for the older girls down the hall. The center of their universe is on social networking and chat sites, so spending six hours a day marooned in a building with no WiFi is akin to water torture. The same pre-teen who will happily while away hours playing Scrabble with her friends on Facebook dreads each Thursday afternoon, when she will be forced to laboriously write out a list of spelling words in silence alongside two dozen peers.
During the last 30 years, the per-student cost of K-12 education has more than doubled in real dollars, with no academic improvement to show for it. Meanwhile, everything the Internet touches gets better: listening to music on iTunes, shopping for shoes at Zappos, exchanging photos on Flickr.
Even with school hours offline, kids are logging plenty of computer time. A January study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids spend an average of 7.5 hours a day in front of a screen. The knee-jerk response is to lament those lost hours and hatch schemes to pry the kids’ hands from their keyboards. But that’s the wrong approach. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: Let kids stare at a computer screen until their eyeballs fall out, but add more educational material to the mix.
A growing number of kids and their parents are figuring out ways to sneak schoolwork online. More than 1 million public school students are enrolled in online classes, up from about 50,000 a decade ago. In Florida, nearly 80,000 kids take classes in the state-sponsored Florida Virtual School. Virtual charter school companies such as K12 Inc. provide full-time online education to 70,000 students in 25 states. Hundreds of small, innovative companies are springing up, vying to combine learning with the power of the Internet. Nationwide, 17 percent of high school students report having taken an online course for school in the last year; another 12 percent say they took a class on their own time. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, co-author of Disrupting Class, a seminal 2008 book about online education, estimates that half of all high school courses in the United States will be consumed over the Internet by 2019.
But the commercial Internet has already been around for a decade and a half. As the 3-year-old with the iPhone might whine from the back seat of the minivan: Why aren’t we there yet?
School in the Sunshine State
Online education’s biggest success to date is the Florida Virtual School (FLVS). Founded in 1997, FLVS was the first public statewide online education program in the country. Founder Julie Young had snagged a $200,000 “Break the Mold” grant from the state of Florida to experiment with online learning. In the early days, as she traveled the state selling the idea to local districts, the reception was muted. “People were sitting there with arms folded and saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ ” recalls the friendly, carefully manicured Young, who had previously worked as a teacher and technology adviser in the state’s public schools.
With the election of Jeb Bush in 1998, Young found herself working under a governor with a serious interest in education reform. With Bush’s support, legislation expanding the virtual school gave the program a unique advantage: Rather than allowing school officials to be the arbiters of who gets to go online and how, the law said any Florida student who wants to take an FLVS course online must be allowed to do so. The students themselves—not preoccupied guidance counselors, budget-conscious principals, or any other gatekeepers—decided whether to give the virtual school a try.
As the Harvard education scholar Paul Peterson put it in his 2010 book Saving Schools, “Much like an Everglades alligator, Young took a quiet, underwater approach.” At a time when Gov. Bush and his cadre of education reformers were regularly butting heads with the educational establishment, Young went out of her way not to antagonize teachers unions or disparage traditional schools. “From day one, what we tried to do was design FLVS so that it was not competitive with the schools, but complementary,” she says. Her pedagogical philosophy is noncontroversial—with a few exceptions, the curriculum is typical of the stuff Florida students would get in a traditional classroom—and she is studiedly nonpolitical. The courses offered by FLVS are supplemental; the virtual school cannot grant degrees on its own. Nearly every student remains enrolled in a full-time program at a physical school. The funding formula adopted by the state takes only a fraction of the annual per-student cost from their local school, and FLVS gets paid only when students successfully complete the course.
Young doesn’t use the language of reform or revolution. Instead she talks about “doing what’s right for kids.” Yet Florida Virtual School’s model is, in its own way, revolutionary. The school employs 1,200 accredited, nonunion teachers, who are available by phone or email from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week. Kids take what they want, when they want. The academic results are more than respectable. FLVS boasts that kids in advanced placement courses—39 percent of whom are minority students—score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for students in offline public school classes. FLVS students also beat state averages in reading and math at all grade levels, with 87 percent of eighth-graders receiving at least a passing score on the state standardized test in math, compared with 60 percent statewide. Even critical studies of educational achievement in Florida’s online courses find that the results are as good as or better than state averages on virtually every measure.
Picking Fights
Not all of the major players in online education have opted for the stealthy alligator approach. K12 Inc., one of the largest private providers nationwide, doesn’t mind picking political fights. One of its founders is Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, an outspoken conservative. (He resigned from the school’s leadership in 2005 after some intemperate remarks about the alleged links between abortion, race, and crime.) While FLVS was sneaking up on the Sunshine State’s educational establishment, K12 Inc. started showing up all over the country in 2000 with a bullhorn.
Unlike FLVS, K12 provides full-time instruction. That means students from kindergarten through 12th grade can do their entire school year online. While the curriculum isn’t particularly innovative, the model is potentially far more disruptive than a program like FLVS. K12 takes children and teenagers out of school and away from traditional teacher-student relationships. The company has some partnerships with traditional public schools, but K12 primarily works by helping charter schools in states with lenient laws go virtual, accepting kids (and the money they bring with them) from all over the state.
In the zero-sum world of education dollars, that approach means that state education bureaucrats generally don’t show up at K12’s virtual door with welcoming tater tot casseroles. In 2003 Wisconsin’s Northern Ozaukee School District was experiencing declining enrollment and hoped that bringing in a virtual charter might attract students (and their per-pupil spending allocations) from around the state. This worked brilliantly, with 500 students signing up for the virtual charter school from all over the state in the program’s first year. The district and K12 split the $5,000 that came with each kid, and everyone was happy. Well, everyone except the administrators and teachers in the districts losing enrollment dollars to the experiment in online learning. The conflict exploded in January 2004 with a lawsuit brought by the teachers union and the elected state superintendent. State Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine), who heads his chamber’s education committee, accused private education companies of “profiteering off of kids.”
The result was a compromise that neutered virtual education in Wisconsin. K12 could continue to operate, but it could enroll students only from the physical district where the charter school was located—essentially stopping the Internet at the county line. And enrollment was capped at 5,250 students. For good measure, Wisconsin announced plans to create an FLVS-like state-sponsored virtual academy, which will compete with K12 on lopsided terms and, unlike in Florida, be firmly under the control of the education bureaucracy.
Unions Fight Back
The National Education Association, the country’s main teachers union, takes a hard line on virtual charters such as K12. “There also should be an absolute prohibition against the granting of charters for the purpose of home-schooling, including online charter schools that seek to provide home-schooling over the Internet,” says the organization’s official policy statement on charter schools. “Charter schools whose students are in fact home schoolers, and who may rarely if ever convene in an actual school building, disregard the important socialization aspect of public education, do not serve the public purpose of promoting a sense of community, and lend themselves too easily to the misuse of public funds and the abuse of public trust.” But analog unions can’t stave off online education for digital natives forever, and state-run virtual academies like FLVS—rather than virtual charters like K12—make it easier to control the pace of change.
Similar battles have been fought in Oregon, where the state teachers union declared last year that resisting another full-time virtual charter company, the Baltimore-based Connections Academy, would be its top priority. “You’d think among all the kids in Oregon there are some other pressing issues,” says Barbara Dreyer, CEO of Connections, which runs one Oregon school and dozens of others across the country. When 2009 began, the state legislature had already obliged the union by capping enrollment for virtual schools and mandating that kids do work under the eyes of physically present teachers. Yet union support for funding and expanding the state’s Oregon Virtual School District (which has been slow to attract enrollment) remained strong, with union members citing the existence of the government-run academy as sufficient to meet online education needs in the state.
Says Dreyer: “Many states say, ‘We hate the whole thing with these for-profit providers. We should just do it ourselves.’ But with the exception of FLVS, nobody has been able to do it. It’s complicated; it takes capital. It’s tough to do it from scratch. They don’t have expertise. It’s particularly tough in these times when there is no money.”
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Something analogous happened four years ago in Indiana, where the charter school law seemed to authorize the creation of full-time online schools. K12 launched a program and started recruiting students. Even though the legislative session was over for the year, when opponents of online education got wind of the new venture they executed some special maneuvers to insert language into the budget bill to kill the virtual charters. While a hybrid model did get up and running, it was on a far smaller scale than originally intended, leaving most of the interested parents and kids out in the cold. This year, with the demand for online education still growing, the union supported the creation of a 200-person pilot program for the state education department to run its own virtual academy.
In its 2010 legislative program, the Indiana State Teachers Association claims to support virtual schools. That is, as long as the programs adhere to nearly all of the criteria that define traditional schools, including class size, seat time, teacher licensing, grading mechanisms, and the physical location and conditions for testing. They can’t open their programs to homeschooled kids, and they can’t spend more than 5 percent of their budgets on administrative costs.
Teachers unions, consistently among the biggest donors to U.S. election campaigns, are incredibly powerful. The National Education Association can buy and sell elections, but a continuous flow of membership dues will be tougher to come by if online education blooms.
Make New Friends
Politics aren’t the only reason online education is coming to the masses at the speed of a 14k modem. Cultural resistance is strong as well. Parents and politicians fret about the consequences of creating a nation of lonely nerds with Google tans.
Socialization looms large in discussions of online education, but the worriers may be missing the point. For one thing, kids are already doing much of their socializing on their screens. That hasn’t brought sports, clubs, summer camp, or neighborhood activities to an end, and neither will online education.
More important, it’s not clear that the kind of socialization we’re currently offering kids in schools is doing them any favors. Even in schools where the quality of education is decent, enthusiastically partaking in it can make you a mockable nerd, even a target for daily brutalization. The problem is worse among minority populations at large urban schools. Smart black kids across America are choosing not to speak up in class every day, even when they know the right answer, because it’s not worth the social suicide. A large body of social scientific literature investigates this problem, beginning with Signithia Forham’s seminal 1986 paper “Black Students’ School Success: Coping With the ‘Burden of “Acting White.” ’ ” The reasons for the problem remain a topic of heated debate, but the problem itself is well-established: Surveys consistently show that black students worry more than white students that their peers will criticize their academic success.
While the smartest kids face one set of troubles, the slower kids in the same classes have problems of their own, mutely letting lessons roll by because they’re afraid of asking a question and being called stupid. Learning online in the morning and then heading out to play in the park in the afternoons could be a much better alternative for both kinds of kids.
The real issue here isn’t socialization but something else. If there is one thing that nearly all American parents have in common, it is the paralyzing fear that they might have to figure out what to do with their children all day, every day, for 12 long years. Michael Horn, one of the co-authors of Disrupting Class, estimates that the number of kids who might learn full time at home tops out at 5 million, a figure based on how many live in family structures that allow for all-day adult supervision. That leaves more than 90 percent of the nation’s 55 million school-age children in need of someplace to go during the day.
The Future of Online Education
One promising idea is a hybrid approach, where kids get the socialization and adult supervision of a shared physical space but consume much of their actual instruction online. Of the million kids already taking classes online, some are just logging in from their bedrooms, but others are taking courses on computers in community centers or gyms or heading out to the strip-mall outposts of private tutoring companies.
Such hybrids are springing up around the country. Rocketship Education in San Jose, California, brings at-risk elementary students together in a safe, colorful, trailer-like modular space, with a small staff to keep an eye on the kids while they do lessons online. Dropout recovery programs such as AdvancePath Academics catch kids who have fallen out of the system. Some of these programs, in which the content is administered primarily online, give kids physical spaces to learn in shopping malls. Kids in mentoring programs such as Group Excellence are offered a choice: they can opt for after-school tutoring in a physical space with free pizza, or take advantage of 24-hour support to do the same work on an iPhone, netbook, desktop, or even a Nintendo, whenever they want.
State governments spend between $10,000 and $15,000 annually on each of the nation’s 55 million school kids, making primary and secondary education a $1 trillion market. Under ordinary circumstances, that kind of money attracts entrepreneurs. But the uncertainties of politics, the powerful opposition of the teachers unions, and the astonishing technological backwardness of the education establishment discourage would-be entrepreneurs and, perhaps more importantly, potential investors.
In the 2010 annual letter from his charitable foundation—the biggest in the United States, with a $33 billion endowment—Bill Gates listed online education as one of his top priorities. “Online learning can be more than lectures,” he wrote. “Another element involves presenting information in an interactive form, which can be used to find out what a student knows and doesn’t know.” Hundreds of smaller contenders are proliferating, trying to figure out ways to exploit the new medium and answer concerns about what a nation of online learners might look like. Carnegie Learning uses artificial intelligence techniques to customize math learning to the individual. The Online School for Girls creates and administers advanced courses geared to female learning styles. The list is as large and diverse as the iPhone app store and growing every day.
Internet access isn’t a barrier anymore. The digital divide has essentially closed. A 2009 Pew Research Center report found that 93 percent of Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. Computers are cheap, and they’re getting cheaper every day. Textbooks are expensive, and they always have been. There’s a point not too far off where the price of a decent laptop and the price of a single hardback biology textbook will converge. Books full of nonhyperlinked text already must seem like a cruel joke to the congenitally connected. The virtual charter school company Connections Academy supplies its 20,000 full-time students with computers as part of the package.
Adults who weren’t weaned on broadband find the beeps and boops of their computers distracting, but distractions from the computers aren’t a problem for kids. Slow brain death from data deficit while they sit still, eyes forward, listening to a one-dimensional lecture that’s going too slowly, too quickly, or in the wrong direction altogether is a much more serious threat.
Failing for Success
From the perspective of education reformers and policy wonks, beaten down by a decades-long war of attrition, online education has swept onto the scene with astonishing speed. Paul Peterson, the Harvard education scholar, calls the rate at which the online education sector has grown “breathtaking.” But his private-sector counterpart Tom Vander Ark—who helped found the country’s first K–12 online school in 1995, served as the executive director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and now runs a private equity fund focused on education—has a different view. “Coming from the business world, I thought this would all happen fast,” he says. “It’s frustrating that 15 years later online learning is just beginning to mature.”
Until recently, virtual schools have been funded by state education budgets. Now states are increasingly fishing for federal dollars. Sixteen states included an online education component this year when requesting funds from Race to the Top, a federal grant program launched under George W. Bush and expanded under Barack Obama that was designed to bribe states to push toward greater teacher accountability and competition. The first round of funding was awarded in April, and while the inclusion of online education in several of the winning proposals is encouraging, the grants heavily favor top-down, state-run online academies over virtual charters and other bottom-up options.
Vander Ark calls the online component of the Race to the Top finalists’ plans “lame.” On his blog, he explains: “Given less than optimal policy environments, state v-schools can and do play an important role in supporting blended environments and online options.” But “we’re a generation behind where we should be in terms of online tools, platforms and options—a state government caused market failure. Where competition is welcomed, we’ll see innovation.”
The existing offerings are making life better for hundreds of thousands of kids. But we’re a long way from widespread access to genuinely innovative educational practices. Only 28 states allow full-time online programs right now. If you’re a kid who lives in New York, you don’t have access to any public online programs. In Virginia you have online A.P. courses, but nothing full time. If you’re in California, you have access to full-time programs but not supplemental ones, unless you happen to live in a district that made an independent investment in online learning.
We can’t let state legislatures and federal grant programs pick winners. We can’t let teachers unions allow only one version of online education to squeak by. But if online learning keeps growing, when that 3-year-old with the iPhone graduates from high school in 2025, education will be virtually unrecognizable, and thank goodness for that.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (kmw@reason.com) is a senior editor at reason.
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Grigori Rasputin Bailout
Posted by Neal McCluskey
Sending billions of federal taxpayer dollars to teachers and other public school employees is the bailout that just won’t die. It’s been sliced, shot up in a firefight between Democrats, and even had a battle with food stamps, but it just can’t be killed!
Now, let’s be clear: This is not some wonderful crusade all about helping ”the children.” It is pure political evil, a naked ploy to appease teachers’ unions and other public school employees that Democrats need motivated for the mid-term elections. It has to be, because the data are crystal clear: We’ve been adding staff by the truckload for decades without improving achievement one bit. Since 1970 (see the charts below) public school employment has increased 10 times faster than enrollment, while test scores have stagnated.
(http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/wp-content/uploads/coulson-achievement-21.jpg)
(http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/wp-content/uploads/coulsonmccluskey0805101.jpg)
But suppose there were some rational reason to believe that we need to keep staffing levels sky-high despite getting no value for it. Lots of teachers’ jobs could be saved without a bailout if unions would just accept pay concessions like millions of the Americans who fund their salaries. But all too often, they won’t.
Sadly, this is all just part of the one education race that Washington is always running, and it absolutely isn’t to the top. It is the incessant race to buy votes. And guess what? Despite its reputation even among some conservatives, the Obama administration, just like Congress, is running this race at record speeds.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/08/05/grigori-rasputin-bailout/
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What Part of “Nonrepresentative” Don’t Profit-Haters Get?
Posted by Neal McCluskey
For the last few days, for-profit colleges and universities have been suffering an even worse hammering than usual, both in the media and their pocketbooks. The proximate cause: a GAO report released Wednesday that has been portrayed as revealing “systemic” and “pervasive” fraud — and otherwise just seamy behavior — by the for-profit sector.
No doubt there is some bad stuff going on in proprietary postsecondary education. But the assault on for-profits reeks of political bullying of the unpopular kid — the kid who’s just different — as well as the never-ending Washington demonization of anyone who honestly pursues a profit. The waving of the bloody GAO report is case-in-point, and one need look no further than the following statement contained on the report’s very first page:
Results of the undercover tests and tuition comparisons cannot be projected to all for-profit colleges.
You mean, GAO investigators went to 15 non-randomly selected schools in six states and Washington, DC, and the results cannot be construed to be representative of the whole sector? And the GAO also, apparently, meant it when it wrote on page two of the report that “we investigated a nonrepresentative selection” of schools? But, then, how could Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, have stated in a show-trial hearing that “GAO’s findings make it disturbingly clear that abuses in for-profit recruiting are not limited to a few rogue recruiters or even a few schools with lax oversight”?
Oh, right: Truth doesn’t matter to Harkin — only scoring political points. That not only explains how Harkin could say such a thing, but why he has targeted for-profits rather than seeking truth and purity in all sectors of higher education, including the coolest of the cool kids, public colleges. With dismal program completion rates of their own, and their imposition of huge burdens on taxpayers, you’d think they’d be worth some investigating, too.
I encourage you to read the GAO report, and you’ll see that it in no way supports a blanket condemnation of for-profit higher ed. And it’s not just because its findings can in no reasonable way be extrapolated to the whole of proprietary schooling. It’s also because many of the supposedly terrible things it discovers, while perhaps distasteful, are hardly abhorent, such as telling prospective students that they ”can” — not “will” — earn a lot of money in a profession even if that amount is well above the average. And then there’s the report’s worthless comparisons of tuition at for-profit and nearby public instituions. Once again: public colleges are heavily subsidized by taxpayers, so of course their tuition is lower. And these comparisons were also not randomly selected.
After you’ve read the GAO report, you should take in a new paper from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, For-Profit Higher Education: Growth, Innovation and Regulation. It might be a bit too fond of the for-profit sector, which like all of higher education lives far too much off the sweat of taxpayers, but it furnishes lots of terrific data and insights about proprietary higher ed to balance out the ongoing truth-eschewing assaults the sector keeps on suffering.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/08/06/what-part-of-nonrepresentative-dont-profit-haters-get/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Cato-at-liberty+%28Cato+at+Liberty%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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The Los Angeles Times crunched a bunch of numbers on standardized test performance over the last seven years to gauge the relative effectiveness of various teachers in the city. Then it published a summary of the results, noting that there is a huge gap between the gains shown by kids in classrooms with a good teacher and those right down the hall suffering under a bad teacher. Obvious, as far as it goes. Interestingly, they also found that the variation between teachers was more important than the variation between schools.
But the Los Angeles Times also promised to publish a bunch more stories based on the teacher quality data, and they say they're going to make their database public. Naturally, the union is now calling for a boycott of the paper by its 40,000 members. But here's the part that really kills:
The district has had the ability to analyze the differences among teachers for years but opted not to do so, in large part because of anticipated union resistance, The Times found.
Lots more on teachers unions here.
http://reason.com/blog/2010/08/16/la-times-we-did-the-math-and-s
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Long piece with lots of tables and formatting examining Florida's success in improving the education for underachievers.
Closing the Racial Achievement Gap: Learning from Florida’s Reforms
Published on September 17, 2010 by Matthew Ladner, Ph.D. and Lindsey Burke BACKGROUNDER #2468
Abstract: An education gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers is something to which most Americans have become accustomed. But this racial division of education—and hence of prospects for the future— is nothing less than tragic. The good news is that the racial divide in learning is a problem that can be fixed. Of course, it can only be fixed if education reform is approached in a common sense and innovative way. Continuing to repeat the largely failed national policies and ever-increasing spending of the past decades is surely not commonsense. One state, Florida, has demonstrated that meaningful academic improvement—for students of all races and economic backgrounds—is possible. In 1999, Florida enacted far-reaching K–12 education reform that includes public and private school choice, charter schools, virtual education, performance-based pay for teachers, grading of schools and districts, annual tests, curbing social promotion, and alternative teacher certification. As a result of parental choice, higher standards, accountability, and flexibility, Florida’s Hispanic students are now outperforming or tied with the overall average for all students in 31 states. It is vital that national and state policymakers take the lessons of Florida’s success to heart. The future of millions of American children depends on it.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/09/Closing-the-Racial-Achievement-Gap-Learning-from-Floridas-Reforms
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For those of us lacking a spare hour and for those of us needing a bit more of a tease to invest an hour, would you be so kind as to provide a bit more of a summary? :-)
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2010/12/shut-out.html
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Shut Out
In the past, we're written at length about the looming recruiting crisis facing the U.S. military. Simply stated, too many of those in the prime demographic group targeted for enlistment (18-25 year-olds) don't quality for military service, for reasons ranging from obesity and other medical issues, to academic problems and past run-ins with the law. By some estimates, only 28% of young Americans in the prime enlistment cohort actually qualify for military service (emphasis ours).
The cognitive short-comings of potential enlistees represent a particular concern. In a high-tech military, you simply can't train someone on high tech weapons or information systems when they lack basic academic skills. And the problem seems to be growing worse, according to a new report by the Education Trust. Entitled Shut Out of the Military, the study analyzes five years of test scores from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Pouring over reams of data, researcher Christina Theokas discovered that one in five candidates who took the ASVAB failed to achieve the minimum score required to enter the U.S. Army.
At this point, some clarification is in order. The ASVAB, as its name implies, measures aptitude in a variety of areas, helping the military determine which recruits have skills that might be useful in specific jobs. Scores from the four academic sections of the ASVAB generate the AFQT score, which provides an overall measure of cognitive ability. It's the AFQT score that determines if a recruit gets in, and the type of technical training he or she qualifies for in their respective branch of service.
In terms of qualifying scores on the AFQT, each branch of the military has its own standards (listed below). The Army has the lowest; the Coast Guard has the highest.
Minimum Required AFQT Score by Service Branch
Army 31
Marine Corps 32
Navy 35
Air Force 40
Coast Guard 45
We should also note that the AFQT is based on a 100-point scale. So, a prospective recruit can score below 50% and still meet cognitive standards for enlistment in any branch of the military--assuming they don't have other disqualifying issues. Indeed, none of the 350,000 young people in the study sample had those problems, so these young men (and women) were viewed as prime enlistment candidates--until some of them took the ASVAB.
It's a damning indictment of America's education system when 23% of those taking the ASVAB couldn't achieve a passing score for any branch of the military. And, as you dig into Ms. Theokas's work, the news grows steadily worse. Among her findings:
-- Everyone in the sample group had a high school diploma, and all graduated within three years of the time they sat for the ASVAB. So, the notion that these young people had been out of school for an extended period (and lost much of what they learned) really doesn't apply.
-- Failure rates for Hispanic and African-American youngsters were significantly higher than their white peers. Nationally, twenty-nine percent of Hispanics who took the test could not meet Army standards, while 39% of African-Americans failed to achieve the minimum score.
-- Ineligibility rates vary greatly from state-to-state. In Hawaii and Mississippi, the number of test-takers who couldn't meet minimum standards approaches 40%, and it's over 30% in Washington, D.C. and Louisiana. Figures for those southern states are hardly surprising, given long-standing problems with the education systems in Louisiana and Mississippi. But Hawaii ranks 28th in per-pupil spending ($7253 per year) and Washington D.C. spends more per child ($13,187) than any other state, federal district or territory. So the dismal AFQT scores for graduates of the D.C. system are not the result of under-funded schools. You could make a similar case for Hawaii, though many educators in that state would disagree.
-- High-school grads who can't pass the AFQT are equally unprepared for the civilian job market.
Another fact worth remembering: these are not the ASVAB takers of decades past, when local schools (in cooperation with military recruiters) would administer the test to the entire senior class. Under that approach, some students earned rock-bottom scores, because they had no interest in joining the military and didn't care about the results.
But all of the participants in this study took the exam at an armed forces recruiting station. In other words, these individuals were already disposed towards military service by their prior meeting(s) with recruiters and willingness to sit for the ASVAB.
So, their difficulties on the entrance exam represents a serious loss, both for the armed forces and society as a whole. The military impact is disturbing, even if you only consider the recruiting process. Based on the study results, we lost upwards of 80,000 potential recruits because they couldn't achieve minimum scores on the AFQT. That represents the Army's active-duty recruiting quota for one year, plus 10,000 additional recruits.
And because of high failure rates on the ASVAB/AFQT, the Army (along with the rest of the military) must spend more effort to find qualified volunteers in the 18-25 cohort, with additional costs for recruiting, marketing, advertising, evaluation and related functions. In an era of decreased resources for defense, that money might be better spent on new weapon systems, or higher bonuses for recruits who have already demonstrated their value to the military.
From a societal perspective, it means that the military is no longer a potential gateway to the middle class for thousands of lower-income youngsters. To be fair, social advancement has never been--nor should it ever be--a primary function for the armed forces. But it is also irrefutable that hundreds of thousands of lower-income whites, Hispanics and African-Americans have used their military training (and service) to acquire skills and expertise that led to a higher standard of living, more education and other opportunities. Without the required AFQT score, that option is effectively closed.
To its credit, the education trust doesn't suggest any dilution of the ASVAB. The test (and the AFQT score) are proven indicators of applicant skills and their cognitive abilities--crucial measurements in determining who should serve, and in what capacity. Clearly, the problem isn't with the test.
Additionally, the study's authors do not call for the military to lower its standards. Talk to any battalion, squadron or brigade commander (and their senior enlisted members) and they'll tell you: the armed forces simply can't train and inculcate soldiers, Marines, sailors or airmen who score below 30 on the AFQT. As commanders and senior NCOs, they need more junior troops who can master complex tasks quickly and act with initiative. From experience, they know that young enlisted members with lower AFQT scores will need more remedial training and supervision, placing another strain on the unit and its resources.
The real solution--obviously--lies with improving our educational system. But beyond suggestions for more spending, you won't find many politicians proposing serious reform programs. That's because it's much easier to promise more money, instead of tackling the tough issues like poor teachers, inadequate curricula, out-of-control students, timid administrators and too-powerful education unions, to name a few. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is one of the few trying to buck the education establishment, in order to save money and improve student performance. Unfortunately, Governor Christie's campaign is the exception and not the rule.
We also find it rather curious that first lady Michelle Obama has failed to weigh in on this matter. Earlier this year, she (correctly) described the nation's childhood obesity epidemic as a threat to national security, since young people who are grossly overweight are ineligible for military service. But we lose far more recruits to the AFQT issue and (so far) the White House has been silent. Wouldn't want to offend all those NEA members who write checks for Democratic politicians and vote in lock-step for the party's candidates.
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Additionally, this recruiting issue may also be affected by the recent repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." A landmark Heritage Foundation Study (conducted five years ago), found that 29 states, mostly in the south, Midwest and west, were over-represented among military recruits. At that time, the states with the highest proportional enlistment rates (compared to the general population) were: Montana, Texas, Wyoming, Alaska and Oklahoma.
All are deeply red, located in flyover country (a.k.a. "Jesusland"), more closely identified with traditional American values, including opposition to homosexuality. With DADT now gone, will young people from those states (and other rural regions) still be willing to sign up in required numbers to sustain current force levels? Or should the recruiters expand their efforts in places like San Francisco and New York City, which have, in recent years, supplied small numbers of recruits in relation to their overall population. Call it another, unintended consequence of repealing DADT.
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Well how is it ILLEGAL aliens are serving in out military?
Isn't that one of the scams of the DREAM law?
"Well if they are good enough to risk their lives for this country than don't they deserve citizenship?"
First question I have yet to hear one talking head ask is, what in the hell are people who are in this country illegally doing serving in our military?
The foreign invaders keep coming with no control in sight.
Mark my words:
Bamster if push comes to shove will grant amnesty. I don't know when but he will.
If far as I am concerned Kalifornia, you are on your own. You made your bed now lie in it.
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To enlist in the military, one must either be a US citizen, a permanent resident alien, or under a program for needed foreign language skills, a legal non resident alien. Normally, an illegal alien cannot lawfully enlist in the military.
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http://www.indypendent.org/2010/09/09/education-rediscovered/
Education Rediscovered
The reasons why public education is suddenly an issue despite years of neglect by politicians and the media are straightforward. In this depressed economy credentials seem to have lost their advantage. Many parents and politicians claim schools have failed to deliver what students need. There is a widespread perception that illiteracy is rising, meaning, for one, that fewer people can read complex texts. And the results of No Child Left Behind with its draconian high-stakes standardized testing have been disappointing, to say the least.
Mainstream educators and commentators warn that the United States, once a leader among advanced capitalist societies in graduation rates, has fallen to 12th place and is still tumbling. Many are concerned that education has become a national security issue. Others point out that the engines of the global economy are math and science and this country is turning out fewer trained physicists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians and computer scientists.
Some trumpet as solutions the usual neoliberal bromides — charter schools and for-profit private schools at all education levels. But, according to numerous studies, these schools rarely live up to the hype. Others have rejected the long American experiment with progressive education, in which students are the subjects of schooling, not just its object. In the 1980s, school authorities decided that kids needed more discipline, more time in school and more homework. The latest brilliant policy concept is to reward or punish teachers for their students’ performance.
Teachers unions have soundly rejected this particular “solution,” calling it a blatant attack on teacher professionalism and living standards. In a time of severe cuts in school funding, however, many locals of both major national teacher unions have meekly accepted layoffs, increased class sizes and performance criteria. Above all, neither the unions nor educational authorities have offered serious alternatives to the conservative-led drive toward neoliberal privatization. And the left seems content to roll out the usual proposals: more money for schools, wider access for poor and working-class students of color to higher education and an end to privatization.
While these reforms are necessary, they are hardly sufficient. The right wants to keep kids’ noses to the grindstone by testing them into submission, hand off schools to the for-profit sector and throw unworthy, disruptive kids out of school or at least relegate them to “special education,” the only thriving sector in K–12.
Most liberals lack a similarly direct and powerful program. They may praise the centrality of critical thinking, a legacy of the progressive era, but they mainly offer band-aids. That’s because liberals have accepted the dominant framework that education, or more accurately, schooling should serve the economy by training students to take their respective places in the world of work.
Not true. What radicals should offer handwringing liberals is what radicals do best: go to the root of things. Education should be a preparation for life, especially helping kids become active in determining the conditions that most affect them.
........ (there is more in the link)
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Bigdog,
Why is it Obama sends his kids to an expensive private school, rather than DC's public schools? Why do other NEA funded politicians choose to do the same?
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GM, I am not sure why you are asking me that question based on the article I posted.
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"Some trumpet as solutions the usual neoliberal bromides — charter schools and for-profit private schools at all education levels. But, according to numerous studies, these schools rarely live up to the hype."
**Do you agree with this?
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Big Dog:
Glad to have you with us again.
I read the article in its entirety and if I understand it correctly it says , , , I'm not sure what. Is the idea that we start children too soon and are too rigorous for them? Is it that not enough Marxist class consciousness and deconstructionism is taught? Or is it, as GM laconically queries, that there is too much private sector competition for the public sector?
FWIW, my sense of things is that:
a) a large % of the problem is due to the decline of the American family. Much of this is due in my opinion, to feminist ideology that women whould leave their children to be raised by others as they work. Most of the declines we see today in the family track strongly with the movement of women into the workforce;
b) a large % of the problem is due to the progressive claptrap being taught;
c) in a related vein, teacher unions also play a strong role in all this.
Anyway, I happened to come to this thread at the moment to post the following POTH article on Chinese education, which may be tangentially relevant to what you post.
Marc
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By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: December 29, 2010
SHANGHAI — In Li Zhen’s ninth-grade mathematics class here last week, the morning drill was geometry. Students at the middle school affiliated with Jing’An Teachers’ College were asked to explain the relative size of geometric shapes by using Euclid’s theorem of parallelograms.
Enlarge This Image
Ryan Pyle for The New York Times
A teacher instructed students in class at the middle school associated with Jing’An Teachers’ College in central Shanghai.
“Who in this class can tell me how to demonstrate two lines are parallel without using a proportional segment?” Ms. Li called out to about 40 students seated in a cramped classroom.
One by one, a series of students at this medium-size public school raised their hands. When Ms. Li called on them, they each stood politely by their desks and usually answered correctly. They returned to their seats only when she told them to sit down.
Educators say this disciplined approach helps explain the announcement this month that 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai outperformed students from about 65 countries on an international standardized test that measured math, science and reading competency.
American students came in between 15th and 31st place in the three categories. France and Britain also fared poorly.
Experts said comparing scores from countries and cities of different sizes is complicated. They also said that the Shanghai scores were not representative of China, since this fast-growing city of 20 million is relatively affluent. Still, they were impressed by the high scores from students in Shanghai.
The results were seen as another sign of China’s growing competitiveness. The United States rankings are a “wake-up call,” said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education.
Although it was the first time China had taken part in the test, which was administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, the results bolstered this country’s reputation for producing students with strong math and science skills.
Many educators were also surprised by the city’s strong reading scores, which measured students’ proficiency in their native Chinese.
The Shanghai students performed well, experts say, for the same reason students from other parts of Asia — including South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong — do: Their education systems are steeped in discipline, rote learning and obsessive test preparation.
Public school students in Shanghai often remain at school until 4 p.m., watch very little television and are restricted by Chinese law from working before the age of 16.
“Very rarely do children in other countries receive academic training as intensive as our children do,” said Sun Baohong, an authority on education at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. “So if the test is on math and science, there’s no doubt Chinese students will win the competition.”
But many educators say China’s strength in education is also a weakness. The nation’s education system is too test-oriented, schools here stifle creativity and parental pressures often deprive children of the joys of childhood, they say.
“These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests,” Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal at Peking University High School in Beijing, wrote in an opinion article published in The Wall Street Journal shortly after the test results were announced. “For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.”
In an interview, Mr. Jiang said Chinese schools emphasized testing too much, and produced students who lacked curiosity and the ability to think critically or independently.
“It creates very narrow-minded students,” he said. “But what China needs now is entrepreneurs and innovators.”
This is a common complaint in China. Educators say an emphasis on standardized tests is partly to blame for the shortage of innovative start-ups in China. And executives at global companies operating here say they have difficulty finding middle managers who can think creatively and solve problems.
In many ways, the system is a reflection of China’s Confucianist past. Children are expected to honor and respect their parents and teachers.
“Discipline is rarely a problem,” said Ding Yi, vice principal at the middle school affiliated with Jing’An Teachers’ College. “The biggest challenge is a student who chronically fails to do his homework.”
While the quality of schools varies greatly in China (rural schools often lack sufficient money, and dropout rates can be high), schools in major cities typically produce students with strong math and science skills.
Shanghai is believed to have the nation’s best school system, and many students here gain admission to America’s most selective colleges and universities.
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Page 2 of 2)
In Shanghai, teachers are required to have a teaching certificate and to undergo a minimum of 240 hours of training; higher-level teachers can be required to have up to 540 hours of training. There is a system of incentives and merit pay, just like the systems in some parts of the United States.
“Within a teacher’s salary package, 70 percent is basic salary,” said Xiong Bingqi, a professor of education at Shanghai Jiaotong University. “The other 30 percent is called performance salary.”
Still, teacher salaries are modest, about $750 a month before bonuses and allowances — far less than what accountants, lawyers or other professionals earn.
While Shanghai schools are renowned for their test preparation skills, administrators here are trying to broaden the curriculums and extend more freedom to local districts. The Jing’An school, one of about 150 schools in Shanghai that took part in the international test, was created 12 years ago to raise standards in an area known for failing schools.
The principal, Zhang Renli, created an experimental school that put less emphasis on math and allows children more free time to play and experiment. The school holds a weekly talent show, for example.
The five-story school building, which houses Grades eight and nine in a central district of Shanghai, is rather nondescript. Students wear rumpled school uniforms, classrooms are crowded and lunch is bused in every afternoon. But the school, which operates from 8:20 a.m. to 4 p.m. on most days, is considered one of the city’s best middle schools.
In Shanghai, most students begin studying English in first grade. Many middle school students attend extra-credit courses after school or on Saturdays. A student at Jing’An, Zhou Han, 14, said she entered writing and speech-making competitions and studied the erhu, a Chinese classical instrument. She also has a math tutor.
“I’m not really good at math,” she said. “At first, my parents wanted me to take it, but now I want to do it.”
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Woof,
All I can say on early childhood education is that when my wife and I put our daughter on the big yellow bus for the first time, she looked incredibly tiny climbing those steps to get in. :cry:
P.C.
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"Some trumpet as solutions the usual neoliberal bromides — charter schools and for-profit private schools at all education levels. But, according to numerous studies, these schools rarely live up to the hype."
**Do you agree with this?
Very few things live up to the hype.
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I thought the crux of the article was the lack of philosophy in the class room. In particular, the lack of teaching critical thinking, according to the author, has led to a perilous situation in the American educational system.
GM (and others), I post articles that I think are interesting, thought provoking, worthwhile reading, or worthy of discussion. I don't necessarily agree with any, or all, of the author's contentions, ideas, or viewpoints. Not everything is a personal attack, an attack, personal, or worth getting bent of shape about.
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I'm not bent out of shape. Just trying to clarify your position relative to the article you posted.
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May I interject that in my experience it is often helpful to preface a post, particularly one with which one may disagree in part or whole, with some sort of comments as to why one is posting it. Answering posts with articles without attendant explanation/context/commentary is often easily misunderstood as well.
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**When we look at global competition in the 21st century, I think it's crucial we examine our educational system, from pre-K to higher ed. I think what we are doing now isn't up to the task for creating a competitive American population.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/surfeits-of-certitude/28226
On the same page of the Times as Dr. Cohen’s op-ed, columnist Nicholas Kristof calls for cuts in American military spending. At one point in his argument he cites the since-abandoned expensive military bases the U.S. kept in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War. He tries to drive the lesson home with a rhetorical question, “Wouldn’t our money have been better spent helping American kids get a college education?” I have nothing to say here one way or the other about military bases or defense spending, but I don’t think Kristof’s invocation of educational spending as the wholesome alternative works anymore—at least to the degree he seems to suppose.
The indubitable virtue of increased public spending on higher education has become another theory, like global warming, that has a divided life. As the general public grows more and more skeptical about it, the people society pays to be skeptical—professors and journalists—by and large continue to see nothing amiss.
Over the last year, numerous observers have been calling attention to an emerging higher education “bubble,” likened to the real estate bubble, in which the public awakens to find that it has been paying way too much for something on the mistaken assumption that the high prices would be covered by an even higher return. Housing prices, however, peaked and then rapidly descended, leaving many people with mortgages higher than the resale values of their homes. As for higher education, it has been clear for a while that many students pay tuition and pile on debt far in excess of what their college degrees are likely to bring them by way of augmented lifetime earnings. The situation has been dramatized by a few extreme cases, such as Kelli Space, the sociology major who graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with $200,000 in debt in the form of student loans. Recently, my fellow Innovations blogger Richard Vedder has unearthed Department of Labor statistics that are dispositive: 60 percent of the growth in college graduates from 1992 to 2008 ended up working in low-skill jobs, the kind of jobs for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics regards a college degree as irrelevant.
Like global warming, the topic is intrinsically complex, though probably nowhere near as imponderable as the dynamics of heat transfer in the atmosphere. Clearly having a degree from the right college in the right field can translate (on average) into a larger premium in lifetime earnings. For many students, however, a college experience can end in no degree and a substantial debt burden. And many others graduate having learned little, possessed of a credential that carries little weight in the job market and yet still saddled with student loans that will take decades to pay off. These days, in any given week one can find half a dozen articles decrying this situation. (This week, for example, I’d include in the count Neal McCluskey from the Cato Institute, “Hurrah for ‘Draconian’ Education Cuts!”; Hans Bader from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “Time for Big Cuts in Education Spending;” and Katherine Mangu-Ward writing in Reason, “Easy Money For College Can Really Mess You Up, Man.”)
Higher education’s response? Generally, if the topic is acknowledged at all, it is done so in scorn for the philistines who would reduce the “value” of a college degree to the job prospects and earnings of graduates. Never mind that higher education has been busy selling itself to the public in precisely those terms for the last fifty years and that the official position of the Obama administration is that our “national competitiveness” depends on a huge expansion in the number of young people who earn college degrees.
But I’m ready to concede the point. Higher education should be about more than gaining a credential that gives one a leg up in the marketplace. But if we are going to re-focus the debate on the non-utilitarian substance of higher learning—on the transmission of disciplined intellectual inquiry, on developing civilized discernment, on aspiration for genuinely higher knowledge—we had better be prepared to rethink our national preoccupation with mass higher education. Judged by those standards, contemporary American undergraduate education as a whole is a colossal failure.
Which is it? Do we want to run a mass credentialing service that the public increasingly views as an expensive con? Or do we want to engage in rigorous higher education as something that has intrinsic value, but which our current system is ill-suited to provide?
There may be clear-cut answers to these questions, deflected in the winds high over the Tien Shan and Altai Mountains, reflected in the glare of Siberian snowfields, and twisted in the vacillations of the jet stream. But I’m not sure. I do know that when I encounter the offhand assurance of those who simply assume that more and more college degrees at greater and greater and greater public expense are unquestionably a good thing, I get a chill.
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http://www.openmarket.org/2010/12/26/time-for-big-cuts-in-education-spending/
Time for Big Cuts in Education Spending?
**I say yes!
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http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/college-censors-get-ready-to-open-your-wallets/?singlepage=true
College Censors, Get Ready to Open Your Wallets
If you can't appeal to a public official's sense of responsibility towards the Constitution, appealing to their self-interest is the next best option.
December 28, 2010 - by Robert Shibley
There are 296 American public officials at grave risk of being personally sued for civil rights violations. The names of those who may soon be paying out of pocket for civil damages include some of America’s most respected citizens, who every day manage multi-million dollar budgets and massive numbers of government employees with little oversight and even less accountability. Can you guess who they are?
They are the presidents of many of America’s largest and most prestigious public colleges and universities.
It may not occur to many Americans that the president of a public university is, in many ways, a government employee like any other. Granted, they tend to wear fancy suits, live in mansions, and sometimes even have what amount to private jets for their own personal use, but when it comes to the Constitution, they are legally bound to respect it just as much as your local sewer district commissioner.
Unfortunately, too many of them don’t seem to have gotten the memo about their obligations under the Bill of Rights. So over Christmas week, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), where I work, sent it to them.
In a letter to 296 public college and university presidents and general counsel, FIRE warned that the law is increasingly clear that speech codes at public universities are unconstitutional and that they risk being held personally liable for violating the free speech rights of their students if they continue to maintain policies censoring speech. That goes for all of their administrative employees as well, from deans and provosts to lower-level student affairs officials.
The 296 college administrations that received the letter consist of all of the schools deemed to have “red-light” and “yellow-light” speech codes by FIRE’s latest report on campus speech restrictions: Spotlight on Speech Codes 2011. This fifth edition of the annual report reveals that speech codes on public campuses are slowly declining in number. Three years ago, 79 percent of public colleges had red-light speech codes, compared to “only” 67 percent today. However, it also revealed that new threats to free speech are on the horizon thanks to proposed “anti-bullying” laws like that introduced in Congress by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ).
The problem is easily fixable if administrators have the will to respect the law. Earlier this year, the University of Virginia eliminated all of its speech codes in a matter of months. But UVa is, unfortunately, the honorable exception to the rule. At this rate, our taxpayer-funded colleges and universities will have manged to get on the right side of the Constitution (sort of; yellow-light schools still have significant speech problems) by the year 2027. Perhaps whatever university starts up on the Mars colony will actually respect the Bill of Rights!
Thankfully, there is a way to speed up this process. It’s called “piercing qualified immunity,” and it’s what FIRE’s letter to public university administrators is mainly about. Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that protects government officials from personal liability for monetary damages for violating constitutional rights if their actions do not violate “clearly established law” of which a reasonable person in their position would have known. And it’s more clearly established than ever, especially in light of a recent decision from the Third Circuit in McCauley v. University of the Virgin Islands, that campus speech codes that ban speech for being “offensive,” for example, are not legal.
Nevertheless, courts are pretty generous about granting qualified immunity, even when universities do something clearly insane — like punishing a student for quietly reading a book. Most people don’t even consider trying to get administrative malefactors to pay out of their own pockets for their blatant censorship.
But this is changing. This year, for the first time in FIRE’s memory, a (former) university president has been held personally liable for violating the constitutional rights of a student. Ronald Zaccari, then president of Valdosta State University in Georgia, summarily expelled student Hayden Barnes after he posted a collage on Facebook making fun of the president’s project to build two parking garages on campus. For this heinous crime, he woke up one morning to a letter under his dorm room door telling him to get out. Barnes took Zaccari to court, where, in what will be a landmark precedent if upheld on appeal, Zaccari was determined to have ignored “clearly established” law in punishing Barnes and therefore did not enjoy qualified immunity for his offense against the First Amendment.
This has the potential to fundamentally change the incentive structure that leads to campus censorship. Instead of indulging the natural tendency to silence one’s opponents or capitulating to censor-happy pressure groups on campus, public university presidents and other administrators will have to consider, “Is silencing my critics or placating these people really worth the possibility that I will be paying thousands of dollars of my own money?”
FIRE is willing to bet that while censorship might be tempting, it’s going to look a lot less inviting when it it means you might have to buy a Ford rather than that Mercedes you had your eye on. (Or, if you’re that low-level student affairs staffer, maybe a Pinto instead of a new Fiesta.) If you can’t appeal to a public official’s sense of responsibility towards the Constitution, I suppose appealing to their self-interest is the next best option.
Robert Shibley is the vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in Philadelphia, PA.
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FIRE is, in my opinion, a very good organization. In my adult life, I have dealt with public and private colleges and universities in several states and in varying capacities. I can tell you first hand that many are becoming more controlling of speech than they were even 10-12 years ago (and even then there were control issues). I can also tell you from first hand experience that several have begun to relinquish some of that control. There has been some backlash from faculty and students that have led to this. Organization such as FIRE are also an intrical part of this movement, again in my opinion.
There are some good media reactions to speech control on campuses as well. Two of my favorite:
1. PCU, a very funny, low budget film from the mid-1990's starring Jeremy Piven, Jon Favreau, and David Spade. See below for a trailer that fails to fully illustrate or even hint at the depth at the attack on PC.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Fp61jJcIs&feature=related[/youtube]
2. "Free Speech for me but not for Thee" by Nat Hentoff (who has written several books on the subject of free speech). This book includes several examples of censorship on campuses.
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Nearly half of the nation's undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don't make academics a priority, a new report shows.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-01-18-littlelearning18_ST_N.htm?csp=hf&loc=interstitialskip
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http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/are-chinese-mothers-superior/?singlepage=true
Are Chinese Mothers Superior?
Maybe American parents could use some tiger in their tanks.
January 19, 2011 - by Barbara Curtis
Last week saw the rise of a new contender for most reviled woman in America. A Chinese-American Yale professor, author, and mom proved once again that Americans have little patience with self-confident, achievement-oriented mothers, especially those that express themselves with authenticity, humor, and conviction.
Amy Chua proved also that multiculturalism and diversity were never intended to help us set the bar higher, but only to validate underachievers.
For decades now, we’ve stood by in denial as affirmative action programs have dumbed down our university/college system and work environments. We’ve been vaguely aware that the drive to include more blacks and Hispanics has been at the sacrifice of better-qualified Asians (see “Do colleges redline Asian-Americans?”).
Most of us have worked alongside, gone to school with, or lived next door to Asians. We know their grades, SAT scores, and need to succeed are typically higher. There truly is something about Asians — as an adoptive mother of a Taiwanese son, I see it every day.
Consider the spine-tingling 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony and the incredible self-discipline required of each individual to produce such unity and precision. This is incomprehensible to Americans, whose religious devotion to individualism — and the modern Have It Your Way mentality — is producing signs of strain on our social fabric, transforming our universities into places where many undisciplined girls and boys party hearty on their parents’ dime.
These were not my first reflections on reading Chua’s now-infamous piece — at least the piece presented/misrepresented in the Wall Street Journal. Book sales aside, the Journal certainly did the author no favors when they wove together segments from her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to present a skewed and provocative essay with Chua’s byline and the Journal’s heavy-handed title: “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”
Unlike many of those in the nearly 7000 comments to date, I was not threatened or deeply disturbed by Chua’s well-written and humorous narrative. First of all, much of it rang true. As a San Francisco Montessori teacher, my class was 50% Asian. And for seven years our family was neighbors with a wonderful Chinese family in Marin. So I’ve seen strict and bossy up close and personal. I’ve seen the drills, the Kumon classes, the piano practice, the push for perfection.
It might not have been my style of parenting, but I felt comfortable living alongside it. In fact, I felt like my kids would probably be a little better off if a little of that Chinese mother stuff would rub off on me.
I never felt the need to judge or condemn my dear friend (and her mother-in-law) because their tone of voice was harsher than mine. Isn’t that what multiculturalism and diversity are all about?
In the immediate aftermath of the Journal‘s piece — as every mother with a keyboard registered her alarm — my first thought was that this was yet another media-created MommyWar. After all, as a blogger who happens to be a mom, I’ve seen several of those in the past six years.
But when the backlash and tone grew worse, beyond any MommyWar to date — to vicious personal attacks, mockery, and even death threats — I knew that there was more afoot.
You see, someone can write a book or make a movie about a girl named Precious and we don’t attack the indigent, neglectful, and monstrously selfish mother because we accept she just can’t do any better. Since she makes a normal mother look like Mother Teresa, she actually is useful. She poses no threat.
But a mother determined to produce exceptional children with a skill level developed only with discipline — why, how dare she share how she encourages her children to meet their potential? What an outrage that she chose a path different than we American moms!
Lost in all the noise was Chua’s quiet assertion that though her parents were strict and harsh — and yes, her dad once called her garbage and she once reflexively called her daughter that — she never doubted her parents’ love for her. And obviously she is pleased enough with her own outcome to follow in their steps. This is actually a culturally appropriate thing for her to do.
Alas for Chua, the American mantra of multiculturalism and diversity must not extend to Asians — particularly as we find ourselves in the midst of almost incomprehensible global changes, with a president seemingly determined to hand over the reins of world leadership and finance to China.
This is all by way of saying that, with 290,00 Google results for amy+chua+chinese+mothers, there’s surely a lot more going on in the American psyche than meets the eye. And note, since Chua’s 18-year-old daughter published a defense of her mother on January 17th, she too has been mocked and ridiculed.
As in the case of Palin Hatin’, only fear can evoke this kind of response. And that fear may be well warranted. Tom Wilkinson commented at the WSJ:
This is a wake up call. The Chinese are eating our lunch by ignoring the feel good fake social science that US/Western academics have been manufacturing for years. For years we sloughed off the superior performance of the Chinese by saying that they were stifling creativity and later in life they burn out, fail to achieve because they only know how to work [...].
Tough love and hard work works. Get over it. Our thinking only works in Walt Disney animated movies. The Chinese are preparing themselves to win in the real world — where there is another Chinese kid around every corner trying to outwork you. But I am sure Yale would prefer a more creative and flexible person on staff to teach their kids — oops, maybe not.
For Chua, the misogynistic backlash is, I believe, mixed with subconscious but growing fear that maybe our relaxed parenting standards, academic expectations, and work protocols have placed us in a position where we may well have not only become inferior, but are stupidly and stubbornly determined to celebrate our inferiority.
Whatever you do, don’t make us have to rethink our positions and parenting/education styles. You see, the real secret of what sets Amy Chua apart is something every parent knows deep inside: it’s easier to be nice, and much more difficult to be a demanding but loving parent. Chua’s high sense of purpose and her own self-discipline in pushing her kids towards a brighter future show a kind of love lost several decades ago when parents decided it was more fun to be cool.
Barbara Curtis is a wife, mother of 12, and author of nine books, including Reaching the Left from the Right: Talking About Social Issues with People Who Don't Think Like You. Visit her at www.barbaracurtis.com or at her blog www.MommyLife.net. Her fourth son will begin Marines OCS in January.
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I posted the Chua story, but didn't read the backlash. It was a little extreme, in the early part I thought she was joking. I agree with this part of the previous post, we could all learn 'a little' from her. Intensity to a point makes sense, but not that extreme. No sleepovers? maybe. No play dates ever? No sports allowed. All parent determined. That sounds sick to me. Allowing positive friendships to foster was important part of parenting IMO.
I grudgingly read Andre Agassi's autobiography where he expresses his hatred for the game that his readers and fans love. His father was Iranian and driven to make his kid the best in the world at any and all costs including keeping out of school, hitting balls at all hours, tweaking the home ball machine to shoot at him at 140mph and sending him away at a young age. With all the promos to the book I thought he was just an ungrateful kid. Reading the book I just got more and more squeamish about the level of abuse he experienced and the childhood he missed. As I wrote about CEO level obsessions, I don't think being number one at the expense of all other aspects and balances in life is the sweet spot.
All of that said, 'a little' or even quite a bit more discipline like those Chinese mothers have would be very helpful for most kids floundering in American education. Inner city schools have 50% dropout rates and we are not talking about college. I would say that like successful management styles, as the parent, the coach or the educator, you want to get the kid moving in the right direction without always making them feel like it is being forced on them by someone else.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xE0q4wK7BM&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
This is a trailer of a forthcoming documentary of the rise of homeschooling. It looks like it may be interesting.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/259354/more-political-bias-academia-veronique-de-rugy
More on the Political Bias in Academia
February 9, 2011 10:37 A.M.
By Veronique de Rugy
As I have reported in these pages before, George Mason University’s Dan Klein has done a lot of work on the political bias against conservatives or free-marketeers in academia. Yesterday, over at Freakonomics, Stephen Dudner added to the conversation by commenting on a piece by John Tierney in the New York Times about the bias that “some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.”
Tierney’s note about the bias:
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal.
This part is really interesting:
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”
Dubner makes a good point which is that under representation isn’t hard to understand in a self-selecting group. In fact, it is the point of the selection.
The lack of diversity isn’t actually “statistically impossible” in a self-selecting group. But that of course is the point. How can it be that an academic field is so politically homogeneous? What kind of biases does such homogeneity produce? What sort of ideas get crowded out? And how homogeneous are other disciplines?
I have to say that I was surprised at the overt political (leftward) bias exhibited by several prominent economists at the recent American Economics Association meetings, although my sample set was quite small.
Tierney concludes:
In the old version, the society announced that special funds to pay for travel to the annual meeting were available to students belonging to “underrepresented groups (i.e., ethnic or racial minorities, first-generation college students, individuals with a physical disability, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students).”
As Dr. Haidt noted in his speech, the “i.e.” implied that this was the exclusive, sacred list of “underrepresented groups.” The society took his suggestion to substitute “e.g.” — a change that leaves it open to other groups, too. Maybe, someday, even to conservatives.
Finally, a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a new analysis that shows the left-leaning bias in Harvard University Press:
Harvard University Press’s output during the last decade has leaned heavily to the left, according to an analysis published this week in Econ Journal Watch. The press’s slant embodies and reinforces ideological disparities in academe, the paper argues, because faculty members are rewarded for publishing with prestigious presses like Harvard.
The analysis is here.
It would be interesting to understand why such bias exists (especially in economics where my bias tells me that it doesn’t make sense!). Also, does evidence of bias make it go away?
Thanks to Jason Fitchner for the pointer.
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Home school works like this for us: My daughter loves school so I just threaten home school with Dad all day and any problem is solved. :-)
My nephew began home school this year. Bright kid with some learning 'differences' was being left behind by a big public school and testing below grade level. We will see how that goes. He hated school so has to get his work done or he goes back. Choice, competition, alternatives.
The name home schooling understates the resources, curricula and networking that these highly organized moms have in place, as I'm sure the documentary will show.
The education dollar here is about 10k per kid per year, 30 to a classroom and the teacher supposedly makes on average 52k - an almost negligible part of that 300k. If the dollar followed the kid with school choice, two things would happen, marvelous alternatives get funded and the public school sees real incentive to improve.
I remember Jesse Jackson arguing with George Will on 'This Week' against vouchers and how bad that would be for the already failing DC public schools. Will closed with: we will just have to agree to disagree - see you tomorrow at school. Their kids were in the same elite Washington private school, same as Sasha and Malia now, as their parents fight against opening up parent choice. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2009/04/22/obama-wrong-on-dc-school-vouchers-and-hypocritical-just-like-congress
Innovation in the public sector, government or education, will begin IMHO the day that public unions are disbanded. http://articles.ocregister.com/2010-03-02/opinion/24643100_1_unions-health-care-public-safety
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DougMacG: My family homeschools, and I think it is a wonderful choice for us. We have two extremely bright, kind children who also have peculiar learning styles. So, they get, at worst (when at home), 2 "students" for one teacher. It is often 1-1. We also have field trips consistently. It helps that we live close to major zoos, art and other museums, a large university and in a small town with two liberal arts colleges. There are often events in and around our home town.
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http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
This is a talk on creativity killing schools. For those of you who don't know, TED talks are consistently interesting and thought provoking, and the talks cover a wide range of material. You might want to spend some time poking around.
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This source is unknown to me.
http://rightwingnews.com/2011/03/nea-to-un-“oral-sex-masturbation-and-orgasms-need-to-be-taught-in-education”/
NEA To UN: “Oral Sex, Masturbation, And Orgasms Need To Be Taught In Education”
(Read WP posts from Duane Lester) | (Read MT posts from Duane Lester) | rss
The United Nations was busy recently, deciding what every country in the world needs to be teaching their wards. Not wanting to be left out of any meeting that involves the programming of children's minds, the National Education Association had a seat at the table.
The brought their sexualization of children packet and made the case for teaching, well, everything...to middle school kids:
“Oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms need to be taught in education,” Diane Schneider told the audience at a panel on combating homophobia and transphobia. Schneider, representing the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the US, advocated for more “inclusive” sex education in US schools, with curricula based on liberal hetero and homosexual expression. She claimed that the idea of sex education remains an oxymoron if it is abstinence-based, or if students are still able to opt-out.
Two things to note here. One, the NEA thinks sex education in America needs to be "more 'inclusive,'" because kids just aren't being indoctrinated enough, and two, choice is for abortion. These kids need to be forced to sit in this class.
Now, maybe I have always been more of a self starter than others, but I don't remember needing a class on masturbation. I think this is one lesson that makes everyone a bit autodidactic.
Seriously though, this is stuff the NEA thinks students in grades 6-9 need to be forced to attend. Apparently, learning about oral sex will help them be less homophobic, or something:
“Gender identity expression and sexual orientation are a spectrum,” she explained, and said that those opposed to homosexuality “are stuck in a binary box that religion and family create.”
Read it again.
Yeah, you are reading that right. The NEA went to the UN and said this curriculum was needed, and every student needed to be forced to attend, in order to reprogram them out of the teachings they had learned from their religion and their family.
The parents of the child are of no consequence. The collective is supreme.
And you might not believe this, but the UN agreed:
A Belgian panelist at the same event explained how necessary it was to have government support when educating about anti-discrimination issues. He claimed that the “positive, pro-LGBT policies in Belgian schools are a direct consequence of liberal and open-minded legislation in Belgium,” and went on to stress the importance of states in providing relevant materials for students and schoolteachers. He also held up Belgium’s “gender in the blender” programs, which are discussion-based programs for Belgian teachers who want to discuss gender and transgender issues in their courses, as a model for other nations who wished to encourage their teachers to address these topics.
You know what this reminds me of? "Brave New World," by Aldus Huxley.
Here's what I am talking about:
One of the things that makes the society in Brave New World so different from ours is the lack of spirituality. The pleasure-seeking society pursues no spiritual experiences or joys, preferring carnal ones. The lack of a religion that seeks a true transcendental understanding helps ensure that the masses of people, upper and lower classes, have no reason to rebel. What religious ritual they have begins as an attempt to reach a higher level of understanding as a community but quickly turns into a chance to please the carnal nature of man through orgiastic ritual. This denies the human soul, which is usually searching for a pleasure not experienced in the flesh but in the mind, and preserves the society based on happiness which they have established.
The novel addresses the importance of family values and the family structure as an integral part of our society. A new way to be born and raised has done away with the family and brought in a dehumanizing strict class structure and psychological messages to replace it. There are five rigid classes in this world, each with its own characteristics ranging from jobs to clothing to intelligence level. These classes are enforced from birth through experience and suggestion. A dislike of roses and books, for example, is enforced through electric shock while the children are still babies. The knowledge of the different classes in the world and why it is best to be in the class you are in is implanted in the child's mind through hypnopaedia, a series of hypnotic suggestions played while the child is asleep. Through the suggestions that make up the childhood of the adults in this society, the adults are "raised" by the leaders of the State to think and act as they are told. Rather than individual parents instilling their own values into their children, the State chooses how and what each child will learn. The parental relationship of a father and mother to a child has become a dirty and improper idea. Feelings have become obsolete. It is this lack of family that helps keep the different classes in their place. They are conditioned to think and act only as a member of their class, rather than as an individual. Things that create problems in society's class structure, such as the desire of parents to want something better for their children, or people striving for something better for themselves, have been eliminated with the family.
So, in the Brave New World, religion and family were destroyed. Sound familiar?
One of the more bizarre things in Brave New World is the child sex. Oh, you may find it abhorrent, but in the book, it's promoted. Here's an excerpt from Chapter Three:
OUTSIDE, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.
..."That's a charming little group," he said, pointing.
In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the focussed attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.
"Charming, charming!" the D.H.C. repeated sentimentally.
"Charming," the boys politely agreed. But their smile was rather patronizing. They had put aside similar childish amusements too recently to be able to watch them now without a touch of contempt. Charming? but it was just a pair of kids fooling about; that was all. Just kids.
"I always think," the Director was continuing in the same rather maudlin tone, when he was interrupted by a loud boo-hooing.
From a neighbouring shrubbery emerged a nurse, leading by the hand a small boy, who howled as he went. An anxious-looking little girl trotted at her heels.
"What's the matter?" asked the Director.
The nurse shrugged her shoulders. "Nothing much," she answered. "It's just that this little boy seems rather reluctant to join in the ordinary erotic play. I'd noticed it once or twice before. And now again to-day. He started yelling just now …"
"Honestly," put in the anxious-looking little girl, "I didn't mean to hurt him or anything. Honestly."
"Of course you didn't, dear," said the nurse reassuringly. "And so," she went on, turning back to the Director, "I'm taking him in to see the Assistant Superintendent of Psychology. Just to see if anything's at all abnormal."
"Quite right," said the Director. "Take him in. You stay here, little girl," he added, as the nurse moved away with her still howling charge. "What's your name?"
"Polly Trotsky."
"And a very good name too," said the Director. "Run away now and see if you can find some other little boy to play with."
The child scampered off into the bushes and was lost to sight.
"Exquisite little creature!" said the Director, looking after her. Then, turning to his students, "What I'm going to tell you now," he said, "may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible."
He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.
A look of astonished incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could not believe it.
"Even adolescents," the D.H.C. was saying, "even adolescents like yourselves …"
"Not possible!"
"Barring a little surreptitious auto-erotism and homosexuality - absolutely nothing."
"Nothing?"
"In most cases, till they were over twenty years old."
"Twenty years old?" echoed the students in a chorus of loud disbelief.
"Twenty," the Director repeated. "I told you that you'd find it incredible."
"But what happened?" they asked. "What were the results?"
"The results were terrible." A deep resonant voice broke startlingly into the dialogue.
Yes, I imagine to the Director, and the hierarchy of the NEA and UN, they were terrible. Good thing actions were taken so that children could be removed from the "binary box that religion and family create.”
Cross posted at All American Blogger.
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One of the most amazing resources available on the internet. MIT is free. I'm amazed at how few people know about this.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/
Hundreds of courses, No cost, no credit. Available for about 10 years now and the course list keeps growing.
Departments:
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By RICHARD VEDDER
No sooner do parents proudly watch their children graduate high school than they must begin paying for college. As they write checks for upwards of $40,000 a year, they'll no doubt find themselves complaining loudly about rising college costs—even asking: "Is it worth it?"
It's a legitimate question. As college costs have risen wildly, the benefits of the degree seem less and less clear. Larger numbers of college graduates are taking relatively low-paying and low-skilled jobs.
The good news? There are ways to greatly ease the burden and make college more affordable, according to new data from the University of Texas at Austin.
Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of "The Faculty Lounges," explains how colleges are spending your money.
.In a study for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Christopher Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe and I concluded that tuition fees at the flagship campus of the University of Texas could be cut by as much as half simply by asking the 80% of faculty with the lowest teaching loads to teach about half as much as the 20% of faculty with the highest loads. The top 20% currently handle 57% of all teaching.
Such a move would require the bulk of the faculty to teach, on average, about 150-160 students a year. For example, a professor might teach one undergraduate survey class for 100 students, two classes for advanced undergraduate students or beginning graduate students with 20-25 students, and an advanced graduate seminar for 10. That would require the professor to be in the classroom for fewer than 200 hours a year—hardly an arduous requirement.
Faculty will likely argue that this would imperil the university's research mission. Nonsense. First of all, at UT Austin, a mere 20% of the faculty garner 99.8% of the external research funding. Second, faculty who follow the work habits of other professional workers—go to work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and work five days a week for 48 or 49 weeks a year—can handle teaching 200 hours a year while publishing considerable amounts of research. I have done just this for decades as a professor.
Third, much research consists of obscure articles published in even more obscure journals on topics of trivial importance. Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, once estimated that 21,000 articles have been written on Shakespeare since 1980. Wouldn't 5,000 have been enough? Canadian scholar Jeffrey Litwin, looking at 70 leading U.S. universities, concluded the typical cost of writing a journal article is about $72,000. If we professors published somewhat fewer journal articles and did more teaching, we could make college more affordable.
There are other things colleges could do to reduce costs, such as slashing bureaucracies or using buildings more efficiently. But by not extending the contracts of nontenured faculty or by phasing out tenured positions over time, universities could seriously cut labor costs.
The bottom line is that colleges typically spread knowledge about everything under the sun except themselves. It's time to change that. There's no better place to start than by closely examining the work load of those who absorb the lion's share of university budgets.
Mr. Vedder is a professor of economics at Ohio University and directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
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This is, for the most part, a good article. Some small things I would add, however. First, in my mind, teaching goes far beyond the classroom. Professors spend a damn lot of time on emails, lunches, study sessions, office hours, and the like. Professors also do a great deal of counseling, whether life questions or class/academic/career advice. The author, I think, sorely underestimates the total number of hours that many professors tend to spend teaching.
Also, he used skewed evidence: "a mere 20% of the faculty garner 99.8% of the external research funding." So what? The sciences garner the vast majority of research funding. It costs a damn lot more for a nuclear physicist to experiment than a sociologist. And philosophers can research damn near for free. That doesn't mean that the contributions aren't important, it means they are cost effective.
I'm not sure why the author wouldn't want professors at large, research institutions to focus on research. That is the mission of the university. There many, many professors who teach, teach, and teach some more. They are at liberal arts colleges, where the focus is on teaching.
All of that said, I think the position of the article that college needs to be more affordable, that colleges/universities need to help that with efficient staffing and use of buildings, etc. is important.
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http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/06/university-administrators-will.html
University Administrators Will Outnumber College Faculty by 2014
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A sample of "interesting" answers given by students on exams:
http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/
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A sample of "interesting" answers given by students on exams:
http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/
Funny, and scary.
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We write frequently about the charter-school wars in New York City because the battle touches so many aspects of the effort to give children from poor families the education necessary to escape their circumstances.
Today's report has good news: Results released yesterday of test scores in the New York State Assessment Program showed that the most relentlessly attacked charter schools—Eva Moskowitz's Harlem Success academies—have outperformed their public-school peers, often by a wide margin.
At all New York City's public schools, 60% of third, fourth and fifth graders passed the math exam; at Harlem Success, 94% passed. In the state language arts exam, 49% from the city schools passed compared to 78% at the charters. The 94% pass rate for the academies' black and Hispanic students surpassed the 73% pass rate for white students taking the exam in New York state.
Other New York City charters—such as Geoffrey Canada's Promise Academies or the Democracy Prep charter schools—generally produce similar results, even compared to the state's best public schools. In a 2009 study of New York City charter schools, Caroline Hoxby of Stanford concluded, "On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English."
Meanwhile, the battle to stop the movement continues. Ms. Moskowitz's effort to open another school on Manhattan's Upper West Side has met massive resistance. Actor Matt Damon is now throwing his celebrity against charters. Their students, meanwhile, continue upward.
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See, children just need to form unions that pay off dems, then they'll have a chance at getting decent educations.
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No Child Left Behind
Testing times
Deadlock over standards in schools
Aug 13th 2011 | NEW YORK | from the print edition
SEVENTEEN months ago Barack Obama sent Congress a proposal to revamp the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), one of George Bush junior’s cherished policies. In March Mr Obama said he wanted to see a new version of the act in place before the new school year began. Even though “Back to School” sales signs are already in shop windows, there has been little movement on Capitol Hill. Fed up with waiting, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, said this week that he will start releasing states from the need to comply with NCLB.
When Mr Bush signed NCLB a decade ago, with support from both sides of the aisle, it decreed that 100% of students should be reading and doing mathematics at the appropriate level for their ages by 2014. Sadly 82% of America’s public schools are at risk of failing to meet those targets. States are now worried that they will lose vital federal funding because the NCLB connects aid with test results.
The main reason why American schools do badly is poor teaching. NCLB has helped point this out. But it also produces distortions. Nobody can excuse school districts that have resorted to cheating to pass the tests. But others found that when they raised their standards, they saw test scores fall. In Tennessee, for example, results showed 91% of students were proficient in maths; after the state raised its standards, scores fell to 34%. Instead of recognising the improvements, the current law penalises Tennessee for the poor scores. NCLB has in fact long been criticised for its reliance on tests and not enough on progress. One study examined the first five years of NCLB and found that while more time was devoted for tested subjects, other subjects such as science and art were cut, on average by 30 minutes a day.
In this section
Looking for someone to blame
End of a fantasy
»Testing times
Unexpected consequences
Some justice at last
Lock and load
Who isn’t coming for dinner
ReprintsMr Duncan has already spoken to more than 30 governors about issuing waivers from NCLB. Most want them. The waivers will still demand accountability, but allow much more flexibility. Where there’s a high bar, Mr Duncan says he wants to “get out of their way and let them hit that higher bar”. Specifics will be released in September, but the waivers will probably reflect reforms already rewarded in the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” programme for educational grants. These include evaluating teachers.
The White House sees the waivers as merely being a bridge to congressional action. But John Kline, the chairman of the House education committee, is worried that they may instead undermine his committee’s efforts to rewrite the original bill. Jamie Gass of the Centre for School Reform at Boston’s Pioneer Institute concedes that Mr Duncan has the power to grant waivers from NCLB, but reckons that he cannot tie the waivers to conditions that have not yet been sanctioned by Congress.
Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute in Washington, DC, says there is no question that the states need relief from the original NCLB, but thinks that Mr Duncan is being politically tone-deaf. The row, Mr Petrilli reckons, could jeopardise other education programmes backed by the administration. That is overstating it. There will be opposition, particularly from conservatives, but Mr Duncan was right not to wait for Congress to act. Otherwise, he would have been kept waiting a long time.
from the print edition | United States
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http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/9565/
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WHEN Stephanie Kelly, a 2009 graduate of the University of Florida, looked for a job in her chosen field, advertising, she found few prospects and even fewer takers. So now she has two jobs: as a part-time “senior secretary” at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville and a freelance gig writing for Elfster.com, a “secret Santa” Web site.
But is Ms. Kelly stressed out about the lack of a career path she spent four years preparing for? Not at all. Instead, she has come to appreciate her life. “I can cook and write at my own pace,” she said. “I kind of like that about my life.”
Likewise, Amy Klein, who graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a degree in English literature, couldn’t find a job in publishing. At one point, she had applied for an editorial-assistant job at Gourmet magazine. Less than two weeks later, Condé Nast shut down that 68- year-old magazine. “So much for that job application,” said Ms. Klein, now 26.
One night she bumped into a friend, who asked her to join a punk rock band, Titus Andronicus, as a guitarist. Once, that might have been considered professional suicide. But weighed against a dreary day job, music suddenly held considerable appeal. So last spring, she sublet her room in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and toured the country in an old Chevy minivan.
“I’m fulfilling my artistic goals,” Ms. Klein said.
Meet the members of what might be called Generation Limbo: highly educated 20-somethings, whose careers are stuck in neutral, coping with dead-end jobs and listless prospects.
And so they wait: for the economy to turn, for good jobs to materialize, for their lucky break. Some do so bitterly, frustrated that their well-mapped careers have gone astray. Others do so anxiously, wondering how they are going to pay their rent, their school loans, their living expenses — sometimes resorting to once-unthinkable government handouts.
“We did everything we were supposed to,” said Stephanie Morales, 23, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 2009 with hopes of working in the arts. Instead she ended up waiting tables at a Chart House restaurant in Weehawken, N.J., earning $2.17 an hour plus tips, to pay off her student loans. “What was the point of working so hard for 22 years if there was nothing out there?” said Ms. Morales, who is now a paralegal and plans on attending law school.
Some of Ms. Morales’s classmates have found themselves on welfare. “You don’t expect someone who just spent four years in Ivy League schools to be on food stamps,” said Ms. Morales, who estimates that a half-dozen of her friends are on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. A few are even helping younger graduates figure out how to apply. “We are passing on these traditions on how to work in the adult world as working poor,” Ms. Morales said.
But then there are people like Ms. Kelly and Ms. Klein, who are more laissez-faire. With the job market still bleak, their motto might as well be: “No career? No prospects? No worries!” (Well, at least for the time being.)
After all, much of the situation is out of their control, as victims of bad timing. Ms. Klein contrasted her Harvard classmates with the ones of her older sister, Lauren, who graduated from Harvard seven years earlier. Those graduates, she said, were career-obsessed and, helped along by a strong economy, aggressively pursued high-powered jobs right after graduation. (Lauren is a professor at Georgia Tech University.)
By comparison, Ms. Kelly said her classmates seemed resigned to waiting for the economic tides to turn. “Plenty of people work in bookstores and work in low-end administrative jobs, even though they have a Harvard degree,” she said. “They are thinking more in terms of creating their own kinds of life that interests them, rather than following a conventional idea of success and job security.”
The numbers are not encouraging. About 14 percent of those who graduated from college between 2006 and 2010 are looking for full-time jobs, either because they are unemployed or have only part-time jobs, according to a survey of 571 recent college graduates released in May by the Heldrich Center at Rutgers.
And then there is the slice of graduates effectively underemployed, using a college degree for positions that don’t require one or barely scraping by, working in call centers, bars or art-supply stores.
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“They are a postponed generation,” said Cliff Zukin, an author of the Heldrich Center study. He noted that recent graduates seemed to be living with parents longer and taking longer to become financially secure. The journey on the life path, for many, is essentially stalled.
The Heldrich survey also found that the portion of graduates who described their first job as a “career” fell from 30 percent, if they graduated before the 2008 economic downturn (in 2006 and 2007), to 22 percent, if they graduated after the downturn (in 2009 and 2010).
In an ominous sign, those figures didn’t change much for second jobs, Dr. Zukin added, suggesting that recent graduates were stumbling from field to field. Indeed, Till Marco von Wachter, an economics professor at Columbia University who has studied the impact of recessions on young workers, said the effect on earnings took about a decade to fade.
MEANWHILE, modest jobs mean modest lives. Benjamin Shore, 23, graduated from the University of Maryland last year with a business degree and planned to go into consulting. Instead, he moved back into his parents’ house in Cherry Hill, N.J., and spent his days browsing for jobs online.
But when his parents started charging him $500 a month for rent, he moved into a windowless room in a Baltimore row house and took a $12-an-hour job at a Baltimore call center, making calls for a university, encouraging prospects to go back to school. “There’s no point in being diplomatic: it is horrible,” Mr. Shore said.
“I have a college education that I feel like I am wasting by being there,” he added. “I am supposed to do something interesting, something with my brain.” For a while, Mr. Shore ran LongevityDrugstore.com, an online drug retailer that he started, but it went nowhere. To stretch his pay check, he made beans and rice at home and drove slowly to save gas. Eventually he quit, got work as a dock hand and is now thinking of becoming a doctor.
Perhaps not surprisingly, volunteering has become a popular outlet for a generation that seeks meaning in its work. Sarah Weinstein, 25, a 2008 graduate of Boston University, manages a bar in Austin because she couldn’t find an advertising job. In her spare time, she volunteers, doing media relations for Austin Pets Alive, an animal rescue shelter.
“It’d be nice to make more money,” Ms. Weinstein said, but “I prefer it this way so that I have the extra time to spend volunteering and pursuing other things.” Volunteering, however, goes only so far. After three years without an advertising job, she is now applying to graduate school to freshen up her résumé.
Meanwhile, people forced out of the rat race are re-evaluating their values and looking elsewhere for satisfaction. “They have to revise their ideas of what they are looking for,” said Kenneth Jedding, author of “Higher Education: On Life, Landing a Job, and Everything Else They Didn’t Teach You in College.”
For Geo Wyeth, 27, who graduated from Yale in 2007, that means adopting a do-it-yourself approach to his career. After college, he worked at an Apple Store in New York as a salesclerk and trainer, while furthering his music career in an experimental rock band. He has observed, he said, a shift among his peers away from the corporate track and toward a more artistic mentality.
“You have to make opportunities happen for yourself, and I think a lot of my classmates weren’t thinking in that way,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of setting up your own lemonade stand.”
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By RUPERT MURDOCH
These days everyone is for education reform. The question is which approach is best. I favor the Steve Jobs model.
In 1984 Steve introduced the Mac with a Super Bowl ad. It ran only once. It ran for only one minute. And it shows a female athlete being chased by the helmeted police of some totalitarian regime.
At the climax, the woman rushes up to a large screen where Big Brother is giving a speech. Just as he announces, "We shall prevail," she hurls her hammer through the screen.
If you ask me what we need to do in education, I would point you to that ad.
At the top end, our public schools are producing fewer and fewer graduates who have the skills necessary for the world's best jobs. At the bottom, each year more than a million Americans—that's 7,000 every school day—are dropping out of high school. In the middle, too many American children float from grade to grade in schools that never challenge them to reach their full potential.
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CloseAssociated Press
A high school student in Casper, Wyo., familiarizes herself with the iPad.
.This is unjust, unsustainable and un-American. And it is especially galling because we have the technology to change it.
If you read the front pages of the New York Times, they will tell you that technology's promise has not yet been realized in terms of student performance. My answer is, of course not. If we simply attached computers to leeches, medicine wouldn't be any better today than it was in the 19th century either.
You don't get change by plugging in computers to schools designed for the industrial age. You get it by deploying technology that rewrites the rules of the game.
Our children are growing up in Steve Jobs's world. They are eager to learn and quick to embrace new technology. Outside the classroom they take technology for granted—in what they read, in how they listen to music, in how they shop.
The minute they step back into their classrooms, it's like going back in time. The top-down, one-size-fits-all approach frustrates the ones who could do more advanced work. And it leaves further and further behind those who need extra help to keep up.
Teachers are likewise stunted. Some excel at lecturing. Some are better at giving personal attention. With the right structure, they would work together like a football team. With the existing structure, they are treated like interchangeable cogs.
The point I'm making isn't about Apple. It's about our colossal failure of imagination. The education industry bears a good part of the blame here. It continues to sell its tired wares into a failing status quo. It settles for mediocre charter schools. And its answer seems to be throwing more money at the problem.
Three decades ago, the Department of Education released a report noting that if an unfriendly foreign power had imposed our mediocre education system on us, "we might well have viewed it as an act of war." In the three decades since, per-pupil spending on K-12 education has doubled—while achievement scores have been flat.
That's where technology comes in. Just as the iPod compelled the music industry to accommodate its customers, we can use technology to force the education system to meet the needs of the individual student.
For example, say I was trying to teach a 10-year-old about Bernoulli's principle. According to this principle, when speed is high, pressure is low. Sounds dry and abstract.
But what if I could bring this lesson alive by linking it to the soccer star Roberto Carlos—showing students a video clip that illustrates how his famous curved shot is an example of Bernoulli's principle in action. Then suppose I followed up with an engineer from Boeing—who explained why this same principle is critical in aviation and introduced an app that could help students master the concept through playing a game. Finally, assessment tools would give teachers instant feedback about how well their students had mastered the material.
Better doesn't have to be more expensive, either. For example, Georgia state legislators now spend $40 million a year on textbooks. They are considering iPads to save money and boost performance. Unlike a textbook—which is outdated the moment it is printed—digital texts can be updated.
Textbooks aren't the only area for savings. Rocketship charter schools in San Jose, Calif., use a model that combines traditional classroom learning with tutor-led small groups and individualized instruction through online technology. So far the mix has brought higher performance with lower costs—savings that can be used to pay teachers more, hire tutors, and so on.
Let's be clear: Technology is never going to replace teachers. What technology can do is give teachers closer, more human and more rewarding interactions with their students. It can give children lesson plans tailored to their pace and needs. And it can give school districts a way to improve performance in the classroom while saving their taxpayers money.
Everything we need to do is possible now. But the investments the private sector needs to make will not happen until we have a clear answer to a basic question: What is the core body of knowledge our children need to know?
