The Devil Is In The Details

Galen Clark Elementary, Merced, California, circa 1965

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Walter Russell Mead:

Mayors: Don’t Put Matt Yglesias in Charge of Your Schools

Slate columnist Matt Yglesias has harsh criticism for districting in public school systems. In most American cities, children can only attend the schools in their district, which Yglesias argues effectively turns these ostensibly public schools into the “private property of local homeowners.” As he sees it, this is a root cause of much of the inequality between high-performing and low-performing public schools:

In my view, over the long term the question of how linked schools are to particular places is a more important issue than the cliché debate over “charters” vs “traditional” public schools. In a zoning-free Yglesiastopia this might not be such a big deal. But in a real world where real estate markets are defined by location, location, location tying school access to location turns the school system into a form of private property. You can call a facility “public” all you like, but if the only way to gain access to it is to first buy your way into an expensive neighborhood then there’s nothing public about it.

But Yglesias’s “zoning-free” public schools ignore some very real logistical barriers. Theodore Ross at the Atlantic captures them well:

Yglesiastopia must be a place with infinite resources, one in which the good schools are large enough for all, and where no allocation process whatsoever—financial, racial, ethnic, linguistic, or residential—need be implemented. Let students flock to the quality schools and the problems in our educational system will disappear. Hail Yglesiastopia!

There’s something to this argument. Quality schools aren’t just a matter of good facilities and good teachers—although these are certainly important. Parents who are active and engaged in the school community are a key component of any successful school. Moving schools out of local communities and distributing children across the city will make it much more difficult for parents to get engaged and sever the ties schools have with their local community. A smart society realizes the determination of local families to build a good system and capitalizes on it.

Another effect of the Yglesias reform: an acceleration of middle class flight from the cities. Cities have been working like stevedores to convince professional works and higher income people to stay in the city once they’ve gotten married and had kids. One of the most important tools at their disposal: giving parents a reasonable certainty that their kids can go to good public schools. Take that assurance away, and roll out the welcome mat in the burbs. Watch the tax base decline and watch support for public education wither away.

If you want to wreck an American city, put an Yglesian in charge of the schools.

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Part of the problem with our public schools is a legacy of Jim Crow segregation. In many southern states there were “white only” and “colored” schools. But it wasn’t just the southern states. One segregated school system was located in Topeka, Kansas, which was a “Union” state during the Civil War. Even California got into the act when the school district in Lemon Grove decided to put all the kids of Mexican heritage in the same school regardless of where they lived.

The U.S. Supreme Court put the kibosh on “de jure” segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). They said that “separate” was inherently “unequal”. But that only dealt with official segregation. When all the black people live in one neighborhood then that neighborhood school will still be the “black” school. That’s what’s called “de facto” segregation.

Then somebody came up with a bright idea – start busing kids back and forth across town so as to achieve racial balance in all the schools. Lots of them smug Yankees who sneered at the southern segregationists weren’t to happy about this new development and “white flight” entered the political lexicon as white libruls took their kids and fled to the suburbs.

When I first started school pretty much everyone went to their local neighborhood school. If you lived between two schools you might have an option, but otherwise you went to the closest one. Almost all the kids walked or rode bikes to school back then, and some kids even went home to eat lunch each day.

In September 1970 busing started in Merced. Even though my hometown had no history of de jure segregation, most of the black and Mexican kids lived on one side of town. The City School district bought a fleet of buses and began transporting 2,900 kids back and forth across town every school day.

It wasn’t just the black kids riding buses. They used census data to determine where where the boundary lines were to be drawn and assigned schools accordingly. You could literally go to a different school than the kids across the street.

They also consolidated two high schools into a single school with one campus, which did wonders for our school sports teams. I graduated in 1978 and we had a graduating class of 822 students. We started with well over 1000. Our football team went to the conference championship three times while I was there and won twice.

From kindergarten though fourth grade I walked to school. From fifth grade through 9th grade I rode a bus. In 10th and 11th grade I walked. In 12th grade I drove.

