Recently in Education Category

As you know, Jessica and I are having a baby in a few months, so we've been thinking about how we're going to invest in our kids' futures. Everyone at work is horrified when I tell them that we're not going to pay for our kids' collage. I know such a stance is evil and unAmerican, but hear me out.

1. People line up to loan money to college students; no one will loan Jessica and I money for our retirement. College loans are cheap, easy money with low interest rates and undemanding repayment schedules.

2. Our kids will probably be sick of my meddling by the time they leave the house.

3. There may be more efficient ways to invest in your kids... ways that most people don't think about but that can make an even bigger difference in their lives. For example, Jessica is planning to be a stay-at-home mom; there's an opportunity cost to that decision, and in the long run it will certainly be more expensive than paying college tuition.

When it comes to launching missiles in the Mommy Wars, Sarah Palin has nothing on Christopher Ruhm. On Thursday, the University of North Carolina, Greenboro, economist published a study showing that kids from high-socioeconomic-status families take a long-term hit when their moms work outside the home—at ages 10 and 11, they perform more poorly on cognitive tests and are also more likely to be overweight than those whose high-status mothers leave the workforce. ... "This comes down to a fundamental principle of economics: something has to give. We can't have it all," he says.

That's right. We think having a stay-at-home mom will be a bigger advantage for our kids than a stack of money would be when they turn 18.

I'm almost speechless! Democrats at the Denver convention are echoing some of my complaints about America's teachers' unions and getting cheered!

Things We Thought We'd Never See: Democrats Rally Against the Teachers' Unions! I went to the Ed Challenge for Change event mainly to schmooze. I almost didn't stay for the panels, being in no mood for what I expected would, even among these reformers, be an hour of vague EdBlob talk about "change" and "accountability" and "resources" that would tactfully ignore the elephant in the room, namely the teachers' unions. I was so wrong. One panelist--I think it was Peter Groff, president of the Colorado State Senate, got the ball rolling by complaining that when the children's agenda meets the adult agenda, the "adult agenda wins too often." Then Cory Booker of Newark attacked teachers unions specifically--and there was applause. In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention! "The politics are so vicious," Booker complained, remembering how he'd been told his political career would be over if he kept pushing school choice, how early on he'd gotten help from Republicans rather than from Democrats. The party would "have to admit as Democrats we have been wrong on education." Loud applause! Mayor Adrian Fenty of D.C. joined in, describing the AFT's attempt to block the proposed pathbreaking D.C. teacher contract. Booker denounced "insane work rules," and Groff talked about doing the bidding of "those folks who are giving money [for campaigns], and you know who I'm talking about." Yes, they did!

This account is the single best thing I've ever seen come from the Democrats. I'm sure they and I could quibble about the details, but their recognition of the source of the problems facing our public education system is a huge step forward. I'm stunned.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Charlie Martin wonders if a one-room schoolhouse model would be economically feasible in modern times. This pondering leads him to the titular question. First off, what kind of results would one expect from such an education system?

Once upon a time, an American public school student was expected to be able to name principal parts of speech; define and give examples of verse, stanza, and paragraph; write an intelligible one-page composition; compute interests, discounts, and tax rates; describe major events in U.S. history; have an understanding of the U.S. government; and be sufficiently familiar with geography to be able to talk about climate, its causes and effects, and to identify and locate continents, major rivers, and important world capitals, in order to graduate.

From the eighth grade.

Sounds nice, but certainly our conveyor-belt mass-production public education system is more efficient than a one-room school, right?

So, as a thought experiment, I constructed a proposal for a revived one-room school. Since I had a cost per student for New York, I’d develop a plan for New York City — in fact, for midtown Manhattan, using midtown Manhattan rents. Could I pay a teacher enough to live on, with a one-room school, based on New York costs per student?

The full details are on a page on my own blog Explorations, but here are the basics. The Adams County school has room for 24 students, so we assume 24 students in Manhattan, and a one-room school built in quality office space in midtown. I laid out a floor plan and discovered we could fit it nicely into 1,050 square feet; equip it with good quality desks and chairs and with one iMac computer for every two students, plus one for the teacher and a Mac Pro as a classroom server; and add Internet connections and $1,000 per student for books and supplies. How much remained to hire a teacher?

$230,000. Almost a quarter of a million dollars.

Our modern public education system is a farce that not only produces a sub-standard product (students who can barely read) but does so at exorbitant expense. Go read the details and ponder for yourself where all the money is being wasted.