I don't pretend to be an expert on academic standards. But as a business leader, I do know something about how common standards unlock investment and unleash innovation. For example, once we established standards for MP3 and Wi-Fi, innovators had every incentive to invest their brains and capital in building the very best products compatible with those standards.
We are now seeing the same thing happening in education. Over the last few years, leaders and educators in more than 40 states have come together to reach agreement on what their students should know and be able to do in math and English—and by what grades.
They have come together because they have taken a look around the world. They know that the student in, say, San Francisco is not just competing against his classmate—or even against the kid from St. Louis. He or she is competing with his peers in Shanghai, Lima and Prague.
Steve Jobs knew all about competitive markets. He once likened our school system to the old phone monopoly. "I remember," he said in a 1995 interview, "seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said 'We don't care. We don't have to.' And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day. And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care."
We have to care. In this new century, good is not good enough. Put simply, we must approach education the way Steve Jobs approached every industry he touched. To be willing to blow up what doesn't work or gets in the way. And to make our bet that if we can engage a child's imagination, there's no limit to what he or she can learn.
Mr. Murdoch is chairman and CEO of News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal and a new Education Division. This article is adapted from his remarks Friday to the Foundation for Excellence in Education Summit in San Francisco.
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For hard-working American families struggling to make ends meet, the student protesters at Occupy Wall Street must seem like cast members of a reality show designed to make them look shallow and self-indulgent. The irony is that these students and recent grads have a point about their college debt. It's just not the point they are making.
Here, for example, is a typical entry on the blog "We Are the 99 Percent." A woman is holding up a handwritten note that reads: "I am a college graduate. I am also unemployed. I was lead [sic] to believe that college would insure me a job. I now have $40,000 worth of student debt."
John Kline on the National Labor Relations Board's strike against Boeing and the increase in the student loan default rate.
.The headlines tell us that, as a nation, we now owe more in college loans than we do on our credit cards. Notwithstanding the stock horror stories about the kid who leaves campus owing hundreds of thousands, however, the average college debt load is about the price of a new Toyota Prius—$28,100 for those with a degree from a four-year private school, $22,000 for those from public schools.
Even so, these figures don't touch the most important question: Are students getting fair value in return?
Anne Neal has been trying to help families answer that question for years. As president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, she believes students should leave college with a broad base of knowledge that will allow them "to compete successfully in our globalized economy and to make sense of the modern world." By that ACTA means universities should require a core curriculum with substantive courses in composition, literature, American history, economics, math, science and foreign language.
"The fundamental problem here is not debt but a broken educational system that no longer insists on excellence," Ms. Neal says. "College tuitions have risen more than 440% over the last 25 years—and for what? The students who say that college has not prepared them for the real world are largely right."
At WhatWillTheyLearn.com, students can click onto ACTA's recent survey of more than 1,000 American four-year institutions—and find out how their colleges and universities rate. Two findings jump out. First, the more costly the college, the less likely it will require a demanding core curriculum. Second, public institutions generally do better here than private ones—and historically black colleges such as Morehouse and service academies such as West Point amount to what ACTA calls "hidden gems."
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CloseGetty Images/Stock Illustration Source
.Alas, much of the debate over the value of a college degree breaks down one of two ways. Either people pit the liberal arts against the sciences—"Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?" asks Florida Gov. Rick Scott—or they plump for degrees that are thought to be more practical (e.g., business). Both are probably mistakes.
If the young people now entering our work force are going to change jobs as often as we think, the key to getting ahead will not be having one particular skill but having the ability to learn new skills. In this regard, the problem is not so much the liberal arts as the fluff that too often passes for it. In other words, though Gov. Scott is right to demand better measures of what Florida citizens are getting for their tax dollars, he'd probably be better off focusing on excellence and transparency than on suggesting specific courses of study.
As for the "practical" majors, New York University's Richard Arum and the University of Virginia's Josipa Roksa tell us they might not be as useful as once thought. In a recent work called "Academically Adrift," these authors tracked the progress of more than 2,300 undergraduates at two dozen U.S. universities. They found that more than a third of seniors leave campus having shown no improvement in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, or written communications over four years. Worse, the majors and programs often thought most practical—education, business and communications—prove to be the least productive.
So yes, the student protesters with their iPads and iPhones may come across badly to other Americans. Yes too, even those who leave school thousands of dollars in debt will—on average—find their degrees a good investment, given the healthy lifetime earnings premium that a bachelor's degree still commands.
Still, when it comes to what our colleges and universities are charging them for their degrees, they have a point. Too many have paid much and been taught little. They've been ripped off—but not by the banks or the fat cats or any of the other stock villains so unwelcome these days in Zuccotti Park.
"If these students and grads understood the real issues with their college debt," says Ms. Neal, "they would change their focus from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy the Ivory Tower
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Guest post: In defense of a liberal education
By Daniel de Vise
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/guest-post-in-defense-of-a-liberal-education/2011/12/02/gIQAj8plKO_blog.html?mid=5484
St. John's College President Chris Nelson, left, talks with students on the Annapolis school’s campus. (Mark Gail - The Washington Post) Liberal arts colleges have struggled in these lean years to retain the confidence of parents that they will prepare students for a better fate than barista duty. Studies consistently show lib-arts students get a good education. Yet, Georgetown researcher Anthony Carnevale and others have documented that graduates in science and tech fields stand to earn more money in the long run.
Here, then, is a guest post from Christopher Nelson, president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, an outspoken champion of the liberal arts.
Students headed for college are worried that they may not find employment when they graduate. Specialized career training at the undergraduate level might thus seem to have appeal. And yet, study after study suggests that this can be short-sighted. The best preparation for the workforce of tomorrow, for the jobs that have yet to be created, is a liberal education -- the kind of education most especially found at the small residential liberal arts colleges across the country.
In the latest of these studies, alumni of our national liberal arts colleges, including St. John’s College, describe just how much they have benefitted personally and professionally from their college experience. The Annapolis Group, a consortium of 130 independent liberal arts colleges, released the findings of a national survey.
The Annapolis Group survey found that 60 percent of liberal arts college graduates said they felt “better prepared” for life after college than students who attended other colleges, compared to 34 percent who attended public flagship universities. The reasons are undoubtedly many, but one of them must surely be the level of personal attention the student receives at these colleges. For instance, 89 percent of liberal arts college graduates reported finding a mentor while in college, compared to 66 percent for public flagship universities.
Another reason will be the efforts made at these colleges to help their students develop the skills they will need to use in any career or profession: thoughtful reflection concerning the ends and means of both public and private life, habits of inquiry that will open pathways to new discoveries, practice in shaping a thought and in listening to others - actually listening.
These are skills best honed in small classes, where students are not just taking lecture notes but are actively participating in their own education. There they get daily practice working with their classmates in analyzing problems, framing arguments, interpreting meaning, demonstrating propositions, and translating works written in a foreign language. Experience has taught us that education is a cooperative art that is best done with others who can challenge our thinking and open our minds to new ways of seeing the world and making our way in it. The stronger the community of learning, the more opportunity to practice this cooperative art. Once again, experience has taught us that smaller, residential campuses are stronger communities of learning that help to maximize these cooperative opportunities both inside and outside the classroom.
The best educated person today, just as yesterday, is one fully capable of adapting to or taking advantage of changing conditions, precisely because the well-educated adult has integrity of character, a rootedness in essentials, and a self-understanding that makes it possible to live well and consistently in an unpredictable world. That character and self-understanding are best shaped in communities of learning that are concerned more with foundations than with extravagances, more with roots than with branches.
How do liberal arts colleges go about doing this? Consider what they are asked to study. Students at St. John’s College study original works in mathematics and science, language and literature, politics and history, philosophy and theology. All of these books – from Homer to Shakespeare, Plato to Hegel, and Euclid to Einstein -- help students consider the deeply human questions: What kind of world do I live in? What is my place in it? What should I do with my life? How should I live a life that is worthy of my humanity? They then have a lifetime to practice the arts they have learned, to deepen their questions, and to choose with some intelligence the life that suits them best. Boundaries throughout the world are vanishing, and we need our next generation of leaders in every field, in every endeavor, to have been broadly educated across the disciplines rather than narrowly trained.
St. John’s graduates reflect the strengths of all liberal arts college alumni. They enter a broad array of careers, from entrepreneurial endeavors to medicine, law, and teaching. St. John’s College is among the top two percent of all colleges in the percentage of alumni who go on to earn PhDs, and the top four percent of colleges in the percentage of graduates who earn PhDs in science and engineering. These graduates have faced some of the most difficult texts ever written and have acquired intellectual virtues along the way: courage in the face of the unknown and the difficult; candor about their ignorance; industry in preparation; and open attentiveness to the words of their colleagues - all things that will stand them in good stead as they head into the world of work and family, citizenship and service.
Graduates of the nation’s many fine liberal arts institutions are prepared not only for a diverse range of career, but for life.
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A better title would be "In defense of the higher ed bubble" or "In defense of crippling student loans that will destroy most of our graduates when their useless degree leaves them unemployed".
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For some reason I am reminded of a humorous email of several years ago that told the story of a man and a woman who were given the assignment of writing a story together by taking turns writing sentences (or was it paragraphs?)
:lol:
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Rachel, interesting read. I did a google on the value of liberal arts education. A lot comes up. Here is one take:
The Value of Liberal Arts Education | Print |
Written by Warren Mass
Tuesday, 06 April 2010 16:00
“The Death of Liberal Arts” lamented a headline in an April 5 Newsweek.com article that carried the subhead: “How the recession and unemployment are making schools and students rethink the value of an education in the humanities.”
The trend, notes Newsweek, was as rapid as the onset of the current recession. Case in point was Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, which Newsweek had labelled in 2007 as the “hottest liberal-arts school you never heard of.”
But the recession has taken its toll. As Newsweek reporter Nancy Cook observed: “After the endowment of Centenary College … fell by 20 percent from 2007 to 2009, the private school decided to eliminate half of its 44 majors. Over the next three to four years, classic humanities specialities like Latin, German studies, and performing arts will be phased out.”
In response to changing economic conditions, Centenary’s administrators are considering the addition of several new graduate programs to increase their students’ career prospects, such as master's degrees in teaching and international business.
The college’s president explained that the school was trying offer a compromise between providing “a grounding in the arts and sciences, but they also probably need some training in a specific area.”
As another college official quoted in the article, Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, noted: "Students want something they can sell."
The report provided statistics to prove that this was no small concern, citing a recent study by the Pew Research Center that just 41 percent of people ages 18 to 29 are working full-time compared with 50 percent in 2006.
The ancient principle that “man must eat before man can philosophize” may certainly apply to our current situation, as students opt for majors that will provide them with income over those that might feed the mind at the expense of the body. However, students and academians alike may have overlooked a liberal arts education’s value in the world of commerce as well as in the arts. As Cook writes
Among liberal-arts proponents, the concern is that students who specialize in specific careers will lack critical thinking skills and the ability to write, analyze, and synthesize information. While business education tends to prepare students to work well in teams or give presentations, it often falls short in teaching students to do in-depth research or to write critically outside of the traditional business communiqués of memos or PowerPoints. "I think you need to have both liberal-arts and pre-professional classes at the four-year level," says José Luis Santos, assistant professor in the Higher Education and Organizational Change division at UCLA. "People need to graduate with critical thinking skills because most workplaces retrain individuals for the needs of the industry."
To put it simply: Most employers would prefer to train an applicant who has already learned to think and analyze problems the specific technical skills pertinent to an industry than to teach a new employee who has technical skills — and nothing more — how to think.
In the April 5 edition of The Maine Campus, the University of Maine student newspaper, French language professor Yann Dupuy wrote an op-ed piece entitled “In defense of the liberal arts and languages at UMaine.”
Professor Dupuy cited a statement made in response to proposed budget cut by Raymond Pelletier, the chairperson of the university’s Modern Languages and Classics Department, who was quoted in the campus newspaper as saying, “We need to go at it philosophically, not by the numbers.”
“He is perfectly right," observed Dupuy. “It is a matter of philosophy, and APPWG’s [the Academic Program Prioritization Working Group] report shows the philosophy of university pretty clearly: They lean toward education over instruction.” He continues:
Instruction means giving the bare minimum of knowledge a student needs to be competent at his future job.
Education is this as well, but it also includes giving students the tools they need to later be an independent, free-thinking and morally sound citizen. Education is aimed to make one grow as a human being, while preparing for your future career as well. Education makes citizens; instruction makes good servants. (Emphasis added.)
Dupuy lamented a recent e-mail communication from the university’s dean of students, Robert Dana, in which the dean wrote: “Our primary focus remains on providing the best possible experience for our students.”
Dupuy noted: “Tellingly, in this long e-mail, the word ‘instruction’ is used once, while the word ‘education’ is nowhere to be found.”
With a sense of ironic wit, Dupuy concludes: “People go to Disneyland for a good experience, but students pay tuition for an education.”
Yet another commentary on the decline of liberal arts education, “A look at teaching ills of top-tier colleges,” a book review written by Cornell University professor Glenn C. Altschuler, appeared in the Boston Globe for April 6. Altschuler reviewed The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and staff writer at the New Yorker. Altschuler writes:
Liberal education, Menand reminds us, is in danger of being marginalized by the proliferation of alternatives. Twenty-two percent of bachelor’s degrees are conferred in business. Twice as many sheepskins are awarded in social work each year as in all foreign languages and literatures combined. Four percent of undergraduates major in English; two percent in history.
Over the past 30 years, the revolution in humanities disciplines has spawned a crisis of legitimacy. An emphasis on context, contingency, and interpretations rather than facts, Menand indicates, led to an abandonment of “Great Books,’’ “Western Civ,’’ a core curriculum, and, often, prerequisites for courses in the major. Professors of women’s studies, cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, and postcolonial studies took the theoretical position that disciplinary boundaries are arbitrary and limiting.
If there is any surprise to be found in these critical analyses, it is that they originate from sources generally deemed to fall on the modernist “liberal” side of the philosophical spectrum, and not on the classically liberal side from which "liberal arts" takes its name.
Whatever the sources, and whichever labels are attached to these sources, they present a concurrence with the message delivered by the late University of Chicago professor Allan David Bloom (1930-1992) who championed the idea of “Great Books” education. Bloom became famous for his criticism of modern American higher education, and is best remembered for having expressed his views in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind.
That these concerns about the decline in American education are being voiced in circles traditionally thought of as being receptive to modern “liberal” philosophy is encouraging. Perhaps the ever-more apparent impending political totalitarianism and collectivism enveloping our nation is making the need for an intelligent, informed, and thinking electorate apparent to our nation's most intelligent and honest observers, by whatever philosophical label was previously applied to them.
More and more academians apparently are realizing, as Professor Dupuy said: “Education makes citizens; instruction makes good servants.
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GM,
Are you arguing against liberal arts degree or against college degrees at all? The cost of not going to school is larger than the cost of college education-- statistically. However, If you want a job today a degree alone won't cut it you need experience ( volunteer work, internships and summer jobs) and you need to network. If you think liberal arts is the problem what do you think people should major in? I would say that all the PHD's I know recommend a liberal arts degree to start with because you will specialize enough later. I only have A Bachelors but knowing how to read almost anything has certainly been very valuable to me personally and professionally.
http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/writing.asp ---Marc's Joke.
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GM,
Are you arguing against liberal arts degree or against college degrees at all? The cost of not going to school is larger than the cost of college education-- statistically. However, If you want a job today a degree alone won't cut it you need experience ( volunteer work, internships and summer jobs) and you need to network. If you think liberal arts is the problem what do you think people should major in? I would say that all the PHD's I know recommend a liberal arts degree to start with because you will specialize enough later. I only have A Bachelors but knowing how to read almost anything has certainly been very valuable to me personally and professionally.
http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/writing.asp ---Marc's Joke.
I think college degrees are vastly oversold, overrated and for many a bad investment. It's also another bubble that looms over the economy. If it's not a STEM degree, it almost always is a waste. Now, if one comes from a background where one has the financial security to indulge in English, Sociology, Queer Theory or whatever is the flavor of the day, fine. If one needs to use the degree to advance one's financial position, then it's crucial to get something that actually will pay off as an investment. Most Liberal Arts degrees will not.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/283172/unc-wilmington-prof-tells-it-it-george-leef
UNC-Wilmington Prof Tells It Like It Is
November 14, 2011 3:57 P.M.
By George Leef
This letter (published in the Wilmington Star-News) is by physics professor Moorad Alexanian, who has been a thorn in the side of the UNC-Wilmington administration for complaining that the university’s budget cuts avoid all the sacred cows:
The genesis of the problem in our universities is the “democratization” of education and the easy availability of student loans, “Affordable education,” November 7. The nation is thus saddled with a trillion dollars in student loan debt ready to follow the housing bubble.
The floodgates have been opened wide to campus admission with faculty responding by adding courses and programs that do not prepare students in the important basic areas, especially, in the hard sciences and mathematics. Accordingly, students do not seek truly academic knowledge and skills but are just satisfied with a diploma, which is used by potential employees as a selection tool.
Administrators cater to such business model irrespective of how soft academic programs expand exponentially with the more solid academic curricula not being supported and even eliminated. Students are thus shackled with bogus degrees that lead nowhere. The state subsidizes students and so the increase in the number of students results in higher tuition costs for all.
Education reform models, like outcome-based education, exacerbate academic problems and lead to mediocrity, a model that resembles a sausage factory with good quality control. Lip service abounds for teaching excellence but none for learning excellence. The failure of K-12 education is finally creeping and crippling our entire university system. Too bad.
Moorad Alexanian
Wilmington
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http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_root_cause_of_market_failure_in_higher_education_99387.html
The Root Cause of Market Failure In Higher Education
By Bill Frezza
A little noticed Associated Press news story last week reported that China now plans to phase out college majors that consistently produce unemployable graduates. Any program in which 60% of the graduates failed to find work for two consecutive years would face funding reductions until supply was brought back into balance with demand.
This Chinese hand may not be invisible, but it would be one that Adam Smith would recognize. Isn't it amazing that even self-identified communists are figuring out that markets only work when adjustment mechanisms act to reduce surpluses and shortages? Destroy those mechanisms and unemployable college graduates pile up as fast as unsold electric cars.
The back story is a simple one illustrating the old adage: He who pays the piper calls the tune. In a world turned upside down, China's rulers want to make sure the young cadres they educate at the people's expense actually find jobs in the private economy. Here in the U.S., where outstanding government guaranteed student loans have recently passed the $1 trillion mark, education policy is geared not toward maximizing the employability of graduates, but toward garnering votes for politicians.
How so? After years of cultural bombardment, a college education has gone from being a means to an end - a successful career - to an end in itself. Parents who don't send their children to college lose status. American kids feel both entitled and pressured into getting a college education regardless of whether they have the intellectual capacity to profit from it, the work ethic to manage it, or the money to pay for it.
Alternative means of career training, like apprenticeship in trades that remain in demand - because, after all, you can't fly in Chinese plumbers - get no social respect. This despite the fact that skilled plumbers, with a little hustle, can out-earn most liberal arts majors.
Countless politicians now call college education a "right," alongside food, housing, and medical care. They pander to the education establishment, promising to deliver diplomas no matter how much of other people's money they have to spend. Meanwhile, the intelligentsia looks askance when college students are encouraged to choose a major based on practical expectations of future employment, suggesting instead that students should follow their muse.
To finance this so-called "right" to a college education a Government Sponsored Entity known as Sallie Mae, originally the Student Loan Marketing Association, was created in 1972 to issue below market rate student loans guaranteed by the federal government. Like its cousin Fannie Mae in the home mortgage business, lending practices were guided by political considerations, not sound economics. Just as Fannie Mae fueled an unsustainable housing bubble, Sallie encouraged runaway college tuition increases. And just as the federal government was forced to nationalize Fannie Mae when the bubble bust, Uncle Sam has now nationalized the college loan business with an eye on disguising the coming tsunami of student loan defaults.
Such policies have consequences. Too many aspiring young museum curators can't find jobs? The pragmatic Chinese solution is to cut public subsidies used to train museum curators. The free market solution is that only the rich would be indulgent enough to buy their kids an education that left them economically dependent on Mommy and Daddy after graduation. The progressive American solution is to seek increased public funding to build more museums.
When such make-work spending fails - as it must during periods of fiscal belt tightening - do progressives encourage maleducated kids to look around, see what needs doing, and start businesses of their own? No. They urge them to take to the streets to bang drums and chant slogans.
The system is nearing breakdown, which will come when student loan defaults finally push the federal agency that guarantees such loans into bankruptcy. At that point, we will have to face the fact that capping off adolescence with a four-year party at taxpayer expense is a luxury we can no longer afford.
College participation rates will have to go back down to historical norms. Slots will have to be reserved for students that can actually profit from them, restoring graduation rates to where they were before colleges were flooded with people who don't belong there, including illiterate freeloaders. Selection will have to be based on merit, not social engineering. Loans will have to be restricted to majors that confer capacity to pay the loans back. Dead-end programs used to train the next generation of professors - whose only skill will be to teach more such dead-end programs - will have to be limited, funded not by taxpayers but by ideological philanthropists with a hankering for fineries like literary criticism and gender studies.
This may seem like common sense to most people, but it strikes horror into the hearts of the liberal professoriate. After years of feathering their nests so they can produce students trained only to bite the hand that feeds them, perhaps it's time to serve up a few helpings of horror. We can no longer afford to take the snobbery of academics seriously. Taxpayers just don't have the money to keep them or their young acolytes on the dole.
Bill Frezza is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a Boston-based venture capitalist. He can be reached at bill@vereverus.com. If you would like to subscribe to his weekly column, drop a note to publisher@vereverus.com or follow him on Twitter @BillFrezza.
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CCP---That was good balanced article
My favorite quotes about education is
Scott Buchanan
http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/about/donrag.shtml
"Under the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, have you persuaded yourself that there are knowledges and truths beyond your grasp, things that you simply cannot learn? Have you allowed adverse evidence to pile up and force you to conclude that you are not mathematical, not linguistic, not poetic, not scientific, not philosophical? If you have allowed this to happen, you have arbitrarily imposed limits on your intellectual freedom, and you have smothered the fires from which all other freedoms arise."
A Liberal Arts degree does not equal a Humanities degree. I happen to have ended up with an English degree but I took more Math and Science classes combined than I took English Classes.
I think EE majors should have a liberal arts background even if they have to be in a 5 year program to do so. You will make lots more money if you are engineer that can speak or write well than if can’t but that is not the most important factor to me. English majors should have a background in the math and sciences.
There is a higher education bubble and it is a huge problem but having everyone get a STEM won’t solve the higher education bubble. STEM degrees will just be worth less.
My plumber has a college degree. ( My previous plumber his father didn’t) I don’t think the only reason people should go to college is for money or status.
I have a friend that was a math major and became an art history major and got her masters in museum studies and she is working and doesn’t regret it. Her twin sister the physics major is actually having more work problems. Statically Stem majors do make more but I don’t think anyone one on this board thinks money equals happiness or the amount of money you make has anything to do with your value as a person.
I have friends who are writers and friends who are scientists and all value their liberal arts degree.
I personally find my liberal arts degree one of the best choices I have ever made and you will never convince me it was a mistake.
I will probably won't be able to post for a few days.
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"I think EE majors should have a liberal arts background even if they have to be in a 5 year program to do so. You will make lots more money if you are engineer that can speak or write well than if can’t but that is not the most important factor to me. English majors should have a background in the math and sciences."
Once upon a time, public schools could be counted on to teach everyone to speak, read and write well and then higher ed could develop specialized areas of education based on the core foundations.
(CNSNews.com) - Two-thirds of the eighth graders in Wisconsin public schools cannot read proficiently according to the U.S. Department of Education, despite the fact that Wisconsin spends more per pupil in its public schools than any other state in the Midwest.
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http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/12/07/how-to-ruin-your-life/
December 7, 2011
How To Ruin Your Life
Alert reader Dan Shea drew Via Meadia‘s attention to an unusually depressing article in the Boston Globe. It is one of those fluffy and airheaded “lifestyle” pieces, the print equivalent of empty calorie junk food and like many such articles it provides a horrifying glimpse into the vacuous nature of the modern American mind. In this particular case, the reporter, who hopefully is affecting rather than spontaneously producing prose redolent of relentless stupidity, shares her view of 10 “awesome” classes at Boston area colleges that she thinks her readers would like to take.
A couple of them, we hasten to observe, look both useful and good. The MIT course taking first year mechanical engineering students through the entire process of toy design seems a bit out of place on this list. And we also note that the actual classes may have more substance than our chipper journalist reports. But some “awesome” courses look like the kind of academic malpractice that help so many American kids emerge from four years of “education” with massive debt loads, major attitude problems, and no marketable skills. Consider:
“Staging American Women: The Culture of Burlesque”. Burlesque is a complex and alluring underground culture — and sexy, too, of course. Think about tassels for a moment — are you blushing? Then you might want to skip out on a course that involves discussing pin-ups and early sexploitation films. Your loss.
It is hard to know which is more disturbing, here: that a college can accept student loan money for a course like this without being charged with financial fraud or the vapid thinking and limp prose that Globe editors evidently think belongs in their newspaper. Or consider this piece of awesomeness from the same college (Emerson, where tuition and fees run to more than $30,000 a year, and almost half of those who apply are admitted):
“Puppetry”. “The course culminates in the construction of puppets for in-class presentations,” which is really all you need to know. Plus, puppets are pretty popular right now. I’ll be the first to say it: This class will make you a hit with the ladies.
Or there is our fatuous writer’s top suggestion, a useful course on the history of surfing:
“Surfing and American Culture“. As a Massachusetts native, I have a bit of trouble picturing the impact surfing has had on American culture beyond that Beach Boys song and Point Break. This class will take the uninitiated through the history of surfing up to the present day, as well as examine its role as a major economic force. And include field trips? Just a suggestion.
(Again, one wonders when the Globe decided that soggy, tasteless mush like this was publishable content. Either the writer or the editor of this piece and quite possibly both clearly spent much too much time in college taking classes like the ones being praised here.)
As Via Meadia looked at these course descriptions, and reflected that all over America students are borrowing tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend expensive schools and then blowing the money on glittering fripperies like these, we were reminded of a book title we came across in our long vanished youth: How to Make Yourself Miserable. It occurs to us that there is an infallible recipe for making yourself miserable, and that many young people in this country are following it — some, perhaps, without knowing that that is what they are doing.
So, inspired by this list of awesome courses, here is a sure-fire way to make yourself miserably unhappy in your twenties.
First, enroll in a college that you cannot afford, and rely on large student loans to make up the difference.
Second, spend the next four years having as good a time as possible: hang out, hook up, and above all, take plenty of “awesome” courses.
Third, find teachers and role models who will encourage you to develop an attitude of enlightened contempt for ordinary American middle class life, the world of business, and such bourgeois virtues as self-reliance, thrift, accountability and self-discipline. Specialize in sarcasm and snark.
Fourth, avoid all courses with tough requirements, taking only the minimum required number of classes in science, math and foreign languages.
Fifth, never think about acquiring marketable skills.
Sixth, when you graduate and discover that you have to repay the loans and cannot get a job that pays enough to live comfortably while servicing your debts, be surprised. Blame society. Demand that the government or your parents or evil corporations bail you out.
Seventh, expect anyone (except for other clueless losers who’ve been as stupid and wasteful as you) to sympathize with your plight, or to treat you with anything but an infuriating mixture of sorrow, pity and contempt.
If you follow this recipe faithfully, Via Meadia promises that you will achieve all the unhappiness you want. And don’t worry; anytime you feel sad and blue, just read some “lifestyle” journalism in the Boston Globe. It will be sure to cheer you up.
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Some pretty good back and forth there.
Rachel-- amazing that you could find that joke story I referenced!
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"Once upon a time, public schools could be counted on to teach everyone to speak, read and write well and then higher ed could develop specialized areas of education based on the core foundations.
(CNSNews.com) - Two-thirds of the eighth graders in Wisconsin public schools cannot read proficiently according to the U.S. Department of Education, despite the fact that Wisconsin spends more per pupil in its public schools than any other state in the Midwest."
I just did search on reading proficiency and a lot comes up and all very confusing with different definitions, ways to measure, ways to test for it, interpretations, goals etc. I wonder how much is language barriers what not with all the foreign kids here who don't learn English. Now we also have every learing disability under the sun with nearly everyone who can fit in some sort of category or ADD ADHD and on and on and on.
WE have more spent on schools more specialized classes and focus on these "disabilities" and yet is the above telling me 2 out of 3 kids in Wisconsin cannot read a paragrah and tell me what they read?
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Yes. :cry:
IMHO a goodly part of this is due to:
a) mothers going into the workplace and thus not spending the time working with their children in support of their schooling that they used to;
b) fatherless children-- at its most extreme, the ghetto culture
c) progressive PC feel-good excrement and the general decline of holding people responsible for the consequences of their actions.
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I'm not sure why overall scores are down, however I do know women themselves are the ones who fought to go into the workplace - equality and all that.
I don't think you will get many takers from women wanting to go back.
Anyway, I think Wisconsin, the place of my birth is getting a bad rap here. Nationwide, only 30 percent of public school eighth graders earned a rating of "proficient" or better in reading, and the average reading score on the NAEP test was 262 out of 500. That's right, the reading proficiency rate for Wisconsin eighth graders is slightly higher than the national average.
The question, of course, is why can't kids read is still valid (CCP - they can read a paragraph, just not at the test level expected of them in their grade). However, it's just not a WI problem, but a nationwide problem.
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City leaders, think tankers suggest various causes of Detroit’s high illiteracy rate
12:01 AM 05/10/2011
A damning report released this month showing that nearly half of all adults in Detroit, Michigan are functionally illiterate has pundits and officials playing the blame game.
“The National Institute for Literacy estimates that 47% of adults (more than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate, referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills in everyday life situations,” a report from the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund reads.
Karen Tyler-Ruiz, the Fund’s director, explained the difficulties this presents to the average illiterate.
“Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job — those types of basic everyday [things]. Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should take…just your basic everyday tasks,” she said. “I don’t really know how they get by, but they do. Are they getting by well? Well, that’s another question,” she told WWJ Newsradio 950.
In a town where unions rule, some have pointed to the teachers’ union as a possible reason for the city’s high illiteracy rate.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/10/city-leaders-think-tankers-suggest-various-causes-of-detroits-high-illiteracy-rate/
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http://classicalvalues.com/2011/11/the-war-between-useless-and-useful/
The war between useless and useful
November 28, 2011 11:56 am - Author: Eric
The Democrats have finally officially decided to dump the white working class.
For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.
All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.
Bear in mind that the group that is being jettisoned was once the backbone of the Democratic Party, just as the big business/country club sets were once the backbone of the Republican Party.
I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but from what I’ve seen around here, the white working class is quite used to feeling abandoned. Liberals are seen as the sort of people who would never get their hands dirty and who disdain blue collar jobs of any kind, instead gravitating towards elite positions at universities or jobs in government or public policy where they can tell their inferiors what to do. While the universities are filled with the latter, local community colleges are inundated with white working class kids seeking to obtain for themselves what they failed to get from the public schools: basic literacy and numeracy — and job skills which are of actual use in the real world.
Aside from the irony that anyone with a high school degree should have to go to college in order to learn to read and write, a perfect example of a valuable real-world skill is welding. Public school teachers (who reflect the view of the educrat class) tend to hold such “dirty” and “dangerous” work in disdain, and they steer kids away from it. Guidance counselors attempt to push them into universities where they go into a lifetime of debt for worthless degrees that impart zero job skills. But some of the kids are smarter than that. They realize that if you have a skill that is worth something in the real world, you can actually feed your family.
They also know something that the Occupy movement (often holders of useless degrees) has missed: that the educational system’s institutional bias against promoting real world skills has led to shortages — in some instances not of jobs, but of skilled workers to fill them. Such as welders.
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"I'm not sure why overall (literacy) scores are down,however I do know women themselves are the ones who fought to go into the workplace - equality and all that. I don't think you will get many takers from women wanting to go back."
a) Forgive me, but that is not responsive to the point I am making. My point is this MOTHERS MATTER. If a mother is working with her children to help them succeed it school-- SHE MAKES A DIFFERENCE. If she goes off to work and leaves here children in daycare and then on their own when it comes to school when they are of school age THAT TOO SHOWS UP IN THE RESULTS.
b) I contest your assertion above. While true of many women, it is untrue of many others. Many women regret the choices they have made, and many others wish they could be with their children.
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I absolutely agree, mothers matter. So do fathers.
I'm not sure, I just checked briefly, but if Mom goes off to work, let's say she is an attorney, and leaves her child in a daycare center or mom quits her job
and stays home, I would like to see what you are referencing when you say, "THAT TOO SHOWS UP IN THE RESULTS". From what I've seen, test scores
are comparable, often even higher among those in quality daycare centers than stay at home mom environments.
That said, I see nothing wrong with choices; work or don't work. Or maybe the father stays home and the mother works if she draws the higher income.
Most couples I know, except a few that are very very rich, in most cases both work. They mumble about wanting more time at home, but when asked it
they would give up their job to stay home, the answer is a resounding "No". The "proof" is that more and more women are working. And choosing careers. Opportunities abound.
Also, unfortunate I think, but many/most working women often look down upon non working women in today's society. They have little or no respect for them.
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1) Being a full time mother IS work. I submit that your description in and of itself IS condescending and disrespectful to women who exercise the freedom of choice you say you favor. You are right, the condescension of the progressive paradigm intimidates many women into not doing what they really want to do.
2) You are right, many/most women "choose" work. I would also note that groups where this is the predominant paradigm tend not to breed sufficiently to reproduce. See the demographics of Europe to see just how that is working out.
3) I submit that women usually inherently disrespect stay at home dads, for reasons similar to those why they usually prefer a taller man. Get a group of women sufficiently drunk to the point of honesty (in vino veritas) and ask if they want a shorter, less earning, Mr. Mom.
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I do agree; being a full time mother is work. I personally am not condescending to disrespectful to woman who do not work. I don't care. For example, I have a few Muslim friends who do not work;
their husband's insist that they stay home. I have a close very rich white (Christian) male friend who prefers a cocktail then dinner on the table when he gets home..... She is a nice wife, I like her,
but frankly, society looks down upon her. "What do you do?" "Oh, you're a housewife, huh? Aren't you bored?" She has a UCLA Degree; yet she constantly feels put down.
Perhaps they don't breed sufficiently to reproduce. Then again, if we had fewer people, in the long run we would be better off. Large families, making a terrible generalization that is not always true,
seem to be on welfare. In contrast, I've had affluent friends tell me that they "can't afford" any more than 2 children because of the high cost of raising them is prohibitive in the education and lifestyle that they
they think is appropriate.
Of course many don't want a stay at home Dad nor do they want a short guy. But frankly, I think the short guy has it tougher. Unless you are Mick Jagger, no taller girl wants you. It just looks stupid. Oddly enough, I know quite a few high wage earning females; their biggest complaint is that most guys ego's are insufficient to cope. They actually have trouble finding a date. One cute girl I know under 30 in particular, a Senior Associate on the fast track $300,000+) can't seem to find a date. The guys are scared of her; actually she is quite sweet and fun out of the office. I know a woman partner at a large accounting firm, another who is a doctor, they all complain not about the income, but rather the guy's insecurity. Frankly, I think most of them would be happy to make the big bucks and have someone at home. They love their job, but they want companionship too. Me? My wife doesn't make enough to pay for basic groceries, but I do wish she made high six figures. I'ld have no problem with the insecurity issues. :-D
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May I ask what you consider to be "real world" skills or "useful" courses of study, GM?
http://classicalvalues.com/2011/11/the-war-between-useless-and-useful/
The war between useless and useful
November 28, 2011 11:56 am - Author: Eric
The Democrats have finally officially decided to dump the white working class.
For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.
All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.
Bear in mind that the group that is being jettisoned was once the backbone of the Democratic Party, just as the big business/country club sets were once the backbone of the Republican Party.
I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but from what I’ve seen around here, the white working class is quite used to feeling abandoned. Liberals are seen as the sort of people who would never get their hands dirty and who disdain blue collar jobs of any kind, instead gravitating towards elite positions at universities or jobs in government or public policy where they can tell their inferiors what to do. While the universities are filled with the latter, local community colleges are inundated with white working class kids seeking to obtain for themselves what they failed to get from the public schools: basic literacy and numeracy — and job skills which are of actual use in the real world.
Aside from the irony that anyone with a high school degree should have to go to college in order to learn to read and write, a perfect example of a valuable real-world skill is welding. Public school teachers (who reflect the view of the educrat class) tend to hold such “dirty” and “dangerous” work in disdain, and they steer kids away from it. Guidance counselors attempt to push them into universities where they go into a lifetime of debt for worthless degrees that impart zero job skills. But some of the kids are smarter than that. They realize that if you have a skill that is worth something in the real world, you can actually feed your family.
They also know something that the Occupy movement (often holders of useless degrees) has missed: that the educational system’s institutional bias against promoting real world skills has led to shortages — in some instances not of jobs, but of skilled workers to fill them. Such as welders.
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"May I ask what you consider to be "real world" skills or "useful" courses of study, GM?"
Anything that makes you more employable in today's and future job markets. As an example, one might compare the average wages for those trained as Welders and Plumbers from a community college vs. the wages earned from a holder of soft social science/english degree at a 4 year university.
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http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/a-mortgage-every-college-graduation-student-debt-to-stifle-home-buying/
A mortgage with every college graduation – Student debt to stifle home buying prospects of younger Americans – In 2000 student debt made up 2 percent of all household debt. Today student debt is up to 7 percent of all household debt and growing.
In order to have a healthy housing market you need to have a steady employment base and also a low level of distressed properties. Both of these prerequisites unfortunately are not applicable to the current economy. One albatross of future buyers is the now increasing burden of student loan debt. While virtually every other debt sector has contracted since the recession hit student loan debt is the only segment that has increased dramatically. It is understandable since many unemployed and the steady stream of high school graduates are still demanding a college education. What is incredible is the amount of debt students are taking on. Most are coming out with the debt of a brand new car while many others, are exiting school with what amounts to a mortgage with no home. Just look at the data; in 2000 student loan debt was roughly 2 percent of all household debt. Today student loan debt makes up over 7 percent of total household debt. Many future buyers are going to have their purchasing power curtailed by the amount of debt they are carrying with student loans.
What long-term impact will rising tuition have on other sectors like housing?
We’ve covered the housing bubble extensively on this site and the underlying argument has always been that home prices increased because of a mania produced by an economic bubble. Incomes never justified housing values and so we are here with the repercussions of a bubble bursting and with 6 million distressed properties still waiting on the sidelines five years after the music stopped playing. Yet as out of touch with reality that home prices became with household incomes student tuition saw an even more astronomical bubble:
(http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/rising-student-debt.jpg)
Since 1978 home prices tracked the general rate of inflation until the late 1990s. At that point you can see the housing bubble emerge. But look at fees associated with college. This is where the next bubble exists and with nearly $1 trillion in outstanding student loans, this will put a clamp on how much future buyers can afford when purchasing other items like automobiles and more importantly homes.
The Federal Reserve now publishes data for student debt from Sallie Mae. This is only one component of the student debt market but nonetheless the chart is incredible:
(http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/student-debt-sallie-mae-data.png)
Source: Federal Reserve
This is not a healthy trend. More importantly the long-term impacts of student debt are only now starting to filter down into the overall economy. You think a recent graduate with an entry level job and $100,000 in debt is going to buy a home? A decade ago this scenario was rare with 2 percent of all household debt being in the form of student loans. Today it is over 7 percent and this debt is largely held by a group of potential future home buyers, not current owners.
Recent data shows that many graduates are working in fields that don’t even require their college degree:
(http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/employment-status-college-graduates.png)
Source: John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University
The good news for recent graduates is that 56 percent are working in fields that require a college degree. The bad news is that 22 percent are not working while another 22 percent are working in fields that don’t require a college degree. With this group, you probably have many that simply accepted whatever job they were able to find in this ongoing recession. The above data is for the class of 2010 and I’m sure we are going to get more information soon on the class of 2011.
Home prices versus college costs
In relation to a public education even here in California, the cost of higher education has become more expensive in relation to home prices:
(http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/home-price-versus-uc-education.png)
“The cost of an UC degree was cheapest in 1980 in relation to housing prices. For example, for the cost of the median home in California in 1980 you would have been able to purchase over 330 years of education at the UC. Today the cost of a median priced California home will only get you 22 years of college education.”
In other words, even measured against another bubble asset category in housing the cost of higher education is in a deeper bubble. None of this has kept people from enrolling and much of the growth has occurred with for-profit institutions but public and private institutions have also been increasing their fees:
(http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/enrollment1.png)
Source: Pope Center
The patterns seem extremely similar to the housing bubble with certain segments taking up the roll of subprime lenders and the entire industry getting excited by easy finance and an unrelenting line of demand. The only problem of courses is the debt is being backed by the U.S. government (i.e., taxpayers) and we all know what happens when the bubble pops.
You then have many thinking that graduate school is the answer and going deeper into debt:
“(Bloomberg) Gerrald Ellis, 28, took about $160,000 in federal loans to attend Fordham Law School, and then spent a year searching for a job. He eventually found work at a four-lawyer firm in White Plains, New York, doing consumer protection work.
Because his student debt is so high compared to his salary, Ellis said he expects to qualify for a plan that would let him pay 15 percent of his salary for 25 years, and whatever debt is left after that is forgiven.
“I’m trapped for at least two decades,” said Ellis, who lives in Harlem with a classmate who also borrowed more than $100,000. “The debt has an impact on everything, where I decide to live, what job I take. I can’t even imagine having kids with this kind of debt burden. Multiply that by a whole generation.”
Or what about this case:
“Laura Sayer, unsure of what she wanted to do after graduating from college in 2006, figured a master’s degree was “a safe bet.”
With $5,000 in undergraduate loans from her time at the University of Cincinnati, Sayer was set back $50,000 more after completing the Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University. The 27-year-old now makes about $45,000 a year as an administrative assistant for a nonprofit group, a job that didn’t require her advanced degree.”
A large part of this growth has come from the government working with banks to back up these loans:
“After a change in federal law in 2006, graduate students became eligible to borrow federally backed loans that covered the full cost to complete their degrees, while undergraduates are limited to $27,000 over four years, according to Kantrowitz.
The number of students enrolled in graduate schools, excluding law and medicine, totaled 1.7 million last year, a 33 percent jump from 2000, according to data from the Council of Graduate Schools, which represents more than 500 universities.”
Do you notice a pattern here? The combination of banks and our government seems to produce bubbles that sprout up like weeds in a garden. Only difference is there will be no investors to purchase distressed college degrees.
Tying it together with housing
Today more of the high paying jobs however do require a college degree. Growth industries like engineering, health care, computer science, and applied sciences require four year degrees. The problem comes when you have many entering for-profits and coming out with tremendous debt but very little job prospects. With student debt not being discharged in bankruptcy, you lock in millions of potential future buyers from buying a home. First, the debt burden is high and second you have a more reluctant group of people that may develop risk aversion.
Banks are no longer lending money out like candy during Halloween so income is important and debt-to-income ratios are now part of the lending lexicon. Given that the student debt bubble keeps on growing and good paying jobs are yet to be found in mass, the justification for higher home prices seems to be a wishful fantasy. The shadow inventory is still immense and the reality that home prices are making post-bubble lows is a reflection of this confluence of forces. People are doubling up, don’t qualify even for FHA insured loans, demand is muted even with artificially low rates, and are simply burdened by weak household wage growth. Certainly the millions who have moved back home because of the recession are putting a plug into the future buying pool and hierarchy of the old buying process:
-Go off to school
-Rent once you graduate
-Find a partner and purchase a home
-Build equity and move up
This has been the pattern for decades but this entire ecosystem of buying is no longer applicable. Not at least in this current climate with distressed properties being the bulk of sales and home prices moving lower.
With every incentive in the world being thrown at home buying little can be done without a healthy economic jobs machine. Those that understood this were able to see through the housing bubble rhetoric. I wonder how many can understand this argument with the student debt machine going at full speed today and the future implications on other segments of the economy including housing.
Have any stories about student debt and housing?
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/teachers-upset-over-elementary-students-reciting-pledge-of-allegiance-in-english-and-spanish/
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As the cost of college goes up and up and up, one thing missing in the value of the degree debate is the second part of what they call college degree or "equivalent". (Link below)
With the college search process in full gear, soon I will know more about the inner workings of college pricing. Our family income is very low, but does that mean she will get money paid by someone else or get loans. The idea of loans equal to a large home mortgage just for a basic 4 year is unacceptable to me. My understanding at the high priced places is that most don't pay asking price. Some places pay money for ACT scores and for academics, but it is all very confusing. Girls at her level in sports are getting recruited and some money may come related to that. The girls a notch better than her in sports are getting full rides.
There is definitely value in having the best technical people also develop real communication skills and for the communications people to have a deeper understanding of math, science, engineering and business. Hard to measure value, but it is important. The price problem is similar to health care. As 3rd party pay grows, how can the consumer hold down the cost? It is also hard for me to see if there is competition on price with quality or is higher education really just one large racket. I know they compete for the high end students but they all seem to fill up with numbers of students, one way or another.
One avenue out of the cost mess is to achieve the equivalent in learning and don't pay the institution. For the ordinary person that may not work and it doesn't work in every field, like medicine, but an amazing amount of information is out there for the taking. Read the forum here for knowledge. Also I like this site:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/
2000 courses online, free. No tuition, no admissions screening, no degrees. Just courses, syllabuses, tests, lecture notes, etc. from one of the greatest technical institutions in the world on an amazing array of topics.
Google: 'MIT OCW' (Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Open Course Ware)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/education/online-schools-score-better-on-wall-street-than-in-classrooms.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23
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Doug said, "One avenue out of the cost mess is to achieve the equivalent in learning and don't pay the institution. For the ordinary person that may not work and it doesn't work in every field, like medicine, but an amazing amount of information is out there for the taking."
That is true, however unfortunately IMHO many/most white collar jobs now list a college degree as a prerequisite. You simply don't even get the interview unless you have graduated from college;
we have "evolved" to the point where a college degree is almost mandatory. I personally know hard working white collar people who do not have a college degree and they have been told by management that they will not be promoted, regardless of their performance, because they do not have a degree. It's the price of admission.
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'many/most white collar jobs now list a college degree as a prerequisite'
Yes in big corporations though I very often see things like Masters of Engineering or equivalent. If you are the best in your profession, doors open up for you. More often I know people with PhD in Physics etc working in other sectors and the credential merely establishes they are smart and trainable. With employment law and escalating mandates etc. we may be evolving back toward an entrepreneurial economy where merit may surpass credentials for criteria - at least in some sectors.
I have been hired in a degree required situation where the boss didn't have one.
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Doug,
A young relative of mine got her undergrad degree while serving on an aircraft carrier. Both the US Air Force and US Navy have their own community college systems that can be accessed globally by their personnel.
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GM.
I am missing the connection between puppetry and getting a liberal arts education.
Writing well at 18 and writing well at 22 should be very different things.
What happens if you get learn a trade and 5 years later technology changes and your skills are obsolete or even worse 25 years later and you way too young to retire but learning a new skill would be difficult. What do you do then? A college degree might look a lot more attractive. What is your suggestion for all the out of work construction workers?
Community colleges are wonderful resources and can be a great fit for some. However the undergraduate education you get at community colleges is often less rigirous than the education you get at many traditional colleges.
I am not denying that there is a higher education bubble and that is it a serious problem.
Marc,
This is an old study I couldn't find a more recent one the statics are not in you favor that working moms ='s lower literacy
http://parenthood.library.wisc.edu/Hoffman/Hoffman.html
Day Care does provide education and you can help you kids with their homework when you get home from work.
It is true that people wrongly look down on stay at home moms. They are definitely worthy of great respect but so are working moms. You seem to be suggesting that is impossible to be a working mother and a good parent.
I have friends who are working moms and I have friends that are stay at home moms and I have friends that are somewhat in between. Almost all complain about feeling guilty and being looked down upon by people who made different choices than they did. The right solutions for your family does not have to be the right solution for someone else.
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Well put...
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Rachel: I do not remember saying "lower literacy" (though I tend to suspect it, and tend to doubt the integrity of studies that purport to show otherwise). I simply say that mothers being present matters, and matters a lot.
Agreed that what is right or necessary for some is not necessarily right or necessary for others, but on the whole I think in the big picture on the whole mothers mothering their children is a good thing and to say it doesn't matter if they do not inherently depreciates all the women who do care for their children. Of course a good mother will go to work if she has to (and as the kids get older things change) but I distinguish the self-important selfish yuppie attitude which simply sees kids less important than her ego gratification.
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GM.
I am missing the connection between puppetry and getting a liberal arts education.
Writing well at 18 and writing well at 22 should be very different things.
Really? One need not be a novelist to demonstrate basic writing skills, which are not as common as one would hope these days.
What happens if you get learn a trade and 5 years later technology changes and your skills are obsolete or even worse 25 years later and you way too young to retire but learning a new skill would be difficult. What do you do then?
Go into whatever field that best fits the circumstances of that time.
A college degree might look a lot more attractive.
Maybe, maybe not. Lots of people of various ages with college degrees facing long term unemployment these days. Except those with STEM degrees or trade skills that are in demand.
What is your suggestion for all the out of work construction workers?
Look for what's in demand and has a reasonable expectation of being in demand in the future and go that route.
Community colleges are wonderful resources and can be a great fit for some. However the undergraduate education you get at community colleges is often less rigirous than the education you get at many traditional colleges.
I think that point can reasonably be disputed in the era of grade inflation and lowered standards.
I am not denying that there is a higher education bubble and that is it a serious problem.
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An interesting article from a philosophy professor on the purpose of college.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/what-is-college-for/
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An interesting article from a philosophy professor on the purpose of college.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/what-is-college-for/
What is your take, BD?
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An interesting article from a philosophy professor on the purpose of college.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/what-is-college-for/
What is your take, BD?
You know I like college, GM.
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"To work or not to work after having children: it's a subject that's been debated over and over again. What's best for the kids? What’s best for women? And wait, what's best for you?
According to a recent study by the American Psychological Association of over 1,300 moms the happiest moms are, perhaps unsurprisingly, those who work part-time.
Full-time working mothers were equally well-off on several important levels, though. Both part- and full-time workers reported better overall health and fewer symptoms of depression than those who stayed at home. The working groups also showed no significant differences in terms of personal perceptions that their jobs "supported family life, including their ability to be a better parent," the study's authors said in a press release."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/15/study-working-moms-are-ha_n_1152202.html
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An interesting article from a philosophy professor on the purpose of college.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/what-is-college-for/
What is your take, BD?
You know I like college, GM.
Well, yes.
I was hoping to get a bit more from you, such as how many undergrads do you teach that actually should be there in your class?
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http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/12/18/thomas-friedman-and-the-higher-education-bubble/?singlepage=true
Thomas Friedman and the Higher Education Bubble
That Thomas Friedman would spout stupidity and anti-Semitism surprises me no more than the appearance of a gumball after I put a quarter into the machine and turn the knob. But one line in the New York Times‘ calumnist’s (sic) Dec. 13 tantrum against Israel was worth a double-take:
I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused.
Why on earth is the “real test” at the University of Wisconsin? For liberals, the only people who count are the smart people, because it is an article of faith that social engineering can fix all the world’s problems, and a logical conclusion that only smart people qualify as social engineers. It doesn’t matter what the dumb people think. They are the ones who need to be socially engineered. To Friedman, it is irrelevant whether Americans at large support Israel by a 4:1 margin or better, and that support for Israel is growing steadily, as the Gallup Poll consistently shows:
(http://sas-origin.onstreammedia.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/8epwwsmayeegxgthtobk5a.gif)
That poll includes dumb people, so it doesn’t count. To Friedman, what matters is what university audiences might think. The insularity of the liberal mind is astonishing. It brings to mind the anecdote about Emperor Ferdinand of Austria (deposed for incompetence in 1848). He went hunting and shot and eagle. The bird fell to his feet, and Ferdinand said, “It’s got to be an eagle — but it’s only got one head!”
The American university system exists for the most part to produce the social engineers who will fix all the world’s problems. During the 1960s, those of us who had the misfortune to attend the better colleges were taught that our mission was to make the world perfect, through the Great Society, arms control, internationalism, disarmament, and so forth. When the Vietnam War and the urban riots of the 1960s showed that the liberalism of our elders had not fixed the world’s problems, we abominated them, and pursued even more radical versions of social engineering. The radicalization of the universities produced a generation of clever people unsuited to productive activity in the real world but skilled at bloviating, and they became the tenured faculty of today. And their salaries, privileges, and perks continued to grow to the point that $50,000 in annual tuition barely covers them. Overall CPI is up 70% since 1990, but tuition and fees have risen by 300%.
(http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/tuition-cpi-college.png)
Meanwhile the hard-science faculties of major universities (as well as the better music conservatories) filled up with foreign graduate students, mainly Asians. As I noted in a recent post, MIT’s Chinese graduates now get higher starting salaries if they return home. The most disturbing report of all was a UCLA study showing that only 40% of students who initially chose a science/engineering/math major finished a degree within five years (for blacks and Latinos, the completion rate was closer to 15%). Americans simply won’t work hard enough.
Rather than produce smart people, the university system has dumbed America down. After two generations of academic wheel-spinning, the transformation of universities into Maoist re-education camps with beer kegs has ruined their practical value. The giant sucking sound you hear is the air going out of the higher education bubble. As the New York Times reported in a Nov. 23 feature, “One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from non-elite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability.”
Student loans, with a default rate of 8.8%, are the new subprime debt.
The only good news here is that liberal mainstream culture can’t afford to brainwash as many American kids as it used to. Prof. Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University likes to say that the big question in American politics is whether the red states can produce kids faster than professors from the blue states can corrupt them. The lure of the elite universities was the promise that kids could have their cake and eat it, too, that is, save the planet and drive a Volvo. The dashed hopes of American students promote the sort of misbehavior we see in the Occupy Wall Street protests. They would do better to sue their universities for fraud and demand a return of their tuition, with interest. Somehow, I don’t expect quite the same level of mobilization for Obama in 2012 as we saw at the universities in 2008. The kids won’t have gas money, let alone cars.
The existential question for liberalism becomes: If you so smart, how come you ain’t rich? Who cares what an audience of soon-to-be-unemployed kids at the University of Wisconsin might think? With their heads stuffed with literary theory, gender studies, and environmental pseudo-science, they are barely qualified for the cubicle jobs they will obtain if they are lucky. There is some value to a B.A. of any kind; it teaches you to read, memorize, show up on time and repeat what you are told. College graduates, at least, can read the new job manual, which explains why their unemployment rate is much lower than the national average. But few of them will live well, and almost none up to their expectations.
Liberalism, like cancer, is a self-liquidating malady. Eventually it kills the patient. Secular Americans, mainline Protestants, loosely-affiliated Catholics, and Reform and Conservative Jews breed like Germans or Italians, with fewer than 1.5 children per female. By contrast, Hispanic Catholics have 3 children, and evangelicals 2.6 children. America is like Schroedinger’s Cat, in a superposed state of being dead and live. And long before demographics catch up with liberal culture and extinguish it, like the post-Alexandrine Greeks or the 5th-century Romans, the economic destruction wrought by liberal education will have impoverished most of a generation of American young people.
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"Who cares what an audience of soon-to-be-unemployed kids at the University of Wisconsin might think? With their heads stuffed with literary theory, gender studies, and environmental pseudo-science, they are barely qualified for the cubicle jobs they will obtain if they are lucky. There is some value to a B.A. of any kind; it teaches you to read, memorize, show up on time and repeat what you are told. College graduates, at least, can read the new job manual, which explains why their unemployment rate is much lower than the national average. But few of them will live well, and almost none up to their expectations."
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As an aside, the abovenamed university with high academics and a very liberal reputation is one my daughter is strongly considering right now. This question could go under parenting. UW Madison is perhaps the best academic institution of the public schools within roughly driving distance and with in-state tuition reciprocity for us, rated higher than all but a very few small private colleges in the region. If I had any influence, should I be steering her away from known, pervasive liberalism on campus and toward a smaller, more conservative college with perhaps lesser academic experience to protect her, or sit back and trust it all to work out fine in the end? Any helpful suggestions?
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I think you will find that UW Madison to be an excellent school. It has a "liberal" reputation, but solid real world academics - it depends upon your major. My Mother, who was quite conservative graduated from
the UW Madison in Science. If you are considering small liberal arts colleges, my father went to Lawrence University in Appleton WI. Again, he is conservative. He loved the school. Further, I have had friends who have gone to both schools and everyone seems happy with their choice.
Since UW Madison is in the Rose Bowl this year and I live close, I suppose I could take a political survey on the street. Already, the streets are beginning to be awash in UW red.
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Doug,
What kind of career does your daughter want to do?
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http://www.crisismagazine.com/2011/are-american-colleges-cheating-students
The issue of liberal indoctrination and the iron grip of political correctness on campus has often been studied. The National Association of Scholars, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and activist David Horowitz, among others, have provided us with an abundance of evidence, especially in the humanities and social sciences, that we need not explore here. The fact is that students are too often unexposed to both sides of issues and lack opportunities to think for themselves. Conservatives on campus, students and faculty, suffer.
Then there is matter of what college graduates are supposed to know. A study sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, WhatWillTheyLearn.com grades 1,000 colleges and universities on the breadth of their graduation requirements and lists graduation rates. Campuses are graded from A to F on the basis of seven key areas of knowledge: composition, literature, foreign language, US history, economics, mathematics, and science. (Curiously, philosophy, fine arts, and the history of Western civilization are ignored.) Most educators and many students are well aware of the U.S. News ranking of campuses, in part a reflection of the reputation of professors on board. Now we have a more objective study pointing to the knowledge being required of students.
There are many, often shocking, surprises. In Massachusetts, for example, not a single campus earned an “A.” (That is true of most states.) Tufts and Wellesley earned a “B,” MIT received a “C,” Brandeis, Harvard, and Williams received a “D,” and Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, and Holy Cross were graded “F.” Academic reputations can be deceiving.
In California, Pepperdine, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, and the California State University at Dominguez Hills (which has a large minority enrollment), received an “A.” Almost all the California State University campuses and the University of California-San Diego earned a “B.” Stanford, Pomona, the University of Southern California, and the University of California -Santa Barbara received a “C.” Mills and the University of California-Santa Cruz, received a “D.” The flunk-outs included Occidental and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, and Irvine.
In Wisconsin, the “B” range includes Marian and the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Campuses rated “C” include Marquette and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Graded “D” were Beloit, Carthage, Lawrence, and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Trailing with “F” were Alverno, and the University of Wisconsin campuses at Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Parkside. (Both Milwaukee and Parkside, neighbors of mine, were given bottom ratings in the U.S. News rankings as well.)
Other schools around the nation receiving “A” include the Air Force, Army, and Coast Guard Academies, Brooklyn College, St. Johns Maryland, and Gardner-Webb. Among the “B” institutions are the University of Chicago, Ave Maria, Columbia, Cornell, St. Bonaventure, Seattle University, the US Naval Academy, Loyola University in Chicago, the University of Miami, Notre Dame, Duke, and Villanova.
At the other end of the scale nationally, the “D”s include Johns Hopkins, Yale, Northwestern, the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Ohio University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of Oregon, Reed, Bryn Mawr, Penn State, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
At the very bottom we find: Vassar (where tuition alone is $43,190), the University of Rochester, Lake Forest, Knox, New College of Florida, Case Western Reserve, the University of Cincinnati, Colorado College, Bucknell, Dickinson, Gettysburg, Trinity, and Wesleyan.
There appears to be no correlation between breadth of knowledge requirements and graduation rates. In Massachusetts, “F” rated Amherst graduates 95 percent of its students, while “D” rated Harvard graduates 97 percent. In Wisconsin, “C” rated Madison leads the state with 83 percent graduation, and “F” rated Parkside trails all with a rate of 32 percent.
High admission standards and venerable campus academic reputations appear to correlate most closely with high graduation rates. Students want a prestige degree, and actual knowledge acquired in the college classroom seems to be of secondary importance. That should not be surprising since American students, for many generations, have gone to college with rising socio-economic success as the foremost consideration. Business is the most popular major.
As for the conflicting claims that there aren’t enough college graduates, and on the other hand that there are fewer and fewer jobs for college graduates, perhaps we need to reconsider what a college and university diploma should mean.
What is an educated person? I believe that the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has it right when they argue for breadth of knowledge. Tough academic courses in all seven fields should be required or at least encouraged strongly. (A Roper poll shows that that 70 percent agree that colleges and universities should require courses in basic skills. The figure jumps to 80 percent among those in the 25 to 34 year old bracket.)
Instead, catalogs are stuffed with pseudo-intellectual, ideological, and even silly courses and majors that require little mental effort and are often brimming over with ideological bias. Students are often able to select from a wide range of courses and, predictably, many choose the easy way out. (Mass communications, sports psychology, and gender and sexual studies anyone?)
Students need not major in, say, history or English if such studies lack employer appeal, but history and English should be somewhere on a graduate’s transcript. Exposure to the literature itself is important, even if the professor isn’t. Perspective, serious thought, and good writing skills can be useful, on and off the job.
Today nearly 40 percent of American adults have a bachelor’s degree and higher, and yet the state of our popular culture and our political-intellectual life is scandalously low. In part this is because a college diploma too often signifies very little beyond foresight and persistence.
If you think I’m exaggerating, read Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation. The author documents in detail the miserable state of ignorance and anti-intellectualism shared by both our high school and college graduates. You can also learn the significance of computers and tech toys in the overall decline. And don’t miss the new book Academically Adrift: Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. The authors document lax standards in the classroom, and report that 36 percent of students experienced no significant improvement in learning after four years of higher education. According to the Association of American Colleges and Universities, 63 percent of employers believe that recent college graduates lack the skills necessary for success.
I believe that educators are more to blame than students. Weak academic requirements are often products of deliberate efforts to keep campuses growing and prosperous. Students deserve more knowledge for their (often borrowed) money, even if they don’t want it. Our culture cries out for the learning that might produce higher standards of conduct, thought, sensitivity, and responsibility. We must also, of course, be able to compete effectively in the world marketplace. Few Americans want to be speaking Chinese in the near or distant future.
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http://www.navy.com/joining/education-opportunities.html
College is one of many routes to a higher education Education Opportunities
In America’s Navy, a great deal of emphasis is placed upon education. The high-tech work environment and the complex nature of Navy missions demand it. So when it comes to earning a degree or advancing the level of education you already possess, there are many programs that can help you on your way to an associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s or beyond.
Opportunities for Those With Diplomas or Degrees
From a qualifications standpoint, the Navy insists that all recruits have at least a high school diploma or equivalent and all Officers have a college degree. With that in mind, initial and continuing education opportunities are available whether you’re just out of high school, in the workforce, in college, a recent college graduate or a degreed professional. And whatever your background, you’ll be encouraged to pursue your educational goals – and provided with many ways to do so.
Programs for Traditional and Distance Learning
The Navy offers everything from degree earning coursework to degree-accredited on-the-job training – in settings that range from typical classrooms to ships or bases. There are college scholarships and post graduate scholarships that help cover things such as tuition, books and other expenses. Plus, there are educational savings programs and loan repayment programs available to subsidize your schooling costs. Some of the programs are offered as part of your service. Others require that you meet additional requirements.
Consider All Your Options
Whether it's scholarships or financial reimbursement, salary advances or sign-on bonuses, educational assistance can take many forms in the Navy. It all depends on where you are now and which of the career areas you’re interested in pursuing.
Look into the NROTC, undergraduate and graduate and professional programs outlined in this section to identify the program or programs that best fit your needs. And be sure to talk with a recruiter for further details or clarification or just to make sure you have the latest information to consider.
Undergraduate
Enter the military or go to college? Too often, the first thought is that you must choose one or the other. But the reality is this: Education and service can go hand in hand in America’s Navy.
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Exams in South Korea
The one-shot society
The system that has helped South Korea prosper is beginning to break down
Dec 17th 2011 | SEOUL | from the print edition
ON NOVEMBER 10th South Korea went silent. Aircraft were grounded. Offices opened late. Commuters stayed off the roads. The police stood by to deal with emergencies among the students who were taking their university entrance exams that day.
Every year the country comes to a halt on the day of the exams, for it is the most important day in most South Koreans’ lives. The single set of multiple-choice tests that students take that day determines their future. Those who score well can enter one of Korea’s best universities, which has traditionally guaranteed them a job-for-life as a high-flying bureaucrat or desk warrior at a chaebol (conglomerate). Those who score poorly are doomed to attend a lesser university, or no university at all. They will then have to join a less prestigious firm and, since switching employers is frowned upon, may be stuck there for the rest of their lives. Ticking a few wrong boxes, then, may mean that they are permanently locked out of the upper tier of Korean society.
Making so much depend on an exam has several advantages for Korea. It is efficient: a single set of tests identifies intelligent and diligent teenagers, and launches them into society’s fast stream. It is meritocratic: poor but clever Koreans can rise to the top by studying very, very hard. The exam’s importance prompts children to pay attention in class and parents to hound them about their homework; and that, in turn, ensures that Korea’s educational results are the envy of the world. The country is pretty much the leading nation in the scoring system run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 2009 it came fourth after Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong, but those are cities rather than full-sized countries.
Korea’s well-educated, hard-working population has powered its economic miracle. The country has risen from barefoot to broadband since 1960, and last year, despite the global slowdown, its economy grew by 6.2%. In the age of the knowledge economy, education is economic destiny. So the system has had far-reaching and beneficial consequences.
Yet it also has huge costs. For a start, high school is hell. Two months before the day of his exams Kim Min-sung, a typical student, was monosyllabic and shy. All the joy seemed to have been squeezed out of him, to make room for facts. His classes lasted from 7am until 4pm, after which he headed straight for the library until midnight. He studied seven days a week. “You get used to it,” he mumbled.
His parents have spent much of Min-sung’s life worrying about his education. His father, a teacher, taught him how to manage his time: to draw up a plan and stick to it, so as to complete as much revision as possible without collapsing exhausted on the desk. His mother kept him fuelled with “delicious food” and urged him to “study more, but not too much”.
Min-sung says he doesn’t particularly want to go to university, but he feels “social pressure” to do so. He dreams of getting a job as an agent for sports stars, which would not obviously require a university degree. But he reluctantly accepts that in Korea, “You can’t get [any] job without a degree.”
Min-sung’s happiest time was playing football with his friends during the lunch hour. Every child in his school dashes to the cafeteria when the bell goes and gulps down the noodles like a wolf in a hurry. The quicker they eat, the more precious minutes of freedom each day will contain.
A poll by CLSA, a stockbroker, found that 100% of Korean parents want their children to go to university. Such expectations can be stressful. In one survey a fifth of Korean middle and high school students said they felt tempted to commit suicide. In 2009 a tragic 202 actually did so. The suicide rate among young Koreans is high: 15 per 100,000 15-24-year-olds, compared with ten Americans, seven Chinese and five Britons. Min-sung’s older sister, Kim Jieun, who took the exams a few years ago, recalls: “I thought of emigrating, I hated the education system so much.”
As more and more students cram into universities, the returns to higher education are falling. Because all Korean parents want their children to go to university, most do. An incredible 63% of Koreans aged 25-34 are college graduates—the highest rate in the OECD. Since 1995 there has been a staggering 30 percentage-point increase in the proportion of Koreans who enter university to pursue academic degrees, to 71% in 2009.
This sounds great, but it is unlikely that such a high proportion of young Koreans will actually benefit from chasing an academic degree, as opposed to a vocational qualification. A survey in August found that, four months after leaving university, 40% of graduates had not yet found jobs.
Unemployment represents a poor return on what for most families is a huge financial sacrifice. Not only is college itself expensive; so is getting in. Parents will do anything to help their children pass the college entrance exam. Many send them to private crammers, known as hagwon, after school. Families in Seoul spend a whopping 16% of their income on private tuition.
Seoul children
Korea’s rigid social model aggravates the nation’s extreme demographic problems. Korean women have stopped having anywhere near enough babies to provide the country with the workforce it will need in the future.
Since Korean women started entering the labour force in large numbers, the opportunity costs of having children have risen sharply. The workplace makes few allowances for women who want to take a career break. If a woman drops off the career track for a couple of years, Korean firms are far less likely than Western ones to welcome her back. And if a firm does take back a working mother, she will face a stark choice: drop off the fast track or work long and inflexible hours.
Flexitime and working from home are frowned on. This makes it staggeringly hard to combine work and child care, especially since Korean mothers are expected to bear most of the responsibility for pushing their children to excel academically.
The direct costs of raising children who can pass that all-important exam are also hefty. Sending one child to a $1,000-a-month hagwon is hard enough. Paying for three is murder. Parents engage in an educational arms race. Those with only one child can afford higher fees, so they bid up the price of the best hagwon. This gives other parents yet another incentive to have fewer children.
Since 1960 the fertility rate in Korea has fallen faster than nearly anywhere on earth, from six children per woman to 1.15 in 2009. That is a recipe for demographic collapse. If each Korean woman has only one baby, each generation will be half as large as the one that came before. Korea will age and shrink into global irrelevance.
Small wonder the government is worried. President Lee Myung-bak talks of the need to create a “fair society”. That means, among other things, changing attitudes to educational qualifications. He says he wants employers to start judging potential employees by criteria other than their alma mater. In September he promised that the government would start hiring more non-graduates. “Merit should count more than academic background,” he said.
The forces for change
The president is also urging Korean firms to recruit people with a wider range of experiences. Some have agreed to do so. In September, for example, Daewoo Shipbuilding said it would start hiring high-school graduates and set up an institution to train them. But the managers who run big Korean companies are mostly from the generation in which academic background was everything, so they may be reluctant to change.
The government is trying to reduce the leg-up that private tuition gives to the children of the well-off. Since 2008 local authorities have been allowed to limit hagwon hours and fees. Freelance snoops, known as hagparazzi, visit hagwon with hidden cameras to catch them charging too much or breaking a local curfew. The hagparazzi are rewarded with a share of any fines imposed on errant educational establishments. Yet still the hagwon proliferate. By the government’s count, there are nearly 100,000.
The other force for change is Korea’s young people. Many are questioning whether the old rules about how to live one’s life will make them happy. Kang Jeong-im, a musician, puts it bluntly: “I think it’s difficult to live the way you want to in South Korea.” High school was the worst, she recalls: “We were like memorising machines. Almost every day, I’d fall asleep at my desk. The teacher would shout at me or throw chalk.”
Ms Kang made her parents proud by getting into Yonsei, one of Korea’s leading universities. But once there, she rebelled. She hung out with radicals and read Marx and Foucault. She went on protest marches, waving a placard, inhaling tear gas and almost getting herself arrested. “I kinda enjoyed it,” she says, “I felt I was doing something really important.”
She learned to play the guitar. She wrote a thesis on female Korean rock musicians that involved a lot of “field studies”: ie, going to concerts and talking to cool people. She even interviewed the singer of 3rd Line Butterfly, a group she loved.
She formed a band with a male friend. They played some gigs in small venues, but eventually he took a full-time job at a news agency and no longer had time for rocking. So Ms Kang started a solo career, writing songs and performing them herself, using the stage name “Flowing”. She is working on an album, she says, and performing in clubs. Her parents are not exactly thrilled; they want her to find a respectable job and get married. Their friends and relatives ask: “What is your daughter doing?” and “Why do you let her live like this?”
Ms Kang cannot live on what she makes as a musician, so she takes temporary jobs. She is one of many. Among the young, the proportion of jobs that are part-time has exploded from 8% in 2000 to 23% in 2010; the proportion of workers under 25 on temporary contracts has leapt from zero to 28%. This is partly because cash-strapped companies are backing away from the old tradition of lifetime employment, but also because many young people do not want to be chained to the same desk for 30 years.
According to TNS, a market-research firm, Koreans are markedly more fed up with the companies they work for than people in other countries. Only half would recommend them as a good place to work, compared to three-quarters of TNS’s global sample. Only 48% think they receive suitable recognition, as individuals, for their work, compared with 68% of workers in supposedly collectivist China. Only Japanese workers are more disgruntled.
Despite these gripes, 79% of Korean workers expect still to be working for the same employer in a year’s time. TNS speculates that this attitude reflects the difficulty of switching employers rather than genuine loyalty; it talks of “captive” employees.
Such averages mask wide variation, of course. Some highflying Korean salarymen feel intensely loyal to their employers and are prepared to slave long hours to help them conquer new markets. But this inner circle is quite small: the chaebol employ only 10% of the workforce. And the rigid way that chaebol tend to seek talent—recruiting only from prestigious universities and promoting only from within—means that, as well as failing to get the best out of Korean women, they miss clever people who are not much good at exams and late developers whose talents blossom in their 20s or 30s. They also shunt older people into retirement when they still have much to offer. (The chaebol tend to promote by seniority, which sounds good for older employees but isn’t. There are only a few jobs at the top, so when you reach the age at which you might become a senior manager, you are either promoted or pensioned off.)
Parents praying for their children’s success in exams
It is still rare for a Korean who is clever enough to reach the top by the conventional route to choose a different one; but it is becoming less so. One fertile source of subversion is the Koreans who have studied overseas. Some 13% of Korean tertiary students study abroad, according to the OECD, a higher proportion than in any other rich country. In recent years, many have come home, not least because the American government, in a fit of self-destructive foolishness, made it much harder after September 11th 2001 for foreign students to work in America after they graduate. A survey by Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University found that most foreign students at American universities feared they would not be able to obtain a work visa. And since the application process is long and humiliating, many do not even bother to try. America’s loss is Korea’s (and India’s, and China’s) gain.
Returnees are typically bright, and less beholden to tradition than their stay-at-home peers. For example, Richard Choi, whose father was a globe-trotting manager for a chaebol, attended a British school in Hong Kong and learned about America’s start-up culture while studying biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Having returned to Korea, he has devised a business model in which customers receive store credits from merchants for recommending their products to their friends. “Let’s say you think this pie is good,” says Mr Choi, pointing at a chocolate confection your correspondent has just bought. “And you tell your friends about it [via a smartphone app developed by Mr Choi’s company, Spoqa]. And they come to this café and spend money. Then you get store credits.”
If this model will work anywhere, it will work in Seoul, figures Mr Choi. The Korean capital is densely populated and splendidly connected: nearly everyone with spare cash has a smartphone. And if it does not, he can probably get a good job, he thinks. But he has to hurry. Even with his skills, he reckons that no chaebol would hire him once he is over 30.
A few locally educated Koreans are also challenging the system. Charles Pyo, a young internet entrepreneur, borrowed his mother’s credit card when he was 14 and started a business helping people set up websites. His parents did not approve; they thought he should be studying instead. But then they saw all the money coming in, and relented. He made $200,000 in three years.
He then won a place at Yonsei University. He took the exam like anyone else, but what really counted was his interview, in which he argued that he had exceptional talents. Korean universities have traditionally spurned interviews, but the government is now urging them to select many more of their students this way.
On the ladder to prosperity .
While at university, Mr Pyo teamed up with a former hacker, Kim Hyun-chul. (In his teens, Mr Kim set off cyber-terror alarm bells by infecting hundreds of thousands of computers with a virus that deleted files on his birthday. He was caught, but he was too young to send to prison.) Now a reformed character, he helped Mr Pyo start another company, Wizard Works, that supplies “widgets”—little packets of software that make corporate websites work better—and is about to start selling “cloud computing” apps for smartphones. Still only 25, Mr Pyo has now started yet another company, Rubicon Games, that designs online social games.
Mr Pyo says that what he does is much more fun than being a salaryman. But it is hard for him to recruit good staff. People assume that if you don’t work for a chaebol, it must be because you are not bright enough, he gripes. “They say: ‘Why should I work for you? You’re not Samsung.’”
Mr Choi has the same problem. “Older people look at my business card and say: ‘What’s this?’ Younger people admire the fact that I am doing something no one else is doing. But given the choice of working for me or Samsung, people are naturally inclined to go with a big company.”
Mr Pyo believes that Korea would be a happier place if more people had the courage to strike out on their own. But talented students “care too much about other people’s expectations,” he sighs. “They don’t want to fall behind their friends. They fear that if they do something different they might be viewed as a failure.”
The Land of Miracles must loosen up
The Korean economic boom was built on hard work, benign demography (a bulge of working-age Koreans between 1970 and 1990) and plenty of opportunities to catch up with richer countries. But the world, and Korea, have changed.
Korea is rich, so it can no longer grow fast by copying others. It cannot remain dynamic with an ageing, shrinking workforce. It cannot become creative with a school system that stresses rote learning above thinking. And its people cannot realise their full potential in a society where they get only one shot at doing well in life, and it comes when they are still teenagers. To remain what one writer called “The Land of Miracles”, Korea will have to loosen up, and allow many routes to success.
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http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/12/19/the-ax-is-laid-to-the-root-of-the-tree/
December 19, 2011
The Ax Is Laid To The Root of the Tree
Walter Russell Mead
From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes a story that should make every mediocre academic in this country shudder in fear. Mark Bauerlein has looked under the hood of the “research” that professors in English literature conduct and he has documented what many of us know but few want to think about: nobody reads much of this stuff.
Nobody. Not even the other scholars in the field.
Much, perhaps most, of the research that American university professors do could be dumped into the ocean rather than published — and nobody, not even the other professors, would notice. Looking at two universities and what happened to the articles their literature professors published in peer-reviewed journals, Bauerlein reports:
Of 13 research articles published by current SUNY-Buffalo professors in 2004, 11 of them received zero to two citations, one had five, one 12. Of 23 articles by Georgia professors in 2004, 16 received zero to two citations, four of them three to six, one eight, one 11, and one 16.
Measuring the impact of research by counting citations to some degree tends to overstate the actual value of the research. Scholars writing articles for peer-reviewed journals are expected to show a thorough command of the research in the field; many articles are cited less because they provide valuable help to a scholar writing something new than because literature reviews complete with multiple citations are part of the game. Many, and sometimes most of the cited articles are more listed than used. If no one even cites an article in literature reviews, then the tree has truly fallen in a forest where nobody heard.
Bauerlein responds to some possible objections to his depressing findings:
Research makes professors better teachers and colleagues. Agreed, but not at the current pace. We want teachers to be engaged in inquiry, but we don’t need them to publish a book and six articles before we give them tenure. We shouldn’t set a publication schedule that turns them into nervous, isolated beings who end up regarding an inquisitive student in office hours as an infringement. Let’s allow 10 years for a book, and let’s tenure people for three strong essays. The rush to print makes them worse teachers and colleagues.
So some works get overlooked—so what? We need lots of research activity to produce those few works of significance. Agreed, but how much, and at what cost? If a professor who makes $75,000 a year spends five years on a book on Charles Dickens (which sold 43 copies to individuals and 250 copies to libraries, the library copies averaging only two checkouts in the six years after its publication), the university paid $125,000 for its production. Certainly that money could have gone toward a more effective appreciation of that professor’s expertise and talent. We can no longer pretend, too, that studies of Emily Dickinson are as needed today, after three decades have produced 2,007 items on the poet, as they were in 1965, when the previous three decades had produced only 233.
The real problem, and if the state and federal fiscal crunches go on for much longer it will be upon us very soon, is that our society is less and less willing and able to pay for research that nobody really wants or needs.
Our universities today look a lot like the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII: vulnerable targets for a hungry state. State legislators are going to be wrestling with questions like whether to cut the pensions of retired state workers, cut services for voters, or raise taxes. In this atmosphere, the research university model (in the humanities and, economics and management excepted, the social sciences) may not long survive, at least in the public sector. (Highly endowed private universities may keep the old model alive.)
The campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bauerlein, who for all the radical implications of his work remains a fairly conservative reformer looking to prune the hedge rather than burn the building, underestimates the costs of “research”. If college teachers were paid to teach rather than research, they would also need to be trained less expensively. We would need (and probably do need) many fewer Ph.D programs and degrees than we now have.
Imagine the (not unlikely) scenario in which more and more state universities shift to a two and two model: almost all undergraduates spend two years in low cost community colleges and then the best of them go on to two more years at a university. It is hard to see why the humanities departments in the community colleges would need to be staffed with holders of Ph.D degrees — in part because it is overwhelmingly clear that most students need basic skills in community colleges rather than advanced courses. There might be a small “honors college” with something like the traditional structure of a 20th century university faculty, but demand for Ph.D’s would drop precipitously and the majority, possibly a very large majority of existing doctoral programs would close their doors. That would further diminish the demand for Ph.D’s, and would lead to another round of cutbacks in doctoral programs. In the end we might have a small number of excellent programs, producing a relatively small number of top scholars capable of doing important work — as opposed to large number of mediocre scholars most of whom don’t produce anything that even their fellow specialists and academic colleagues value.
This would be a distressing thing for a number of people, but would our society really suffer from the closure of dozens of mediocre programs turning out intellectual drones who publish research that nobody, even the other drones, really wants to follow?
Via Meadia thinks that the republic might survive even this.
Bauerlein is a cautious thinker; his research cuts the ground out from under the existing US university model but he does his best to limit the damage. He is thinking about tweaks and incremental reforms — though the confederacy of dunces that makes up the majority of every academic field in the country will do its best to do him in even so.
From the Via Meadia point of view, the problem lies precisely in the statement that Bauerlein accepts: “Research makes professors better teachers and colleagues”. Wrong. What makes better teachers and colleagues is a love of the beauty and truth found in a particular discipline, and a deep personal commitment to follow that love and share it with others. A professor who inspires her students with a lifelong love of Shakespeare is infinitely preferable to the industrious drone who publishes two unread and unreadable journal articles a year, an equally pointless book every four years, and bores students to tears. The first is an asset of the first order; the second is a danger to literature and makes America stupider and less cultured every year he grubs on.
In the humanities and most of the social “sciences”, the Ph.D and peer review machine as it now exists is a vastly expensive mediocrity factory. It makes education both more expensive and less effective than it needs to be. There are islands and even archipelagos of excellence in the sea of sludge but we needn’t subsidize the sea to preserve them.
We need college faculty who inspire as they teach: who infect their students with the love of knowledge and give them the skills to pursue that love on their own once they leave school. Our Shakespeare teachers shouldn’t worry about making sure their students know the latest hot craze in Shakespeare studies — but they should make sure that as many of their students as possible become lifelong fans of the Swan of Avon. A deep grounding in the twists and turns of contemporary literary theory may support that vocation — but it often does not, and the resources of a college ought to go towards the promotion of the core mission (leading students to fall in love with the life of the mind while giving them a set of skills that enable them not only to pursue that love but to function effectively in the adult world) not to subsidize academic hackery.