Did all that busing do any good? That’s hard to say. If you bus kids across town every day they’ll stand in line and ride the bus with the same kids – kids that live in their neighborhood. These are also the kids they see after school and on weekends, holidays and school breaks. So guess who they make friends with.

Then add to that the tendency of kids to self-segregate with their own racial groups and you still have de facto segregation. But now the black kids spend their entire school careers as minorities. When they were at home, all the neighborhood kids were black or Mexican. But when they went to school, most of the kids (and teachers) were white. Could this affect their self-esteem?

I know, I know, we’re not supposed to ask such questions. Busing is good and holy, and anyone who says otherwise is a racist.

Getting back to Matt Yglesias, I am gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his heart is in the right place even if his head is up his ass. He suffers from that all-too-common progressive scourge known as do-gooderism.

I must confess that I used to suffer from the same condition. You see a problem and try to solve it. But your solution either doesn’t solve the problem or it make things worse. So you come up with another solution. Of course these problems are not your own, and you don’t have to deal with the consequences of the solutions. You are meddling in other peoples’ lives.

There is nothing wrong with a little bit of do-gooderism. It becomes a problem when you start trying to control other people for their own good. Then “mission creep” sets in as you start trying to control more aspects of the lives of more people. That’s the road to Vile Progdom.

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What about poor people who talk a lot?

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NY Birdcage Liner:

The Power of Talking to Your Baby

By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school — before preschool, perhaps even before birth.

There is no consensus, however, about what form these attempts should take, because there is no consensus about the problem itself. What is it about poverty that limits a child’s ability to learn? Researchers have answered the question in different ways: Is it exposure to lead? Character issues like a lack of self-control or failure to think of future consequences? The effects of high levels of stress hormones? The lack of a culture of reading?

Another idea, however, is creeping into the policy debate: that the key to early learning is talking — specifically, a child’s exposure to language spoken by parents and caretakers from birth to age 3, the more the better.

[...]

All parents gave their children directives like “Put away your toy!” or “Don’t eat that!” But interaction was more likely to stop there for parents on welfare, while as a family’s income and educational levels rose, those interactions were more likely to be just the beginning.

The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.

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This is one of those studies that looks impressive until you realize that there are some serious flaws with causation and data gathering. What about poor people who talk a lot? What about taciturn rich people? What about rich kids with working-class nannies?

I’m not sure when it started but there is a school of thought that you can turn kids into super-geniuses if you start young enough. I’ve always felt sorry for the kids who are subjected to these ridiculous training regimes.

Of course it’s good for kids to interact with their parents. Talking and reading to them increases their language and vocabulary. Using the television as a babysitter will turn them into Democrats drooling idiots.

But there is a saturation point where the Law of Diminishing Returns takes over. IMNSHO you can harm your kids by pushing them too hard. Kids need to be kids.

BTW- If you prep your kids for IQ tests it might raise their score but it won’t make them any smarter.

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Groupthink Causes Groupstink

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The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World

It sounds like the setup for a bad joke: What did the Wall Street type say to the college president on the golf course? Well, we don’t know exactly—but it has launched a saga with weighty implications for American intellectual and civic life.

Here’s what we do know: One day in the summer of 2010, Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, a respected liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, met investor and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein for a round of golf about an hour north of campus. College presidents spend many of their waking hours talking to potential donors. In this case, the two men spoke about college life—especially “diversity”—and the conversation made such an impression on President Mills that he cited it weeks later in his convocation address to Bowdoin’s freshman class. That’s where the dispute begins.

In his address, President Mills described the golf outing and said he had been interrupted in the middle of a swing by a fellow golfer’s announcement: “I would never support Bowdoin—you are a ridiculous liberal school that brings all the wrong students to campus for all the wrong reasons,” said the other golfer, in Mr. Mills’s telling. During Mr. Mills’s next swing, he recalled, the man blasted Bowdoin’s “misplaced and misguided diversity efforts.” At the end of the round, the college president told the students, “I walked off the course in despair.”

