Recently in Education Category

Self-identified liberals outnumber conservatives among Harvard faculty by 82-1.

More than 80 percent of Harvard faculty respondents characterized their political leanings as "liberal" or "very liberal," according to The Crimson's annual survey of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in April.

A little over 37 percent of faculty respondents identified as "very liberal"-- a nearly 8 percent jump from last year. Only 1 percent of respondents stated they are "conservative," and no respondents identified as "very conservative."

Academics usually explain this uniformity by asserting that liberals are smarter than conservatives and thus better suited for faculty positions in higher education -- particularly in self-identified elite universities. This explanation is relatively simple to assess by considering whether or not these same academics would entertain a similar explanation for a lack of sex or racial diversity in other institutions, such as corporate leadership or government. If one were to claim that "there are more male CEOs because men are smarter than women" that claim would be rightly dismissed.

(HT: Campus Reform and Instapundit.)

I'm a big supporter of public education -- I went to public school and university for my entire education. Despite my libertarian leanings, I think taxpayer-funded, locally-directed public education can be a very valuable governmental function. However, I'm not a fan of the grift and graft that engulfs public education, for example the money laundering between teachers' unions and the Democrat party. I'm also not fond of the ideological indoctrination that many of the grifters seek to impose on American children, without the consent of the parents.

So I think it's great that the "get woke, go broke" trend is finally hitting the public education grift infrastructure.

Seventeen NSBA affiliates have cut ties with the NSBA over their coordination with the White House and Department of Justice in casting parental complaints over curricula "domestic terrorism." And as Axios reports, they're taking their checkbooks with them -- accounting for a 40% loss in revenue at the NSBA:

The National School Boards Association has since apologized, but the fallout could be seven figures in annual funding. At least 17 state affiliates have severed ties with the group -- and some are even considering establishing a competitor.

The 17 state affiliates accounted for more than 40% of annual dues paid to NSBA by its state association members in 2019, according to Axios' analysis of documents detailing those contributions.

Officials fear upheaval at the organization -- the nation's leading trade group representing U.S. public schools -- will handicap it just as national debates over school curricula and COVID-19 mitigation measures dominate the political conversation.

Good.

Many states have majorities of conservative citizens and legislatures who are getting tired of funding public universities who often seem to despise conservative people and values. In an ideal world universities would be responsible enough to avoid ideological possession, but we don't live in an ideal world and legislatures are moving to oversee their state university systems more closely.

[Patrick Garry, University of South Dakota law professor] concludes that "political indoctrination is not a legitimate academic function and hence is undeserving of special constitutional protection. ... [Campuses] have, in a way, become like the southern states under the Voting Rights Act. Those states were put under judicial supervision to make sure that voting rights were respected in those states," Garry concludes. "Perhaps, as the South Dakota Legislature has recognized, universities may now have to be put under a kind of formalized public review process regarding their actions concerning free speech and academic freedom." ...

Sue Peterson, one of the state representatives who sponsored the bill, told RealClearInvestigations the Board of Regents' lack of progress over such a long period of time left the legislature no choice but to act. "They did make some policy changes between 2018 and 2019 that were positive," she said. "We still felt certain changes needed to be in statute because policies can change." South Dakota Rep. Tina Mulally was even blunter. "I don't believe the Board of Regents has been responsive to the taxpayers for decades," she told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I tried to have conversations with them when I became a representative, and I got the impression that they didn't want to talk to me."

The motivations for reining in campus radicalism aren't just ideological. Legislators say radicalism is making their schools less attractive to prospective students. The University of Missouri, in one of the states currently considering intellectual diversity legislation, was rocked by violent protests in 2015 that caused such a steep enrollment drop that the university closed four dormitories, saw its credit rating downgraded, and created a budget shortfall of $32 million.

Political oversight of public universities is an unfortunate necessity, but I encourage legislatures to use a light touch.

Yet another college admissions scandal where the wealthy cheat, this time to steal money from taxpayers and the poor.

The Journal tells a story of a Chicago-area family whose household income is greater than $250,000. They live in a home valued at more than $1.2 million.

The mother transferred guardianship of her then-17-year-old daughter to her business partner last year.