A classroom of empty chairs
Worse, our current system encourages students to think that if you really love a subject, you should become a hack: a “serious” student of literature in our perverted world is someone who scribbles unreadable and unread treatises about minutiae rather than someone who takes that love into the public arena and encourages new generations to love, revere and, who knows, expand the literary heritage with which we are blessed.
Teachers must be evangelists for knowledge. We have a society that produces an ever growing torrent of unread “research” while fewer and fewer people know or care anything about the cultural heritage that the “research” ostensibly aims to examine. This is idiocy and it is madness, and the expense can no longer be borne. It will change.
There is one ray of light in the Bauerlein study. We can applaud the common good sense of a nation that would still rather read Emily Dickinson than squint over peer reviewed articles about her. However few people read her today, even fewer read the tedious pablum the hacks write about her. (I emphasize again that it isn’t all hackery; literary scholarship at its best matters. It is the mediocrity and worse in the field that needs no encouragement.)
It is a good sign, not a bad one, that most of this research goes unread. As long as most Americans continue resolutely to ignore this tripe, hope remains.
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http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_19526032
Cal State campuses overwhelmed by remedial needs
By Matt Krupnick
Contra Costa Times
© Copyright 2011, Bay Area News Group
Posted: 12/11/2011 04:33:25 PM PST
Updated: 12/12/2011 04:58:59 AM PST
Wracked with frustration over the state's legions of unprepared high school graduates, the California State University system next summer will force freshmen with remedial needs to brush up on math or English before arriving on campus.
But many professors at the 23-campus university, which has spent the past 13 years dismissing students who fail remedial classes, doubt the Early Start program will do much to help students unable to handle college math or English.
"I'm not at all optimistic that it's going to help," said Sally Murphy, a communications professor who directs general education at Cal State East Bay, where 73 percent of this year's freshmen were not ready for college math. Nearly 60 percent were not prepared for college English.
"A 15-hour intervention is just not enough intervention when it comes to skills that should have been developed over 12 years," Murphy said.
The remedial numbers are staggering, given that the Cal State system admits only freshmen who graduated in the top one-third of their high-school class. About 27,300 freshmen in the 2010 entering class of about 42,700 needed remedial work in math, English or both.
By requiring the Early Start courses, the university is trying, in part, to cut down the number of students kicked out for failing to complete remedial classes their first year. College-level math and English are required for many other Cal State courses, so students who are ineligible for
entry-level classes in one or both subjects have a significant disadvantage.
The courses may be taken online, at a Cal State campus or at some community colleges.
Few instructors believe the 15-hour Early Start courses will ease the burden for remedial students or the university, said Jim Postma, a Cal State Chico chemistry professor and chairman of the systemwide Academic Senate.
If half the students eligible for the Cal State system are unable to handle college work, he said, California is in bad shape.
"It's a terrible indictment of the K-through-12 system," Postma said. "If a factory was building cars and the lug nuts kept falling off the tires, you would do something pretty dramatic about it. We keep adding the lug nuts back to the tires rather than trying to figure out what the problem is."
The remedial problem is hardly confined to California. Schools across the country have puzzled over how to better prepare students for college and what to do with those who are not ready.
But budget cuts have staggered the Cal State system's ability to teach childhood math and English skills to tens of thousands of students every year. One solution would be to do a better job figuring out exactly what kind of help students need to focus remedial education, said Linda Wong, executive director of the University of Southern California's Center for Urban Education.
"There have been a lot of problems with the assessment tools that colleges use," she said. Because of that shortfall, "it's very difficult to customize the curriculum to address specific needs of the students."
The Cal State system's remedial pressures have, for the past few years, led many students to take basic classes at community colleges. That influx has, in turn, made it more difficult for full-time community college students to get into classes they need to prepare for four-year schools.
Budget cuts also have hurt the community colleges: Thousands of classes have been cut the past few years on the state's 112 two-year campuses.
"We're all trying to figure out how to handle these students who are woefully unprepared," said Mark Wade Lieu, an Ohlone College instructor who directs remedial education for the state's community colleges. "The greatest fear is we're going to lose a generation of students."
Matt Krupnick covers higher education. Contact him at 510-208-6488. Follow him at Twitter.com/MattKrupnick.
Remedial needs
at California State University
New freshmen in the 23-campus system, fall 2010: 42,738
New freshmen who needed remedial help, fall 2010: 27,298
Percentage of fall 2011 freshmen taking remedial math, Cal State East Bay:
73 percent
Percentage of fall 2011 freshmen taking remedial English, Cal State East Bay: 58 percent
Percentage of fall 2011 freshmen taking both subjects, Cal State East Bay:
46 percent
Sources: California State University; Sally Murphy, Cal State East Bay
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQqSUTRHEKY&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQqSUTRHEKY&feature=player_embedded
Pop.
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How come student loans aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy? That sounds like a racket. They overspent like a credit card, more than they could afford. The lender extended irresponsible amounts of lending. I don't fully understand bankruptcy but if some debts aren't fully dischargeable, maybe none should be.
How soon until the income inequality attacks bleed over to education inequality? Colleges and universities pay cash for ACT scores and other achievements including sports and music, which in all 3 examples spill over disproportionately to rich kids. How is that fair?
As mentioned, I am re-learning the world of college cost as father of a H.S senior. She doesn't like hearing it but my 4 years, done in 3 or so, cost less than her upcoming spring break orchestra trip of one week. The rest of the learning came from the school of hard knocks.
The bubble in numbers or false expectations upon graduation isn't new. The absurd cost structure is. It grows like health care costs I think because of third party pay. Maybe more like housing where the lender lends without checking or expecting to find income from the borrower. Worse than housing, the less able your family is to handle the debt, the more they will lend.
The answer ("Cognitive Dissonance of the Left") is to move the cost even further away from the person using the service. Let's make a 4 year degree "free"! Tax the people who go straight to work and never get college to pay for the others to pursue pre-med, gender studies and social welfare degrees - until no one goes straight to work or pays taxes.
Nothing contains costs like tying the price charged to the affordability of the purchaser of the product in a market. From a conservative side it would seem the answer is work and study and pay as you go with your own money, 4 years takes perhaps 8 or whatever it takes if the institutions cannot provide a first rate, full time education within the cost framework of what a middle class family can afford. When you finish, you actually have bettered yourself, and will understand both the value of the education and the value of productive work.
With work rules as we have and those coming with Obamacare and everything else, I believe we are destined to move away from a 'job' society and back toward a more entrepreneurial economy. If that happens, paper-based portion of the credentials will diminish in value compared to real knowledge and real ability to get real work of value done. Just my two cents.
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Doug - it's not easy deciding where your child should go to college.
I was accepted and wanted to go to Berkeley, a bastion of liberal education. Instead, my parents sent me to USC, at that time a bastion of conservatism. Both are good schools, but being a CA resident, USC was a lot more expensive although I did get some scholarships. Still, my parents insisted. And look how I turned out! :-)
I think a liberal arts education is fabulous. An education cannot be only measured in immediate dollars and sense; the income level of graduates in their first few years. I think, if you tabulate incomes over a lifetime, good quality small liberal arts school graduates income is commensurable with larger institutions. That said, if I had a child who wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I would encourage them, however I would anticipate paying for a more focused graduate school later, be in Medicine, Law, or Business etc.
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Doug - it's not easy deciding where your child should go to college.
I was accepted and wanted to go to Berkeley, a bastion of liberal education. Instead, my parents sent me to USC, at that time a bastion of conservatism. Both are good schools, but being a CA resident, USC was a lot more expensive although I did get some scholarships. Still, my parents insisted. And look how I turned out! :-)
I think a liberal arts education is fabulous. An education cannot be only measured in immediate dollars and sense; the income level of graduates in their first few years. I think, if you tabulate incomes over a lifetime, good quality small liberal arts school graduates income is commensurable with larger institutions. That said, if I had a child who wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I would encourage them, however I would anticipate paying for a more focused graduate school later, be in Medicine, Law, or Business etc.
Hey, buy a house, it's a great long term investment....... :roll:
Any other advice that no longer makes sense?
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Do a job search in any state. Look for ads wanting new Registered Nurse grads and the pay and signing bonuses offered. Compare and contrast with the ads looking for newly graduated holders of liberal arts degrees.
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"Hey, buy a house, it's a great long term investment....... "
At about 15 cents on the dollar, I am still bullish on home purchasing. Just worn out. Pretty good analogy though, because if people actually did buy instead of borrow for the education or the house, they would in general be better off for owning it.
If you can afford to not work the first 4 years of adulthood and pay the costs, a 4 year degree in personal growth and human knowledge is a wonderful foundation before learning a marketable skill like running a business, designing a bridge or diagnosing a patient. Same degree with a quarter million in debt and no marketable skill and now you need to go work, maybe not.
I have not found an explanation on or off the board as to why it is okay that the rate charged is different for everyone. Try pricing rent or food differently to different people. Some colleges have so much as told us the price is negotiable. For a kid with a great application, it looks like play money. She got a 16k award in the mail the other day and she just laughed, knowing that was a drop in the bucket, still far from affordable. We still don't have a financial plan.
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The other theme GM had was STEM. For others that means Science, technology, engineering, math. Thinking of two successful relatives in business, different sides of the family, one got the PhD in Math and the other in Physics, neither doing what you would think of as directly working in that field, but the credentials proved the foundation to move forward. My advice to my daughter is along those lines, do something that you are good at, that sounds really hard, that is relevant and needed and in scarce supply, and do it at a place that is widely respected. Not just put in 4 years.
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"My advice to my daughter is along those lines, do something that you are good at, that sounds really hard, that is relevant and needed and in scarce supply, and do it at a place that is widely respected. Not just put in 4 years."
Good advice. Let us know what you/she decide.
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"Let us know what you/she decide."
That's really nice. It's certainly her decision and I will keep you posted. She rules out engineering and most sciences for a major even though she would be good at it and her Grandma broke that ground over 60 years ago and would love to get her the institute of technology tours and introductions. I have suggested the opportunities for high end math in business applications. We will see.
Further complicating the decision is the negative effect that federal Title IX has on limiting her opportunities to play college varsity sports.
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I agree that education and real estate investments have some similarities. May I suggest some others? 1, as with a home you will be living in, be sure you are comfortable with the environment you will be studying in. 2, you DO own your education. And the idea that you can't make off of it is silly. It is also silly to suggest that liberal arts degrees do not provide marketable skills. 3, like a home, if you want to increase the resale value you need to cultivate your investment. If you buy a house, then don't mow the yard, let the roof go to shit, and don't fix the front step your investment is going to reap rewards like you want. Likewise, if you invest in an education and you drink and f%#@ your way through school, rarely go to class, fail to turn in assignments in a timely fashion and view 30 pages per class of reading as an arduous chore (especially since Jersey Shore is on), you didn't really learn any damn thing no matter what your major is.
Liberal arts colleges do a damn good job of training students for the "real" world. Are students willing to pay the price (in non-monetary terms) to recieve the training? That is the great question in the next few decades.
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I'm reminded of a friend of mine who took the day off from delivering pizzas to get his B.A. English diploma and was back at Dominos the next day. Wasn't even a manager.
Just saying....
Can anyone show me current help wanted ads for new liberal arts graduates promising signing bonuses and pay equal or better than what is being offered to new RN grads?
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There are liberal arts colleges which to produce RNs. My college just began a program, with the best medical school in the country, because the med school wanted liberal arts trained nursing students. Something about the ability to write, learning ethics and the ability to think critically... especially when coupled with a high quality science background.
And, did you see how much a historian can make? Newt is bringing back the bank for liberal arts majors!
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"And, did you see how much a historian can make? Newt is bringing back the bank for liberal arts majors!"
I'm sure that explains the reverence for Newt found at the liberal arts colleges/universities across the land.... :-D
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"There are liberal arts colleges which to produce RNs. My college just began a program, with the best medical school in the country, because the med school wanted liberal arts trained nursing students. Something about the ability to write, learning ethics and the ability to think critically... especially when coupled with a high quality science background."
Cool. the other students at those liberal arts colleges can say that some of the people they went school with got good paying jobs right after graduation. Nice! Them and Newt will really alter the average income for liberal arts grads!
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Ever hear of Maui Jim sunglasses? Guess who owns the company.
I have several students making serious money starting out, in a first job. Economics, political science, history, English and many other liberal arts majors can produce money makers. Of course, some people major in something just because they enjoy it. I even have a couple criminal justice majors, who I am sure will make mad cash.
"There are liberal arts colleges which to produce RNs. My college just began a program, with the best medical school in the country, because the med school wanted liberal arts trained nursing students. Something about the ability to write, learning ethics and the ability to think critically... especially when coupled with a high quality science background."
Cool. the other students at those liberal arts colleges can say that some of the people they went school with got good paying jobs right after graduation. Nice! Them and Newt will really alter the average income for liberal arts grads!
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Ever hear of Maui Jim sunglasses? Guess who owns the company.
I have several students making serious money starting out, in a first job. Economics, political science, history, English and many other liberal arts majors can produce money makers. Of course, some people major in something just because they enjoy it. I even have a couple criminal justice majors, who I am sure will make mad cash.
"There are liberal arts colleges which to produce RNs. My college just began a program, with the best medical school in the country, because the med school wanted liberal arts trained nursing students. Something about the ability to write, learning ethics and the ability to think critically... especially when coupled with a high quality science background."
Cool. the other students at those liberal arts colleges can say that some of the people they went school with got good paying jobs right after graduation. Nice! Them and Newt will really alter the average income for liberal arts grads!
BD,
I'm not saying Liberal Arts grads cannot or will not make money, my point is that from a P/E ratio analysis, a liberal arts degree isn't a good investment when compared to trades/skills or STEM degrees.
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GM, my point is that some of the best people in STEM have liberal arts degrees, or at least degrees from a LAC. It also is the case that many people who earn a liberal arts degree are employed in something outside their area of study, but are often better at their job because of the liberal arts degree.
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GM, my point is that some of the best people in STEM have liberal arts degrees, or at least degrees from a LAC. It also is the case that many people who earn a liberal arts degree are employed in something outside their area of study, but are often better at their job because of the liberal arts degree.
I'd tend to agree with some stipulations that more education is better, but from the education as an investment from the tangible dollars and cents perspective, liberal arts is not the way to go. I could cite people who dropped out of higher education who did well, but on the whole, that's a bad strategic move as well.
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GM, my point is that some of the best people in STEM have liberal arts degrees, or at least degrees from a LAC. It also is the case that many people who earn a liberal arts degree are employed in something outside their area of study, but are often better at their job because of the liberal arts degree.
I'd tend to agree with some stipulations that more education is better...
I'll settle for this. Happy New Year, GM. You helped make 2011 more interesting and informative. Looking forward to 2012!
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GM, my point is that some of the best people in STEM have liberal arts degrees, or at least degrees from a LAC. It also is the case that many people who earn a liberal arts degree are employed in something outside their area of study, but are often better at their job because of the liberal arts degree.
I'd tend to agree with some stipulations that more education is better...
I'll settle for this. Happy New Year, GM. You helped make 2011 more interesting and informative. Looking forward to 2012!
Same here.
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Turns out political science, a liberal arts degree, doesn't do too damn bad.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/what-the-top-1-of-earners-majored-in/
What the Top 1% of Earners Majored In
By ROBERT GEBELOFF and SHAILA DEWAN
12:21 p.m. | Updated Added a fuller list of majors at the bottom of the post.
We got an interesting question from an academic adviser at a Texas university: could we tell what the top 1 percent of earners majored in?
The writer, sly dog, was probably trying to make a point, because he wrote from a biology department, and it turns out that biology majors make up nearly 7 percent of college graduates who live in households in the top 1 percent.
According to the Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey, the majors that give you the best chance of reaching the 1 percent are pre-med, economics, biochemistry, zoology and, yes, biology, in that order.
The 1 Percent
Looking at the top of the economic strata.
Below is a chart showing the majors most likely to get into the 1 percent (excluding majors held by fewer than 50,000 people in 2010 census data). The third column shows the percentage of degree holders with that major who make it into the 1 percent. The fourth column shows the percent of the 1 percent (among college grads) that hold that major. In other words, more than one in 10 people with a pre-med degree make it into the 1 percent, and about 1 in 100 of the 1 percenters with degrees majored in pre-med.
Of course, choice of major is not the only way to increase your chances of reaching the 1 percent, if that is your goal. There is also the sector you choose.
A separate analysis of census data on occupations showed that one in eight lawyers, for example, are in the 1 percent — unless they work for a Wall Street firm, when their chances increase to one in three. Among chief executives, fewer than one in five rank among the 1 percent, but their chances increase if the company produces medical supplies (one in four) or drugs (two in five). Hollywood writers? One in nine are 1 percenters. Television or radio writers? One in 14. Newspaper writers and editors? One in 62.
Undergraduate Degree Total % Who Are 1 Percenters Share of All 1 Percenters
Health and Medical Preparatory Programs 142,345 11.8% 0.9%
Economics 1,237,863 8.2% 5.4%
Biochemical Sciences 193,769 7.2% 0.7%
Zoology 159,935 6.9% 0.6%
Biology 1,864,666 6.7% 6.6%
International Relations 146,781 6.7% 0.5%
Political Science and Government 1,427,224 6.2% 4.7%
Physiology 98,181 6.0% 0.3%
Art History and Criticism 137,357 5.9% 0.4%
Chemistry 780,783 5.7% 2.4%
Molecular Biology 64,951 5.6% 0.2%
Area, Ethnic and Civilization Studies 184,906 5.2% 0.5%
Finance 1,071,812 4.8% 2.7%
History 1,351,368 4.7% 3.3%
Business Economics 108,146 4.6% 0.3%
Miscellaneous Psychology 61,257 4.3% 0.1%
Philosophy and Religious Studies 448,095 4.3% 1.0%
Microbiology 147,954 4.2% 0.3%
Chemical Engineering 347,959 4.1% 0.8%
Physics 346,455 4.1% 0.7%
Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration 334,016 3.9% 0.7%
Accounting 2,296,601 3.9% 4.7%
Mathematics 840,137 3.9% 1.7%
English Language and Literature 1,938,988 3.8% 3.8%
Miscellaneous Biology 52,895 3.7% 0.1%
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-01-24/liberal-arts-education-graduates/52779652/1
Recent college graduates who as seniors scored highest on a standardized test to measure how well they think, reason and write — skills most associated with a liberal arts education — were far more likely to be better off financially than those who scored lowest, says the survey, released Wednesday by the Social Science Research Council, an independent organization.
It found that students who had mastered the ability to think critically, reason analytically and write effectively by their senior year were:
•Three times less likely to be unemployed than those who hadn't (3.1% vs. 9.6%).
•Half as likely to be living with their parents (18% vs. 35%).
•Far less likely to have amassed credit card debt (37% vs. 51%).
Grades and other factors influence a student's chances of success, too. Graduates of colleges with tougher admissions standards tended to have fewer debts and were less likely to live with their parents, the study found.
A report this month by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, which studies the labor-market value of college degrees, found that recent graduates with a bachelor's degree in architecture had the highest average jobless rate (13.9%, vs. 8.9% for all recent college graduates). Education and health care majors had some of the lowest jobless rates.
The findings released Wednesday "show something new and different," says lead author Richard Arum, a New York University professor. "Students would do well to appreciate the extent to which their development of general skills, not just majors and institution attended, is related to successful adult transitions."
The study is based on surveys of 925 graduates who as college seniors had taken the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test that aims to measure student learning. In addition to showing greater success financially, high-scorers were more likely to read the news and discuss politics and be living with or married to a romantic partner they met in college.
Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, an association that encourages its member schools to assess student learning, says findings suggest that the Collegiate Learning Assessment is "a pretty good measure of how people are going to do in life."
Arum also cautions that the study doesn't speak to whether high-scoring graduates picked up their skills while in college. It follows up on research last year showing that 36% of college graduates showed few or no gains in learning between their freshman and senior years.
"While their outcomes are not a product solely of their college experience … it's important for colleges to figure out a way to be more effective," he says.
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By JAMES TARANTO
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, economist Richard Vedder notes a new development in the education marketplace that should make many of his fellow academics nervous:
The announcement of agreements between Burck Smith's StraighterLine and the Education Testing Service (ETS) and the Council on Aid to Education (CAE) to provide competency test materials to students online is potentially very important, along with several other recent developments. A little economics explains why this is so.
With regards to colleges, consumers typically have believed that there are no good substitutes–the only way a person can certify to potential employers that she/he is pretty bright, well educated, good at communicating, disciplined, etc., is by presenting a bachelor's degree diploma. College graduates typically have these positive attributes more than others, so degrees serve as an important signaling device to employers, lowering the costs of learning about the traits of the applicant. Because of the lack of good substitutes, colleges face little outside competition and can raise prices more, given their quasi-monopoly status.
As college costs rise, however, people are asking: Aren't there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers?
"This is not for everyone, of course," Vedder notes. "Many have the resources to go to expensive residential colleges, which is as much a consumption as academic/investment experience."
The crucial distinction here is actually between the "academic" and "investment" functions of higher ed. The industry has exploded over the past few decades based on a business model that focuses more on selling the college degree as a credential--an "investment" that yields an increase in one's own "human capital"--than on persuading young adults that education is intrinsically valuable.
If someone could offer a less expensive job-hunting license--one that assessed an entry-level job-seeker's worth to a prospective employer at least as accurately as a college degree does--then the demand for college would plummet, as young adults could realize the same gains from a much smaller investment.
.That's where ETS and CAE come in. They will offer two tests. One, called iSkills, "measures the ability of a student to navigate and critically evaluate information from digital technology." The other, the CLA, "assesses critical learning and writing skills through use of cognitively challenging problems." As Vedder explains: "Students can tell employers, 'I did very well on the CLA and iSkills test, strong predictors of future positive work performance,' and, implicitly 'you can hire me for less than you pay college graduates who score less well on these tests.' "
If the practice became widespread, it would drive college costs down and force cost-cutting and downsizing within the higher-ed industry. So you can expect the industry to fight hard against it.
How might it do that? One aspect of all this that Vedder doesn't explore is the historic origins of the higher-ed industry's credential cartel. As we've explained before, it goes back to Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that companies could not administer IQ tests because they had a racially "disparate impact"--that is, it discriminates against blacks because they score more poorly on average than whites do.
The disparate-impact test in Griggs, written into law in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, applies only to employers. Educational institutions are free to administer IQ tests, which is essentially what the SAT and other entrance exams are. To assure that their degrees pass muster as a condition of employment, colleges and universities go to extreme lengths to ensure a "diverse" student body, including discriminating in favor of blacks (and selected other minorities) in admissions.
As we noted last month--and a tip of the hat to Heather Mac Donald for documenting the phenomenon--colleges and universities have developed sprawling bureaucracies to encourage "diversity," at the expense of traditional academics. Higher-ed institutions also pump out an enormous quantity of dubious scholarship that purportedly proves the ideological presupposition behind this business model--namely, that white racism is the proximate cause of all racial disparity. Here's a funny example, reported by LiveScience.com:
There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle [sic], according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
So IQ tests are racist, except when they're used to "prove" that people with "socially conservative ideologies" are racist and intellectually inferior.
TheRoot.com has an article arguing that the Republican presidential candidates are racist. It's about as uninteresting an argument as you can find--but the headline is revealing: "Colorblind Racism: The New Norm." That Orwellian term, "colorblind racism," is the pithiest summation we've ever encountered of the absurdity of contemporary left-liberal racial dogma.
It also turns out to be a product of academia: The idea of "colorblind racism" was hatched by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke University, a decade ago. Here's a paper on the subject from the journal Critical Sociology.
The higher education industry's credential cartel is under financial threat owing to the necessity of state and local (and eventually federal) budget cuts and the increasing sense that a degree isn't worth incurring a mountain of debt. It is under legal threat, too. There is a strong likelihood that the Supreme Court will abolish or severely curtail the use of racial preferences in college admissions sometime in the next few years, a possibility that led to gnashing of teeth at the New York Times editorial board. Thanks to the senescence of white guilt, explicated here Monday, it is also under cultural threat.
Now, as Vedder reports, there is a competitive threat as well. We can expect that the higher-ed industry will do whatever it can to crush this threat. The obvious point of attack would be to claim that the new skills tests have a racially disparate impact. ETS and CAE would be well-advised to take strong defensive measures.
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Two quick things: There is a major difference between measuring what you know and having an indication of how you think and learn. ETS won't replace that important portion of the college degree. And, as technology and information increases seemingly exponentially, thinking and learning will be more important than knowing.
There is spurious research put out by any organization who produces research, whether the higher education "industry," media, think tanks or corporations. Cherry picking examples of this spurious research to indicate the weakness of the "industry" is spurious itself. I don't hate capitalism because tobacco industry scientists "proved" for years that smoking and cancer had no link.
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Of greater interest to me there was the spurious and specious notion of "color-blind racism".
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That was part of the research I was referencing.
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By FAY VINCENT
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama said he wants the federal government to assert control over the rapidly rising cost of college tuition. His objective is to force all schools receiving federal aid—which is nearly all of them—to justify their tuition increases or lose the aid. Where to begin?
The president could hardly have found a more intricate area in which to assert power. His supporters laud his effort for recognizing the burdens on young people emerging from college with mounting debts. Critics see political motivations, with the president appealing to young voters in an election year. And cynics may consider all this just another idea that will have come to life during a State of the Union only to die rapidly in the cold weather of careful analysis. Whatever the case, by treading into educational pricing, the president may find himself getting an education.
Consider an analogy. If Harvard is a Ferrari, then Fairfield University, the small Jesuit school in Connecticut where I was a trustee for many years, is a Chevrolet. Yet in education, Ferraris cost about the same—often less—than Chevrolets. This year Harvard's stated tuition is $36,300, while Fairfield's is $39,900.
Rich, prestigious schools like Harvard and Yale could charge much more for what they provide. They could also reduce tuition by increasing their reliance on their huge endowments. Less wealthy schools, by contrast, are dependent on tuition and have almost no pricing flexibility. Yet the sticker price for four years at Harvard is very close to the price at Fairfield, even though many would consider a Harvard education and diploma more valuable.
Enlarge Image
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Students at a college and career convention in Los Angeles.
.The crucial defect in the president's thinking is the assumption that four years of higher education is a commodity. Of course it's not. Price can be deceptive. And the real cost of a Harvard education is about twice the sticker price.
Much of the complication in tuition pricing arises from schools' policies on endowment-spending and financial aid. President Obama will find that at many schools only a relatively small percentage of students pay the full tuition sticker price, with the average net cost of the education well below that stated price. Financial aid provided to students accounts for the difference.
How would President Obama have federal authorities decide whether a school should take more from its endowment in order to reduce tuition? How would the feds determine whether a school with a major financial-aid program based solely on need is to be equated with another school that gives much of its aid to wealthy kids based on merit?
If the feds believe in supporting only needy students and not those who are wealthy but win merit scholarships, the financial-aid policies at many schools would have to be adjusted. What is to be the operative governing principle for federal policy—"fairness"?
Is it fair to give financial aid to rich kids? Is it fair to give financial aid to athletes who have no academic plans? Is it fair to spend money on academic programs in unpopular subjects? These are but a few of the many educational and financial issues the feds will have to confront. Think of how many new federal employees will have to be hired to meet this new responsibility of our government.
Then there's the baleful history of how federal price controls have worked in the past. Private companies hired thousands of lawyers to justify proposed price increases to federal bureaucrats. Those bureaucrats examined the reasons and often challenged the merits.
Time and money were wasted. Looking back, that was the point. By making price increases difficult and tedious, the federal government ensured that many didn't take place—so consumers bore other, indirect costs, like waiting in hours-long gas lines.
Why is this history not persuasive to the White House? What about all the legal challenges that colleges and universities would make to the feds' decisions? More litigation and more costs to be absorbed by tuition and endowments.
The only consolation one can derive from this obvious fiasco is that it will almost surely be next seen in that dark corner of the Capitol where premature and poorly developed ideas are abandoned to die of inattention.
President Obama has identified a legitimate issue. The costs of education are increasing rapidly and there are few structural limits. Perhaps the president will set out a more sensible effort when and if he ever supplies details of what he has in mind.
Mr. Vincent, a former CEO of Columbia Pictures Industries and commissioner of Major League Baseball, has served as a trustee of Fairfield University, Williams College and Carleton College.
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January 2012
Charles Murray
American Enterprise Institute
Do We Need the Department of Education?
Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He received his B.A. in history at Harvard University and his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written for numerous newspapers and journals, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and National Review. His books include Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, What It Means to Be a Libertarian, and Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. His new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, will be published at the end of January.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered in Atlanta, Georgia, on October 28, 2011, at a conference on “Markets, Government, and the Common Good,” sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Center for the Study of Monetary Systems and Free Enterprise.
THE CASE FOR the Department of Education could rest on one or more of three legs: its constitutional appropriateness, the existence of serious problems in education that could be solved only at the federal level, and/or its track record since it came into being. Let us consider these in order.
(1) Is the Department of Education constitutional?
At the time the Constitution was written, education was not even considered a function of local government, let alone the federal government. But the shakiness of the Department of Education’s constitutionality goes beyond that. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates the things over which Congress has the power to legislate. Not only does the list not include education, there is no plausible rationale for squeezing education in under the commerce clause. I’m sure the Supreme Court found a rationale, but it cannot have been plausible.
On a more philosophical level, the framers of America’s limited government had a broad allegiance to what Catholics call the principle of subsidiarity. In the secular world, the principle of subsidiarity means that local government should do only those things that individuals cannot do for themselves, state government should do only those things that local governments cannot do, and the federal government should do only those things that the individual states cannot do. Education is something that individuals acting alone and cooperatively can do, let alone something local or state governments can do.
I should be explicit about my own animus in this regard. I don’t think the Department of Education is constitutionally legitimate, let alone appropriate. I would favor abolishing it even if, on a pragmatic level, it had improved American education. But I am in a small minority on that point, so let’s move on to the pragmatic questions.
(2) Are there serious problems in education that can be solved only at the federal level?
The first major federal spending on education was triggered by the launch of the first space satellite, Sputnik, in the fall of 1957, which created a perception that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in science and technology. The legislation was specifically designed to encourage more students to go into math and science, and its motivation is indicated by its title: The National Defense Education Act of 1958. But what really ensnared the federal government in education in the 1960s had its origins elsewhere—in civil rights. The Supreme Court declared segregation of the schools unconstitutional in 1954, but—notwithstanding a few highly publicized episodes such as the integration of Central High School in Little Rock and James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi—the pace of change in the next decade was glacial.
Was it necessary for the federal government to act? There is a strong argument for “yes,” especially in the case of K-12 education. Southern resistance to desegregation proved to be both stubborn and effective in the years following Brown v. Board of Education. Segregation of the schools had been declared unconstitutional, and constitutional rights were being violated on a massive scale. But the question at hand is whether we need a Department of Education now, and we have seen a typical evolution of policy. What could have been justified as a one-time, forceful effort to end violations of constitutional rights, lasting until the constitutional wrongs had been righted, was transmuted into a permanent government establishment. Subsequently, this establishment became more and more deeply involved in American education for purposes that have nothing to do with constitutional rights, but instead with a broader goal of improving education.
The reason this came about is also intimately related to the civil rights movement. Over the same years that school segregation became a national issue, the disparities between black and white educational attainment and test scores came to public attention. When the push for President Johnson’s Great Society programs began in the mid-1960s, it was inevitable that the federal government would attempt to reduce black-white disparities, and it did so in 1965 with the passage of two landmark bills—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act. The Department of Education didn’t come into being until 1980, but large-scale involvement of the federal government in education dates from 1965.
(3) So what is the federal government’s track record in education?
The most obvious way to look at the track record is the long-term trend data of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Consider, for instance, the results for the math test for students in fourth, eighth and twelfth grades from 1978 through 2004. The good news is that the scores for fourth graders showed significant improvement in both reading and math—although those gains diminished slightly as the children got older. The bad news is that the baseline year of 1978 represents the nadir of the test score decline from the mid-1960s through the 1970s. Probably we are today about where we were in math achievement in the 1960s. For reading, the story is even bleaker. The small gains among fourth graders diminish by eighth grade and vanish by the twelfth grade. And once again, the baseline tests in the 1970s represent a nadir.
From 1942 through the 1990s, the state of Iowa administered a consistent and comprehensive test to all of its public school students in grade school, middle school, and high school—making it, to my knowledge, the only state in the union to have good longitudinal data that go back that far. The Iowa Test of Basic Skills offers not a sample, but an entire state population of students. What can we learn from a single state? Not much, if we are mainly interested in the education of minorities—Iowa from 1942 through 1970 was 97 percent white, and even in the 2010 census was 91 percent white. But, paradoxically, that racial homogeneity is also an advantage, because it sidesteps all the complications associated with changing ethnic populations.
Since retention through high school has changed greatly over the last 70 years, I will consider here only the data for ninth graders. What the data show is that when the federal government decided to get involved on a large scale in K-12 education in 1965, Iowa’s education had been improving substantially since the first test was administered in 1942. There is reason to think that the same thing had been happening throughout the country. As I documented in my book, Real Education, collateral data from other sources are not as detailed, nor do they go back to the 1940s, but they tell a consistent story. American education had been improving since World War II. Then, when the federal government began to get involved, it got worse.
I will not try to make the case that federal involvement caused the downturn. The effort that went into programs associated with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 in the early years was not enough to have changed American education, and the more likely causes for the downturn are the spirit of the 1960s—do your own thing—and the rise of progressive education to dominance over American public education. But this much can certainly be said: The overall data on the performance of American K-12 students give no reason to think that federal involvement, which took the form of the Department of Education after 1979, has been an engine of improvement.
What about the education of the disadvantaged, especially minorities? After all, this was arguably the main reason that the federal government began to get involved in education—to reduce the achievement gap separating poor children and rich children, and especially the gap separating poor black children and the rest of the country.
The most famous part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was Title I, initially authorizing more than a billion dollars annually (equivalent to more than $7 billion today) to upgrade the schools attended by children from low-income families. The program has continued to grow ever since, disposing of about $19 billion in 2010 (No Child Left Behind has also been part of Title I).
Supporters of Title I confidently expected to see progress, and so formal evaluation of Title I was built into the legislation from the beginning. Over the years, the evaluations became progressively more ambitious and more methodologically sophisticated. But while the evaluations have improved, the story they tell has not changed. Despite being conducted by people who wished the program well, no evaluation of Title I from the 1970s onward has found credible evidence of a significant positive impact on student achievement. If one steps back from the formal evaluations and looks at the NAEP test score gap between high-poverty schools (the ones that qualify for Title I support) and low-poverty schools, the implications are worse. A study by the Department of Education published in 2001 revealed that the gap grew rather than diminished from 1986—the earliest year such comparisons have been made—through 1999.
That brings us to No Child Left Behind. Have you noticed that no one talks about No Child Left Behind any more? The explanation is that its one-time advocates are no longer willing to defend it. The nearly-flat NAEP trendlines since 2002 make that much-ballyhooed legislative mandate—a mandate to bring all children to proficiency in math and reading by 2014—too embarrassing to mention.
In summary: the long, intrusive, expensive role of the federal government in K-12 education does not have any credible evidence for a positive effect on American education.
* * *
I have chosen to focus on K-12 because everyone agrees that K-12 education leaves much to be desired in this country and that it is reasonable to hold the government’s feet to the fire when there is no evidence that K-12 education has improved. When we turn to post-secondary education, there is much less agreement on first principles.
The bachelor of arts degree as it has evolved over the last half-century has become the work of the devil. It is now a substantively meaningless piece of paper—genuinely meaningless, if you don’t know where the degree was obtained and what courses were taken. It is expensive, too, as documented by the College Board: Public four-year colleges average about $7,000 per year in tuition, not including transportation, housing, and food. Tuition at the average private four-year college is more than $27,000 per year. And yet the B.A. has become the minimum requirement for getting a job interview for millions of jobs, a cost-free way for employers to screen for a certain amount of IQ and perseverance. Employers seldom even bother to check grades or courses, being able to tell enough about a graduate just by knowing the institution that he or she got into as an 18-year-old.
So what happens when a paper credential is essential for securing a job interview, but that credential can be obtained by taking the easiest courses and doing the minimum amount of work? The result is hundreds of thousands of college students who go to college not to get an education, but to get a piece of paper. When the dean of one East Coast college is asked how many students are in his institution, he likes to answer, “Oh, maybe six or seven.” The situation at his college is not unusual. The degradation of American college education is not a matter of a few parents horrified at stories of silly courses, trivial study requirements, and campus binge drinking. It has been documented in detail, affects a large proportion of the students in colleges, and is a disgrace.
The Department of Education, with decades of student loans and scholarships for university education, has not just been complicit in this evolution of the B.A. It has been its enabler. The size of these programs is immense. In 2010, the federal government issued new loans totaling $125 billion. It handed out more than eight million Pell Grants totaling more than $32 billion dollars. Absent this level of intervention, the last three decades would have seen a much healthier evolution of post-secondary education that focused on concrete job credentials and courses of studies not constricted by the traditional model of the four-year residential college. The absence of this artificial subsidy would also have let market forces hold down costs. Defenders of the Department of Education can unquestionably make the case that its policies have increased the number of people going to four-year residential colleges. But I view that as part of the Department of Education’s indictment, not its defense.
* * *
What other case might be made for federal involvement in education? Its contributions to good educational practice? Think of the good things that have happened to education in the last 30 years—the growth of homeschooling and the invention and spread of charter schools. The Department of Education had nothing to do with either development. Both happened because of the initiatives taken by parents who were disgusted with standard public education and took matters into their own hands. To watch the process by which charter schools are created, against the resistance of school boards and administrators, is to watch the best of American traditions in operation. Government has had nothing to do with it, except as a drag on what citizens are trying to do for their children.
Think of the best books on educational practice, such as Howard Gardner’s many innovative writings and E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Curriculum, developed after his landmark book, Cultural Literacy, was published in 1987. None of this came out of the Department of Education. The Department of Education spends about $200 million a year on research intended to improve educational practice. No evidence exists that these expenditures have done any significant good.
As far as I can determine, the Department of Education has no track record of positive accomplishment—nothing in the national numbers on educational achievement, nothing in the improvement of educational outcomes for the disadvantaged, nothing in the advancement of educational practice. It just spends a lot of money. This brings us to the practical question: If the Department of Education disappeared from next year’s budget, would anyone notice? The only reason that anyone would notice is the money. The nation’s public schools have developed a dependence on the federal infusion of funds. As a practical matter, actually doing away with the Department of Education would involve creating block grants so that school district budgets throughout the nation wouldn’t crater.
Sadly, even that isn’t practical. The education lobby will prevent any serious inroads on the Department of Education for the foreseeable future. But the answer to the question posed in the title of this talk—“Do we need the Department of Education?”—is to me unambiguous: No.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHtDF-z77wk&feature=player_embedded
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http://pjmedia.com/blog/campus-president-rebukes-limbaugh-supporting-professor/?singlepage=true
Campus President Rebukes Limbaugh-Supporting Professor
U. of Rochester intimidates a professor and allows students to disrupt his class.
by
Robert Shibley
March 10, 2012 - 12:00 am
By now, most are familiar with the national tempest over conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, and her testimony to Congress about whether Georgetown and other Catholic universities should have to cover birth control through their insurance policies. Predictably, the controversy has spilled over to a university campus. But the campus is the University of Rochester, and the issue is not contraception, but campus policing of speech.
UR economics professor Steven Landsburg addressed the arguments of Limbaugh and Fluke on his blog, The Big Questions, with three entries. In the first blog entry, “Rush to Judgment,” Landsburg states that while Fluke deserves respect as a human being, her position does not. He defended in economic terms Limbaugh’s (obviously joking) suggestion that those who use subsidized contraception should have to tape their sexual activities and post them online so that the benefit can be shared by those doing the subsidizing.
Landsburg called Fluke an “extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement,” and in his second blog entry, he gave the nickname “contraceptive sponges” to “people who want others to pay for their contraception because — well, just because they don’t want to pay for it themselves.” Landsburg then discussed the pros and cons of six arguments that contraception should be subsidized. The third blog entry suggested that perhaps the best way to subsidize contraception fairly is simply to tax men and to give women cash.
This went over very poorly with folks at UR. At least 17 students even barged into Landsburg’s class and formed a line blocking him off from his students. (Landsburg continued to lecture.) And UR president Joel Seligman sent out a memo blasting Landsburg’s blog entries, saying that he was “outraged that any professor would demean a student in this fashion.”
Thankfully for free speech, however, Seligman also said:
Professor Landsburg has the right to express his views under our university’s deep commitment to academic freedom.
Landsburg responded to Seligman in a fourth blog entry.
While UR is private and does not have to guarantee free speech, it nevertheless does so, as do most private universities (and such promises have especially clear legal force in the state of New York). After all, attracting quality students and faculty is likely to be much harder for a university that tells its community free thought is unwelcome on campus. UR states:
Freedom of expression of ideas and action is not to be limited by acts of intimidation, political or ideological oppression, abuse of authority, or threat of physical harm and well-being.
That freedom extends to both Landsburg and Seligman as well as to UR as an institution, and as university president, Seligman had the right to both personally and institutionally condemn Landsburg’s remarks as long as UR takes no official action against the professor for his expression.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that all public universities and the vast majority of private universities are supposed to protect unpopular views on campus, the reality is quite different. According to a study (large PDF) by the Association of American Colleges & Universities, less than 20 percent of faculty members strongly agreed that it was “safe to hold unpopular positions” on their campus. This is borne out by multiple cases from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (where I work), such as that of SUNY Fredonia’s Steven Kershnar, who was denied promotion because of his op-eds in a local newspaper, or Purdue University-Calumet’s Maurice Eisenstein, who was investigated under nine complaints of harassment for his Facebook comments about Islamist violence.
While Seligman had the right to condemn Landsburg, whether doing so was wise is a different issue. This article from UC Berkeley, which points out that its chancellor condemned an affirmative action bake sale on campus last fall but not a recent appearance from Louis Farrakhan, shows us why. Once a university president takes the position that some expression (like Landsburg’s) is beyond the pale, that president risks looking like a political hack when he or she fails to condemn equally controversial statements from the other side of the political spectrum.
Most worrisome, however, is the fact that UR allowed its students to disrupt Landsburg’s class without any consequences, despite the fact that campus security was on the scene. What happened in Landsburg’s class is a textbook example of “mob censorship,” where a group of people silence or drown out a speaker with whose views they disagree. A classroom is perhaps the least appropriate place for something like this to happen, and the fact that UR did not see fit to clear the heckling students out of the class is disturbing. If UR truly values “freedom of expression of ideas and action,” it should make clear that those who engage in mob censorship will be punished and that it will tolerate no further disruptions of campus speakers, be they professors like Landsburg or (the more common target) invited speakers like former Congressman Tom Tancredo, Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist, or General David Petraeus.
Robert Shibley is the vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in Philadelphia, PA.
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“contraceptive sponges”
I wish I'd thought of that! :-D
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A WEEK and a half ago, the day after the school shooting near Cleveland, a student stood in the doorway of my Bronx college classroom. He was eating half a bagel with cream cheese. It was a month into the semester, 45 minutes into the class period. I didn’t remember ever having seen him before.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/opinion/teachers-need-trust-and-security.html?ref=opinion
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http://school.failblog.org/2012/02/28/homework-class-test-why-couldnt-he-just-be-complacent-and-dumb-like-everyone-else/
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http://hotair.com/archives/2012/03/22/homework-at-virginia-school-do-some-oppo-research-on-republicans-but-not-on-obama/
Homework at Virginia school: Do some oppo research on Republicans but not on Obama
posted at 4:40 pm on March 22, 2012 by Allahpundit
The bad news: This is a brazen bit of political indoctrination. The good news: The class is now more or less qualified for work in America’s mainstream media. If you’re going to push your politics on kids, at least teach ‘em a trade.
He may or may not have also told them to send their research to Obama’s campaign. Another useful journalistic skill — learning to coordinate with Democrats for professional gain and the advancement of the cause. In a world of high Hopenchange unemployment, shouldn’t we congratulate this guy for looking out for his students’ bottom line?
“This assignment was just creepy beyond belief — like something out of East Germany during the Cold War,” one frustrated father, who asked for his family to remain anonymous, told The Daily Caller.
The assignment was for students to research the backgrounds and positions of each of the GOP candidates for president and find “weaknesses” in them, the parent explained. From there, students were to prepare a strategy paper to exploit those weaknesses and then to send their suggestions to the Obama campaign…
No similar assignment was given to research Obama’s history, identify his weaknesses or pass them along to the Republican candidates…
[Fairfax County Public School system spokesman John] Torre explained that Principal Dr. Catherine Cipperly, who refused to comment, discussed the matter with Denman, citing that students should have been given a choice to research candidates from either major party.
I’m guessing that Team O is already sufficiently well stocked with oppo people that it doesn’t need help from the JV, but any competitive organization knows that it’s always worth scouting promising young talent. And speaking of vetting The One, go read the 1995 interview that Team Breitbart dug up in which an ambitious young redistributionist muses about how the top five percent control all of America’s wealth while the rest of us get “bitter” and look for “scapegoats” among each other. Say this for the guy: If nothing else, at least he’s consistent. (Except when it’s politically inconvenient.) Exit question: Time for OWS to start demagoging “the five percent” instead?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/senior-citizens-continue-to-bear-burden-of-student-loans/2012/04/01/gIQAs47lpS_story.html?wprss=
Senior citizens continue to bear burden of student loans
(Sid Hastings/ For The Washington Post ) - Sandy Barnett stands in the rear doorway of her trailer home in Springfield, Ill. Barnett is struggling to pay student loan debt associated with graduate study at Sangamon State University and the University of North Texas.
By Ylan Q. Mui, Published: April 1
The burden of paying for college is wreaking havoc on the finances of an unexpected demographic: senior citizens.
New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that Americans 60 and older still owe about $36 billion in student loans, providing a rare window into the dynamics of student debt. More than 10 percent of those loans are delinquent. As a result, consumer advocates say, it is not uncommon for Social Security checks to be garnished or for debt collectors to harass borrowers in their 80s over student loans that are decades old.
That even seniors remain saddled with student loans highlights what a growing chorus of lawmakers, economists and financial experts say has become a central conflict in the nation’s higher education system: The long-touted benefits of a college degree are being diluted by rising tuition rates and the longevity of debt.
Some of these older Americans are still grappling with their first wave of student loans, while others took on new debt when they returned to school later in life in hopes of becoming more competitive in the labor force. Many have co-signed for loans with their children or grandchildren to help them afford ballooning tuition.
The recent recession exacerbated this problem, making it harder for older Americans — or the youths they are supporting in school — to get good-paying jobs. And unlike other debts, student loans cannot be shed in bankruptcy. As a result, some older Americans have found that a college degree led not to a prosperous career but instead to a lifetime under the shadow of debt.
“A student loan can be a debt that’s kind of like a ball and chain that you can drag to the grave,” said William E. Brewer, president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys. “You can unhook it when they lay you in the coffin.”
Sandy Barnett, 58, of Illinois thought she was doing the right thing when she decided to pursue a master’s degree in clinical psychology in the late 1980s. She had worked her way through college but said she took out a loan of about $21,000 to pay for graduate school so she would have more time to focus on her studies.
But even after earning her master’s, Barnett struggled to find a job that paid more than $25,000 a year and soon fell behind on her payments. She suffered through a layoff, a stretch of unemployment and the death of her husband — while her student loan ballooned to roughly $54,000.
Barnett filed for bankruptcy in 2005, but she couldn’t get out from under her student loan debt. She said a collection agency began garnishing the wages from her full-time job as a customer service representative a year ago, and now money is so tight that she must choose between buying gas and buying food. An air conditioner for her mobile home is an unimaginable luxury.
“I shake my head every day at the thought that I’m working for nothing,” Barnett said. “It’s really a black hole because there’s no end in sight.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/opinion/nocera-football-and-swahili.html
"In playing for the team, the athletes are giving their schools more immediate value than anyone else in the student body. They are also doing something that requires at least as much skill as playing in a university orchestra. Even putting aside the question of pay, surely the university ought to feel a moral obligation to return the favor by giving the players the tools to succeed in life.
Instead, universities do the opposite. With their phony majors and low expectations, they send the unmistakable message to the athletes that they don’t care what happens after their eligibility expires. It’s a disgrace."
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http://catholicexchange.com/why-are-homeschooled-kids-so-annoying/2/
About a year ago, when I first started considering taking my kids out of public school, I wasn’t met with the kind of incredulous questioning that I expected after suggesting something so reckless and foolhardy. For the most part people were excited and supportive and helpful. Many thought we were already homeschooling, in fact. What surprised me most though is that folks who were concerned about the prudence of such a decision weren’t worried that my children might not learn enough or the the right things. They didn’t wonder how my kids would know how to be quiet when they were supposed to or to wait in lines when they have to.
No, the biggest concern among the concerned was: SOCIALIZATION. Ahhhh! Socialize those kids! Learnin’, schmlearning- those kids need to be among herds of other kids their exact age in order to learn how to be normal. In other words: homeschooled kids are annoying and weird, and you don’t want your kids to be annoying and weird, do you?
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You're depriving your kids the offical indoctrination from the teacher's union! Where will they learn to sing song of praise for Obama? MMMMM mmmmm MMMMM!
http://catholicexchange.com/why-are-homeschooled-kids-so-annoying/2/
About a year ago, when I first started considering taking my kids out of public school, I wasn’t met with the kind of incredulous questioning that I expected after suggesting something so reckless and foolhardy. For the most part people were excited and supportive and helpful. Many thought we were already homeschooling, in fact. What surprised me most though is that folks who were concerned about the prudence of such a decision weren’t worried that my children might not learn enough or the the right things. They didn’t wonder how my kids would know how to be quiet when they were supposed to or to wait in lines when they have to.
No, the biggest concern among the concerned was: SOCIALIZATION. Ahhhh! Socialize those kids! Learnin’, schmlearning- those kids need to be among herds of other kids their exact age in order to learn how to be normal. In other words: homeschooled kids are annoying and weird, and you don’t want your kids to be annoying and weird, do you?
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Funny line at the end: "And that’s why homeschooled kids are so annoying. Because no one tells them that the way God made them isn’t cool enough."
Looking forward to any first hand home school stories or info. My nephew did it for a year at age 12 and got caught up in academics. He needs the socialization. The Boy Scouts for one thing has been very good for that. They do a lot of great activities and the dads are very involved keeping the atmosphere fun and positive.
Home school is of course not really home school. It is a parent directed education (like public schools are supposed to be). Those kids often get out and about way more than school kids and have academic and social networks. They are eligible here for school sports and other activities as well which can help them stay connecting if they later come back in.
Thye teacher union comment is funny. Around here each home school choice cuts about 10k/yr out of their funding. Every bit of competition with the public school is a force for good for all of the kids.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2012/04/07/teacher-tells-6th-grade-class-that-republicans-are-stupid/
Teacher tells 6th grade class that ‘Republicans are stupid’
posted at 10:00 am on April 7, 2012 by Howard Portnoy
I suppose it can said of a Virginia elementary school teacher who allegedly told her students “Republicans are stupid” that she at least spoke her mind. Her actions are more defensible than those of a fellow Old Dominion State colleague who deviously tasked her students with finding flaws in the GOP presidential candidates but not in the lone Democratic candidate.
The Daily Caller reports that “as Republican voters were filing into the halls of [Colin] Powell Elementary School in Fairfax County to vote on Super Tuesday,” teacher Kristin Martin told her sixth-grade class that “Republicans are stupid” and “they don’t care about anyone but wealthy people and businesses.”
One of the students in the class told The DC:
It all started when this disabled kid came in and named all the Republicans candidates for Super Tuesday. She [Martin] said to him, ‘I don’t like them, I think that they are stupid.’
The blog additionally notes that Martin reportedly told the class that she had voted for Obama and that “Democrats do more for the community and schools.”
I reached out to John Torre, a spokesman for the school district, who said that the county’s investigation into the incident was “inconclusive.” The teacher, he told me, denies having made these statements, which means that in the district’s eyes it boils down to a case of “she said, they said.”
But not all the parents of children in Martin’s class are satisfied with that outcome. One mother, a self-identified Republican, is quoted by The DC as saying:
I felt like the teacher was brainwashing naïve, young children to believe people like me, my family and, to a certain extent, my daughter, were stupid.
The reaction is understandable, but I would find it far more instructive to know what a parent who is a Democrat thinks of this type of proselytizing—whether it happened or not.
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http://news.yahoo.com/1-2-graduates-jobless-underemployed-140300522.html
WASHINGTON (AP) — The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.
Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.
While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.
Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he got financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.
His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having long-lasting financial impact.
"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."
Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put, we're failing kids coming out of college," he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. "We're going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."
By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed — roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.
On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.
The figures are based on an analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor's degrees who were "underemployed."
About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.
Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.
In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.
College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.
In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.
With the state's economy languishing in an extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates have shown up at job placement centers in tears. Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more experienced workers, job counselors said, and are now having to explain to prospective employers the time gaps in their resumes.
"It's kind of scary," said Cameron Bawden, 22, who is graduating from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a business degree. His family has warned him for years about the job market, so he has been building his resume by working part time on the Las Vegas Strip as a food runner and doing a marketing internship with a local airline.
Bawden said his friends who have graduated are either unemployed or working along the Vegas Strip in service jobs that don't require degrees. "There are so few jobs and it's a small city," he said. "It's all about who you know."
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Doug, without going into a defense, albeit tepid, of the LA Times, here is another article in the opinion section today that I think you will agree with; at least I do.
"We have no problem with a school that takes an unusual path to engage students and brings about academic success. The problem is that the "academic success" part is eluding the school. Its students' scores on state standardized tests have bounced up and down, most recently down. Compared with schools statewide that have similar student demographics, Semillas is in the basement."
Therefore IMHO and the LA Times, close it down.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-charter-semillas-del-pueblo-20120511,0,4516055.story
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Perhaps this should be a personal email, but since you have raised the subject on the public forum, I am curious which College your daughter and you finally selected for her? She sounds
absolutely great; you are very lucky.
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Thanks JDN. St. Olaf College. They are strong academically and she was recruited for sports. They are especially famous for their choir but have great orchestras, beautiful campus, nice people, religious atmosphere even though it is Lutheran and she is Catholic, alcohol and drug free atmosphere, top notch food, an hour from home and mostly paid for. A 4 year residential liberal arts college, they are also very good in the sciences.
The last one she passed on was a great business school at a major university, almost all scholarship including a semester abroad scholarship, but no chance to compete for the school team (because of Div 1 and title 9), large urban campus (scary for a protected suburbanite), and she isn't sure business is her major to enter such a focused program. Could possibly make that switch after one year, or for grad school. We'll see...
https://www.stolaf.edu/about/ (some info)
According to the most recent National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates, St. Olaf ranks 11th overall among the nation's 262 baccalaureate colleges in the number of graduates who go on to earn doctoral degrees. St. Olaf earned top 10 rankings in the following fields: religion/theology and social service professions (2nd); arts/music, education, and medical sciences (4th); life sciences (5th); mathematics/statistics, chemistry, and engineering (8th); foreign languages and biological sciences (9th); and physical sciences (10th).
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Please congratulate your daughter. Yes, I know the school; I have a friend who went there and enjoyed it immensely. She went on to become a physician. One could argue the merits of large versus small. My father went to Lawrence, a school similar to St. Olaf only in Wisconsin. He loved the small college atmosphere and the opportunity to participate in sports. In contrast, while I was quite good at tennis, I was not good enough to play varsity while I was at USC; while I was there they won Div. I. In some ways I missed out.
Probably your daughter will end up in grad school elsewhere, but while at St. Olaf I'm sure she will enjoy herself. By the way, St. Olaf does offer a good overseas study program if your daughter is interested.
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Thank you JDN. It is quite a beautiful campus with green grass and majestic trees, up on a hill overlooking the river valley and the metro area to the north and southern MN to the south.
Small colleges are quite competitive. St. Olaf's claim is being the only school in the nation whose fight song is in 3/4 time - a waltz, Um Ya Ya at 3:30 and 3:45 in the video after a blonde MN college girl gives her homecoming commentary in Swedish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9K4Mx87p1w
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"while I was quite good at tennis, I was not good enough to play varsity while I was at USC"
You will need to remove the past tense attached to 'quite good at tennis' before we meet halfway for the match to decide all differences. )
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I notice they even have Norwegian studies and offer Norwegian language classes! It is a lovely campus.
Well you must be quite good at tennis if I need to remove the past tense from "quite good" in order to keep up with you, but I'm afraid that's not going to happen. 20+ years ago a 88 year old man blindly drove up on the sidewalk and ran me down; I had just finished my running exercises at the track and was jogging home. Among other injuries, my shoulder was damaged; suddenly my "big serve" become a powder puff and my attack serve/volley game became suicide. So I gave up the sport.
But golf I suppose is a possibility to decide our differences. :-) Or do you ride/race bicycles? After totalling my motorcycle last year I bought a nice bicycle. I've found that I enjoy training on a bicycle, although I will admit on the hills I do terribly miss my throttle. :-)
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The rising cost of education
"For decades, American politicians have waxed passionate on the need to put college within every family's reach. ... The College Board, which tracks each type of financial assistance in a comprehensive annual report, shows total federal aid soaring by more than $100 billion in the space of a single decade -- from $64 billion in 2000 to $169 billion in 2010. ... And what have we gotten for this vast investment in college affordability? Colleges that are more unaffordable than ever. Year in, year out, Washington bestows tuition aid on students and their families. Year in, year out, the cost of tuition surges, galloping well ahead of inflation. And year in, year out, politicians vie to outdo each other in promising still more public subsidies that will keep higher education within reach of all. ... Federal financial aid is a major source of revenue for colleges and universities, and aid packages are generally based on the gap between what a family can afford to pay to send a student to a given college, and the tuition and fees charged by that college. That gives schools every incentive to keep their tuition unaffordable. Why would they reduce their sticker price to a level more families could afford, when doing so would mean kissing millions of government dollars goodbye? Directly or indirectly, government loans and grants have led to massive tuition inflation. ... The more government has done to make higher education affordable, the more unaffordable it has become. Doing more of the same won't yield a different outcome." --columnist Jeff Jacoby
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"If our students are burdened with oppressive loans, why do so many university rec centers look like five-star spas? Student cell phones and cars are indistinguishable from those of the faculty. The underclass suffers more from obesity than malnutrition; our national epidemic is not unaffordable protein, but rather a surfeit of even cheaper sweets. Flash mobbers target electronics stores for more junk, not bulk food warehouses in order to eat. America's children do not suffer from lack of access to the Internet, but from wasting hours on video games and less-than-instructional websites. We have too many, not too few, television channels. The problem is not that government workers are underpaid or scarce, but that so many of them seem to think mind readers, clowns and prostitutes come with the job. An average American with an average cell phone has more information at his fingertips than did a Goldman Sachs grandee 20 years ago. ... In 1980, a knee or hip replacement was experimental surgery for the 1 percent; now it is a Medicare entitlement. American poverty is not measured by absolute global standards of available food, shelter and medical care, or by comparisons to prior generations, but by one American now having less stuff than another." --historian Victor Davis Hanson
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"On May 2, D'Avonte Meadows, a 6-year-old with an infectious grin and rambunctious streak, was suspended for three days from Sable Elementary in suburban Denver for crooning "[I'm] Sexy and I Know It" to a girl in lunch line.
The school declared it sexual harassment and told his parents that, because D'Avonte sang the same song to the same girl before, he is a repeat offender." :?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-zero-tolerance-20120523,0,61074.story
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The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn
The greatest tragedy of progressive education is not the students' lack of skills, but of teachable character.
by
JANICE FIAMENGO
“The honeymoon is over.” Instructors who award low grades in humanities disciplines will likely be familiar with a phenomenon that occurs after the first essays are returned to students: former smiles vanish, hands once jubilantly raised to answer questions are now resentfully folded across chests, offended pride and sulkiness replace the careless cheer of former days. Too often, the smiles are gone for good because the customary “B+” or “A” grades have been withheld, and many students cannot forgive the insult.
The matter doesn’t always end there. Some students are prepared for a fight, writing emails of entreaty or threat, or besieging the instructor in his office to make clear that the grade is unacceptable. Every instructor who has been so besieged knows the legion of excuses and expressions of indignation offered, the certainty that such work was always judged acceptable in the past, the implication that a few small slip-ups, a wrong word or two, have been blown out of proportion. When one points out grievous inadequacies — factual errors, self-contradiction, illogical argument, and howlers of nonsensical phrasing — the student shrugs it off: yes, yes, a few mistakes, the consequences of too much coffee, my roommate’s poor typing, another assignment due the same day; but you could still see what I meant, couldn’t you, and the general idea was good, wasn’t it? “I’m better at the big ideas,” students have sometimes boasted to me. “On the details, well … ”.
Meetings about bad grades are uncomfortable not merely because it is unpleasant to wound feelings unaccustomed to the sting. Too often, such meetings are exercises in futility. I have spent hours explaining an essay’s grammatical, stylistic, and logical weaknesses in the wearying certainty that the student was unable, both intellectually and emotionally, to comprehend what I was saying or to act on my advice. It is rare for such students to be genuinely desirous and capable of learning how to improve. Most of them simply hope that I will come around. Their belief that nothing requires improvement except the grade is one of the biggest obstacles that teachers face in the modern university. And that is perhaps the real tragedy of our education system: not only that so many students enter university lacking the basic skills and knowledge to succeed in their courses — terrible in itself — but also that they often arrive essentially unteachable, lacking the personal qualities necessary to respond to criticism.
The unteachable student has been told all her life that she is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability. Pedagogical wisdom since at least the time of John Dewey — and in some form all the way back to William Wordsworth’s divinely anointed child “trailing clouds of glory” — has stressed the development of self-esteem and a sense of achievement. Education, as Dewey made clear in such works as The Child and the Curriculum (1902), was not about transferring a cultural inheritance from one generation to the next; it was about students’ self-realization. It involved liberating pupils from that stuffy, often stifling, inheritance into free and unforced learning aided by sympathy and encouragement. The teacher was not so much to teach or judge as to elicit a response, leading the student to discover for herself what she, in a sense, already knew. In the past twenty years, the well-documented phenomenon of grade inflation in humanities subjects — the awarding of high “Bs” and “As” to the vast majority of students — has increased the conviction that everyone is first-rate.
This pedagogy of self-esteem developed in response to the excesses of rote learning and harsh discipline that were thought to characterize earlier eras. In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Mr. Gradgrind, the teacher who ridicules a terrified Sissy Jupe for her inability to define a horse (“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth … ”), was seen to epitomize a soulless pedagogical regime that deadened creativity and satisfaction. Dickens and his readers believed such teaching to be a form of mental and emotional abuse, and the need to protect students from the stigma of failure became an article of faith amongst progressive educators. For them, the stultifying apparatus of the past had to be entirely replaced. Memorization itself, the foundation of traditional teaching, came to be seen as an enemy of creative thought: pejorative similes for memory work such as “rote learning” and “fact-grinding” suggest the classroom equivalent of a military drill, harsh and unaccommodating. The progressive approach, in contrast, emphasizes variety, pleasure, and student interest and self-motivation above all.
It sounds good. The problem, as traditionalists have argued (but without much success), is that the utopian approach hasn’t worked as intended. Rather than forming cheerful, self-directed learners, the pedagogy of self-esteem has often created disaffected, passive pupils, bored precisely because they were never forced to learn. As Hilda Neatby commented in 1953, the students she was encountering at university were “distinctly blasé” about their coursework. A professor of history, Neatby was driven to investigate progressive education after noting how ill-equipped her students were for the high-level thinking required of them; her So Little For the Mind remains well-worth reading. In her assessment:
The bored “graduates” of elementary and high schools seem, in progressive language, to be “incompletely socialized.” Ignorant even of things that they might be expected to know, they do not care to learn. They lack an object in life, they are unaware of the joy of achievement. They have been allowed to assume that happiness is a goal, rather than a by-product.
The emphasis on feeling good, as Neatby argued, prevents rather than encourages the real satisfactions of learning.
Of course, the progressive approach has advantages, not the least of which is that it enables university administrators to boast of the ever-greater numbers of students taking degrees at their institutions. Previously disadvantaged groups have gained access to higher education as never before, and more and more students are being provided with the much-touted credentials believed to guarantee success in the workforce. Thus our universities participate in a happy make-believe. Students get their degrees. Parents are reassured that their money has been well-spent. And compliant professors are, if not exactly satisfied — it corrodes the soul to give unearned grades — at least relieved not to encounter student complaints.
More than a few students know that something fishy is going on. The intelligent ones see their indifferent, mediocre, or inept counterparts receiving grades similar to their own, and the realization offends their sense of justice. Moreover, there is little satisfaction in consciously playing the system. The smart student with his easy “A” knows that he has not been challenged to develop his intellect. I remember once walking in the hallway behind a student who had just picked up her final term essay; as she joined her friends, she flipped to the back of the paper without reading any of the instructor’s comments. “An A,” she said jubilantly, but with a strong undertone of derision. “And I didn’t even read the book!” As the paper thudded into the trash basket, her friends joined in the disdainful laughter.
In contrast, the weak student who believes in his high grades has also had a disservice done him. He has been misled about his abilities, falsely persuaded that career paths and goals are open that may be out of reach. Eventually, the fraud will be revealed: by an employer who finds him inadequate, by his own dawning recognition that he cannot achieve what he hoped. The reckoning will likely be bitter; evidence exists that the pedagogy of false esteem can even cause psychological harm. When students who have always been praised must confront the reality of their low achievement, their tendency is, as researchers James Coté and Anton Allahar report, not to confront the problem directly but to hit back at its perceived source — the teacher who has given them the bad news, the employer who does not renew a contract. Far more than their adequate peers when faced with difficulties, these students experience a range of negative reactions, including anger, anxiety, and depression.
Even more seriously, such students have not only been misled but fundamentally malformed. They have never learned to listen to criticism, to recover from disappointment, or to slog through difficulties with no guarantee of success except commitment. The person who is never challenged is also never refined, never learns to cope with the setbacks that come on the way to high endeavor. And it is not only in the academic realm, of course, that they may be hampered: a full life outside of university also requires the ability to confront one’s weaknesses and recover from defeat. Despite the admittedly important emphasis on character formation in our schools — on tolerance, anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on — it seems that we have failed to show students what real achievement looks like and what it will require of them.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-unteachables-a-generation-that-cannot-learn/?singlepage=true
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An excellent read Mick :-)
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Chubb and Moe: Higher Education's Online Revolution
The substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive) can vastly increase access to an elite-caliber education
By JOHN E. CHUBB And TERRY M. MOE
At the recent news conference announcing edX, a $60 million Harvard-MIT partnership in online education, university leaders spoke of reaching millions of new students in India, China and around the globe. They talked of the "revolutionary" potential of online learning, hailing it as the "single biggest change in education since the printing press."
Heady talk indeed, but they are right. The nation, and the world, are in the early stages of a historic transformation in how students learn, teachers teach, and schools and school systems are organized.
These same university leaders mentioned the limits of edX itself. Its online courses would not lead to Harvard or MIT degrees, they noted, and were no substitute for the centuries-old residential education of their hallowed institutions. They also acknowledged that the initiative, which offers free online courses prepared by some of the nation's top professors, is paid for by university funds—and that there is no revenue stream and no business plan to sustain it.
In short, while they want to be part of the change they know is coming, they are uncertain about how to proceed. And in this Harvard and MIT are not alone. Stanford, for instance, offers a free online course on artificial intelligence that enrolls more than 150,000 students world-wide—but the university's path forward is similarly unclear. How can free online course content be paid for and sustained? How can elite institutions maintain their selectivity, and be rewarded for it, when anyone can take their courses?
This challenge can be met. Over the long term, online technology promises historic improvements in the quality of and access to higher education. The fact is, students do not need to be on campus at Harvard or MIT to experience some of the key benefits of an elite education. Moreover, colleges and universities, whatever their status, do not need to put a professor in every classroom. One Nobel laureate can literally teach a million students, and for a very reasonable tuition price. Online education will lead to the substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive)—as has happened in every other industry—making schools much more productive.
And lectures just scratch the surface of what is possible. Online technology lets course content be presented in many engaging formats, including simulations, video and games. It lets students move through material at their own pace, day or night. It permits continuing assessment, individual tutoring online, customized reteaching of unlearned material, and the systematic collection of data on each student's progress. In many ways, technology extends an elite-caliber education to the masses who would not otherwise have access to anything close.
Skeptics worry that online learning will destroy the "college experience," which requires that students be at a geographical place (school), interacting with one another and their professors. But such a disconnect isn't going to happen. The coming revolution is essentially about finding a new balance in the way education is organized—a balance in which students still go to school and have face-to-face interactions within a community of scholars, but also do a portion of their work online.
In this blended educational world, the Harvards and MITs will not be stuck charging tuition for on-campus education while they give away course materials online. They and other elite institutions employ world-renowned leaders in every discipline. They have inherent advantages in the creation of high-quality online content—which hundreds of other colleges and universities would be willing to pay for.
In this way, college X might have its students take calculus, computer science and many other lecture courses online from MIT-Harvard (or other suppliers), and have them take other classes with their own local professors for subjects that are better taught in small seminars. College X can thus offer stellar lectures from the best professors in the world—and do locally what it does best, person to person.
Don't dismiss the for-profit colleges and universities, either. Institutions such as the University of Phoenix—and it is hardly alone—have embraced technology aggressively. By integrating online courses into their curricula and charging less-than-elite prices for them, for-profit institutions have doubled their share of the U.S. higher education market in the last decade, now topping 10%. In time, they may do amazing things with computerized instruction—imagine equivalents of Apple or Microsoft, with the right incentives to work in higher education—and they may give elite nonprofits some healthy competition in providing innovative, high-quality content.
For now, policy makers, educators and entrepreneurs alike need to recognize that this is a revolution, but also a complicated process that must unfold over time before its benefits are realized. The MITs and Harvards still don't really know what they are doing, but that is normal at this early stage of massive change. Early stumbles and missteps (which edX may or may not be) will show the way toward what works, and what is the right balance between online and traditional learning.
But like countless industries before it, higher education will be transformed by technology—and for the better. Elite players and upstarts, not-for-profits and for-profits, will compete for students, government funds and investment in pursuit of the future blend of service that works for their respective institutions and for the students each aims to serve.
Mr. Chubb is interim CEO of Education Sector, an independent think tank, and a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Mr. Moe is professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at Hoover. They are the authors of "Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education" (John Wiley & Sons 2009).
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"I think also, that general virtue is more probably to be expected and obtained from the education of youth, than from exhortations of adult persons; bad habits and vices of the mind being, like diseases of the body, more easily prevented than cured. I think moreover, that talents for the education of youth are the gift of God; and that he on whom they are bestowed, whenever a way is opened for use of them, is as strongly called as if he heard a voice from heaven..." --Benjamin Franklin
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303561504577496863632059058.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Is it true that college students today are unprepared and unmotivated? That generalization does injustice to the numerous bright exceptions I saw in my 25 years of teaching composition to university freshmen. But in other cases the characterization is all too accurate.
One big problem is that so few students are readers. As an unfortunate result, they have erroneous, and sometimes hilarious, notions of how the written language represents what they hear. What emerged in their papers and emails was a sort of literary subgenre that I've come to think of as stream of unconsciousness.
Some of their most creative thinking was devoted to fashioning excuses for tardiness, skipping class entirely, and failure to complete assignments. One guy admitted that he had trouble getting into "the proper frame of mime" for an 8 a.m. class.
Then there were the two young men who missed class for having gotten on the wrong side of the law. They both emailed me, one to say that he had been charged with a "mister meaner," the other with a "misdeminor."
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From WRM's American Interest website, selected as 'notable and quotable' in the WSJ:
[The University of Missouri] has just announced that it is closing its university press after losing its annual subsidy of $400,000. Now professors and students are up in arms over the closure, decrying the move as an attack on scholarly discourse and taking to Facebook petitions to protest the decision.
Look past the uproar, however, and it is clear that this is part of a wider trend. A number of other universities, including prestigious schools like Rice, have shuttered their presses, and six more have joined it in the past three years alone. As state budgets contract, and as private universities face higher costs, schools across the country are all finding out the same thing—the money just isn't there.
Fewer university presses with higher standards would probably serve humanity better than the current system. Some of the problem stems from the nature of the tenure system, in which every academic in the country is under pressure to publish books whether he or she has anything worth saying or not. In that sense the university press problem is a symptom rather than a cause of academia's woes. Parts of the university press system work like vanity presses, where the driving force in the system is the author's need to be published rather than the reader's need to know.
What's going on here, however, is less about quality than it is about money and the outmoded foundations of American institutions and practices built in the post World War Two era. The baroque inefficiency of the academic enterprise—and especially the research model university, which . . . has built a system that demands enormous outside resources to continue to function.
In a handful of cases, notably the best endowed private universities, there is enough money on hand to make this system work. But less affluent private universities and virtually all public universities face a harsher climate. And as state governments in particular face claims on their tight revenues from more powerful constituencies than university faculty and staff, the public universities are being systematically starved of cash.
There are two ways for the system to respond. One is by cheese paring: cutting costs on "extraneous" or "non-core" activities while trying to preserve the heart of the old model. This looks like simple common sense to most administrators, and it is often the thinking that leads to the closure of university presses as well as other activities that, in the cold light of a budget crunch, suddenly look like frills.
The second way is more difficult, but it is ultimately what the academy must do: it must reinvent itself and radically restructure. This would involve not merely closing down an expensive university press but rethinking the relationship of scholarship to teaching, and re-examining the relevance of the "publish or perish" system for the large group of disciplines and institutions where it doesn't really make sense.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120729
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The Friendly, Neighborhood Internet School
We have the technology, the people and the institutions we need to usher an online-education revolution
By DAVID GELERNTER
We have big problems with our schools—and need new ideas about how to fix them. Deep changes are needed in our attitude toward teaching, leading education scholar Diane Ravitch wrote recently in the New York Review of Books. We need smarter, better-educated recruits to the profession. We need to value a teacher's experience properly and discard the thought that idealistic college graduates with no experience make brilliant teachers automatically.
Fair enough. But we need other solutions too. We need plans that make direct use of our biggest assets: parental anger, and people's selfish but reasonable willingness to give some time to improve their own children's education now, versus someone else's in 20 years.
Local Internet schools are a promising way to mobilize existing talent. Much infrastructure is required that doesn't exist. But the parts are all spread out on the table. All we need is to fit them together properly.
Is there a problem? "We have to see this as a wake-up call," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan responded to the latest international survey of 15-year-olds in 2010. "We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we're being out-educated." Of course this was only the latest wake-up call. We slept through the first 30 years' worth of ringers and buzzers and alarms, starting with the devastating report "A Nation At Risk," commissioned by the Reagan administration in 1983. And as matters stands, our plans are to go on sleeping.
Among 65 participating nations in the latest survey, the United States ranked 15th in reading, 23rd in science, 31st in math. In "science literacy" we were beaten by such intellectual powerhouses as Slovenia and crushed by the likes of Japan and Finland. But take heart: We beat Bulgaria!
Unfortunately, science is one of our strong subjects. "American students are less proficient in their nation's history than in any other subject, according to results of a nationwide test," the New York Times reported last year. "Most fourth graders [were] unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure." The exam found 12% of high school seniors "proficient" in American history.
But statistics can't measure the outright grotesqueness of our failure. Earlier this year, the Huffington Post reported on "Lunch Scholars," a high-school student's video about his fellow students. "Do you know the vice president of the United States?" the filmmaker asks. One student volunteers "bin Laden." "In what war did America gain independence?" No one had the right answer without a hint.
A local Internet school sounds like a contradiction in terms: the Internet lets you discard geography and forget "local." But the idea is simple. A one-classroom school, with 20 or so children of all ages between 6th and 12th grade, each sitting at a computer and wearing headsets. They all come from nearby. A one-room Internet school might serve a few blocks in a suburb, or a single urban apartment building.
In front sits any reliable adult whom the neighbors vouch for—often, no doubt, some student's father or mother, taking his turn. He leads the Pledge of Allegiance, announces regular short recesses to clear everyone's head, proclaims lunchtime. He hands out batteries and Band-Aids and sends sick children home or to a doctor. He reloads the printers and futzes with malfunctioning scanners, no doubt making any problem worse. But these machines are cheap, and each classroom can deploy several.
Each child does a whole curriculum's worth of learning online, at the computer. Most of the time he follows canned courses on-screen. But for an hour every day, he deals directly, one-to-one over phone or videophone with a tutor. Ideally there's a teaching assistant on an open phone line throughout the day, each assistant dealing with a few dozen students. In early years, parents will need to help here too. And each child needs a mentor who advises parents on courses and keeps track of the student's progress. The wealthy conservative foundation, think tank or consortium that spends liberally to get this idea off the ground will probably provide mentors, in early years, from its own staff.
The online courses—some exist already but not enough—are produced by teaching maestros. As these new schools gather momentum, they will make use, as tutors or assistants, of the huge number of people who are willing and able to help children in some topic for a few hours a week but can't or won't teach full time: college and graduate students and retirees, lawyers, accountants, housewives, professors.
Parents must be far more involved in children's educations than most are today. They must choose—with online help and advice from mentors and friends—a set of courses for each child every year. They must talk to their children about school every day, to make sure things are moving forward. They might need to take turns supervising the class. A few will have taken the hugely time-consuming step of organizing the school to begin with.
Obviously these schools aren't for everyone. But for many thousands of students, they are likely to work well—and better every year, as the pool of courseware, tutors and assistants grows.
We have the technology, the people and the institutions we need. Of course in-person education will always be better than online teaching—if the teacher is any good. Of course these local Internet schools are a huge, daunting project. Of course it's much easier just to shrug and pump another class-full of imbeciles straight into our heavily polluted cultural atmosphere.
But each newly minted ignoramus is a child we have failed, who will likely lug around the burden of a third-rate education his whole life; who deserved better of this nation. Maybe we'll go on doing nothing. But there are times to act, and this is one.
Mr. Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, is the author of "America-Lite" (Encounter, 2012).
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Second post of the day:
College Debt Hits Well-Off
Upper-Middle-Income Households See Biggest Jumps in Student Loan Burden
By RUTH SIMON and ROB BARRY
Rising college costs and a sagging economy are taking the biggest toll on a surprising group: upper-middle-income families.
According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of recently released Federal Reserve data, households with annual incomes of $94,535 to $205,335 saw the biggest jump in the percentage with student-loan debt from 2007 to 2010, the latest figures available. That group also saw a sharp climb in the amount of debt owed on average.
The surge is leading many such families to look closer at cost and value when choosing colleges. If the new frugality continues, experts say, it could make it difficult for all but the most selective schools to keep pushing through large tuition increases.
For Thomas and Mary Beth Hofmeister of Albany, N.Y., the news in December that their son was accepted to the University of Notre Dame, Ms. Hofmeister's alma mater, was met with equal parts excitement and anxiety. The family's financial-aid package included only a tiny grant, meaning the family will have to sink deep into debt to cover the annual cost of nearly $58,000.
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Close.Ms. Hofmeister, an insurance broker and financial planner, says she and her husband, an operations manager, combined earn a six-figure income that puts them in the upper-middle class and were surprised by the amount they will have to borrow. She says she feels trapped in financial purgatory, between "people with lower incomes who have a lot of subsidy, and the truly affluent, for whom this isn't a problem."
The Journal's analysis defined upper-middle-income households as those with annual incomes between the 80th and 95th percentiles of all households nationwide. Among this group, 25.6% had student-loan debt in 2010, up from 19.5% in 2007. For all households, the portion with student loan debt rose to 19.1% in 2010 from 15.2% in 2007.
The amount borrowed by upper-middle-income families, meanwhile, has soared. They owed an average of $32,869 in college loans in 2010, up from $26,639 in 2007, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Journal's analysis.
Borrowing has also increased for lower-income families, but by a smaller amount. Families with lower incomes tend to send their children to lower-cost schools and to cover a greater portion of their costs through financial aid, according to Sallie Mae. The typical low-income family receives grants and scholarships totaling 36% of the cost, the lender says, while for higher-income families such packages total 21%.
The figures put this segment at the heart of a larger trend striking across income groups. More than three million households now owe at least $50,000 in student loans, up from about 794,000 in 2001 and fewer than 300,000 in 1989, after adjusting for inflation.
"There's no doubt that this is a squeeze on a lot of household incomes that many people did not anticipate," says Wells Fargo chief economist John Silvia.
Many well-off families remain willing to dig deep for the most prestigious schools and should be able to handle higher debt loads. The upper-middle-income households now repaying student loans spend just 3.2% of their monthly incomes on debt payments, according to the Journal's analysis, meaning they should have an easier time meeting those obligations than less-affluent families.
Even after adjusting for inflation, the average sticker price of four-year colleges has more than doubled since 1985, according to the College Board. Now there are signs that financial pressures are fostering a greater cost consciousness, even among wealthier families, and an increased focus on value.
According to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California at Los Angeles, which surveys more than 200,000 freshmen, the portion of last year's freshmen who said cost was a "very important" factor when picking a college increased by 20.7% since 2007 for students with family incomes of $150,000 or more, the biggest jump for any income group, says John Pryor, the program's director.
Rhonda Ker, a private-college counselor in the Los Angeles area, says some well-off families she works with are now willing to apply to second-tier schools where their total cost can be cut by half. Adds Ms. Ker, "I've been seeing these more realistic calculations and choices, rather than families just going for highest-ranked schools."
Even if the economy rebounds strongly, "this downturn has been long enough and severe enough that, for a generation, it will alter the way families think about price and higher education," says Richard Bischoff, vice president for enrollment management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. A July 26 report from Moody's Investors Service noted that reductions in net worth, lackluster job growth and stagnant incomes have "created the stiffest tuition price resistance that colleges have faced in decades."
To be sure, some families are turning to loans because they spent heavily or used extra cash to save for retirement. More than one-third of parents with incomes of $95,000 to $125,000 with a child who entered college in 2011 didn't save or invest for that child's education, according to a survey by education consultants Human Capital Research.