Word of the speech soon got to Mr. Klingenstein. Even though he hadn’t been named in the Mills account, Mr. Klingenstein took to the pages of the Claremont Review of Books to call it nonsense: “He didn’t like my views, so he turned me into a backswing interrupting, Bowdoin-hating boor who wants to return to the segregated days of Jim Crow.”

The real story, wrote Mr. Klingenstein, was that “I explained my disapproval of ‘diversity’ as it generally has been implemented on college campuses: too much celebration of racial and ethnic difference,” coupled with “not enough celebration of our common American identity.”

For this, wrote Mr. Klingenstein, Bowdoin’s president insinuated that he was a racist. And President Mills did so, moreover, in an address that purported to stress the need for respecting the opinions of others across the political spectrum. “We are, in the main, a place of liberal political persuasion,” he told the students, but “we must be willing to entertain diverse perspectives throughout our community. . . . Diversity of ideas at all levels of the college is crucial for our credibility and for our educational mission.” Wrote Mr. Klingenstein: “Would it be uncharitable to suggest that, in a speech calling for more sensitivity to conservative views, he might have shown some?”

After the essay appeared, President Mills stood by his version of events. A few months later, Mr. Klingenstein decided to do something surprising: He commissioned researchers to examine Bowdoin’s commitment to intellectual diversity, rigorous academics and civic identity. This week, some 18 months and hundreds of pages of documentation later, the project is complete. Its picture of Bowdoin isn’t pretty.

Funded by Mr. Klingenstein, researchers from the National Association of Scholars studied speeches by Bowdoin presidents and deans, formal statements of the college’s principles, official faculty reports and notes of faculty meetings, academic course lists and syllabi, books and articles by professors, the archive of the Bowdoin Orient newspaper and more. They analyzed the school’s history back to its founding in 1794, focusing on the past 45 years—during which, they argue, Bowdoin’s character changed dramatically for the worse.

Published Wednesday, the report demonstrates how Bowdoin has become an intellectual monoculture dedicated above all to identity politics.

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Methinks that Mr. Mills needs to work on his people skills. He’s obviously not very good a schmoozing donors.

The real problem in modern academia isn’t just the lack of real-world experience within their ivory towers, it’s also the lack of diversity of opinion. Universities are supposed to be places where ideas can be explored and debated, not indoctrination centers for our kids.

If you are not paying due consideration to differing points of view then you ain’t engaged in critical thinking. That’s why our courts have jury instructions that tell the jurors they must listen to ALL the evidence and hear ALL the arguments before reaching an opinion. When you close your mind to other facts and opinions you aren’t thinking, you are executing a program.

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Utopian Ideas

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Michael Barone:

Obama keeps talking about corporate jets because it tests well in polls.

And that’s the reason, I think, he keeps talking about universal preschool, not just for disadvantaged children.

Polls show that large majorities of Americans would be willing to have more government money spent for preschool for disadvantaged children. The impulse to help adorable but needy little kids is very strong.

Unfortunately, the evidence that preschool programs do any permanent good for such children is exceedingly weak.

Preschool advocates point to a 1960s program in Ypsilanti, Mich., and a 1970s North Carolina program called Abecedarian. Research showed those programs produced lasting gains in learning.

But no one has been able to replicate the success of these very small programs staffed by unusually dedicated people. Mass programs like Head Start staffed by more ordinary people don’t work as well.

Kids in such programs seem to make no perceptible lasting gains. That’s too bad, because disadvantaged kids need help.

So why is Obama emphasizing universal preschool, which would cost a lot more than preschool for the disadvantaged? The reason, I suspect, is that you would have to hire lots more credentialed teachers, which means you would get lots more teacher union members.

Teacher union leaders would love to see more dues money coming in, and to channel more to the Democratic Party.

To my suspicious eye, the preschool proposal doesn’t make much sense as policy, but it makes a lot of sense as politics.

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I’m not in agreement with Michael Barone, particularly in regard to the value of early childhood education. But that is not the point of this post. I want to talk about one of my utopian ideas of which I was rather proud.

Any parent can tell you that one of the biggest obstacles to working and raising kids is reliable, quality, affordable daycare. If you have three or more kids you can find yourself paying more in daycare than you make from working.