I mostly lift free-weights rather than using machines, but for anyone who spends a lot of time at the gym I recommend checking out this list of exercise machines you "must" avoid because of their propensity to cause injury.

(HT: RD.)

I've written on this topic many times before, but Marty Nemko has the data which shows that many people should not waste their time and money on college.

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."

I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

Education is a business. The American higher education system is the best in the world, but it's there first to make money and only secondarily to educate. That's not a flaw in the system, that's just life. Don't let yourself or your kids be duped by the sales-pitches if the product really isn't right for you.

Despite massive outpourings of money over the past decades, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson says America's secondary education system is a failure.

Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent.

"If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn't put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down," he said.

Gone are the days when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally, he said.

"We're able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as we're able to do it in Austin, Texas," he said, referring to the Indian city where many international companies have "outsourced" technical and customer support workers.

"I know you don't like hearing that, but that's the way it is," he said.

The problem with American secondary education isn't a lack of funding, it's a lack of teaching. Not teachers -- we've got plenty of those, it's just too bad they apparently aren't capable of doing their jobs effectively. I think most of the blame lies with the teachers' unions' commitment to their own power at the expense of our students. They've created a culture in which the purpose of public education is to create union jobs rather than to actually educate children.

A state appeals court has ruled that homeschooling is illegal in California unless the parent has a teaching credential.

A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution. ...

Yet the appeals court said state law has been clear since at least 1953, when another appellate court rejected a challenge by homeschooling parents to California's compulsory education statutes. Those statutes require children ages 6 to 18 to attend a full-time day school, either public or private, or to be instructed by a tutor who holds a state credential for the child's grade level.

"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. "Parents have a legal duty to see to their children's schooling under the provisions of these laws."

Parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply, Croskey said.

"A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare," the judge wrote, quoting from a 1961 case on a similar issue.

Setting aside some thousands of years of common law and custom on the matter, I've known plenty of homeschooled kids in California -- this law has never been enforced. I'll be surprised if this ruling is allowed to stand without intervention by the state Legislature, even in California.

The usual parasites are naturally pleased:

The ruling was applauded by a director for the state's largest teachers union.

"We're happy," said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. "We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting."

And I think no one without a degree in computer science should be allowed to program a computer!

I've written before about the damaging cult of self-esteem in our education system, and now Abraham Katsman proposes that the cult of self-esteem is fueling "Obamania".

For the past two decades, America's educational establishment has stressed the inculcation of self-esteem as the supreme educational goal. Self-respect - the product of struggle and achievement - is out; self-esteem - the entitlement tofeel great self-worth regardless of actual accomplishment - is in.

Strict correction of misspelling or of wrong answers to math problems is discouraged. Competition is a big no-no: many youth sports leagues forbid keeping score, lest any child's self-esteem suffer from the indignity of losing. Posting honor rolls is discouraged, as it might injure the self-esteem of those who did not make the grade.

Grade inflation is rampant in schools: according to one recent study, about half of today's college freshman had an "A" average in high school compared to under 20% in the late 1960s, even though SAT scores have tanked over the same period. The focus on self-esteem has, in a sense, been a huge success.

For example, American students have very high scores when asked to assess how good they are at math. Unfortunately, they have low/mediocre scores in actual math performance, routinely being outscored by students in most other developed countries.

Inevitably, however, such over-indulgence of students leads to increased narcissism, self-absorption, and sense of entitlement. Those with self-esteem disproportionate to their achievement tend to be less willing to take responsibility for their own failures, shortcomings, or bad behavior.

Coddled children raised to believe that any dream is not only attainable, but an entitlement granted regardless of actual effort and accomplishment are increasingly growing into depressed and stressed young adults as they rudely discover that the post-school world is not so cooperative and doesn't really care about their dreams or their feelings. In the real world, they keep score.

But not in Obama-world. That is a world of Hope; of Action; of Change You Can Believe In; of Yes We Can; of Coming Together; of Moving Forward Into the Future, and of other banalities that can mean absolutely anything to anyone. "I am asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations." It's all about us and our good feelings of youth and unity. Nothing so difficult as spelling out tough policy choices or arguing about a particular program's merits or ramifications is involved.

If that's right, then America is simply reaping the vacuity our mushy education system has been sowing for decades. Hopefully "Obamania" will meet the real world sometime before November.

All eyes are on Ohio and Texas... guess which state is being sucked dry by union vampires?