But with college costs rising, twin blows from falling home values and the stock market plunge of 2008-09 have sent many families over the edge. On average, upper-middle-income households' median net worth fell 19%, to $369,320, in 2010 from three years earlier, according to Journal calculations.
Robert Bremer, a sales manager, expected college savings to cover two years of tuition for each of his two children, a senior and a freshman. But he says he "lost a lot of paper money" and now only has enough for one year apiece. He plans to borrow to cover the shortfall.
Some well-off households are squeezed because of their preference for costly private colleges. Mary Nucciarone, associate director of financial aid at Notre Dame, says families earning $125,000 to $250,000 pose the biggest challenge for private institutions because "the contributions expected from them are probably higher than what the family is prepared to do."
But public universities also are seeing a shift. At Pennsylvania State University, where tuition has increased 21% over the last five years and state appropriations have fallen by 25%, "we've seen unsubsidized loans skyrocket," says Anna M. Griswold, executive director of the Office of Student Aid, partly because of stepped up borrowing by families that don't qualify for subsidized interest rates.
With their finances strained, some higher-earning parents are making their children pick up more of the tab. Among families earning $100,000 or more, students paid 23% of their college costs in 2012 through loans, income and savings, according to Sallie Mae, up from 14% in 2009; the share covered by parents fell to 52% from 61%.
"The boomers are the first generation shifting the cost of college to their kids," both through increased student borrowing and reduced taxpayer support for higher education, says Susan Dynarski, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan.
Some families are trying to keep debt to a minimum. Laura Casey's daughter initially planned to attend the University of Arizona at Tucson this fall, but instead will work and attend a community college in South Carolina. Her goal is to qualify for in-state tuition at Clemson University and eventually attend medical school. "Her goal is to avoid borrowing," says Ms. Casey. "Even though it's a little painful upfront, it is probably what all of us should do."
A version of this article appeared August 9, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: College Debt Hits Well-Off.
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Paying Professor Warren
Scott Brown explains why college is less affordable. .
Article Comments (110) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».
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How refreshing to see a politician say that more money isn't always the answer for American education. In Wednesday night's Massachusetts debate, GOP Senator Scott Brown had the audacity to suggest that more taxpayer subsidies for college education may simply transfer wealth to colleges—and their faculty.
The fun began when Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard, attacked Mr. Brown for voting against the umpteenth Senate bill to expand student-loan subsidies. According to the New York Times, Mr. Brown responded that "she makes $350,000 to teach one course" and received a no-interest loan from Harvard. This, he added, is "one of the driving forces behind the high costs of education."
Rising federal subsidies have allowed colleges to raise their prices, pocketing the increased aid that is allegedly intended to help students. According to the College Board, average tuition and fees in the last decade at private schools like Harvard surged a full 2.6% per year faster than the general rate of inflation. Price hikes at public universities have been worse—rising almost 6% per year faster than the consumer price index.
Like health care and everything else that politicians decide to make "affordable," higher education has become unbearably expensive. Kudos to Mr. Brown for suggesting there may be a better way to make college affordable, perhaps by requiring professors like Ms. Warren to spend more time in the classroom.
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How to Avoid a Bonfire of the Humanities
'English majors are exactly the people I'm looking for,' one successful Silicon-Valley entrepreneur recently told me..
By MICHAEL S. MALONE
A half-century ago in his famous "Two Cultures" speech, C.P. Snow defined the growing rift between the world of scientists (including, increasingly, the commercial world) and that of literary intellectuals (including, increasingly, the humanities). It's hard to imagine the sciences and the humanities ever having been united in common cause. But that day may come again soon.
Today, the "two cultures" not only rarely speak to one another, but also increasingly, as their languages and world views diverge, are unable to do so. They seem to interact only when science churns up in its wake some new technological phenomenon—personal computing, the Internet, bioengineering—that revolutionizes society and human interaction and forces the humanities to respond with a whole new set of theories and explanations.
Not surprisingly, as science has grown to dominate modern society, the humanities have withered into increasing irrelevancy. For them to imagine that they have anything approaching the significance or influence of the sciences smacks of a kind of sad, last-ditch desperation. Science merely nods and says, "I see your Jane Austen monographs and deconstructions of 'The Tempest' and raise you stem-cell research and the iPhone"—and then pockets all of the chips on the table.
All of this may seem like a sideshow—in our digital age the humanities will limp along as science consolidates its triumph. There is, after all, a distinct trajectory to industries and disciplines that are about to be annihilated by technology. Typically, those insular worlds operate along with misplaced confidence. They expect an industry evolution; they fail to recognize that they are facing a revolution—and if they don't utterly transform themselves, right now, it will destroy them. But of course, they never do.
I watched this happen in almost every tech industry, and now it is spreading to almost every other industry and profession. Medicine, education, governance, the military and my own profession of journalism. And so I found myself earlier this year talking with the head of the English department where I teach. The department's tenured faculty had been reduced to just a handful of professors, many nearing retirement; the rest of the staff was mostly part-time adjunct lecturers. And the students? Little more than half the number of majors of just a decade earlier. I had seen this before.
I asked him: How bad is it? "It's pretty bad," he said. "And this economy is only making it worse. There are parents now who tell their kids they will only pay tuition for a business, engineering or science degree."
Aversion to risk, lack of research money, dwindling market share, a declining talent pool. That is how mature industries die; perhaps it is the same story with aging fields of thought. But hope for the humanities may be on the horizon, coming from an unlikely source: Silicon Valley.
A few months back I invited a friend to speak in front of my professional writing class. Santosh Jayaram is the quintessential Silicon Valley high-tech entrepreneur: tech-savvy, empirical, ferociously competitive, and a veteran of Google, GOOG +0.07%Twitter and a new start-up, Dabble. Afraid that he would simply run over my writing students, telling them to switch majors before it was too late, I asked him not to crush the kids' hopes any more than they already were.
Santosh said, "Are you kidding? English majors are exactly the people I'm looking for." He explained: Twenty years ago, if you wanted to start a company, you spent a month or so figuring out the product you wanted to build, then devoted the next 10 or 12 months to developing the prototype, tooling up and getting into full production.
These days, he said, everything has been turned upside down. Most products now are virtual, such as iPhone apps. You don't build them so much as construct them from chunks of existing software code—and that work can be contracted out to hungry teams of programmers anywhere in the world, who can do it in a couple of weeks.
But to get to that point, he said, you must spend a year searching for that one undeveloped niche that you can capture. And you must also use that time to find angel or venture investment, establish strategic partners, convince talented people to take the risk and join your firm, explain your product to code writers and designers, and most of all, begin to market to prospective major customers. And you have to do all of that without an actual product.
"And how do you do that?" Santosh said. "You tell stories." Stories, he said, about your product and how it will be used that are so vivid that your potential stakeholders imagine it already exists and is already part of their daily lives. Almost anything you can imagine you can now build, said Santosh, so the battleground in business has shifted from engineering, which everybody can do, to storytelling, for which many fewer people have real talent. "That's why I want to meet your English majors," he said.
Asked once what made his company special, Steve Jobs replied: "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough—it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."
Could the humanities rebuild the shattered bridge between C.P. Snow's "two cultures" and find a place at the heart of the modern world's virtual institutions? We assume that this will be a century of technology. But if the competition in tech moves to this new battlefield, the edge will go to those institutions that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first-century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.
The demand is there, but the question is whether the traditional humanities can furnish the supply. If they can't or won't, they will continue to wither away. But surely there are risk-takers out there in those English and classics departments, ready to leap on this opportunity. They'd better hurry, because the other culture won't wait.
Mr. Malone is the author of the recently published "The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory" (St. Martin's Press). This op-ed is based on his speech at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University on Oct. 18.
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She is hardly the only one. Republicans have done the same.
Paying Professor Warren
Scott Brown explains why college is less affordable. .
Article Comments (110) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».
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How refreshing to see a politician say that more money isn't always the answer for American education. In Wednesday night's Massachusetts debate, GOP Senator Scott Brown had the audacity to suggest that more taxpayer subsidies for college education may simply transfer wealth to colleges—and their faculty.
The fun began when Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard, attacked Mr. Brown for voting against the umpteenth Senate bill to expand student-loan subsidies. According to the New York Times, Mr. Brown responded that "she makes $350,000 to teach one course" and received a no-interest loan from Harvard. This, he added, is "one of the driving forces behind the high costs of education."
Rising federal subsidies have allowed colleges to raise their prices, pocketing the increased aid that is allegedly intended to help students. According to the College Board, average tuition and fees in the last decade at private schools like Harvard surged a full 2.6% per year faster than the general rate of inflation. Price hikes at public universities have been worse—rising almost 6% per year faster than the consumer price index.
Like health care and everything else that politicians decide to make "affordable," higher education has become unbearably expensive. Kudos to Mr. Brown for suggesting there may be a better way to make college affordable, perhaps by requiring professors like Ms. Warren to spend more time in the classroom.
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So? We oppose them doing it too :-D
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So? We oppose them doing it too :-D
I am SO glad to hear this. We can agree, then.
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And how do you do that?" Santosh said. "You tell stories." Stories, he said, about your product and how it will be used that are so vivid that your potential stakeholders imagine it already exists and is already part of their daily lives. Almost anything you can imagine you can now build, said Santosh, so the battleground in business has shifted from engineering, which everybody can do, to storytelling, for which many fewer people have real talent. "That's why I want to meet your English majors," he said.
Asked once what made his company special, Steve Jobs replied: "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough—it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."
Not surprising, really. And I concur, as I suspect you suspected I might.
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I should not be surprising you here BD. I am NOT Republican-though I prefer them to the Dems. I am Tea Party. God willing, our efforts to take over the Republican Party will succeed.
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The strength of the tribe comes from the shared history, beliefs, and ethics that bind the tribe together. Not technology be it sticks, stealth fighters or iPhones.
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Obama Pushing Federal Control of Public Schools
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On December 10, 2012 - www.frontpagemag.com
The effort to turn public school classrooms into laboratories for government propaganda has reached a new milestone. Common Core State Standards in English is a program already adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia. It calls for an increase in the reading of “informational text” instead of fictional literature. When the new standards are fully implemented in 2014, nonfiction texts will comprise 50 percent of reading assignments in elementary schools, with a required increase to 70 percent by grade 12. Thus, timeless literature such as Of Mice and Men, or Catcher in the Rye will be replaced by recommended nonfiction works such as “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” or “Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency.”
Proponents of Common Core, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, claim U.S. students have grown used to easy reading assignments that leave them unprepared to comprehend complex nonfiction. This leaves too many students unprepared for the rigors of college and the demands of the workplace, experts say. And while some of the recommended texts are legitimate, such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” those mentioned in the first paragraph, or a New Yorker essay titled “The Cost Conundrum,” which would give students the impression that the Affordable Healthcare Act is good policy, are little more than thinly-veiled efforts to promote a progressive agenda masquerading as education.
Jamie Highfill, an eighth-grade English teacher at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville, AK reveals some of the “unintended consequences” of the rollout. “I’m struggling with this, and my students are struggling,” said the Arkansas 2011 middle school teacher of the year. “With informational text, there isn’t that human connection that you get with literature. And the kids are shutting down. They’re getting bored. I’m seeing more behavior problems in my classroom than I’ve ever seen,” she added.
David Coleman, the chief architect of the Common Core, who led the effort to write the standards with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said educators are overreacting as the standards move from concept to classroom. “There’s a disproportionate amount of anxiety,” he contended.
There ought to be, but not just for the concerns expressed by teachers such as Ms. Highfill. As National Review’s Stanley Kurtz explains, there is a good reason why control over public schools was kept out of federal hands by the Founding Fathers. They realized that one political party or ideology shaping the curriculum in public schools was a direct route to tyranny. What the Obama administration has done has conditioned Department of Education funding and regulatory waivers on state acceptance of Common Core. That such a move is constitutionally suspect at best, and another naked power grab at worst, should infuriate Americans who still believe an education is about teaching children how to think, not what to think. (Furthermore, considering the reality that this is being sold as an alternative to “easy reading assignments,” they should ask themselves how and why the public school curriculum was dumbed-down in the first place).
Accuracy in Media’s (AIM) Mary Grabar reveals how 48 state governors were lured into entering a contest called “Race to the Top” for a portion of $4.35 billion of funds made available by the stimulus package. “It was one of the many ‘crises’ exploited by the Obama administration,” she writes. “While the public was focused on a series of radical moves coming in rapid-fire succession, like the health care bill and proposed trials and imprisonment of 9/11 terrorists on domestic soil, governors, worried about keeping school doors open, signed on.”
Far more importantly, she reveals the players involved. The educational component of Common Core is controlled by Linda Darling-Hammond, a radical left-wing educator and close colleague of William Ayers, former member of the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground, who became a professor of education — and a friend of Barack Obama’s. Both Darling-Hammond and Ayers have advocated ending funding disparities between urban and suburban schools, ending standardized testing, and attacking “white privilege.” The big picture here is to eliminate objective measurement of knowledge and skills, and replace them with teachers offering up subjective appraisals of students’ attitudes and behavior.
In a 2009 article for the Harvard Educational Review, Darling-Hammond extolled these initiatives as the Obama administration’s “opportunity to transform our nation’s schools.” Grabar reveals what such “transformation” is intended to achieve. ”When these dangerous initiatives are implemented, there will be no escaping bad schools and a radical curriculum by moving to a good suburb, or by home schooling, or by enrolling your children in private schools,” she warns.
Some state governors have wised up. Virginia opted out when Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell was elected. Georgia, Indiana, Utah, South Carolina, and others have also begun, or completed, the effort to do the same. Last February, Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley explained her rationale for doing so. “Just as we should not relinquish control of education to the Federal government,” she wrote in a letter to a state lawmaker, “neither should we cede it to the consensus of other states.” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan characterized Haley’s fear of losing control as “a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy.” Yet when Utah dumped the program, Duncan was far more conciliatory. “States have the sole right to set learning standards” he wrote in a letter.
Legally they do, but the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) application says exactly the opposite, noting that any applicant is required to adopt “a set of content standards…that are substantially identical across all States in a consortium.” In other words, any states that wish to compete for RTTT school funding must embrace Common Core. Thus, a portion of federal funding for schools is nothing less than an effort to coerce the states into adopting a de facto national educational system. In many instances, such coercion is hardly necessary: the public school system is dominated by progressive-supporting unions who contribute virtually all of their campaign dollars to Democrats. Thus, the progressive agenda is already welcomed in many public schools. The Common Core curriculum is nothing less than an effort to coordinate that agenda on a national level.
In 2009, Bill Ayers was one of three keynote speakers at a conference sponsored by the Renaissance Group. The other two speakers were Secretary of Education Duncan and U.S. Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter. The Renaissance Group is purportedly interested in finding ways to educate the “New American Student,” part of which deals with the alleged inability of white teachers to deal with the issues of poverty, diversity and multiculturalism that affect their students. While some Americans might contend that the emphasis on such obvious progressive talking points is overblown, they should still ask themselves why those in charge of overseeing the federal government’s education programs would associate with a terrorist thug whose contempt for American culture, tradition and history is well-documented.
Just before he was elected in 2008 President Obama told his followers, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” It would appear that he and his progressive minions intend to make good on that promise, state by state, school by school–and child by child.
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Combine that with this:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid949801312001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAACEco_Vk~,9bOat4XcfB_88ri1a3UMdKnLpH9aM8Fv&bclid=0&bctid=1271237687001 :-o :x :x
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A Turkish 'Trojan Horse' for Loudoun?
Center for Security Policy | Dec 10, 2012
By Frank Gaffney, Jr. - December 10, 2012.
It is a commonplace, but one that most of us ignore: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That applies in spades to a proposal under active consideration by the school board in Virginia's Loudoun County. It would use taxpayer funds to create a charter school to equip the children of thatWashington exurb with enhanced skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Ostensibly, they will thus be equipped to compete successfully in the fields expected to be at the cutting edge of tomorrow's workplace.
What makes this initiative, dubbed the Loudoun Math and IT Academy (LMITA), too good to be true? Let's start with what is acknowledged about the proposed school.
LMITA's board is made up of a group of male Turkish expatriates. One of them, Fatih Kandil, was formerly the principal of the Chesapeake Science Point (CSP) Public Charter School in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Another is Ali Bicak, the board president of the Chesapeake Lighthouse Foundation, which owns CSP and two other charter schools in Maryland. The LMITA applicants expressly claim that Chesapeake Science Point will be the model for their school.
The taxpayers of Loudoun County and the school board elected to represent them should want no part of a school that seeks to emulate Chesapeake Science Point, let alone be run by the same people responsible for that publicly funded charter school. For one thing, CSP has not proven to be the resounding academic success the applicants claim. It does not appear anywhere in the acclaimed US News and World Report lists of high-performing schools in Maryland, let alone nationwide - even in the subsets of STEM or charter schools.
What is more, according to public documents chronicling Anne Arundel Public Schools' dismal experience with CSP, there is significant evidence of chronic violations of federal, state and local policies and regulations throughout its six years of operations, with little or inconsistent improvement, reflecting deficiencies in fiscal responsibility and organizational viability.
Why, one might ask, would applicants for a new charter school cite so deeply problematic an example as their proposed institution? This brings us to aspects of this proposal that are not acknowledged.
Chesapeake Science Point is just one of five controversial schools with which Mr. Kandil has been associated: He was previously: the director at the Horizon Science Academy in Dayton, Ohio; the principal at the Wisconsin Career Academy in Milwaukee and at the Baltimore Information Technology Academy in Maryland; and one of the applicants in a failed bid to establish the First State Math and Science Academy in Delaware.
These schools have something in common besides their ties to the peripatetic Fatih Kandil. They have all been "inspired" by and in other ways are associated with Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish supremacist and imam with a cult-like following of up to six million Muslims in Turkey and elsewhere around the world. More to the point, Gulen is the reclusive and highly autocratic leader of a global media, business, "interfaith dialogue" and education empire said to be worth many billions and that is run from a compound in the Poconos.
This empire - including its roughly 135 charter schools in this country and another 1,000 abroad - and its adherents have come to be known as the Gulen Movement. But those associated with it, in this country at least, are assiduously secretive about their connections to Imam Gulen or his enterprise. For example, the LMITA applicants, their spokeswoman and other apologists have repeatedly misled the Loudoun school board, claiming that these Turkish gentlemen and their proposed school havenothing to do with Gulen.
There are several possible reasons for such professions. For one, the Gulen schools are said to be under investigation by the FBI. A growing number of them - including Chesapeake Science Point - have also come under critical scrutiny from school boards and staff around the country. In some cases, they have actually lost their charters for, among other reasons, chronic financial and other mismanagement and outsourcing U.S. teachers' jobs to Turks.
The decisive reason for the Gulenist lack of transparency,however, may be due to their movement's goals and modus operandi. These appear aligned with those of another secretive international organization that also adheres to the Islamic doctrine known as shariah and seeks to impose it worldwide: the Muslim Brotherhood. Both seek to accomplish this objective by stealth in what the Brotherhood calls "civilization jihad" and Gulen's movement describes as "jihad of the word."
This practice enabled the Gulenists to help transform Turkey from a reliable, secular Muslim NATO ally to an Islamist state deeply hostile to the United States - one aligned with other Islamic supremacists, from Iran to the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas to al Qaeda. Fethullah Gulen's followers clearly don't want us alive to the obvious dangers posed by their penetration of our educational system and influence over our kids.
The good news is that members of the Loudoun County school board have a code of conduct which reads in part: "I have a moral and civic obligation to the Nation which can remain strong and free only so long as public schools in the United States of America are kept free and strong." If the board members adhere to this duty, they will reject a seductive LMITA proposal that is way too "good" to be true.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9cbM18bTj4&feature=player_embedded
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/education/massive-open-online-courses-prove-popular-if-not-lucrative-yet.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130107&_r=0
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.
Virtual U.
This is the second article in a series that will examine free online college-level classes and how they are transforming higher education.
Related
Virtual U.: College of Future Could Be Come One, Come All (November 20, 2012)
The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.
In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.
Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.
All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.
Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.
“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet,” said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. “I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”
For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.
“Monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point,” said Scott Sandell, a Coursera financier who is a general partner at New Enterprise Associates. “What is important is that Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use. We invest with a very long mind-set, and the gestation period of the very best companies is at least 10 years.”
But with the first trickles of revenue now coming in, Coursera’s university partners expect to see some revenue sooner.
“We’ll make money when Coursera makes money,” said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera’s partners. “I don’t think it will be too long down the road. We don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.”
Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made “course in a box” or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.
Ms. Koller has plenty of other ideas, as well. She is planning to charge $20, or maybe $50, for certificates of completion. And her company, like Udacity, has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering.
This fall, Ms. Koller was excited about news she was about to announce: Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus had agreed to offer its students credit for successfully completing two Coursera courses, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, both taught by professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Antioch would be the first college to pay a licensing fee — Ms. Koller would not say how much — to offer the courses to its students at a tuition lower than any four-year public campus in the state.
“We think this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price,” she said.
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Why would colleges pay licensing fees for material available free on the Web? Because, Ms. Koller said crisply, Coursera’s terms of use require that anyone using the courses commercially get a license, and because licensing would give colleges their own course Web site, including access to grades.
Just three days before the announcement, Ms. Koller discovered that the deal would have a very modest start. For the pilot, Antioch planned to have just one student and a faculty “facilitator” in each course. She expressed surprise but took the news in stride, moving right on to greet a delegation from the University of Melbourne that was waiting for her in the conference room.
Coursera recently announced another route to help students earn credit for its courses — and produce revenue. The company has arranged for the American Council on Education, the umbrella group of higher education, to have subject experts assess whether several courses are worthy of transfer credits. If the experts say they are, students who successfully complete those courses could take an identity-verified proctored exam, pay a fee and get an ACE Credit transcript, a certification that 2,000 universities already accept for credit.
Under Coursera’s contracts, the company gets most of the revenue; the universities keep 6 percent to 15 percent of the revenue, and 20 percent of gross profits. The contracts describe several monetizing possibilities, including charging for extras like manual grading or tutoring. (How or if partner universities will share revenue with professors who develop online courses remains an open question on many campuses, with some professors saying the task is analogous to writing a textbook and should yield similar remuneration.)
One tiny revenue stream has begun flowing into the nondescript Silicon Valley office building where Coursera’s 35 employees work to keep up with the demand for their courses: the company is an Amazon affiliate, getting a sliver of the money each time Coursera students click through the site to buy recommended textbooks or any other products on Amazon.
“It’s just a couple thousand, but it’s our first revenue,” Ms. Koller said. “When faculty recommend a textbook and people buy it on Amazon, we get some money. The funny thing is that we’re getting more than twice as much money from things like Texas Rangers jackets as from what the textbooks are bringing in.”
Other possibilities around the edges include charging a subscription fee, after a class is over, to continue the discussion forum as a Web community, or perhaps offering follow-up courses, again for a fee. And advertising sponsorships remain a possibility.
Like the Antioch deal, some early attempts have gotten off to a slow start. For example, the University of Washington has already offered credit for a fee in a few Coursera courses. But while thousands of students enrolled in the free version, only a handful chose the paid credit-carrying option. David P. Szatmary, the vice provost, said part of the problem was that the credit option was posted only shortly before the course started, when most students had already enrolled free.
“We’re going to try it again,” he said. “We think that if students know about the possibility of doing it for credit, they might be willing to pay a fee and get their own discussion board, an instructor who guides them through the course and some additional readings and projects.”
Some Coursera partners say they are in no hurry to cash in.
“Part of what Coursera’s gotten right is that it makes more sense to build your user base first and then figure out later how to monetize it, than to worry too much at the beginning about how to monetize it,” said Edward Rock, a law professor serving as the University of Pennsylvania’s senior adviser on open course initiatives.
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Page 3 of 3)
The Coursera co-founders have become oracles of higher education, spreading their gospel of massive open online courses at the World Economic Forum in Abu Dhabi, the Web Summit in Dublin and the Aspen Ideas Festival. They describe how free online courses can open access to higher education to anyone with an Internet connection; liberate professors from repeating the same tired lectures and jokes semester after semester; and generate data, because the computers capture every answer right or wrong, that can provide new understanding of how students learn best.
“We think this model will spread,” said Daphne Koller, a computer professor at Stanford and a co-founder of Coursera.
Many educators predict that the bulk of MOOC revenues will come from licensing remedial courses and “gateway” introductory courses in subjects like economics or statistics, two categories of classes that enroll hundreds of thousands of students a year. Even though less than 10 percent of MOOC students finish the courses they sign up for on their own, many experts believe that combining MOOC materials with support from a faculty member or a teaching assistant could increase completion rates.
The University of Pennsylvania has high hopes for the mass marketing of Robert Ghrist’s single-variable calculus course, which starts this month and features his hand-drawn animations.
“What Rob has done is figure out how to make PowerPoint dance,” Mr. Rock said. “I think it’ll revolutionize the teaching of calculus both by allowing kids to take it on Coursera and by making the normal textbooks obsolete. It could become a way that more high schools that want to offer BC Calc can do so, and junior colleges that don’t have good quality calculus instruction can license it and use it in a blended format, with the teacher now not giving frontal lectures but answering questions and exploring concepts in great detail.”
Mr. Rock, whose university has produced 16 Coursera courses, said each one costs about $50,000 to create, the biggest expenses being the videography and paying the teaching assistants who monitor the discussion forum. The University of Pennsylvania is just beginning to think about how to recover those costs. Last fall, at the conclusion of its Listening to World Music course, for example, the university sent out a questionnaire asking students whether they would be interested in a follow-up course, what they would want to cover and how much they would be willing to pay for it.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a Penn bioethicist who served as health adviser to the Obama administration, is teaching two Coursera courses: one on the Obama health care law, the other on rationing scarce medical resources.
He said he was not trying to produce a course that can be offered over and over, with no additional costs, but simply hoping to spread understanding of important health issues. And rather than reuse his materials from last summer’s course on the new law, Dr. Emanuel overhauled the course, using not one but two videographers to film his live classes at Penn.
But Dr. Emanuel is not immune to the commercial possibilities: he is considering whether to develop a MOOC that could be marketed to those seeking health care ethics certification.
Even Ms. Koller is unsure about the future of MOOCs — and her company.
“A year ago, I could not have imagined that we would be where we are now,” she said. “Who knows where we’ll be in five more years?”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/opinion/sunday/bruni-how-to-choose-a-college.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
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By MICHAEL CORKERY
The demand for four-year college degrees is softening, the result of a perfect storm of economic and demographic forces that is sapping pricing power at a growing number of U.S. colleges and universities, according to a new survey by Moody's Investors Service.
Students at the University of Washington in Seattle. Gov. Chris Gregoire wants the Legislature to give college parents a break during the next two years by freezing tuition, but officials at Washington's universities say that won't help them solve their budget problems.
Facing stagnant family income, shaky job prospects for graduates and a smaller pool of high-school graduates, more schools are reining in tuition increases and giving out larger scholarships to attract students, Moody's concluded in a report set to be released Thursday.
But the strategy is eating into net tuition revenue, which is the revenue that colleges collect from tuition minus scholarships and other aid. College officials said they need to increase net tuition revenue to keep up with rising expenses that include faculty benefits and salaries. But one-third of the 292 schools that responded to Moody's survey anticipate that net revenue will climb in the current fiscal year by less than inflation.
For the fiscal year, which for most schools ends this June, 18% of 165 private universities and 15% of 127 public universities project a decline in net tuition revenue. That is a sharp rise from the estimated declines among 10% of the 152 private schools and 4% of the 105 public schools in fiscal 2012.
The financial pressures signal that many schools are starting to capitulate to complaints that college has become unaffordable to many American families, observers say. At least two dozen private colleges froze tuition this fall, roughly double the previous year's total.
"It's pretty clear that pricing power of colleges has reached an inflection point," said John Nelson, a managing director at Moody's who oversaw the survey team.
For colleges, the declines in net revenue could portend cuts to academic programs and a search for alternative sources of revenue such as more online courses and recruiting wealthy students from overseas who can pay full tuition.
Many smaller private schools that depend heavily on tuition revenue are under particular pressure. But even some public universities that have had success raising tuition recently told Moody's that it will be increasingly hard to keep doing so. Highly selective and highly rated colleges still experience "healthy student demand,'' according to Moody's, and many have large endowments that can help pay for scholarships and boost revenue.
Wittenberg University, a roughly 1,730-student school in Springfield, Ohio, froze tuition at $37,230 for the 2013-14 academic year in an effort to make the private college more affordable. The school is also reviewing academic departments to make sure it is offering programs that have the greatest demand from students.
"If colleges do not adapt to shifting demographics and the weak economy making families more price sensitive, there will be fewer institutions," Wittenberg President Laurie Joyner said in an interview.
Public School, Big Tab
The cost of attending public colleges is rising faster than the cost of private colleges, as states reduce funding. This graphic shows the published tuition and fees for state residents in 2012-13, and in 2006-07, for 72 public universities with substantial research activity, including many state "flagship" schools.
Nearly half of the schools surveyed by Moody's reported enrollment declines this fall, though overall median enrollment remained relatively flat from the previous year. A stagnant high-school graduate population, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, is contributing to the declines at some schools.
Moody's also attributed the enrollment decline at some public universities to a "heightened scrutiny of the value of higher education" after years of tuition increases and stagnating family income. The credit-rating firm said in its report that more students are "increasingly attending more affordable community colleges, studying part time, or electing to enter the workforce without the benefit of a college education."
Private universities and colleges with lower credit ratings, as well as smaller public universities, reported the most enrollment pressure, according to Moody's.
"We have a more informed class of college consumers," said Bonnie Snyder, founder of Kerrigan College Planning in Lancaster, Pa. "Everyone today knows someone who went to college and ended up with a career that didn't justify the cost. They see college as a more risky investment."
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Jane Shaw: Higher Learning, Meet Lower Job Prospects
Outrage greets a governor who dared to suggest that college degrees should lead to employment..
By JANE S. SHAW
When North Carolina's new governor, Pat McCrory, was interviewed last week on the syndicated radio show hosted by former U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett, the talk naturally turned to education. According to some listeners—or those who heard about the interview in the media echo chamber—Gov. McCrory committed a major error.
No, he actually just stated an uncomfortable truth. Gov. McCrory, a former mayor of Charlotte, said he is concerned that many college graduates can't get decent jobs. The problem, he suggested, might be that many academic disciplines have no real practical applications.
Referring specifically to North Carolina's 16-campus state university system, Mr. McCrory wondered if state funding incentives should encourage areas of study that align with the job market. Other disciplines, such as gender studies, Mr. McCrory said, might be subsidized less. The funding formula, he said perhaps a bit indelicately, should not be based on the number of "butts in seats, but how many of those butts can get jobs."
The education establishment immediately went bonkers. The pundits piled on. But Mr. McCrory raised a legitimate concern. And the solution he proposed, sketchy as it is at this stage, is not a bad one.
The truth is: Elite universities, such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are doing a disservice when they lead students into majors with few, if any, job prospects. Stating such truths doesn't mean you're antagonistic to the liberal arts.
Yet some, always eager for a fight, misconstrued the governor's comments as a call for abolishing liberal-arts education in favor of vocational training. UNC-Chapel Hill geography professor Altha Cravey said the governor "was not elected to decide what has intellectual value and what does not." Sociology professor Andrew Perrin said that the governor's comments reflected "a fundamental misunderstanding" of higher education.
Instead of treating Mr. McCrory's statements as an attack on liberal arts—and thus missing his point—the education community might instead pause to consider the validity of his criticism. They could even acknowledge the possibility that many taxpayers, perhaps a majority, share his views.
The governor may have understated the case. Many liberal-arts graduates, even from the best schools, aren't getting jobs in large part because they didn't learn much in school. They can't write or speak well or intelligently analyze what they read.
The National Association of Educational Progress indicates that literary proficiency among adults with "some" college is declining. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, authors of the 2011 book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," found that 36% of college students made no discernible progress in the ability to think and analyze critically after four years in school.
For many students, college is a smorgasbord of easy courses chosen for their lack of academic rigor. There is no serious "core curriculum." Students spend limited time studying. Faculty and administrators make matters worse by allowing students to fill up their time with courses like UNC-Chapel Hill's "Dogs and People: From Prehistory to the Urbanized Future" and "Music in Motion: American Popular Music and Dance." When students can get a minor in "Social and Economic Justice" without ever taking a course in the economics department, it's hardly surprising that businesses aren't lining up to hire them.
As it happens, North Carolina's Pat McCrory is not alone. Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who recently took over the helm of Purdue University, has suggested much the same. In an open letter to the Purdue community, Mr. Daniels cited a long list of challenges facing universities, including complaints that "rigor has weakened."
To meet such challenges, he said, those in higher education can't afford to look the other way. "We would fail our duty of stewardship either to ignore the danger signs all around us, or to indulge in denial and the hubris that says that we are somehow uniquely superb and immune."
U.S. colleges and universities aren't "uniquely superb," nor should they be immune from criticism. This is the time for humility and introspection, not circling the wagons.
Ms. Shaw is president of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C.
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http://eagnews.org/texas-6th-graders-design-flags-for-a-new-socialist-nation/
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https://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=517&load=8006
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Push to Gauge Bang for Buck from College Gains Steam .
Article Video Comments (186) more in US | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».
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By RUTH SIMON And MICHAEL CORKERY
U.S. and state officials are intensifying efforts to hold colleges accountable for what happens after graduation, a sign of frustration with sky-high tuition costs and student-loan debt.
Sens. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) are expected to reintroduce this week legislation that would require states to make more accessible the average salaries of colleges' graduates. The figures could help prospective students compare salaries by college and major to assess the best return on their investment.
Bryce Harrison, who graduated last May from Goucher College, a private school in Baltimore, said wage data could have helped him pick his major.
A similar bipartisan bill died last year, but a renewed push has gained political momentum in recent weeks. "This begins to introduce some market forces into the academic arena that have not been there," said Mr. Wyden, adding that support for the move is unusually broad given the political divide in Washington. Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), the House majority leader, said he intends to support a similar measure in the House.
High-school seniors now trying to decide which college to attend next fall are awash with information about costs, from dorm rooms to meal plans. But there is almost no easy way to tell what graduates at specific schools earn—or how many found jobs in their chosen field. Supporters say more transparency is needed as students graduate deeper in debt and enter the rocky job market.
The Wyden-Rubio bill doesn't spell out exactly how this information has to be assembled. The goal is that students and parents could use the U.S. Department of Education website to query data from all 50 states. But the bill relies on states to knit together wage data submitted by employers with information on graduates submitted by colleges.
Virginia, which recently began publishing wages by colleges and program on its own, linked these two data sets using Social Security numbers. It didn't publish the Social Security numbers.
Mr. Harrison hoped his political-science degree would land him a job with the government, but has had no luck.
Some colleges are resisting the broader push, saying it would be a burden for states to compile the information, and that it would tell students little they don't know already.
"You don't need a database to tell you that people who major in fine arts won't earn a lot of money when they graduate," said Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, a trade group that hasn't taken a position on the bill by Messrs. Wyden and Rubio. Some officials worry that salary is too narrow a measure of the value of a liberal-arts education.
Privacy advocates have concerns with compiling so much data. One potential issue, they say, is that the data could be sliced so thinly that it would reveal information about individuals. "It's the risk of re-identification in small samples," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.
Still, Bryce Harrison, who graduated last May from Goucher College, a private school in Baltimore, said wage data could have helped him pick his major. Mr. Harrison, 23 years old, hoped his political-science degree would land him a job with the government.
He has had no luck. With about $100,000 in student loans to repay, Mr. Harrison spent the summer working for his father, power-washing houses. But business slows in the winter, so he is now unemployed and is considering joining the National Guard.
"Was college worth getting in the amount of debt I'm in?" he asks. "At this point, I can't answer that."
Providing more information about outcomes will be a priority during President Barack Obama's second term, a Department of Education spokeswoman said. Last spring, the Obama administration began developing a "College Scorecard" that would add salary information for graduates and average debt load to existing data on costs, graduation rates and loan repayment rates. The Department of Education declined to detail how it might do this.
About 10 U.S. states already publish or are expected to start releasing this year data showing how salaries of recent graduates vary by school and program. The states include California, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
States typically match salary information from employers with separate data provided to states by colleges. The college lists typically include the course of study for recent graduates, the year of graduation and degree earned. The information is linked using Social Security numbers, though personal data isn't included in the final reports.
The state data have shortcomings. Paychecks for the same job can vary widely by location. Salary data don't reflect self-employed graduates or those who work for the U.S. government or move to another state.
Last year, Virginia lawmakers began requiring the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia to produce annual reports on the wages of college graduates 18 months and five years after they receive their degrees. Beginning this year, the reports must also include average student loan debt.
While it is still early, some students are already using the information in making decisions about where to go for graduate school, says Tod Massa, director of policy research and data warehousing for the State Council.
Among graduates who live in Virginia, the highest starting wages for a bachelor's degree were $56,400 for graduates of Jefferson College of Health Sciences, a Roanoke school that largely turns out nursing graduates.
That was 42% higher than the University of Virginia's average of $39,648. Overall, students with associate's degrees in technical fields, such as health care, earned more than recipients of bachelor's degrees. A spokesman for the University of Virginia declined to comment.
"It's much easier to plan when you have this information," said Jerusalem Solomon, a senior at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
At first, Ms. Solomon followed her parents' advice to pursue a major in the medical field because they assumed it had the best job prospects. Then she switched to public relations because she believes she can still earn a good salary doing a job she loves.
The California Community College Chancellor's Office soon will publish data showing median pay for graduates of more than 100 community colleges two years before they earn their degrees and two and five years after they graduate.
Florida officials will start publicizing later this year data showing, by school and major, the percentage of students who graduate and find jobs, their starting salaries and average debt loads. Florida community colleges already have begun posting data on their websites.
College Measures, a research group in Rockville, Md., that works with states to turn data they already have into information that can be used by the public, has prepared reports for Virginia and Tennessee. The group's president, Mark Schneider, expects to release data for Colorado this month and Texas soon afterward.
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Another article by Matthew Vadum exposing the truth about Harvard Law School and
other Ivy-League Law Schools:
Return to the Article
March 5, 2013We Have Ted Cruz's List: Harvard Law Really Is Littered with
CommunistsBy Matthew Vadum
It turns out Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was correct when he claimed Harvard Law School
had significant numbers of what might reasonably be called "communists."
Anyone who knows the Ivy League knows the question shouldn't be, Who at Harvard is
Marxist? but Who at Harvard isn't Marxist?
Cruz, a U.S. senator for almost two months now, made the offending statement in a
speech almost three years ago. He described Barack Obama as "the most radical"
president "ever to occupy the Oval Office."
Obama "would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School" because "there
were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than communists!"
said Cruz. "There was one Republican. But there were 12 who would say they were
Marxists who believed in the communists' overthrowing the United States government."
Dan McLaughlin, a law school classmate of Cruz, confirms that the senator "is
absolutely right on the basic point here: there were multiples more Marxists on the
Harvard Law faculty at the time than open Republicans."
Does any of this mean that Cruz believes actual dues-paying, card-carrying members
of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) dominate the Harvard Law faculty? No, but he
knows that Harvard, like so many institutions of higher learning across America, is
infected with Marxist fellow travelers who are ideologically sympathetic to
communism. To distinguish such people from actual CPUSA members, they are often
referred to as small-c communists or neo-communists.
Like most Americans, Cruz wasn't using the plural form of the word communist with
the precision of a political theory scholar. He was referring to people who believe
that markets are fundamentally unjust and that physical force should be used to
create a classless society. They believe in extreme, forced equality and boring
sameness at the expense of freedom and individual rights.
A Cruz spokeswoman later explained that her employer's "substantive point was
absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included
numerous self-described proponents of 'critical legal studies' -- a school of
thought explicitly derived from Marxism -- and they far outnumbered Republicans."
Greg Sargent, the Washington Post's in-house ideological purity enforcer, pounced on
Cruz, calling the clarification the "latest blast of unhinged nonsense from Cruz's
office."
Sargent is wrong.
Critical legal theory takes the neo-Marxist perspective that the law is concerned
with power, not justice. Because the law is a fraud perpetrated on the people, an
oppressive tool of capitalism, imperialism, sexism, racism, and whatever other ism
it is currently fashionable to attack, the legal system should be criticized
endlessly as a means of tearing it down. If you're a communist it's natural to
embrace critical legal theory as a way of changing American society.Judge Alex
Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals eloquently describes critical legal
studies (CLS) as "horse manure."
As I understand this so-called theory, the notion is that because legal rules don't
mean much anyway, and judges can reach any result they wish by invoking the right
incantation, they should engraft their own political philosophy onto the
decision-making process and use their power to change the way our society works.
Imagine the chaos that would ensue if "Crits" dominated the judiciary. There would
be no fixed rules. The only certain criterion for decisions would be so-called
social justice, whatever that might mean on a particular day. As the judicial
branch became an instrument of naked redistribution, Karl Marx would look up from
his fiery torments and cheer as America degenerated into kleptocracy.
There are more than a few Harvard Law academics associated with critical legal
studies.Harvard has been ground zero for the CLS movement for decades, a fact Time
acknowledged in 2005. The magazine identified Harvard law professors Roberto
Mangabeira Unger, Morton Horwitz, and Duncan M. Kennedy as "three of the best-known"
CLS adherents. (Kennedy is also a member of the far-left Democratic Socialists of
America and the radical, pro-terrorist National Lawyers Guild. Bernardine Dohrn,
incidentally, used to be an organizer for the NLG.)Other Crits on the Harvard
faculty are Mark Tushnet and David W. Kennedy. In a 1981 law review article titled
"The Dilemmas of Liberal Constitutionalism," Tushnet wrote that if he were a judge
he "would decide what decision in a case was most likely to advance the cause of
socialism."
Crits Northeastern University law professor Clare Dalton and University of Wisconsin
law professor emeritus David Trubek taught at Harvard Law but failed to earn tenure.
CLS-friendly law professors with ties to Harvard are easy to find. Yale's Jack
Balkin and Georgetown's Gary Peller and Louis Michael Seidman (author of the
infamous column "Let's Give Up On the Constitution") all received their law degrees
from Harvard. So did academic Peter Gabel (who is also associate editor at leftist
magazine Tikkun).
Stanford professor Robert W. Gordon, who has a Harvard law degree, organized a
campaign at Harvard Law in support of Dalton and Trubek when they were trying to get
tenure. Gordon whined at the time that Harvard had engaged in "red-baiting" the two
academics.
CLS enthusiast Mark G. Kelman, a highly cited law professor and vice dean of
Stanford Law School, also earned his law degree from Harvard.
And don't forget that while Barack Obama was a law student at Harvard, he studied
under CLS guru Unger. Moreover, Derrick Bell, Obama's racist, Marxist mentor at
Harvard Law, was a proponent of critical race theory, the multiculturalist Left's
race-obsessed spinoff of critical legal theory.
Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has
described critical race theorists as the "lunatic core" of "radical legal
egalitarianism."At the heart of this ugly, destructive, balkanizing worldview is the
idea that the white-dominated American system is hopelessly racist. To remedy this
imbalance, the views of non-whites on the system should be given greater weight.
As one commentator has written, this perspective appears to be shared by Supreme
Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia "Wise Latina" Sotomayor, along with Attorney
General Eric Holder who is reluctant to investigate civil rights complaints when the
victim is white.Harvard is not the only university infected by CLS-loving
communists.
Virtually all major colleges and universities across the fruited plain are dominated
by small-c communists. Far-left insurrectionists such as Northwestern University
School of Law professor Bernardine Dohrn, a leader of the Weather Underground
terrorist group, are not outliers. In the groves of academe today communists are
mainstream or close to it.
It's been this way for decades.
Communists, who reject the core values of American society and want radical change,
don't like being labeled and compelled to defend their subversive beliefs in public.
When they are identified as communists, they marginalize adversaries by calling
them crazy or by letting the media do their dirty work for them.
Communism may have faded as a threat to U.S. national security, but its lingering
influence on the culture is powerful enough that, to quote Ann Coulter in Treason,
accusing someone of being a communist "makes you the nut."
Naturally, Cruz, who earned his J.D. magna cum laude at Harvard Law School in 1995,
has been vilified by left-wingers and mocked by the antique media for speaking truth
to power. He is portrayed as a liar, a bully, and a lunatic.
The senator has been attacked by leftist Obama-worshipers such as MSNBCers Chris
Matthews and Rachel Maddow, The Daily Beast'sMichael Tomasky, and an ever-expanding
echo chamber of radical journalists and useful idiots.
Jane Mayer, a reporter on the New Yorker's anti-conservative beat, started the ovine
stampede recently by reporting Cruz's otherwise unremarkable comments about
communists on campus. Like her comrades, Mayer smeared Cruz after he tried to hold
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to account at his recent confirmation hearing by
comparing the Texan to Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Red-hunting Wisconsin Republican from
the 1950s. Hagel scoffed at congressional demands for details about who has been
paying his speaking fees and Cruz responded by speculating about the sources.
That's what happens when cabinet nominees thumb their noses at Congress. Things get
ugly.
For pressing Hagel, Cruz was accused by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) of conducting
an ideologically motivated witch hunt. Boxer said she was reminded of "a different
time and place, when you said, 'I have here in my pocket a speech you made on
such-and-such a date,' and of course there was nothing in the pocket."
Of course, the late Sen. McCarthy had nothing to do with much of what has come to be
known as McCarthyism. And he was correct about the presence of real, live,
pro-Soviet Communist agents in the U.S. government, as M. Stanton Evans proved in
his exhaustively researched book,Blacklisted By History.
In his pursuit of Communist spies, McCarthy was a great deal more accurate than
Cruz's critics are about the freshman senator.
Vadum is senior editor at Capital Research Center
and author of Obama/ACORN expose Subversion Inc. and Government Unions.
from:http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/03/we_have_ted_cruzs_list_harvard_law_really_islittered_with_communists.html
at March 05, 2013 - 04:54:16 PM CST
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Florida Atlantic University: Another Left-Wing Seminary
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Question: What is the difference between Christian seminaries and American universities?
Answer: Christian seminaries announce that their purpose is to produce committed Christians. American universities do not admit that their primary purpose is to produce committed leftists. They claim that their purpose is to open students' minds.
This month Florida Atlantic University provided yet another example of how universities have become left-wing seminaries.
An FAU professor told his students to write "JESUS" (in bold caps) on a piece of paper and then step on it.
One student who did not, a junior named Ryan Rotela, complained to the professor and then to the professor's supervisor. He explained that he had refused to do so because it violated his religious principles.
Two days later, Rotela was told not to attend the class anymore. The university then went on to defend the professor in an email to a local CBS TV station: "Faculty and students at academic institutions pursue knowledge and engage in open discourse. While at times the topics discussed may be sensitive, a university environment is a venue for such dialogue and debate."
FAU further pointed out that the stomping exercise -- to "discuss the importance of symbols in culture" -- came from a textbook titled "Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach."
After the story became national news, FAU issued an apology: "We sincerely apologize for any offense this has caused. Florida Atlantic University respects all religions and welcomes people of all faiths, backgrounds and beliefs."
Of course, this "apology" was meaningless. Apologizing for "giving offense" has nothing to do with condemning the act. Not to mention that kicking Rotela out of the class belied the university's claim of open discourse.
This story is significant because it provides yet another example of the deteriorated state of American higher education. There are some excellent professors in the so-called "social sciences" at American universities. But they are in the minority. The left has taken over American universities as well as most high schools, and like almost everything the left has influenced -- education, religion, the arts and the economies of most countries -- this influence has been destructive.
The argument that the professor represents no one but himself is refuted by the fact that the university defended the professor until it feared the national outcry that resulted.
Moreover, in another nationally reported incident, Northwestern University acted similarly in 2011. One of its professors invited his 600 students to stay after class to watch a live demonstration of female ejaculation, the subject of that day's class. A naked young woman (not a student) then used a motorized sex toy to come to orgasm. About 120 of the students watched.
When word got out, Northwestern defended the professor: "Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines. The university supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge."
Like FAU, only after national condemnation increased did Northwestern "apologize."
Entire books have been written providing hundreds of examples of left-wing indoctrination having replaced education in American universities. FAU is just the latest example.
It is also instructive that the name to be stepped on was JESUS, not, for instance, MUHAMMAD, ALLAH or, for that matter, BILL CLINTON or MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Imagine the reaction at FAU if a professor had told students to step on the name MUHAMMAD. The professor would be condemned at huge rallies organized by the university to protest "Islamophobia." And he would fear for his life. Desecrate Christianity and you get tenure. Desecrate Islam and you get bodyguards.
Or, imagine if the name had been MARTIN LUTHER KING. FAU professors would have competed with one another in expressing outrage at this example of the racism that pervades the university and America. The president of the university would have issued a statement condemning the professor and distancing FAU from his action.
And is there one reader of this column who is surprised to learn that the FAU professor, Deandre Poole, is vice-chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party? Or that the party defended him?
This is why I founded Prager University (www.prageru.org): to undo in five-minute courses the intellectual and moral damage that universities do over four years. And unlike FAU and Northwestern, PragerU is free.
The universities' damage is huge and enduring. And you don't have to believe in JESUS to recognize it.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/02/want-to-see-what-cscope-and-common-core-even-homeschooling-lessons-look-like-these-parents-opened-up-to-theblaze/
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/education/crucible-of-change-in-memphis-as-state-takes-on-failing-schools.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130403&_r=0
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/education/restorative-justice-programs-take-root-in-schools.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130404
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Click 'Listen' at the link for a brief Colorado Public Radio interview. A bold experiment, what if kids get exposed to this stuff? http://www.cpr.org/#load_article|University_Appoints_First_Professor_of_Conservative_Thought
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130407
A specter is haunting university history departments: the specter of capitalism.
After decades of “history from below,” focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy.
Even before the financial crisis, courses in “the history of capitalism” — as the new discipline bills itself — began proliferating on campuses, along with dissertations on once deeply unsexy topics like insurance, banking and regulation. The events of 2008 and their long aftermath have given urgency to the scholarly realization that it really is the economy, stupid.
The financial meltdown also created a serious market opportunity. Columbia University Press recently introduced a new “Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism” book series (“This is not your father’s business history,” the proposal promised), and other top university presses have been snapping up dissertations on 19th-century insurance and early-20th-century stock speculation, with trade publishers and op-ed editors following close behind.
The dominant question in American politics today, scholars say, is the relationship between democracy and the capitalist economy. “And to understand capitalism,” said Jonathan Levy, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of “Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America,” “you’ve got to understand capitalists.”
That doesn’t mean just looking in the executive suite and ledger books, scholars are quick to emphasize. The new work marries hardheaded economic analysis with the insights of social and cultural history, integrating the bosses’-eye view with that of the office drones — and consumers — who power the system.
“I like to call it ‘history from below, all the way to the top,’ ” said Louis Hyman, an assistant professor of labor relations, law and history at Cornell and the author of “Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink.”
The new history of capitalism is less a movement than what proponents call a “cohort”: a loosely linked group of scholars who came of age after the end of the cold war cleared some ideological ground, inspired by work that came before but unbeholden to the questions — like, why didn’t socialism take root in America? — that animated previous generations of labor historians.
Instead of searching for working-class radicalism, they looked at office clerks and entrepreneurs.
“Earlier, a lot of these topics would’ve been greeted with a yawn,” said Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States.” “But then the crisis hit, and people started asking, ‘Oh my God, what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?’ ”
In 1996, when the Harvard historian Sven Beckert proposed an undergraduate seminar called the History of American Capitalism — the first of its kind, he believes — colleagues were skeptical. “They thought no one would be interested,” he said.
But the seminar drew nearly 100 applicants for 15 spots and grew into one of the biggest lecture courses at Harvard, which in 2008 created a full-fledged Program on the Study of U.S. Capitalism. That initiative led to similar ones on other campuses, as courses and programs at Princeton, Brown, Georgia, the New School, the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere also began drawing crowds — sometimes with the help of canny brand management.
After Seth Rockman, an associate professor of history at Brown, changed the name of his course from Capitalism, Slavery and the Economy of Early America to simply Capitalism, students concentrating in economics and international relations started showing up alongside the student labor activists and development studies people.
“It’s become a space where you can bring together segments of the university that are not always in conversation,” Dr. Rockman said. (Next fall the course will become Brown’s introductory American history survey.)
While most scholars in the field reject the purely oppositional stance of earlier Marxist history, they also take a distinctly critical view of neoclassical economics, with its tidy mathematical models and crisp axioms about rational actors.
Markets and financial institutions “were created by people making particular choices at particular historical moments,” said Julia Ott, an assistant professor in the history of capitalism at the New School (the first person, several scholars said, to be hired under such a title).
To dramatize that point, Dr. Ott has students in her course Whose Street? Wall Street! dress up in 19th-century costume and re-enact a primal scene in financial history: the early days of the Chicago Board of Trade.
Some of her colleagues take a similarly playful approach. To promote a two-week history of capitalism “boot camp” to be inaugurated this summer at Cornell, Dr. Hyman (a former consultant at McKinsey & Company) designed “history of capitalism” T-shirts.
The camp, he explained, is aimed at getting relatively innumerate historians up to speed on the kinds of financial data and documents found in business archives. Understanding capitalism, Dr. Hyman said, requires “both Foucault and regressions.”
It also, scholars insist, requires keeping race and gender in the picture.
As examples, they point to books like Nathan Connolly’s “World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida,” coming next year, and Bethany Moreton’s “To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise” (Harvard, 2009), winner of multiple prizes, which examines the role of evangelical Christian values in mobilizing the company’s largely female work force.
The history of capitalism has also benefited from a surge of new, economically minded scholarship on slavery, with scholars increasingly arguing that Northern factories and Southern plantations were not opposing economic systems, as the old narrative has it, but deeply entwined.
And that entwining, some argue, involved people far beyond the plantations and factories themselves, thanks to financial shenanigans that resonate in our own time.
In a paper called “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans and Securitized Human Beings: The Panic of 1837 and the Fate of Slavery,” Edward Baptist, a historian at Cornell, looked at the way small investors across America and Europe snapped up exotic financial instruments based on slave holdings, much as people over the past decade went wild for mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations — with a similarly disastrous outcome.
Other scholars track companies and commodities across national borders. Dr. Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton,” to be published by Alfred A. Knopf, traces the rise of global capitalism over the past 350 years through one crop. Nan Enstad’s book in progress, “The Jim Crow Cigarette: Following Tobacco Road From North Carolina to China and Back,” examines how Southern tobacco workers, and Southern racial ideology, helped build the Chinese cigarette industry in the early 20th century.
Whether scrutiny of the history of capitalism represents a genuine paradigm shift or a case of scholarly tulip mania, one thing is clear.
“The worse things are for the economy,” Dr. Beckert said wryly, “the better they are for the discipline.”
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Other than the passage of time, one can find no real distinction between the cowardly actions of last Monday’s Boston murderer and the terror carried out by [Columbia Prof.] Boudin and her accomplices.
...
Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village...Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails.
...
The Web site of Columbia’s School of Social Work sums up Boudin’s past thus: “Dr. Kathy Boudin has been an educator and counselor with experience in program development since 1964, working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.”
“Since 1964” — that would include the bombing of [the author's] house, it would include the anti-personnel devices intended for Fort Dix and it would include the dead policeman on the side of the Thruway in 1981.
...
Maybe, if he is caught, Monday’s bomber can explain that, like Boudin, he was merely working within the community to solve social problems.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/tale_of_two_terrorists_3WtcmY2p7PwFkbO1NheqNL
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http://www.cnbc.com/id/100642178
From the article:
What do American businesses want from their college hires? According to a new survey, creative thinkers and better communicators—both of which are said to be in short supply.
The survey of CEOs by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 74 percent said they would recommend a 21st-century liberal education in order to create a more dynamic worker. The survey of 320 business leaders was conducted in January. Results were released last week.
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Colleges Cut Prices by Providing More Financial Aid
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By RUTH SIMON
Private U.S. colleges, worried they could be pricing themselves out of the market after years of relentless tuition increases, are offering record financial assistance to keep classrooms full.
The average "tuition discount rate"—the reduction off list price afforded by grants and scholarships given by these schools—hit an all-time high of 45% last fall for incoming freshmen, according to a survey being released Monday by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
"It's a buyer's market" for all but the most select private colleges and flagship public universities, said Jim Scannell, president of Scannell & Kurz, a consulting firm in Pittsford, N.Y., that works with colleges on pricing and financial-aid strategies.
It is likely that some private colleges will be forced to be even more generous with discounts this fall. As of the May 1 deadline for many high-school seniors to commit for their freshman year of college, early reports suggest some non-top-tier schools fell 10% to 20% short of enrollment targets, said Mr. Scannell.
The jump in aid shows that many colleges are losing pricing power as more families focus on cost and value, with about 65% increasing their discount rate in the fall of 2012. Except for the most exclusive schools, private colleges increasingly are vulnerable to the stagnant wages of many families, deepening student debt, the uncertain job market, growing questions about the value of costly four-year degrees and unfavorable demographics.
About one of every eight U.S. undergraduates is enrolled at a private nonprofit college. Such schools provided 70% of all grant aid to undergraduate students in 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, Nacubo says.
The average discount rate at private colleges has climbed for seven years in a row, and the latest increase was smaller than the jump in 2011, said Natalie Pullaro Davis, the study's author. But colleges also are having a tougher time boosting their sticker prices. That makes it harder for colleges to generate enough new revenue to offset the impact of higher aid and their own rising costs.
Because of economic factors and political pressure on colleges to hold the line on tuition, "we have hit a tipping point on price," said John Nelson, managing director at Moody's Investors Service MCO +3.51% . Last year, the median sticker price at about 280 private colleges and universities tracked by the debt-rating firm rose 3.9%, the smallest increase in at least 12 years.
Tuition increases for the 2013-14 year at these schools are likely to be about the same or slightly smaller, Mr. Nelson said.
Meantime, at four-year public colleges and universities, tuition and fees for in-state students rose 4.8% in the 2012-13 academic year, the smallest increase since 2000-01, according to the College Board. Tuition at these schools for out-of-state students rose 4.2%.
The discount rate for public universities fell modestly in 2012, said Mr. Nelson of Moody's, after rising from 2007 to 2011.
Last fall, enrollment fell at 46% of the 383 private colleges in the new Nacubo survey as the pool of high-school seniors declined. John Walda, the group's president, said the financial squeeze from fewer students is forcing such colleges to find ways to boost revenue, control costs and seek a way to stand out from the crowd. Some of those that can't eventually will shrink, merge or fold, he predicted.
Bill Hall, president of Applied Policy Research Inc., said about 10 of the 20 undergraduate colleges he advises on pricing and aid strategies still are scrambling to fill seats for this fall's freshman class. Officials at some schools are asking accepted applicants who haven't said yes or no if "there are financial issues within reason where we can make an adjustment," he said.
Some private colleges are seeing just 20% of the students they accepted actually enrolling, down from about one-third of accepted students five years ago, Mr. Scannell said.
The economic downturn boosted the number of families who qualify for aid. In addition, even those earning too much to demonstrate need under aid formulas "expect to see some sort of merit aid," unless the school is highly selective, said Trey Chappell, a college adviser in Scottsdale, Ariz.
John Ames said the College of Saint Benedict increased his daughter's scholarship to $17,800 from $14,000—and added a $2,800 work award—after he told the St. Joseph, Minn., school about student-athlete awards she had won and a better offer she received from another college. The school's tuition and fees are $37,926 this fall.
"The end result indicates that I had more power than I thought I did," he said, adding that he appreciated the college's "willingness to meet us in the middle."
Saint Benedict's executive director of financial aid, Stuart Perry, said he couldn't discuss individual students. In general, the roughly 2,000-student college makes "a very small number of revisions to academic-based scholarships," typically in response to new information, and revises need-based awards due to changes in a family's financial situation.
Discounting can help private colleges compete against public institutions. Maureen Anderson, who lives in Detroit Lakes, Minn., said a $55,740 scholarship, which covers tuition, fees and certain other expenses, sealed her daughter's decision to attend New York University instead of her other top choice, the University of California, Berkeley, which made her a less-generous offer. NYU's tuition and fees are about $44,800 for the 2013-14 year.
"Money talks," said Ms. Anderson, host of a syndicated radio program. "Many people look to private colleges because they have those pools of money to draw from."
A Berkeley spokeswoman said 40% of undergraduates pay no tuition because of grants and scholarships, while 65% get at least some financial aid.
Some colleges are trying to raise their appeal by experimenting with new pricing. Sewanee, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., cut tuition 10% to $41,500 in the 2011-12 academic year. While it raised it for freshmen arriving this fall to $45,900, it guaranteed that rate for four years.
As part of the new pricing strategy, Sewanee no longer negotiates merit-based scholarships. "Our first offer is our final and best offer," said John McCardell, Sewanee's vice chancellor. "We have deliberately removed ourselves from the bidding wars."
Sewanee's tuition revenue rose $1.5 million to $33.5 million in the current academic year, after a decline of about $920,000 in the first year of the tuition cut.
One reason: Last fall's entering class of 453 students was 13% larger than two years earlier. The applicant pool rose by nearly 500 to roughly 3,400 last year, allowing the school to take more students while being more selective, said Mr. McCardell, who believes publicity surrounding the new pricing played a roll.
Meantime, Sewanee's current tuition discount of 42% is down from 45% before the price cut.
Write to Ruth Simon at ruth.simon@wsj.com
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second post of the morning
http://salary.com/8-college-degrees-with-the-worst-return-on-investment/
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"Colleges Cut Prices by Providing More Financial Aid "
It is a strange system, almost modeled after the airlines where every customer pays a different price. My daughter is in her first year at college. I almost never discuss with other parents what she is paying, receiving, or was offered at other places because everyone seems to have their own arrangement. Like the airlines, I suppose someone is willing to pay full price so they keep that number really high.
The easiest to compare academic measure for colleges I found is the 25th and 75th percentile ACT score. The goal for the college is not to take a kid who is above the minimum, but to enroll the kids who move the college's percentiles upward. People need to know in advance that colleges pay cash for ACT scores. (SAT too I'm sure.) We thought the tests were only for admittance. My advice even for students who do will great anyway on these tests is prepare all you can and take the test more than once. If you bump your score up just slightly, it doesn't just change where you are admitted, it changes the price.
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Gov't reaps windfall profits on student loans
When President Obama pushed his student loan legislation he said it would stop greedy banks from getting handouts, but in reality it led to the government takeover of student loans. Since Obama has taken office, student loan debt has risen 250% and the administration projects windfall profits of $51 billion dollars, or nearly the same amount the major banks earn combined.
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/05/20/huge-cscope-is-out-of-texas/?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2013-05-20_221812&utm_content=5054942&utm_term=_221812_221820
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http://www.freeenterprise.com/education-workforce/building-21st-century-workforce
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=o1ivyhCHpGw
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It is my expectation that the name of one of our own will find its way onto this list.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/02/introducing-the-power-line-100.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/07/the-power-line-100-alan-jacobs.php
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Rebekah Bell: It's Possible to Graduate Debt-Free. Here's How
Scout out scholarships, take courses online, use your skills to make money and get a summer job.
By REBEKAH BELL
In 2009, when I was applying to my dream college, my parents had one stipulation: graduate without debt. I burst out laughing.
There was no feasible way that a middle-class 19-year-old with average grades could attend a college with a price tag of nearly $40,000 a year without taking out loans. But now that I've graduated loan-free, I realize how lucky I am that my parents made this seemingly ridiculous demand.
Figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reveal that 37 million Americans have student loan debt. About two-thirds of students receiving bachelor's degrees borrow to fund their education, with the average student debt at an all-time high of $26,000. Total student-loan debt is estimated to be $1 trillion.
Only 38% of borrowers are making payments on their loans. The rest are either still in school, postponing payments or not paying them back. Almost one in 10 students who started repayment in 2009 defaulted within two years. At least 40% of student borrowers put off a major purchase such as a car or home because they couldn't afford it, and many are delaying marriage and families.
The lesson here is that students should do everything within their power to avoid this kind of debt. Although attending school without loans is difficult, it is not impossible. Here's what I learned about avoiding the debt trap:
• Think creatively. I attended a college close to home during my freshman year because it offered a scholarship. I also took classes online to save money. Some of my friends completed dual-enrollment classes during high school, got college credits from the College-Level Examination Program in subjects where they were already proficient, or attended a less expensive community college before moving to a four-year school. Others attended trade or vocational schools instead of college. The aim should always be: Reduce the number of credits you're paying for at the premium rate.
• Look hard for scholarships. I received an academic scholarship and need-based aid through my university. I also received several community and church scholarships and a matching grant through my father's workplace. Searching for scholarships and aid is tiring but can definitely pay off.
• Use your skills. Figure out a way to use your college interests to earn extra money—and to beef up your résumé and gain real-world experience. I competed on my university's speech team and worked as a videographer for the college newspaper in exchange for several thousand dollars' worth of scholarship money. Some of my friends received athletic or theater scholarships. A friend who was an English major worked in the on-campus tutoring center.
• Generate income. There are creative ways to make money. For me, it meant raising and selling cattle (one of the perks of being raised as a 4-H kid on a farm). One friend became a wedding photographer, earning cash and working only on weekends. My older sister taught piano lessons. A tech-savvy friend did Web design. These were all jobs that brought in money without interfering with classes.
• Make the most of summers. I worked full-time but also spent time interning for film companies. Some of my friends found paid internships during the summer, worked at camps, or took classes at community college for a fraction of the cost. One friend who did this was able to graduate a semester early, thereby saving several thousand dollars on tuition.
• Live frugally. I had a 10-meal per week plan and bought groceries for the rest of my meals. I also lived in a less expensive dorm and had two roommates instead of one, which saved money on room and board. Figure out simple ways to save money. Even if it's only $20 or $30 a month, it adds up over a year.
More than one financial-aid counselor told me it would be impossible to graduate debt-free. It often seemed like the naysayers were right. But persistence helped me pull it off. And even if I had fallen short, I still would have had to borrow much less than the average student. I may not have had as much free time as some classmates, but I enjoyed a rich and fulfilling college experience while also graduating debt-free. Graduating without debt means that now I can apply for jobs that I really want—instead of feeling like I have to grab the first one that will help me start paying off a student loan. Today, I'm indebted only to my parents for being so unreasonable.
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http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
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Benno Schmidt: Mitch Daniels's Gift to Academic Freedom
His skepticism about the merits of a sacrosanct liberal history textbook has sparked an overdue debate.
By BENNO SCHMIDT
Most Americans would agree that academic freedom is a sacred right of the academy and crucial to the American experiment in democracy. But what is it really?
That's the question raised by the Associated Press's July 16 release of emails between Mitch Daniels, when he was the governor of Indiana, and his staff concerning Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." The emails were written in 2010 and Mr. Daniels, whose second term as governor ended this January, is now president of Purdue University in Indiana.
Published in 1980, Zinn's "A People's History" (the author died in 2010 at age 87) has been a staple of Advanced Placement courses at the high-school level and omnipresent in college syllabi for decades. Praised by some for focusing on American history from the ground up, the book has been condemned by others as emblematic of the biased, left-leaning, tendentious and inaccurate drivel that too often passes as definitive in American higher education.
Mr. Daniels falls squarely among the critics. Zinn's history, the then-governor wrote in February 2010, "is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page." Then Mr. Daniels asked: "Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?"
Did Mr. Daniels—the future university president—violate academic freedom with his outburst? A July 22 open letter signed by 90 Purdue professors suggested as much, saying the teachers were "troubled" by his actions, in particular by his continuing to criticize Zinn's book after taking over at the university. Demanding retaliatory funding cuts or preventing college faculty from teaching or publishing certain ideas would have amounted to such a violation. It appears Mr. Daniels, either as governor or as Purdue president, did none of these. In his emails, he aired his unhappiness with Zinn's account of American history, but there is currently no evidence that anything was done by him or his staff to act upon his heated remarks.
Moreover, in a written response to the Purdue professors' letter, he explained that as governor he was only concerned about the teaching of Zinn's book in Indiana's K-12 schools, and that he is "passionately dedicated to the freest realm of inquiry possible at Purdue."
But what about his criticism? Do politicians or outside groups violate academic freedom when they criticize academics? Again, the answer is no.
Inquiries of this sort about teaching materials are not unusual in the life of a university president. Presidents take such inquiries seriously and follow up to make sure that the curriculum and materials are of the highest quality. Public scrutiny helps institutions fulfill their mission. It rightly keeps institutions on their toes.
Academic freedom is faculty's freedom to teach. But, more important, it is also students' freedom to learn. It is, as University of Wisconsin Prof. Donald Downs writes in the American Council of Trustees and Alumni guidebook, "Free to Teach, Free to Learn": "the right to pursue the truth in scholarship and teaching, and to enjoy authority regarding such academic matters as the nature of the curriculum, [and] faculty governance." At the same time, it is "maintaining respect for the truth (which means avoiding bias in its various forms), exercising professional and fair judgment, and maintaining professional competence."
In other words: Academic freedom is a right and a responsibility. In recent times, the academy has too often been focused on rights and privileges rather than responsibility and accountability.
Mr. Daniels surely won't be the last politician hoping to do something in the face of frequent imbalance and bias in the academy. And it won't be the last time that faculty and others raise rightful concerns about inappropriate interference. That is why the recent email revelation offers not only Purdue, but the academic community at large, a long-overdue opportunity to undertake a robust self-examination of what academic freedom is—and isn't.
Politicians can't dictate course syllabi or reading lists in higher education. But nor should faculty be allowed to engage in indoctrination and professional irresponsibility without being held to account. And yet, over the past 50 years, that is essentially what has happened. The greatest threat to academic freedom today is not from outside the academy, but from within. Political correctness and "speech codes" that stifle debate are common on America's campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.
If academics want to continue to enjoy the great privilege of academic freedom, they cannot forget the obligations that underline the grant of that privilege. The American Association of University Professors itself recognized those obligations in its seminal statement, the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom, which is today nearly forgotten: "If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims . . . from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others."
It's time that college and university trustees, presidents and faculty made a concerted effort to ensure and engender a culture of academic freedom—and responsibility. If integrity is not maintained from within, the public will attempt to impose it from without. Mr. Daniels's emails have sparked a needed debate on this defining value.
Mr. Schmidt, chairman of the City University of New York Board of Trustees, is a former president of Yale University and a contributor to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni guidebook, "Free to Teach, Free to Learn."
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http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1337.msg57724#msg57724 :wink:
Education: College degree or equivalent: MIT OCW
« Reply #128 on: December 13, 2011, 10:00:34 AM »
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/
2000 courses online, free. No tuition, no admissions screening, no degrees. Just courses, syllabuses, tests, lecture notes, etc. from one of the greatest technical institutions in the world on an amazing array of topics.
Google: 'MIT OCW' (Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Open Course Ware)
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/tony-bennett-resigns_n_3688690.html
From the article:
Less than eight months after starting his job, Florida's education commissioner Tony Bennett resigned on Thursday, amid a growing scandal over policy changes he made while serving as schools superintendent in Indiana.
"I asked Governor Scott to accept my resignation, and he did," Bennett said during a press conference.
Bennett's plans to resign were first reported by the Tampa Bay Times. He has faced increasing pressure to step down since the Associated Press published emails on Monday showing that he quietly changed Indiana's school grading formula. The emails show that the formula change happened when Christel House Academy, a charter school backed by influential Republican donors, received a low grade under the original formula.
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http://www.youngresearch.com/researchandanalysis/economy-researchandanalysis/after-disrupting-publishing-internet-sets-its-sights-on-education/?awt_l=PWy8k&awt_m=3Vt1FBZ2Pizlu1V
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The $4 Million Teacher
South Korea's students rank among the best in the world, and its top teachers can make a fortune. Can the U.S. learn from this academic superpower?
By AMANDA RIPLEY
Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country's private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand.
[image] SeongJoon Cho for The Wall Street Journal
Kim Ki-Hoon, who teaches in a private after-school academy, earns most of his money from students who watch his lectures online. 'The harder I work, the moreImake,' he says. 'I like that.'
Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students' online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).
"The harder I work, the more I make," he says matter of factly. "I like that."
I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like—one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world's other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.
Tutoring services are growing all over the globe, from Ireland to Hong Kong and even in suburban strip malls in California and New Jersey. Sometimes called shadow education systems, they mirror the mainstream system, offering after-hours classes in every subject—for a fee. But nowhere have they achieved the market penetration and sophistication of hagwons in South Korea, where private tutors now outnumber schoolteachers.
Viewed up close, this shadow system is both exciting and troubling. It promotes striving and innovation among students and teachers alike, and it has helped South Korea become an academic superpower. But it also creates a bidding war for education, delivering the best services to the richest families, to say nothing of its psychological toll on students. Under this system, students essentially go to school twice—once during the day and then again at night at the tutoring academies. It is a relentless grind.
The bulk of Mr. Kim's earnings come from the 150,000 kids who watch his lectures online each year. (Most are high-school students looking to boost their scores on South Korea's version of the SAT.) He is a brand name, with all the overhead that such prominence in the market entails. He employs 30 people to help him manage his teaching empire and runs a publishing company to produce his books.
To call this mere tutoring is to understate its scale and sophistication. Megastudy, the online hagwon that Mr. Kim works for, is listed on the South Korean stock exchange. (A Megastudy official confirmed Mr. Kim's annual earnings.) Nearly three of every four South Korean kids participate in the private market. In 2012, their parents spent more than $17 billion on these services. That is more than the $15 billion spent by Americans on videogames that year, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. The South Korean education market is so profitable that it attracts investments from firms like Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group and A.I.G.
It was thrilling to meet Mr. Kim—a teacher who earns the kind of money that professional athletes make in the U.S. An American with his ambition and abilities might have to become a banker or a lawyer, but in South Korea, he had become a teacher, and he was rich anyway.
The idea is seductive: Teaching well is hard, so why not make it lucrative? Even if American schools will never make teachers millionaires, there are lessons to be learned from this booming educational bazaar, lessons about how to motivate teachers, how to captivate parents and students and how to adapt to a changing world.
To find rock-star teachers like Mr. Kim, hagwon directors scour the Internet, reading parents' reviews and watching teachers' lectures. Competing hagwons routinely try to poach one another's celebrity tutors. "The really good teachers are hard to retain—and hard to manage. You need to protect their egos," says Lee Chae-yun, who owns a chain of five hagwons in Seoul called Myungin Academy.
The most radical difference between traditional schools and hagwons is that students sign up for specific teachers, so the most respected teachers get the most students. Mr. Kim has about 120 live, in-person students per lecture, but a typical teacher's hagwon classes are much smaller. The Korean private market has reduced education to the one in-school variable that matters most: the teacher.
It is about as close to a pure meritocracy as it can be, and just as ruthless. In hagwons, teachers are free agents. They don't need to be certified. They don't have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay is based on their performance, and most of them work long hours and earn less than public school teachers.
Performance evaluations are typically based on how many students sign up for their classes, their students' test-score growth and satisfaction surveys given to students and parents. "How passionate is the teacher?" asks one hagwon's student survey—the results of which determine 60% of the instructor's evaluation. "How well-prepared is the teacher?" (In 2010, researchers funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found classroom-level surveys like this to be surprisingly reliable and predictive of effective teaching in the U.S., yet the vast majority of our schools still don't use them.)
"Students are the customers," Ms. Lee says. To recruit students, hagwons advertise their results aggressively. They post their graduates' test scores and university acceptance figures online and outside their entrances on giant posters. It was startling to see such openness; in the U.S., despite our fetish for standardized testing, the results remain confusing and hard to interpret for parents.
Once students enroll, the hagwon embeds itself in families' lives. Parents get text messages when their children arrive at the academies each afternoon; then they get another message relaying students' progress. Two to three times a month, teachers call home with feedback. Every few months, the head of the hagwon telephones, too. In South Korea, if parents aren't engaged, that is considered a failure of the educators, not the family.
If tutors get low survey marks or attract too few students, they generally get placed on probation. Each year, Ms. Lee fires about 10% of her instructors. (By comparison, U.S. schools dismiss about 2% of public school teachers annually for poor performance.)
All of this pressure creates real incentives for teachers, at least according to the kids. In a 2010 survey of 6,600 students at 116 high schools conducted by the Korean Educational Development Institute, Korean teenagers gave their hagwon teachers higher scores across the board than their regular schoolteachers: Hagwon teachers were better prepared, more devoted to teaching and more respectful of students' opinions, the teenagers said. Interestingly, the hagwon teachers rated best of all when it came to treating all students fairly, regardless of the students' academic performance.
Private tutors are also more likely to experiment with new technology and nontraditional forms of teaching. In a 2009 book on the subject, University of Hong Kong professor Mark Bray urged officials to pay attention to the strengths of the shadow markets, in addition to the perils. "Policy makers and planners should…ask why parents are willing to invest considerable sums of money to supplement the schooling received from the mainstream," he writes. "At least in some cultures, the private tutors are more adventurous and client-oriented."
But are students actually learning more in hagwons? That is a surprisingly hard question to answer. World-wide, the research is mixed, suggesting that the quality of after-school lessons matters more than the quantity. And price is at least loosely related to quality, which is precisely the problem. The most affluent kids can afford one-on-one tutoring with the most popular instructors, while others attend inferior hagwons with huge class sizes and less reliable instruction—or after-hours sessions offered free by their public schools. Eight out of 10 South Korean parents say they feel financial pressure from hagwon tuition costs. Still, most keep paying the fees, convinced that the more they pay, the more their children will learn.
For decades, the South Korean government has been trying to tame the country's private-education market. Politicians have imposed curfews and all manner of regulations on hagwons, even going so far as to ban them altogether during the 1980s, when the country was under military rule. Each time the hagwons have come back stronger.
"The only solution is to improve public education," says Mr. Kim, the millionaire teacher, echoing what the country's education minister and dozens of other Korean educators told me. If parents trusted the system, the theory goes, they wouldn't resort to paying high fees for extra tutoring.
To create such trust, Mr. Kim suggests paying public-school teachers significantly more money according to their performance—as hagwons do. Then the profession could attract the most skilled, accomplished candidates, and parents would know that the best teachers were the ones in their children's schools—not in the strip mall down the street.
Schools can also build trust by aggressively communicating with parents and students, the way businesses already do to great effect in the U.S. They could routinely survey students about their teachers—in ways designed to help teachers improve and not simply to demoralize them. Principals could make their results far more transparent, as hagwons do, and demand more rigorous work from students and parents at home in exchange. And teacher-training programs could become far more selective and serious, as they are in every high-performing education system in the world—injecting trust and prestige into the profession before a teacher even enters the classroom.
No country has all the answers. But in an information-driven global economy, a few truths are becoming universal: Children need to know how to think critically in math, reading and science; they must be driven; and they must learn how to adapt, since they will be doing it all their lives. These demands require that schools change, too—or the free market may do it for them.
—Ms. Ripley is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, "The Smartest Kids in the World—and How They Got That Way," to be published Aug. 13 by Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2013 by Amanda Ripley
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=1407571966135569
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324009304579040822709807800.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
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http://www.techyville.com/2012/11/news/mit-educated-engineer-builds-a-business-by-teaching-math-to-kids/
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http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/fisking-slate-over-public-schools/
Fisking Slate over Public Schools
Posted on August 30, 2013 by correia45
I took a break from working on Monster Hunter Nemesis to check Facebook, and of course I found a link to something so astoundingly dumb that it demanded an immediate fisking. It is such a jaw dropping level of stupid that my first thought was that it was a brilliant piece of satire by a free market libertarian who really hates collective do gooders, but the article is from Slate, and I don’t think anybody over there is clever enough to pull off something like that.
The article itself is your typical white guilt liberal pontificating on topics they don’t quite grasp and lecturing everyone about how to live in a manner that best assuages their white liberal guilt. This article is dumb, even by Slate standards, and that is saying something, but there is some value to be taken from it as it is an excellent look into the thought process of ass kissing statists. If it was satire by somebody who has run into all of these same arguments before (I’ve seen all of these points pop up in various school choice arguments, only I’ve never seen them bundled so completely) then high five. Good work. If this author actually believes this tripe, then I’m amazed she figured out how to turn on her computer to type it.
READ it all!
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Obama is calling for law school to be two years not three. What do any of our legal contributors think?
I really have no knowledge in this area and no opinion.
Some are calling for radical overhaul of medical education too. For example get rid of much of the basic sciences. Some procedures could be done by non doctors etc.
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We already have too many lawyers. Why make it any easier?
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Well his point is it would be cheaper.
Save students money.
Your point well taken.
Can you imagine a nation of millions more lawyers?
Has anyone studied the fact that most politicians are lawyers and the connection with ever expanding legislations and government?
I suspect there is a huge connection or correlation.
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Actually, law school is now one of the worst possible investments one can make. People are getting their JD's with 100,000 student debts and no jobs in the field. It's brutal.
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We already have too many lawyers. Why make it any easier?
If it is an Obama proposal, it is probably aimed at the wrong outcome for the wrong reasons. I have no standing to know how long law school should be. It seems to me that if shortened, then more good lawyers will need an additional law degree in their specialty to be qualified, like tax law lawyers have right now.
To answer your question, if people with law degrees are more plentiful, competition increases and the cost of hiring one should go down. If most lawyers can't find work in law anyway, more will have to enter other professions (entrepreneur, corporate management, etc.) with a better understanding of law.
Everyone proficient in my business, residential rental property, has lawyer level knowledge of housing law, learned the hard way. Everyone who is an expert in my previous occupation, exporting, had a lawyer level knowledge of export law, more knowledge than a lawyer not working in export law. Same for securities etc.
It sounds to me like Obama wants to create an additional level, (Masters vs Juris Doctor)? In Medicine they seem to be transferring Doctor responsibilities to LPNs, Physician Assistants, etc. Maybe CCP has a view of how that is going. In law, there are tasks like advising and preparing routine legal documents that require less training than litigating constitutional issues, for example.
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I admit to being a bit glib in my answer, in a perhaps vain search for wittiness :lol:
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I admit to being a bit glib in my answer, in a perhaps vain search for wittiness :lol:
No, there are too many already, in the sense of pulling against rather than for the productive process. Too many of our great minds go into compliance of overly burdensome regulations rather than becoming inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs. The smartest guy by far in our school district growing up, with a Yale law degree, made a career at a public utility in employee benefit compliance. God Bless him for making a choice that worked for him, to work normal hours and be with his kids growing up, but this economy needs as many as possible of our best and brightest to go into some of those things mentioned above, finding the next abundant clean energy source, curing cancer, etc.