She and her husband have already spent $600,000 sending their other children through college, the article said. There wasn't enough cash to send their youngest, so they reached into the loophole with the help of, no surprise here, a lawyer and an education consultant.

The daughter claimed only $4,200 in income that she earned from a summer job. The daughter was accepted into a private university, and received a $27,000 merit scholarship, and on top of that, $20,000 in need based financial aid, including a Pell grant that she'll never have to pay back.

What really needs to be said about this? If there are hand-outs paid for by taxpayers, then dishonest people will conspire to steal them.

We're all shocked, shocked to learn that rich people cheat to get their kids into elite universities.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department revealed a massive effort by wealthy parents and a shady "admissions consultant" to bribe and cheat their way into getting kids into a slew of elite schools.

Prosecutors say William Singer, the ringleader, sold two forms of services. For tens of thousands of dollars, parents could pay to have a proctor correct their kids' incorrect answers as they took the SAT. Or they could pay hundreds of thousands to bribe coaches at elite schools to designate applicants as desired athletes, thus circumventing the minimum requirements for grades and test scores.

One California family allegedly paid $1.2 million to Singer, who in turn allegedly paid Rudy Meredith, the women's soccer coach at Yale, $400,000 to claim that the family's daughter was a coveted recruit even though she didn't play at all.

If you think this is about one shady "consultant" at a few schools then I've got a bridge to sell you. Higher education has always been a bit of a racket -- ever since aristocrats started sending their second, third, and fourth sons off to University. In order to be sustainable a grift can't be too obvious, and it needs to provide some value to its marks while it skims a little off the top for itself. Higher education has abandoned that social contract, and it's in for a reckoning.

In his book "The Case Against Education," George Mason economics professor Bryan Caplan makes a compelling case that most of the value in diplomas from elite colleges isn't in the education they allegedly represent but in the cultural or social "signaling" they convey.

Imagine you're deposited on a desert island, forced to fend for yourself. Would you rather have the knowledge that comes with taking a survival training course, or just the piece of paper that says you took the course? Obviously, you'd rather know how to identify poisonous plants and sources of water than have a diploma that says you know how to do things you can't do. Now, ask yourself: Would you rather have the Yale education without the diploma, or the diploma without the education?

From an economic perspective, the piece of paper is vastly more valuable than the education, particularly in the humanities (and Caplan runs through the numbers to demonstrate this). The paper opens doors and gets you callbacks from employers and entrée into elite social circles where whom you know matters more than what you know. The education might make you a better person, but the parchment is the ticket to opportunity. It's no guarantee of success, but it's a profound hedge against failure.

Parents know this, and parents without special advantages (wealth, fame, connections) resent it.

"Elite" education -- and to a lesser extent, higher education more generally -- has become a scheme for inter-generational power transfer disguised as meritocracy.

Do you think I'm exaggerating by calling higher education a grift? Here's how America's young people are being robbed blind by our universities.

If you're wondering why the majority of Americans under 30 say they prefer socialism, debt is a major reason. Student loans are killing them, and they never go away. Thanks to extensive lobbying efforts here in Washington, student loans, unlike other forms of debt, cannot be erased by bankruptcy.

The student loan crisis is a modern problem. Just 13 years ago, the average new college graduate owed $20,000 in student loans. Today, that number has jumped to $37,000. Student debt is rising far faster than the earnings of American workers, the very earnings that are supposed to justify student loans in the first place. ...

In 1990, a quarter of American adults lived with their parents. Today, the number has risen to 35 percent. The home ownership rate for millennials dropped eight points from the generation before. Unable to afford homes, millennials are getting married later and less often. They're also having fewer kids. It's not because they don't want children. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who want children has not changed in 25 years. And yet fewer children are being born, thanks in part to rising debt levels, America's middle class cannot replace itself. ...

A hundred schools now have endowments over a billion dollars. They are hedge funds with schools attached. What have colleges done with this money? Well, they've hired massive staffs of like-minded people for one thing. From 1987 to 2012, the number of administrators on college campuses more than doubled. That's far bigger than the increase of actual students going to college. College administrators routinely make six-figure salaries. What exactly do they do for that money? Not a single thing that makes this a better country.