Ohio's most crippling handicap may be that its politicians -- and thus its employers -- are still in the grip of such industrial unions as the United Auto Workers. Ohio is a "closed shop" state, which means workers can be forced to join a union whether they wish to or not. Many companies -- especially foreign-owned -- say they will not even consider such locations for new sites. States with "right to work" laws that make union organizing more difficult had twice the job growth of Ohio and other forced union states from 1995-2005, according to the National Institute for Labor Relations.

On the other hand, Texas is a right to work state and has been adding jobs by the tens of thousands. Nearly 1,000 new plants have been built in Texas since 2005, from the likes of Microsoft, Samsung and Fujitsu. Foreign-owned companies supplied the state with 345,000 jobs. No wonder Texans don't fear global competition the way some Presidential candidates do.

Just imagine how good our education system would be if it's primary role weren't playing host organism to the education unions. Etc.

(HT: The Pirate.)

Did anyone else have no idea about the full title of Darwin's "masterpiece" that is now commonly referred to simply as On the Origin of Species?

Those who argue at school board meetings that Darwin should be taught in public schools seldom have taken the time to read him. If they knew the full title of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, they might have gained some inkling of the racism propagated by this controversial theorist. Had they actually read Origin, they likely would be shocked to learn that among Darwin's scientifically based proposals was the elimination of "the negro and Australian peoples," which he considered savage races whose continued survival was hindering the progress of civilization.

In his next book, The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin ranked races in terms of what he believed was their nearness and likeness to gorillas. Then he went on to propose the extermination of races he "scientifically" defined as inferior. If this were not done, he claimed, those races, with much higher birthrates than "superior" races, would exhaust the resources needed for the survival of better people, eventually dragging down all civilization.

Darwin even argued that advanced societies should not waste time and money on caring for the mentally ill, or those with birth defects. To him, these unfit members of our species ought not to survive.

Uh, yeah. As Professor Tony Campolo writes in the rest of the article, Darwin's philosophy is no less morally and spiritually influenced than the theory of intelligent design. It even has its own gods: whites. I can't figure out why they didn't mention any of this in high school... it's almost like the secular humanist education system was trying to brainwash me by teaching half-truths and concealing all contrary viewpoints.

(HT: Ed Driscoll and Brothers Judd.)

Here's a lawsuit that could create a form of school vouchers through tax deductions if the plaintiffs are successful.

A Jewish couple's bid to take a tax deduction they say the IRS reserves only for members of the Church of Scientology is getting a friendly reception from a federal appeals court, increasing the possibility of a ruling that could create a tax break for taxpayers of many religions who pay tuition to religious schools.

During arguments on the case this week, three judges who ride the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals expressed deep skepticism of the IRS's position that the way the agency treats Scientologists is irrelevant to the deductions the Orthodox Jews, Michael and Marla Sklar, took for part of their children's day school tuition and for after-school classes in Jewish law.

"The view of the IRS is it can unconstitutionally violate the Constitution by establishing religion, by treating one religion more favorably than other religions in terms of what is allowed as deductions, and there can never be any judicial review of that?" Judge Kim Wardlaw asked at the court session Monday in Pasadena, Calif.

Basically the IRS has been allowing scientolgists to deduct the cost of their "education" from their taxes since at least 1994, but refusing to treat Christians, Jews, Muslims, or any other religion the same way. Apparently there's quite a history between the IRS and Scientology, and the IRS agreed to this special treatment in exchange for the Church of Scientology dropping thousands of lawsuits against the agency in 1993.

A policy of tax-deductible private school tuition would be superior to any form of distributivist school voucher scheme I've yet seen. Let's hope this case continues to play out favorably.

(HT: TaxProf Blog.)

West Virginia sees the project as a form of economic stimulus, but teaching kids how to handle guns seems smart for a myriad of reasons.

West Virginia is considering a bill to teach schoolchildren how to handle a gun and hunt safely its proponent hopes will increase state revenues from hunting licenses, a state lawmaker said Thursday.

"We will teach a hunting safety course during their physical education class," state senator and bill sponsor Billy Wayne Bailey told AFP. The courses would be imparted in secondary schools, from the eighth to 10th grade (13-16 years of age).

We're teaching kids this age how to use condoms and get abortions, so why not about how to handle a gun?

If my wife and I weren't married she would get a ton of grants and subsidized loans to pay for her education. Because of my income, however, she gets nothing. I guess we should have just co-habitated until she graduated.