At the same time we have problems with illiteracy and declining test scores compared to the rest of the industrialized world. But we have lots of trained teachers and an educational infrastructure and bureaucracy. Why not go big instead of go home?

Imagine if our children could start universal public preschool as soon as they were potty-trained. Combine that with expanded before and after school programs so that kids could be dropped off at 7:30 in the morning and picked up as late as 5:30 in the evening. Make that effective twelve months a year, Monday thru Friday and excluding major holidays. Part of the program would be optional and part of it mandatory, with an exception for private and home-schooled kids.

Think how much more our kids could learn if they entered the educational system around age three and the length of both the school day and school year were significantly increased. We could add back a lot of programs like art, sports and music that have gotten the axe in recent decades.

I acknowledge that there would be lots of bugs to work out, both practical and political. The paranoid right would freak out for sure. But we have the infrastructure and bureaucracy already in place, so we would need only to expand it, not create a new one.

Like I said, it’s a utopian idea. At the very least it would do no harm to the kids and would certainly benefit working parents. Existing daycare providers would take a hit, but many of them could more over into the expanded job openings at their local schools.

Once upon a time I was rather proud of the idea. Not so much these days.

The real problem isn’t the idea, it’s the execution. A massive expansion of our educational system would cost a buttload of money. And not just to get it started – it would cost us a buttload of money every year. And they would be unionized government employees, which are the most expensive kind of employees out there.

How much money can we afford to spend on education? In a utopia money would be no problem, but we live in the real world. This is an era of limits and we can’t afford perfection. We need to forget about all the cool things we could do and worry about what we need to do. So how much education can we afford to pay for? We need to figure that out and plan accordingly.

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Huh?

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Ever read something that makes you go “Huh?”

California no longer requiring eighth graders to take Algebra

California will no longer require eighth-graders to take algebra — a move that is line with the Common Core standards being adopted by most states, but that may leave students unprepared for college.

Last month, California formally shifted to the Common Core mathematics standards, which recommend that students delay taking algebra if they aren’t ready for it. Previously, algebra class was a requirement for all eighth-graders in the state.

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So California is lowering their standards. What else is new?

The Common Core State Standards Initiative, which is sponsored by the National Governor’s Association, is an effort to unify diverse state education curricula. Forty-five other states and the District of Columbia have signed on so far.

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Wait, so we lowered them to match the rest of the country? Well that’s not so bad, is it?

But some education experts worry that the change will further damage struggling students’ college chances, since early proficiency in Algebra I is an excellent predictor of college graduation, according to the Mercury News.

Black and Latino students in California are significantly more likely to fail eighth-grade algebra, and 80 percent of those who fail it once will fail it again when they take it in high school.

A study published by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area claims that some minority students who score well enough to place into advanced math classes are often mistakenly held back.

“School districts have been disproportionately requiring minority students to repeat Algebra I even after they scored proficient or advanced on the Algebra I California standardized tests,” said Kimberly Thomas Rapp, executive director of the committee, in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The new standard is a step back for California, and may leave students, particularly minority and low-income students, unprepared for college, said Rapp.

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Huh?

Is the problem that we aren’t pushing kids enough, or that too many black and Latino kids are failing algebra? Or is it that black and Latino kids are being required to re-take algebra even though they passed it?

If I was grading this essay I would have to give it an “F”. Maybe the author failed 8th grade English composition.

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What’s the difference between boogers and broccoli?

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Answer: Kids won’t eat broccoli.

Complaints Mount Against Michelle Obama’s New Lunch Menu

In Wisconsin, high school athletes are complaining about not getting enough to eat each day, due to the skimpy new school lunch menu mandated by the United States Department of Agriculture and First Lady Michelle Obama.

The story we published earlier this week on that subject is unfortunately not unique. Students across the country are complaining about the new school lunch regulations.

Perhaps the real motive is to starve students into slimming down. Just ask students in Pierre, South Dakota who, too, are in an all-out revolt.