College presidents often get seven-figure salaries. Their pay is probably the only thing in America rising as fast as tuition costs. Academic publishers are getting rich from all of this, too -- from the debt boom. Prices of textbooks have tripled in the past 20 years. Printing hasn't gotten more expensive; non-academic books are cheaper now than they were two decades ago. But students are a captive market, and they are being exploited ruthlessly. Nobody says a word about it.

Parasitical universities are killing their hosts, and destroying our cultural and intellectual inheritance in the process.

"The Long-run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining" concludes that teachers unions hurt the education and later careers of students.

Our estimates suggest that teacher collective bargaining worsens the future labor market outcomes of students: living in a state that has a duty-to-bargain law for all 12 grade-school years reduces earnings by $800 (or 2%) per year and decreases hours worked by 0.50 hours per week. The earnings estimate indicates that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $199.6 billion in the US annually. We also find evidence of lower employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation, as well as reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which workers sort. The effects are driven by men and nonwhites, who experience larger relative declines in long-run outcomes. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we demonstrate that collective bargaining leads to sizable reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults. Taken together, our results suggest laws that support collective bargaining for teachers have adverse long-term labor market consequences for students.

But, of course, teachers unions are designed to advantage teachers, not students.

Robert Maranto describes a scenario wherein a grad school applicant is mocked for her Christian beliefs and observes that such mockery would be unacceptable if targeted at a racial or religious minority.

Compared to racial and gender discrimination, this kind of religious discrimination gets little attention from researchers. Professors do not find the topic interesting, which itself is telling. Yet the extant research findings are concerning.

Back in the 1980s, J.D. Gartner found Christianity reduced the chances of admission to psychology doctoral programs. Using 1999 data, "The Still Divided Academy" by Stanley Rothman, April Kelly-Woessner, and Matthew Woessner offered strong statistical evidence that (typically religious) socially conservative professors must publish more to get the same academic posts.

More recently, George Yancey's "Compromising Scholarship" showed that in many academic fields, significant numbers of professors, more than enough to blackball hiring decisions, express reluctance to hire evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.

None of this makes secular professors bad people. As psychologists William O'Donohue and Richard E. Redding argue, people generally express willingness to discriminate against those of other political or religious ideals. The danger comes when individual institutions lack ideological diversity, enabling an arrogant tendency to dismiss dissenters as unacceptable people with unacceptable opinions.

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that, other than Jews, Christians have been the most persecuted people on the planet for 2,000 years.

First off, kudos to the St. Charles School District for paying off existing bonds ahead of schedule. The district's finances appear to be well-managed, which is a big reason that I've decided to reluctantly vote "yes" on Proposition KIDS, despite my skepticism about the flagship product and what I consider to be a flawed campaign.

On April 4th, 2017, voters in the City of St. Charles School District will be asked to consider a ballot measure called Proposition KIDS. Proposition KIDS is a 47 million dollar bond issue that does not require a tax rate increase and allows the District to borrow money to fund capital projects such as building renovations, repairs, technology costs and other building upgrades. The money generated by Proposition KIDS, by law, can only be used to fund renovations, repairs, property acquisitions and other approved capital projects. Bond issues proceeds cannot be used to pay salaries or benefits.

Most Approximately one-third of the money will be spent to build an Early Childhood Center. (Corrected from "most" to "one-third".)

The building of the Early Childhood Center would provide approximately 200 additional spaces for students to enroll in the District and remove some of the burden placed upon the elementary schools currently housing pre-Kindergarten programs.

However, the district has nearly 1500 fewer students than it had 20 years ago, so why do we need to build new classrooms? I posed this question to Chris Bennett, the district's communication coordinator, who replied:

This is an excellent question. There are a few reasons for this. One is that schools use educational space much differently that they did 20 years ago. With the proliferation of technology and changes in pedagogy, today's teaching methods use more space than in the past.

Also, it's been a goal of our school board to keep our class sizes low, the lowest in St. Charles County in fact, in order to increase individual instruction for our students and to enhance the classroom experience for both teacher and student. So, while we do have less students than in the past, our dedication to keeping low class sizes means that same amount of space becomes more spread out in order to achieve this goal.

