Recently in Education Category

This shouldn't be news, nor should for-profit colleges be singled out for derision: lots of people waste borrowed money on useless degrees.

After graduating from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Carrianne Howard hoped to find a job in the video game industry.

She did -- kind of. For $12 an hour, she worked as a recruiter for video game companies. And then her position was eliminated. So now, she's working as a stripper.

According to Bloomberg, Howard spent $70,000 on her degree from the for-profit Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, the parent company of which is owned in part by Goldman Sachs. She told Bloomberg that upon a pre-enrollment visit to the school, a campus tour guide "made it sound like [she] was going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Heck, at UCLA they had a whole department dedicated to studying women, but it sounds like Howard it going to eat their lunch.

(HT: RD.)

It's hard to imagine a more striking example of how liberal arts education is destroying itself than the explicitly political "Crying Wolf" project.

Academic freedom carries with it rights as well as responsibilities. The concept derives from the belief that academics, because of specialized training in their subject matter, have earned the right to teach their areas of expertise and to follow their research questions as the evidence dictates---free from political pressure from the government. Indeed, only through a guarantee of such freedom can academics engage in a search for truth.

A corresponding responsibility, of course, is that academics will actually seek to pursue the truth. If professors' research methods imitate the likes of James Carville or Karl Rove, then what purpose exists to safeguard the academy from the government? Indeed, at public universities, if the professoriate functions as partisan hacks, selectively plucking items to advance a political agenda, what's to stop legislative demands that the faculty mirror the partisan breakdown of the state, to ensure proportionate representation to all political viewpoints?

A newly announced project called "Crying Wolf," organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom. As John has noted, project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university's Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in "history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy") to perform "paid academic research" that can "serve in the battle with conservative ideas."

I bolded the key sentence: it's not just that liberal arts education is making itself useless by failing to teach anything of value, but it's also baiting the powers-that-be by undermining the foundation of the societal protection it enjoys. If "academic freedom" is used as a shield to protect political adversaries rather than merely unpopular truth, then why should society preserve it? Academic freedom will become just another political football at the mercy of whatever ideology holds power.

Life is a bit different in the science and engineering schools, but this essay does a pretty good job of explaining why I didn't become a professor.

Take the issue of money--always a good place to begin with things American. Academics outside business and the sciences often labor for many long years in college and graduate school in order to obtain a doctorate. More than a few collect their diplomas sporting some gray in their hair along with a briefcase full of debts. If we are lucky enough to land a tenure-track position in higher education, a large "if" over the last four decades, we frequently start at a salary that a skilled blue collar worker might expect a few years out of high school. Don't think about salaries at Harvard; consult the data on most academics published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A friend's son, a brand new pharmacist, recently started work at a local drug store with a salary that exceeded my University of Wisconsin System salary when I retired as a full professor.

Serious economic problems face the glowing, self-confident scholar with little money. How, for example, is he able to find adequate housing? Even US$300,000, well beyond the reach of most young and many senior professors, won't buy much in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta or Chicago, not to mention Madison, Sarasota, Ann Arbor, Palo Alto or Santa Barbara. The affluent suburbs, where the successful in other fields gather, are out of the question, of course. And so many of us move into older, deteriorating, often dangerous areas, telling all who listen that we made the choice deliberately and that we, being humanists, have a natural desire to live among the poor and oppressed. In my experience, some English and anthropology professors actually believe this nonsense, and enjoy dressing as factory workers and displaying furniture obviously purchased at a rummage sale.

Hey, don't knock rummage sales! But anyway, yeah, this is spot-on.

Megan McArdle aptly sums up the perpetual nausea of students protesting for more free stuff: "Students Protest University Cutbacks, Reality".

But while I'm sympathetic to students finding it harder to attend college, I'm not sure what they think is supposed to happen. There's no money. This is not some question of reallocating resources from bad uses to good--everything is being cut because their institutions are under serious financial duress. When administrators point this out, the students reiterate how hard it all is, as if doing so will spur the administration to shake the money tree harder until extra cash falls from the skies.

I mean, they might protest the core business model, in which so many employees are effectively unfireable, meaning that everyone else has to take a disproportionate share of the cuts. But other than that, what is all this protesting going to accomplish?

Brings back memories of my old student protest days....

Whether or not you like my sign, at least I could spell.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Illinois has cut its education budget by a whole two percent and, of course, the sky is falling.

State education officials Tuesday slashed millions of dollars from dozens of initiatives -- ranging from preschool to after-school to gifted programs -- and warned of a "catastrophic'' year ahead, when $2 billion in federal stimulus dollars will dry up.

Acting in emergency session, State Board of Education members faced with shrunken state revenues approved a $7.26 billion budget for this coming school year, down $146 million, or 2 percent, from fiscal year 2009.

You'd think it would be easy to absorb a 2% decrease in spending by simply reducing spending across the board. But no! Thanks to unions the cuts will exclusively affect students and their education rather than teachers or administrators.

Taking the biggest hit was early childhood education, which lost $123 million. The action "rolls back about five years of progress'' and means an estimated 30,000 children will lose preschool services this fall, said Sean Noble of Voices for Illinois Children.

All state money for gifted education was "zeroed out,'' along with dollars for two after-school programs -- one of them started by the wife of Mayor Daley.