“I know a lot of my friends who are just drinking a jug of milk for their lunch. And they are not getting a proper meal,” middle school student Samantha Gortmaker told Keloland.com.

[...]

Nancy Carvalho, director of food services for New Bedford Public Schools, was quoted as saying that hummus and black bean salads have been tough sells in elementary cafeterias. That means even smaller children are going through the day fighting hunger pains, which can never be considered a good thing.

One government official tried to put the blame on the students.

“One thing I think we need to keep in mind as kids say they’re still hungry is that many children aren’t used to eating fruits and vegetables at home, much less at school. So it’s a change in what they are eating. If they are still hungry, it’s that they are not eating all the food that’s being offered,” USDA Deputy Undersecretary Janey Thornton was quoted as saying.

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You can pile all that “healthy” food on kids’ trays, but if they won’t eat it they go hungry and the food gets wasted. Not exactly an optimal situation.

Meanwhile:

SAT Reading Scores Are the Lowest They’ve Been in 40 Years

Coming in with an average SAT reading score of 496, 2012′s graduating seniors have the dubious distinction of having attained the worst reading score since 1972. (For those test-takers of a certain age and test-taking history, “reading” is actually that part we knew as “verbal.”) Regardless of what you call(ed) it, “The average reading score for the Class of 2012 was 496, down one point from the previous year and 34 points since 1972, reports the Washington Post’s Emma Brown, gleaning numbers from the College Board, the organization that administers the test.

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Maybe our schools should focus on teaching kids to read and write.

(For those of you keeping score, the U. S. Department of Education is 33 years old.)

BTW – Here is an earlier post of mine on the same topic;

The way to hell is paved with good intentions

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Striking Out

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Teachers strike leaves parents scrambling: ‘As long as they’re on strike, I can’t work either.’

Less than a week after the bulk of Chicago Public Schools students and parents started their back-to-school routines, from early morning wake-up to late-night homework supervision, it all came to a screeching halt when teachers hit the picket lines Monday.

Regardless of their feelings about the strike, parents and guardians frantically sought last-minute child care, pleaded with their bosses for leniency and hoped that their kids would return to school sooner rather than later.

In some cases, students and parents arrived at schools, unaware classes were canceled Monday. At other schools, parents were highly mobilized, developing babysitting co-ops and publicizing alternatives to the CPS-sponsored Children First strike contingency plan.

Citywide for thousands of families, stress was high and consequences were real in a situation with an abrupt, late-night beginning and an unknown ending.

“I might be losing my job over this,” said Martina Watts, 38, as she dropped her kids off at Hefferan Elementary in Garfield Park. “As long as they’re on strike, I can’t work. I’m not getting paid, either.”

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Chicago school teachers are already some of the highest paid in the country, but then again Chicago is an expensive place to live. Some critics have charged that based on test results the teachers aren’t doing a very good job, but you could argue that the low scores aren’t the teachers’ fault.

But the real issue isn’t how much the teachers deserve to make, it is how much Chicago can afford to pay them.

The optics here are bad for the teachers. As I’ve said before it’s hard to get the proles to support your cause when you are better off than the proles. Even worse, it’s the proles who are being inconvenienced the most.

This strike isn’t coming out of Rahm Emanuel’s pocket. The taxpayers of Chicago will bear the cost of the strike and the eventual new contract as well. During a time of economic crisis it’s not a really bright idea to piss off the taxpayers when the choice is basically between paying more taxes or breaking the union.

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Here we go again

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CBS:

90 percent of Chicago teachers authorize strike

Teachers in the nation’s third-largest school district voted overwhelmingly to authorize the first strike in 25 years if their union and the city cannot reach a deal on a contract this summer — signaling just how badly the relationship between teachers and Chicago school officials has deteriorated, union officials said Monday.

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis announced the result of last week’s balloting — nearly 90 percent of its 26,502 members voted to authorize a strike —and called it “an indictment of the state of the relationship between the management of CPS and its largest labor force members.” State law requires 75 percent approval.