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As Education Declines, So Does Civic Culture
A generation of college graduates unable to write or reason bodes ill for liberal democracy.
By
JONATHAN JACOBS
Even as the cost of higher education skyrockets, its benefits are increasingly being called into doubt. We're familiar with laments from graduates who emerge from college burdened with student loans and wondering if their studies have prepared them for jobs and careers. A less familiar but even more troubling problem is that their education did not prepare them for responsible civic life. The decline in education means a decline in the ability of individuals—and ultimately the nation as a whole—to address political, social and moral matters in effective, considered ways.
The trouble begins before college. Large numbers of high-school students have faced so few challenges and demands that they are badly underprepared for college courses. Many who go on to four-year colleges seem to need two years of college even to begin to understand what it is to study, read carefully and take oneself seriously as a student. For many students, high-school-level preparation for college is a matter of having high self-esteem and high expectations but little else.
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Even after three or four years of undergraduate education, many students still cannot recognize reasoning when they encounter it. They have little grasp of the difference between merely "saying something" and constructing an explanation or formulating an argument. This is often reinforced by college instructors who urge students to regard all theories, intellectual perspectives and views as ideology—without acknowledging the differences between theories, beliefs, hypotheses, interpretations and other categories of thought.
This impedes students from acquiring habits of intellectual responsibility. Far too often, teachers and texts insist upon a "verdictive" approach, a politicized view of issues. Whatever your stance regarding the "culture wars" and the politics of higher education, it is undeniable that a great many graduating students have little idea of what genuine intellectual exploration involves. Too often, learning to think is replaced by ideological scorekeeping, and the use of adjectives replaces the use of arguments.
Such blinkered thinking has serious implications for civic culture and political discourse. It discourages finding out what the facts are, revising one's beliefs on the basis of those facts and being willing to engage with people who don't already agree with you. What does that leave us with? A brittle, litmus-test version of politics. It is one thing if people move too quickly from argumentation to name-calling; it is another to be unable to tell the difference.
There has been so much grade inflation in high school and college, so much pressure to move students along regardless of their academic accomplishment, that it is unsurprising to find large numbers of graduates lacking the skills required for available jobs. They may also lack the patience and discipline to learn those skills: If you haven't been required to meet demands in order to receive good grades, then patience and discipline are less likely to be among your habits. For graduates who do find work, the reality of employers' expectations may come as a shock.
Many employers can attest, as college instructors will too if they're being frank, that many college graduates can barely construct a coherent paragraph and many have precious little knowledge of the world—the natural world, the social world, the historical world, or the cultural world. That is a tragedy for the graduates, but also for society: Civic life suffers when people have severely limited knowledge of the world to bring to political or moral discussions.
To see the effect of these trends, simply ask a few 15-year-olds, 19-year-olds or 22-year-olds some basic, non-tricky questions from non-esoteric knowledge categories (history, biology, current events, literature, geography, mathematics, grammar). See what the responses are. Ask these young people to describe the basic institutions of American government, or how a case makes its way to the Supreme Court or what "habeas corpus" means. The point isn't to embarrass them, but to wake up the rest of us to how little students have been expected to know even about the political and legal order in which they live.
The primary concern shouldn't be how American students rank in international science and math scores (though that is certainly relevant). It is whether the United States can be a prosperous, pluralistic democracy if higher education fails to require students to think, inquire and explain. A liberal democracy requires a certain kind of civic culture, one in which citizens understand its distinctive principles and strive to preserve them by addressing issues and one another in a responsible manner. That is essential to the mutual respect at the core of liberal democracy.
The U.S. faces serious challenges; education should be serious and challenging. The cost to America of failing to reverse the trend toward trivializing education will be more than just economic. It will be reflected in social friction, coarsened politics, failed and foolish policies, and a steady decline in the concern to do anything to reverse the rot.
Mr. Jacobs is director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics and chairman of the Department of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
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http://www.girardatlarge.com/2013/10/stop-experimenting-on-my-kids-common-core/
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The Shanghai Secret
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 22, 2013 216 Comments
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SHANGHAI — Whenever I visit China, I am struck by the sharply divergent predictions of its future one hears. Lately, a number of global investors have been “shorting” China, betting that someday soon its powerful economic engine will sputter, as the real estate boom here turns to a bust. Frankly, if I were shorting China today, it would not be because of the real estate bubble, but because of the pollution bubble that is increasingly enveloping some of its biggest cities. Optimists take another view: that, buckle in, China is just getting started, and that what we’re now about to see is the payoff from China’s 30 years of investment in infrastructure and education. I’m not a gambler, so I’ll just watch this from the sidelines. But if you’re looking for evidence as to why the optimistic bet isn’t totally crazy, you might want to visit a Shanghai elementary school.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
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I’ve traveled here with Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, and the leaders of the Teach for All programs modeled on Teach for America that are operating in 32 countries. We’re visiting some of the highest- and lowest-performing schools in China to try to uncover The Secret — how is it that Shanghai’s public secondary schools topped the world charts in the 2009 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exams that measure the ability of 15-year-olds in 65 countries to apply what they’ve learned in math, science and reading.
After visiting Shanghai’s Qiangwei Primary School, with 754 students — grades one through five — and 59 teachers, I think I found The Secret:
There is no secret.
When you sit in on a class here and meet with the principal and teachers, what you find is a relentless focus on all the basics that we know make for high-performing schools but that are difficult to pull off consistently across an entire school system. These are: a deep commitment to teacher training, peer-to-peer learning and constant professional development, a deep involvement of parents in their children’s learning, an insistence by the school’s leadership on the highest standards and a culture that prizes education and respects teachers.
Shanghai’s secret is simply its ability to execute more of these fundamentals in more of its schools more of the time. Take teacher development. Shen Jun, Qiangwei’s principal, who has overseen its transformation in a decade from a low-performing to a high-performing school — even though 40 percent of her students are children of poorly educated migrant workers — says her teachers spend about 70 percent of each week teaching and 30 percent developing teaching skills and lesson planning. That is far higher than in a typical American school.
Teng Jiao, 26, an English teacher here, said school begins at 8:35 a.m. and runs to 4:30 p.m., during which he typically teaches three 35-minute lessons. I sat in on one third-grade English class. The English lesson was meticulously planned, with no time wasted. The rest of his day, he said, is spent on lesson planning, training online or with his team, having other teachers watch his class and tell him how to improve and observing the classrooms of master teachers.
“You see so many teaching techniques that you can apply to your own classroom,” he remarks. Education experts will tell you that of all the things that go into improving a school, nothing — not class size, not technology, not length of the school day — pays off more than giving teachers the time for peer review and constructive feedback, exposure to the best teaching and time to deepen their knowledge of what they’re teaching.
Teng said his job also includes “parent training.” Parents come to the school three to five times a semester to develop computer skills so they can better help their kids with homework and follow lessons online. Christina Bao, 29, who also teaches English, said she tries to chat either by phone or online with the parents of each student two or three times a week to keep them abreast of their child’s progress. “I will talk to them about what the students are doing at school.” She then alluded matter-of-factly to a big cultural difference here, “I tell them not to beat them if they are not doing well.”
In 2003, Shanghai had a very “average” school system, said Andreas Schleicher, who runs the PISA exams. “A decade later, it’s leading the world and has dramatically decreased variability between schools.” He, too, attributes this to the fact that, while in America a majority of a teacher’s time in school is spent teaching, in China’s best schools, a big chunk is spent learning from peers and personal development. As a result, he said, in places like Shanghai, “the system is good at attracting average people and getting enormous productivity out of them,” while also, “getting the best teachers in front of the most difficult classrooms.”
China still has many mediocre schools that need fixing. But the good news is that in just doing the things that American and Chinese educators know work — but doing them systematically and relentlessly — Shanghai has in a decade lifted some of its schools to the global heights in reading, science and math skills. Oh, and Shen Jun, the principal, wanted me to know: “This is just the start.”
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SAGE FROM SOUTH CENTRAL
Where do public school teachers send own kids?
Larry Elder looks at data on choices made by elite who oppose vouchers for parents
Published: 10/16/2013 at 7:51 PM
Larry Elder is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host. His latest book is "Dear Father, Dear Son: Two Lives … Eight Hours." To find out more about Larry Elder, or become an "Elderado," visit www.LarryElder.com.
Guy walks into a restaurant. Says to the waitress, “I’d like some scrambled eggs and some kind words.” She brings the eggs. The guy smiles, “Now how about the kind words?” Waitress whispers, “Don’t eat the eggs.”
This brings us to the fact that urban public school teachers are about two times more likely than non-teachers to send their own children to private schools. In other words, many public school teachers whisper to parents, “Don’t eat the eggs.”
About 11 percent of all parents – nationwide, rural and urban – send their children to private schools. The numbers are much higher in urban areas. One study found that in Philadelphia a staggering 44 percent of public school teachers send their own kids to private schools. In Cincinnati and Chicago, 41 and 39 percent of public school teachers, respectively, pay for a private school education for their children. In Rochester, N.Y., it’s 38 percent. In Baltimore it’s 35 percent, San Francisco is 34 percent, and New York-Northeastern New Jersey is 33 percent. In Los Angeles nearly 25 percent of public school teachers send their kids to private school versus 16 percent of all Angelenos who do so.
The study, conducted in 2004 by the Fordham Institute, said: “These findings … are apt to be embarrassing for teacher unions, considering those organizations’ political animus toward assisting families to select among schools. But these results do not surprise most practicing teachers to whom we speak. … The data have shown the same basic pattern since we first happened upon them two decades ago: Urban public school teachers are more apt to send their own children to private schools than is the general public. One might say this shows how conservative teachers are. They continue doing what they’ve always done. Or it might indicate that they have long been discerning connoisseurs of education. …
“The middle class will tolerate a lot – disorder, decay and dismay, an unwholesome environment, petty crime, potholes, chicanery and rudeness. One thing, however, that middle-class parents will not tolerate is bad schools for their children. To escape them, they will pay out-of-pocket or vote with their feet. That is what discerning teachers do.”
What about members of Congress? Where do they send their own children?
A 2007 Heritage Foundation study found that 37 percent of representatives and 45 percent of senators with school-age children sent their own kids to private school. Of the members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with school-age children, 38 percent sent them to private school. Of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus with school-age children, 52 percent sent them to private school.
The ex-mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, was asked why he did not have his own kids in public school despite his strong advocacy of public education. Villaraigosa, whose wife was a public school teacher, said, “I’m doing like every parent does. I’m going to put my kids in the best school I can. My kids were in a neighborhood public school until just this year. We’ve decided to put them in a Catholic school. We’ve done that because we want our kids to have the best education they can. If I can get that education in a public school, I’ll do it, but I won’t sacrifice (emphasis added) my children any more than I could ask you to do the same.”
When he got elected president, Barack Obama and his wife made a big display of looking into D.C. public schools for his two daughters to attend. But the Obamas chose Sidwell Friends, the elite private school whose alums include Chelsea Clinton. Obama’s own mother sent the then-10-year-old to live with her parents – so he could attend Punahou Academy, the most exclusive prep school on the island. In fact, from Punahou to Occidental (a private college in Los Angeles) to Columbia (where he completed college) to Harvard Law, Obama is a product of private education.
So how does this square with Obama’s opposition to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that offered a voucher for the children of participating parents? It doesn’t.
Here’s what Obama’s Office of Management and Budget said about the program: “Rigorous evaluation over several years demonstrates that the D.C. program has not yielded improved student achievement by its scholarship recipients compared to other students in D.C.”
Tell that to the educator/consultant the Department of Education hired to evaluate the program. Testifying before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Patrick Wolf, a University of Arkansas education policy professor who spent more than 10 years evaluating school choice programs in D.C., Milwaukee, New York and Dayton, Ohio, said, “In my opinion, by … boosting high school graduation rates and generating a wealth of evidence suggesting that students also benefited in reading achievement, the D.C. OSP has accomplished what few educational interventions can claim: It markedly improved important education outcomes for low-income inner-city students.”
President Barack Obama calls education “the civil rights issue of our time.” Yet, his opposition to K-12 education vouchers guarantees that many of America’s kids will sit in back of the bus.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/10/where-do-public-school-teachers-send-own-kids/#rgEUdgdZ6XhhGu7T.99
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http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/School-apology-Think-like-a-Nazi-task-vs-Jews-4428669.php#photo-4366034
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http://www.nytimes.com/pages/education/edlife/index.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131104
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https://apps.carleton.edu/career/visualize/
Click on any major on the left and any career on the right and see the the 'pathways'.
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If You Want a Conservative Child
Posted By Dennis Prager On November 18, 2013 @ frontpagemag.com
In my last column, I proposed some explanations for why many conservative parents have left-wing children.
In a nutshell, American parents who hold traditional American values — such as belief in small government as the basis of liberty, in a God-based moral code, that American military strength is the greatest contributor to world peace and stability, or in American exceptionalism, not to mention in the man-woman definition of marriage or in the worth of a human fetus — are at war with almost every influence on their children’s lives. This includes, most importantly, the media and the schools.
Here, then are some suggestions for raising a child with American, i.e., conservative, values.
First, parents who are not left-wing need to understand that if they do not articulate their values on a regular basis, there is a good chance that after one year, let alone four, at college, their child will adopt left-wing views and values. Do not think for a moment that values are automatically transmitted. One hundred years ago they may have been — because the outside world overwhelmingly reaffirmed parents’ traditional values — but no longer.
You have to explain to your children — repeatedly — what America and you stand for. (That, if I may note, is why I wrote “Still the Best Hope” and why I started PragerUnversity.com.)
Second, they need to know what they will be taught at college — and now in many high schools — and how to respond. When they are told from day one at college that America and its white citizens are inherently racist, they need to know how to counter this libel with these truths: America is the least racist society in the world; more black Africans have immigrated here of their own volition than were came here forcibly to be slaves; and “racist” is merely one of many epithets — such as sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and bigoted — that the left uses instead of arguments.
Third, when possible, it is best that your child not go to college immediately after high school. One reason colleges are able to indoctrinate students is that students enter college young and unworldly. It is very rare that adult students are convinced to abandon their values and become left-wing. Why? Because they have lived life and are much less naive.
For example, someone with life experience is far more likely than a kid just out of high school to understand that the best formula for avoiding poverty is to take personal responsibility — get a job, get married and then have children — not government help.
Teenagers who spend a year before going to college working — in a restaurant, for a moving company, at an office — will mature far more than they would after a year at college. And maturity is an inoculation against leftism.
If your home is Jewish, Catholic, Protestant or Mormon, another option for the year after high school is to have your child devote a year to studying religion in some formal setting. The more your child knows, lives and adheres to the principles of any of these religions, the less likely he or she will convert to Leftism, which has been the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years. For example, it is a fundamental belief of each of these Judeo-Christian religions that the root of evil is within the evildoer. But it is a fundamental belief of leftism that people murder, steal and rape overwhelmingly because of outside influences such as poverty and racism. The moment your child understands that people who commit evil are responsible— not poverty or racism — they cannot be a leftist.
Fourth, don’t be preoccupied with instilling high self-esteem in your child. It is the left that believes that self-esteem is a child’s right, something that parents and society owe children. Conservatives believe that everyone, including children, must earn self-esteem. Indeed, the belief in earning — rather than in being given — is conservative.
Fifth, teach character. The left has essentially defined a good person as one who holds progressive social positions — on race, the environment, taxes, health care, etc. That is why the left, including the feminist left, could so adore Bill Clinton who regularly used his positions of power to take advantage of women: He held progressive positions.
If your child recycles or walks five kilometers on behalf of breast cancer, that is lovely. But if your child refuses to cheat on tests or befriends an unpopular kid at school, that is character. And teaching that definition of character is more often done in a conservative (usually a religiously conservative) context.
It is not all that hard to produce a son or daughter able to withstand left-wing indoctrination. You just have to understand that it doesn’t happen automatically.
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303531204579208211730264896?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond
"The Harlem Success teachers' contract drives home the idea that the school is about the children, not the grown-ups. It is one page, allows them to be fired at will, and defines their responsibilities no more specifically than that they must help the school achieve its mission. Harlem Success teachers are paid about 5 to 10 percent more than union teachers on the other side of the building who have their levels of experience.
"The union contract in place on the public school side of the building is 167 pages. Most of it is about job protection and what teachers can and cannot be asked to do during the 6 hours and 57.5 minutes (8:30 to about 3:25, with 50 minutes off for lunch) of their 179-day work year."
In the 2010, 29 percent of the students at the traditional public school were reading and writing at grade level, and 34 percent were performing at grade level in math. At the charter school, the corresponding numbers were 86 percent and 94 percent.
(More at the link.)
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(http://2-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2013/11/490x600xGettysburg-handwirting-experts-copy-490x600.jpg.pagespeed.ic.N1OjjilpoW.jpg)
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http://weaselzippers.us/2013/11/25/lib-professor-tells-class-if-youre-a-white-male-you-dont-deserve-to-live-youre-a-cancer-youre-a-disease-white-males-only-murder-and-oppress-non-whites/
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Please post in the Race, discrimination, etc thread as well.
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13 percent of students in two-year colleges graduate in two years
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/the-great-stagnation-of-american-education/?_r=0
The Great Stagnation of American Education
By ROBERT J. GORDON
Javier Jaén
The Great Divide
The Great Divide is a series about inequality.
For most of American history, parents could expect that their children would, on average, be much better educated than they were. But that is no longer true. This development has serious consequences for the economy.
The epochal achievements of American economic growth have gone hand in hand with rising educational attainment, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have shown. From 1891 to 2007, real economic output per person grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year — enough to double every 35 years. The average American was twice as well off in 2007 as in 1972, four times as well off as in 1937, and eight times as well off as in 1902. It’s no coincidence that for eight decades, from 1890 to 1970, educational attainment grew swiftly. But since 1990, that improvement has slowed to a crawl.
Companies pay better-educated people higher wages because they are more productive. The premium that employers pay to a college graduate compared with that to a high school graduate has soared since 1970, because of higher demand for technical and communication skills at the top of the scale and a collapse in demand for unskilled and semiskilled workers at the bottom.
As the current recovery continues at a snail’s pace, concerns about America’s future growth potential are warranted. Growth in annual average economic output per capita has slowed from the century-long average of 2 percent, to 1.3 percent over the past 25 years, to a mere 0.7 percent over the past decade. As of this summer, per-person output was still lower than it was in late 2007. The gains in income since the 2007-9 Great Recession have flowed overwhelmingly to those at the top, as has been widely noted. Real median family income was lower last year than in 1998.
There are numerous causes of the less-than-satisfying economic growth in America: the retirement of the baby boomers, the withdrawal of working-age men from the labor force, the relentless rise in the inequality of the income distribution and, as I have written about elsewhere, a slowdown in technological innovation.
Education deserves particular focus because its effects are so long-lasting. Every high school dropout becomes a worker who likely won’t earn much more than minimum wage, at best, for the rest of his or her life. And the problems in our educational system pervade all levels.
The surge in high school graduation rates — from less than 10 percent of youth in 1900 to 80 percent by 1970 — was a central driver of 20th-century economic growth. But the percentage of 18-year-olds receiving bona fide high school diplomas fell to 74 percent in 2000, according to the University of Chicago economist James J. Heckman. He found that the holders of G.E.D.’s performed no better economically than high school dropouts and that the rising share of young people who are in prison rather than in school plays a small but important role in the drop in graduation rates.
Then there is the poor quality of our schools. The Program for International Student Assessment tests have consistently rated American high schoolers as middling at best in reading, math and science skills, compared with their peers in other advanced economies.
At the college level, longstanding problems of quality are joined with the issues of affordability. For most of the postwar period, the G.I. Bill, public and land-grant universities and junior colleges made a low-cost education more accessible in the United States than anywhere in the world. But after leading the world in college completion, America has dropped to 16th. The percentage of 25- to 29-year-olds who hold a four-year bachelor’s degree has inched up in the past 15 years, to 33.5 percent, but that is still lower than in many other nations.
The cost of a university education has risen faster than the rate of inflation for decades. Between 2008 and 2012 state financing for higher education declined by 28 percent. Presidents of Ivy League and other elite schools point to the lavish subsidies they give low- and middle-income students, but this leaves behind the vast majority of American college students who are not lucky or smart enough to attend them.
While a four-year college degree still pays off, about one-quarter of recent college graduates are currently unemployed or underemployed. Meanwhile, total student debt now exceeds $1 trillion.
Heavily indebted students face two kinds of risks. One is that they fall short of their income potential, through some combination of unemployment and inability to find a job in their chosen fields. Research has shown that on average a college student taking on $100,000 in student debt will still come out ahead by age 34. But that break-even age goes up if future income falls short of the average.
There is also completion risk. A student who takes out half as much debt but drops out after two years never breaks even because wages of college dropouts are little better than those of high school graduates. These risks are acute for high-achieving students from low-income families: Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found that they often don’t apply to elite colleges and wind up at subpar ones, deeply in debt.
Two-year community colleges enroll 42 percent of American undergraduates. The Center on International Education Benchmarking reports that only 13 percent of students in two-year colleges graduate in two years; that figure rises to a still-dismal 28 percent after four years. These students are often working while taking classes and are often poorly prepared for college and required to take remedial courses.
Our subpar performance in schooling our kids hurts our economy’s capacity to grow.
Federal programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have gone too far in using test scores to evaluate teachers. Many children are culturally disadvantaged, even if one or both parents have jobs, have no books at home, do not read to them, and park them in front of a TV set or a video game in lieu of active in-home learning. Compared with other nations where students learn several languages and have math homework in elementary school, the American system expects too little. Parental expectations also matter: homework should be emphasized more, and sports less.
Poor academic achievement has long been a problem for African-Americans and Hispanics, but now the achievement divide has extended further. Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, has argued that “family breakdown is now biracial.” Among lower-income whites, the proportion of children living with both parents has plummeted over the past half-century, as Charles Murray has noted.
Are there solutions? The appeal of American education as a destination for the world’s best and brightest suggests the most obvious policy solution. Shortly before his death, Steve Jobs told President Obama that a green card conferring permanent residency status should be automatically granted to any foreign student with a degree in engineering, a field in which skills are in short supply..
Richard J. Murnane, an educational economist at Harvard, has found evidence that high school and college completion rates have begun to rise again, although part of this may be a result of weak labor markets that induce students to stay in school rather than face unemployment. Other research has shown that high-discipline, “no-excuses” charter schools, like those run by the Knowledge Is Power Program and the Harlem Children’s Zone, have erased racial achievement gaps. This model suggests that a complete departure from the traditional public school model, rather than pouring in more money per se, is needed.
Early childhood education is needed to counteract the negative consequences of growing up in disadvantaged households, especially for children who grow up with only one parent. Only one in four American 4-year-olds participate in preschool education programs, but that’s already too late. In a remarkable program, Reach Out and Read, 12,000 doctors, nurses and other providers have volunteered to include instruction on the importance of in-home reading to low-income mothers during pediatric checkups.
Even in today’s lackluster labor market, employers still complain that they cannot find workers with the needed skills to operate complex modern computer-driven machinery. Lacking in the American system is a well-organized funnel between community colleges and potential blue-collar employers, as in the renowned apprenticeship system in Germany.
How we pay for education shows, in the end, how much we value it. In Canada, each province manages and finances education at the elementary, secondary and college levels, thus avoiding the inequality inherent in America’s system of local property-tax financing for public schools. Tuition at the University of Toronto was a mere $5,695 for Canadian arts and science undergraduates last year, compared with $37,576 at Harvard. It should not be surprising that the Canadian college completion rate is about 15 percentage points above the American rate. As daunting as the problems are, we can overcome them. Our economic growth is at stake.
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Recalling Eisenhower's warning "beware the industrial military complex" I know propose this warning:
"Beware the academic industrial government complex"
It is very self serving and just as much greed error and hubris as every other sector of humanity.
Here is one example:
****Impervious to Evidence, Liberals Ride Again
Mona Charen
By Mona Charen 8 hours ago
"We will restore science to its rightful place ... " So intoned a "dismissive and derisive" President Barack Obama in his first inaugural. It's been oft quoted in the five years since (frequently by me, I'll confess) for its arrogance and condescension, which has continuing relevance, but before turning to the left's latest departure from scientific rigor, I cannot resist a fuller quotation. The second part of this sentence from Obama's first inaugural reads " ... and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost." Hmm.
In his second inaugural (compared to Abraham Lincoln's second by Chris Matthews), Obama proposed a vast new program ($150 billion in combined federal and state funds) for universal preschool serving 4-year-olds. "Every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can save more than $7 later on — by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime ... We know this works."
Universal preschool is universally popular with Democrats. Nancy Pelosi has hailed Head Start as "one of our most effective investments," while the newly minted progressive heartthrob New York mayor, Bill de Blasio, proclaims, "We will ask the very wealthy to pay a little more in taxes so that we can offer full-day universal pre-K and after-school programs for every middle school student."
Before getting to science, let's talk politics. The federal government already runs a preschool program called Head Start. Democrats love it because they can claim to be doing something beneficial for poor children. Republicans decline to oppose it because they fear ads saying "Rep. X wants to deny education to poor children ... "
Now, let's talk science. Head Start, a product of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, has been carefully evaluated by the Administration for Children and Families within the Department of Health and Human Services. The study examined 4,667 3- and 4-year-olds across 23 states. It compared children who had applied for but not been accepted into Head Start to those who had participated in it. The children were evaluated by their teachers, parents and outside examiners both before and after. As David Armor and Sonia Sousa relate in the winter issue of National Affairs, the Head Start Impact Study found almost no positive effects of the program.
While children in the program showed some positive results on measures of cognitive skills and social/behavioral ratings while in the program, those results lasted only so long as the children were enrolled and did not carry through to kindergarten or early elementary school. The principle positive effect noted in the HSIS was in social skills for 3-year-olds, but these results were reported only by parents and not replicated by outside examiners. Teachers, by contrast, noted a negative effect on social/emotional skills for the 4-year-old cohort.
The point of Head Start is the promise that it offers poor children a leg up and prepares them for school. It would be nice if it worked, but it doesn't. It does provide jobs for teachers and federally subsidized day care. But taxpayers have spent $180 billion since 1965 for a program that fails to achieve its objectives.
Other studies have examined the effect of preschool more generally on school performance and have found effects ranging from very small to none.
What then was Obama referring to when he insisted that "high-quality" preschool "boosts graduation rates," "reduces teen pregnancy" and so forth? In a post titled "Obama's Preschool Proposal Is Not Based on Sound Research" on the center/left Brookings Institution website, Russ Whitehurst explains that the studies the president and other advocates of universal pre-K rely on are flawed. They do not involve randomized controls (as the HSIS did) but instead employ something called "age-cutoff regression discontinuity."
Due to state-mandated birthdates for enrollment in preschool, the studies wind up comparing kids who are actually enrolled in play-based programs for 3-year-olds with those enrolled in academically oriented preschool for 4-year-olds. These regression discontinuity studies also fail to account for dropouts from the program. The Brookings post, to which Armor also contributed, concludes: "Because 'gold standard' randomized studies fail to show major impacts of present day pre-K programs, there are reasons to doubt that we yet know how to design ... a government funded pre-K program that produces sufficiently large benefits ... "
Armor and Souza suggest in National Affairs that those truly respectful of science would propose: "A national demonstration project for pre-K in a selected number of cities and states, accompanied by a rigorous randomized evaluation that would follow participants at least into the third grade. This demonstration project should also examine whether 'preschool for all' closes achievement gaps between rich and poor, since it is possible that middle-class children will benefit more than disadvantaged children."
This would put science in its "rightful place," but don't hold your breath. Many liberal nostrums are impervious to evidence.
To find out more about Mona Charen and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM****
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http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/01/07/this-is-what-happens-when-a-kid-leaves-traditional-education/
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Obama Administration Mandates Racism in Schools
Mona Charen's column is released once a week.
Mona Charen
By Mona Charen January 17, 2014 3:00 AM
The Departments of Education and Justice have teamed up to make the lives of students in tough neighborhoods even tougher. Framed as a measure to combat discrimination against black and Hispanic children, the guidelines issued by the Obama administration about school discipline will actually encourage racial discrimination, undermine the learning environments of classrooms and contribute to an unjust race-consciousness in meting out discipline.
Claiming that African-American and Hispanic students are more harshly disciplined than whites for the same infractions, the Obama administration now advises that any disciplinary rule that results in a "disparate impact" on these groups will be challenged by the government.
"Disparate impact" analysis, as we've seen in employment law, does not require any intentional discrimination. It means, for example, that if an employer asks job seekers to take a test, and a larger percentage of one ethnic group fails the test than another, that the test is de facto discriminatory because it has a "disparate impact."
In the school context, the federal government is now arguing that if a disciplinary rule results in more black, Hispanic or special education kids being suspended or otherwise sanctioned, the rule must be suspect. The "Dear Colleague" letter explains that a disciplinary policy can be unlawful discrimination, even if the rule is "neutral on its face ... and is administered in an evenhanded manner," if it has a "disparate impact" on certain ethnic and other groups.
The inclusion of special education students is particularly perverse, as special ed students frequently get that designation because their emotional disturbances cause them to misbehave in various ways. So if a rule against, say, knocking over desks, is found to be violated more frequently by special ed than regular ed students, then the rule must be questioned? That's circular.
As the CATO Institute's Walter Olson notes, the federal guidelines pass over one example of disparate impact with no comment — namely the dramatically more males than females who face disciplinary action nationwide. If we are to judge a rule's lawfulness by the disparate impact on males, no rule would survive the inquiry. Is it possible that more boys misbehave in the classroom than girls? To ask this question is to venture into an area the federal government would have us avoid. Actual infractions by individuals are not the issue. We must have group justice, not individual justice.
We've actually been down this road many times before. Various state and federal agencies have raised concerns about the large numbers of black and Hispanic students facing disciplinary action. Such concerns helped to generate the rigid "zero tolerance" policies the administration now condemns. Zero tolerance is a brainless approach to a subject that requires considerable finesse and deliberation, but the disparate impact rule is even more pernicious.
Under the new dispensation, teachers, principals and other officials will have to pause before they discipline, say, the fourth black student in a month. "How will this look to the feds?" they'll ask themselves. Will the student's family be able to sue us? A variety of solutions to the federally created problem will present themselves. School officials can search out offenses by white and Asian students to make the numbers come out right. Asian students are disciplined at rates far below any other ethnic group. Is this due to pro-Asian bias in our schools, or is it because Asians commit many fewer infractions? Oops, there we go into territory forbidden by the federal guidelines.
Another solution will be to ignore misbehavior by blacks and Hispanics. For classes with large numbers of minority students, this guarantees that the learning environment for the kids who actually want to learn will be impaired as teachers — reluctant to remove troublesome students — expend precious time on kids who are rude, threatening, loud or otherwise disruptive. Every minute of the school day taken up by bad kids is taken away from good kids. It's a true zero-sum game.
So the Obama administration's pursuit of group justice actually leads to injustice to individual students. Whites and Asians will be disciplined more than they merit it by their conduct, and fewer students of all groups will get the kind of classroom atmosphere that is conducive to learning. Even the students who get a pass on their bad conduct are disserved, as they will not have learned that disrespectful language, tardiness and even violence are unacceptable in society.
Everyone loses. Obama strikes again.
To find out more about Mona Charen and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM
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One of the great parts about being a consumer these days is that many of items we like to buy--computers, smartphones, and televisions, for instance--every year are higher quality with more choice at declining cost. This is true not just of electronics, but of a wide range of products.
Walmart and more recently Amazon are the two clearest examples: Each offers an astounding variety of products at very narrow margins, and they’ve developed sophisticated systems for customers to evaluate items before they buy. This drive to improve cost and quality has won them tens of millions of happy customers. Walmart accounts for roughly 3 percent of the country’s GDP. Amazon sold 426 items per second in the weeks before Christmas.
Although they improve the lives of millions of people, these businesses aren’t increasing quality and choice while lowering cost simply out of altruism. They have to do it, because they have to compete with each other. Every customer at Walmart has the option to place an Amazon order instead right from his or her smartphone. That’s the magic of competition.
But if being a consumer recently has meant higher quality at declining cost, the world of education has moved in the opposite direction. Even after two decades of astonishing progress in information technology, we still trap our students in schools that offer higher cost and declining quality.
Spending on elementary and secondary education has gone up almost 40 percent since 2001, with no substantial improvement in outcomes. Twelve years later, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argues that “our public schools must greatly accelerate the rate of progress of the last four years and do more to narrow America's large achievement gaps,” describing the mission of improving schools as an “urgent moral and economic imperative.”
This is an understatement, as we all know. Last year only 36 percent of eighth graders were proficient in math, and the rate for reading was the same. Our schools are failing a majority of our students.
Should we keep doing the same things that have failed for decades to improve schools, then, or should we make some big changes?
It’s clear that the only way we will see the major improvements in learning is by opening up schools to competition, forcing them to compete for students as Walmart and Amazon compete for customers. And as I argued last week, the only way to promote competition and innovation in education is to fund the students, not the school, so families can vote with their feet.
Two U.S. senators, Lamar Alexander from Tennessee and Tim Scott from South Carolina, have introduced pioneering legislation this week to promote school choice for those Americans who need it most. Their efforts could be an important step toward giving every student in the United States the option to choose the school that is best for him or her.
Senator Alexander’s bill, the Scholarships for Kids Act, would consolidate roughly $24 billion of federal education funding and allow states to make it available to low income students to help pay for the public, private, or charter school of their choice. This could potentially allow millions of poor children to escape from the failing schools they’re trapped in based only on their neighborhoods.
Senator Scott’s CHOICE Act would allow states to provide similar school choice opportunities for students with disabilities. It would also create portable scholarships for the children of military families on certain military bases.
These are critical steps toward creating a breakout in learning. If federal funding for education remains locked up by school district, it will be impossible to create the competition we need to foster innovation.
Call or write your senators today and urge them to support this important school choice legislation.
Your Friend,
Newt
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My friend Walter is asserting that spending on education has gone down. My distinct impression is that it has gone up. Anyone have a quite and easy citation either way?
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My guess is that he refers to cuts to the US Department of Education (bureaucracy), not to education which is funded at the state and local level.
The 'cuts' restore spending to pre-crash levels.
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That helps. Citations, especially on the net trend over time, would be wonderful.
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That helps. Citations, especially on the net trend over time, would be wonderful.
(http://www.heritage.org/~/media/Images/Reports/2012/04/bg2677/beducationbudget2012chart1750.ashx)
As stated previously, this is not 'education', this is federal bureaucracy. Education is funded at the state and local level.
"The Department of Education, a 4,200-person agency, has enjoyed dramatic funding increases year after year since its creation over three decades ago. The President’s FY 2013 budget request includes a 2.5 percent increase (over 2012 levels) for the Department of Education—the largest increase for any domestic agency in the proposed budget. But nearly a half century of ever-increasing federal education spending and control has failed to improve academic outcomes. The bloated bureaucracy has added layer upon layer of red tape on states and school districts, requiring school leaders to demonstrate compliance with more than 150 federal education programs."
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/04/obamas-2013-education-budget-and-blueprint-a-costly-expansion-of-federal-control
Also please see this chart.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2014USbn_15bs2n_20#usgs302
Click on current year, click on 5 years past, etc. Education spending is up 42% in 10 years, in spite of budget woes. Test scores remain "utterly stagnant" over the same time period: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/03/us-test-scores_n_4374075.html
Local examples (MN):
Minneapolis Public Schools, per student spending $20,911, Graduation Rate: 55.1%
Minnetonka Public Schools, Per student spending: $9,579, Graduation Rate: 93.7%
Edina Public Schools, Per-Pupil Spending: $9,219; Graduation Rate: 94.1%
http://www.localschooldirectory.com/public-school/45651/MN
http://www.better-ed.org/20911-minneapolis-public-schools-avg-spending-student
http://www.localschooldirectory.com/public-school/45623/MN
Money has an inverse relationship with results. There could be other factors involved...
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Thank you very much Doug, I have forwarded the URL to this thread to Walter. We'll see if he joins in.
Walter?
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Dr. Ben Carson addresses graduates at the Univ of Delaware May 27, 2000.
(http://c.crossmap.christianpost.com/images/1/58/15865.gif)
Great story. Read it!
http://crossmap.christianpost.com/blogs/benjamin-s-carson-told-of-his-journey-from-poverty-at-university-of-delaware-4712
"When I was in the fifth grade, I thought I was stupid, so I conducted myself like a stupid person and achieved like a stupid person. When I was in the seventh grade, I thought I was smart: I conducted myself like a smart person and achieved like a smart person."
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http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/02/26/in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution/?singlepage=true
In Defense of the Elastic Clause of the Constitution
February 26th, 2014 - 5:15 am
If college students listened to Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh, they would receive a better American history education than they are getting from their professors. I recently spoke at Emory University, where one student defended all of President Obama’s unconstitutional actions by invoking the Elastic Clause of the Constitution.
Citing the Elastic Clause could indeed justify a wide range of administration actions, except for one problem – it doesn’t exist.
But you couldn’t tell that to the student at Emory University who came to my speech last week on Obama’s abuses of power. He persisted in defending the actions through the Elastic Clause, as if the be-all, end-all provision was common knowledge.
From the sound of it, the Elastic Clause must be common knowledge in faculty lounges.
The Elastic Clause, he persisted, gives the president the power to address a wide range of issues through executive prerogative. It allowed the government, he said, to adapt to new circumstances unlike the age when the Founders wrote the Constitution.
Of course the Founders did include an “elastic clause” of sorts, namely Article V, which gives the people and the states the power to amend the Constitution.
But he wasn’t speaking of something quite so stiff and formal. He wasn’t referring to something that required broad assent. He was referring the Elastic Clause that allows the president to swiftly respond to needs as they arise – sort of like Mussolini and Mugabe did.
He was serious. He really believed the Elastic Clause was real. But the constitutional literacy of a different student was even worse. With a straight face, she defended the exercise of executive power and the issuance of executive orders as constitutional because of the inaction of Congress.
“It’s part of the Constitution that if the Congress doesn’t act, then the president can issue executive orders to fix something,” was her argument.
Even more frightening, the person saying this is an officer of the campus Democrats. A little totalitarian in training.
Naturally, this was all quite an eye opener. I’m no fool when it comes to the institutional left and their corrosion of the system. But to have a student debate me over a verifiably fictional constitutional provision, to have a student presume I was the one making things up when I said the Elastic Clause didn’t exist – that blazed new territory.
All of this illustrates the dangerous rot occurring on campus, facilitated in large part by the faculty. All signs point to their success. Students are learning the lexicon of the institutional left and producing tragic-comedy like complaining about equality at UCLA, and worse. My appearance at Emory was sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the College Republicans. Recognize that groups like these are fighting an uphill battle on campus. But without them, college campuses would be intellectually monolithic.
The talk at Emory wandered into the small discrete psychological components of tyranny as described brilliantly in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. No doubt Mr. Elastic Clause and College Democrat Vice President Edict had never heard of the Nobel Prize winning description of where elastic ideas can lead.
Solzhenitsyn’s great book of the 20th century describes the small ideas of totalitarianism, and the camouflaged embryonic consent that individuals give to tyranny over time. Tyranny isn’t just about gruel with potato peelings day after day and bullets to the back of the head.
I presume Mr. Elastic Clause and Ms. College Democrat Officer will never read Gulag, but if they did, they would learn the story of Georgi Osorgin. Osorgin was imprisoned in the Solovetsky Islands in the early 1920s. The date was important because American leftists (such as some Democrats of the 1960s) like to pin the mass murder system only on Stalin. But Solzhenitsyn documents that the gulags were a necessary part of Lenin’s vision of the International Brotherhood. Without terror, his system would not work.
Solovki Prison Camp
Osorgin was to be shot, but he begged his jailers for a few more days because his wife was coming to visit him at the gulag. Osorgin’s wife visited him, then as her boat pulled away from Solovetsky Island, keeping his part of the bargain, he undressed to be shot. Niceties were part of the gulag in the early days because nobody really knew where the fledgling system was headed.
Solzhenitsyn:
But still, someone did give them those three days. The three Osorgin days, like other cases, show how far the Solovetsky regime was from having donned the armor of a system. The impression is left that the air of Solovki strangely mingled extreme cruelty with an almost benign incomprehension of where all this was leading, which Solovetsky characteristics were becoming the embryo of the great Archipelago and which were destined to dry up and wither on the bud. After all, the Solovetsky Islands people did not yet, generally speaking, firmly believe that the ovens of the Arctic Auschwitz had been lit right there and that its crematory furnaces had been thrown open to all who were ever brought there. (But, after all, that is exactly how it was!)
People there were also misled by the fact that all their prison terms were exceedingly short: it was rare that anyone had a ten-year term, and even five was not found very often, and most of them were three, just three. And this whole cat-and-mouse trick of the law was still not understood: to pin down and let go, and pin down again and let go again. . . .
Here too, on the first islands of the Archipelago, was felt the instability of those checkered years of the middle twenties, when things were but poorly understood in the country as a whole. Was everything already prohibited? Or, on the contrary, were things only now beginning to be allowed? Age-old Russia still believed so strongly in rapturous phrases! And there were only a few prophets of gloom who had already figured things out and who knew when and how all this would be smashed into smithereens.
I explained to the students that a written Constitution, free from the phony Elastic Clause and power for a president to issue edicts, is what keeps them free. It is what lets them have fun and have a good life. Structural constraints on the power of government allow people to experience joy, worship God, build dreams and fulfill potential. Our Constitution does not have an Elastic Clause for a very good reason. It was established to be inelastic absent the consent of three quarters of states. It was established to lay down fundamental ironclad restraints on the power of government, especially the executive branch.
Some are trying to redefine freedom away from this ideal and toward freedom from want.
That it is becoming fashionable to reject our particularly American version of freedom deserves an overpowering response.
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http://www.triviumeducation.com/
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second post
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/sat-test-prep-makeover-104291.html?hp=t2_3
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http://patriotpost.us/opinion/23891
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I really don't know much about it - off my radar:::
*****Get to know the Common Core marketing overlords
by Michelle Malkin
Copyright 2014
They’re everywhere. Turn on Fox News, local news, Animal Planet, HGTV, The Family Channel or talk radio. Pro-Common Core commercials have been airing ad nauseam in a desperate attempt to persuade American families to support the beleaguered federal education standards/testing/technology racket. Who’s funding these public relations pushes? D.C. lobbyists, entrenched politicians and Big Business interests.
The foundational myth of Common Core is that it’s a “state-led” initiative with grassroots support that was crafted by local educators for the good of all of our children. But the cash and power behind the new ad campaign tell you all you need to know. For parents in the know, this will be a refresher course. But repeated lies must be countered with redoubled truths.
The Bipartisan Policy Center is one of the leading Common Core ad sponsors. It’s a self-described nonprofit “think tank” founded by a pantheon of Beltway barnacles: former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and George Mitchell.
“Lobbying tank” would be more accurate. The BPC’s “senior fellows” include K Street influence peddlers such as liberal Republican Robert Bennett, the big-spending Utah senator-turned-lobbyist booted from office by tea party conservatives; former Democratic Agriculture Secretary and House member-turned-lobbyist Dan Glickman; and liberal Democrat Byron Dorgan, the former North Dakota senator who crusaded as an anti-D.C. lobbying populist before retiring from office to work as, you guessed it, a D.C. lobbyist.
Jeb Bush’s “Foundation for Excellence in Education” is also saturating the airwaves with ads trying to salvage Common Core in the face of truly bipartisan, truly grassroots opposition in his own home state of Florida. As I’ve reported previously, the former GOP governor’s foundation is tied at the hip to the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which pulled in $186 million through the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program to develop Common Core tests.
One of the Bush foundation’s top corporate sponsors is Pearson, the multibillion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate. Pearson snagged $23 million in contracts to design the first wave of PARCC test items and $1 billion for overpriced, insecure Common Core iPads purchased by the Los Angeles Unified School District, and is leading the $13.4 billion edutech cash-in catalyzed by Common Core’s technology mandates.
In December, you should know, the state of New York determined that Pearson’s nonprofit foundation had abused the law by siphoning charitable assets to benefit its for-profit arm in order to curry favor with the Common Core-peddling Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Pearson paid a $7.7 million settlement after the attorney general concluded that the company’s charitable arm was marketing Common Core course material it believed could be sold by the for-profit side for “tens of millions of dollars.” After being smoked out, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to its corporate sibling for $15.1 million.
Then there’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has joined the Clintonite-stocked Center for American Progress to promote Common Core and has earmarked more than $52 million on D.C. lobbying efforts.
Two D.C. trade associations, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, continue to rubber-stamp Common Core propaganda. They are both recipients of tens of millions of dollars in Gates Foundation money. NGA employed Democratic education wonk Dane Linn to help shepherd through the standards; Linn now flacks for Common Core at the D.C.-based Business Roundtable lobbying shop, another leading sponsor of the ads now bombarding your TVs and radios.
Despite its misleading name, the NGA does not represent all of the nation’s governors, holds only nonbinding resolution votes, and serves primarily as an “unelected, unrepresentative networking forum,” as Heartland Institute scholar Joy Pullmann put it, with funding from both taxpayers and private corporations. NGA’s Common Core standards writing meetings were convened in secret and are protected by confidentiality agreements.
Direct public input was nil. Of the 25 people in the NGA and CCSSO’s two Common Core standards-writing “working groups,” EdWeek blogger Anthony Cody reported in 2009, six were associated with the test-makers from the College Board, five were with fellow test-publishers ACT, and four were with Achieve Inc. Several had zero experience in standards writing.
Achieve Inc., you may recall from my previous work, is a Washington, D.C., nonprofit stocked with education lobbyists who’ve been working on federal standards schemes since the Clinton years. In fact, Achieve’s president, Michael Cohen, is a veteran Clinton-era educrat who also used to direct education policy for the NGA. In addition to staffing the standards writing committee and acting as lead Common Core coordinating mouthpiece, Achieve Inc. is the “project management partner” of the Common Core-aligned, tax-subsidized PARCC testing conglomerate.
Who’s behind Achieve? Reminder: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has dumped $37 million into the group since 1999 to promote Common Core. According to a new analysis by former Georgia State University professor Jack Hassard, the Gates Foundation has now doled out an estimated total of $2.3 billion on Common Core-related grants to thousands of recipients in addition to NGA, CCSSO, the Foundation for Excellence in Education and Achieve.
As they prop up astroturfed front groups and agitprop, D.C.’s Common Core p.r. blitzers scoff at their critics as “black helicopter” theorists. Don’t read their lips. Just follow the money. This bipartisan power grab is Washington-led and Washington-fed. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s elementary: All Common Core roads lead to K Street.*****
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Oppose Common Core with all your energy. And when it comes back under some other name, oppose that too.
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Oppose Common Core with all your energy. And when it comes back under some other name, oppose that too.
I do NOT like Common Core, Sam-I-am.
https://twitter.com/ColetteMoran/status/395967716382629889/photo/1
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http://www.ijreview.com/2014/03/125409-crazily-scary-common-core-problem-asks/
The let's long march through the institutions continues.
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http://nypost.com/2014/04/02/student-accepted-to-all-ivy-league-schools-gives-tips-for-success/
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What a marvelous story ( or beginning of a story). Truly the American dream. I recall posting about my Indian friend and colleague who commented how he sees American Blacks simply not seeing the advantages they have because they are in America. I don't want to sound cold or indifferent or that I don't recognize the sort of holocaust Blacks went through over centuries as slaves and in segregated America etc.
But this son of parents from Africa seem to have been taught and learned to embrace the gift of America that exists no where else. I have many African patients and some colleagues. I also have many from the Caribbean and American. Culture and nation/regional roots certainly does influence them (as it does us all).
Yet there is something special in this child's parents. And there is something special in him.
It seems like they just wanted the chance. You don't hear anything about entitlements or the rest. Just to be in America where one has a chance.
To blame discrimination was believable in the past. It is not anymore. In fact most of the Black Doctors I run into these days seem to be of African descent.
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Similarly several years ago economist Walter Williams (who happens to be black) pointed out that Jamaicans and their children in America score equal to whites on average.
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303847804579481500497963552?mod=WSJ_article_EditorsPicks
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http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/21/see-what-theyll-be-teaching-in-the-chicago-public-schools/?onswipe_redirect=no
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George Will: Common Core Disregards The Creativity Of Federalism
(link below)
GEORGE WILL: The advocates of the Common Core say, if you like local control of your schools, you can keep it, period. If you like your local curriculum you can keep it, period, and people don't believe them for very good reasons. This is a thin end of an enormous wedge of federal power that will be wielded for the constant progressive purpose of concentrating power in Washington so that it can impose continental solutions to problems nationwide. You say it's voluntary. It has been driven by the use of bribes and coercion in the form of waivers from No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top money to buy the compliance of these 45 states, two of which, Indiana and I believe Oklahoma have already backed out, and they will not be the last. Watch the verb align in this argument. They are going to align the SAT and ACT tests with the curriculum. They are going to align the textbooks with the tests. And sooner or later you inevitably have a national curriculum that disregards the creativity of federalism. What are the chances, Juan, that we're going to have five or six creative governors experimenting with different curricula or one creative constant permanent Washington bureaucracy overlooking our education? We've had 50 years now of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. 50 years of federal involvement that has coincided with stagnation in test scores across the country.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/05/06/george_will_common_core_disregards_the_creativity_of_federalism.html
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/05/05/california-school-district-gives-students-jaw-dropping-holocaust-assignment-in-attempt-to-meet-common-core-standards/
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First my thought that we will not advance our causes if we spend all our time on defense, opposing the endless stream of liberal leftist bad ideas. That said, C.C. cannot be ignored and Peggy Noonan sums up the main reason why very well:
It isn't that we disagree with the abstraction that students should be taught and master a core curriculum of great building blocks for life in school, we disagree with WHO should decide what those are.
Noonan: "The irony is that Core proponents’ overall objective—to get schools teaching more necessary and important things, and to encourage intellectual coherence in what is taught—is not bad, but good. Why they thought the answer was federal, I mean national, and not local is beyond me."
She compares the implementation of C.C. to the implementation of O'Care. She quotes this caricature that sums up all the real examples of stupidity within Common Core:
Louis CK was right “Late Show With David Letterman,” when he spoofed the math problems offered on his daughters’ tests: “Bill has three goldfish. He buys two more. How many dogs live in London?”
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2014/05/07/the-trouble-with-common-core/
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http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-system-rigged-a-guide-grads/
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http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-weekend-interview-escaping-the-student-debt-trap-1402699281
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www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/the-wagner-case-decision.php
A 49 to 1 advantage is not good enough!
www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/the-wagner-case-decision.php
"Professor Wagner sought a full-time position legal writing position at the University of Iowa College of Law after working there on a part-time basis. She was well known as a stalwart social conservative among the school’s faculty, which at the time numbered 49 Democrats and one Republican. The law school is overwhelmingly liberal. When she didn’t get the job and an inferior candidate did, she brought her lawsuit in federal court under section 1983, the statute that allows civil rights claims against state actors to be litigated in federal court."
Read about the case at the link.
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It's not about teaching, it's about indoctrinating.
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I now live in Central NJ -> ugghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! Should have stayed in Florida. What a crooked Dem controlled - union controlled tax and distribute hole this is. Anyway - does this not sound right of the Pepsi Generation Flowerchild almost commune nirvana of the 60's or what?
http://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/local/2014/08/06/high-school-diversity-initiative-expected-reach/13692487/
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http://online.wsj.com/articles/obamas-student-loan-blowout-1410305233?mod=Opinion_newsreel_5
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Look who’s data-mining your toddlers
By Michelle Malkin • October 9, 2014 10:07 PMScreen Shot 2014-10-09 at 8.20.16 PM
Look who’s data-mining your toddlers
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2014
Attention, parents: Have your little ones been subjected to “TS Gold” in school yet? If you care about student privacy, data mining and classroom intrusions, you might want to start asking questions and protecting your children now before it’s too late.
What’s happening here in Colorado with this onerous testing regime is happening everywhere. Informed families and teachers from all parts of the political spectrum agree: It’s a Big Government/Big Business “gold” rush you don’t want to join.
“TS Gold” stands for Teaching Strategies Gold. This “school readiness assessment system” was mandated in our state several years ago. It has already permeated private day-care centers and preschools; pilot testing in publicly funded preschools and kindergartens is currently taking place. More than 42,000 kids in Colorado alone have been subjected to the assessments.
Most parents have no idea the scheme is on track for full implementation by the 2015-2016 school year. The company already plans to expand assessments to cover children from birth through third grade. Competitors include California’s “Desired Results Developmental Profile” system and the “HighScope Child Observation Record.”
TS Gold’s creators describe the testing vehicle as “an early childhood assessment system” that purportedly measures the “whole child.” What that means is that the tests are not only for “literacy, mathematics, science and technology, social studies and the arts,” but also for “developmental domains including social emotional, physical, language and cognitive development.”
Aligned to the federal Common Core standards, which were designed and copyrighted by a small cadre of Beltway educrats, TS Gold received $30 million in federal Race to the Top subsidies in 2012. The assessors have 38 “objectives” arranged under nine topics of academic learning, psychomotor data and social-emotional development. Students are rated and recorded on their ability to do things like “respond to emotional cues,” “interact cooperatively” and “cooperate and share ideas and materials in socially acceptable ways.” (Read the document here.)
TS Gold directs teachers to document student behaviors with videos, audio files, journals and photos — which are then uploaded to a central database cloud.
Already overwhelmed by myriad testing burdens, teachers must undergo intensive training that takes scarce time away from actual instruction. Educators must gather disturbingly intimate and personal data every school day, collate and upload it, and then file lengthy “checkpoint ratings” on each child every 10 to 12 weeks.
Here’s a TS Gold training video on entering multiple children into the company’s checkpoint rating database:
Creeped out yet? This is just the tip of the data-mining iceberg. Last spring, parent Lauren Coker discovered that TS Gold assessors in her son’s Aurora, Colo., public preschool had recorded information about his trips to the bathroom, his hand-washing habits, and his ability to pull up his pants.
“When I asked if we could opt out of the system,” Coker told me, school officials told her “no.” She pulled her son out of the school and still doesn’t know whether or how the data can be removed.
“>Sunny Flynn, a mom with kids in Jefferson County, Colo. who spearheaded the fight against data-miner inBloom, started raising pointed questions to her school officials about TS Gold last year. “Where exactly is this powerful, predictive and personal data on our children being stored?” she asked. “What security measures are being used to protect this data? Who exactly has access to this data? How long will the data be stored? What is the proven benefit of a kindergarten teacher putting all of this data into a database?”
The ultimate goal is not improved school performance. The real end is massive student data-mining for meddling and profit. The Obama administration sabotaged federal student and family privacy protections through backroom regulation, allowing once-protected student data to be sold to private vendors for the creation of what one Colorado bureaucrat calls “human capital pipelines.”
Edutech firms such as Pearson, Microsoft, Google and Knewton are salivating at the lucrative opportunities to exploit educational Big Data and sell “customized learning” products in the most data-mineable industry in the world. And the politicians who can hook them up are reaping rich rewards in their campaign coffers.
Watch Knewton’s CEO Jose Ferreira gloat over the education “datapalooza” gold mine here:
As the authors of the Pioneer Institute’s invaluable report “Cogs in the Machine” explain: “Accompanying Common Core and national testing, and undergirding their influence, is a thickening network of student databases, largely pushed on states by the federal government.” Federally subsidized “state longitudinal data systems” — all identical and shareable — have enabled “a de facto national database.”
Cheri Kiesecker, a mom of elementary school kids in Fort Collins who has vigilantly tracked the student data mining initiative in Colorado, warns that the “data follows these children from preschool all the way through college and the workforce.” Colorado educrats glowingly refer to the profiles as “golden records.” While they smugly assure parents that the data is safe, Kiesecker told me: “We all know how frequent data breaches are. We also know that TS Gold allows teachers to share video and photos of children, as well as observations on children’s general anxiety levels and behavior. Are parents aware of just how much information is collected and shared outside the classroom?”
At a meeting of concerned parents in my community, grassroots activist Kanda Calef, a Colorado Springs mom, issued a call to arms last week that applies to primary educational providers here and across the country: “If we don’t get parents to stand up, we will never win this fight.” The battle never ends.
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From Cognitive Dissonance of the Left:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/392900/universities-are-now-taking-down-their-jonathan-gruber-videos-brendan-bordelon
I wonder what places like MIT think that people like Gruber are doing to their brand name. The main reaction seems to be, sorry he got caught, take down those videos and references.
I notice that MIT is closing its Economics Department, (merging it with Harvard).
These guys that advance lies to the nation in order to advance a socialistic takeover of the country, that is worth it, are called "center-left"??!!
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The Grand Jury getting the non-indictment right posed an "existential worry" to some students.
"It’s an existential worry. Then having to apply the very law that’s being used to oppress us.”
Can you imagine a case far away, that you know nothing about, not going your way, right before finals? Who could fight through that kind of trauma?!
NY Times credits Powerline blog for breaking this story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/nyregion/columbia-lets-law-students-delay-exams-after-garner-and-brown-decisions.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=1
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/ny-times-reports-on-columbia-exam-postponement.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/columbia-law-school-and-existential-worry.php
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Are many Columbia law students violently assaulting police officers?
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Well, from the age of 15 to about the age of 38 every single one of my dreams had a policeman in it somewhere , , ,
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I like the Carly Fiorina line: She worked as a secretary after getting a degree in Medieval History - all dressed up and nowhere to go!
Ann Coulter unnecessarily rips the college education in this column, especially my daughter's major, but some of the points are quite good:
"The GOP needs to hold tobacco company-style hearings, hauling in the presidents of various universities and asking them to justify their multimillion-dollar salaries."
"We want professors explaining, under penalty of perjury, exactly how much they make per hour for their rigorous schedules of two classes a week, summers off, and full-year "sabbaticals" every few terms."
Especially this:
"If colleges really believe their product is worth anything, why don't they guarantee their own student loans?" !!!
http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2015/01/28/how-much-is-that-psychology-degree-worth-n1949717
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Aren't the highest paid university people the football coaches? Maybe the basketball coaches?
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Aren't the highest paid university people the football coaches? Maybe the basketball coaches?
Worse than an active coach's, superintendent's or University President's salary is the severance that we pay them to not work after they fail at their job.
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Search
The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much
Laurie Rollitt
By PAUL F. CAMPOS
April 4, 2015
BOULDER, Colo. — ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.
This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.
The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”
In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.
In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.
Some of this increased spending in education has been driven by a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who go to college. While the college-age population has not increased since the tail end of the baby boom, the percentage of the population enrolled in college has risen significantly, especially in the last 20 years. Enrollment in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs has increased by almost 50 percent since 1995. As a consequence, while state legislative appropriations for higher education have risen much faster than inflation, total state appropriations per student are somewhat lower than they were at their peak in 1990. (Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is today.)
As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.
For example, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1980, my parents were paying more than double the resident tuition that undergraduates had been charged in 1960, again in inflation-adjusted terms. And of course tuition has kept rising far faster than inflation in the years since: Resident tuition at Michigan this year is, in today’s dollars, nearly four times higher than it was in 1980.
State appropriations reached a record inflation-adjusted high of $86.6 billion in 2009. They declined as a consequence of the Great Recession, but have since risen to $81 billion. And these totals do not include the enormous expansion of the federal Pell Grant program, which has grown, in today’s dollars, to $34.3 billion per year from $10.3 billion in 2000.
It is disingenuous to call a large increase in public spending a “cut,” as some university administrators do, because a huge programmatic expansion features somewhat lower per capita subsidies. Suppose that since 1990 the government had doubled the number of military bases, while spending slightly less per base. A claim that funding for military bases was down, even though in fact such funding had nearly doubled, would properly be met with derision.
Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.
By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.
The rapid increase in college enrollment can be defended by intellectually respectable arguments. Even the explosion in administrative personnel is, at least in theory, defensible. On the other hand, there are no valid arguments to support the recent trend toward seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university administrators, unless one considers evidence-free assertions about “the market” to be intellectually rigorous.
What cannot be defended, however, is the claim that tuition has risen because public funding for higher education has been cut. Despite its ubiquity, this claim flies directly in the face of the facts.
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y
Jason L. Riley
May 5, 2015 7:19 p.m. ET
134 COMMENTS
The term “soccer mom”—political shorthand for the upscale suburban women President Clinton courted so successfully in the 1990s—may have fallen out of use with the Beltway set in more recent years, but this swing voting bloc is still around. Just ask Arne Duncan.
As President Obama’s education secretary and the administration’s head cheerleader for the new Common Core academic standards, Mr. Duncan has spent four years trying to convince the country that the biggest problem with K-12 schooling is insufficient federal intervention. His problem is that the more parents learn about this federal effort to impose uniform math and reading standards across state lines, the less they like the idea. And women, who are more likely than men to rank education as “very important” in political surveys, seem to harbor a special disdain for Common Core.
A national poll released by Fairleigh Dickinson University earlier this year put approval for the new standards at 17%, against 40% who disapproved and another 42% who were undecided. A breakdown by gender had Common Core support at 22% for men and only 12% for women.
Wealthier parents tend to be the most skeptical, and they are not satisfied with merely sounding off to pollsters. This year hundreds of thousands of students across the country are boycotting Common Core-aligned state exams, and this so-called opt-out movement has been growing. Preliminary estimates are that between 150,000 and 200,000 students skipped New York state’s mandatory English exams last month, up from the 49,000 in 2014.
The Obama administration is aware of these developments, though you might question how it has chosen to respond to critics. “It’s fascinating to me,” said Mr. Duncan in 2013, “that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who—all of a sudden—their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought.”
More recently, the administration has pivoted from insulting parents to threatening them. Mr. Duncan told an education conference in April that if the boycott numbers continue to rise, “then we have an obligation to step in.”
His spokesman later informed reporters that the administration is considering whether to withhold federal funding for districts with test-participation rates below 95%. Given that there is no political will or effective mechanism for punishing test opponents without turning them into martyrs, this is an idle threat. The districts doing most of the boycotting are affluent and not dependent on federal money, which in any case parents could easily replace out of pocket.
Nor is this backlash as “fascinating” as Mr. Duncan claims. For the purposes of opposing accountability measures in No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal education law signed by George W. Bush, the Obama administration told these white suburban moms that their schools were just fine. For the purposes of imposing Common Core, Mr. Duncan is telling them the opposite.
No Child Left Behind had its shortcomings, but Congress went to great lengths to preserve local control. The law’s objective was to produce information—disaggregated data on the racial, ethnic and income groups that were struggling academically. Unlike the Common Core standards and tests, No Child Left Behind didn’t tell schools what to do and what not to do. States were still in charge of determining what to teach and how to teach it.
“The one thing upper-middle-class parents want and have grown accustomed to having is the ability to control their kids’ education,” Jay Greene, an education reform scholar who teaches at the University of Arkansas, told me by phone this week. “They will purchase private school if they have to. They will move to another neighborhood if they must. And they will boycott testing if they feel their control is being interfered with.”
Forty-five states initially signed on to Common Core in return for more federal education funding, but the tide is turning and opponents—including teachers unions who don’t want student test scores, or any other objective measures, used to evaluate instructors—have the momentum. California and Utah already allow parents to opt out of assessments, and CBS News reported in March that 19 other states “have introduced legislation to either halt or replace Common Core.”
This issue won’t go away when students head home for summer vacation next month. The presidential candidates will have to declare themselves. Labor will pressure Hillary Clinton to at least hedge any support for testing, and it is increasingly difficult to imagine a Republican nominee who hasn’t distanced himself from Common Core.
Prof. Greene thinks the administration’s education agenda has crossed the wrong voters. “They’re going to lose,” he said, citing White House hubris and overreach. “You can’t beat organized upper-middle-class people. They will fight back and you will lose.”
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
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The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much
By PAUL F. CAMPOSAPRIL 4, 2015
BOULDER, Colo. — ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.
This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.
The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”
In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.
In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.
Some of this increased spending in education has been driven by a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who go to college. While the college-age population has not increased since the tail end of the baby boom, the percentage of the population enrolled in college has risen significantly, especially in the last 20 years. Enrollment in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs has increased by almost 50 percent since 1995. As a consequence, while state legislative appropriations for higher education have risen much faster than inflation, total state appropriations per student are somewhat lower than they were at their peak in 1990. (Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is today.)
As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.
For example, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1980, my parents were paying more than double the resident tuition that undergraduates had been charged in 1960, again in inflation-adjusted terms. And of course tuition has kept rising far faster than inflation in the years since: Resident tuition at Michigan this year is, in today’s dollars, nearly four times higher than it was in 1980.
State appropriations reached a record inflation-adjusted high of $86.6 billion in 2009. They declined as a consequence of the Great Recession, but have since risen to $81 billion. And these totals do not include the enormous expansion of the federal Pell Grant program, which has grown, in today’s dollars, to $34.3 billion per year from $10.3 billion in 2000.
It is disingenuous to call a large increase in public spending a “cut,” as some university administrators do, because a huge programmatic expansion features somewhat lower per capita subsidies. Suppose that since 1990 the government had doubled the number of military bases, while spending slightly less per base. A claim that funding for military bases was down, even though in fact such funding had nearly doubled, would properly be met with derision.
Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.
By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.
The rapid increase in college enrollment can be defended by intellectually respectable arguments. Even the explosion in administrative personnel is, at least in theory, defensible. On the other hand, there are no valid arguments to support the recent trend toward seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university administrators, unless one considers evidence-free assertions about “the market” to be intellectually rigorous.
What cannot be defended, however, is the claim that tuition has risen because public funding for higher education has been cut. Despite its ubiquity, this claim flies directly in the face of the facts.
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By Popular Demand: Worthwhile Revisions to AP History Exam
Finally, some good news for a change. The College Board, the nonprofit organization that administers AP exams to high school students, has announced yet another revision to its history framework. But this time it's for the better. Previously, the College Board painted American history in far too negative a light, emphasizing our nation's sins while ignoring or minimizing its uniqueness and greatness. Some Founders, such as Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson and Constitution writer James Madison, were mentioned; that's it — mentioned. But they were taught as examples of Western class, gender and racial evil. And while teachers could choose to teach the Constitution as it's written, they would disadvantage their students by doing so because the real Constitution wasn't on the test. After numerous scholars objected in an open letter, however, the College Board worked to make revisions. Neglected Founders are back, and there's even a new section on the concept of "American exceptionalism." A College Board official insisted they meant no harm, and that American exceptionalism was previously omitted because they assumed they didn't need to spell it out. We don't buy it, and the changes don't go nearly far enough, but perhaps the episode proves that strong, principled voices on the Right can make a difference.
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https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-fainting-couch-at-columbia/
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http://thelibertyzone.com/2015/10/15/this-is-teaching-your-kids/
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http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/11/12/mizzou-and-yale-pc-hysteria-spreads-to-other-campuses/
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First, who knew that education was political? It was once thought of as part of Science, culture and humanities. Now everything is political.
So, liberals want college to be free.
I agree, with a couple of caveats.
1. If the point is economic, only productive knowledge and skills can fall into the government paid category. The experts can't stop talking about STEM. Good, let's make science, technology, engineering and math free. Not deep thoughts classes, philosophy, art histrory, social engineering, gender studies. Do those on your own time.
2. Free college doesn't mean setting up a big money windfall to the corrupt and bloated 'higher' education institutions that in partnership with government made education so expensive in the first place. Free college means making the material available free to those who want to learn.
Good news: It already is free. No big additional funding is required. Readers of the forum already know this:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1337.msg57724#msg57724
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1337.msg74333#msg74333
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere.
Video lectures, online course materials, online textbooks.
There are more opportunities out there, try EdX, a similar program put on by MIT, Harvard, UC Berkley, University of Texas, Boston Univ, ASU, Caltech, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Rice, Princeton, Univ of Chicago, Notre Dame, Michigan, Colgate and so many others.
https://www.edx.org/ Enroll in courses, take tests, get certified.
You wimpy little college dependents, quit your whining and open your eyes. Welcome to the 21st century. Knowledge is widely available but we aren't going to pay for your dorm or sorority.
College is overpriced because of the money government puts into it. Otherwise they could just charge what it's worth, like everyone else.
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Posting this here too:
Today, nearly 95 percent of students (New Orleans) attend public charter schools. Less than five percent did before Katrina.
Charters have been instrumental in closing the achievement gapm[in New Orleans]: 62 percent of students are now performing at their grade level versus only 20 percent 15 years ago.
Nearly 100,000 fewer African Americans live in the city [New Orleans] today than in 2000. Around 11,500 fewer white residents live there.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150828-data-points-how-hurricane-katrina-changed-new-orleans/
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The huge improvement in educational performance in not based on race IMHO. It was a caused by the political change.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html?mid=facebook_nymag
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http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-new-learning-that-failed-3833?utm_source=The+New+Criterion+Subscribers&utm_campaign=48de07da31-Archives_Learning_and_Education_5_11_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f42f7adca5-48de07da31-104738973
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B553na_skKI
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http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/27997/
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http://manufacturingstories.com/how-solving-the-skills-gap-can-rebuild-the-middle-class/
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http://manufacturingstories.com/how-solving-the-skills-gap-can-rebuild-the-middle-class/
"In manufacturing alone there are two million job openings that could go unfilled due to a shortage of qualified applications, all while many young people are struggling in the labor market."
People think manufacturing left the US because of low wage rates elsewhere and its true for some things. But that doesn't make any sense as manufacturing gets more robotic, specialized and automated.
Strange to me that people can pay $60,000 per year to get educated, whether it is in engineering or gender studies, but it is illegal for a company to train an employee for free. Young people and all people jump jobs so quickly and easily that real investment in training often has no return to the company. Another firm can pick them off after training and save the expense, and they do. We need some kind of business innovation on this front. Government's best role in it, most likely, is to get out of the way.
Read the description of these unfilled jobs. They want someone who has years of experience doing exactly that job.
Mobility is a great thing - except that the employer and the employee no longer have any loyalty, and no one outside of government has a pension anymore.
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I think a post disappeared here. I wanted to jump back in and say great story DDF(?). It brought up many questions about companies, the training of their employees, the difficulty of relocating and considerations that go way beyond wage rates.
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I think a post disappeared here. I wanted to jump back in and say great story DDF(?). It brought up many questions about companies, the training of their employees, the difficulty of relocating and considerations that go way beyond wage rates.
It did disappear. I deleted it. I don't want the details out there.
Moving companies abroad doesn't work as smoothly as people think it does. I know this from having done it.
Primary challenges that will crush relocation efforts:
1.) The lack of an established industry being in the target location (if it was there, they'd being putting something where competitors already have a head start. If it isn't there, they have to train people from scratch or import workers, neither option is viable, especially with high tech stuff).
2.) There are ITAR issues. In fact, often times, companies cannot even send blueprints or other sensitive information to themselves, once it is out of the country, which means that blueprints or other things need to have their dimensions changed and the accompanying documents transferred into "work instructions," with any relevant techincal information removed from the documents. This will, in some cases, make doing certain work outside of the US impossible.
3.) There are on-site inspections from the customers. In order to maintain AS9100 certifications (you aren't flying anything without this certification), the work instructions have to initially be transferred from the parent language to create work instructions that eliminate sensitive information, then transferred from the target language back to the parent language, noting each difference between that and the parent language. Each work instruction must be a controlled process, complete with revision control, and with each revision change, it needs to be certified by Quality, Operations, and Engineering departments. The COLLOSSAL amount of paperwork this creates costs A LOT!!!! I personally, hate it. HATE IT. So inefficient.
4.) Cultural differences. I won't get into this, but let's just say, some people that are used to a more laid back lifestyle, make less for a reason. They don't get jack s..t done.
5.) Initial workers are likely to be college graduates lacking real world experience due to the lack of skilled workers. The moment these graduates have an ounce of experience, they're off and looking for another place (or country), where they will make more than the 16,000 pesos a month they make as a fully degreed engineer. This creates a dependency on experienced floor personnel, that also, will leave, the moment they get 10 pesos a day more, and moving half a country away to make it (I've seen it happen more than once and it stings), just to make 8000 pesos a month. The US will NEVER overcome this because in order to do so, the target countries would have to have decades of experience, and if they had that, the workers would be worth more, which would bring in more money and work, which would better the economy, which would make moving the companies there unfeasible from an economic standpoint. The ONLY exception to this are fully automated factories or factories that are manual, easily trained work types, escaping for tax and labor reasons. Everything else will fail.
6.) Most importantly, and by far the biggest inhibitor, is the fact that goods produced in a weaker economy, but where the desired market is in a stronger economy, (in order to maximize profits) creates nightmares with; loss of immediate corporate control of everything in regards to the product, skyrockets logistical costs, and sends lead time through the roof, especially when the raw materials to produce products are strictly controlled.
Let's give an example of what I just stated.
Boeing wants to sell Iran (for example) airplanes, so they'll sign a contract for millions of dollars (if the customer were the US government, what I am about to describe could be even worse in terms of dollars, and include having the military take control of your factory to insure THEIR product delivery). What the signed contract will generate is a certain build rate per month, in order to meet their contractual obligations. If everything is an existing model airplane currently being built, all of the necessary quality inspection planning, blueprint revisions, work instructions, raw material requirements, etc, have already been generated and proven....if not, there is MUCH more work to be done, but to keep this easy, let's move past the paperwork part.
Purchasing will place an order for all of the materials needed to build the required number of aircraft per month. Titanium for example (of the necessary grade... 5553, Ti 6Al-4V, whatever (each have different tooling requirements due to modes of elasticity and the tooling needs to be ordered ahead of time too), this titanium almost always comes from Russia.... steel forgings, Austria, etc....and all of this needs to be ordered well in advance, flown to the States, inspected, trucked to Mexico, machined, sent back to the States, further machine perhaps (remember the part about ITAR regulations?), assembled, inspected, shipped to Boeing ON TIME, put on the plane and assembled, and if you're A DAY late on that part or build assembly Boeing WILL fine you a million or so for stopping their line, PER day. That's a lot to get right just in order to save a few dollars an hour on labor and taxes. It in many cases, is proving to not be worth it.
The US is safe as far as some industries are concerned.
As crazy as people think I am, I was sent abroad after the initial team had failed, to start up a $60,000,000 dollar aerospace facility, for a company that I worked for, for 8 years in the function of Manager of Machining Operations and Manager of Engineering, before leaving to work for the Mexican government. I know quite a bit about the subject. I have personally seen, multimillion dollar facilities shut down within months of operating in other countries, specifically due to the challenges that I have outlined above.
EDIT: Just to be a jerk, and being that the the tread is regarding education, I did this with a 9th grade education and a GED from the Hall of Justice, everything else, including the languages involved, I learned at home in my spare time, and set sales, quality and production records, proof being, I'm not known for being charming, but am known for results, hence the 8 years in until I decided that I wanted to do something more interesting for a living. More often than not, people will tell you that you can't do something (like own firearms for example, be a government agent, etc.) You can do whatever you damn well want to.... education is just another excuse people put on themselves. It's all bullshit.
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" I did this with a 9th grade education and a GED from the Hall of Justice, everything else, including the languages involved, I learned at home in my spare time, and set sales, quality and production records, proof being, I'm not known for being charming, but am known for results, hence the 8 years in until I decided that I wanted to do something more interesting for a living. More often than not, people will tell you that you can't do something (like own firearms for example, be a government agent, etc.) You can do whatever you damn well want to.... education is just another excuse people put on themselves. It's all bullshit."
Very impressive. I agree. Initiative and "can do attitude", is more often then not better, then an education in a person that has neither.
You are very entrepreneurial . Like the people on Shark Tank. Instead of sitting at home blaming others they go out and work hard to get ahead.
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" I did this with a 9th grade education and a GED from the Hall of Justice, everything else, including the languages involved, I learned at home in my spare time, and set sales, quality and production records, proof being, I'm not known for being charming, but am known for results, hence the 8 years in until I decided that I wanted to do something more interesting for a living. More often than not, people will tell you that you can't do something (like own firearms for example, be a government agent, etc.) You can do whatever you damn well want to.... education is just another excuse people put on themselves. It's all bullshit."
Very impressive. I agree. Initiative and "can do attitude", is more often then not better, then an education in a person that has neither.
You are very entrepreneurial . Like the people on Shark Tank. Instead of sitting at home blaming others they go out and work hard to get ahead.
Thanks CCP. Excuses are a dime a dozen and get one nowhere.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2016/06/01/why-i-was-wrong-about-liberal-arts-majors/
"Philosophy, literature, art, history and language give students a thorough understanding of how people document the human experience. Technology is a part of our human experience, not a replacement to it."
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The world retains its ability to surprise.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2016/06/01/why-i-was-wrong-about-liberal-arts-majors/
"Philosophy, literature, art, history and language give students a thorough understanding of how people document the human experience. Technology is a part of our human experience, not a replacement to it."
Good point Bigdog. I would add that 'college degree equivalent' and 'graduate degree equivalent' can equal or surpass the value of the college degree. Maybe organizations will come to recognize that. The academic material is available online at no charge, see MIT OCR and EDx. The credential can cost a quarter million and up. The hardest part is to get hired and up to speed with a company. They need the credential and experience to justify the hire. After that, key employees are known for their capabilities and achievements on the job, not their college, major or credential coming in. Many entrepreneurs have also been able to get around traditional credentialing. State licensing boards are constantly fighting the practice of entering a profession through an unconventional path.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2016/06/01/why-i-was-wrong-about-liberal-arts-majors/
"Philosophy, literature, art, history and language give students a thorough understanding of how people document the human experience. Technology is a part of our human experience, not a replacement to it."
Good point Bigdog. I would add that 'college degree equivalent' and 'graduate degree equivalent' can equal or surpass the value of the college degree. Maybe organizations will come to recognize that. The academic material is available online at no charge, see MIT OCR and EDx. The credential can cost a quarter million and up. The hardest part is to get hired and up to speed with a company. They need the credential and experience to justify the hire. After that, key employees are known for their capabilities and achievements on the job, not their college, major or credential coming in. Many entrepreneurs have also been able to get around traditional credentialing. State licensing boards are constantly fighting the practice of entering a profession through an unconventional path.
The credential doesn't mean squat.
Results do though.
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DDF: "The credential doesn't mean squat. Results do though.
I'm not as far over as DDF but I believe a lot of what is studied in college is fluff that should be enjoyed in peoples' free time. The cost side is not being addressed. They are copying the failed model of health care with third party pay and near zero accountability.
I'm glad my daughter went to college, worked really hard and got a technical (STEM) degree (math). Yes it led to a job. The degree won't be used to directly in her work but it sharpened her skills, broadened her, proved something about her and opened that particular door. I value my degree and regret not going further at the time. We were paying $250 for a quarter, not $300,000 for a degree.
(Let's see, the cost of education went up 10 fold in a generation yet we don't allow an adjustment for inflation in a capital gain when taxing it.)
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Tough times for higher ed: Glenn Reynolds
Glenn Harlan Reynolds 1:20 p.m. EDT August 4, 2016 USA Today
Not everyone — probably not even most people — will really benefit from college.
AP COLLEGE COSTS A HFR USA DC
Gan Golan protests student debt in 2011, in Washington, D.C.(Photo: Jacquelyn Martin, AP)
Colleges, and graduate programs, are in trouble. Enrollments are falling — and not just at the PC-tainted University of Missouri — student debt is rising, and, worst of all in any bursting-bubble industry, the rubes seem to be catching on. This weekend, walking out of the drugstore, I saw Consumer Reports’ cover story, “I kind of ruined my life by going to college.” It was all about student loan debt and what it does to people’s lives. Hint: Nothing good.
I noted some years ago that trends in higher education couldn’t continue. The cost of college goes up every year; salaries, on the other hand, have grown much more slowly, if at all. This means that where today’s parents might have been able to comfortably fund their educations with loans and part-time work, today’s students can’t. Tuition is too high to cover with a waitressing job, and salaries are too low to comfortably pay back the debt after graduation. Or, sometimes, to pay it back at all.
When I wrote that book, student loan debt was approaching a trillion dollars. Now, Charles Sykes’ new book, Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education says that it’s $1.3 trillion, unsurprising given that tuitions of $60-70,000 a year are common now, and most students borrow to cover expenses.
The problem is that neither students nor society are getting their money’s worth.
Politicians sell education as a solution to economic inequality because it has two features that politicians love: It sounds good, and people won’t discover that it isn’t true until much later. Plus, when you push spending on education, you can always count on support from educators, who have a lot of influence in the media.
But as Sykes notes, “college for all” isn’t actually a good idea. Not everyone — probably not even most people — will really benefit from college. Fifty three percent of college grads under 25, he reports, are unemployed, or underemployed, working part-time or in low-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree.
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I cannot bring up the article without requiring one to subscribe. Briefly it is an argument that coding should be required , as it is in some other countries, education in grade school. It points out how little effort is put in to investing in this.
Why are not the tech titans investing here in OUR schools and our children to educate us ? Instead they want to open the doors to cheap labor at our expense and their profit
ttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coding-for-all-is-it-a-smart-goal-for-schools/
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Just posting because author says this a a "learning" experience:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/we-only-tip-citziens-receipt_us_57b62796e4b03d5136875a22
I would never have done what the diner did but the fact that this citizen is in US probably of being born here because of illegal residence of her parents (since it was NOT stated otherwise) is being drowned out by the LEfts front and center social justice gamesmanship. True I make an assumption about that.
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https://www.prageru.com/courses/life-studies/every-high-school-principal-should-say
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https://fee.org/articles/student-loan-subsidies-cause-almost-all-of-the-increase-in-tuition/
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/17/nyregion/math-camp-quiz.html?emc=edit_th_20170218&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/nyregion/new-york-math-camp.html
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/17/nyregion/math-camp-quiz.html?emc=edit_th_20170218&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/nyregion/new-york-math-camp.html
I like these Crafty. A 6th question for you and Connor and all from the book, A Beautiful Mind:
Two bicycles are twenty miles apart and start toward each other at ten mph each until their front tires meet. Meanwhile, a fly starts on the front edge of the front tire of the first bike and flies at 15 mph to the second bike and back and forth and back and forth shorter and shorter distances until it is squished in the middle when the two front tires meet.
How far did the fly fly?
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15 miles?
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448043/ben-sasse-book-senator-teaches-self-reliance-adults-children
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"Politics is downstream from culture."
I like that. Very pithy.