Another article on about plunging computer science education requirements from a couple of college professors who have witnessed the decline first-hand:

Let us propose the following principle: The irresistible beauty of programming consists in the reduction of complex formal processes to a very small set of primitive operations. Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want. How it does it is not interesting! The result is a student who knows how to put a simple program together, but does not know how to program. A further pitfall of the early use of Java libraries and frameworks is that it is impossible for the student to develop a sense of the run-time cost of what is written because it is extremely hard to know what any method call will eventually execute. A lucid analysis of the problem is presented in [4].

We are seeing some backlash to this approach. For example, Bjarne Stroustrup reports from Texas A & M University that the industry is showing increasing unhappiness with the results of this approach. Specifically, he notes the following:

I have had a lot of complaints about that [the use of Java as a first programming language] from industry, specifically from AT&T, IBM, Intel, Bloomberg, NI, Microsoft, Lockheed-Martin, and more. [5]

He noted in a private discussion on this topic, reporting the following:

It [Texas A&M] did [teach Java as the first language]. Then I started teaching C++ to the electrical engineers and when the EE students started to out-program the CS students, the CS department switched to C++. [5]

Computer science needs to fork and create a "technical" branch X that fulfills the analogy:

electrician:electrical engineer::X::computer science

Rand Simberg agrees.

(HT: GeekPress.)

Most colleges don't really teach computer science anymore, they just churn out Java programmers. I personally hate Java, and though I really like C# and the .NET framework in general I completely agree with Joel Spolsky when he writes that modern CS students don't really learn more than what's needed to generate monkey-level software and basic websites.

Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that's not today's topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature, not a bug, but it does have this one problem.

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. Those courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn't handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try to prove things about fixed point theory.

All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea. I've seen all kinds of figures for drop-out rates in CS and they're usually between 40% and 70%. The universities tend to see this as a waste; I think it's just a necessary culling of the people who aren't going to be happy or successful in programming careers.

Yeah, it's too bad that most CS programs these days aren't hard enough to create good computer scientists... but then, real computer science is so hard that there just aren't many people who can do it (if I may be so humble). The fact of the matter is that the world needs code-monkeys, and Java (and the like) were created so that people closer to the mean would be able to contribute to the information age. There will always be a need for real computer scientists who can do the theorizing and architecting, but most programming jobs don't require that level of expertise.

(HT: Cypren.)

I spent a couple of minutes scouring the web but couldn't find strong data to support this hunch, nevertheless... I doubt that pregnant teens gain much benefit from special programs that help them earn symbolic high school diplomas.

Pregnant students in a Denver high school are asking for at least four weeks of maternity leave so they can heal, bond with their newborns and not be penalized with unexcused absences.

The request is unusual in Colorado's public schools, where districts tend to deal with pregnant students or new moms with specialized programs or individualized education plans. ...

"It's critical that these young women have a chance to bond with their babies," Moss said. "Maybe we do need a policy. Clearly, as a district, we have to look at what is going on with our young women. We've got to look at the birth-control issues and teen pregnancy and how we best help them deal with it and still graduate."

Despite the fact that high school graduates earn more than drop-outs, I expect that girls who have babies while they're in high school earn about the same whether they end up getting a diploma or not.

"If there are young mothers asking for maternity leave, the board should listen to them," said Lori Casillas, executive director of the Colorado Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting, and Prevention. "If they think it is a barrier to graduation, the board should look at that."

Her organization advocates that schools provide child-care services for new moms. Too many girls drop out after giving birth, and schools must do something to keep them, Casillas said.

My hunch is that there's very little point. The 1.5% of teen mothers who go on to finish college are undoubtedly exceptional; I suspect that the vast majority of girls who get pregnant in high school will benefit very little financially from a symbolic piece of paper.

In a surprising move (to me), Utah voters have rejected a school choice plan that would have created education vouchers for families who wanted to attend private schools and simultaneously increased funding for public schools. The vote wasn't even close:

Utah citizens voted down the voucher plan by 62% to 38%. That is too bad--educational choices by parents for their children is an important concept--but not surprising. While there are successful school choice programs operating in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, 10 state referenda on various voucher proposals have been defeated since 1972, including two defeats each in California, Michigan and Colorado.

One reason for these defeats has been the work of the teachers unions, which oppose school choice of any kind because it limits their power. Passage of the Utah school choice statute earlier this year prompted a union call to arms. The national teachers unions went to war in Utah and won.

A very unfortunate turn of events, and surprising because I think the population is decreasingly trusting of unions in general. Introducing producer competition to the education system/industry improves education for students everywhere that it's tried. Either teachers' unions are more concerned with their own power than with educating students, or their leaders are unable to comprehend the statistics.