Teachers are upset that Mayor Rahm Emanuel canceled last year’s raise and that they’re being asked to work longer days without what they consider to be an adequate pay increase. Lewis said other key issues include class size and resources.

[...]

Much of the teachers’ frustration has centered on Emanuel, who rescinded a 4 percent raise last year and then tried to go around the union in his push for longer school days by asking teachers at individual schools to waive the union contract to work more hours. The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board subsequently blocked Emanuel’s negotiations with schools.

He still was able to lengthen the school day for children to 7 hours, starting this fall, without the union’s approval.

[...]

The district has proposed a five-year deal that guarantees teachers a 2 percent pay raise in the first year and lengthens by 10 percent the amount of time teachers must spend at school, from 7 hours to 7 hours and 40 minutes. The union wants a two-year deal that reduces class size and calls for teachers to receive a 24 percent pay raise in the first year and a 5 percent pay raise in the second year.

Chicago public school students have the shortest school day — 5 hours and 45 minutes — among the nation’s 50 largest districts, according to a 2007 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality — part of the reason Emanuel moved to lengthen it.

But the Chicago Teachers Union said that report did not track actual classroom time and insisted the amount of instruction time was on par with other districts.

There is an interesting pro-teacher post and comments about this at Cheetoville. The best part is how they are trying to blame this on the Republicans.

BTW – The current median income for Chicago Teachers is $65,000 a year.

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Peepul R Stoopit

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Danps at Corrente provides an example of a common meme:

Slogan and bromide open thread

One of the things liberals are terrible at is messaging. We tend to start discussing issues by going Full Wonk, and that isn’t very appealing to the largest part of the population. If you want to engage on an issue you need to get your rhetorical foot in the door first, and that means finding a quick, punchy way to grab the average citizen’s attention.

So I thought I’d throw open a thread for brainstorming. Come up with something that could fit on a bumper sticker and (important!) is an actual policy prescription or direct action most people can take. No “visualize world peace” or anything like that. Make it short, make it punchy, make it relevant.

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I guess we’re just too smart for our own good. Obviously, we’re right and they’re wrong. If people aren’t convinced of our superiority they must be booger-eating morons. We need to “dumb-down” our message so they can understand. What’s the matter with Kansas? Why do these inbred hillbillies keep voting against their self-interest?

Danps gives a couple examples. Here’s my favorite:

Slogan: 15:1
Policy prescription/direct action: Make a nationwide standard for the maximum student/teacher ratio in public primary and secondary schools to be 15:1.
Effect: Smaller class sizes, especially in lower income communities that need it most. Focuses attention on classroom environment instead of standardized testing or privatization. Provides guaranteed national funding to those places (including, ahem, some entire states) that abdicate their responsibilities in that regard.

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I don’t know what the ideal student-teacher ratio is, but “reducing class size” has been offered as a panacea for years now. We’ve been trying to “fix” education since before I was born. We keep increasing the workload, lengthening the school day and school year, and cutting back on things like sports and art. Are kids any smarter?

If we reduce class size to 15:1, how long before someone suggests 10:1? 5:1? 1:1?

Nobody wants their kids to be illiterate. But how much money are we willing to spend on their educations? How much would it cost us to implement a 15:1 class size ratio? How many more teachers will we need? How many more classrooms will we need to build?

Assuming we do it, what’s the pay-off? How much will that increase test scores?

But getting back to the original point of this post, is someone stupid if they are unwilling to pay more in taxes to reduce class sizes some more? What if they don’t have any kids? What exactly is their self-interest?

Would teachers be willing to take a 25% pay cut to fund more teachers?

BTW – Ever notice that conservatives don’t call voters stupid?

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Why Johnnie can’t read – Racism

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From Black Youth Project:

Black 8th Grader’s Essay Comparing Education System To Slavery Ignites Outrage

A 8th grader’s incendiary essay comparing today’s education system to slavery is causing a firestorm of controversy in her upstate New York community.

13 year-old Jada Williams,writing an essay on Frederick Douglass for a contest, made the very astute analysis that packing 30-40 students into a crowded classroom, and having mostly white teachers give them packets and pamphlets to complete that they don’t fully comprehend, impedes the learning process; and that this produces results similar to those hoped for by a slave master that forbids his slaves from learning how to read at all.