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https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32762/
Davidson College students furious after they’re tricked into rejecting socialist ideal
WILLIAM NARDI - LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
MAY 24, 2017
8099 1721 Share2213 78
Many students at Davidson College recently responded in anguish and outrage after some conservative students filmed a video asking people on campus if they would sign a petition to redistribute GPAs for the sake of “education equality.”
Many students refused to sign the petition, saying it wasn’t fair for a variety of reasons, including that people who earned their As should keep their As, and that students who are given good grades without hard work might not be inspired to improve.
But after students discovered later the petition was a hoax played on them by conservative students in an attempt to illustrate the unfairness of wealth distribution, they hastily called a teach-in at the campus union at which they denounced the effort and vented their frustration.
Some students said the fake petition made them struggle with feelings that they do not belong at Davidson, while others aggressively attacked the video, calling it “oppressive,” “illegally filmed,” and “inflammatory bullsh*t,” according to a video of the April 27 teach-in on Facebook.
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The crisis in higher education includes millions of people studying nothing of significance, writing big words with co-opted meanings - often at taxpayer expense. "The College Fix' reports on such an effort. Meanwhile, STEM positions go unfilled and outsourced.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32830/
http://minnesotareview.dukejournals.org/content/2017/88/69.short?rss=1
“Assembled Bodies: Reconfiguring Quantum Identities.”...argues in support of “combining intersectionality and quantum physics” to better understand “marginalized people” and to create “safer spaces” for them...
Because traditional quantum physics theory has influenced humanity’s understanding of the world, it has also helped lend credence to the ongoing regime of racism, sexism and classism that hurts minorities, Stark writes in “Assembled Bodies: Reconfiguring Quantum Identities.”
[author] holds an appointment in women’s and gender studies at the University of Arizona through its Institute for LGBT Studies.
...identifies Newtonian physics as one of the main culprits behind oppression. “Newtonian physics,” she writes, has “separated beings” based on their “binary and absolute differences.”
These structures of classification, such as male/female, or living/non-living, are “hierarchical and exploitative” and are thusly “part of the apparatus that enables oppression.”
Therefore, Stark argues in favor of combining intersectionality and quantum physics theory to fight against the imperative to classify people based on hierarchical categories.
“For instance, I, being white, should not be in all spaces, positions of authority, or meetings,” she said, because her presence could “stall” movements towards progress.
Stark concludes her paper by hoping that the “apparatus that enables oppression” – buoyed by Newtonian physics – shifts towards “less oppressive” power dynamics.
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While she does not have any academic training in physics or quantum physics, she did complete a master’s degree in “Cyborg and Post Colonial Theory”...
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Powerline based in the Twin Cities covers some MN news, but this story from Edina (Ee-DINE-ah) MN is happening across the fruited plain. Edina is known for affluence and top rated schools, but teachers, principles, superintendents and curricula are all known for coming out of the nation's most leftist public workers unions.
http://www.startribune.com/edina-high-school-named-best-in-minnesota-according-to-u-s-news-and-world-report/256255541/
POSTED ON JULY 13, 2017 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN EDUCATION
LEFT-WING INDOCTRINATION IN THE SCHOOLS: IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/left-wing-indoctrination-in-the-schools-its-worse-than-you-think.php
A parent writes:
"The principal hosted a BLM demonstration in the cafeteria and students were required to attend (no parent notification). The “cultural celebration” is actually not a celebration but rather a shaming of white kids from stage (I have video). It is truly awful. They are breaking our kids of self confidence and self esteem, shaming them because of the color of their skin – which by nature is racist – and no consequence whatsoever. Teachers violate policy every day by using personal twitter and other social media accounts and requiring students to follow them for class work – but then put out social justice and political commentary. This is a direct violation of policy and district won’t enforce it."
Read it all. It's disgusting what is happening in our best public schools. As John Hinderaker wrote about leftist activism and Trump derangement syndrome at Edina H.S., more and more students and parents came forward with their stories.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/14/enrollment-drops-at-schools-known-for-social-justi/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWmpabU5qbGhNMkl6TlRVeiIsInQiOiJjajRuVW5hRFVuT0wxYUswQTJMeHhyeHZOSndXR1R4TjhONnk2cDdWcVFJTmVPN1JndW9vRStuK3pJOUVMOFRlM0JINTRZU2FlNG1iazRQaDdUUCtoenVPTVVHWTdac1NtVEVBWENGQVpvdWxDUFh0azY0Z0dBUXJnZEQ3VmdQNCJ9
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/business/student-loans-licenses.html?emc=edit_th_20171119&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2017/11/25/elitists-crybabies-and-junky-degrees/?undefined=&utm_term=.3fce36e8e042&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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Odd that I can't find education on the politics forum. Do we still believe they do something more than political indoctrination? (
This is about an incident at a Canadian college. A TA allowed debate on gender pronouns in class and is getting fired for it. Hat tip Steve Hayward. 40 minutes of your life you will never get back but a direct eavesdrop into the voice of leftism behind the scenes in education.
These [18 year old adults] are children and can't trusted to hear another side to our indoctrination until we develop their skills to a higher level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=9YdFlKaJv4g
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/11/the-witch-hunt-at-laurier.php
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http://www.somedaily.org/ipad-far-bigger-threat-children-anyone-realizes/
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Studying Western Civilization in the South Bronx
Hostos Community College overcomes students’ resistance to learning about ‘dead white dudes.’
By Jillian Kay Melchior
Jan. 12, 2018 6:40 p.m. ET
The Bronx, N.Y.
On her first day of English class at Hostos Community College during the fall 2017 semester, Maria Diaz glared at the reading handout, a Plato excerpt on the trial of Socrates. “I used to be like, ‘Prof, why are we reading this? It’s so boring and confusing,” she recalls. But only months later, Ms. Diaz would gush about the merits of the Western canon, quoting Socrates’ claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
While much of academia continues its progressive and postmodern lurch, these courses at Hostos, first offered in 2016, represent a move in the opposite direction. One of the classes even was designed especially for students who score a “high fail” on their literacy tests. Profs. Andrea Fabrizio and Gregory Marks, along with their colleagues in the English Department, created the courses in collaboration with Columbia University. They borrowed heavily from the Ivy League school’s core curriculum for liberal-arts undergraduates.
So far about 1,300 students at Hostos, which is part of the City University of New York, have taken these Western Civ classes. “We’re trying to make them good writers, good thinkers and ultimately good citizens by talking about these deeply humane questions,” Mr. Marks says.
Studying the classics has become an anomaly on many campuses, as once-foundational texts have come under attack. The faculty at Oregon’s Reed College recently bumped up their decennial review of a required humanities course that student activists claimed was “Eurocentric,” “Caucasoid” and “oppressive.” Yale’s English Department voted in March to change its curriculum after more than 150 students signed a petition claiming “a year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color and queer folk are absent actively harms all students.” It’s now fathomable that a student could get a Yale English degree without studying Chaucer, Shakespeare or Milton.
And in 2016, Seattle University students held a weekslong sit-in to protest the classical emphasis in the humanities college, ultimately prompting the dean’s departure. One student, Zeena Rivera, complained to reporters that “the only thing they’re teaching us is dead white dudes.”
Based on demographics alone, Hostos Community College might seem like a probable place for similar protests. Hostos is in the South Bronx, in a congressional district that has repeatedly ranked the poorest in the nation. People of color account for more than 98% of the student body. Many are immigrants. In one Western Civ class, the 25 students spoke 10 foreign languages.
Like their counterparts at other colleges, Hostos students are focused on oppression and injustice. During a recent class I sat in on, slavery came up several times, and one student suggested that because of economic disparities and discrimination, “we’re still not really free.” Several students talked about how they suffered from racism and sexism.
“These students’ interest in rights and equality is just burning,” Mr. Marks says. He and Ms. Fabrizio draw on that interest with readings like the Declaration of Independence and excerpts from the Federalist Papers. Students also are given Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Fourth of July oration, which venerates America’s founding principles but notes that they are “flagrantly inconsistent” with slavery.
Students at other schools often cite this mismatch as a reason to reject the Western canon wholesale. Mr. Marks and Ms. Fabrizio say one of their goals is to cultivate critical thinking, so they encourage classroom debate—as long as students first demonstrate they’ve understood the writings and have weighed the merits of the author’s arguments.
After that, “when we see students ripping apart a classical text, we’re like, ‘Great,’ ” Mr. Marks says. But Ms. Fabrizio adds that by the end of the semester, “I think the students appreciate how revolutionary these texts actually are.”
In some cases, at least, that seems to be true. “These are books that should be taught,” says Reynaldo Martinez, a freshman studying chemical engineering. “I think the hypocrisy is not behind the papers, the writing. It’s the people. These works open your eyes to the way morality and education and equality are still needed in our society. These books don’t focus on power, because power is misleading for the purpose of a perfect life.”
Ms. Diaz, the student who was initially so skeptical, says that the class has been “really important, and not just because of language.” The 32-year-old is adjusting to civilian life after nearly seven years in the Navy. There, Ms. Diaz says, she learned to take orders unquestioningly; in Western Civ class, she’s weighing virtues and values and thinking about what it means to live well.
“First, you need to know the concept of what freedom means to be hungry for it,” Ms. Diaz says. She adds that these books “are for everyone. They were different people in different centuries, but at the end, they’re thinking about the same problems. And if we’re talking about this, it’s because we’re not where we need to be.”
Ms. Melchior is a Journal editorial page writer.
Appeared in the January 13, 2018, print edition.
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http://www.wpxi.com/news/trending-now/betsy-devos-common-core-is-dead-at-us-department-of-education/685118228
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If you care about K-12 Education and are not a Leftist, please get to know the research and writing of Kathy Kersten, most recently on the changes at Edina Schools. (eee-Dine-ah)
The district that the Left is trying to change has been one of the best and top performing districts in one of the highest rated education states. Best because of two parent families, affluence, good values, etc. What is happening in this is NOT unique to Edina schools. It is the investigative journalism funded by Center for the American Experiment that is unique. This is all happening in a school district near you too, building new little Leftists from the ground up.
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/inside-a-public-school-social-justice-factory/article/2011402
From the article: The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the “All for All” strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity.”
...
"K-2 students: “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone elses!-[sic] Everyone is special!”
...
A course description of an 11th-grade U.S. Literature and Composition course puts it this way: “By the end of the year, you will have . . . learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytical . . .lenses to literature.”
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One student characterized the course this way on the “Rate My Teachers” website: “This class should be renamed . . . ‘Why white males are bad, and how oppressive they are.’”
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"...their son and a classmate to a lengthy, humiliating and ideologically charged grilling—unlike that faced by other students—after the boys made a presentation with which she disagreed following racially-charged incidents in Ferguson, Missouri."
...
The result of all of this? Four years into the Edina schools’ equity crusade, black students’ test scores continue to disappoint. ... other than that, the news is all bad. Black students “on track for success” in reading decreased from 48.1 percent in 2014 to 44.9 percent in 2017. Math scores decreased from 49.6 percent proficiency in 2014 to 47.4 percent in 2017. Black students “on track for success” in math decreased from 51.4 percent in 2014 to 44.7 percent in 2017.
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https://www.heritage.org/education/impact/education-secretary-betsy-devos-embraces-heritages-school-choice-plan-military?utm_source=THF_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TheAgenda&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWWpkaU16aGhaVEE0TjJNeSIsInQiOiJnak0rWnY1a1AxcDJyY3JGazc5WFl4UmlvUEhsQThJTVY5KzVWNm5aY0pNcGpTYnU0Y2NJc0lXdUN6UGR3NmpuYWlqbUxFVzRIa2FpQkhPZnAyaCtuTG96Ump0ZHM2QUhmY25oMVQycWdJUEo1bkU5emtWbTVyVHhuUnBCTDJzbiJ9
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A bit scary if the creative destruction of the free market leaves you in the lurch, but , , , intriguing.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-42441366
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http://yournewswire.com/florida-school-common-core/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
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One down and 999,999 to go:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/teenager-accepted-20-top-ranked-175040558.html
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http://michellemalkin.com/2018/04/11/the-student-data-mining-scandal-under-our-noses/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/26/donald-trump-pull-feds-out-k-12-education/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/26/donald-trump-pull-feds-out-k-12-education/
The LEFT will go beyond nuts over this.
How about abolishing the DoE next?
If only we could break the Fed employee unions next as well.
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The rise of student debt has a near perfect overlap with the timeline of the decline of young people owning a home.
(http://financeography.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/studentloanshomeownership.png)
What are we teaching our kids??
http://financeography.com/millennial-home-ownership-shrinks-as-student-debt-grows/
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- Prosperity of the teachers comes ahead of best interests of the students.
- "Higher Ed" is a cartel. No one competes on price.
- Leftism doesn't believe in property ownership, except for themselves. Go to a college town and see who owns the nice houses.
- Hierarchy of the Left, Academia at the top and then media pulling the strings; Dem politicians are the puppets.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/american-educated-elite-not-educated-not-elite/
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/56356-whats-up-with-college-dropouts?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3527&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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I'll put this under education, for a high school competition but she exhibiting what they may not teach in school. A state champion golfer corrected her scorecard after the round costing her team the championship.
http://www.startribune.com/high-school-golfer-self-reports-violation-loses-state-title/484701581/
I witnessed the same thing in tennis a couple of years ago. My daughter's friend and teammate had won the decisive point in college doubles match and the other players were headed to shake hands and she stopped, said her racquet had touched the net during the volley, a violation, and she said "That's your point." They went on to finish the match and the other team won. The opposing coach wrote a letter honoring the girl and her action that was the basis for her to win the NCAA sportsmanship award.
http://athletics.stolaf.edu/news/2015/10/28/WTEN_1028151418.aspx?path=wten
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VDH in National Review today:
Reforming the university would help too, mostly by abolishing tenure, requiring an exit competence exam for the BA degree (a sort of reverse, back-end SAT or ACT exam), and ending government-subsidized student loans that promote campus fiscal irresponsibility and a curriculum that ensures future unemployment for too many students.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/origins-of-second-civil-war-globalism-tech-boom-immigration-campus-radicalism/
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DeVos’s Gainful Deregulation
Two new rules will expand options for low-income students.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos speaks during a Federal Commission on School Safety meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C., Aug. 16.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos speaks during a Federal Commission on School Safety meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C., Aug. 16. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News
348 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 17, 2018 6:58 p.m. ET
The Trump Administration’s regulatory rollback continues to be overshadowed by the White House circus. In case you missed the news late last week, the Education Department is moving to reverse two Obama rules that would have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and diminished education options for students who can’t afford tuition at Stanford or Georgetown.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is proposing to repeal the Obama Administration’s 2014 “gainful employment” rule, which was the tip of the left’s spear against for-profit colleges. Under the rule, colleges whose graduates have annual debt payments exceeding 8% of their income would lose federal student aid. Team Obama had grabbed the 8% threshold from a 2006 research paper on mortgage eligibility standards, which the authors acknowledged had no “particular merit or justification” as a gauge of manageable student debt.
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The department also applied the rule exclusively to vocational programs—i.e., for-profits—yet Monroe College President Marc Jerome calculated based on the department’s College Scorecard that 15.5% of programs at public and 41.5% at nonprofits would have failed the test. When Mrs. DeVos proposed applying the rule to all colleges, nonprofit and public colleges howled.
Colleges noted, among other things, that the metric would punish schools that enroll large numbers of low-income students who take out more debt and those whose graduates choose lower-paying jobs in public service. Many college programs could also be forced to close during recessions as wages dip even as demand for vocational training increases.
Mrs. DeVos has good reason to scrap the rule and is soliciting public comment on adding more granular data to the College Scorecard on student outcomes. This would allow a prospective student to compare the expected earnings of, say, a psychology major at the local community college to a DeVry cyber-security graduate.
If colleges intentionally mislead students, they would be held accountable under the department’s proposed revisions to the Obama “borrower defense” rule. After driving the for-profits Corinthian and ITT Technical Institute out of business, the Obama Administration established a haphazard process for discharging loans of students left in the lurch.
In their final days, Obama regulators expanded loan forgiveness to all students who claimed to have been duped. Like the gainful employment regulation, the “borrower defense” rule eviscerated due process. Students didn’t have to prove they were harmed by a college’s alleged misrepresentations—or that they were intentional—to obtain relief. Nor could colleges dispute student claims though they could be dunned for discharged loans. The rule also pleased plaintiff attorneys by banning class-action arbitration waivers.
Mrs. DeVos late last month proposed applying the same standards and procedures that courts use to adjudicate fraud claims. To discharge loans, borrowers would have to show a college made a misrepresentation with knowledge of “its false, misleading, or deceptive nature or with a reckless disregard for the truth.” Colleges will still be liable for intentional deception.
Liberals say these due process protections will prevent students from obtaining relief. But the Education Department is demonstrating it will hold colleges—regardless of their tax status—accountable by investigating Temple University’s business school for allegedly goosing its US News & World Report rankings with false test scores.
The department explains that its “goal is to enable students to make informed decisions prior to college enrollment, rather than to rely on financial remedies after the fact when lost time cannot be recouped and new educational opportunities may be sparse.” Credit to Mrs. DeVos for prioritizing student welfare over ideological hostility to “profit.”
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More Yale freshman identify LBGTQ than conservative, Protestant, Catholic or Jewish.
Same goes for the professors.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/more-yale-freshmen-identify-as-lgbtq-than-conservative/
“Yale is increasingly out of touch with America, and America is increasingly out of touch with Yale.”
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As Academic Freedom Teeters, Will the Old Become New Again?
By Ian Morris
Board of Contributors
University students in an auditorium listen to their lecturer. Despite the success of the modern university, increasing numbers of people seem to see academically free universities as a luxury they no longer wish to support.
(Shutterstock)
Contributor Perspectives offer insight, analysis and commentary from Stratfor’s Board of Contributors and guest contributors who are distinguished leaders in their fields of expertise.
Academically free universities have provided tremendous economic and cultural benefits to the United States and the West.
Despite the success of the modern university, increasing numbers of people seem to see academically free universities as a luxury they no longer wish to support.
Online education probably will dominate in a world without academically free universities, while top-tier institutions will focus on providing an expensive, individually tailored education to the children of the global elite.
American institutions seem well placed to control new platforms and revenue flows, though the question likely to arise is whether the loss of academic freedom is something to be wished for.
Academically free universities are one of the West's great strategic assets. The aim of academic freedom, as defined by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in its 1915 Declaration of Principles, is "to advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators." The payoffs from pursuing it have been enormous. According to The Times Higher Educational Supplement, only two of the world's top 50 universities are in countries that routinely restrict academic freedom (Peking University, ranked 27th, and Tsinghua University, ranked 30th), and according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, each time a country doubles its number of academically free universities, it reliably adds 4 percent to its GDP. The firm Oxford Economics calculated in 2015 that the gross value contributed by universities to Britain's GDP was £52.9 billion ($69.8 billion), 2.9 percent of the country's total. And that is just the quantifiable, hard benefits of academic freedom. Its soft-power payout is arguably even greater, with more than 1.2 million foreign students flocking to American universities in 2018.
It might seem surprising, then, that the AAUP currently sees "a concerted attack on academic freedom" in the United States, and that The New York Times and other newspapers have reported similar assaults across Europe. In one sense, of course, academic freedom has always been under attack: The AAUP issued its 1915 declaration to push back against academic freedom's critics, and the group felt the need to revise its declaration in 1925 and again in 1940 as the threats evolved. But maybe this time is different.
Academic freedom was barely a century old when the AAUP first defended it. It had been created at a particular time (the early 19th century) and in a particular place (Western Europe and North America) in response to particular conditions. But today, despite the astounding success of the modern university (globally, 32 percent of college-age students are currently enrolled in higher education), increasing numbers of people seem to think that the conditions that made academic freedom seem like such a good idea have now changed so much that academically free universities are just a luxury. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries currently spend an average of 1.6 percent of GDP on higher education because their citizens think it is good investment, but that might be changing. For thousands of years, the world did perfectly well without these institutions. Perhaps, an increasing number of people seem to think, it can do so again.
The (Relatively Cheap) Price We Pay for Academic Freedom
In both East Asia and Europe, educational institutions that can be reasonably called universities have been around for a thousand years, but before 1800 hardly any were academically free. Rather, they were what the AAUP called in 1915 "proprietary institutions." What they meant by this was that "If a church or religious denomination establishes a college … with the express understanding that the college will be used as an instrument of propaganda in the interests of the religious faith professed by the church or denomination creating it, the trustees have a right to demand that everything be subordinated to that end." Such institutions "do not … accept the principles of freedom of inquiry, of opinion, and of teaching; and their purpose is … to subsidize the promotion of opinions held by the persons, usually not of the scholar's calling, who provide the funds for their maintenance."
The difference between proprietary and academically free institutions is that the latter do not assume in advance that they know the truth, and so cannot tell professors what to think or students what to learn. In the absence of such certainty, all the institution can do is bring together experts and students and leave them to argue it out, following the path of knowledge wherever it leads, regardless of what the people paying for it might think. This is a radical idea, and takes some getting used to. One of the few things I found entertaining about being a dean at my own university was telling potential donors that if they gave us their money, we would in return give them no say whatsoever in how we spent it or who we hired with it and what they subsequently did on the donors' dime. They often looked amazed, but not, I suspect, as amazed as I looked myself when they wrote their checks anyway.
The academically free institution brings together experts and students and leaves them to follow the path of knowledge wherever it leads, regardless of what the people paying for it might think.
But, like every radical idea, this one has its downsides. The obvious one is that if academics alone can judge what counts as good scholarship, who judges the judges? Earlier this month, a trio of disaffected scholars published an expose of 20 peer-reviewed academic journals to which they had sent spoof articles. None of the authors had any prior experience in the relevant academic fields, but despite cranking out a new paper every 13 days (most professors think one or two papers per year is pretty good), they got seven of their nonsense texts accepted for publication. At the time of writing, seven more were still under review, and while six had been rejected, four journals did ask the hoaxers if they'd like to act as referees of future submissions (they declined).
Their report — "Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship," published online by Areo magazine — makes hilarious but sobering reading. The authors admit to "considerable silliness." This, they tell us, included "claiming to have tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality ('Dog Park'), becoming seemingly mystified about why heterosexual men are attracted to women ('Hooters'), insisting there is something to be learned about feminism by having four guys watch thousands of hours of hardcore pornography over the course of a year while repeatedly taking the Gender and Science Implicit Associations Test ('Porn'), expressing confusion over why people are more concerned about the genitalia others have when considering having sex with them ('CisNorm'), and recommending men anally self-penetrate in order to become less transphobic, more feminist, and more concerned about the horrors of rape culture ('Dildos')." "Considerable silliness" is quite the understatement; yet "Dog Park," "Hooters" and "Dildos" were among the seven papers accepted for publication. "CisNorm" was one of those still under review, and the editors of the journal Porn Studies had asked that "Porn" be resubmitted without its (made-up) statistical support.
Predictably, some of the duped editors found the authors' violation of "many ethical and academic norms" (as one put it) more shocking than the exposure of their own journals' vacuity, and equally predictably, some conservatives saw the whole thing as evidence that the sky is falling. Writing in London's Sunday Times, my Stanford University colleague Niall Ferguson concluded that "grievance studies" pose more of a threat to the West than cyberwar.
Both reactions are silly. This is just the cost of doing business. Free riders find ways to flourish in every walk of life, and in some academic fields — particularly the humanities, where it is often quite difficult to specify what would constitute falsification of a hypothesis — it is all too easy for pseudo-scholars to set themselves up as cartels, validating one another's writings and extracting rents from everyone else. Nor is this new. Ever since peer review was established as the only real basis for judging research, professors with nothing much to say have been building careers on dry-as-dust, jargon-ridden nonsense that no one ever reads. This is the price we pay for academic freedom, and it is relatively cheap.
Top-Tier Advantages
The obvious response to the absurdity is for academics to redouble their efforts to root out pseudo-scholars, silliness and rent-seeking. However, increasing numbers of people seem to suspect that what journals like Porn Studies and their self-righteous defenders really show is that academically free universities are not in the public interest. The ridiculous professors are not a few bad apples: They are part and parcel of a rigged system, run by self-serving elites for their own benefit.
Students of American higher education often divide colleges into four "tiers." Tier 1, at the top, contains the 154 main research universities; Tier 4, at the bottom, contains more than 1,000 less-selective, less research-oriented institutions, which between them grant 60 percent of the nation's bachelor of arts degrees. Graduates of Tier 1 colleges are roughly 10 times as likely as those from Tier 4 colleges to get into Tier 1 graduate programs. Even if a student with a Tier 4 bachelor's degree does obtain a Tier 1 higher degree, he will earn 30 percent (or, if a she, 40 percent) less than students who went to Tier 1 institutions throughout.
Nor do the advantages of getting into a Tier 1 undergraduate program end there. American higher education is staggeringly expensive. My own university, Stanford, says it costs $64,729 for one year. However, these universities are also staggeringly rich — Stanford's endowment is worth about $25 billion; Harvard's, $36 billion — and they share this largesse with their undergraduates. In 2014-15, the most recent year for which I have figures, the typical Stanford student actually paid $17,952 — still a lot, but a lot less than $64,729, and less, in fact, than students typically pay at Tier 2 and Tier 3 institutions.
Access to Tier 1 universities can produce personal wealth, and personal wealth can produce access to Tier 1 universities.
This, of course, is how a meritocracy is supposed to work, with the academically strongest universities attracting the best students, rewarding them and adding value to them throughout the process. However, it is also the case that fully 64 percent of the undergraduates in Tier 1 colleges come from families in the top 10 percent of the income distribution. At Stanford, legacies — the offspring of previous generations of Stanford students — are three times as likely to be admitted as anyone else. Access to Tier 1 universities can produce personal wealth, and personal wealth can produce access to Tier 1 universities.
With American student debt currently standing at $1.5 trillion, and the average member of the class of 2016 carrying $37,172 of that debt, it is easy to see how those who have not had access to Tier 1 universities might conclude that the entire system is rigged. If we then add in the mounting suspicions that much of what is being studied and taught in Tier 1 universities is in fact nonsense, it is no great leap to the conclusion that academic freedom is just a smoke-screen, behind which a self-perpetuating elite is exploiting its cultural capital to extract rents. As one scholar of education told The New York Times in 2014, "even if you distinguish yourself as a great student at a Tier 4 school, and by some miracle you get into a good grad program, you aren't likely to wind up with the tools you need to ever catch up to those people who went to a more selective four-year college … By high school, it's pretty much over."
This is why, if you Google the phrase "colleges are just businesses," you will get 50.7 million hits. And it's why, in 2017, Congress imposed an endowment tax on nonprofit universities that have more than 500 students and net assets of more than $500,000 per student. Even though this excise tax is only 1.4 percent, it may well be merely the opening shot.
Glimpses of a New Norm
Modern higher education is a massive, complicated structure. Even if Western electorates do decide that academic freedom is a scam, rather than a vital part of liberal democracy, it will probably take decades to unwind it — although, in what I suspect is the closest analogy, when England's King Henry VIII persuaded Parliament in 1534 that the Catholic Church was a similar scam, it only took five years to close every monastery in the land and plunder their assets.
But we can perhaps already see what the institutions of higher education might look like in a world without academically free universities. For most students, online education will probably be the norm by the mid-21st century. Early experiments with massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have had only mixed success, but if university tuition keeps rising at twice the rate of inflation, technology carries on improving and costs go on falling, it is hard to see how the trends can take us anywhere else.
Scholarship is morphing from a career into a gig.
Much of the online infrastructure might be provided by institutions that grow out of the old, campus-based universities, but a handful of residential, Tier 1 institutions — the Harvards and the Stanfords — probably will survive too. Shorn of the need to pay lip-service to 20th century egalitarian ideals, they will be free to concentrate on their core mission of providing an extremely expensive, face-to-face, individually tailored experience for the children of the global elite (much as universities did before the 20th century). The rich will get richer. But plenty of the best and brightest 18-year-olds will probably decide that they don't need even these services from brick-and-mortar universities. Already, the maverick tech billionaire Peter Thiel is offering some students up to $100,000 to drop out of college and start their own businesses.
The professoriate, which currently boasts 1.6 million members in the United States alone, will surely shrink sharply. The 20th century ideal of academia as a lifelong vocation is already in retreat — 45 percent of American academics were tenured in 1975, but by 2015 the figure was just 25 percent, and full-time positions now make up just half of the total. Scholarship is morphing from a career into a gig.
Profound as this transformation would be, none of it will necessarily affect the West's domination of both the hard- and soft-power dimensions of higher education. American institutions seem far better placed than any rivals to control the new platforms and revenue flows. But is it something to be wished for? As a fan of academic freedom, warts and all, I suspect that the only way to decide will be by frank and forthright argument among communities of experts. But that, of course, is just what you would expect a professor to say.
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"An Asian-American applicant with a 25 percent chance of admission would have a 35 percent chance if he were white, a 75 percent chance if he were Hispanic, and a 95 percent chance if he were black."
https://www.city-journal.org/racial-balancing-by-colleges-16237.html
We just don't like him or her 'personally'.
It's all exposed now. "Students for Fair Admission will get its day in a Massachusetts federal district court on allegations that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants."
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Funny that our Ed thread is under humanities, not politics.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/05/9-years-common-core-test-scores-indoctrination/
9 Years Into Common Core, Test Scores Are Down, Indoctrination Up
The latest English ACT scores are slightly down since 2007, and students’ readiness for college-level English was at its lowest level since ACT’s creators began measuring that item, in 2002. Students’ preparedness for college-level math is at its lowest point since 2004.
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On a positive note with declining achievement and lowering standards, at least these illiterate, math challenged kids will be qualified to teach.
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'Funny that our Ed thread is under humanities, not politics.'
Good point.
I can think of other threads that would be more fitting such as "cognitive dissonance of the left"
or social justice warriors
or maybe a new thread on "unions"
or maybe under government programs
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from a school because he doesn't espouse victimization and preach the old tired racism mantra or reparations stuff:
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/removing-ben-carsons-name-from-a-detroit-high-school-wont-help-the-students-dismal-academic-results/
Not withstanding he is a shining example of pre eminent success from a poor background.
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That's odd. When this thread was started, Education was thought to be more a part of Culture and Humanities than of Politics. It's too bad the Leftists who control American Education don't think of it that way!
Speaking of Leftists' pretend ideals, what happened to the promise of making a college education more affordable?
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James Freeman, WSJ Opinion
https://outline.com/uTafgH
Remember When Politicians Promised to Make College Affordable?
JAMES FREEMAN JANUARY 17, 2019
Most Americans can’t remember a time when politicians weren’t claiming to make education more affordable by funneling more money to colleges. But after the latest surge in “affordability” policies, implemented over the last decade, the staggering costs are becoming clear.
Josh Mitchell and Laura Kusisto report in the Journal:
The Federal Reserve has linked rising student debt to a drop in homeownership among young Americans...
Most Americans can’t remember a time when politicians weren’t claiming to make education more affordable by funneling more money to colleges. But after the latest surge in “affordability” policies, implemented over the last decade, the staggering costs are becoming clear.
The Federal Reserve has linked rising student debt to a drop in homeownership among young Americans and the flight of college graduates from rural areas, two big shifts that have helped reshape the U.S. economy.
The effect of student debt on the economy has been debated in recent years, as the total has soared to $1.5 trillion, surpassing Americans’ credit-card and car-loan bills.
Expanding federal grants and loans to finance higher education has predictably given colleges the ability to raise prices, which in turn requires students to take on even more debt to pay the new higher prices.
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[Doug] Does that remind anyone of what happened when we made health care "affordable", and when government decided to make housing 'affordable'?
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[Back to the article]
It’s not a new story. In 1965 Washington launched a program to make college “affordable” by offering a taxpayer guarantee on student loans. By an amazing coincidence college costs have been rising much faster than inflation ever since.
[Remind anyone of healthcare, housing?]
Despite decades of data showing that colleges were simply pocketing the new subsidies by raising prices on students, many politicians have been unable to resist the urge to send more money to campus. In June of 2008, the Detroit News reported on a presidential candidate who just happened to be a former university professor. The newspaper covered his appearance in Taylor, Michigan:
A tearful Wayne County Community College student got advice and encouragement from Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday, as he touted his plan to improve financial aid and tax credits to college students.
Marilyn Pace is about $1,500 short of paying for tuition and supplies for her dental hygiene studies, she told Obama at a meeting arranged by his aides. After she described the costs of supplies and exams, gas to get to and from classes and her father’s disability, which keeps him from working, a financial aid counselor told her and Obama that private loans should be able to close her financial gap – prompting tears from her and encouraging words from the candidate.
“You’re doing a good job,” he told Pace. “The key is just hanging in there. But you’re making good choices.”
Pace later introduced Obama to a small group of WCCC students, where he described his proposal for a $4,000-a-year tax credit to help pay college costs and to reform the federal student loan market.
“I will make college affordable for every American. Period,” Obama promised the students.
He didn’t keep the promise because he didn’t make good choices. In 2010 he enacted still another expansion of the federal role in financing higher education. More “affordability” initiatives followed. Speaking at the University at Buffalo in 2013, Mr. Obama had to acknowledge that his promise still hadn’t been kept:
This is something that everybody knows you need -- a college education. On the other hand, college has never been more expensive. Over the past three decades, the average tuition at a public four-year college has gone up by more than 250 percent -- 250 percent. Now, a typical family’s income has only gone up 16 percent...
So the bottom line is this -- we’ve got a crisis in terms of college affordability and student debt... The problem is, is that even if the federal government keeps on putting more and more money in the system, if the cost is going up by 250 percent, tax revenues aren’t going up 250 percent -- and so at some point, the government will run out of money, which means more and more costs are being loaded on to students and their families.
Audience members might have hoped that Mr. Obama had finally learned that more government subsidies weren’t the answer. But in January of 2016 CNBC reported:
In his final State of the Union address, President Barack Obama touched on the student debt crisis and emphasized the problem with college affordability.
“We have to make college affordable for every American, because no hardworking student should be stuck in the red,” the president said Tuesday night.
“We’ve actually got to cut the cost of college. Providing two years of community college at no cost for every responsible student is one of the best ways to do that, and I’m going to keep fighting to get that started this year,” he added.
Has all of this taxpayer money and all of this student debt at least fulfilled the stated objective of allowing more people of modest means to earn degrees? This week the Journal’s Jason Riley reviewed the results:
In 1970, about 12% of recent college grads came from the bottom 25% of the income distribution. Today, it’s about 10%.
Education “affordability” is among the most expensive promises politicians have ever broken.
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[Doug]
The more government/taxpayer money we inject, the worse it gets.
The more we move away from market discipline on costs, the worse it gets.
The debt is screwing up a a generation. Not to mention that the government money injected is all debt too that will be left to fall on the next generation.
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Two terms new to me in liberal-speak education:
"E-12" now replaces the term K-12 in terms of government funding and control with the E meaning Early Childhood replacing the K of Kindergarden as the government's first touch of your children. We are not talking about pre-school, we are talking about everything starting from birth [sooner if they admitted it was a life in there].
Second, Leftist politicians now talk about "Cradle to Career", meaning government involvement and control is not limited to k-12 classroom curricula but includes lunch, breakfast, after school, break and what is happening at home - at any age even into adulthood.
If you think government involvement in education ends at high school graduation you are probably a racist conservative living in the 1950s, in their view.
Oddly, the more they touch the worse it gets.
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Deep implications in those two terms!
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March 19, 2019
By George Friedman
Geopolitical Futures
American Universities Are in Crisis
Elite universities are once again looking for social conformists rather than disrupters.
Last week, dozens of wealthy parents were charged for allegedly paying a firm to cheat on college entrance exams or bribe officials to get their children accepted into elite colleges. The number of people involved in the scam is small, so the case itself has proved little except that all human institutions can be corrupted. But there’s a broader point that must be considered. This case is an indicator of a profound crisis at American universities. I know that profound crises have become a dime a dozen, manufactured by people like me with writing deadlines, but I ask you to bear with me.
We live in a knowledge-based economy. Our universities are the social institutions designed to produce and educate the next generation that will participate in that economy. But the best universities do more than this. They teach those outside elite circles the manners and customs of power. They allow them to meet others who will form the networks of authority that are indispensable to society. If you go to Harvard, you likely won’t learn any more about biology in your freshman year than you would at a state school. But you will learn something that isn’t taught by professors but is still vitally important: how to fit into the structure and customs of influence.
Harvard is blunt about this, though it might be unaware how blunt it is. The school’s website lists several factors considered in the admissions process. One is particularly striking: “Would other students want to room with you, share a meal, be in a seminar together, be teammates, or collaborate in a closely knit extracurricular group?” In other words, the school wants to know if an applicant will conform to the social order. Eccentrics and non-conformists – people who have radically different views that might be offensive to some – are not really welcome.
There is, of course, always the socially acceptable oddity, but the real outlanders, the ones who have beliefs or interests that would cause them not to attract roommates, are screened out.
According to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, about 12 percent of Harvard’s student body is Republican. But it’s unlikely students with conservative views would, for example, wear MAGA hats or organize pro-life rallies because most students likely wouldn’t want to room with them if they did, and that would make them a bad fit for Harvard. What’s missing in all this is the idea that you should be required to work and learn with people who you profoundly disagree with and face the fact that those who disagree with you may be not only reasonable but even right.
Many will leap on the political imbalance in the student body, but the more important issue is that Harvard bases its admissions policy on social conformity. And in doing so, it undermines one of its most important claims: that it promotes social diversity. As in the 1920s, elite schools now are looking for students who would fit in, not those who have different or uncomfortable perspectives on life. It should be the role of a university to, as H.L. Mencken and others said about newspapers, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
The American university system was transformed after World War II by the GI Bill, which provided educational assistance to veterans. They flooded the nation’s universities and were admitted into some of its top schools. They did superbly and created the mass professional class that powered the nation through the 1970s. The GIs were mostly men, many of whom faced the abyss and saw it smile back at them. Many others had not been in combat but understood discipline and knew that life did not have to be pleasant, but had to be lived. They had to live with strangers they may not have liked. They never expected to be surrounded only by people who had similar views and experiences as they did. They understood diversity in a personal way and were there to learn the skills they would need in the next phase of life.
During this time, money flowed into universities from the federal government. The Manhattan Project, the U.S.-led effort to develop an atomic bomb, turned universities into centers for national security research. They were an integral part of American life and, in the 1950s and 1960s, included the best of Europe’s emigre scholars. While teaching for a short time at Louisiana State University in the mid-1990s, I remember discovering that the legacy of German political philosopher Eric Voegelin, who fled Germany in the 1930s and taught as LSU, was still alive and well.
When I went to college, candidates were still judged on their merits, but the ideological battle had already surfaced at Cornell and was developing into a discussion of what was and wasn’t socially acceptable at Harvard. Having the wrong point of view (and I always seemed to have the wrong point of view) could get you barred from grad school parties, and debates on the Vietnam War began redrawing the lines of propriety as they had been before the war.
Today, that divide seems even deeper. According to a study cosponsored by the College Board, there are 800,000 veterans or family members of veterans enrolled in U.S. colleges under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Only 722, however, are enrolled at the country’s 36 most selective universities. That’s a stunning reversal of the numbers under the previous GI Bill. What that bill broke open more than 70 years ago is now closed.
This is part of the nation’s upward mobility problem. The lower-middle class has an average annual income of about $35,000. That leaves a take-home pay of about $2,500 a month, barely enough to rent an apartment, much less buy a house. I grew up in a lower-middle-class family. We had a small house and a car, but these days, that would be nearly impossible. For families facing such circumstances, getting a university education gives some hope that they’ll be able to improve their lot in life. Some of these students may even have the qualifications to get into an elite college, but the question remains whether they would be accepted in such schools. Would, say, a devout Catholic from a lower-middle-class home in Michigan be welcomed at Harvard? Would the university support such diversity?
Here’s a radical idea. I taught political philosophy for many years, and I noted that my students were less than thrilled to prowl through Plato. At 19 years old, a student’s hormones are raging and the desire to be liked by others is at its peak. Plato has little to do with any of this. The idea of going to university at this age originated in the Middle Ages when the university was created and life expectancy was in the mid-30s. Now, life expectancy is about 80, and a 40-year-old would be far more willing to learn about Plato than a 19-year-old. A 40-year-old student can understand the importance of justice; a 19-year-old can understand only that class will be over shortly.
Universities are failing in two ways. First, they have slipped back into the role of gatekeeper for the conformists. Second, they seem incapable of playing their historic role in not just promoting upward mobility but integrating the brightest of the poor with the existing elite. That was a vital function, and as everyone knows, unrest begins when the most intelligent youngsters have no hope left.
The university has become the major bar to the kind of social ferment the United States has always enjoyed. The problem started when universities stopped focusing on achievement and tried to admit students based on personal characteristics that were impossible to verify. The result was inevitable. They recruited students who were intelligent, likeable and liked. Plato wrote about Socrates, who was put to death for being an ass. I guess he wouldn’t have been accepted into Harvard either.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/news/mark-levin-bill-bennett-discuss-left-warped-public-education-young-american-minds/
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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/dr-dre-brags-daughter-getting-182453674.html
I didn't know USC was such and elite school. :|
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Around LA it is said the initials USC stand for University of Spoiled Children and that UCLA stands for University of Caucasians Lost among Asians.
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https://thefederalist.com/2018/11/05/9-years-common-core-test-scores-indoctrination/
ACT scores released earlier this month show that students’ math achievement is at a 20-year low. The latest English ACT scores are slightly down since 2007, and students’ readiness for college-level English was at its lowest level since ACT’s creators began measuring that item, in 2002. Students’ preparedness for college-level math is at its lowest point since 2004.
...
During the Obama administration, writes Harvard professor Paul Peterson, “No substantively significant nationwide gains were registered for any of the three racial and ethnic groupings in math or reading at either 4th or 8th grade.”
...
the evidence indicates that at best Common Core made negligible improvements, and at worst it’s reduced student achievement, all while soaking up huge amounts of time and money. The years of small but visible achievement growth under George W. Bush have been replaced by zero growth under and after Obama.
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Who could have predicted all this?
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https://reason.com/2019/05/02/10-colleges-where-you-wont-have-to-walk-on-eggshells/?utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR0kIBm8MILKm2Tv3gw7PI2shKDYlIlF-dpZMY_YuE6EYF_RwizixRZNLcA
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/dsa-marxists-target-school-board-races-in-wisconsin-los-angeles_2892533.html?ref=brief_Opinions&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=6ef3c1f0d9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_09_09_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-6ef3c1f0d9-239065853
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https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/finally-seeing-full-scope-common-cores-damage/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2019-05-31&utm_campaign=manualpost&fbclid=IwAR2OuR7u0A5CdHTltdMPlTlGEKzg1AFTj6D9MvNKcOr_IHoGxglbq9muVcs
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http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will060819.php3
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http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will060819.php3
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/05/20/how-about-some-adversity-points-for-hardworking-kids-of-hardworking-parents-n2546541
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agree with Kurt
making an adversity score as factor for college admissions will also lead to its being used for other things.
like ensuring the Democrat Party supports people in a way to ensure more votes for itself.
Thinks the Communists in China now scaring all their citizens to ensure they are in control of thinking , freedom of thought and behavior
The elites and all the other cheats will simply change their strategy
instead of making up phony athletic participations have other take their tests , cheat on the tests,
the NEW
scam will be
to "color your application " with "ADVERSITY".
Such as:
I grew up living out of car.
My father ditched the family after I was born.
We had no money
Had to work 7 jobs while in high school to pay for books
I have grandparents who are black, native American, Muslim , and one who fleed Venezuela long ago.
....... maybe admitting , if female, you had 2 abortions already would also be a few points in one's favor
Or one of the LBGTQ and the rest for even more points....
:-o
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you say what .
So does Walt Williams:
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2019/06/19/black-education-decline-n2548373
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Please post in Race thread as well.
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you say what ? :-o
So does Walt Williams:
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2019/06/19/black-education-decline-n2548373
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Please post in Race thread as well
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/amy-coney-barrett-strikes-a-blow-against-campus-kangaroo-courts/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-07-02&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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This guy is , and always has been so crazy. To think he is a "professor"
Just to show how meaningless that title is:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/megan-rapinoe-science-is-science_n_5d22b3f6e4b04c4814163c9e
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to save money for their children to go to College:
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/illinois-college-scholarships-034913070.html
Frankly I do not blame them.
Why not? I am sure they are sick and tired of having to subsidize other people's kids.....
(of course not mentioned in the Huff compost article)
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/mayors-diversity-panel-recommends-scrapping-gifted-programs-at-new-york-city-schools-11566863093?mod=hp_listb_pos1
A diversity panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for New York City to stop using academic criteria to screen applicants for admission to public middle schools, and to phase out elementary gifted-and-talented programs that now require a test.
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Why would you want to educate the gifted?
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Ronal Reagan ! :roll: :roll: :roll:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/college-cost-indebted-zaloom/597181/
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I struggled with where to post this as it crosses lines with education, religion, gender roles, anti-victimization, economics and anti-politically-correct free speech.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-feminist-capitalist-professor-under-fire-11567201511
Not fair to just excerpt the parts I like. She sings a different tune and therefore they want her out.
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https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/10/02/support-kaplan-purdue-launches-low-cost-edx-degrees
Purdue is a top ten engineering school in the country:
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools/eng-rankings
Change.
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why should the creditors be forced to eat this?
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trump-education-official-resigns-student-loans-141706667.html
why not like in other markets ?
if colleges cannot get their fees down the go out of business
stop supplementing them.
I guarantee that will changes things - fast/.
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America’s Schools Flunk
Despite more spending, test scores fall and the achievement gap grows.
By The Editorial Board
Oct. 30, 2019 6:49 pm ET
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
The highest-achieving students are doing better and the lowest are doing worse than a decade ago. That’s one depressing revelation from the latest Nation’s Report Card that details how America’s union-run public schools are flunking.
The results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is administered to students around the country every two years, were published on Wednesday. There isn’t much to cheer. Only 35% of fourth graders rated proficient in reading, which is about the same as in 2009. Worse, students have backslid in reading over the last two years.
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While median math and reading scores have stayed about the same over the last decade, achievement gaps are increasing. Since 2009 scores for the lowest 10% of students fell by about as much as they improved for the top 10%. The 90th percentile of eighth graders in math scored about four points higher while the bottom tenth scored five points lower.
It’s also distressing that the learning gap between black and white students hasn’t budged since 2009. Hispanics showed significant improvement in reading between 1992 and 2013 but their gains have since stalled. Average scores for English-language learners have ticked up slightly since 2009, though the disparity between low-income kids and everyone else has stayed flat.
The academic stagnation has been pervasive. Over the last two years, scores in fourth-grade reading declined in 17 states while improving in one—Mississippi. Eighth graders scored lower in reading in 31 states while increasing only in Washington, D.C. Eighth-grade math scores have improved in only Washington, D.C., Mississippi and Louisiana.
Washington, D.C., has been the biggest school reform success story over the last decade. Twice as many fourth and eighth graders score proficient in math than in 2009. Proficiency in reading has likewise increased by about 10 percentage points, and the learning gap between whites and blacks has significantly shrunk. What accounts for these improvements?
For one, charter-school enrollment in Washington has increased by nearly 60% since 2009. Studies have shown that charters have increased competition and thereby raised student performance at traditional public schools. Former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s teacher tenure and merit pay reforms are also paying learning dividends.
The teachers unions’ answer to every education deficit is more spending. But between 2012 and 2017—the last year of available Census Bureau data—average per-pupil education spending increased by 15%. Spending has been growing at an even faster clip over the last couple of years as government revenue has recovered from the recession.
States that are spending more haven’t shown improvement. In California annual K-12 spending has increased by more than half since 2013 to $102 billion. Yet student test scores have been flat since 2013. It’s a similar story in New York, Illinois and New Jersey where Democrats have raised taxes for schools.
Much of the money has gone to fund teacher pensions and administrative positions that pad union rolls. Maybe parents should go on strike to demand more accountability from the union-run public school monopoly.
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"The young congresswoman shared a childhood story about how her family made financial sacrifices to leave the Bronx and buy a house in Westchester so that she could attend school in a higher quality district."
https://reason.com/2019/10/22/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-accidentally-makes-the-case-for-school-choice/
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Can everyone make that choice?
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"Some animals are more equal than others".
"The young congresswoman shared a childhood story about how her family made financial sacrifices to leave the Bronx and buy a house in Westchester so that she could attend school in a higher quality district."
https://reason.com/2019/10/22/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-accidentally-makes-the-case-for-school-choice/
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Can everyone make that choice?
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I don't know if this is the right thread
but here goes:
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/01/01/colleges-dupe-parents-and-taxpayers-n2558704
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Exactly the right place 8-)
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https://clarionproject.org/6-prominent-us-universities-failed-to-disclose-1-3-billion-in-foreign-funding/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c8d535d346-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_12_03_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-c8d535d346-6358189&mc_cid=c8d535d346
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"The letter also notes that “Qatari ‘donations’ to American colleges and universities are made strategically to advance Qatari interests.”
You mean they did it to buy influence ? what a shock
"The universities named by the Department of Education were Georgetown, Texas A&M, Cornell, Rutgers, the University of Maryland and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
I graduated med school from Rutgers (after starting in Grenada) . Rutgers is one of the most militant progressive social justice warrior universities around
I know two people who went to Georgetown Law........ :wink:
"China, Qatar and Russia were some of the sources of foreign funding that went unreported."
I remember when I lived in Arlington outside of DC
during the Iranian crisis at the end of the Carter administration seeing hundreds of Iranians facing off Americans at the picket lines screaming down with America. I was in shock and asked some people what are all these Iranians doing here. The response was don't you know? Iranians built the engineering building. ( at George Washington U.)
All for altruistic reasons.
Like the Hollywood types etc.
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https://reason.com/2020/01/28/1619-project-new-york-times-public-schools/
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https://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/953269/212
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This is good news!
The block grants should provide some political inoculation.
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I went to Sarah Lawrence for my first two years of college.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/former-felon-sarah-lawrence-parent-arrested-for-sex-trafficking-abusing-students
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I went to Sarah Lawrence for my first two years of college.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/former-felon-sarah-lawrence-parent-arrested-for-sex-trafficking-abusing-students
Most disturbing story I have seen in a very long time.
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Rahm Emanuel went to SLC too.
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https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/public-schools-are-teaching-our-children-to-hate-america/
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https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/harvard-not-paying-all-workers-during-coronavirus-shutdown-despite-40-9b-endowment/
Evil capitalists? No. Evil, greedy, selfish Marxists. Is that really who we want to rule us? Or even to educate us?
When they re-open, let them do it without food service workers.
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https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/harvard-not-paying-all-workers-during-coronavirus-shutdown-despite-40-9b-endowment/
Evil capitalists? No. Evil, greedy, selfish Marxists. Is that really who we want to rule us? Or even to educate us?
When they re-open, let them do it without food service workers.
watch
they probably can get something from the 2 trillion deal
most likely it wa s all harvard /wall street people coming up with the "Bail out " "for the People' for "workers and their families". rah rah
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https://www.nas.org/reports/the-lost-history-of-western-civilization/full-report
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https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/roots-partisan-divide/
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/70109-no-free-thought-harvard-prof-calls-for-homeschooling-ban-2020-04-22?mailing_id=5008&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5008&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14700
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/4/23/harvard-china-scrutiny/
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https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-americans-were-poorly-educated-before-mass-government-schooling/
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https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/1619-project-pulitzer-center-education-programming
The Pulitzer Center is proud to be the education partner for The 1619 Project, which is inaugurated by a special issue of The New York Times Magazine. Click here for our curricular resources, including a reading guide for the issue, activities to engage students, and more.
----------------------------------
Did they mention in the award criteria, we prefer authors and publications we are in bed with?
The only problems with the 1619 Project is that, a) it is wrong from start to finish, and b) it is designed to further divide us along racial lines for at least another generation.
Or as educators might say, perfect.
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https://freebeacon.com/national-security/harvard-canceled-human-rights-event-as-its-president-met-with-xi-jinping/?utm_source=actengage&utm_campaign=FreedomMail&utm_medium=email
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https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rep-michael-waltz-chinese-infiltration-of-us-colleges-results-in-massive-theft-of-our-research
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https://clarionproject.org/us-at-tip-of-the-iceberg-in-uncovering-china-college-funding-scandal/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=01b94dc740-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_05_11_02_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-01b94dc740-6358189&mc_cid=01b94dc740
https://clarionproject.org/china-college-funding-scandal-gets-worse/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=01b94dc740-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_05_11_02_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-01b94dc740-6358189&mc_cid=01b94dc740
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California’s College Testing Mistake
The state university system puts racial politics above merit.
By The Editorial Board
May 22, 2020 7:20 pm ET
Thursday’s decision by the University of California regents to eliminate the SAT and ACT in admissions is a historic blow to excellence in higher education. Applicants to the largest university system in the U.S. will now be judged entirely on how well they can flatter admissions bureaucracies with coached personal statements, as well as high school grade-point averages whose meanings are obscured by grade inflation.
The UC started using the SAT in the 1960s to find talented students from modest backgrounds. As an exhaustive faculty senate report—ignored by university leadership—put it this year, “This original intent is clearly being realized at UC.” Yet diversity bean-counting has displaced the philosophy of merit and excellence that made the UC the envy of the world in the last century. The claim that math and reading tests discriminate against minorities (except Asians) easily won the day, never mind the evidence.
California’s political class is desperate to create a different racial makeup at the UC, and it sees testing as an obstacle. The SAT shines a light on failures and inequalities in California’s public K-12 school system. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend low-quality schools which because of unions are nearly impossible to reform. For California’s political class the convenient solution is to ban tests—concealing the achievement gap while congratulating themselves on a commitment to equity and inclusion.
The result is that wealthy students will find the system easier to game, and more students of all races who aren’t ready will be thrust into UC schools. If that happens on a large scale, the rigor of instruction will have to fall to keep graduation rates up and the value of degrees may erode.
California was a bellwether when it started using the SAT 60 years ago, so some think this week’s move heralds the beginning of the end for testing nationwide. Yet few other schools have made moves as radical as UC’s. The University of Chicago made headlines in 2018 by going test-optional, but 85% to 90% of admitted applicants still submitted a score last year.
The higher education business model was already under pressure before the coronavirus, and the recession may force deep cuts in the UC. The regents’ political move to compromise educational quality against faculty advice does not bode well for the future of a system that for decades was an engine of opportunity.
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Is the SAT Really the Problem?
Family breakdown causes serious disadvantages when it comes to college.
By William McGurn
May 25, 2020 12:32 pm ET
When the University of California announced it will stop using the SAT and ACT for admissions, it sent tremors through the world of higher education. If only because of its sheer size—the UC system covers 285,000 students over several campuses—others are bound to follow.
Thursday’s decision by the Board of Regents was taken, as are so many decisions in academia these days, in the name of equity and diversity. Requiring SAT scores, the argument goes, discriminates against low-income, black and Latino children who perform poorly on the tests because they lack advantages such as prep courses. To amp up the pressure, a coalition of students and activist groups filed suit in November against the Board of Regents, challenging the SAT requirement on these grounds.
Undeniably wealth is a big advantage. But if the idea is to address what’s keeping children from a college degree, instead of papering over the achievement gap, it might be better to address the elephant in the room: family.
It’s taboo to raise it, but for all the invocations of “science” and “data-driven decisions,” seldom is any recognition given to what the data tell us about the most privileged kids of all: those living with their biological parents under the same roof.
“Family structure is about as important as family income in predicting who graduates from college today,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. “In the absence of SAT scores, which can pinpoint kids from difficult family backgrounds with great academic potential, family stability is likely to loom even larger in determining who makes it past the college finish line in California.”
The data are pretty conclusive. The more intact the family, the better the education outcomes. In a new IFS study released Monday, research psychologist Nicholas Zill reports that when it comes to graduation from top colleges, “students from intact families are twice as likely to do so as those from all other family types combined.”
Who Gets Through College?
Likelihood of graduating from a selective college within 10 years, by livingarrangement as a high-school sophomore
Source: Nicholas Zill for the Institute for Family Studies, May 2020
Married birth parents
Widowed mom or dad
Divorced mother
Separated/divorced dad
Adoptive parents
Birth & step parent
Foster parents
Separated mother
Cohabitating birthparents
Never married mother
Grandparents
0%
5
10
15
20
By dropping SATs, UC hopes to produce a student body that includes higher percentages of blacks and Latinos. This requires discrediting the SATs as an indicator of college performance (a point contested by the UC Academic Senate). It also requires finding a way to make room for the students it wants by reducing the number of Asian-Americans (13.6% of California’s population but 29.5% of UC undergraduates). This is why the Asian American Coalition for Education warned the regents that, without the SAT, Asian-American applicants will “become easy victims of various radical acts of racial balancing.”
Wenyuan Wu, who addressed the regents on the coalition’s behalf, tells me she cringes whenever the anti-SAT crowd invokes the “racial/socioeconomic biases argument.” She asks: “What about those Chinatown kids whose parents toil in ethnic enclaves with low incomes and tremendous language barriers?” Which raises a further indelicate question: Is it a coincidence that Asian-Americans, who disproportionately earn entry into UC, disproportionately come from intact families?
If it’s unjust that rich kids get test prep from their parents, why doesn’t the university simply come up with a good prep course and provide it free to anyone who wants it? If the rejoinder is that the wealthy kids enjoy the further advantage of better schools, why do so many SAT opponents also reject measures that might help level the playing field—vouchers and charter schools come to mind—by giving underserved kids the opportunity of going to a good school too?
The modern American university isn’t afraid to weigh in when it comes to issues outside its direct purview. Two days before UC announced its decision on the SAT, it boasted of having completely divested from fossil fuels. But when it comes to addressing a major factor keeping students out of its system and thus widening the achievement gap—crickets.
As Charles Murray noted in “Coming Apart” (2012), the data showing the advantage to children of living with their biological parents across a range of outcomes are broadly accepted by social scientists. But those data are “resolutely” ignored by “network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.” Not to mention the UC regents.
“Given the science,” Mr. Wilcox says, “why can’t universities bring themselves to tell the truth that if you’d like your kids to get a college degree—especially from a selective college—you’d do well to get and stay married?”
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
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https://www.gingrich360.com/2020/06/three-generations-of-brainwashing-pays-off-for-the-left/
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2020/06/22/biden-reaffirms-plan-to-cancel-student-debt-reduce-racial-inequality/
cancel debt???
how about we make professors work for school teacher wages and lower costs
then we can see how much they like socialism
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The Trump Administration says, open the schools this fall. Some families have grandparents at home, don't want the kids going back to school. Fine. Homeschool. No school is not an option. The schools have more control over the kids being open then having them just run free all day.
https://fee.org/articles/back-to-school-no-thanks-say-millions-of-new-homeschooling-parents/
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I think they should get 15 an hour. Seems fair.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2020/06/22/biden-reaffirms-plan-to-cancel-student-debt-reduce-racial-inequality/
cancel debt???
how about we make professors work for school teacher wages and lower costs
then we can see how much they like socialism
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence/
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Holding Colleges Accountable To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury, Chief Economist
Robert Stein, Deputy Chief Economist
Date: 7/13/2020
It's time to think about something other than COVID, statues, the election, and defunding the police. How about higher education? Specifically, student loans and grants.
Just like the bipartisan efforts to making housing more affordable, these programs were well-intentioned. But, also like the housing market, they have led to serious problems. The US has about $1.5 trillion in student debt outstanding, more than subprime mortgage loans in 2007. We're not worried these loans will cause a collapse in the economy, but they are a major burden that must be dealt with at some point
The debate about student loans isn't easy. One side argues that, if young adults are having trouble paying, they should have known better, gone to a different college, or taken classes that taught more marketable skills. Maybe they shouldn't have gone to college at all. The other side says that's why we need to "forgive" these loans, it's not the students' fault; they were told a college degree is a key to the American Dream.
What both sides are missing is that student loans have become a jobs and wage subsidy program for college professors and administrators. They, not the students, are the primary beneficiaries. The government is using young adults to deliver money to the intellectual class, much of whom is utterly lacking in marketable skills, and deeply hostile toward Western Civilization in general (and free-market capitalism in particular).
A large portion of the revenue that funds academics' salaries comes from the government. According to the GDP accounts, the value of higher education services totaled $196 billion in 2019. Meanwhile, housing and meals at schools totaled $57 billion. For comparison, federal loans and grants totaled $134 billion in the 2018-19 school year, with an additional $13 billion in state grants. And these figures exclude direct spending sent to colleges themselves. In other words, a substantial part of college funding is supported by government spending.
Imagine if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announced a program to buy all the mortgages that banks made to 18 year olds who bought homes with no money down. Obviously, that policy would lead to disaster and excessive homeownership among teenagers, who would have little idea of the long-term consequences. Well, that's what's happened with colleges. Except a mortgage has a home collateralizing the loan. You can't foreclose on a degree in poetry.
Unfortunately, both sides of the political spectrum would keep the gravy train for privileged academics intact, no matter how absurd, useless, or harmful the "education" they provide, and no matter how much these institutions impinge on the free speech of their students.
So, here are some suggestions to end the windfall for the intellectual class and make them put some skin in the game.
First, just like new banking rules that were passed after the subprime crisis, let's require 50% claw-backs of federal loan money from a college if its students don't repay. If they default, students will still be on the hook for 50% themselves. And if a college thinks a defaulting former student could repay the full amount, let the college go after the student for the other 50%.
Second, because colleges have abused their charitable status and engage in political activity, they should no longer be tax exempt. Third, wealthy colleges with massive endowments should be taxed like the hedge funds that they are.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's time policymakers take a different route on higher education.
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best wesbury post yet.
along the lines of my thoughts too.
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I don't recall students running the show in college 45 yrs ago, I wouldn't even have dreamed of anything like this.
getting a UPD chief to apologize for flag that respects police?? just nuts
these kids don't pay the bills
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/07/16/west-virginia-u-police-chief-faces-calls-for-firing-over-pro-police-flag-in-home/
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I don't recall students running the show in college 45 yrs ago, I wouldn't even have dreamed of anything like this.
...
http://www.northrop.umn.edu/events/takeover-morrill-hall-1969
On January 14-15, 1969, approximately 70 Black students from the University of Minnesota took over Morrill Hall, the administration building housing the Office of the President
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Minnesota
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Not Satisfied With Just Having Summers Off, Teachers Push For Fall, Winter, Spring too. - Babylon Bee
https://babylonbee.com/news/not-satisfied-with-just-having-summers-off-teachers-push-for-fall-winter-spring/
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenmcbride1/2020/07/21/why-college-is-never-coming-back/#69ba127024b7
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https://english.rutgers.edu/news-events/department/5875-department-actions-in-solidarity-with-black-lives-matter.html
https://freebeacon.com/campus/rutgers-declares-grammar-racist/
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English grammar bad
Ebonics good
yeah right
AT this point the only thing Americans will have in common is our reliance on the State as well as being controlled by the State
with the AOCs of the Left telling us how to live with lawfare .
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ewtE0nk4tQ&feature=youtu.be
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School closures ‘a mistake’ as no teachers infected in classroom
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/school-closures-a-mistake-as-no-teachers-infected-in-classroom-gpppq8r7k
The Times ^ | July 22 2020 | Mark McLaughlin,
Scientists are yet to find a single confirmed case of a teacher catching coronavirus from a pupil anywhere in the world, a leading epidemiologist has said. Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Edinburgh University, offered reassurance to staff preparing for the full reopening of schools next month. Professor Woolhouse, a member of the UK government’s scientific advisory group, Sage, said that in hindsight closing schools in March was probably a mistake, but the limited role children play in spreading the virus only became clear further along the infection curve.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/school-closures-a-mistake-as-no-teachers-infected-in-classroom-gpppq8r7k
Shut 'em down. But don't say it was because of the virus.
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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/07/schroedingers-1619-project.php
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The Virus May Strike Teachers Unions
What happens when they refuse to do their jobs and it turns out home-schoolers are better at it anyway?
By David R. Henderson
July 29, 2020 12:38 pm ET
If you have school-age children, you may be wondering if they’ll ever get an education. On Tuesday the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest education union, threatened “safety strikes” if reopening plans aren’t to its liking. Some state and local governments are insisting that public K-12 schooling this fall be conducted online three to five days a week and imposing stringent conditions on those students who actually make it to the classroom.
Yet there are three reasons to be optimistic about the future of education. First, many parents will be more prepared to home-school their kids than they were in the spring. They or their hired teachers will do a better job of educating children, in many cases, than the public schools.
Second, once the pandemic ends, many parents, perhaps millions, will have a new appreciation of how mediocre a job the public schools were doing. They will continue home-schooling, switch to a private school, or push hard to end restrictions on the growth of charter schools. Third, as schools sit empty and homebound teachers draw their regular salaries for less effective work, there will be more opposition to more funding for public schools, which, in turn, will make local school boards amenable to lower-cost options such as charter schools.
Consider California. On July 17, Gov. Gavin Newsom decreed that neither government-run nor private schools may open in counties that have rising Covid-19 caseloads and hospitalizations. Like most governors who imposed lockdowns in March and April, he has completely abandoned the original “flatten the curve” rationale for lockdowns; the curve has flattened but the lockdowns remain. With current caseloads and hospitalization rates, 80% of California residents live in counties that won’t be allowed to open.
Even if the numbers allow them to open, teachers and staff members will have to distance themselves by at least 6 feet from each other and from children. Students in third grade and higher will be forced to wear masks. Even if Mr. Newsom backs down, school boards in Los Angeles and San Diego have already decided against in-person instruction for the start of the school year.
Public schools are dominant because they don’t need to compete for funds. Taxpayers are forced to finance them. If a family decides to take a child out of the local public school, thereby saving the school board the cost of educating that child, the family gets no tax break, no rebate. If a family finds a cheap private school that charges $8,000 in annual tuition, sending the child there makes economic sense only if the family values the private education by at least $8,000 more than they value the public education. That’s a high hurdle for most parents.
But with public schools’ shift to online instruction, the equation changes dramatically for two reasons. First, the public schools have done a poor job of adjusting to the new reality. Second, and possibly more important, online instruction eliminates arguably the most valuable service provided by public schools: child care. On net, therefore, the value of the online public school is much lower, especially for young children, than the value of in-person public school.
Many will opt instead to home-school. This summer, parents have had time to plan for the fall. Many of them are forming “learning pods,” which are small groups of families getting together to hire a teacher or a tutor to teach their kids.
What if, as I predict, home-schooling works, on average, better than the public schools before the pandemic? Once the pandemic ends, many parents will want to continue with home-schooling. A poll taken in May of 626 parents found 40.8% of them saying they were more likely than before the pandemic to enroll their child in “a home school, a neighborhood home-school co-op, or a virtual school” once the lockdowns ended. There are now about 56 million children in K-12 schools. Before the pandemic, an estimated two million children were home-schooled. If even a third of the 40.8% of parents who said they might take it up followed through, the number of home-schooled children would almost quadruple.
Even many who don’t home-school will push for an expansion of charter schools, which tend to be responsive to parents and can more easily fire poor teachers. The advantage for taxpayers is that charter schools cost, on average, thousands of dollars less than traditional public schools. Teachers unions won’t be in a strong position to object to a shift to lower-cost charters if they continue to object to the idea of teaching in person five days a week. The unions might even “settle” for charter schools over the dreaded home-school option.
Get ready. A school renaissance is coming.
Mr. Henderson is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and editor of “The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.”
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In the olden days, one-room schoolhouses were common across the country, many of them simple wood-frame buildings painted white.
Katy Young’s one-room school is going be a dome.
Ms. Young, who lives in the suburbs outside Berkeley, Calif., recently set up a 24-foot-round geodesic polyhedron in her backyard to host a small group of kindergarteners. An Airstream trailer parked nearby will serve as an administrative office.
Pandemic schoolhouse
The dome was built by Ms. Young’s husband, Randy, for use at Burning Man, the annual outdoor art festival in the Nevada desert. But with Burning Man canceled this summer, the structure is being repurposed for her kindergarten son and five classmates, whose Mandarin-language school has switched to distance learning in the fall.
“We’re calling it ‘dome school,’ ” said Ms. Young, a lawyer.
With thousands of schools across the country moving to partial or full remote learning in the fall, parents are racing to form small at-home schooling groups or “pandemic pods,” groups of children who will be taught together. Some parents are hiring teachers to help guide the students through remote learning, while others plan to devise lesson plans on their own.
But finding a place to host the mini schools is proving to be a challenge. Even for parents that have the space, hosting students inside seems iffy because of social-distancing guidelines. Plus, many parents are working from home and don’t want the distraction.
For parents without the space or financial means for elaborate setups, the challenge can be even greater. Shauna Causey, founder and chief executive of Weekdays Micro-Schools, a website that helps organize schooling pods, says some families are retrofitting their dining rooms or basements, or taking over local parks.
Holding school outside comes with its own set of issues: What about Wi-Fi and bathroom access? Is there enough space for students to sit 6 feet apart? What happens when it rains?
Parents are devising workarounds. In Davis, Calif., Liam Honigsberg rolled out several Ikea benches and chairs, and erected a shade canopy at the end of a small side street for his 6-year-old son and his friends for the coming school year. Mr. Honigsberg said he suspects that setting up in the street is probably illegal.
As companies reopen offices and schools get ready for a new academic year, how can parents best prepare? Hear from The Wall Street Journal’s Work & Life columnist Rachel Feintzeig in conversation with reporters covering the current crisis. Join us for a discussion.
If it gets too cold in the winter, the class might end up in down jackets in his open garage.
“The spirit of American innovation is sort of the centerpiece of where I was going with this,” said Mr. Honigsberg, who works in education technology.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently mandated that most school districts across the state begin the academic year with full-time distance learning.
Sage Cohen, the mother of a sixth-grader in Portland, Ore., thought her recently renovated garage would make the perfect location for a home school. Portland Public Schools is planning a fall schedule that is largely remote, and she didn’t want her son to toil alone.
Ms. Cohen’s space has several windows that can be opened during the summer months and closed during the wet ones.
Then she stumbled onto a problem: she didn’t have anywhere for children to go to the bathroom. She is considering bringing in a port-a-potty or installing a compost toilet. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said.
In Renton, Wash., Lynzora Lowmax cleared her basement of her families’ belongings and converted it into a home-school pod for her young children and a couple of neighbors. “They’re not used to being down there, so when we go down, they know it’s time to get on schedule,” she said. Ms. Lomax plans to teach the class herself.
In cities, where extra space and backyards are scarce, parents are looking at renting empty storefronts and churches.
New York City schools are planning to open in the fall with only partial in-person instruction for more than one million students.
Josh Skyer, who owns commercial real estate in Brooklyn, is hoping to interest one or more home-school pods in renting a vacant store and condominium space he owns in the Cobble Hill neighborhood.
“I would get Wi-Fi, throw a flat-screen on the wall and build it out to be a luxury school house for the kids,” said Mr. Skyer.
Michelle Luxmore, a real-estate agent in Seattle, is finishing an 800-square-foot cottage in her backyard that she had planned to rent through the home-sharing platform Airbnb Inc.
Instead, she plans to turn it into a school for her 6-year-old and his classmates, and wants to help other parents build similar structures in their yards. Seattle’s regulations recently changed to allow for such structures up to 1,000 square feet, but a permit is required.
“Some people that I talk to are like, ‘Really? Why would I do that?’ and I’m like, ‘Hear me out,’ ” Ms. Luxmore said.
Seattle Public Schools is planning to hold school remotely in the fall.
Ms. Young, who erected the dome, said she already is anticipating some of her neighbors complaining, as they did when she parked her Airstream in the yard. “We’re going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission,” she said.
Like many other parents, Ms. Young was stressed about what to do with her son after his school announced recently it would go fully remote.
Then Mr. Young remembered the collapsible dome he had spent about three months building for Burning Man, which typically takes place each August.
Randy Young built the dome to use at the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
PHOTO: KATY YOUNG
Made of old parachute material and aluminum piping, the dome will withstand light drizzle, but if it rains hard, the couple plans to throw some tarps on top or move the whole structure indoors. Inside of it, they plan to set up tables, workstations and portable heaters for the winter months.
It took the Youngs about three hours to set it up in the yard. Mr. Young carved a “Dome School” sign to hang out front.
“I am super happy to reuse it now,” he said.
Write to Kirsten Grind at kirsten.grind@wsj.com
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https://www.heritage.org/data-visualizations/education/k-12-school-responses-to-the-covid-19-crisis/
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https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/stacey-lennox/2020/08/17/teachers-unions-falling-out-of-favor-with-americans-is-it-any-wonder-n788367
Teachers often say they are fighting for their students. I believe sometimes that is true but not most of the times.
Doctors. when facing third party payer cuts use the same ruse - it is about being able to provide care to their patients.
Democrats claim it is about the rule of law, about preserving Democracy , etc when it is about naked power , reparations, control, and ramming socialism down our throats.
I could not believe my ears for the less than one minute I decided to watch DNC last night when I no sooner turn it on and there is Bernie Sanders , explaining we need to fight totalitarianism - of all the people to get up and warn us we need to fight Trump for this reason.
It gave me a great belly laugh before I switched back to Pawnstars.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJZNjRBHVNY
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https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/057/887/378/original/9bf01554266e9287.png?1598447414
(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/057/887/378/original/9bf01554266e9287.png?1598447414)
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The Crisis of the University and the Liberal Arts
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
In my book “The Storm Before the Calm,” I predicted that one of the main battles of the next cycle would be the future of the university. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the timetable dramatically, so the crisis is now, and its manifestation is financial. Only schools with significant endowments can do without tuition for any length of time. This means many of the more than 5,000 universities in the United States will not be able to open this year and the rest will be teaching at distance.
For about 20 years, on and off, I was a professor of political philosophy. So believe me when I say the financial problems of the university come from how Americans see the university. The professors who teach the students are oddly deployed. They have the responsibilities of teaching, researching and serving on committees to manage the department. They also have a guarantee of academic freedom. Once tenured, after about seven years of service, they can no longer be fired except for cause. This guarantees them academic freedom, to challenge accepted truths and stand against conventional wisdom. One of the less appetizing aspects of American life (or all life) is the periodic fashions that hold certain ideas to be unacceptable. During various times in history, including our own, those holding these ideas were hunted down and banished. Academic freedom was meant to be a bulwark against conformity.
There is perhaps no place in which conformity rages more than in the university. Outsiders do not get tenure, and having gotten tenure they don’t get to sit on the cool committees that run the place, nor do they get to go to faculty parties, which on reflection is another benefit of being intellectually boorish. This affects teaching and research. As a professor, I taught between zero and nine hours per week during my career. After factoring in the holidays, professors are working part-time. Yes, there are office hours and times saved for grading papers – for which God frequently provides graduate assistants in better universities – but the teaching load is remarkably light even at its heaviest.
This is meant to free professors for research. But there is no quality control on research. In my academic career, I wrote two books and a bunch of articles. No one really read any of them, which was a mercy since they were really bad. But I made full professor on the strength of that, and at that point, I could climb no higher and could not be fired.
All of this is financed by federally backed loans – which permits universities to raise the price of entry, knowing that students will borrow money to pay the costs, which cover staff as well as the land the campus is built on. The university could easily sell that land and move into prefab buildings in the inner city, but then their entire marketing strategy would collapse. For students, the attraction of college is that it offers a chance not to think about the meaning of life, as the liberal arts demand, but to enjoy the company of their contemporaries, drink heavily and spend a couple of weeks pounding out bad papers for which they get high grades because they will at some point evaluate their professors, and hilariously the professors care.
This is financially unsustainable and quite unlike European universities. The university emerged in Europe to teach the tradition of ideas, not for vocational training. This inevitably attracted the high born, who could afford it. It was the origin of the liberal arts as a mode of thought. It was designed to keep tradition of knowledge derived from Plato and Aristotle alive through the ages, albeit in the hands of the literate aristocracy. That higher education has since been democratized is good, but it’s unclear whether the average American 19-year-old is able or willing to grasp the truth and the beauty of the liberal arts.
It is intellectually unsustainable too. The founding mission of the university was to preserve and transmit tradition to the future. The university has adopted other tasks such as engineering, social work and kinesiology. All are useful and necessary, but the liberal arts have gotten lost. Technology is critical, but it derives from a tradition few know and which is indispensable for us to know who we are and what our obligations are.
Those who study the liberal arts are the few. The many must study the useful and necessary crafts. Philosophy and mechanical engineering occupy different realms. What will emerge from this, I suspect, will be not a university encompassing everything that generates student loans, but a recognition that while all must know of the liberal arts, few can or want to master them. It is not the university but knowledge that we must care about, and we must not confuse teaching with research, or animal husbandry with the history of ideas. Both are needed. They do not enrich each other as much as divert resources. Schools of philosophy should be modest, small and filled with 40-year-olds. Schools of biology should be ambitious, large and filled with 20-year-olds. It will not be a measured or deliberate approach that will take us here. It will be closures and the drying up of funds.
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https://www.toddstarnes.com/campus/schools-in-vermont-district-ordered-to-fly-black-lives-matter-flags/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social-pug
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=YiUEXAXcvQ4&feature=emb_logo
https://clarionproject.org/clarion-finds-another-3-billion-in-undisclosed-foreign-financing-of-universities/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=70ab6c4f12-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_09_01_10_51&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-70ab6c4f12-6358189&mc_cid=70ab6c4f12
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https://clarionproject.org/saeb-erekat-harvard-mentor/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=fb5c445b6e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_09_08_02_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-fb5c445b6e-6358189&mc_cid=fb5c445b6e
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Bad Teaching Is Tearing America Apart
Education’s dumbing down frays the bonds of citizenship and is hardest on the poor, says E.D. Hirsch, the man who wrote the book on cultural literacy.
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
Sept. 11, 2020 4:49 pm ET
If you have school-age children, the pandemic-induced move to online classes may give you an unusual window into their education. E.D. Hirsch expects you’ll be surprised by “how little whole-class instruction is going on,” how little knowledge is communicated, and how there is “no coherence” from day to day, let alone from year to year.
The current fashion is for teachers to be a “guide on the side, instead of a sage on the stage,” he says, quoting the latest pedagogical slogan, which means that teachers aren’t supposed to lecture students but to “facilitate” learning by nudging students to follow their own curiosity. Everything Mr. Hirsch knows about how children learn tells him that’s the wrong approach. “If you want equity in education, as well as excellence, you have to have whole-class instruction,” in which a teacher directly communicates information using a prescribed sequential curriculum.
Mr. Hirsch, 92, is best known for his 1987 book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” It is an argument for teaching “specifics,” followed by a lengthy list of them—thousands of historical figures, events, concepts and literary works with which, in Mr. Hirsch’s view, educated Americans should be familiar. Heavily weighted toward Western history and civilization, the list provoked charges of elitism. Yet Mr. Hirsch is singularly focused on helping disadvantaged kids. They “are not exposed to this information at home,” he says, so they’ll starve intellectually unless the schools provide it.
He continues the argument in his new book, “How to Educate a Citizen,” in which he describes himself as a heretofore “rather polite scholar” who has become more “forthright and impatient because things are getting worse. Intellectual error has become a threat to the well-being of the nation. A truly massive tragedy is building.” Schools “are diminishing our national unity and our basic competence.”
Mr. Hirsch is nonetheless cheerful in a Zoom interview from a vacation home in Maine, his armchair perched next to a window with a water view. An emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, he normally resides in Charlottesville, where he continues his research and acts as the chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation.
He cites both history and neuroscience in explaining how education went wrong. It began in the 1940s, when “schools unbolted the desks and kids were no longer facing the teacher.” Instead children were divided into small groups and instructed to complete worksheets independently with occasional input from teachers. “That was also when our verbal test scores went down and the relative ranking of our elementary schools declined on a national level.” On the International Adult Literacy Survey, Americans went from being No. 1 for children who were educated in the 1950s to fifth for those in the ’70s and 14th in the ’90s. And things have only gotten worse. Between 2002 and 2015, American schoolchildren went from a ranking of 15th to 24th in reading on the Program for International Student Assessment.
The problem runs deeper than the style of instruction, Mr. Hirsch says. It’s the concept at its root—“child-centered classrooms,” the notion that “education is partly a matter of drawing out a child’s inborn nature.” Mr. Hirsch says emphatically that a child’s mind is “a blank slate.” On this point he agrees with John Locke and disagrees with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought children’s need to develop according to their nature. Both philosophers make the “Cultural Literacy” list, but “Locke has to make a comeback” among educators, Mr. Hirsch says. “The culture is up for grabs, and elementary schools are the culture makers.”
Mr. Hirsch is a man of the left—he has said he is “practically a socialist.” But he bristles at the idea that kids should read only books by people who look like them or live like them. He recalls how reading outside his own experience enabled him “to gain perspective.” Growing up in Memphis, Tenn., in the 1930s, he says, “there was no one I knew who wasn’t a racist.” In his teens, he picked up Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy” (1944), which “allowed me to escape.” The Swedish sociologist’s survey of American race relations “made a huge impact” on Mr. Hirsch. “I take it as an illustration of how important knowledge is and how important it is to not necessarily become a member of your culture.”
That’s no less true in 21st-century America. “The idea that identity and ethnicity are inborn and indelible from birth is a false view that leads to group hostility,” Mr. Hirsch says. “The idea that there can be an American culture that everyone joins seems to be anathema to some academic thinkers,” Mr. Hirsch says. “But I can’t believe it’s anathema to any normal person in the country who isn’t some social theorist.” It’s fine for children to embrace their particular heritage, he says, but also vital to create an “American ethnicity.” The purpose of elementary schools “is to make children into good citizens.”
That requires knowledge that is “shared nationally, if you’re going to read and write and communicate with one another.” He’s dismayed that people keep getting hung up on the particulars. “I’m fine with arguing about whether it shall be Toni Morrison or Herman Melville. Who cares?” He calls elementary school “a nonpartisan institution,” a view that may seem quaint in an era when schools are adopting ideological curricula like the “1619 Project” and teachers are displaying “Black Lives Matter” banners as their Zoom backgrounds.