Finally, we've seen a shift in population the past few years, with the eastern portion of the district seeing quite a bit of growth. This means that schools such as Blackhurst and Lincoln are at capacity to achieve our class size goal and have 2-3 classrooms dedicated to preschool. Relocating these classes to a dedicated early childhood building will alleviate some of the burden placed upon these schools and allow us to offer our community a facility that is 100% dedicated to early childhood education.

There do seem to be some benefits to smaller class sizes, but the research isn't very strong despite the "obviousness" of the conclusion. A lot depends on the ability to provide enough high-quality teachers and facilities -- it's better to have a large class with a great teacher than a small class with a mediocre teacher.

(I couldn't find any more information about the population shift that Bennett referred to.)

Anyway, the plan seems generally reasonable, which is why I'm going to be voting "yes". Two elements of the publicity pitch grate on me though.

1. "Does not require a tax rate increase" -- this is literally true, but I think it's misleading. A bond issuance is exactly equivalent to a tax increase: the bond will be paid off with tax dollars, and if you don't issue the bond then you don't need the tax revenue. A bond is a tax on the future taxpayer. A person who makes the last payment on his 5-year-old car and then immediately buys a new car with an identical monthly payment is still incurring a significant expense.

2. Keeping up with the Jonses. An email I received from the district says:

"Early childhood centers are becoming more prevalent in today's educational environment," said Dr. Danielle Tormala, associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction to the City of St. Charles School District. "Due to research showing the importance of early childhood education to the overall success of a child, we've seen an increase of early childhood centers in districts across the region."

Currently, the City of St. Charles School District is the only district in St. Charles County that does not have a location solely dedicated to early childhood education.

"Early childhood centers are now a thing that young families have on their checklist when looking to move into a district," Tormala said. "It's an important thing to offer if you want to remain a viable option within the community."

This is a questionable argument, as the publicity email itself admits in the very next paragraph.

While early childhood centers are becoming increasingly common in the region, their prevalence is not based in the logic of "keeping up with the Joneses", but rather the numerous studies that statistically show their importance.

I've looked into some of the research, but I'd love to know specifically which studies the district relied on to make this decision. It appears to me that Early Childhood Centers are trendy -- oh, and by the way, there's some research somewhere that says you should build one. Great.

Anyway, as I said, I'm going to vote "yes". I've been impressed with the District since my kids started school, and I trust the administration despite my misgivings about the campaign. Maybe I'm just grumpy.

I'm not sure what to say about this, so I'll just link to it and you can make up your own mind: Cal State LA offers segregated housing for black students.

California State University Los Angeles recently rolled out segregated housing for black students. ...

Cal State LA joins UConn, UC Davis and Berkeley in offering segregated housing dedicated to black students. While these housing options are technically open to all students, they're billed and used as arrangements in which black students can live with one another.

As a Missouri resident, the collapse of Mizzou worries me. Of course, college as we know it may not exist by the time my kids are graduating future-high-school, so maybe Missouri is just ahead of the curve.

The steep dropoff in enrollment appears to directly traceable to the events of last fall. During October and November, the university found itself in the national spotlight after reports emerged of several racist incidents on campus. Protests erupted, forcing the cancellation of classes. In solidarity with a graduate student who went on a hunger strike, the university's football team refused to play until the demands of one organization, #ConcernedStudent1950, were met. As the protests raged, a video went viral portraying one of the university's communications professors, Melissa Click, calling for "muscle" against a student journalist covering the controversy.

The protestors ultimately ousted both the president and chancellor. But as Heat Street has reported, the fallout from the protests has been punishing. Donors and alumni have vowed to pull financial support, sports fans have declared that they will stop attending games, and parents and prospective students said they'd no longer consider Mizzou.

Victor Davis Hanson suggests college exit exam similar to the SAT and ACT. Sounds like a good idea, as long as they aren't run by the government.

Lawyers with degrees can only practice after passing bar exams. Doctors cannot practice medicine upon the completion of M.D. degrees unless they are board certified. Why can't undergraduate degrees likewise be certified? One can certainly imagine the ensuing hysteria.