Jada’s point is that nothing has really changed since the days of Frederick Douglass; “the same old discrimination still resides in the hearts of the white man.”

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By the end of 8th grade a student has received nine years of education. NINE YEARS

When I was in school they didn’t start teaching us to read until 2nd grade. Now they start teaching them in preschool. So who is to blame if a child reaches the 8th grade and still can’t read?

From Liz Dwyer at Good:

Williams wrote that overcrowded, poorly managed classrooms prevent real learning from happening and thus produces the same results as Mr. Auld’s outright ban. She wrote that her white teachers—the vast majority of Rochester students are black and Hispanic, but very few teachers are people of color—are in a “position of power to dictate what I can, cannot, and will learn, only desiring that I may get bored because of the inconsistency and the mismanagement of the classroom.”

Instead of truly teaching, most teachers simply “pass out pamphlets and packets” and then expect students to complete them independently, Williams wrote. But this approach fails, she concluded, because “most of my peers cannot read and or comprehend the material that has been provided.” As a result, she continued, not much has changed since the time of Douglass, “just different people, different era” and “the same old discrimination still resides in the hearts of the white man.” Williams called for her fellow students to “start making these white teachers accountable for instructing you” and challenged teachers to do their jobs. “What merit is there,” she asked, if teachers have knowledge and are “not willing to share because of the color of my skin?”

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Yeah, that’s right. All those white teachers spent years earning teaching credentials so they could get jobs preventing black kids from learning.

Here’s my question – Where are the parents? How does any parent let their children pass through years of school without obtaining even basic literacy skills?

Blaming racism is a cop-out.

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The college myth – Elitism 101

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Via Hot Air:

Former Sen. Rick Santorum expanded his populist message into education Saturday, accusing President Barack Obama and others of “snobbery” for pushing all kids to go to college.

“We are leaving so many children behind,” Mr. Santorum said at a forum sponsored by the Atlantic, the National Journal and Saint Anselm College. “They’re not ready to go to [college.] They don’t want to go to college. They don’t need to go to college. I was so outraged that the President of the United States [said] every student should go to college.”

“Who are you to say that every child in America goes” to college, he continued. “I have seven kids. Maybe they’ll all go to college. But if one of my kids wants to go and be an auto mechanic, good for him! That’s a good-paying job.”

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If you do things the “correct” way in this country, your parents began prepping you for college before you were born. Reading to you in the womb, buying you educational toys, getting you into the best pre-schools, etc. By the time you start Kindergarten you are able to read, write, speak three languages and can handle non-Euclidian geometry.

If your parents aren’t fortunate enough to afford a fancy private school they must find a home in the right public school {{shudder}} district. For the next twelve years your entire childhood will be consumed by preparing for getting into one of the best universities.

This means the classes you take and the grades you get, but also your extra-curricular activities as well. You want to be able to fill out your college applications with evidence of your good character (charitable activities), athleticism (soccer, karate dance and yoga) as well some unusual interests (fly fishing, mandolin). Then there are the SAT prep classes.

So finally your parents dreams come true and you are accepted at an Ivy League university. During your freshman year you quickly discover you have no interest in becoming a doctor and your favorite classes are Intoxication and Intercourse. You drop out of school, your parents disown you and you begin working at Walmart.

Wait, what?

There are two main questions about college – who should go and when (if ever) should they go?

Not everyone needs to go to college. In the immortal words of Judge Smails, “The world needs ditch diggers too.” My cousin had a backhoe business and he did alright.

There are lots of skilled labor jobs out there. If you enjoy building and fixing things, why should you take an office job?

But I want to focus on that second question – when (if ever) should they go?

When I was 18 years old I hated school and my grades reflect it. It would have been a waste of time and money for me to go to college right then. I was a hormone with tennis shoes and had no idea what I wanted to be.