Mr. Hirsch wants to correct some of these excesses. He dedicates “How to Educate a Citizen” to the late political scientist Richard Rorty, who died in 2007. Rorty “made a distinction between the political left and the cultural left,” says Mr. Hirsch, who considers himself a man of the former but not the latter. He commends to me a 1994 New York Times article, “The Unpatriotic Academy,” in which Rorty wrote: “In the name of ‘the politics of difference,’ [the left] refuses to rejoice in the country it inhabits. It repudiates the idea of a national identity, and the emotion of national pride.” Mr. Hirsch agrees and longs for the “willingness to sacrifice for the good of society that was very strong” during his early years. “Patriotism is important because we want to make our society work.”
Mr. Hirsch also takes issue with grade schools’ focus on “skills.” Whether it is imparting “critical thinking skills,” “communication skills” or “problem-solving skills,” he says such instruction is a waste of time in the absence of specific knowledge. He describes the findings of the National Academy of Sciences on the subject of the “domain specificity of human skills.” What this means, he explains in the new book, “is that being good at tennis does not make you good at golf or soccer. You may be a talented person with great hand-eye coordination—and indeed there are native general abilities that can be nurtured in different ways—but being a first-class swimmer will not make a person good at hockey.”
He cites the “baseball study,” conducted by researchers at Marquette University in the 1980s, which found that kids who knew more about how baseball was played performed better when answering questions about a text on baseball than those who didn’t understand the game—regardless of their reading level. The conventional response in education circles is that standardized tests are unfair because some kids are exposed to more specific knowledge than others. In Mr. Hirsch’s view that’s precisely why children should be exposed to more content: Educators “simply haven’t faced up to their duty to provide a coherent sequence of knowledge to children.”
There are now about 5,000 schools in the U.S. that use some form of the Core Knowledge curriculum, developed by Mr. Hirsch’s foundation. And research suggests Mr. Hirsch is right. A recent large-scale randomized study of public-school pupils in kindergarten through second grade found that use of the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum had statistically significant benefits for vocabulary, science knowledge, and social-studies knowledge.
Even in poor neighborhoods, kids at Core Knowledge schools perform well and are admitted to competitive high schools. From the South Bronx Classical Charter School to the public schools in Sullivan County, Tenn., Mr. Hirsch is clearly proud that his ideas have helped the least privileged kids in America.
He questions the idea that children who are exposed to more “experiences” are at an automatic advantage. “That’s what fiction is for,” he quips. And not only fiction. “The residue of experience is knowledge,” he says. “If you get your knowledge from the classroom, it’s just as good as if you got it from going to the opera. Poor kids can catch up.”
Asked about the effect of the pandemic and lockdown on children’s emotional well-being, Mr. Hirsch shrugs, then offers an anecdote from a principal at a Core Knowledge school. Before classes began one morning, a second-grade girl approached him and said: “I’m so excited for today.” When the principal asked why, she said, “Because today we are going to learn about the War of 1812.”
“Gee, I wonder what that’s about,” the principal said.
“I don’t know,” the girl replied. “But today I’m going to find out!”
For Mr. Hirsch, the lesson is clear. No matter the circumstances, “kids delight in learning things.”
Ms. Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
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aka
taxpayers eat 50K per student:
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/democrats-senate-chuck-schumer-elizabeth-warren/2020/09/17/id/987488/
also a nod to colleges and universities
that just keep upping their bills.
so long as they keep up leftist woke teaching ..........
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aka
taxpayers eat 50K per student:
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/democrats-senate-chuck-schumer-elizabeth-warren/2020/09/17/id/987488/
also a nod to colleges and universities
that just keep upping their bills.
so long as they keep up leftist woke teaching ..........
Since the govt is already 4 trillion in deficit, they can"t really 'cancel' debt, they can only transfer it to others - including the same people they say no longer owe the money.
It penalizes those young voters who already paid off their obligations. Now they owe for their classmates' overpriced education too. They either become new Republicans or are just chumps.
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9 Years Into Common Core, Test Scores Are Down, Indoctrination Up: Common Core sucked all the energy, money, and motivation right out of desperately needed potential reforms to U.S. public schools for a decade.
https://thefederalist.com/2018/11/05/9-years-common-core-test-scores-indoctrination/
Math achievement is at a 20 year low.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/10/17/math-scores-slide-to-a-20-year-low.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2&M=58642882&U=987573&UUID=0d3e884f4a62f5edab8873cacf59ebb9
4th graders reading decline:
https://thefederalist.com/2017/12/08/post-common-core-u-s-kids-slide-another-academic-measure/
So you’re saying everything is proceeding as planned? - Glenn Reynolds
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/private-schools-outpace-public-schools-in-putting-kids-on-the-path-to-marriage/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-09-22&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/outrageous-ohio-state-university-president-sends-ignorant-unhinged-text-message-parents-following-breonna-taylor-decision/
I have been thinking about my own education and it was about a quarter of a century ;
I cannot recall even ONE instance of a teacher or professor at any level who ever mentioned politics one way or the other. Not one.
College is now an indoctrination system for the Democrat Party
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https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/tackle-critical-theory-the-k-12-classroom-start-colleges-education
of course Columbia was happy to have Jewish philosopher Max Horkheimer, another of the self righteous :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Horkheimer
Like Mark Levin says
the Jews brought their communist like socialist views from Europe with them to the US
me : thanks for your gift. :roll:
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https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/tackle-critical-theory-the-k-12-classroom-start-colleges-education
of course Columbia was happy to have Jewish philosopher Max Horkheimer, another of the self righteous :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Horkheimer
Like Mark Levin says
the Jews brought their communist like socialist views from Europe with them to the US
me : thanks for your gift. :roll:
Nice answer to this here: [UK]
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/10/my-new-hero-kemi-badenoch.php
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would it wipe out the creditors?
would colleges and universities eat the cost?
no , money would be confiscated from those who have more money to pay off the creditors:
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/10/738506646/student-debt-forgiveness-sounds-good-what-might-happen-if-the-government-did-it
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/investigation-prompts-schools-to-report-6-5-billion-in-undisclosed-foreign-gifts-and-contracts_3545741.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorsnote-2020-10-20&utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20201027213229
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funny is it not
how whenever student debt is spoken about by Democrats ad nauseam, we never (as far as I know) hear then state we should hold the institutions administrators or employees who have increased the student fees much faster than inflation , should be the ones who are held accountable
it is always someone "rich" ( code word for all taxpayers ) should pay them everything they ask
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/americas-elite-universities-hide-contributions-from-worlds-worst-human-rights-abusers/
the cash is not charity
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16786/subverting-american-universities
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Optimistic thinking, some years ago, that the 'education' thread wasn't put under 'politics'.
This is a Harvard Law Professor. If not adherence to a constitution, what are they teaching?
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Harvard law professor Michael J. Klarman writing in the November 2020 Harvard Law Review:
The second way to pursue a fairer Senate apportionment would be simply to ignore the constitutional provision mandating two senators for every state as a particularly egregious example of dead-hand control. The Senate could then be reapportioned through statute or perhaps a national referendum. Ignoring a clear constitutional provision would trouble many Americans, but the Court has done this itself more than once when societal consensus strongly backed the move ...
wsj opinion notable and quotable, need subscription to get full quote.
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talking about Klarman
above
lawyer
Harvard
political correctness
Jewish
would love to see his opinion if the the Senate would become more REpublican not Democrat if his dreams come true
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https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/12/217-fewer-high-school-graduates-enrolled-in-college-this-fall-due-to-covid-19.html
What an upside down world it is where this unintended consequence is partly good news?
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22 % less go to college
watch
what do you think the response from college administrations will be ?
It SHOULD be they start reducing their fees and reduce salaries
Instead it will be to lobby for more State and Federal money
and future President Gaffe will be right there to accommodate them .
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(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/rodney_robinson_assault_mcconnell_12-30-2020.jpg)
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/rodney_robinson_assault_mcconnell_12-30-2020.jpg
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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/we-are-all-white-supremacists-now.php
Here are some of the things that will no longer be covered in the public school curriculum:
* World War I
* World War II
* The Holocaust
* The Civil War
* The American Revolution
* Communism
* Notable Americans like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson
You may ask, what in God’s name do the standards cover? The usual:
* Systemic racism in the U.S., rooted in our founding
* How freedom and democracy have included or excluded certain groups throughout our history
* Developing a “respectful awareness” of the LGBTQ+ community
* The Reconstruction period, specifically successful efforts to disenfranchise newly freed Black Americans and connecting this history to persistent discrimination and inequity in the present
* An analysis of the ideology of Manifest Destiny and its relationship to whiteness, Christianity, and capitalism
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If Dems Support 'Equity,' Why Are They Silent on School Choice?
John Kass, Chicago Tribune
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/28/if_biden_and_democrats_truly_support_equity_why_are_they_silent_on_school_choice_145143.html
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Do we even call this education? TAKE BACK OUR KIDS.
Seattle schools teach K-5 students to pick gender, disrupt nuclear family
This week, Seattle Public Schools (and other area schools) are teaching students in kindergarten to pick their gender, combat a so-called hetero-patriarchal society, and disrupt the nuclear family structure. The lessons are part of the Black Lives Matter at School movement.
The radical, political agendas on gender identity and the family structure have some parents livid. These topics are not age appropriate
https://mynorthwest.com/2533338/rantz-seattle-schools-kindergartner-pick-gender-blm/
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Yes, part of the published "Black Lives Matter" movement is to disrupt the traditional family. Now it's in the K-5 curriculum.
If you believe in old fashioned things like FAMILY, you are losing.
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advocates for free tuition at community colleges:
https://www.newsmax.com/us/jill-biden/2021/02/09/id/1009344/
but costs already are not much:
https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-community-college
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(https://mcusercontent.com/dc8d30edd7976d2ddf9c2bf96/images/a1dbd091-b872-4811-af35-9ec44e3e79d9.jpg)
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At some point the warning this is bad for the kids becomes the reality, this was bad for the kids.
Maybe 'we' can target blue state kids with a pro freedom and liberty argument. The Leftist government school cabal is losing their grip.
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https://www.startribune.com/woke-revolution-looms-for-minnesota-schools/600020000/?refresh=true
Woke revolution looms for Minnesota schools
[The article covers Minnesota, but the movement is national, and then some.]
From the article:
"parents, are you ready for the coming "woke" invasion of your child's public school?
By 2022, as your first-grader is learning that two plus two is four, the Minnesota Department of Education intends to mandate that she also learn to recognize "stereotypes," "biased speech," and "injustice at the institutional or systemic level."
Your middle schooler will be drilled in how his identity is a function of his skin color.
Your high schooler will be required to explain how Europeans invented "whiteness" and that America's 19th-century westward expansion was the shameful product of "whiteness, Christianity and capitalism."
...
By high school, students must "explain" — parrot back is more like it — "the social construction of race" and "assess how social policies and economic forces offer privilege or systematic oppressions for racial/ethnic groups."
Katherine Kersten writes for Center for the American Experiment. Donate here:
https://www.americanexperiment.org/donate/
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[Doug] We can't concede the state governments, the departments of education and the local school board to the Leftist "woke" crowd. Stand up and start stopping them. "Fight like Hell." [Can I say that here?]
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"Fight like Hell." [Can I say that here?]
Only if you become a Democrat
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if one teaches that 2+ 6 equals 8. one is a white supremacist
and black children should not be tested on their answer as that is also racist:
https://www.breitbart.com/education/2021/02/16/oregon-educators-making-math-students-show-their-work-is-white-supremacy/
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Get these people away from our children. Putting all whites [or blacks or any other group based on skin color] together in a box and stereotyped is racist.
Shame on them.
https://www.city-journal.org/critical-race-theory-in-wake-county-nc-schools
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/03/19/woke-critical-race-theory-training-schools-grade-education-antiracism/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=recaps&pnespid=lvlnqudCCRKN8nmGT_21MFYeZltKP7F4yXkvaiI_
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/bureaucracy-has-conquered-schools-joe-biden-wont-fix-it/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202021-03-21&utm_term=WIR-Smart
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/bureaucracy-has-conquered-schools-joe-biden-wont-fix-it/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202021-03-21&utm_term=WIR-Smart
Tim Kennedy (Army SF combat vet/UFC Champion) has a solution.
https://apogeestrong.com/about/
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2021/03/22/teachers-unions-still-pushing-back-on-school-openings-say-3-foot-rule-is-not-proven-n1434248
but who would replace them?
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/31/over-100-professors-sign-letter-demanding-transparency-with-colleges-ties-to-china/
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but instead of accepting the answer from the student
the teacher projects his on racial bias:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/03/31/teacher-bullies-student-for-his-colorblind-attitude-towards-race-n1436539
Well I see a girl with red hair and a girl with black hair
so does that mean I am racist?
student was being smart and tried to be neutral
"I see a girl"
this should be the desired answer
but the racist teacher tried to push his own agenda into this .
sickening
enough already
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see my post of 3/22:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/04/14/issa-teachers-in-ca-should-be-replaced-if-they-wont-go-back-to-work/
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see my post of 3/22:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/04/14/issa-teachers-in-ca-should-be-replaced-if-they-wont-go-back-to-work/
They do less damage out of the classroom.
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Just like Reagan did with the Air Traffic Controllers.
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Just like Reagan did with the Air Traffic Controllers.
Makes sense, but I can't imagine what protection for not working is in a California teacher's contract. It should say, if you want this kind of pay, retirement, benefits for classroom teaching, you will have to - teach, which might reasonably include being in the same room as - children.
I wonder what the Soviet leaders thought when they saw the new US President stand up to a powerful public employee union.
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Ten years ago in these columns, we hailed Indiana for its leadership in establishing one of America’s most ambitious school voucher programs. On Thursday the Indiana Legislature built on that achievement by approving a budget that will take the program to 48,000 students a year from about 37,000.
The choice provisions in the budget have three main components. The first would lift the income cap for eligibility to $145,000 a year from $96,000. This would make as much as 90% of the population eligible for the program. The bill would also increase the voucher amount to 90% of tuition support levels, and eliminate the existing tiered system.
OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
Amid Covid, a Breakthrough for School Choice?
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Another provision would establish Education Savings Accounts for children with special needs. The budget also increases the per student grants for charter schools to $1,000 next year and $1,250 in the second year from $750 today. All this became possible when lawmakers learned last week that increased tax revenue meant they had more than $2 billion to work with than they’d previously thought.
The teachers unions are unhappy. Their beef is that money to expand choice is taken from traditional public schools. And this year they lobbied local school boards to pass resolutions opposed to school choice.
But that common union line about choice robbing public schools isn’t true. Though the final breakdown of the $1.9 billion in extra education spending won’t be known until after parents have made their choices for their children, the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency does a projection of how the money will be distributed based on anticipated student enrollment. According to this projection, 92% of Indiana students will be in traditional public schools, and 93% of all education funding will go to these schools.
This is before the $3 billion in federal funding that Indiana will receive from the latest Covid spending bill, almost all of which will go to the public schools. The budget further covers the $600 million gap needed to make teacher pay in the state competitive, as identified by the Next Level Teacher Compensation Commission last year.
Since 2011, when Indiana pushed through its first voucher plan, more than a quarter-million Hoosier students have benefited. In an interview with Today’s Catholic, former Gov. Mitch Daniels explains the moral logic of choice this way: “Providing poor and minority families the same choice of schools that their wealthier neighbors enjoy is the purest example of ‘social justice’ in our society today.”
The good news is that Republicans such as Todd Huston and Rep. Bob Behning in the state House and Rodric Bray, Brian Buchanan and Jeff Raatz in the Senate have stepped up to reject the idea that unions should have a monopoly over K-12 education dollars. Once again Hoosiers are leading the way in establishing an education system that gives parents and children a choice.
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https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-accelerated-math-courses-equity
Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan
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Are you kidding. This was probably the only thing they did right in my early schooling. I had math aptitude but really didn't learn to read and write until way after college. During those crucial school years when I was doing the minimum to get by, I still went to a math class that featured the best of the math teachers and put me in the room 1 hour a day with the top students. Just being there and doing the required work opened doors for years to come. Try to name a subject or career where math is not a key building block.
One part of it was social, your friends in a big school tend to include people who go to the same class with you year after year, and those kids tend to be going places, more likely to go to college, into good professions, less likely to end up as bums, losers, failures.
Another big part of it is to deal with the boredom that comes with good students being underchallenged. Most time in most lectures, it seems, is spent having someone who doesn't interest you tell you either things you already know or things you think you don't want to know. The higher the student, the more bored they are with ordinary classes. I remember this especially in Business school. They would teach mundane concepts endlessly to the C level student, and write the test questions to the A level and beyond. You had to fight through hours of monotony to find the 3 or 4 things needed to rise from B or C to the goal of getting the lowest possible A (we didn't have + or - in college). Anyway, having more math training coming in than most business students made getting high grades in college possible, which opened doors and options for life.
The idea this can all be individualized instead of grouping people of like abilities into a classroom setting is intriguing. If the teaching lobby believes videos and interactive computer work can replace old fashioned classroom teaching, that's great, let's fire the teachers.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
It's supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an objective.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-accelerated-math-courses-equity
Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Are you kidding. This was probably the only thing they did right in my early schooling. I had math aptitude but really didn't learn to read and write until way after college. During those crucial school years when I was doing the minimum to get by, I still went to a math class that featured the best of the math teachers and put me in the room 1 hour a day with the top students. Just being there and doing the required work opened doors for years to come. Try to name a subject or career where math is not a key building block.
One part of it was social, your friends in a big school tend to include people who go to the same class with you year after year, and those kids tend to be going places, more likely to go to college, into good professions, less likely to end up as bums, losers, failures.
Another big part of it is to deal with the boredom that comes with good students being underchallenged. Most time in most lectures, it seems, is spent having someone who doesn't interest you tell you either things you already know or things you think you don't want to know. The higher the student, the more bored they are with ordinary classes. I remember this especially in Business school. They would teach mundane concepts endlessly to the C level student, and write the test questions to the A level and beyond. You had to fight through hours of monotony to find the 3 or 4 things needed to rise from B or C to the goal of getting the lowest possible A (we didn't have + or - in college). Anyway, having more math training coming in than most business students made getting high grades in college possible, which opened doors and options for life.
The idea this can all be individualized instead of grouping people of like abilities into a classroom setting is intriguing. If the teaching lobby believes videos and interactive computer work can replace old fashioned classroom teaching, that's great, let's fire the teachers.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/04/27/report-hunter-biden-to-guest-teach-tulane-university-class-on-fake-news-this-fall/
Libs new voting block - crack heads
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-d35_5Istw
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Haven't watched this yet but it seems promising:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b3Ob4CK4Xs
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/13/charter-schools-targeted-left-despite-enrollment-s/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=%2FBicHODb8AcqSiZSTdHW3Q131QgLVy%2FFK8Pzg67T5hX1aS9Uun9aC4itavKVqTin&bt_ts=1620995611143
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How My Mind Opened to Charter Schools
Too many teachers oppose them because they’re bad for unions, not kids.
By George Parker
May 26, 2021 12:17 pm ET
The hug took me by surprise. I’d just finished speaking to a group of third-graders about my role as teachers union president when a little girl suddenly wrapped her arms around me and squeezed. Confused, I asked her why. She looked up and told me, “Because you said you care about us and you make sure we have the best teachers.” She was sweet and sincere. She had no idea my words were mostly detached from reality.
I’d just finished telling her and her classmates that I worked to make sure their teachers had what they needed to do their jobs—that I protected their teachers’ rights and tried to help them become the best teachers they could be. But I knew that wasn’t always the case.
Like many union leaders, I had relentlessly negotiated contracts that protected not only teachers’ rights, but their wrongs. As I drove home, I thought about the $10,000 my union had spent to keep a poorly performing teacher in the classroom—not because she deserved another chance, but because of a technicality.
My own childhood taught me the value of an education. I am the son of a Southern sharecropper who was perennially in debt no matter how hard he worked. My teachers were my inspiration and salvation. When I became a teacher, it seemed natural to become an advocate for the profession. Somewhere along the way I became more of a union leader than an educational leader.
The pandemic has highlighted the need to be nimble, to serve the needs of children and families where they are. We will fail our children and our teachers if we return to a pre-pandemic educational system. Unfortunately, many teacher unions want to limit access to quality education for underserved kids.
I used to oppose charter schools, not because they were bad for kids, but because they were bad for unions. Some call it a binary choice: You either support teachers unions or you support charter schools. Nowadays I disagree. I spent 30 years as a high school and middle school math teacher educating kids in low-performing schools in the District of Columbia. I served as president of the Washington Teachers’ Union for six years and recognize the added value unions can bring in securing fair compensation and safe working conditions for teachers. I’m still a union member. But I now work on behalf of charter schools.
Charter schools are also public schools. All of them. They provide more than three million students, mostly black and Hispanic, access to a quality public education. They are innovative and student-centered. They break down barriers that have kept families of color from the educational opportunities they deserve. Another two million children would attend charter schools if there were space for them. How could I work against these kids?
All too often charter critics get caught up denigrating “the system” and forget the duty to do whatever it takes to provide all children with access to high-quality public schools, no matter their race, ethnicity or ZIP Code.
We need more, not fewer, great public-school options for children, and charters are leading the way. If anyone says differently, keep in mind the messenger.
Mr. Parker is a former president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, a former math teacher in the District of Columbia Public Schools, and a senior adviser at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
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I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities. That marks a change. A decade ago I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest. Today? Not so much.
As a graduate of Haverford College, a fancy school outside Philadelphia, I took interest in the campus uproar there last fall. It concerned “antiblackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.” A student strike culminated in an all-college Zoom meeting for undergraduates. The college president and other administrators promised to “listen.” During the meeting, many students displayed a stunning combination of thin-skinned narcissism and naked aggression. The college administrators responded with self-abasing apologies.
Haverford is a progressive hothouse. If students can be traumatized by “insensitivity” on that leafy campus, then they’re unlikely to function as effective team members in an organization that has to deal with everyday realities. And in any event, I don’t want to hire someone who makes inflammatory accusations at the drop of a hat.
Student activists don’t represent the majority of students. But I find myself wondering about the silent acquiescence of most students. They allow themselves to be cowed by charges of racism and other sins. I sympathize. The atmosphere of intimidation in elite higher education is intense. But I don’t want to hire a person well-practiced in remaining silent when it costs something to speak up.
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The traditional Islamic world exhibited a modicum of tolerance. Christians and Jews were dhimmi, allowed to exist, but on the condition that they accepted their subordinate role in society. While studying this arrangement, sociologists coined the term “dhimmitude,” which refers to the mentality of those who have internalized their second-class status.
Haverford, like Harvard and other top tier schools, graduates fine young people, no doubt many with well-adjusted personalities and sensible views of the world. But in the past decade, dhimmitude has become widespread. Normal kids at elite universities keep their heads down. Over the course of four years, this can become a subtle but real habit of obeisance, a condition of moral and spiritual surrender.
Some resist. They would seem ideal for my organization, which aims to speak for religious and social conservatives. But even this kind of graduate brings liabilities to the workplace. I’ve met recent Ivy grads with conservative convictions who manifest a form of posttraumatic stress disorder. Others have developed a habit of aggressive counterpunching that is no more appealing in a young employee than the ruthless accusations of the woke.
In recent years, I’ve taken stock of my assumptions about who makes for the best entry-level employee. I have no doubt that Ivy League universities attract smart, talented and ambitious kids. But do these institutions add value? My answer is increasingly negative. Dysfunctional kids are coddled and encouraged to nurture grievances, while normal kids are attacked and educationally abused. Listening to Haverford’s all-college Zoom meeting also made it clear that today’s elite students aren’t going to schools led by courageous adults. Deprived of good role models, they’re less likely to mature into good leaders themselves.
My rule of thumb is to hire from institutions I advise young people to attend. Hillsdale College is at the top of that list, as are quirky small Catholic colleges such as Thomas Aquinas College, Wyoming Catholic College and the University of Dallas. In my experience, graduates from these sorts of places are well-educated. But more important, they’ve been supported and encouraged by their institutions, and they haven’t been deformed by the toxic political correctness that leaders of elite universities have allowed to become dominant.
Large state universities and their satellite schools are also good sources. In my experience, top-performing students at Rutgers are as talented but less self-important than Ivy Leaguers. They’re more likely to accept the authority of those more experienced. This allows for better mentoring, which in turn produces better results over time.
The biggest liability that comes with hiring graduates from places like Haverford and Harvard is that they have been socialized to panic over pseudocrises. Talk of systemic racism and fixation on pronouns inculcate in young people an apocalyptic urgency, a mentality that often disrupts the workplace and encourages navel-gazing about “diversity,” “inclusion” and other ill-defined notions that are far removed from the main work of my organization, which is good writing, good editing and good arguments.
A few years ago a student at an Ivy League school told me, “The first things you learn your freshman year is never to say what you are thinking.” The institution he attended claims to train the world’s future leaders. From what that young man reports, the opposite is true. The school is training future self-censors, which means future followers.
Mr. Reno is editor of First Things.
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http://stonetoss.com/comic/learned-behavior/
(http://stonetoss.com/comic/learned-behavior/)
(https://i0.wp.com/stonetoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/homeschooling-stonetoss-political-cartoon.png?fit=1500%2C500)
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/076/720/915/original/d2f21351c100d3d4.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/076/720/915/original/d2f21351c100d3d4.png)
http://stonetoss.com/comic/learned-behavior/
(http://stonetoss.com/comic/learned-behavior/)
(https://i0.wp.com/stonetoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/homeschooling-stonetoss-political-cartoon.png?fit=1500%2C500)
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/076/720/915/original/d2f21351c100d3d4.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/076/720/915/original/d2f21351c100d3d4.png)
http://stonetoss.com/comic/learned-behavior/
(http://stonetoss.com/comic/learned-behavior/)
(https://i0.wp.com/stonetoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/homeschooling-stonetoss-political-cartoon.png?fit=1500%2C500)
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/077/533/309/original/4c24a47bcd1625b8.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/077/533/309/original/4c24a47bcd1625b8.png)
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BTW Walter Russell Mead is at Bard:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/02/bard-college-funded-by-soros-will-teach-course-on-prison-abolition/
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https://cuadvising.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/great-fall-course-queering-black-studies-with-professor-kwame-holmes/
"Professor Kwame Holmes wrote an op-ed last July titled “Why Abolish the Police?”, which suggested that neighborhoods should develop their own “pods” designed to “create intentional agreements around safety.”
What a great idea -
Why not start with inner city black neighborhoods?
also from this genius kwame:
which comes up on image search:
https://cuadvising.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/great-fall-course-queering-black-studies-with-professor-kwame-holmes/
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Another once great institution destroyed by the Left, University of Colorado Boulder.
Should "Ethnic Studies" even be a college level pursuit? Separating people into groups is what the Left does - when they're not trying to make them all the same.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6tBQRslg14
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and it may be working :
https://www.yahoo.com/news/growing-animosity-over-critical-race-083200531.html
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https://thepostmillennial.com/ontarios-new-math-curriculum-claims-math-normalizes-racism?utm_campaign=64470
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https://thepostmillennial.com/ontarios-new-math-curriculum-claims-math-normalizes-racism?utm_campaign=64470
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/07/14/research_used_to_justify_californias_racial_equity_math_doesnt_add_up_784966.html
...
Sergiu Klainerman, a professor of mathematics at Princeton, went further. “It's very clear that there is talent in math, just like there is talent in music,” he said in a Zoom interview. “You can clearly see when you teach math that there are certain kids that pick it up extremely fast, some do reasonably well but have to work hard, and there are some for whom it is difficult. The differentiation is very clear.”
Nevertheless, the Framework uses its rejection of giftedness as a basis for its chief and most disputed recommendation, that accelerated classes and “tracking,” the groupings of students in separate classes according to ability, should be eliminated for all California students, until the 11th grade. Until then, it proposes that [all] students take the same math courses in the same classrooms with the same teacher.
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[Doug] Those two paragraphs are in direct contradiction. Some learn math easily and fast. Others don't. We will put them all in the same lowest common denominator classroom where the gifted will be bored to death and learn nothing. That's how we'll prepare the next generation to take on the enormous challenges we face. Sameness and equality, even though we know people aren't the same or equal.
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"Once we break through the idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, then we start making better investments."
Know your enemy. Leftist gaffe is when they say what they think or what they are planning to do out loud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=hAAMGatMHss&feature=emb_logo
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(https://ci4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/z3gSRam-n8x3nmtHKKkZNQEiRpgoJpHUGEFsNJAoDNb1OGIpHA5DUfmDyMXhvEKbquxiGLZWb8Wk5BMi0CBCOqd61APcaYTvRVNLNAk1PtFfr2pc5gIX_KATD7T2dzcx9EgGbmIa3OvO1yZEp8-VFIl4Tou_E68=s0-d-e1-ft#https://mcusercontent.com/dc8d30edd7976d2ddf9c2bf96/images/a0a91d05-e803-9aeb-9200-e57220ee7032.jpeg)
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/07/school-choice-is-not-enough/
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State education and tuition dollars at work.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/08/dumber-than-a-pet-rock.php
Juliana Bennett, a senior and a campus representative on the Madison City Council, said removing the rock signaled a small step toward a more inclusive school.
Higher education. Higher than what?
(https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2021-08-08-at-7.07.04-PM.png?w=550&ssl=1)
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https://jonathanturley.org/2021/08/10/oregon-suspends-need-for-high-school-graduates-to-be-proficient-in-reading-writing-and-math/
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Baltimore high schoolers barely able to read or do math past elementary levels
https://thepostmillennial.com/report-baltimore-high-schoolers-due-to-graduate-perform-math-reading-at-grade-school-level
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We are so fuct , , ,
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395427.php
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/30/the-great-rebundling-of-k-12-schooling/
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[I had this in the wrong thread.]
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/09/28/va_gov_candidate_mcauliffe_i_dont_think_parents_should_be_telling_schools_what_they_should_teach.html
This is the Dem Governor of Virginia.
Democrats run the schools.
A Democrat gaffe is when someone of importance accidentally tells the truth.
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College students surprised to learn facts regarding spending and debt, short video:
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=18239
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https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/college-after-covid/?fbclid=IwAR1uCJhqoplq0lkhPP8U-y_EbeL-BowHMu1AT_YjG4OfdcHN0D5iQJ5HNSA
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/20/reining-in-rogue-educators/
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https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2021/10/21/uc-berkeley-students-happily-pledge-money-to-help-the-taliban-kill-americans-inside-the-u-s-n1525684
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kentucky-high-school-investigation-man-pageant-event-with-lap-dances-hooters-outfits
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kentucky-high-school-investigation-man-pageant-event-with-lap-dances-hooters-outfits
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/video-journalist-reads-filthy-porn-book-schools-library-fl-school-board-meeting-board-members-call-police-forcefully-removed-reading-obscene-content-aloud/
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/29/speaker-ejected-from-florida-school-board-meeting-due-to-reading-passages-from-sexually-explicit-library-book/
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396212.php
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kentucky-high-school-investigation-man-pageant-event-with-lap-dances-hooters-outfits
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/video-journalist-reads-filthy-porn-book-schools-library-fl-school-board-meeting-board-members-call-police-forcefully-removed-reading-obscene-content-aloud/
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https://americanmind.org/memo/defund-the-education-deep-state/?fbclid=IwAR1H-G5P1Djz5sNxt_acjZjL3PDnQJdXkQeqXQ3wsTd5yDEYd4HmjSBkQ2E
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Without public schools, who will teach American children to hate America? Who will teach them critical race theory or take them to gay bars on field trips?
Ignorant homeschool parents probably won't even bother to take their children to drag queen story hour at the local library...
https://americanmind.org/memo/defund-the-education-deep-state/?fbclid=IwAR1H-G5P1Djz5sNxt_acjZjL3PDnQJdXkQeqXQ3wsTd5yDEYd4HmjSBkQ2E
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https://www.city-journal.org/mit-caves-to-wokeness?wallit_nosession=1
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-new-loyalty-oaths/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-11-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/18/virginia-school-board-reverses-course-returns-sexually-explicit-books-to-libraries/
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/18/without-notifying-parents-loudoun-high-school-asked-students-if-they-are-transgender-and-how-much-they-have-sex/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/leaked-audio-reveals-how-california-teachers-recruit-kids-into-lgbtq-clubs_4114896.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-11-20-1&mktids=154531c458a26295230b3721100c92a8&est=D98stW5fYFbn2eZ%2BORdiDk1A3%2BN20Tj0bnYcmf5csvg%2FuSct66MW5dRtUsucHJ0S2Fd2
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https://fee.org/articles/new-harvard-study-homeschoolers-turn-out-happy-well-adjusted-and-engaged/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/home-schoolers-schooling-are-doing-right-education-parents-bartholet-harvard-parenting-11636577345
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/university-of-california-dumps-sat-test-in-favor-of-equity_4125929.html
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Public-school education has gone from bad to worse. In the Chicago Public Schools, only 26% of 11th-graders were at grade level in reading and math in 2019. Remarkably, the school system had a record-high graduation rate of nearly 84% in 2021. Those students must have had strong senior years! This is why over half of first-year community-college students in the U.S. take at least one remedial course in reading or math. In the U.S., 43 million adults are illiterate. This is a disgrace.
In pre-pandemic California, only 32% of fourth-graders were at or above proficient for their grade in reading. Only 19% of eighth-grade Hispanics read at grade level, and only 10% of eighth-grade blacks did. Those who find disparate impact everywhere should be screaming from the rooftops that public education is racist. Instead, silence.
Despite these poor results, spending per student goes up each year. New York spent $25,139 per student in fiscal 2019. In California, it’s over $20,000. So why haven’t outcomes improved? Parents know why. Bad teachers don’t get fired. Because of tenure, even some capable teachers mail it in. Bad school districts don’t get fixed. Caps on charter schools, even those with proven records, limit their ability to put pressure on public schools. Teachers unions are all-powerful.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Welch is trying to improve California’s education system. He tells me we need “accountability of quality education.” You may recall the 2014 Vergara v. California decision, a suit Mr. Welch and others funded. Filed on behalf of nine public-school students, the ruling found that five California statutes related to teacher tenure, firing bad teachers and layoff policy violated the state’s Constitution. In his ruling, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu noted, “Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”
No matter. The California Court of Appeal reversed Vergara in 2016 stating: “With no proper showing of a constitutional violation, the court is without power to strike down the challenged statutes.” In the court’s view, the California Constitution guarantees merely a free public education.
So Mr. Welch was back where he started, with, he says, an “educational system that doesn’t prioritize its actions to educate the children to a degree necessary to function in our society.” Bad teachers are constitutionally protected.
But with his background as a logically thinking Cornell-educated engineer, he set out to prove bad teaching was “a constitutional violation.” In the Democrat-controlled California Legislature, that was going to be a tough sell. Teachers were the fourth-largest campaign contributors to California’s legislative races in 2020 behind energy, prison guards and healthcare. “The Legislature won’t listen to the people,” Mr. Welch grumbles.
Fortunately, Californians can change their constitution through ballot initiatives. And voilà, a group named Kids First including Mr. Welch filed the Constitutional Right to a High-Quality Public Education Act. Here’s the key provision: “Any law, regulation, or policy, or any official action affecting students generally, which does not put the interest of the students first, shall be deemed to deny this right.”
Critics will focus on the lack of a definition for “high-quality public education.” Mr. Welch explains, “The metric for existing or any future legislation, and every school board decision, is ‘Does it make students better or worse?’ ” Pretty simple, yet I suspect it would be deadly effective. This would, by necessity, launch many lawsuits to challenge the status quo of tenure, of the inability to fire bad teachers and of everything else. It would become the guiding principle for any new legislation: Does it put kids first? “The corollary to this right is the existence of a high-quality teaching profession,” Mr. Welch says.
And then there is this provision: “The remedies for this right shall not include new mandates for taxes or spending.” It’s smart for two reasons. It will help the initiative pass, and history has shown that throwing money at the problem doesn’t work.
The cost? Around $8 a signature—they need a million to get on the ballot—plus the cost of the inevitable TV-ad battle with the California Teachers Association and its 310,000 members. That could get expensive.
I asked Mr. Welch why he wants to spend his time and hard-earned capital on this. “What we’re doing to our kids is horrific,” he says. “I can’t think of a greater loss of potential than the poor quality of education of our children. And all the other societal problems that come with it. The prison system uses educational outcomes—fourth-grade reading levels—to determine what size correctional facilities they’ll need.” Scary.
I think a successful Kids First ballot initiative would do more for “equity” than any government program. “The best way in making a productive functioning society is making sure everyone lives up to their potential,” Mr. Welch says. “Education is one of the basic pillars of American democracy.” That pillar is crumbling.
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https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/theres-simple-reason-todays-students-know-nothing/?fbclid=IwAR06-cXEi6fTbA5bdRgwL-VbNngWin3Tmxv7Nr0cH5KAcY_M9T-sVDtzuF4
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Fairfax parents blast school system for bringing back controversial books
BY JAMES VARNEY THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Parents lambasted Fairfax County Public Schools last week for returning two controversial books to the library and making left-wing class assignments.
Stacy Langton, a parent of a public school system student, excoriated the board for the schools’ decision to return “Lawn Boy” and “Gender Queer: A Memoir” to library shelves despite parents’ outrage. After a review, Fairfax schools officials said last week that the books did not include any pedophilia or pornography.
“They sent me a letter saying neither of these books contain pedophilia nor are they obscene,” Ms. Langton told The Washington Times. “That’s a bald-faced lie.”
Ms. Langdon said she planned to follow the schools’ appeals process to continue challenging the library books.
Parents opposed to the books say they are inappropriate because of their sexual content, graphic images and what they say are depictions of pedophilia.
Thursday night’s contentious meeting was the latest in a string of incidents that has roiled the Washington suburb this year as well as hundreds of school districts around the nation. Parents have objected to a range of issues, from COVID-19-related measures, to material infused with critical race theory, to sexually explicit questionnaires and to what Ms. Langton contends are obscene books.
Ms. Langton first raised the issue in September. As she stressed Thursday night and again Friday, her issue is not with LGBQT material but with the explicit nature of the books available to middle and high school students.
She shared screenshots of graphic illustrations of oral sex between young people and one that shows a grown man masturbating a boy that are included in Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir.”
Fairfax County is not the only school in which “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison and “Gender Queer” have raised concern. In some instances, viral social media videos have shown school boards stopping parents reading from the texts because of the obscene language.
“I am the adult child of a gay parent,” Ms. Langton told the board. “But we hear the LGBTQ community tonight defending the indefensible. And this school board doubled down — in clear terms — that they are in favor of pornography in schools.”
The various fronts in the fights between parents and school offi cials are separate, Ms. Langton said, although she believes all of them are rooted in a determination by education professionals and elected officials to force children to learn a left-wing, woke philosophy.
“You can have supportive books of LGBQT community and they don’t have to depict pornography, do they?” she said.
A similar left-wing approach seems to have crept into eighthgrade assignments at Katherine Johnson Middle School in Fairfax County, according to a parent who said he was startled by the material Thursday evening.
He cited an assignment: “Research a couple of social justice organizations in order to gain an understanding of what social justice activism involves,” it read.
The links provided by the teacher took the students to a variety of left-wing social justice groups and included screenshots of various gender and sexuality concepts and pro-immigration policies.
“Some of it is unobjectionable,” said Edwin Donovan, noting information about significant civil rights figures such as Rosa Parks and John Lewis. “But there are a number of links that plainly require my son to learn about ‘social justice activism’.”
One of the links, to the Equal Justice Initiative, paints American history as a parade of racist horrors.
“American history begins with the creation of a myth to absolve White settlers of the genocide of Native Americans; the false belief that nonwhite people are less human than White people,” the group website says. “This belief in racial hierarchy survived slavery’s abolition, fueled racial terror lynchings, demanded legally codifi ed segregation, and spawned our mass incarceration crisis.”
Another link went to teaching guides on social justice activism by the Center for Racial Justice in Education, and Mr. Donovan said he was puzzled at why his 14-year-old child’s English class was focused on left-wing social justice activism.
“Much of this is fine, but this is all disguised critical race theory,” Mr. Donovan said.
A spokeswoman for the school system said she was unfamiliar with the assigned material and it was not clear if it was being given across eighth grade English classes. Mr. Donovan said at least two teachers at Katherine Johnson Middle School had issued the assignment.
One of the parents of a child in the other 8th-grade class filed a formal complaint about the assignment with FCPS Thursday.
“I am furious beyond words that this type of biased, political and hard-left ideology is being assigned as a rational lesson,” Jason Bryk wrote in the complaint.
Mr. Bryk cited approving links to radical left-wing thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Francis Fox Piven as inappropriate and beyond the grasp of 8th graders.
“I realize that Fairfax County is the epicenter of leftist ideology but this lesson is beyond defensible,” Mr. Bryk’s complaint said. “This lesson provides no ‘diversity’ of opinion, ‘inclusion’ of alternative ideologies or any competing viewpoints. This is nothing short of indoctrination.”
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Nosedive in public school enrollment reflects homeschool boom
Homeschooling more than doubled in 2020 from 5% to 11%
By Lance Izumi
Student enrollment in public schools has nosedived as parent disgust with school COVID-19 policies, student learning losses, and controversial education policies have gone through the roof. In the wake of this enrollment implosion, homeschooling has boomed across the country. At the beginning of the current school year, the U.S. Department of Education estimated that 1.5 million students had left public schools since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
If students are not enrolling in public schools, where are they going? The numbers show that many former public school students are now being homeschooled. The U.S. Census Bureau found that the percentage of homeschooling households more than doubled in 2020 from 5% in spring to 11% in the fall.
In Virginia in 2019-20, around 38,000 children were being homeschooled. A year later, in 2020-21, state data showed that the number had risen to nearly 60,000. According to a recent University of Michigan study , from 2020 to 2021, the enrollment at public schools in Michigan fell by nearly 46,000 students, which represented a more than a 3% drop. Among kindergartners, there was a decrease of more than 11%.
The study found that homeschooling rates jumped substantially in the fall of 2020, with homeschooling accounting “for a majority of Michigan’s students who did not return to the public system.” Importantly, the study noted, “national trends in homeschooling follow a similar pattern.”
The increase in homeschoolers does not come from just a narrow segment of the American population. A University of Washington Bothell analysis found “The diversity of homeschoolers in the U.S. mirrors the diversity of all students nationally,” including all racial, religious, political, and income groups. For instance, the Census Bureau found that among African-American households, the increase in homeschooling was much steeper than in the country as a whole, rising from 3% to 16%, a five-fold jump. This increase in African-American homeschooling is not surprising given recent research by McKinsey & Company that found “Students in majority Black schools ended the [2020-21 school] year with six months of unfinished learning.”
Demetria Zinga, one of the country’s top African-American homeschool YouTubers, says, “I believe homeschooling is growing and exploding amongst African Americans, and there will be more and more homeschoolers.” She believes that this growth will be facilitated by “more resources available, in general, but also with regard to the African-American community, in particular, especially online that make it easier for people to homeschool.”
Homeschool mom Magda Gomez, an immigrant from Mexico, has become an activist for homeschooling in the Hispanic community. She observes: “We Hispanics as a culture are usually very protective and loving towards our children. However, I explain that love is not enough to raise our children. We have to educate ourselves in different areas [of education], especially since we are not in our [native] country but are immigrants.” “It is my dream,” she says, “to see more Hispanic families doing homeschool.”
Her dream is coming true with homeschooling doubling among Hispanic households, from 6% to 12%. In addition to the racial diversity of homeschoolers, in 2021, the school-choice organization EdChoice found : “Many parents of children with autism, ADHD, and other neuro-developmental disorders report that public schools cannot effectively address their child’s specialized learning needs.”
As opposed to the rigid structure that schools often impose on special-needs children, homeschooling allows parents to address their children’s particular needs.
Pediatric nurse and homeschool mom Jackie Nunes unenrolled her special-needs daughter from public school, saying , “There just wasn’t enough of the things that matter—time, attention, patience, persistence, passion, support.”
Viewing the growth of homeschooling, Virginia homeschool leader Yvonne Bunn says , “I think it will permanently change the landscape of education. I don’t think it will ever go back to the way it was before.” The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed all the flaws in the one-size-fits-all public schools, which is why the homeschooling boom is shaking up American education.
Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of the new book The Homeschool Boom: Pandemic, Policies, and Possibili
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second
https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/07/former-harvard-president-says-antiracist-math-curricula-poses-a-national-security-threat/
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Study is from Canada, similar expected in US.
1 out of 3 college freshman experience depression / anxiety.
[100% are told the world is going to end, etc. 2 out of 3 must take it all in with a grain of salt.]
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2021/12/07/college-freshmen-one-third-depression-anxiety/8601638827178/
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Also this:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-college-students-declining-mental-physical.html
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/the-union-mandated-school-shutdowns-are-having-major-consequences/
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Rebuild fence to protect our children from radical left Parents have right to know about alleged criminal behavior of teachers By Marc T. Little T
he Biden administration is engaged in an active cover-up to shield sexually deviant teachers from the alleged sexual abuse of students, according to the proposed rollback of the Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights 2021-2022 Civil Rights Data Collection, proposed on Nov. 18, 2021. This effort allows teachers to be reassigned to other locations without being reported, like the Catholic Church’s international scandal wherein it conducted the same horrendous behavior with its priests.
The ultimate effect of these reassignments makes it difficult for parents to know about the alleged criminal behavior of teachers, which is unacceptable.
This move by the Biden administration follows U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s assault on parents who dare to exercise their First Amendment rights at local school board meetings to protect their children. Whistleblower documents strongly suggest Mr. Garland misled Congress about the collusion between the National School Board Association, the White House and the Department of Justice to target parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists. This is scandalous behavior.
Children are our nation’s treasure. Whoever guides the children controls the future. Notwithstanding the 2,000 plus children aborted daily in the womb in the U.S., it is clear the left — President Biden included — is pulling out all the stops to ensure the state has more influence on these remaining children than their own parents.
Our nation woke up to an example of this pernicious agenda when we learned that Jackson Sparks, 8 years old, became the sixth victim of an incident where police say Darrell Brooks Jr. drove his SUV through the Waukesha, Wisconsin, Christmas parade.
Mr. Brooks, convicted of threatening to bomb a Las Vegas casino and having sex with a minor in 2006, was out on $1,000 cash bail for charges including domestic abuse. Mr. Brooks’ freedom was the intended consequence of far-left-wing policies of George Soros-funded district attorneys who disfavor incarceration. This is a colossal failure in the criminal justice system and is the direct cause of this tragic loss of life.
The erosion of the societal mandate to protect children extends beyond the criminal justice system. The erosion is also clear in education and the health care spheres. Children are no longer safe in the hands of school administrators or appointed medical professionals, like White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci, most of whom reside within the radical left.
I recently met a young high school girl in Indiana who revealed the divisive instruction occurring in her school. She said to her mother, “Mommy, they are teaching us to worship Black people.” This girl is the victim of the indoctrination by the left in public schools that promote critical race theory.
Moreover, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s statements that children are at the lowest risk of contracting and spreading the coronavirus, we now see vaccines approved for children ages 5-11. However, according to the CDC, there were only 210 COVID-19 related deaths nationwide in this age group. This is not a national crisis for children, in my view.
Government intrusion on our children in education and medical treatment is no longer driven by the “best interests of the child”; politics has taken over. Two good men started the heavy lift to stop this madness.
Both Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita are rebuilding the fence of protection around our children. Mr. Hawley introduced the Parents’ Bill of Rights Act on Nov. 16, 2021, to defend a parent’s right against efforts to shut them out of their children’s education, providing a way for parents to sue federally-funded schools. However, this bill is unlikely to advance in a radical left majority in the House.
On the other hand, Mr. Rokita introduced a new Parents’ Bill of Rights for Hoosier parents on Nov. 22. He stated, “We have a right to make decisions on and consent to care and medical treatment of our children, including in a school setting.” The Office of the Attorney General added, “Our participation in our children’s education is the most critical factor in assuring school accountability under the law.”
This bill of rights is an example that all attorneys generals should follow.
Suppose we do not actively participate in building the fence of protection around our children right now at the local, state and federal levels. In that case, our children will continue to be mowed down in the streets by criminals who should be in jail, indoctrinated in our schools with racist curricula, and jabbed in their arms with a vaccine against parental wishes. Marc T. Little is the executive director of CURE America Action, Inc., a 501 (c)(4), headquartered in Washington, advocating messages of Christianity, capitalism and the Constitution across the nation. He is a pastor, attorney and political strategist.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-universities-maintain-ties-with-chinese-institutions-that-support-beijings-military-development-report-says_4173275.html?utm_source=uschinaia&utm_campaign=uschina-2021-12-24&utm_medium=email
https://bigthink.com/the-present/pisa-test-china/#Echobox=1640325270
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"These academic relationships are used by the Chinese regime to acquire American technology and know-how to further its military development, said a Dec. 9 report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington-based think tank."
One question I never hear answered:
DO WE EVER GET ANYTHING FROM THEM?
are we learning sciences advances that they discover or find?
NO WHERE HAS ANYONE ASKED THIS QUESTION, that I ever read
We spend the billions doing the R and D and they spend a couple million in bribes and get the same benefit for minimal relative cost
We have so many Chinese in our universities....
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Evidence listed here:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/30/new-york-gov-hochul-declares-racism-a-public-health-crisis/
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"One question I never hear answered:
"DO WE EVER GET ANYTHING FROM THEM?"
Hell, I never hear the question even being asked.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397271.php
The real heroes!
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Colleges lost 465,000 students this fall. The continued erosion of enrollment is raising alarms.
Listen to article
3 min
Undergraduate enrollment at colleges has fallen 6.6 percent since fall of 2019, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (iStock)
By Danielle Douglas-Gabriel
Yesterday at 12:01 a.m. EST
Student enrollment at colleges fell once again in the fall, a new report has found, prompting some to worry whether the declines experienced during the pandemic could become an enduring trend.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center on Thursday said undergraduate enrollment in fall 2021 dropped 3.1 percent, or by 465,300 students, compared with a year earlier. The drop is similar to that of the previous fall, and contributes to a 6.6 percent decline in undergraduate enrollment since 2019.
That means more than 1 million students have gone missing from higher education in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Clearinghouse.
Nationwide college enrollment continues to slide
Even as campuses have largely reopened and returned to some semblance of normalcy, people are not pursuing credentials at the same rate as before. Experts worry that the unabating declines signal a shift in attitudes about higher education and could threaten the economic trajectory of a generation.
“The longer this continues, the more it starts to build its own momentum as a cultural shift and not just a short-term effect of the pandemic disruptions,” Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, said in an interview. “Students are questioning the value of college. They may be looking at friends who graduated last year or the year before who didn’t go and they seem to be doing fine. They’re working; their wages are up.”
Job openings are at near record highs, and the lure of what many economists say is a job seekers’ market may be siphoning off would-be students, especially adult learners. Indeed, one of the sharpest enrollment declines this fall was among people 24 and older, particularly at four-year colleges, according to Clearinghouse data.
The number of associate-degree-seeking students enrolled at four-year institutions plummeted in the fall, down 11 percent from a year ago. The drop was less severe at community colleges, where the decline in head counts was 3.4 percent.
Community colleges at a crossroads: Enrollment is plummeting, but political clout is growing
Still, public two-year colleges remain the hardest-hit sector since the start of the pandemic, with enrollment down 13.2 percent since 2019. Leaders of community colleges have said some of their students struggled to pivot online at the start of the health crisis because of spotty Internet access, while others took a step back from school because of family obligations.
Because community colleges educate a large share of students from low-to-moderate-income families, higher education experts worry a continuation of enrollment declines could erode their earnings potential. Shapiro is broadly concerned that tepid enrollment throughout higher education will impact the nation for years to come.
“There’s a great deal at stake,” he said. “We have to get students back on track, re-engage them.”
There are some promising signs in the data. Freshman enrollment stabilized in fall 2021 following a precipitous decline the previous year, even though it remains 9.2 percent lower compared with pre-pandemic levels. Private nonprofit four-year colleges are driving the increase in enrollment, with an increase of 11,600 students, according to Clearinghouse data.
Only four states — Arizona, Colorado, New Hampshire and South Carolina — witnessed an increase in total fall enrollment. Head counts at colleges and universities in Maryland fell 5 percent, largely driven by depressed enrollment at community colleges. The same trend prevailed in Virginia, where total fall enrollment dipped 1.2 percent because of public two-year schools.
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Not everyone needs to go to college. There are millions of trades jobs going unfilled.
Colleges lost 465,000 students this fall. The continued erosion of enrollment is raising alarms.
Listen to article
3 min
Undergraduate enrollment at colleges has fallen 6.6 percent since fall of 2019, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (iStock)
By Danielle Douglas-Gabriel
Yesterday at 12:01 a.m. EST
Student enrollment at colleges fell once again in the fall, a new report has found, prompting some to worry whether the declines experienced during the pandemic could become an enduring trend.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center on Thursday said undergraduate enrollment in fall 2021 dropped 3.1 percent, or by 465,300 students, compared with a year earlier. The drop is similar to that of the previous fall, and contributes to a 6.6 percent decline in undergraduate enrollment since 2019.
That means more than 1 million students have gone missing from higher education in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Clearinghouse.
Nationwide college enrollment continues to slide
Even as campuses have largely reopened and returned to some semblance of normalcy, people are not pursuing credentials at the same rate as before. Experts worry that the unabating declines signal a shift in attitudes about higher education and could threaten the economic trajectory of a generation.
“The longer this continues, the more it starts to build its own momentum as a cultural shift and not just a short-term effect of the pandemic disruptions,” Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, said in an interview. “Students are questioning the value of college. They may be looking at friends who graduated last year or the year before who didn’t go and they seem to be doing fine. They’re working; their wages are up.”
Job openings are at near record highs, and the lure of what many economists say is a job seekers’ market may be siphoning off would-be students, especially adult learners. Indeed, one of the sharpest enrollment declines this fall was among people 24 and older, particularly at four-year colleges, according to Clearinghouse data.
The number of associate-degree-seeking students enrolled at four-year institutions plummeted in the fall, down 11 percent from a year ago. The drop was less severe at community colleges, where the decline in head counts was 3.4 percent.
Community colleges at a crossroads: Enrollment is plummeting, but political clout is growing
Still, public two-year colleges remain the hardest-hit sector since the start of the pandemic, with enrollment down 13.2 percent since 2019. Leaders of community colleges have said some of their students struggled to pivot online at the start of the health crisis because of spotty Internet access, while others took a step back from school because of family obligations.
Because community colleges educate a large share of students from low-to-moderate-income families, higher education experts worry a continuation of enrollment declines could erode their earnings potential. Shapiro is broadly concerned that tepid enrollment throughout higher education will impact the nation for years to come.
“There’s a great deal at stake,” he said. “We have to get students back on track, re-engage them.”
There are some promising signs in the data. Freshman enrollment stabilized in fall 2021 following a precipitous decline the previous year, even though it remains 9.2 percent lower compared with pre-pandemic levels. Private nonprofit four-year colleges are driving the increase in enrollment, with an increase of 11,600 students, according to Clearinghouse data.
Only four states — Arizona, Colorado, New Hampshire and South Carolina — witnessed an increase in total fall enrollment. Head counts at colleges and universities in Maryland fell 5 percent, largely driven by depressed enrollment at community colleges. The same trend prevailed in Virginia, where total fall enrollment dipped 1.2 percent because of public two-year schools.
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/516/920/original/d951d1ffee2be68e.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/516/920/original/d951d1ffee2be68e.jpg)
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https://populistpress.com/gordon-supreme-court-congress-public-reform-universities/
yet the cost of education goes up faster
then inflation ..........
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Micro-Schools’ Grow In Popularity Amid Student Exodus From Public Schools
By Allan Stein February 7, 2022 Updated: February 7, 2022biggersmaller Print
The romantic image of a one-room schoolhouse nestled on the midwestern prairie has in its modern equivalent today’s micro-school, or “pandemic pod.”
Born amid the COVID-19 pandemic, minimalist by design, their founders say these mini-schools may be small in size but they’re large in curriculum scope, offering individualized instruction in a safe, politics-free environment.
“A micro-school takes the best of different educational formats and brings them together,” said Corey Owens, spokesperson for Prenda micro-schools in Arizona.
“In groups of five to 10 students led by a guide, learners engage with a personalized, adaptable curriculum, while getting healthy social interaction and opportunities to learn from one another,” Owens said.
The first Prenda micro-school opened in Arizona in 2018 with seven students.
Four years later the organization operates micro-schools in hundreds of communities in a dozen states with more than 3,000 students, 300 guides, and nine school partners that include both charter schools and community groups.
“From our vantage point the interest in micro-schools transcends politics and geographics,” said Owens, who attributed the phenomenal growth in micro-schools to parents who are looking for an educational setting that “lets their child develop a love of learning.”
“We’ve seen kids that have struggled with bullying, kids that were having trouble keeping up, and kids that excelled but [who] were bored but thrive in a micro-school environment,” Owens told The Epoch Times.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, forced lots of families to consider what format works for them and their child in uncertain times, and many of them are turning to micro-schools.”
According to Prenda’s website a micro-school is a new kind of entity that connect parents with guides who run micro schools in communities. Prenda’s tuition-free micro-schools for pupils in K-8 are small in size and offer both individualized and group learning in a safe and flexible environment.
Some micro-schools are free, or tuition-based, or receive funding through various state tax credits and “empowerment scholarships.”
Many parents are referred to the micro-school that best fits their child’s needs through school “hubs,” such as Love Your School, in Arizona, an Arizona-based nonprofit that launched three years ago.
Epoch Times Photo
Students follow along remotely with their regular school teacher’s online live lesson from separated by plastic barriers at STAR Eco Station Tutoring and Enrichment Center on Sept. 10, 2020, in Culver City, California. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)
“Depending on what they choose, we walk them through that process,” said spokeswoman Jenny Clark. “All of a sudden we had all these families coming to us initially. I think that there are a variety of issues [driving the trend]—a crazy storm of issues.”
Most importantly, parents “want choices, variety, and a trusted education environment that suits kids’ needs,” Clark told The Epoch Times.
“I think the more parents demand these different options, the more you’ll see public and private schools responding. Parents know what’s best for their kids. I think parents are right: no one knows their child better than them.”
Adamo Education is another Arizona micro-school veteran educator Tamara Becker launched in January 2021 during the height of the pandemic, when micro-schools started spreading like “wildfire.”
“Parents are not satisfied” with public education models, Becker told The Epoch Times. “They’re not happy with their kids in classrooms of 25 to 30 [students]. They’re looking for an environment that is safer.”
Adamo Education meets the needs of its students through a combination of traditional, digital, and at-home learning opportunities with certified teachers in grades K-8, she said.
“My program is different in that I only use certified teachers,” Becker said. “The power and the role of the teacher is so key,” as is the goal of helping students “fall in love” with education.
teacher and students outdoors
In learning pods, or micro-schools, small groups of families take turns teaching children, or pool resources to hire a teacher. (Andrii Medvednikov/Shutterstock)
“I really want kids to love learning and to foster that love of learning,” she said. “You can do so much more academically and socially. You know your parents and students much more intimately.”
While the exact number of micro-schools in the United States is not currently known, they are estimated to be in the hundreds. Like their public school counterparts, micro-schools—”alt-schools” in some circles—pride themselves on their individualized, project-based programs of instruction.
Some micro-schools are home-based; others provide stand-alone facilities where learning takes place.
“It’s so much more personalized and such a tighter knit kind of learning environment. We need to disrupt the educational status quo and micro-schools are going to be the tools to do that,” Becker said.
At Acton Academy in Laconia, New Hampshire, school administrator Mary MacIntosh launched the micro-school with four students in the fall of 2019 because there was “nothing like it in the area.”
Now in its second year of operation the micro-school has grown to 20 elementary school age pupils and recently opened a middle school program with seven students.
“I do think COVID was a factor for a lot of people” to choose Acton Academy, MacIntosh told The Epoch Times. “They didn’t want their children to be remote and it was safer than sending them to class” in larger public school buildings.
What parents like most about Acton Academy, she said, is the individualized hands-on instruction.
Students not only learn about math concepts, they also study about physics and gravity in project-based workshops, such as Newton’s Toy House.
“Children can go as far as they need to go in a subject or as slow as they need to go,” she said.
MacIntosh said the problem with modern public education is that it’s a “gigantic system that just can’t keep up” with the latest innovations in classroom teaching. “It’s just too hard the way it’s set up.”
Epoch Times Photo
Parents concerned about Critical Race Theory took home these buttons from a school board activist training session on Jan. 19 in Sarasota, Florida. (Alexis Spiegelman)
Controversial topics, such as Critical Race Theory, are not taught at Acton Academy, she said.
Which is not to say that micro-schools don’t have their critics.
In August 2020 the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, published a report titled “The Proliferation of Pandemic Pods, Micro-Schools, and Home Education.”
The report concluded that alternative forms of education serve to widen the opportunity gap for minority students and “worsen school segregation as well-resourced families will disproportionately benefit.”
“Just like any private school, pandemic pods do not guarantee students or educators the same civil rights protections that are required in public schools. Furthermore, pandemic pods will likely not provide the necessary supports for students with disabilities as required under state and federal legislation,” the NEA asserted in its findings.
The NEA also stated that in non-public school programs, students are not held accountable to state standards of learning and educators are not required to be credentialed.
“Credentialed educators who teach in a pandemic pod have no guaranteed protections or benefits like those secured under contracts working for school districts.
“Private funders have invested approximately $1.7 billion in 2019 in education technology firms. They now see “pandemic pods” as the way of the future, pushing talking points that traditional
public schools are outdated,” the organization added.
“The National Education Association (NEA) encourages innovative solutions that will allow students to have in-person instruction and important opportunities for socialization with peers; however, the NEA believes that such cohort-style learning arrangements should be organized, implemented, and monitored under the authority of state and district education agencies.”
It is the sense of parents being disenfranchised by the public education system, however, that has spurred growth in micro-schools, said Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem, (R).
“I would say that parents are dissatisfied with public schools. Between material being presented, and the petite tyranny exhibited by ‘leadership’ in public schools, it is clear that political science now rules over real science and medical science,” Finchem told The Epoch Times.
Allan Stein
Allan Stein
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https://news.yahoo.com/wisconsin-democrat-says-parents-want-201045971.html
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2022/03/12/chasten-buttigieg-leads-kids-in-pledge-to-the-gay-flag-n1565901
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/03/15/american-federation-of-teachers-president-randi-weingarten-gets-ukraine-flag-upside-down/
I am not sure why in the world a freakin' (no pun intended ) teachers union is involved in this.
I don't know how they got so powerful in the political game
They should all be banned.
as should all government unions.
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want Doug to pay more in taxes :
https://fee.org/articles/our-fight-is-against-capitalism-and-the-patriarchy-says-union-boss-leading-teachers-strike/
even worse he is a white male capitalist!
like me
who lives in teacher union dominated NJ
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want Doug to pay more in taxes :
https://fee.org/articles/our-fight-is-against-capitalism-and-the-patriarchy-says-union-boss-leading-teachers-strike/
even worse he is a white male capitalist!
like me
who lives in teacher union dominated NJ
They all want to raise my taxes, but these people are unqualified to teach or be left alone with our children.
Radical, ignorant socialists.
When do we fix our educational system?
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Caught.
I didn't know Atlanta kids went to school.
When did liberal teachers quit teaching kids to question authority?
How do you demonize election security in GA where already no one trusts the outcome?
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/03/25/atlanta-public-schools-worked-with-stacey-abrams-group-to-demonize-election-secur-n2605023
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race / black / race / black / race / back / race / black
into infinity..........................................................
it is like "climate change"
you can't do anything read anything watch anything without somehow this always being interjected.....
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race / black / race / black / race / back / race / black
into infinity..........................................................
it is like "climate change"
you can't do anything read anything watch anything without somehow this being always being interjected.....
I don't answer questions about race but we all should answer the question, poc, person of color.
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https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/harvard-drops-out-top-3-annual-law-school-rankings-2022-03-29/?fbclid=IwAR0v4Ls3c51H1jqHGgKlA9a4s1ITvvU5Z3gOBnIUUji9POhVExbQKO47JQs
I can't see the article. Anyone have access to the list?
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https://nationalfile.com/oregon-fourth-grade-teacher-charged-with-attempted-rape-of-two-minors/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2022/03/12/chasten-buttigieg-leads-kids-in-pledge-to-the-gay-flag-n1565901
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398472.php
https://nationalfile.com/oregon-fourth-grade-teacher-charged-with-attempted-rape-of-two-minors/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2022/03/12/chasten-buttigieg-leads-kids-in-pledge-to-the-gay-flag-n1565901
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/making-men/
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398472.php
https://nationalfile.com/oregon-fourth-grade-teacher-charged-with-attempted-rape-of-two-minors/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2022/03/12/chasten-buttigieg-leads-kids-in-pledge-to-the-gay-flag-n1565901
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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https://www.lifenews.com/2022/03/15/leftist-who-wants-to-push-sex-on-kids-says-parents-who-oppose-that-are-white-supremacists/
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398472.php
https://nationalfile.com/oregon-fourth-grade-teacher-charged-with-attempted-rape-of-two-minors/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2022/03/12/chasten-buttigieg-leads-kids-in-pledge-to-the-gay-flag-n1565901
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/398533.php
https://www.lifenews.com/2022/03/15/leftist-who-wants-to-push-sex-on-kids-says-parents-who-oppose-that-are-white-supremacists/
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398472.php
https://nationalfile.com/oregon-fourth-grade-teacher-charged-with-attempted-rape-of-two-minors/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2022/03/12/chasten-buttigieg-leads-kids-in-pledge-to-the-gay-flag-n1565901
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1513046467333689344
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/398533.php
https://www.lifenews.com/2022/03/15/leftist-who-wants-to-push-sex-on-kids-says-parents-who-oppose-that-are-white-supremacists/
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398472.php
https://nationalfile.com/oregon-fourth-grade-teacher-charged-with-attempted-rape-of-two-minors/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2022/03/12/chasten-buttigieg-leads-kids-in-pledge-to-the-gay-flag-n1565901
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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https://mobile.twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1512984011051868165
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1513046467333689344
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/398533.php
https://www.lifenews.com/2022/03/15/leftist-who-wants-to-push-sex-on-kids-says-parents-who-oppose-that-are-white-supremacists/
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398472.php
https://nationalfile.com/oregon-fourth-grade-teacher-charged-with-attempted-rape-of-two-minors/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2022/03/12/chasten-buttigieg-leads-kids-in-pledge-to-the-gay-flag-n1565901
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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https://populistpress.com/finally-someone-who-dares-to-sue-public-universities/
Represented by two of the biggest, most powerful law firms in the state, Perkins Coie [AGAIN! - remember Sussman]. and Snell & Wilmer:
filed a 200+ page bar complaint against him [Brnovch]. Since the left dominates many state bars, it is now weaponizing them to take down conservative lawyers. This way, they don’t even have to bother presenting their case to a jury and proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; just immediately threaten the person’s livelihood under whatever amorphous system they have handy, tarnishing their honorable reputation and obstructing their accomplishment of anything else
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https://www.unz.com/mmalkin/glsens-groomers-in-plain-sight/
GLSEN's Groomers in Plain Sight
MICHELLE MALKIN • APRIL 12, 2022 • 800 WORDS •
Everything old is new again as a new generation of parents takes on kiddie-porn curriculum producers masquerading as anti-bullying crusaders. So let me repeat a warning I’ve issued repeatedly to families across the country: “Diversity.” “Tolerance.” “Safety.” If a corporate-funded educational nonprofit targeting K-12 students employs those weasel words, get your kids as far away as possible, start following the money and stop being afraid.
For 25 years — yes, friends, a full quarter-century — I’ve reported on the perverse and pedophilia-promoting work of a massive propaganda network founded in 1990 and originally called the National Gay, Lesbian and Straight Teachers Network, or GLSTN, “to address homophobic and heterosexist behavior and bias in schools.” Radical leftist community organizers in Chicago spearheaded GLSTN’s hijacking of elementary, middle and high school classrooms under the guise of creating “safe schools.” Through annual conferences, educator training, brainwashing films such as “It’s Elementary,” and dissemination of sexually explicit and age-inappropriate books, the group enticed children into the alphabet mafia and demonized Christian nuclear families who dared dissent.
GLSTN was renamed the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN, in 1997 as it expanded its political advocacy and deepened its coffers filled with cash from Fortune 500 companies targeting children including Hollister, Disney, YouTube, Urban Outfitters and Nickelodeon. Other major sponsors and contributors to GLSEN hail from Wall Street, pedo-clogged Hollywood circles: convicted sex predator Harvey Weinstein-tied talent agency CAA, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
I reported extensively on the vile and toxic GLSEN reading materials pimped by President Barack Obama’s safe schools czar and GLSEN head Kevin Jennings in 2009, but I first learned of GLSTN/GLSEN’s grooming activities in the fall of 1997 while an editorial writer and columnist at the Seattle Times from my friend Linda Jordan, a citizen whistleblower and relentless independent investigator. Here’s what I wrote at the time:
“Picture this: Two bare-chested boys embraced in a kiss. A third person, whose face is not shown but is also bare-chested, stands off to the side with his hand on the head of one boy. Below the vivid color photo, which is posted on the Internet home page of a group called ‘AltKids,’ is a caption explaining that the group provides a service ‘in which gay and bisexual kids can find partners or friends of the same sexual orientation.’ To post messages on the site’s ‘Alternative Connections’ page, users must register not just their name and age, but their height, weight, hair color, eye color, address and phone number.
“Until last week, after West Seattle citizen activist Linda Jordan and other concerned parents complained to the school board, this on-line ‘service’ was advertised on the ‘links’ section of the National Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Teachers Network (GLSTN). GLSTN provides support to a chapter in Washington state, many of whose members are employed by the Seattle School District’s Sexual Minority Advisory Council. The Council promoted the national GLSTN office’s web site in literature made available to schoolchildren.
“Prior to Jordan’s complaint, Seattle students had unlimited access to the GLSTN site and to the smutty AltKids link. After viewing the photos, the district’s legal counsel, Mark Green, contacted the national GLSTN office, which has removed the AltKids link from its site pending further investigation. Green told me that district computer technicians have blocked the site from public school computers. Kudos to Jordan for making the schools safer. But where were all the district’s guardians? What other exploitative materials are children being exposed to in the name of teaching tolerance and self-respect?”
Jordan had been raising hell about child sex abuse in the Seattle public schools and juvenile court system for years — and flagged the longtime allegations of young boys who accused powerful King County Superior Court Judge Gary Little of molesting them while he was a teacher and volunteer counselor. She could smell a child predator from a mile away, and she knew their habits. Little committed suicide outside his chambers hours before the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was set to publish a long-suppressed expose of Little’s sex crimes against children and systematic abuse of power.
Everything Jordan told me was right. The newspapers and powerful NBC TV affiliate station had covered up Little’s pedo record. So had the statewide Commission on Judicial Conduct.
One reporter told The Washington Post that local elites kept quiet about Little’s creepy proclivities and suspicious sleepovers with juvenile delinquents because Seattle was “a liberal city” and “some people refrained from criticizing Little for fear of being accused of unfairness to gays.”
And so it has been for the entire kiddie-porn industry that has metastasized in America’s K-12 schools for at least 25 years, when I first reported on that internet pedo recruitment website in Seattle schools.
Silence is complicity. Complicity in the sexual exploitation of children in the name of “diversity,” “tolerance” and “safety” is an unconscionable crime. The groomers aren’t even hiding in plain sight. They’ve been out in the open, feeding on your fear and feasting on your children.
Michelle Malkin’s email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com.
https://mobile.twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1512984011051868165
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1513046467333689344
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/398533.php
https://www.lifenews.com/2022/03/15/leftist-who-wants-to-push-sex-on-kids-says-parents-who-oppose-that-are-white-supremacists/
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/218/353/original/9ebe3b4e00d67b27.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398472.php
https://nationalfile.com/oregon-fourth-grade-teacher-charged-with-attempted-rape-of-two-minors/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2022/03/12/chasten-buttigieg-leads-kids-in-pledge-to-the-gay-flag-n1565901
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397906.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/144/697/original/264de11f5b4c48f2.jpg)
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Posting that elsewhere.
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just sickening:
https://nypost.com/2022/04/16/queens-principal-booted-for-fraud-will-get-paid-for-7-years/
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https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/04/22/dewey-decimal-disaster-american-library-association-elects-marxist-lesbian-president/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Drabinski
the middle finger to most of the country
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/398791.php
Make them a lesson to the others.
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/398791.php
Make them a lesson to the others.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/mouse-whored-william-kilpatrick/
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did not Nazi storm troopers wear leather jackets
along with WW2 bombers and biker gangs:
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/randi-weingarten-claims-parental-choice-legislation-is-the-way-in-which-wars-start/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
just something about this that is some sort of overt or subliminal expression or "statement"
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War on pedo-teachers?
Sounds good to me.
did not Nazi storm troopers wear leather jackets
along with WW2 bombers and biker gangs:
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/randi-weingarten-claims-parental-choice-legislation-is-the-way-in-which-wars-start/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
just something about this that is some sort of overt or subliminal expression or "statement"
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https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/04/22/dewey-decimal-disaster-american-library-association-elects-marxist-lesbian-president/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Drabinski
the middle finger to most of the country
Sooner or later, she will be cured by a helicopter ride.
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"Sooner or later, she will be cured by a helicopter ride."
yes
and not by the right
but by the left
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"Sooner or later, she will be cured by a helicopter ride."
yes
and not by the right
but by the left
Maybe. As things fall apart, the urban leftist Eloi will be devoured by the urban Morlocks they helped create. In some cases, literally.
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/105/582/555/original/6c660c10f9d0ae54.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/105/582/555/original/6c660c10f9d0ae54.png)
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/398901.php
These people WILL face consequences.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/canceling-student-loan-debt-would-make-college-more-expensive
"Think about what would happen if this loan repayment policy were to be implemented. Who would ever pay off a student loan ever again after this blanket forgiveness program?"
[study found] only 22% of families had student loan debt and that "student debt has consistently been disproportionately held by higher-income families."
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[Doug] A "one-time' forgiveness made purely for political purposes is not a "one-time forgiveness", especially if it works and buys votes. Like one-time" amnesty. It means it is on the ballot forever. It undermines the entire educational lending and funding process - that ought to be called, 'skin in the game'.
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(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/104/780/108/original/efe7024519ac6a2e.jpeg)
So, what changed?
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that is interesting GM
what is the source?
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that is interesting GM
what is the source?
It was linked to by Revolver.news
Appears to be by some internet rando, but seems valid to me.
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https://www.breitbart.com/education/2022/05/06/new-york-teachers-receive-eligibility-credits-for-learning-how-to-indoctrinate-students/
same thing in health care
woke classes galore
funny in the 38 yrs in medicine there has to my knowledge ( of course I could have missed it)
a pro life article
all the articles I have read are close to neutral or always from people with "public health" degrees who are against pro-life
Indeed I have never read an article that was pro Republican or Conservative
in any way
most have tried to be neutral but one can always tell from the tones or insinuations the authors are crats.
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399081.php
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399081.php
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/shock-videos-school-district-philadelphia-teachers-attend-transgender-conference-kink-bdsm-trans-sex-bigger-dck-energy/
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/despite-pushback-parents-publicly-funded-drag-queen-story-hour-expands-nyc-middle-schools-performers-teach-children-put-drag-makeup/
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/107/444/455/original/ce12c032fabb21f5.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/107/444/455/original/ce12c032fabb21f5.png)
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/31/chicago-high-school-to-implement-race-based-grading-system/
since they can't pass a test the logic is to cancel testing, showing up for class,
or doing homework
the Left's wisdom knows no bounds. :roll:
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/31/chicago-high-school-to-implement-race-based-grading-system/
since they can't pass a test the logic is to cancel testing, showing up for class,
or doing homework
the Left's wisdom knows no bounds. :roll:
If you think public schools are bad now, just wait!
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https://www.aier.org/article/no-history-of-education-vouchers-is-complete-without-thomas-paine/
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traced to Massachusetts circa 1837
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-inflation-rate-history-by-year-and-forecast-3306093
Paine was ahead of his time
with the concept of school vouchers
though in other areas maybe more like a modern socialist.
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May I add this from Wikipedia
-------------
State funded social programs
In his Rights of Man, Part Second, Paine advocated a comprehensive program of state support for the population to ensure the welfare of society, including state subsidy for poor people, state-financed universal public education, and state-sponsored prenatal care and postnatal care, including state subsidies to families at childbirth. Recognizing that a person's "labor ought to be over" before old age, Paine also called for a state pension to all workers starting at age 50, which would be doubled at age 60.[115]
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-york-state-city-paid-200000-drag-queens-reading-kids-public-schools-records-show
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https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/arizona-gov-doug-ducey-poised-to-sign-expansive-school-choice-bill-into-law/
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Good news!
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399891.php
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiara_Mack
a Brown University grad !
BA in public health. 2016
yes twerking is good for the public's health
MA from BU in education 2018
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if only we could just twerk together .............
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https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/yes-things-are-really-as-bad-as-youve/comment/7809860
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https://nationalfile.com/video-michigan-school-employee-who-called-for-lgbt-lessons-mocked-parents-arrested-for-pedophilia/
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/teachers-union-survey-backfires-turns-epic-self-own-democrats-education-policy-expert?fbclid=IwAR11RT5AzljT_x6Dq3xSZ29kvC0II6jWXI5E86JcFCF9nYQV3d70IS8xRM4
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https://fee.org/articles/harvard-faculty-survey-reveals-striking-ideological-bias-but-more-balanced-higher-education-options-are-emerging/
this cannot be coincidence
how does this happen?
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https://fee.org/articles/harvard-faculty-survey-reveals-striking-ideological-bias-but-more-balanced-higher-education-options-are-emerging/
this cannot be coincidence
how does this happen?
Anyone who questions the groupthink is purged.
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funny
how when all we here from harvard and other academics etc is we need DIVERSITY!!!!
when
diversity of thought is discouraged.
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funny
how when all we here from harvard and other academics etc is we need DIVERSITY!!!!
when
diversity of thought is discouraged.
That's the left's definition. Everyone marching in lockstep.
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https://fee.org/articles/harvard-faculty-survey-reveals-striking-ideological-bias-but-more-balanced-higher-education-options-are-emerging/
this cannot be coincidence
how does this happen?
Beyond how does this happen, how do organizations maintain their prestige as their quality goes down the tubes. Harvard, now a Leftist training center, UN corrupt, NYT worse than Pravda, Princeton home of Krugman, Nobel awards Arafat, awards Obama his first week, and so on. Yes, why does SO much BS for so long not fully destroy their reputation and prestige?
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https://fee.org/articles/harvard-faculty-survey-reveals-striking-ideological-bias-but-more-balanced-higher-education-options-are-emerging/
this cannot be coincidence
how does this happen?
Beyond how does this happen, how do organizations maintain their prestige as their quality goes down the tubes. Harvard, now a Leftist training center, UN corrupt, NYT worse than Pravda, Princeton home of Krugman, Nobel awards Arafat, awards Obama his first week, and so on. Yes, why does SO much BS for so long not fully destroy their reputation and prestige?
It has. Our rotting system is just stumbling on by inertia now.
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Who could have seen this coming?
https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-health-race-and-ethnicity-education-4d02ce3fe0fe432efc68373ee961c5bb?taid=63104a6ea2fab900019c418c
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Similarly
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/math-reading-scores-plummeted-to-lowest-level-in-decades-during-school-shutdowns/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=28915882
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mental-health-children-depression-suicide-60-minutes-2022-09-04/
IS THIS WHAT WE WANT??!!
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https://www.dailydot.com/irl/teacher-paycheck-1300/
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https://thepostmillennial.com/savanah-hernandez-reports-college-kids-say-they-don-t-care-about-9-11-and-aren-t-proud-to-be-an-american
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https://www.thecollegefix.com/bill-would-force-universities-to-repay-portion-of-student-loan-default/
Have colleges pay 50% of the default. Seems fair and addresses moral hazard run amok.
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EDUCATION
Kentucky test scores reveal struggles caused by pandemic
BY BRUCE SCHREINER ASSOCIATED PRESS FRANKFORT, KY. | Education in Kentucky faces its own difficult recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, a grim fact revealed Tuesday by statewide test scores showing that many students from elementary to high school struggled across a span of core subjects.
Fewer than half of students tested statewide were reading at grade level, with even lower across-the-board scores posted in math, science and social studies.
Education Commissioner Jason Glass acknowledged there’s “no quick fix” to overcome challenges caused by the pandemic, when schools shifted to virtual learning and staff shortages were common. The recovery in education will take “time and resources,” he stressed.
“As expected, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on our students and our schools as they continue to recover from the interrupted learning that occurred over the past two years,” Mr. Glass said in a news release. “These assessment results will serve as the baseline from which we will move forward as we look to new and innovative learning opportunities for all of Kentucky’s students.”
Kentucky has received more than $2 billion in federal funding through the Democrat-backed American Rescue Plan passed by Congress last year. The funding aims to help accelerate learning and provide additional support to districts and the students who need it the most.
Kentucky’s results are consistent with what many other states are experiencing, Mr. Glass said.
In Kentucky, the test scores for the 2021-2022 academic year were released Tuesday by the state Department of Education. The assessments were given last spring to more than 383,000 students in grades three through eight and 10 through 11.
“It’s important for all of us to use this data responsibly to help inform parents and families about their students’ schools and to allow local leaders to target resources to communities and schools that need them most,” Mr. Glass said.
The results showed that 45% of elementary school pupils scored proficient or distinguished on their reading tests — indicating they are where they should be. Nearly the same percentage of middle and high school students tested at proficient or distinguished levels in reading.
Overall scores were worse in other core subjects. Fewer than 40% of students across all the grade levels tested scored proficient or distinguished in math. In science, the highest overall scores were at the elementary-school level, with 29% scoring proficient or distinguished.
State education officials cautioned that this year’s scores can’t be directly compared with previous tests because of changes to the test itsel
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Underfunded and understaffed: The reoccurring themes of K-12 public education
Funds and staffing should be adjusted to reflect a decline in enrollment, quality of instruction
By Dr. Keri D. Ingraham
Chicago Public Schools now spends more than $29,000 per student, up from $17,800 in 2020. This is despite an 8.9% enrollment decline over the same time period. Far from alone, school districts around the country are sharply increasing spending regardless of falling enrollment. It is not only an economic debacle, but student learning is plummeting during the spending spree.
