Education

[G M]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-system-rigged-a-guide-grads/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-weekend-interview-escaping-the-student-debt-trap-1402699281

[DougMacG]

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.

[G M]

It's not about teaching, it's about indoctrinating.

[ccp]

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/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://online.wsj.com/articles/obamas-student-loan-blowout-1410305233?mod=Opinion_newsreel_5

[ccp]

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.

[DougMacG]

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"??!!

[DougMacG]

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

[G M]

Are many Columbia law students violently assaulting police officers?

[Crafty_Dog]

Well, from the age of 15 to about the age of 38 every single one of my dreams had a policeman in it somewhere , , ,

[DougMacG]

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

[ccp]

Aren't the highest paid university people the football coaches?   Maybe the basketball coaches?

[DougMacG]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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).

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-fainting-couch-at-columbia/

[G M]

http://thelibertyzone.com/2015/10/15/this-is-teaching-your-kids/

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/11/12/mizzou-and-yale-pc-hysteria-spreads-to-other-campuses/

[DougMacG]

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.

[DougMacG]

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/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The huge improvement in educational performance in not based on race IMHO.  It was a caused by the political change.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html?mid=facebook_nymag

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B553na_skKI

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/27997/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://manufacturingstories.com/how-solving-the-skills-gap-can-rebuild-the-middle-class/

[DougMacG]

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.

[DougMacG]

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.

[DDF]

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.

[ccp]

" 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.

[DDF]

" 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.

[bigdog]

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."

[Crafty_Dog]

The world retains its ability to surprise.

[DougMacG]

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.

[DDF]

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.

[DougMacG]

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.)
-----------------------------------------------
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.

[ccp]

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/

[ccp]

 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.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.prageru.com/courses/life-studies/every-high-school-principal-should-say

[Crafty_Dog]

https://fee.org/articles/student-loan-subsidies-cause-almost-all-of-the-increase-in-tuition/

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[DougMacG]

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?

[Crafty_Dog]

15 miles?

[ccp]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448043/ben-sasse-book-senator-teaches-self-reliance-adults-children

[Crafty_Dog]

"Politics is downstream from culture."

I like that.  Very pithy.

[DougMacG]

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.

[DougMacG]

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.
-------------
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”...

[DougMacG]

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.