What would happen if some students from less prestigious state schools graduated from college with higher exit-test scores than the majority of Harvard and Yale graduates? What if students still did not test any higher in analytics and vocabulary after thousands of dollars and several years of lectures and classroom hours?

Would schools then cut back on "studies" courses, the number of administrators, or lavish recreational facilities to help ensure that students first and foremost mastered a classical body of common knowledge? Would administrators be forced to acknowledge that their campuses had price-gouged students but imparted to them little in return?

And why not extend truth-in-lending disclosures to education loans?

The average pay associated with a particular major should be posted. Surely an 18-year-old student should have as much information about borrowing for an education as she does about going into far less debt for a car loan.

Cui bono?

I've got all daughters, but I think they'd benefit from some male teachers also.

China's approach is wise and much needed, both in Asia and the West. Many female teachers are doing a wonderful job, but schoolboys are in desperate need of male teachers. Boys are by nature more rambunctious, distracted, hyperactive, and physical than girls. This is obvious to anyone with rudimentary observation skills and access to a playground, but I saw it firsthand a few years ago when I was a teacher. Bluntly put, sometimes it takes a male teacher to handle male students.

Experts can conduct all the studies they want to and the government can hand out blue-ribbon panel guidelines on equality in schools, but all a person has to do to be faced with the difference between girls and boys in school is to simply spend a couple weeks--or even a day--as a teacher.

It's no mystery why men are reluctant to become teachers: a false accusation of misconduct with a child will ruin your life. The vast majority of men, just like women, want nothing but the best for children; it's a shame that our sensationalist culture has made teaching so unappealing and risky for men.

In a bizarrely ironic move that would have Dr. King rolling in his grave the Mizzou protesters have decided to segregate themselves by race. You can't make this stuff up.

In an ironic development, to say the least, protesters at the University of Missouri (MU) segregated themselves by race Wednesday night, having white students leave a gathering in order to create a "black-only healing space."

Supporters of the group Concerned Students 1950, which has spearheaded the protest movement at MU, assembled at the school's student center Wednesday night for a meeting after a planned protest march was canceled due to bad weather. And then, according to activist Steve Schmidt, whites were asked to leave.

"My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing."

Ross Douthat writes that Yale and Missouri University are reaping what they've sown. As a conservative, I have zero sympathy for the university professors and administrators who are being devoured by the beast they've created. My sympathy is for the "normal" students whose educations are being disrupted and degraded by this nonsense, and the taxpayers who support these institutions with their hard-earned money.

The protesters at Yale and Missouri and a longer list of schools stand accused of being spoiled, silly, self-dramatizing -- and many of them are. But they're also dealing with a university system that's genuinely corrupt, and that's long relied on rote appeals to the activists' own left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.

And within this system, the contemporary college student is actually a strange blend of the pampered and the exploited.

A professor in Texas has quit his job because he's afraid of his students exercising their civil rights.

A professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin very publicly quit earlier this month in response to a new state law that allows students to bring their handguns into all classrooms and offices -- including his 500-person introductory economics lectures. The professor, Daniel Hamermesh, has become a symbol for frustrated faculty nervous over the spreading of campus concealed-carry laws.

Gun rights are civil rights. As Glenn Reynolds notes:

I'm sure that many professors in the past were uncomfortable about having women, or blacks, or openly gay students in their classrooms, too. But happily, progress marches on and people's visceral fears and dislikes weren't allowed to rule.

Random variance likely accounts for the mistaken perception that small schools and small classes are better for students. Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars on this misunderstanding of statistics?

The problem is that because small school don't have a lot of students, scores are much more variable. If for random reasons a few geniuses happen to enroll one year in a small school scores jump up and if a few extra dullards enroll the next year scores fall.

Thus, for purely random reasons we would expect small schools to be among the best performing schools in any givenyear. Of course we would also expect small schools to be among the worst performing schools in any given year! And in fact, once we look at all the data this is exactly what we see. The figure below shows changes in fourth grade math scores against school size. Note that small schools have more variable scores but there is no evidence at all that scores on average decrease with school size.