In the fall of 2020, more than 3 million students around the country did not show up to school — a half million of those were kindergartners whose parents opted to forgo online school for their non-reading 5-year-old children. By the spring of 2021, public school enrollment decline grew to 4 million students — a staggering 9% decrease. The exodus is not slowing as the 2022-2023 school year is underway.
The consistent trend of students who have left K-12 public schools over the past three school years is that they are not coming back. Parents and students are witnessing firsthand the benefits of alternative educational avenues, such as private schools, home schooling, microschools, learning pods and virtual schools. Enjoying their new learning experience, the only aspect they miss from K-12 public schools is that they are “free” thanks to the heavy taxes extracted from all.
Even with the sharp enrollment decline, staffing levels have remained level or even increased. In no industry other than government are staffing levels maintained in the face of significant and ongoing customer decline. Downsizing is inevitable. But in K-12 education, in large part by the powerful teacher unions who are teamed up with Democratic policymakers, claims of understaffing are continuous, despite dwindling student enrollment.
As a case in point, Seattle Public Schools employs more than 7,000 adults, which translates to one employee for every seven students. Despite the school system’s 7½% enrollment downturn, it has not paused plans to hire more employees. With only 47% of the district’s employees operating as classroom teachers, the excessive staffing drives up the cost to taxpayers, equating to $22,200 per student without factoring in the capital budget funding.
The Seattle school district is far from alone with reckless spending in the face of shrinking student enrollment and less-than-stellar results to show for it. In 2021, the Los Angeles Unified School District passed a $13.8 billion operating budget for the 2021-2022 school year, a 62% increase over the prior year’s budget. The increase skyrocketed the per-student spending to $24,000 — a more than $7,000 increase within three years.
The same reality is true for New York City Public Schools. The largest public school district in the country chalked up $30,772 in per-student spending in 2020, while enrollment dropped 9.5%.
The Seattle schools recently agreed to a new three-year contract with the Seattle Education Association adding approximately 20% to the budget for primarily more pay and increased staffing. Yet their superintendent, Brent Jones, admits the district doesn’t have the money for the $228 million agreed-upon increase.
So where does this money come from to close the funding gap — more accurately described as the planned overspending deficit? Taxpayers, of course. Schools operate an overstaffing model, ignoring enrollment downturns because it positions them well to claim the education system is underfunded, which pulls on the heartstrings of lawmakers and voters.
It’s hard to argue against the emotional ruse claiming that “if you care about kids and your community, you’ll vote in favor of fully funding public schools.” In this narrative, no regard is given to the poor management of personnel nor the bloated school district bureaucracy and staff rosters. Furthermore, there is no accountability for more money for consistently failing to improve student learning. Nationally, as of 2020-2021, public school districts employ 135 adults for every 1,000 students, which is 7.4 students per adult — similar to the number in Seattle. In the early 1950s, the ratio was more than 17 students per adult. Since personnel costs are the largest school operational budget line item, it’s no surprise that there are annual demands for increased funding, even as more money is poured into the system. Put another way, there are four times as many administrators in our K-12 public education system than in the 1950s, creating an excessive bureaucracy that drains roughly half of the funding before it even has the chance to reach the classroom. Newark, New Jersey, provides a typical example of this inefficiency — the school administration absorbs more than $10,000 of the $20,000 spent per student. And when the funds finally reach the classroom level, there is little positive impact for students because much of the money is gobbled up by teacher salaries, robust benefits packages and lavish pensions — which teacher unions continue to champion as insufficient no matter how large. The next time you hear that public schools are underfunded and understaff ed, don’t fall for it. Washington state public schools average about $119,000 per year in salary and benefits for a nine-month work year compared with the statewide average compensation of roughly $56,600, which in most cases is a 12-month position.
And as we continue to pour more money and additional staff into the K-12 public education system, student learning performance over the past several decades has not improved. On the contrary, student outcomes have remained flat despite enormous funding and personnel expansion.
It’s time we stop the absurdity and redesign U.S. K-12 education to ensure that funding follows students, and parents are empowered to select the education avenue that will best serve their children. The resulting free market education landscape based on choice and competition would force schools to educate students more effectively and cost-efficiently or lose students and ultimately go out of business.
Taxpayers, parents and community members should demand higher returns for their $800 billion K-12 education investment. Our children and the future of our country deserve nothing less.
Keri D. Ingraham is a fellow at Discovery Institute and director of the Insti-tute’s American Center for Transforming Education
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all the spending in the world will not make more then a dent in poor school performance
if education is NOT valued, encouraged, enforced at the home
the multigenerational cycle
is unbelievable
blame it all on white racism
vote for dems because the are for "diversity" and promising "reparations" !
and their supposed leaders all think like this and have vested interest in keeping the con going.
all to keep minorities from voting for policies that will really help break the cycle of impoverishment
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(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2022/11/IMG_0029.jpg?w=444&ssl=1)
https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2022/11/IMG_0029.jpg?w=444&ssl=1
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https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1593044611668545536
https://twitchy.com/mikel-313136/2022/11/17/conservative-moms-take-over-sc-school-board-fire-superintendent-and-ban-crt-in-two-hours/
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https://townhall.com/columnists/townhallcomstaff/2022/11/22/why-are-our-students-failing-n2616225
our teachers unions don't speak much of this or at least it is not in the news if they do as much as they grandstand for Democrats
ask for more money
and blame corona despite the fact they helped keep schools closed
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The School Board Election Revolt Continues
Challenges to union control of local school governance were often successful.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
Nov. 28, 2022 6:36 pm ET
Journal Editorial Report: Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis led the way for education alternatives. Image: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
It hasn’t received much attention since Election Day, but local school board races across the country continue to show welcome political ferment. More parents are refusing to let unions dominate education governance without a fight.
Exhibit A is Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis made a special cause of school board races. “We got involved to help candidates who were fighting the machine, fighting the lock-downers, fighting the forced-maskers, fighting the people that want to indoctrinate our kids,” he said in August.
Of the 34 candidates Mr. DeSantis endorsed in 2022, 29 have won. The parental-rights organization Moms for Liberty counts six Florida school boards that flipped to parental-rights majorities. That includes Miami-Dade County, where Joe Biden beat Donald Trump53.4% to 46.1% in 2020, and where Mr. DeSantis made two successful endorsements.
On Nov. 8 all nine school board seats were up for election in Charleston County, S.C., which went for Mr. Biden 55.5% to 42.6% in 2020. Moms for Liberty endorsed candidates for eight of the seats, and five won. One seat is still up for grabs after a candidate who wasn’t endorsed by Moms for Liberty won but said she had withdrawn from the race and left the state.
Tara Wood, the chair of Charleston County’s Moms for Liberty chapter, said parents wanted the schools to focus on essentials, but the old school board members were “all about social and racial justice” and championed “programs and curriculum that has nothing to do with reading, writing and doing math.”
Moms for Liberty says it also helped flip the school boards in South Carolina’s Berkeley County and the York County Rock Hill School District, New Jersey’s Cape May County and North Carolina’s New Hanover County. At least 114 of the 270 school board candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed won on Nov. 8.
The parental revolt even spread to Minnesota despite opposition from teachers union. Denise Specht, the president of the teacher’s union Education Minnesota, claimed in September that its “political program has been successful between 80 and 90 percent of the time when our locals make endorsements in school board races and carry out an aggressive voter contact plan.”
Yet 49 of 119 school board candidates endorsed by the Minnesota Parents Alliance won on Nov. 8. The alliance was formed in response to parental concern about learning loss and a desire to be more involved in children’s education. “The fact that our candidates did as well as they did” shows that “the parent movement really transcends politics,” says executive director Cristine Trooien.
November’s parental-rights outlier was Michigan. The state “had abortion on the ballot, and that turned out Democrats,” said Ryan Girdusky, the founder of the 1776 Project PAC, which opposes critical race theory in school curricula. Nationwide only 20 of the 53 school board and state superintendent candidates endorsed by the 1776 Project PAC won on Nov. 8, with the majority of their losses in Michigan. Yet in total this year 72 school-board candidates and one state superintendent candidate won among the 125 candidates the group endorsed.
Ballotpedia has identified 1,800 school board races where the Covid response or teachings on race, sex and gender were campaign issues. By Nov. 28 it had identified 1,556 winners. Some 31% of the identified victors opposed woke curricula or the Covid response, with some 37% expressing mixed or unclear opinions.
Teachers unions have an overwhelming political advantage in money and single-minded focus, especially compared to parents who have jobs and other obligations. That parents are winning any of these races is a minor miracle and speaks to the frustration produced by school lockdowns, progressive indoctrination in classrooms, and educational failure as measured by this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. Let’s hope this grass-roots political movement continues
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"It should be your care, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them a habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives." - John Adams
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/11/thought-for-the-day-john-adams-on-education.php
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/how-extreme-has-dumbing-down-america-become-you-might-want-brace-yourself-one?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1141
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Michigan’s Gender Studies Secret
A court says public-school teachers are exempt from FOIA.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 23, 2022 6:04 pm ET
The Freedom of Information Act is a popular tool for taxpayers and journalists to hold government to account. But what if the FOIA law doesn’t apply to documents or communications among many government employees?
That’s the theory endorsed by Michigan state Judge Jacob James Cunningham, who ruled on Dec. 15 that the state’s Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply to public-school teachers.
Carol Beth Litkouhi asked the Rochester community school district to give her more information about a school’s course on the History of Ethnic and Gender Studies. The school slowrolled her request, providing minimal information. With the help of the Mackinac Center, she submitted a FOIA request to see what students were learning in a class that her child might later decide to take.
The Mackinac Center’s interest is in transparency that “affords parents the opportunity to understand what their children are learning, and to fully engage with local government officials about these lessons.” The FOIA sought access to student assignments and reading for the class as well as lesson plans and other materials prepared by the teacher.
That sounds like a simple request, but the school district argued that teachers don’t count as public employees because they’re members of the teachers union, the Michigan Education Association, and thus don’t count as members of a “public body” under FOIA. Huh?
Judge Cunningham bought that argument, and he writes that the Michigan Freedom of Information Act is meant to apply only to public employees who work in the executive branch of state government, and thus teachers and their work product are exempt.
“Even assuming, arguendo, that public school teachers are ‘public bodies’ for the purpose of FOIA requests,” the judge writes, “a review of the court file, pleadings, briefs and evidence offered show RCSD has not prepared, owned, used, possessed or retained the documents requested” (bold in original). How is it possible, let alone logical, for a school district not to prepare, own or use documents that form part of its curriculum?
The school district’s goal here is to prevent parents from questioning what is taught. But public schools should be held to the same transparency standards as other public employees. Their work is funded by taxpayers and they are accountable to taxpayers and parents. Teachers’ salaries are publicly available, so why would their work product be different? The Mackinac Center is appealing the ruling.
Transparency from public officials is a core principle of democratic self-government. Educators know that schools thrive in communities where parents care about education and volunteer their time to help schools. The Rochester obstruction is an insult to the parents and taxpayers who pay their salaries.
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/12/29/queer-porn-college-classes-2022/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=uKR6GT0bM.sXhvKYv22_FpOCpE_0TJRncfHi2Psx9AVmX.RYoA2JkyxECDupFcyV6gnhUHmC
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https://www.propublica.org/article/desantis-critical-race-theory-florida-college-professors?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=feature
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poor white males need not apply
unless they get a sex change and they get rocketed to the top of the list:
https://www.inverse.com/science/inverse-breakthrough-awards-science-microbiome-neuroscience-space
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Is that the URL you intended?
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https://spectator.org/institutional-capture-it-can-happen-here-american-spectator-print-magazine/
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Victor Davis Hanson on the collapse of American universities:
Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year — or over 4% alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the US population still increases by about 2 million people a year.
Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students — an all-time high.
Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
The number of history majors has collapsed by 50% in just the last 20 years.
In the last decade alone, English majors across the nation’s universities have fallen by a third.
At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff — in near one-to-one fashion.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/25/the-woke-university-implosion-and-what-comes-next/
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https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=20987
Penn State professor tells straight students to watch gay porn to discover bisexuality
On December 6, Penn State professor Sam Richards held a sociology class discussion titled 'Trans Issues, TERFs, and The Binary.' During class, he told students 'we are all at some level nonbinary.'
To prove we are all bisexual he instructed students to 'watch gay and lesbian porn.'
--------
The advent of video and online courses makes the content no longer a mystery.
Instead of making professors more careful, it is those who criticize who need to fear being investigated and banned from their platforms, if not fired or prosecuted.
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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/transgender-men-can-get-pregnant-174513259.html
https://www.healthline.com/health/different-genders
no wonder so many children are confused and mixed up
I imagine they are given homework assignments to go home and try to figure who/what they are .
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DeSantis Is Right on African-American Studies
Florida governor Ron DeSantis speaks in a neighborhood impacted by Hurricane Ian in Fort Myers, Fla., October 5, 2022.(Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)
By RICH LOWRY
January 24, 2023 6:30 AM
With the state of American historical and civic knowledge in near collapse, who thinks high-school students need to be brushing up on ‘Black Queer Studies’?
Florida governor Ron DeSantis stands accused of a long parade of horribles to which has now been added a new count — allegedly opposing the teaching of African-American history.
Florida rejected the College Board’s pilot Advanced Placement African American Studies course, and the decision has been treated in progressive quarters like the curricular equivalent of George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the state’s decision “incomprehensible.” DeSantis wants to “block,” according to Jean-Pierre, “the study of Black Americans.” She noted, ominously, “These types of actions aren’t new, especially from what we’re seeing from Florida, sadly.”
Florida state senator Shevrin Jones, a Democrat, said the rejection of the course amounts to a “whitewash” of American history. Jones maintains that “we’re back at square one, seeing that we once again have to defend ourselves to be legitimate in America.”
Never mind that there’s obviously a difference between objecting to the ideological content of a pilot course that hasn’t yet been adopted and erasing the history of African Americans as such.
This is the typical game of pretending that the only way to teach the history of African Americans is through the tendentious political lens favored by the Left.
When red states push back against critical race theory, its proponents make it sound as if students will, as a consequence, never learn about the Transatlantic slave trade, the 13th Amendment, or Frederick Douglass.
This is preposterous. No reasonable person opposes teaching American history fully and truthfully. (In Florida, the controversial “Stop WOKE Act” itself stipulates that instructors should teach the history of African peoples, the Middle Passage, the experience of slavery, abolition, and the effects of segregation and other forms of discrimination.)
The problem is when the curriculum is used as an ideological weapon to inculcate a distorted, one-sided worldview, and here, Florida has the College Board dead to rights.
The College Board hasn’t released the pilot curriculum publicly, but, as conservative writer Stanley Kurtz and a publication called the Florida Standard have documented, it really goes off the rails when it addresses contemporary issues. The curriculum presents the Black Lives Matter and reparations movements favorably and recommends the writings of a clutch of writers on the left, from Robin D. G. Kelley to Michelle Alexander, without rejoinder.
Bias aside, with the state of American historical and civic knowledge in near collapse, who thinks high-school students need to be brushing up on “Black Queer Studies”? The curriculum explains that this topic “explores the concept of queer color critique, grounded in Black feminism and intersectionality, as a Black studies lens that shifts sexuality studies towards racial analysis.”
Surely, if anyone wants to marinate in this dreck, he or she can wait to do it in college, which specializes in wasting the time of students and spreading ridiculous cant and lies.
This is the more fundamental point. Such “studies” programs — African-American, women’s, queer, etc. — are intellectually corrupt and inherently biased at the university level and should be kept far away from the realm of K–12 public education.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that an AP curriculum developed with the input of practitioners of African-American studies at the university level would contain all the same perversities and warped ideas.
Florida should be commended for saying “no,” and other states that care about sound education should do the same.
African-American history is American history. It should be taught — and has been — as an inherent part of the American story. Only when we are confident that all students know that story should we be willing to entertain further specialization, and never if it is the poisoned fruit of “identitarian” courses at universities that take it as a given that their students should be encouraged to thoughtlessly adopt progressive attitudes and beliefs.
This fight isn’t about blocking history or erasing the country’s sins but drawing a line between hifalutin political advocacy and thorough, truthful instruction in the American past.
© 2023 by King Features Syndicate
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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pritzker-demands-black-queer-history-in-ap-african-american-studies/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=30367738
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https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-med-school-teaches-affirming-care-for-adultery-kink-and-bdsm/
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https://www.conservativereview.com/two-states-now-have-universal-school-choice-and-yours-could-be-next-2659317975.html
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https://www.conservativereview.com/two-states-now-have-universal-school-choice-and-yours-could-be-next-2659317975.html
Hey, without public schools, who will teach your children to be gay communists?
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https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-results-23-baltimore-schools-have-zero-students-proficient-in-math-jovani-patterson-maryland-comprehensive-assessment-program-maryland-governor-wes-moore#
But how's their proficiency at gender fluidity and micro aggressions, or whatever it is they're teaching instead of math?
China passing us up in technology starts with k through 12 and all our priorities that don't involve academics.
Do the math.
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https://mikecernovich.substack.com/p/real-and-fake-worlds-why-the-trains
Just wait until all the pilots and doctors get in because of “diversity”.
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I remember being stunned in law school upon reading the Griggs case this piece mentions. I looked around the class. Did no one understand that the holding of the case was "IQ tests are racist being black people are less intelligent"?!?
The article makes a cogent point which I missed until now:
"In the olden days, you didn’t need a college degree to get a real job. You took an IQ test to get a job. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co, the far left wing Supreme Court all but outlawed these tests.
"Employers thus started to required university degrees for jobs that a smart and ambitious 19 year old could have begun learning via on-the-job training and mentorship.
"All the smart kids were forced to attend college. Most of them realized, “If I am going to go through all this hassle, I may as well sell insurance for State Farm upon graduation.”
"Banning IQ tests for jobs, more than any other policy, hollowed out the middle. Millions of smart kids got left behind.
", , , Most won’t have the grades to attend college, or maybe they didn’t do their homework or have the prerequisites. They can’t test their way onto a job. Either they go to college, which is out of reach for most who grew up in my circumstances, or they fall through the cracks."
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second
A Shameful Vote in Virginia
Democrats smear a woman nominated to the board of education.
By The Editorial Board
Updated Feb. 15, 2023 8:51 am ET
Virginia Democrats have hit a new low in their battle to keep Gov. Glenn Youngkin from making good on his promise to give parents more say over their children’s education. On Tuesday the Democratic Senate voted to reject the Governor’s nominee for the state board of education amid nasty racial insinuations.
Mr. Youngkin’s nominee is Suparna Dutta, an India-born woman who co-founded the parents group at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. That group accused the high school of abandoning its merit-based admissions standards to reduce the number of Asian-Americans admitted. Ms. Dutta is an engineer and advocate for STEM education. Democrats say she is unqualified to serve on the board because she has no background in education.
What they mean is she dissents from progressive orthodoxy. The vote to kill her nomination came a week after a heated dispute with board member Anne Holton, Sen. Tim Kaine’s wife. Among Ms. Dutta’s “controversial” remarks was her criticism of socialism and defending the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Never mind that Ms. Dutta lived under socialism in India.
Her nomination was defeated by an amendment introduced by Sen. Ghazala Hashmi. Ms. Hashmi cited Ms. Dutta’s supposed “alignment” with “very extreme and right-wing white supremacist groups.” Winsome Sears slammed this smear on Twitter, noting that as the state’s first female black lieutenant governor she has “also been labeled a ‘white supremacist.’”
The accusation appears based on parent protests in Fairfax County, where a right-wing activist appeared and flew flags. Activists did the same to Glenn Youngkin’s campaign rallies in 2021 until he kicked them out. “To even suggest that I—as a Hindu woman of color—would support white supremacy is so absurd that it can only be part of a deceptive character assassination campaign,” Ms. Dutta said.
But the accusation serves a political purpose. A Parent Power Index by the Center for Education Reform that ranks states by how much they empower parents in education gives Virginia an “F,” ranking it 45th in the nation. It has a mere seven charter schools compared to 51 for neighboring Maryland and 135 for the District of Columbia.
Gov. Youngkin is asking the Legislature to approve $50 million for his lab-school initiative, which would let colleges and universities help to run K-12 schools. But Democrats recently blocked four Republican bills to establish state-funded education savings accounts that could be spent on private tuition. These accounts are spreading in other states around the U.S. and are popular.
Mr. Youngkin will have to take the fight to Senate Democrats if he wants to fulfill his promise to empower parents. The shameful defeat of Ms. Dutta is a reminder that the political opposition’s goal is not racial diversity but ideological conformity.
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Third
Game-Changer? Tennessee En Route to Rejecting Federal Education Money
By Roger L. Simon
February 9, 2023Updated: February 12, 2023
Commentary
The Associated Press is reporting what well may be an earthquake in the relations between red states and the federal government—specifically, the Department of Education, whose decrees and even existence are questioned by many conservatives, including former President Donald Trump:
“NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — One of Tennessee’s most influential Republican lawmakers says the state should stop accepting the nearly $1.8 billion of federal K-12 education dollars that help provide support for low-income students, English learners and students with disabilities.
“House Speaker Cameron Sexton told The Associated Press that he has introduced a bill to explore the idea during this year’s legislative session and has begun discussions with Gov. Bill Lee and other key GOP lawmakers.
“‘Basically, we’ll be able to educate the kids how Tennessee sees fit,’ Sexton said, pointing that rejecting the money would mean that Tennessee would no longer have ‘federal government interference.’”
What that doesn’t immediately say is that Tennessee would fully replace that $1.8 billion with the state’s own money, so that the low-income and other disadvantaged students the AP seems concerned about wouldn’t be affected.
I was on a radio interview with Sexton on Feb. 9, with Michael Patrick Leahy on “The Tennessee Star Report,” and can attest that this proposal—if not yet a done deal—is likely to be one in some form. Sexton said Lee and many other key “stakeholders,” including state Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, were already positively disposed to his idea.
At this point, as always, the devil will be in the details, including how long this will take to effectuate, given annual budget considerations. Sexton estimated 2024, but indicated it could take longer.
The state of Tennessee is fortunately on a solid-enough financial footing to able to do this. Other states, such as Oklahoma and South Carolina, also are exploring similar legislation.
If the measures pass, Beltway heads are likely to explode. You don’t want our money? Mon Dieu!
Tennessee, it’s worth noting, has a Senate with 27 Republicans and six Democrats and a General Assembly with 73 Republicans and 26 Democrats. Passage of such legislation in some form shouldn’t be overly difficult.
This could constitute the beginning of an epidemic, in which red states reject what many believe is serious unconstitutional overreach by the federal government in education and many other areas.
Such things are being examined actively in Tennessee as the state’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, explained at a luncheon of the Nashville Republican Women on Feb. 8. Skrmetti is forming a task force of lawyers potentially to sue the federal government over this overreach and possible attendant violations of the 10th Amendment.
Sexton, for his part, seems to be responding to an increasingly militant grassroots in his party that has been augmented by the great inflow of refugees (political migrants), many of whom are surprisingly activist, to Tennessee from blue states.
They have been demanding reforms in a system that has been infiltrated by critical race theory and also various versions of age-inappropriate sexual education. While these refugees had come to Tennessee to escape such things in blue states, they were deeply disappointed to find that at least in terms of the schools, they were running to stay in place, in great degree due to federal intervention.
This legislation, if it goes forward, will be a significant step in the right direction.
It also could be a baby step, possibly more, toward the rebirth of the federalism intended by the Founders. In the current environment, the only way that could happen would be via the states. The proper word, figuratively and literally, for the federal government is metastasis.
During his talk at the Nashville Republican Women’s luncheon, Skrmetti also referred to the active alliance of a large number of red state attorneys general who are working together to block this overreach in many areas.
For the most part, these legal endeavors exist behind the scenes, but may prove to be the most telling of all in bringing this country back on course.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/outrage-twitter-baltimore-reveals-zero-students-proficient-math-across-23-schools-failure.amp
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https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/02/23/universal-school-voucher-bill-steamrolls-through-arkansas-senate-at-mach-speed-knocking-opponents-flat
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https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-edit-roald-dahl-censorship-20230225-epcbxoaexjeploh6tjlaull7eu-story.html
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https://www.thecollegefix.com/virginia-teachers-union-democrats-oppose-teaching-about-victims-of-communism/
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Said the folks who were worried slavery wasn't being taught enough.
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for their outrageous fees?
https://thebestschools.org/resources/college-finances/why-is-college-expensive/
WHY ARE NOT REPUBLICANS MAKING THIS THE FOCUS OF ATTENTION?
I don't recall anyone pointing this out on our side
Is our side this dumb
just react to loan forgiveness
do not proactively
cut it off at the knees and start explaining loud and clear that colleges universities fees are high due to greed bloat .
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Tuition was $250/qtr. when I went to a major public university. 750/yr (3 quarters). I finished BS degree in 10 quarters, less than 3k total.
That included health insurance.
Now the same state and nation tax me on capital gains for investments made near that time as if there was no inflation.
The major colleges and universities act as a cartel, not competitors.
My daughter's private college president said they were trying to keep up with the colleges of similar rank, meaning keep tuition increases up, salaries competitive, etc.
It is the injection of government money that raises the price more than anything else.
Over 85% of students get financial aid of some sort, per NCES.
Hence, the laws of supply and demand are canceled, demand being what the customer is willing to pay for a product (including borrowing). How much product do I 'demand' when I demand that YOU pay for it?
In the health insurance debate a famous southern Senator said:
"If we had 3rd party pay for food, I'd eat more steak and so would my dawg!"
----------------------------------------
Here is some simple and rough k-12 math (not college):
Taxpayers pay $20,000 per student per year. ($21,656 in Mpls.)
Democrats think teachers don't make enough.
They also complain that 30 students per classroom is too many.
That makes $600,000 per teacher salary - if all the money went to the teacher.
Something like 90% of the money doesn't get to the classroom.
Now raise that to $700,000 - because we care about the children.
How much does the teacher make now?
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so why is our side silent?
I presume
say anything and the unions and the Dem media machine goes into overdrive
screaming - against education
racist , against the poor
the usual
leftist crap :
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/randi-weingarten-melts-down-student-debt-outside-scotus-not-fairetc
that said, if we do not want to conduct a gorilla WW3 war we ala GM we need to go up against this propaganda
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so why is our side silent?
I presume
say anything and the unions and the Dem media machine goes into overdrive
screaming - against education
racist , against the poor
the usual
leftist crap :
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/randi-weingarten-melts-down-student-debt-outside-scotus-not-fairetc
that said, if we do not want to conduct a gorilla WW3 war we ala GM we need to go up against this propaganda
The Left is debating the merits of student debt transference, but the question before the Supreme Court is whether or not the President can spend .5 Trillion on his own or does he have to go through that stupid, cumbersome, constitutional process where a bill originates in the House, goes to the Senate and then to the President and so on.
The decision could be 8-1 or 9-0 against them. It's all a matter of what they believe Congress intended authorizing "Emergency" Covid powers.
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"The Left is debating the merits of student debt transference, but the question before the Supreme Court is whether or not the President can spend .5 Trillion on his own or does he have to go through that stupid, cumbersome, constitutional process where a bill originates in the House, goes to the Senate and then to the President and so on.
The decision could be 8-1 or 9-0 against them. It's all a matter of what they believe Congress intended authorizing "Emergency" Covid powers."
absolutely biden, the ass wipe, will get his ass handed to him, again, from Constitutional point of view
but also we need better public relations putting the blame where it belongs
in addition to Supreme Court decisions that most people do not seem to have a clue about .
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the POINT of these subsidies is to make education unaffordable without them.
(From Instapundit)
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Driving up the cost (of everything) without subsidy is apparently NOT an unintendef consequence. How could they not know that's what they're doing?!!
Yes, ccp, we are failing at messaging on this. Biden wins twice and still keeps the issue alive to keep winning. He made the 'gift' to young voters and Republicans are taking it away.
Meanwhile the public debt owed by EVERY household is going up $10,000 per year.
As mentioned, the table is set for so someone to step forward and call them out for all these bad tactics and policies.
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/131/536/206/original/9f3d962699eb7953.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/131/536/206/original/9f3d962699eb7953.jpeg)
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not sure
there is any turning this back
unless there is a US collapse and the self called "woke" realize they were really asleep and then realize the are wrong and then do wake up to all their idiotic damage :
https://nypost.com/2023/03/15/stanford-students-protest-dean-for-apologizing-to-trump-appointed-judge/
Laura spoke about this at length yesterday
could a conservative leader finally take charge and teach them conservatism has historically worked better ?
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11870455/NY-State-lowers-minimum-scores-student-proficiency-says-post-Covid-scores-new-normal.html
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/michigan-university-hosting-separate-graduation-celebrations-based-on-race-sexuality
in the 60s they fought against segregation
in the 2020's they fight to divide us.
the LEFT is encouraging racism not eradicating it.
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AmINOs!
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Covid Makes an Antiwoke Fortress of a New Age Florida School
Centner Academy’s skepticism of masks and vaccines proves ‘a highly effective curation process.’
By James TarantoFollow
April 7, 2023 1:57 pm ET
“This is Miss Gabriela,” Leila Centner says. “She’s our mindfulness coach.” I’m visiting Centner Academy, the private K-12 school Mrs. Centner and her husband, David, founded in 2019 after his retirement as a “serial tech entrepreneur.” In the “mindfulness room” I watch Gabriela Jimenez lead a circle of fifth-graders in an exercise that involves passing a candle around and formulating “an awesome wish that you have for yourself.”
“Do we have to say it out loud?” a girl asks.
“Well, you don’t have to,” Ms. Jimenez answers. But it would be helpful: “When we express what we want, we move the energy from the bottom, from the first chakra all the way to the throat. So we manifest things when we speak about them.”
You might call Centner a countercultural campus; it calls itself “America’s Happiest School.” “Mindfulness is interwoven into the fabric of the school,” says my tour guide, Josh Hills, whose title—no joke—is director of brain optimization. He shows me another room, which he says is “dedicated to failure.” Here, students undertake projects in “Lego robotics, 3D printing, architecture” and other technical pursuits. It’s a sort of safe space: “We remove the stigma behind failure,” Mr. Hills says. “If we have kids who are not scared to fall or fail, then we have kids who are not scared to reach.”
At the school cafeteria, the food is “sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, non-GMO, all organic, locally sourced,” Mr. Hills says. Much of it comes from the Centners’ Regener8 Farm and Retreat half an hour away in Homestead. Mr. Centner says he and his wife intend “to tightly integrate it into the school . . . so the kids actually go to the farm and have curriculum to teach them about science, Mother Earth, grounding, mindfulness, entrepreneurship.”
If you’re rolling your eyes, stop it. This New Age school is also resolutely and admirably antiwoke. Mr. Hills begins the tour by listing the three things he makes clear to visitors “before I let anybody into this building”:
First, “we have zero Covid policy at this point.” He doesn’t mean a zero-Covid policy; he means zero policy regarding Covid. Even by Florida standards, Centner moved quickly to return to normal during the pandemic, and its unorthodox approach drew indignation from local news organizations, one of which went so far as to urge the White House to intervene.
Second, “CRT”—critical race theory—“doesn’t exist in this building. We are all created equal. We all have equal opportunities, and we’re not in the business of telling anybody they may or may not have more privilege . . . based on skin tone. We don’t play that game in this building.”
Third, “we have a young men’s restroom and a young women’s restroom. We don’t allow anybody to pick what restroom they’re going to use.” If a pupil asks a grown-up about sex or sexual identity, “we say, ‘That’s a really great question. That’s probably a better conversation to have with your parent.’ ”
The Centners didn’t start out as culture warriors. “What happened through Covid opened our eyes,” Mrs. Centner says. “Oh my God, there is so much going on that has been going on for the last 20 years that we need to make a stance against.”
They watched the Chinese epidemic closely starting in January 2020 and were ready to act by the time its spread to the U.S. became undeniable. They shut the school down on March 16, 2020. Everything was fully online the next day. “We were probably the first school to go remote in all of Miami, maybe in the country,” Mr. Centner says. “But we were also the first school to reopen in the fall.”
Mrs. Centner sought expert opinions and concluded that the virus posed little threat to the school’s students or its mostly youthful staff. By the time the Miami-Dade County Public Schools announced a “staggered return for selected students” starting on Oct. 5, 2020, Centner was already back to normal.
At the time, normality was a brave act of defiance. Florida businesses reopened much earlier than those in blue states, but local governments and private companies in Miami still demanded that everyone don a face mask in almost all indoor public spaces. Not the Centners, who made masks optional. Some parents “were irate with me,” Mrs. Centner says. “How dare I allow other kids to not wear a mask? I’m putting their family’s lives at risk.”
The school brought in experts to brief parents on the inefficacy of masks. “Several parents took their masks off in the middle of the presentation as they’re learning information,” Mr. Centner recalls. “But most people get pretty stuck in their beliefs.” Some tagged the couple as “wacko” and withdrew their children from the school.
The conflict intensified in April 2021, when Florida made Covid vaccines available to all adults. Mrs. Centner was a skeptic. She says she had heard anecdotal reports from physicians about children getting sick “after being around their vaccinated parents or grandparents.” So while others across the country debated whether to make the shots mandatory, Mrs. Centner, out of what her husband calls “an abundance of caution,” took the opposite approach. She told teachers: “There’s two more months before the end of the school year. If you really want to get the vaccine, wait. Don’t do it around kids.”
The media pounced. “We had camera crews lined up here every single day trying to speak to teachers and parents,” Mr. Centner says. The Miami Herald quoted parents who described the school they had chosen as “insane and unreasonable and dangerous” and a “cult.” CBS correspondent Ed O’Keefe even asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki at a briefing “if there’s anything federal authorities can do to help the teachers in this case.” Mr. O’Keefe said the query was “on behalf of our Miami TV station.”
The ultimate result was a more harmonious school. Teachers who objected to the policy quit at the end of the school year, and many parents likewise voted with their feet. “It served to be a highly effective curation process,” Mr. Centner says. “The parents and administrators and teachers that were not fully aligned with us ran for the fences but were instantly, immediately replaced by families literally moving from all over the world. . . . A lot of these parents, these families, came from places where they felt like they were outcasts.”
That means there’s no conflict over the last two items on Mr. Hills’s list. “I don’t know why,” Mrs. Centner says, but “forced masks, forced vaccines, CRT, transgender seems to be in the same bundle of parents. . . . The new parents that came in were already anti all of that.”
In October 2021, the school announced that students would have to stay home for 30 days if they got vaccinated. It quickly abandoned that policy after Florida education officials called it “unreasonable, unnecessary and unduly burdensome.” On that point I side with the state. But the pandemic is over, and I leave Centner Academy impressed. If I had a daughter, I’d sooner enroll her here than in any school that might encourage her in the belief that she’s actually my son. It never hurts to be mindful of alternatives.
Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor.
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I don't get it
how can this be
I don't believe this is the answer:
https://dnyuz.com/2023/04/16/kids-cant-read-the-revolt-that-is-taking-on-the-education-establishment/
what is the non woke reason for this?
maybe we could teach them to read if they read rap lyrics ........ :roll:
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I don't get it
how can this be
I don't believe this is the answer:
https://dnyuz.com/2023/04/16/kids-cant-read-the-revolt-that-is-taking-on-the-education-establishment/
what is the non woke reason for this?
maybe we could teach them to read if they read rap lyrics ........ :roll:
"Public education" has nothing to do with actual education.
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"Public education" has nothing to do with actual education.
and that is what I think and hence the sly remark at end of my post
:wink:
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https://www.axios.com/2023/04/16/desantis-trump-2024-tv-ads-fox-news
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The College Board’s Secret Apology
Private emails show it wasn’t honest about Ron DeSantis and African-American Studies.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
April 26, 2023 12:37 pm ET
Hundreds participate in the National Action Network demonstration in response to Gov. Ron DeSantis's rejection of a high school African American history course, Tallahassee, Feb. 15. PHOTO: ALICIA DEVINE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gov. Ron DeSantis is credited with forcing a rewrite of a new high-school AP class in African-American Studies, after Florida balked at such lesson topics as “Black Queer Studies.” Denying pressure, the College Board said the revisions were pedagogical: “This course has been shaped only by the input of experts and long-standing AP principles and practices.”
Yet its own faculty advisers privately castigated this as dishonest spin, according to emails we obtained via open-records laws. “I have patiently and quietly watched the ubiquitous interviews and media assertions that AP would not make changes at the behest of any group beyond professors, teachers, and students,” wrote Nishani Frazier, a University of Kansas professor who sits on the AP course’s development committee. “If this is so, which student, professor, or teacher suggested adding black conservatives to the course over Combahee River Collective?”
Ms. Frazier continued: “We all know this is a blatant lie. In fact, the major changes which occurred came from my unit—and not once did AP speak with me about these changes. Instead, it rammed through revisions, pretended course transformation was business as usual, and then further added insult to injury by attempting to gaslight the public with faux innocence.” The course was “edited behind our backs,” she wrote. “What is unsaid is the failure of AP to recognize both its own institutional racism and how its own lies and capitulation precipitated the creation of a monster of its own making.”
Another professor on the curriculum committee, David Embrick of the University of Connecticut, apparently forwarded Ms. Frazier’s cri de coeur to a sociology professor at Trinity College. “Yikes...Nishani is right here,” Mr. Embrick said. The sociologist’s reaction: “Dude, College Board is f— over y’all.”
The College Board’s reply came from Trevor Packer, who has led the AP program since 2003. “While we stand by our statement that there has been no collaboration or exchange of ideas with Florida,” he said, “Nishani’s point below is right and true: edits made to the framework that were not adequately discussed with the Development Committee are a violation of our core processes for developing AP frameworks. We are deeply sorry for that breakdown.”
This seems to contradict the College Board’s claim that the course was shaped only by experts and established practices. Note Mr. Packer’s denial of “collaboration” with Florida. Was the College Board working on its own to make the class more palatable to red or purple states?
Facing faculty dissent, though, Mr. Packer promised to backtrack. “To rectify this matter,” he said, “we think we should provide the committee with great flexibility between now and the end of the second year of piloting: to change the framework we released on February 1 so that you are proud of it as an authentic representation of an introductory course in this discipline.”
The College Board hasn’t been straight about any of this. Two days later, Mr. Packer sent committee members a draft statement. Its language, he said, reflected their “good feedback,” in which “you asked us to keep our apology to you separate from a public apology for not pushing back immediately on Florida’s attack.”
He also asked for advice on whether to reveal his plan to re-edit the class to the committee’s liking: “Would you prefer that we keep the paragraph I’ve highlighted in yellow, or would you prefer that we keep that option private, just among you?” The highlighted text says the committee may further alter the curriculum “to achieve an authentic representation of a college-level course in this discipline.”
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https://www.oann.com/newsroom/673-university-professors-rally-together-to-oppose-courses-on-americas-founding/
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I am thinking these courses should be taught in middle or high school
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YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Indiana Sets the School Voucher Pace
The Hoosier State expands choice to nearly all K-12 students.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
May 4, 2023 6:39 pm ET
213
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Students at the Greenfield Intermediate School in Greenfield, Ind., Dec. 10, 2020. PHOTO: MICHAEL CONROY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The hits keep coming on school choice in Republican-run states, and the latest good news comes from Indiana. Hoosier lawmakers passed the state budget last week, and it expands the school voucher program so nearly all students will be eligible.
The state’s voucher program, established in 2011, is currently open to students whose family incomes don’t exceed 300% of the federal income requirement for free- and reduced-price lunch eligibility. Students must also meet one of several other criteria, such as being assigned to a failing public school or being in foster care. Each voucher is worth up to 90% of the state per-pupil funding amount, or roughly $6,000, and can be used for tuition at private schools.
The new law raises the income cap to 400% of the free- and reduced-price lunch income level, which is now about $220,000 for a family of four. The bill also removes the other criteria for eligibility so that any family under the income limit can apply. Tens of thousands of additional students could qualify, and a legislative analysis projects that some 95,000 students might use the program in 2025, up from about 53,000 in 2023.
“We would say it’s universal,” Betsy Wiley of the Institute for Quality Educationtold the Indiana Capital Chronicle. Early estimates suggest only 3.5% of families with school-age children in Indiana would not be eligible for the program under the new income limit, she said.
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Lawmakers also expanded the state’s tax-credit scholarship program by lifting the income cap, and they added a measure that allows charter schools in some counties to receive more funds from local tax initiatives. They also created Career Scholarship Accounts of $5,000, similar to education savings accounts, for students in apprenticeships or work-based learning programs.
Despite Republican control of both chambers and the governorship, the expansion met with some resistance. The original Senate budget bill omitted the voucher expansion that the House included, but with leadership from House Speaker Todd Huston, lawmakers agreed to the House proposals.
The principle at work here is that taxpayer education money for grades K-12 should follow the child, rather than school districts. The goal is to make it easier to establish new charters or other schools that give parents a choice that’s the best for their child.
Indiana’s success is a lesson for conservatives that victories can be incremental. The original voucher program, created under former Gov. Mitch Daniels, made as much progress as politically possible at the time and created the foundation and built political support for last week’s bill. That’s how progressives built the welfare state, and reformers can use the same strategy to free K-12 education from the clutches of the teachers unions. Are you paying attention, Texas Republicans?
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second
Miguel Cardona, Miseducation Secretary
National history test scores plummet, and he attacks Republicans.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
May 5, 2023 6:43 pm ET
The federal Department of Education’s mission is supposed to be . . . what exactly? Apparently Education Secretary Miguel Cardona thinks it’s something other than improving educational results. New national test results this week showed eighth-grade U.S. history scores at an all-time low, and Mr. Cardona’s response was to attack the GOP.
The data released is from 2022 tests on U.S. history and civics under the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the “nation’s report card.” The average eighth-grade history score is down five points from 2018 and nine points from 2014. It’s the lowest on record, going back to 1994. Scores dropped the most among the lower performers. Only 13% of students were deemed NAEP proficient. The civics results are similarly depressing.
This is a damning record for the educational establishment, on top of last year’s news that NAEP math scores for eighth-graders in 2022 fell to a 20-year low. For all the money the U.S. keeps pumping into education, surely somebody in authority ought to be embarrassed by these pitiful outcomes, working to reverse them, and explaining to the citizenry what is being done. Maybe that person is supposed to be the U.S. Education Secretary?
Mr. Cardona’s statement on the poor NAEP showing begins by saying that it “further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading.” This might be a workable start if Mr. Cardona went on to acknowledge that Zoom classes were a generational error and that the teachers unions that lobbied to keep schools closed should accept some responsibility.
Instead Mr. Cardona turns to a partisan diversion. “Now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes,” he says. “We need to provide every student with rich opportunities to learn about America’s history and understand the U.S. Constitution and how our system of government works. Banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice.”
Who in America is “censoring” teachers from discussing “the U.S. Constitution and how our system of government works”? Mr. Cardona doesn’t say. The implication is that it’s those nasty Republicans, which is odd, since they’re the same people who are always talking about the Constitution and carrying around pocket versions of it.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently had a dust-up with the College Board about its new AP African-American Studies class, but the state didn’t object to history. It balked at lessons focused on “queer studies” and other overtheorized escapees from the college faculty lounge.
The NAEP test isn’t that. Here’s the U.S. history question given as an example of “basic” achievement: “Which of the following reasons best explains why many people supported the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the sale of alcohol?” The right answer, picked by 58% of eighth-graders, was that prohibitionists thought alcohol had a negative effect on society.
Moving on to a “proficient” sample question: “What were European explorers such as Henry Hudson looking for when they sailed the coast and rivers of North America in the 1600s?” Only 47% of students correctly chose “a water trade route to Asia.”
Does Mr. Cardona imagine that red states are ripping pages from history books because they can’t abide the idea that their children will learn about Henry Hudson? Or is the Education Secretary, with his partisan talking points as our children flunk history, simply revealing himself to be a political hack?
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https://ncnewsline.com/2023/05/03/nc-house-panel-advances-controversial-bill-to-dramatically-expand-school-vouchers/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=59ab9d1b-a2d8-4b7d-a560-afed4f1380b8
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An alternative checklist for what to look for in a college
Universities aren’t what they used to be
By Donald Sweeting
It’s college decision-making time. Many students have received acceptance letters. Now it’s time to choose. Students and parents are having critical conversations. This is one of the biggest investments of time, money and effort they will ever make. What should they look for in a college or university?
Forget reputation and prestige. Many schools are abandoning the traditional rankings. Size, public vs. private, location, sports programs, cheap tuition, cafeteria, dorms — these, at best, should be secondary considerations. It was your mother’s or father’s alma mater? Take my word for it: Their university is not what it used to be.
For this reason, I suggest that graduating high schoolers employ a radically different checklist: 1. Pick a school that believes in and values the pursuit of truth. This was the traditional purpose of university education. If school officials and faculty are known to be triggered by the very idea of truth and are relativists regarding goodness, beauty and truth, stay away.
2. Pick a school with a robust core curriculum. Check out the yearly rankings by ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which ranks over 1,000 universities. In a mobile marketplace where the average student will have 12 jobs in a lifetime, these students will need a foundation in the basics: composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government, economics, mathematics, and natural science.
3. Pick a school that teaches appreciatively about our own civilization and nation. Of course, this is not to the exclusion of other civilizations and nations, but go where you can study the Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization, including an understanding of the American founding and the Constitution, so that students become well-informed citizens ready to take their place in our republic and preserve it.
4. Pick a school that promotes character, virtue, and talk about the meaning of life, not just activism and critical thinking. You are who you hang out with. Go where you can find a student community where “they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
5. Pick a school that values debate and encourages people to think, as opposed to obsessive coddling and worrying about safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, cancel culture and “safetyism.” Sadly, debate is dying on college campuses. So look for a place that instead teaches students to listen respectfully and discuss great ideas.
6. Pick a school where the humanities are not corrupted by critical theory, that instead of politicizing it, deconstructing it, and turning it into a study of victims and oppressors, uses the humanities to teach students about human nature and expose them to human greatness so that they become better, wiser people.
7. Pick a school that is military-friendly, one that values national strength and leadership. Does it have an ROTC program? Does it honor our military’s service and sacrifice?
8. Pick a school that knows how to define what a woman is — or a man, for that matter. That affirms masculinity and femininity and respects privacy in dorms and bathrooms, and that does not undermine women’s athletics.
9. Pick a school that is not a spiritual wasteland, but instead upholds and respects traditional religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition. Look for a school that acknowledges that “the fear of the Lord” is the beginning of wisdom and that values our civilization’s and nation’s most important book — the Bible.
10. Finally, pick a school with a low teacher-student ratio that values teacher quality. How does the college measure teacher quality? Are faculty hired primarily on their expertise and character? Does the school rely more on graduate students or adjuncts to teach the main courses?
11. Oh, and one more: Pick a school that still believes in the concept of excellence and merit and is known for excellence in the area of your interest. Many schools are now embracing “ungrading” and dropping standards by which to measure achievement and success.
I can hear the howls already. And for those who detest this kind of list, you have many opportunities to go to a “‘PC University.” If you really value educational diversity, schools like this should not bother you. But for those who are looking for colleges worth your while and your dollar — what I call islands of educational sanity — when deciding on a college these days, you will need an alternative checklist. I offer mine.
You are making an investment in your future. The college years are a critical time of growth and development laying a foundation for life. Choose carefully how you will invest.
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If you are not getting a STEM degree, you are wasting your money.
An alternative checklist for what to look for in a college
Universities aren’t what they used to be
By Donald Sweeting
It’s college decision-making time. Many students have received acceptance letters. Now it’s time to choose. Students and parents are having critical conversations. This is one of the biggest investments of time, money and effort they will ever make. What should they look for in a college or university?
Forget reputation and prestige. Many schools are abandoning the traditional rankings. Size, public vs. private, location, sports programs, cheap tuition, cafeteria, dorms — these, at best, should be secondary considerations. It was your mother’s or father’s alma mater? Take my word for it: Their university is not what it used to be.
For this reason, I suggest that graduating high schoolers employ a radically different checklist: 1. Pick a school that believes in and values the pursuit of truth. This was the traditional purpose of university education. If school officials and faculty are known to be triggered by the very idea of truth and are relativists regarding goodness, beauty and truth, stay away.
2. Pick a school with a robust core curriculum. Check out the yearly rankings by ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which ranks over 1,000 universities. In a mobile marketplace where the average student will have 12 jobs in a lifetime, these students will need a foundation in the basics: composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government, economics, mathematics, and natural science.
3. Pick a school that teaches appreciatively about our own civilization and nation. Of course, this is not to the exclusion of other civilizations and nations, but go where you can study the Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization, including an understanding of the American founding and the Constitution, so that students become well-informed citizens ready to take their place in our republic and preserve it.
4. Pick a school that promotes character, virtue, and talk about the meaning of life, not just activism and critical thinking. You are who you hang out with. Go where you can find a student community where “they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
5. Pick a school that values debate and encourages people to think, as opposed to obsessive coddling and worrying about safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, cancel culture and “safetyism.” Sadly, debate is dying on college campuses. So look for a place that instead teaches students to listen respectfully and discuss great ideas.
6. Pick a school where the humanities are not corrupted by critical theory, that instead of politicizing it, deconstructing it, and turning it into a study of victims and oppressors, uses the humanities to teach students about human nature and expose them to human greatness so that they become better, wiser people.
7. Pick a school that is military-friendly, one that values national strength and leadership. Does it have an ROTC program? Does it honor our military’s service and sacrifice?
8. Pick a school that knows how to define what a woman is — or a man, for that matter. That affirms masculinity and femininity and respects privacy in dorms and bathrooms, and that does not undermine women’s athletics.
9. Pick a school that is not a spiritual wasteland, but instead upholds and respects traditional religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition. Look for a school that acknowledges that “the fear of the Lord” is the beginning of wisdom and that values our civilization’s and nation’s most important book — the Bible.
10. Finally, pick a school with a low teacher-student ratio that values teacher quality. How does the college measure teacher quality? Are faculty hired primarily on their expertise and character? Does the school rely more on graduate students or adjuncts to teach the main courses?
11. Oh, and one more: Pick a school that still believes in the concept of excellence and merit and is known for excellence in the area of your interest. Many schools are now embracing “ungrading” and dropping standards by which to measure achievement and success.
I can hear the howls already. And for those who detest this kind of list, you have many opportunities to go to a “‘PC University.” If you really value educational diversity, schools like this should not bother you. But for those who are looking for colleges worth your while and your dollar — what I call islands of educational sanity — when deciding on a college these days, you will need an alternative checklist. I offer mine.
You are making an investment in your future. The college years are a critical time of growth and development laying a foundation for life. Choose carefully how you will invest.
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I would submit that Hillsdale is an exception to your assertion, or wherever it is the VDH is teaching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StlVszziHc4&t=9s
https://www.youtube.com/@FoundingValues
or wherever the classical education can be found.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScjYyPSKQ_A
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as the ones indoctrinating
https://www.yahoo.com/news/moms-for-liberty-controversial-school-book-bans-challenges-florida-politics-141208608.html
LBGTQ woksters mob / mafia
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/adam-carolla-gay-mafia-is-705809/
I can't think of the Jewish Hollywood (producer?) who was banned I think in the '90s .
who stated there was a "gay mafia" and it was out to get him and that was the first time I heard the phrase used
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I just remembered who it was :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ovitz
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/this-teacher-was-reprimanded-after-admin-said-they-were-concerned-over-her-teaching-students-their-constitutional-rights-and-no-this-is-not-a-joke/ar-AA1cagUs?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=245c7c50975b4e44986275dc4806cdfb&ei=9
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https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-outlaws-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions/
I can only imagine MSPCP and CNN going nuts on this and stepping up attacks on SCOTUS conservatives
and tying to Trump
Harvard shysters will figure out way around this anyway
does this strengthen law suits against the Universities who discriminate against Asians?
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Definitely a huge decision.
Of course, being a two-fer beneficiary of AA, Justice Jackson was quite opposed.
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Randi Weingarten and Racial Disparities in Education
She wants racial preferences to hide the failure of union schools.
By
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June 30, 2023 7:28 pm ET
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American Federation of Teachers Chief Randi Weingarten PHOTO: JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
Randi Weingarten isn’t known for self-awareness. Right on cue this week the teachers union chief denounced the Supreme Court’s ruling on racial preferences without so much as a bow to her own role in creating racial disparities.
“This decision ignores the original sin of this country—it’s a throwback to a cruel, racist past that admissions policies like this tried to repair,” the American Federation of Teachers chief said. Has she read the briefs by teachers unions in the case?
The briefs admit that colleges use racial preferences to increase enrollment of minority students who are often less academically qualified because they’ve been trapped in rotten public schools. “Our schools, from K-12 to higher education, still struggle to provide equitable opportunities for students of color,” the National Education Association lamented in its brief.
But why is that? Because the unions fight educational choice for minorities and protect bad teachers in low-income schools from accountability. Teachers usually receive tenure protection after two to three years. After that, school districts must spend inordinate time and money to remove them. Instead, they are typically rotated around poor, mostly minority schools in what’s known as the “dance of the lemons.”
Former Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy testified in a lawsuit brought by minority students last decade that it can take 10 years and $250,000 to $450,000 to fire a lousy teacher. Fewer than 0.002% of teachers in California were dismissed for unprofessional conduct or poor performance.
A single year with a grossly ineffective teacher can cost a classroom of students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings. Less experienced teachers are more likely to be assigned to schools in lower-income neighborhoods. Yet these schools can’t recruit higher-performing teachers by offering higher pay since labor contracts base salaries on experience.
The unions more than anyone else are responsible for racial differences in education. College racial preferences try to paper over those disparities while easing political pressure for education reform. Ms. Weingarten can’t admit this because she’d indict her life’s work.
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As much as I despise Randi Weingarten, group IQ and behavior are real.
Randi Weingarten and Racial Disparities in Education
She wants racial preferences to hide the failure of union schools.
By
The Editorial Board
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June 30, 2023 7:28 pm ET
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American Federation of Teachers Chief Randi Weingarten PHOTO: JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
Randi Weingarten isn’t known for self-awareness. Right on cue this week the teachers union chief denounced the Supreme Court’s ruling on racial preferences without so much as a bow to her own role in creating racial disparities.
“This decision ignores the original sin of this country—it’s a throwback to a cruel, racist past that admissions policies like this tried to repair,” the American Federation of Teachers chief said. Has she read the briefs by teachers unions in the case?
The briefs admit that colleges use racial preferences to increase enrollment of minority students who are often less academically qualified because they’ve been trapped in rotten public schools. “Our schools, from K-12 to higher education, still struggle to provide equitable opportunities for students of color,” the National Education Association lamented in its brief.
But why is that? Because the unions fight educational choice for minorities and protect bad teachers in low-income schools from accountability. Teachers usually receive tenure protection after two to three years. After that, school districts must spend inordinate time and money to remove them. Instead, they are typically rotated around poor, mostly minority schools in what’s known as the “dance of the lemons.”
Former Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy testified in a lawsuit brought by minority students last decade that it can take 10 years and $250,000 to $450,000 to fire a lousy teacher. Fewer than 0.002% of teachers in California were dismissed for unprofessional conduct or poor performance.
A single year with a grossly ineffective teacher can cost a classroom of students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings. Less experienced teachers are more likely to be assigned to schools in lower-income neighborhoods. Yet these schools can’t recruit higher-performing teachers by offering higher pay since labor contracts base salaries on experience.
The unions more than anyone else are responsible for racial differences in education. College racial preferences try to paper over those disparities while easing political pressure for education reform. Ms. Weingarten can’t admit this because she’d indict her life’s work.
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Behavior/Culture/Parenting etc. have huge impact, for good or bad. Witness the performance of Nigerians here in America. If I have my data right, they outperform whites.
Not necessary to go for the racist model.
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Behavior/Culture/Parenting etc. have huge impact, for good or bad. Witness the performance of Nigerians here in America. If I have my data right, they outperform whites.
Not necessary to go for the racist model.
https://www.takimag.com/article/mind-the-gap/
Group differences in IQ is very real, no matter how much you might want to deny it.
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Behavior/Culture/Parenting etc. have huge impact, for good or bad. Witness the performance of Nigerians here in America. If I have my data right, they outperform whites.
Not necessary to go for the racist model.
https://businessday.ng/news/article/us-closes-easy-admission-path-for-rich-nigerians-others-into-elite-universities/
The children of the Nigerian wealthy and powerful that are being sent to US schools are probably at the upper levels of IQ you'd find in that population, yes?
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My point exactly.
This is what happens to children raised the right way. IQ develops.
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My point exactly.
This is what happens to children raised the right way. IQ develops.
:roll:
Are you deliberately trying to miss the point?
What's the average in the overall population? S. Korea was much poorer than many 3rd world countries in Africa and Latin America just a few generations ago. Are they just lucky then?
Nigeria will have a space program when China builds one there.
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from my post #687 June 29:
"https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-outlaws-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions/
I can only imagine MSPCP and CNN going nuts on this and stepping up attacks on SCOTUS conservatives
and tying to Trump
Harvard shysters will figure out way around this anyway
does this strengthen law suits against the Universities who discriminate against Asians?"
WHAT A SURPRISE :
"https://www.yahoo.com/news/can-colleges-still-create-diversity-without-affirmative-action-212538447.html
PROGS NEVER STOP
LIKE LEVIN SAYS WE HAVE TO OBLITERATE THEM AS THEY WILL CONTINUE TO SHOVE THEIR AGENDA DOWN OUR THROATS ; ONE WAY OR THE OTHER!
PATHOLOGICAL!
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https://whnt.com/news/u-s-a-beats-china-in-international-mathematical-olympiad-wins-first-place-for-the-first-time-in-21-years/amp/
There seems to be a pattern of some kind here…
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https://whnt.com/news/u-s-a-beats-china-in-international-mathematical-olympiad-wins-first-place-for-the-first-time-in-21-years/amp/
There seems to be a pattern of some kind here…
https://ausimo.wordpress.com/meet-the-team/
Something about the Australian team reminds me of the US team that beat the Chinese team.
Let's see the Canadian team.
https://cms.math.ca/news-item/six-top-mathletes-selected-for-math-team-canada-2023/
Huh. What sort of pattern are we seeing here?
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for '24:
https://news.yahoo.com/will-bidens-plan-b-for-student-loans-work-183225124.html
crats , shysters are not to be denied ! :x
nothing about rising college tuition
just keep the money flowing to the academic progressives ........
bribe them all into the game....
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not forgiveness,
at least not completely:
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/congressional-republicans-offer-own-student-223500514.html
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Am I correct in saying "Pussies!"?
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Correct.
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The College Reckoning Is Here
Dear Weekend Jolter,
Undergraduate college enrollment has been declining for over a decade. Americans increasingly dismiss the value proposition of the four-year-college track. Many higher-education institutions face serious financial difficulties. States are even beginning to do away with degree requirements for many government jobs.
So when the Supreme Court issued its end-of-session rulings on affirmative action and student loans, those decisions only added to the mounting pressure on America’s colleges and universities to reform themselves — and soon. The latter ruling was particularly important, as it made clear no Biden ex machina is being written into the script to relieve the need to cut costs.
And yes, a decision in the other direction could easily have prolonged a vicious cycle. As Daniel Tenreiro wrote for the magazine back in 2021, in examining the drivers of student debt:
The magical thinking of student-loan forgiveness would only exacerbate the issue, demonstrating to universities in no uncertain terms that tuition hikes will continue to be rewarded with federal largesse. Universities have been fed subsidy after subsidy, only to increase costs and leave students with more debt. Erasing debt hands colleges a clean slate on which to calculate next year’s budget.
We avoided that outcome (for now). Cheers. But the underlying cost challenges remain — fueled by what Daniel described as the combination of subsidies and prodigal university administrations, steadily raising tuitions while spending on luxuries like administrative staff and “anything else a deputy assistant dean of student life might think up.” Think: rock-climbing wall. These then become the “rising costs” — voluntary spending beyond the “inherent costs” of producing a quality education, as Thomas Sowell explained in Economic Facts and Fallacies — used to justify more tuition hikes.
Michael Brendan Dougherty, in calling for tuition deflation and a staff purge, recalls how Harvard and Yale have spent their windfalls:
Since 1986, Harvard’s tuition has seen an 89 percent increase in adjusted dollars. Has the school expanded its faculty and course offerings to match that increase? No. It has dramatically expanded its population of administrators. Harvard now employs over 7,000 full-time administrators, slightly more people than the entire undergraduate population. And more than three times the number of faculty members.
The students themselves complain about the labyrinthine buildings that house these functionaries, many of whom exist to politicize life on campus — to populate task forces on Inclusion and Belonging that conduct focus groups and surveys, only to conclude that the university should hire yet another administrator to oversee yet another committee.
Between 2003 and 2021, the number of vice presidents at Yale grew from five to 31 (a 520 percent increase), while the number of faculty members increased from 610 to 675 (a 10 percent increase). Many administrative units have seen a 150 percent increase in size over the last 20 years at Yale, with surging salaries. . . . What we are seeing is the creation and perpetual endowment of make-work political jobs for the professional managerial class at schools.
Even with the pandemic era checking the trajectory of tuition rates for the time being, the challenges for America’s storied institutions of higher education run deeper still. In short: College has an image problem.
Consider the dismal environment for free speech which has stifled debate on campus for years, a situation that administrators are only now coming to regret. Republicans take a particularly dim view toward higher ed, which, no matter how much some professors might prefer seeing fewer conservatives in class, presents an added financial headache for your neighborhood bursar (to repurpose Michael Jordan, Republicans buy degrees too). Then there was Covid. The pandemic was terrible for enrollment, but some schools made it worse by treating infected students like inmates and enforcing nonsensical Covid protocols well after vaccines were available. If you signed up for what looked like a resort and got a penitentiary instead, it probably affected your Yelp review.
On another front, Ryan Mills reports on how colleges also may have to rethink their disciplinary proceedings after a Connecticut court found Yale University’s process failed to provide “adequate safeguards” for a student accused of sexual assault and later acquitted in court. As part of the school’s hearing process, Saifullah Khan was not allowed to question witnesses or introduce evidence he says would have exonerated him. “I think there is a gathering consensus that the means by which campuses are resolving sex-dispute cases is infirm, and perhaps fatally so,” Khan’s lawyer told Ryan.
“Infirm” has many applications when discussing the position American universities find themselves in. Citing the disconnect between the skills employers want and how students are being taught, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) wrote for NR this past week in opposition to the “college degree-for-all” mentality. “As long as these demands are not being met by the modern college promise, it remains an imprudent investment for many,” she warned.
College, of course, is not for everyone. Yet the higher-education system, flaws and all, remains a jewel in the American crown, one that continues to attract people from all over the world. As a recent Brookings report noted, college grads still earn more on average and enjoy a range of other benefits.
Fix, don’t forsake. Opportunities for higher-ed reform are many. Start with legacy admissions, says Yuval Levin; then, reassess whether campus amenities must in fact keep pace with those of cruise ships. But this year’s developments have made clear that colleges can’t put off the hard choices much longer.
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https://www.thecollegefix.com/university-puts-trigger-warning-on-hemingways-old-man-and-the-sea-graphic-fishing-scenes/
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“Trigger warnings’ for ‘graphic fishing scenes’ while we introduce trans porn to young children without informing their parents? There is no word for this but Orwellian,” Susan Hanssen, an associate professor of history at the University of Dallas, told The Fix.
I enjoyed that novel when I was young, maybe 10 to 15 at most ,
as well as the Spencer Tracy movie as an adult.
The only thing that made me sad was how the fish was eaten by the sharks and the old man lost his mega trophy. But the young boy knew .....
I don't recall being sad over the fish ......
"woke" must die!
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/nyc-to-pay-1-8-billion-over-old-racist-teaching-exam-but-blacks-performed-poorly-on-newer-exams-too
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/algebra-1-effectively-eliminated-from-harvard-area-middle-schools-because-too-many-white-and-asian-students-were-taking-it-report
so whites and asians should suffer because
minorities come from broken homes where education is not emphasized?
what is stopping minority kids from taking algebra?
( and don't say white supremacy )
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When did algebra become optional? Calculus shouldn't be optional.
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Make these people stop.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/07/woke-kindergarten.php
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to step down for flawed publications
https://www.yahoo.com/news/stanford-university-president-resign-following-173708866.html
many professors get names on hundreds of papers
they don't write
but their names are used due to being famous in their field
and helps the paper get published
it is a bit of scam really
the same academia that never says we should consider reducing spending and controlling costs rather then demand a stop to public education spending no matter what and never as far as I have seen (FWIw) debated against college debt being erased.......
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/07/revised-california-math-curriculum-still-emphasizes-woke-politics/
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So far, after 3 yrs , extra resources have not improved math proficiency:
I understand:
https://www.westernjournal.com/lebrons-promise-school-put-state-watchlist-school-board-notices-downward-spiral/
details of what is meant by resources
details of what exactly is the problem
no explained
very sad for our nation
I would not be surprised if the poor math performers where not highly efficient on Tik Tok etc.........
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/31/black-students-over-50-likelier-drop-out-md-phd-pr/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=JMuKlKndpE01NwtvV20mmCYMBWSr44OvADnrzsaVgSLFj6lOU6CojoCYKz2onde%2F&bt_ts=1690827476887
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-doctors-orders/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=32231829
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I wish they would say, these are the outcomes for people who came in below minimum standard instead of single them out by race.
From the article:
“Even before affirmative action was ended, these programs often did not feel welcoming for Black students, whose credentials are constantly questioned.”
- (Doug) Doesn't ending affirmative action end that?
Also from the article:
“This is truly alarming ..."
- Um, no. The paragraphs preceding say that has been happening all along.
25 years of mistaken policy, hurting blacks, all because Sandra Day O'Conner was picked based on gender instead of competence.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/08/28/
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9879959/Oregon-scraps-requirement-high-school-students-prove-proficiency-math-reading-writing.html
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Department of Defense elementary schools outperforming the rest of America:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defense-department.html?unlocked_article_code=i_z_I_pjo8ScRcX4a06Wv0heCUykrli1v-hwwIuj1RQ5ghluFueK_juXix0CBjfjKe8v7i2Jbzwa98WV0AXI3QQVDYfSG7Fz28Y423zdAruMXRhsvwXwGrTmSs8ah__aNC6Hm9EXaQ9H_ES51RtI5mCqSQzjZaqreHKBTXf4sGw99sjGghchVIaojyH_Y_tB1s8webQQGn4hoMylRGNi43pTEN95gjzNZ4KWLol6DFtbgOMpJ6srcmttjSwOb49fHFjgVfHtHok9mt7_-GYz6LDBhuxv47q7Um9eDTkYpNpbUlPhb6ps5ryOc7iGbmw4aDZMHPtEyNa68rlJqUWgCKjHAUXfupU&smid=url-share
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I can't recommend this video highly enough. It absolutely excoriates Harvard, race hustlers, liberals, higher ed, and so on, with an amazing black professor taking issue with many liberal narratives, eventually leading to Harvard firing him.
As Roland Fryer say: "The truth is enough."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8xWOlk3WIw
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https://www.bing.com/search?q=harvards+endowment&form=ANNTH1&refig=2db6c8d7845c4f8faa33c057ffc05195&pc=DCTS
why the heck are billionaire's donating to Harvard anyway?
can anyone think of a better place or way to donate money?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DE2Xqs6b98
If already posted, it deserves another watch.
"Aren't you afraid to speak up? I'm speaking up because I am afraid!"
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note this was published months prior to 10/7th:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/10/31/watch-cornel-west-rants-against-the-existence-of-israel-75-years-of-genocide/
I distinctly recall that while I went to George Washington U. in '78 to 79-80
during the Iranian hostage crises that there were hoards with Iranians on the streets yelling and screaming on one side of the street and Americans yelling back at them from the other side of the street.
I remember asking someone what in the world were all these Iranians doing here and was told that Iran money "built the engineering building".
This may be a reason higher education is not speaking out.
Dollars and cents more than ideology.
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I’m tempted to create a “Cognitive Dissonance of Higher Education” thread for pieces like this & indeed suspect one piece of fallout from the Israel/Hamas war will be evermore higher ed asshattery being outed as horrified left leaners come to terms with how far schools have veered from their putative missions and embraced rabid polemicists utterly unable to produce a reasoned argument. More like this is coming, in short, and likely needs a home around here.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2023/11/10/university-college-campus-culture-war-anti-semitism/?fbclid=IwAR3w5ElT2ATOncCIvcZrxUQXwU8EKRRIroM9BL2rEwQRuDcaO2xIeBkrcYA
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sorry BBG pay walled
cannot read posted article
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BBG:
I think this thread will do fine for your purposes:
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=2645.msg102240#msg102240
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https://nypost.com/2023/11/25/entertainment/natalie-portman-says-children-should-not-be-working-in-hollywood-after-she-was-sexualized-in-first-movie-at-age-12/
Forgive me if I put this here in the context of the so called Florida "book banning" "controversy". Those books were aimed at sexualizing the grades of K-3, kids roughly 6-9 years old.
The link above is about an actress in Hollywood at age 12 and that's too early for sexualizing kids, if we should be doing that at all.
We can argue what to do in public education with teenagers and sex ed, but isn't it at least a 60-40 issue in our favor to stop robbing our youngest of the innocence of their childhood?
Must a 7 year old confront trans issues in math class? Some (the"woke") say yes and call everyone who disagrees "book banners".
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good movie
Leon was her first crush ; seemed like some sort of puppy love.
who just happened to be a mafia hit man, but a loner with no friends and only the mafia boss as his liason.
story I may have posted in the past :
We were right behind Jean Reno at the check in at the Cancun airport late 90's.
One of my nephews said "look its the professional"!
Katherine was so flustered she asked him if he was planning on a sequel.
If you saw the movie you would know that was not possible.
He was polite and smiled and said no. :-D
Natalie Portman was sexualized and it was a bit weird in a way.
but she and Renu and Gary Oldman were great in their acting
interesting she felt this traumatized her. And yes I can see the linkage between her being disturbed and with children being exposed in grade school probably being disturbed.
Totally unnecessary and wrong in mho.
and don't tell me grooming is not part of the motive ....._> :x
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https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/11/28/taylor-swift-college-courses-to-be-offered-at-harvard-uc-berkeley-university-of-florida/
Perhaps her move from Nashville to NYC accounts for "move" from country to something else
Perhaps she was no longer getting lyrics from middlemen who got from somewhere else.
Noonan - the "gift" of Swift. It is all her genius. :roll:
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https://news.yahoo.com/depression-anxiety-rates-higher-among-094558454.html#:~:text=Fox%20News-,Depression%20and%20anxiety%20rates%20higher%20among%20college,their%20peers%2C%20new%20study%20suggests&text=College%20students%20may%20be%20at,in%20The%20Lancet%20Public%20Health.
new study published in The Lancet Public Health.
Researchers from University College London analyzed data from two studies (covering 10,000 young people) .
"We would have expected higher education students to have better mental health than their non-student peers, as they tend to be from more privileged backgrounds on average, so these results are particularly concerning," she said. (Dr. Tayla McCloud, the first author of the study from UCL Psychiatry)
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It is a classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with s PhD will cease to be a moron. - HL Mencken
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/h-l-mencken-quote-it-is-the-classic-fallacy-of-our-time-that-a-moron-run-through-a-university-and-decorated-with-a-phd-in-2023--761178774540478233/#:~:text=H.%20L.-,Mencken%20Quote%3A%20It%20is%20the%20classic%20fallacy%20of%20our%20time,cease%20to%20be%20a%20moron.
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https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/2023/05/08/jewish-student-enrollment-down-many-ivies
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sorry BBG pay walled
cannot read posted article
Hmm, wasn’t for me:
Intolerant bigots have seized control of our universities
Jewish students are under attack. It's time for donors to demand action
CHARLES LIPSON
10 November 2023 • 2:13pm
Charles Lipson
Pro-Palestine protests at Harvard have shocked alumni groups
Pro-Palestine protests at Harvard have shocked alumni groups CREDIT: Joseph Prezioso/AFP
The surge of open hatred of Jews on college campuses is unprecedented in modern American life. We saw it outside universities in the 1930s, when it was openly preached by Detroit’s Father Coughlin and published by Henry Ford. We saw it from the KKK during the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. The Klan targeted Jews, as a marginal group, as allies of black equality, and as vehicles to build solidarity in their target audience: poor, angry, Christian whites.
At universities we saw a different kind of prejudice. That bigotry was exemplified by quiet restrictions on Jewish students and faculty, referred to as “Gentleman’s Agreements”. Those agreements excluded Jews from fraternities and sororities at most schools. Harvard began the practise and stated their goal openly, while others followed in secret. This practice changed only when it was prohibited by civil rights laws.
These practices were obviously prejudiced, but they were a far cry from the open hatred, intimidation, and speech suppression we now see on campus. Some of that is an old mask stripped away, some is an increase in underlying hatred, and some is a collapse of any restraints on its public expression. The old mask was emblazoned with the coda, “We don’t hate Jews. We don’t hate Israel. We just oppose Israeli policies and support Palestinian rights.”
Well, if recent demonstrations are any guide, it turns out they do hate Israel. They want to see it wiped off the map. That’s the meaning of their constant chant, “From the river to the sea.” A Palestinian state that occupies all that territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean would extinguish Israel. That’s their “final solution” for the Jewish state.
Chilling as that goal is, the activists don’t stop there. They extend their hatred to all Jews, and they say so openly in campus meetings and demonstrations. That is led by extremist Muslims, who are part of the dominant coalition on campus. But it is embraced by their political allies. More on that coalition in a moment.
Decent Americans know something has gone badly wrong at our universities. This wider public recognises, quite accurately, that the attacks on Jews are only the latest, most visible examples of a more pervasive problem: the rise of intolerant, illiberal ideology on the far-Left. That has always been a problem on the far-Right, but they were never major players on campus or in elite media. The Left is.
Watching these latest instances of anti-Semitic words and violent demonstrations, average Americans want to know why it is happening and what can be done to reverse the damage. Parents and alumni have still more questions. Families want to know where their children should go to college, where they will be encouraged to grow and learn, not bullied for their views or their faith. Those questions aren’t limited to Jewish families. Most parents want their children to live and learn in a safe, tolerant atmosphere. They are deeply worried, and they are right.
Their anxiety is shared by many alumni. Until now, wealthy donors have been content to turn over millions, see their names on a building or professorship, and attend cocktail parties with the university president after football games. No more. Many are saying our leading universities are not worthy of their support. They want to oust the leaders who encouraged this decline, stood silent as it grew worse, and then were surprised – and speechless – when it broke out into the open.
It won’t be easy to enact change – university leadership is self-perpetuating and campus bureaucracy is deeply entrenched. At Yale, for example, when alumni wanted a few dissonant voices on the board, the existing members changed the rules so that only they could nominate new members.
These disturbing events on campus are the bitter fruits of trends that have been developing for years. A few concerned faculty tried, in vain, to halt this ideological frenzy and moral collapse before it sank their institutions. They failed. The number of bureaucrats employed has ballooned and now approaches the number of students on campus. Over these students, they exert enormous control.
Students themselves have contributed mightily to this illiberal, intolerant atmosphere. That culture now begins in elite high schools and has seeped down to middle schools. Surveys now show that only about half of college students support free speech. Many tell survey researchers it is perfectly fine to shout down opposing views. A non-trivial minority think it is okay to use violence against people with different views. They never answer the hard question, “who decides?”
It is hardly surprising that Jews are the targets. That has been true historically when illiberal ideologies gain political clout and look for scapegoats. That is exactly what is happening on American campuses today. It began with hatred of Israel, damning them as “settler colonisers” rather than a people associated with that land for three millennia. It quickly metastasised to vilify anyone who supported the Jewish state and then to Jews in general.
This movement is shaped by the dominant ideology, which divides the world into oppressors and victims. The oppressors are “privileged whites,” whose only hope of redemption is to accept their guilt and support the “oppressed” and “colonised” victims. The result, which dominates campus politics, is an angry, oppositional ideology grounded in identity politics.
It is easy to speculate how this fragile and at times nonsensical coalition might break upon contact with reality. True, you occasionally see students marching with signs like “Queer = Free Palestine.” That idea, to put it mildly, is not endorsed on the ground in Palestine or any majority-Muslim state. It shouldn’t take more than a moment’s reflection to realise that those activists would return home in boxes if they marched with that sign through Gaza. But it’s far easier to signal virtue by proclaiming their alliance with the “oppressed” and assuming it is reciprocated.
This dominant ideology and the coalition that supports it have undermined what should be the most basic values at our universities: free and open inquiry and a safe environment to express them. Those are essential for real learning, the creation of new knowledge, and human flourishing. The result is worse than a gloomy environment on campus. It is a hostile one for conservative students, pro-Israel students, Evangelicals, and others who dare to depart from the approved line.
None of this will get better on its own. It will require a concerted movement of parents, alumni, and donors. They must demand systemic changes to restore sanity, safety, and free expression on campus. It won’t be easy: but action is long overdue.
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in education, the media, DEI and the rest:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12890583/americans-osama-bin-laden-poll-gen-zers.html
one thing these polls NEVER show
and that is how what are the feelings of those born elsewhere.
foreign born more likely then not score high on Osama likeability, I suspect.
how many of the Hispanics are illegal?
how many of the Blacks are illegal or immigrants?
since both those groups have higher percentages who are sympathetic to a mass murderer.
I bet these questions would be quite revealing
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/dec/26/harvard-professors-risk-universitys-wrath-taking-w/
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She leaves the Presidency but keeps her teaching position and (rounds to) million dollar salary.
Isn't plagiarism academic fraud?
Harvard had to choose between dishonor and scandal, got both. Now keeping both. Excuse me, but was the plagiarism and antisemitism real or not? If real, why is it acceptable, forgivable in the classroom?
Poison Ivy describes all who choose to be elite and poison.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/02/opinion/claudine-gays-obnoxious-self-flattering-resignation-is-just-the-start-harvard-needs-to-answer-what-took-so-long/
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" Excuse me, but was the plagiarism and antisemitism real or not? "
according to most on the LEFT the answer is NO
but racism because she is a Black woman is! :roll: :wink:
watched Abby Phillips last night at CNN and as I knew she would first discussion was about this with two Black men. One pointed out this is not about racism. He said it was clear she committed "50" acts of plagiarism, and of course she should have been fired. Did not say much though about her unwillingness to call out those calling for Jews to be wiped out in Israel.
The other gentleman was pure racial anger . This was to get a Black woman in the "Right's" effort to remove Blacks from positions of power. Ranted this was an effort by the Right to go after DEI.
I did not get his name but he must be invested in DEI......
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Looking for 60-40 issues with which to win elections and finding 70% issues that favor 'conservatives':
https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2024/02/08/the_results_are_in_parents_favor_school_choice_1010534.html
Isn't it more like 100% favor school choice - except for teachers unions
In MN we have had public school choice for decades. It was started by a Democrat Governor who ran against his own party and won.
https://education.mn.gov/mde/fam/open/
In the 2020-21 school year, more than 86,000 Minnesota students, or 9.9% are enrolled in a school not in their residential district.
With real school choice, education dollars follow the student to public or private schools.
Some think school choice helps private schools, but competition makes the public schools better as well.
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I would love to see this law spread to other states:
Indiana Senate passes bill restricting tenure for profs who push political views on students, punishing students for disruptive protests
The Indiana Senate passed a massive higher education bill that would require colleges to implement disciplinary policies for disruptive protesters and also restrict tenure.
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Adam Sabes | Deputy Editor
February 9, 2024, 8:40 am ET
The Indiana Senate passed a massive higher education bill that would require colleges to implement disciplinary policies for disruptive protesters and also restricts tenure.
Indiana Senate Bill 202 was passed on Tuesday by a vote of 39-9 on party lines and was authored by Republican Indiana State Sens. Spencer Deery, Rep. Jeff Raatz and Tyler Johnson.
The bill would require public universities in the state to “create a policy that includes a range of disciplinary actions” for any member of the community who ”materially and substantially disrupts the protected expressive activity of another employee, student, student organization, or contractor of the state educational institution.”
If passed, the bill would require each of the state’s public colleges and universities to create a policy preventing tenure or promotion to faculty members who are “unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution,” and “unlikely to expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline.”
[RELATED: University removes ‘Introduction to Bondage’ from ‘Healthy Relationships Week’ after backlash over presenter’s disturbing online activity]
Under the bill, faculty who “subjects students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline” will also not be granted promotion or tenure.
Additionally, the bill would prohibit colleges and universities from requiring applicants for employment from pledging their allegiance to a certain set of policies, politics, or ideological movements.
Each public college and university in the state would also be required to submit data about their DEI budget allocations.
According to the Indiana Capital Chronicle, in reforming the boards of each school, the bill would also give the state’s House and Senate majority leaders power to appoint board members.
[RELATED: Indiana University facing federal civil rights investigation over anti-Semitism response: EXCLUSIVE]
Deery said the bill is supposed to be a response to “declining views” of higher education, according to the outlet.
“Infringing on academic freedom is a red line we should not cross, but we don’t need to give up on these values to curb the excessive politicalization and viewpoint discrimination that threatens our state’s workforce goals,” Deery said on the Senate floor.
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https://www.campusreform.org/article/indiana-senate-passes-bill-restricting-tenure-for-profs-who-push-political-views-on-students-punishing-students-for-disruptive-protests/24827
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Lots of takeaways here for the ed biz, one primary one being that sundry victim status embracement degree paths (black studies, women’s studies, and more recently LGBTQLMNOP studies) do little but create a cadre of angry, underemployed people, which could be seen as a feature rather than a bug.
https://stradaeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Talent-Disrupted.pdf?utm_source=StradaEducation.org&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=TalentDisrupted&utm_content=DownloadButton%20
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" Lots of takeaways here for the ed biz, one primary one being that sundry victim status embracement degree paths (black studies, women’s studies, and more recently LGBTQLMNOP studies) do little but create a cadre of angry, underemployed people, which could be seen as a feature rather than a bug."
Agree.
seems to me a course or two within a sociology department could address all these areas without the need to make these into whole degrees.
For example, a history of America from a Black's perspective seems very reasonable.
But to make it one's field of major does seem to lead to the creation a cadre of angry, underemployed people.
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https://nypost.com/2024/04/03/us-news/seattle-public-schools-shuts-down-gifted-and-talented-program/
Too many whites and 'Asian Americans'?
'Gifted' children have 'special needs' too. They will be bored in regular classes.
But it doesn't actually cost more to educate them.
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80% of K-12 teachers think schools have gotten worse in the last 5 years.
- Pew Research study, 2024