I went back to school full-time at the age of thirty-one. I had spent the years since high school in the army and working in pest control. I had been married (twice), divorced (twice) and had three kids. My attitude towards school was very different and I had a better idea of what I wanted to do with my life.

Some people are better off waiting to go to school. Others should take it in stages. Let’s say you’re eighteen and you want to be an auto mechanic. You go to a community college or trade school to get your basic degree and start working. Then you come back occasionally for additional training to keep current and to learn some specialties. When when you’re thirty you start thinking of opening your own shop so you take some classes on business management. Then in your fifties you start thinking about a second career.

There are lots of ways to measure success, and lots of ways to learn. Treating everyone who doesn’t go to (an Ivy League) college as a failure is a game for snooty elitists.

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When did blue collars become a bad thing?

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Classical Values:

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 have to take exception to his use of the term “liberal” here, because what he is really talking about are progressives. Many FDR/New Deal liberals are blue-collar liberals and they aren’t ashamed to work with their hands nor do they sneer at people who do.

Today’s progressives have contempt for the working class and think physical labor is beneath them. They talk about workers as a bloc of voters to be wooed and led, but not as equal partners.

Listen to them talk when they are defending illegal immigration – they claim we need illegal immigrants because American workers are too lazy to perform those jobs. Does that sound like someone who respects the working class?

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Does a better college make you smarter?

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One of the major gripes of the Occupados is student loan debt. Right now they are protesting at UC Berkeley because of the high cost of tuition. One of the reasons their tuitions are so high is they are attending UC Berkeley. Tuitions are quite a bit lower in the CSU system and even lower at community colleges.

I attended a community college and then transferred to CSU Stanislaus. Then I attended a private state-accredited law school. I have no complaints about my education – it enabled me to pass the bar exam on the first try. When I was practicing no judge ever asked me where I went to school.

Would I be any smarter if I had gone to an Ivy League university?

Seriously – how much more could I have learned at a fancier school? When I was in college and law school I didn’t go to any toga parties or spend spring break in Cancun. I didn’t have much social life at all. I worked, studied and went to class. In my spare time I slept and raised my kids.

There are only so many hours in a day and so many days in a year. Would I have had to read more or listen to longer lectures? Or would the reading and lectures contain more information?

The UC system charges twice as much for tuition as the CSU system. So what do students get for those higher tuitions?

Do they learn twice as much? I doubt it.

But a fancier college looks good on a resume. Some people think that matters. Remember how the snooty elitists reacted to Sarah Palin’s state college diploma?

It seems to me that a lot of these Fleabaggers are upset because the degrees they paid for turned out to be worth less than they thought they would be, and in some cases worthless. But is that the banks’ fault?

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Education is important. That’s why we provide a free one to every child. By the time they graduate from 8th grade every child should have achieved basic literacy. Then we give them another four years in high school to learn pretty much the same stuff.

Then we tell them they need at least two more years of vocational training if they ever want to get a decent job. But now school isn’t free anymore, unless they are on welfare.

But we dangle a big lure in front of them and tell them if they want a really good job they need to go to school for 4-10 years after high school. We show them charts the compare the average earnings of people with and without higher degrees.

Then we offer them easy credit.

But what we don’t do is ask whether they really have the aptitude for college. As long as they grind out minimal passing grades we keep raising their credit limit.

More importantly, we don’t question their fields of study, and the probable lifetime earnings with a degree in that major.

Imagine if we eliminated athletic scholarships, and told kids if they wanted to play college sports they had to pay thousands of dollars a semester for the privilege. But then we told them how much NFL and NBA players make, and offered them student loans. Lots of kids would take the loans, chasing a dream.

Thousands of kids play college football. Only a few hundred will make it to the NFL, and most of those won’t stay long. Letting thousands run up huge non-dischargeable debts when only a few will realize a profit on the investment would be fraudulent and cruel.

So why do we let them do it with majors like dance or poetry?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t let every kid who wants to go to college have the opportunity to do so. Nor am I suggesting that some majors be eliminated. I’m just saying we should question letting them borrow money for degrees that have low prospects of producing enough income to repay the loans.

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