States like North Carolina which reward schools for big performance gains without correcting for size end up rewarding small schools for random reasons. Worst yet, the focus on small schools may actually be counter-productive because large schools do have important advantages such as being able to offer more advanced classes and better facilities.

Good teachers and principals are more important than small classes and schools -- and the smaller your classes and schools, the more good teachers and principals you need to find.

Update:

The linked article doesn't mention class size at all -- in jumped to that conclusion myself!

I love this idea -- the federal government is already involved with accrediting colleges, so why not create a National University that accredits courses and offer degrees? There's a plethora of great online courses, but none of the universities who created them are willing to offer online degrees because they don't want to dilute their brands or lose out on tuition money.

That's where the federal government comes in. With some authorizing language from Congress and a small, one-time start-up budget, the U.S. Department of Education could create a nonprofit, bipartisan organization with only two missions: approving courses and granting degrees.

Don't worry, federal bureaucrats won't be in charge of academic matters. Instead, National U. would hire teams of leading scholars to evaluate and approve courses. Some of the decisions shouldn't be difficult. ...

National U. would also map out which courses students need to take to earn an associate or bachelor's degree. This won't be difficult, since existing colleges have already established a standard set of requirements: a certain number of approved lower- and upper-division courses, plus an approved sequence in an academic major, adding up to 60 or 120 credits. Once students complete the credits, National U. will grant them a degree.

While many of the courses will be free, students will bear small costs for taking exams through secure online channels or in-person testing facilities. (Textbooks will be free and open-source). Students will also pay a modest fee of a few hundred dollars for the degree itself, enough to defray the operating costs of National U.

When my six-year-old goes to college I bet it will look a lot different than it does now.

Ugh, this makes me embarrassed to be a UCLA graduate: UC student government votes to divest from America:

The University of California Student Association board - which represents all 233,000 students enrolled in the UC system's 10 campuses - approved a resolution on Sunday that calls on the system's leaders to financially divest from the United States.

The measure cited alleged human rights violations by America such as drone strikes that have killed civilians, and claimed the country's criminal justice system is racist, among other accusations.

The "Resolution Toward Socially Responsible Investment at the University of California" passed with an overwhelming majority vote of 11-1-3.

If the state and federal government divested themselves of the UC system it would vanish -- as with all public university systems, tuition and fees cover only a very small portion of the system's operating costs (not to mention research).

This has got to be the stupidest thing I've read in months. Good luck finding jobs outside the grievance industry when you graduate.

Lots more at Legal Insurrection, who sums it up:

I'm not glad that the Israel divestment passed, but at least it passed combined with a resolution which made the anti-Israel students and U. Cal student government look like fools.

The primary reason that teenagers should work is because it puts them in a position of having to win approval from adults rather than from other teenagers. The "real world" and the "school world" are completely different. The behaviors and attributes that win acclaim in the school world won't get you far in the real world, and most kids aren't wise enough to learn this just by hearing their parents repeat it. Teenagers who work at a real job earn far more than a few dollars per hour -- the experience they get will pay huge dividends for their whole lives.

What's a BA? (Warning: the content at the link is pretty offensive.)

Imagine a large corporate machine mobilized to get you to buy something you don't need at a tremendously inflated cost, complete with advertising, marketing, and branding that says you're not hip if you don't have one, but when you get one you discover it's of poor quality and obsolete in ten months. That's a BA. ...

"I have a degree." No one assumes you're smart because of it, so what was the point? You were tricked, your parents were tricked, your peers were tricked, your employers were not tricked at all. "There's more to a college education than employability." No there isn't. I am not anti-liberal arts, I am all in on a classical education, I just don't think there's any possibility at all, zero, none, that you will get it at college, and anyway every single college course from MIT and Yale are on Youtube.

Don't forget that the government at all levels is pushing the scam. You, high school graduate: do you really think everyone is looking out for your best interests? Or might the system be urging you onto the lowest rung of a gigantic Ponzi scheme?

Regardless of whether you go to college or not, you've got to find a way to be productive and create value that other people will pay you for. It doesn't matter what some piece of paper says, no matter how much you pay for it.