Efforts to help the blind and dyslexic, teacher recruitment in hard-to-staff schools, high school students taking Advanced Placement classes and teachers who earn rigorous national certification all took whacks.

Well, ok, I'm not sure what kind of "whacks" are in store for teachers with "rigorous national certification".

But look: the total cut is $146 million, $123 million of which was going towards public preschools. That means the remaining $23 million was sufficient to fully fund gifted education, various after-school programs, blind and dyslexic education, teacher recruitment, Advanced Placement classes, and so forth. Something doesn't add up.

First off, if all those programs can be funded for a mere $23 million, where the heck is the other $7.26 billion in the education budget being spent?

Second, why aren't leftists pushing for student to unionize? Students are being oppressed by their organized teachers and their demands for ever-increasing, never-decreasing salaries, pensions, and benefits. When times are good, teachers' unions lock in exorbitant contracts that cannot be revisited when times are lean. Students, on the other hand, have no "contract" to prevent their education from being eviscerated for the benefit of their teachers. It's For The Children! (IFTC!)

IFTC is conveniently used to argue for more teachers, higher pay for teachers, more benefits for teachers, more "certifications" for teachers, and all manner of spending that benefits teachers and their union bosses. But God forbid that IFTC ever be deployed to argue that teachers should take a hit when the economy gets bad. Oh no! Teachers are altruistic saints! Why do you hate children?

Here's a sad story about aspiring teachers failing elementary math tests.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is releasing the results Tuesday. They say that only 27 percent of the more than 600 candidates who took the test passed. The test was administered in March of this year.

The teacher’s licensing exam tested potential teachers on their knowledge of elementary school mathematics. This included geometry, statistics, and probability.

Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester was not surprised by the results. He told the Boston Globe that these results indicate that many students are not receiving an adequate math education.

That's obvious. What's especially frustrating, however, is the conclusion that the administrators drew from these test results.

Tom Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents , says "The high failure rate puts a shining light on a deficiency in teacher-prep programs."

Why should special "teacher-prep" programs be needed to teach elementary-level math to aspiring teachers? This is the basic level of math these adults should have learned when they were in elementary school themselves. If they don't remember how to do 5th grade math, maybe they're just too dumb to be teachers. Anyone who squeaks through the test after taking remedial classes to bring them up to the level of an elementary school child probably still shouldn't be a teacher.

If your kid won't settle down and do their homework, you need a Study Ball!

A red digital display counts down the "Study Time Left" and the device beeps and unlocks when the time expires.

The prison-style device weighs 9.5 kg (21 pounds), making it difficult to move while wearing it.

It cannot be locked for more than four hours and comes with a safety key that allows the manacle to be opened at anytime.

The ball and chain costs £75 and is sold online at curiosite.com.

They should make it nerfy so that the detained student can't cause too much damage.

(HT: LM.)

A new game called Time Engineers teaches kids about engineering (and time travel).

The first product to emerge from the TechInsights-Software Kids partnership is a game called Time Engineers. It's intended to promote kids' interest in engineering and has received numerous educator awards and lots of positive reviews. In fact, it beat out Lucas Arts and Walt Disney at a recent competition. You can view the game at www.software-kids.com/ html/time_engineers.html. The College of Engineering at Valparaiso University also had a hand in the game's creation.

Playing Time Engineers, students travel in a time machine to three different time periods and encounter typical engineering problems that must be solved in order to build pyramids, irrigate farm land, command a WWII submarine, raise and lower medieval drawbridges, and more. The game provides students with opportunities to learn about how engineering principles have helped people through the ages.

Unlike many educational games, Time Engineers was designed to be rich in graphics and content to hold the middle and high school students' interest while simultaneously applying some of the fundamental principles of engineering. Tools like this are now needed more than ever.

(HT: DS.)

My daughter has been born, and I haven't changed my mind about not paying for her college education. In addition to the points I made in that earlier post, I believe that:

1. Tuition will get cheaper over time. It's vastly overpriced right now, and I think that will be corrected over the next 18 years.

2. There will be fewer students in the future. According to this Census estimate almost 10% of the population is currently college-age; in 2025 the percentage is predicted to drop to 8.7%. Fewer college students among a larger population means more loans and grants for future students. We're at a mini-peak for that age group right now, which (along with the credit freeze) is why college is so expensive at the moment.

3. As I said before: no one will lend me money for retirement. Additionally, my wife is younger than I am and will need to live off our retirement savings for longer than I will.

This article about the link between gestures and future vocabulary is interesting, but fatally flawed.

Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking that the lexical gap between rich and poor appears when children are still toddlers and can continue throughout their school life. What is it about a family's socioeconomic status that so strongly affects their child's linguistic fate at such an early age?

That's not striking to me. It seems very likely that socioeconomic status and "linguistic fate" are both effects of the same underlying cause-that-shall-not-be-named: smarter genes.

(HT: NW.)

Fewer kids means fewer teachers, so why aren't teachers' unions pro-life? This data is as-of 1995:

In this sense, abortion-on-demand already has produced a negative economic effect. In his book, "The Cost of Abortion," researcher Lawrence Roberge correlates the legalization of abortion with a slowdown in the production and sales of child-related items. He also estimates that the loss of millions of children to abortion thus far has precluded creation of between 950,000 to 1.2 million teaching jobs.

Considering how fiercely teachers' unions fight to protect their members, it's strange that they dropped the ball on this one.

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.