Education: March 2004 Archives

The success of Florida's school-choice programs proves that the Public Education Empire is beginning to crumble.

In the past five years Florida has delivered real school choice to more American schoolchildren than anywhere else in the country. Which is no doubt why Jesse Jackson was down in Tallahassee earlier this month calling Governor Jeb Bush's policies "racist." He and his allies understand all too well that when poor African-American and Latino children start getting the same shot at a decent education that the children of our politicians do, the bankrupt public education empire starts looking like the Berlin Wall. ...

Ironically those fighting vouchers may have a keener appreciation of Florida's significance to the voucher wars than those defending them. With national attention having focused largely on Milwaukee, Cleveland and the District of Columbia, it's easy to forget that Florida now has three key programs. The first are called Opportunity Scholarships, which allow children to opt out of failing public schools. Second are McKay Scholarships, which provide full school choice to special-ed students.
But perhaps the most innovative is a corporate tax credit that allows businesses to take a dollar-for-dollar deduction for every contribution to a designated scholarship fund. Certainly in terms of sheer numbers this is the most far-reaching, with 13,000 low-income students now benefiting and 20,000 on a waiting list. Because these corporately funded scholarships are capped at $3,500 per child in a state where the average per pupil expenditure runs around $7,500, each scholarship represents not only a lifeline for the recipient but significant savings for the taxpayer.

And even public schools are benefitting.

And another study, this one by the Manhattan Institute, finds that even kids without vouchers benefit because the competition is pushing Florida public schools to improve.

That's the whole theory, in action. People who complain that school-choice hurts public schools are missing the real power of competition -- when people have options, everyone gets better. Teachers unions and public bureaucrats hate having competition because it often reveals how corrupt, inefficient, incompetant, and lazy they are.

The public, however, likes the idea that their tax money isn't being fed to the gaping maw of special interests but instead being used to educate their kids.

The good news is that despite this all-out effort to frog-march poor kids back into miserable public schools, the genie seems to be out of the bottle. Even the liberal newspapers that oppose school choice had to concede that a pro-voucher rally in Tallahassee attracted more marchers (if not more favorable media attention) than the Reverend Jackson's protest that preceded it. And that's precisely what has them so worried.

Justin Katz provokes me to further discussion on the entitled topic by contending that I missed the point of the piece I was commenting on.

Lehrer's suggestion is that the humanities aren't treated with the same degree of academic rigor, and this factor, along with the appreciation that corresponds to greater rigor, push particularly bright students toward the sciences. It isn't that, as Michael concludes, "there are fewer people who can succeed in the sciences than who can succeed in the humanities." To the extent that Lehrer's analysis supports claims either way, the opposite would seem to be the case: fewer people can succeed in the humanities, but those people can also succeed in the sciences, so they go where the rewards seem to be.

As my brother implied in a comment to the previous post, much depends on how you define "success". A higher percentage of people who earn science degrees will go on to use those degrees to greater profit than will those who earn humanities degrees.

Since we're mostly relying on anecdotal data, I know no one who has earned a degree in a scientific field who could not have obtained an equivalent degree in the humanities, should he have so desired. I know plenty of people with humanities degrees who couldn't possibly have earned a scientific degree.

I certainly agree that the humanities are less rigorous than the sciences, but I don't share Mr. Katz's confidence that this shortcoming -- if you see it as such -- is anything but inherent in the philosophy. Likewise, science isn't important or better -- if you see it as such -- because of the surface-level subject matter, but rather because of the underlying philosophy. Indeed, I would argue that Computer Science is the pinnacle of of both science and the humanities.

Consider this quote by the famed philosopher Marvin Minsky.

I think that Computer Science is the most important thing that's happened since the invention of writing. Fifty years ago, in the 1950s, human thinkers learned for the first time how to describe complicated machines. We invented something called computer programming language, and for the first time people had a way to describe complicated processes and systems, systems made of thousands of little parts all connected together: networks. Before 1950 there was no language to discuss this, no way for two people to exchange ideas about complicated machines. Why is that important to understand? Because that's what we are. Computer Science is important, but that importance has nothing to do with computers. Computer Science is a new philosophy about complicated processes, about life, about artificial life and natural life, about artificial intelligence and natural intelligence. It can help us understand our brain. It can help us understand how we learn and what knowledge is.

Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, and other philosophers didn't know that you need an operating system, the part of the brain that does all of the housework for the other parts, to use knowledge. So all philosophy, I think, is stupid. It was very good to try to make philosophy. Those people tried to make theories of thinking, theories of knowledge, theories of ethics, and theories of art, but they were like babies because they had no words to describe the processes or the data. How does one part of the brain read the processes in another part of the brain and use them to solve a problem? No one knows, and before 1960 no one asked. In a computer the data is alive. If you read philosophy you will find that they were very smart people. But they had no idea of the possibilities of how thinking might work. So I advise all students to read some philosophy and with great sympathy, not to understand what the philosopher said, but to feel compassionate and say, "Think of those poor people years ago who tried so hard to cook without ingredients, who tried to build a house without wood and nails, who tried to build a car without steel, rubber or gasoline." So look at philosophy with sympathy, but don't look for knowledge. There is none.

It's been five academic years since the people of California overwhelmingly voted to prohibit our public universities from using race as a criteria for admitting students. In response, the University of California developed a "comprehensive review" system that considers many intangible factors, in addition to the mainstays such as GPA and SAT scores. A recent examination of the new method has shown that it's less discriminatory than the previous criteria, but it may not have eliminated racism entirely.

After a four-month examination of freshman admissions, University of California officials released data Monday that didn't yield an absolute answer as to whether race still plays a role.

The admissions probe was ordered last fall after John Moores, chairman of the UC Board of Regents, issued a report that found hundreds of students with low SAT scores were admitted to Berkeley in fall 2002, while more than 3,000 with stellar scores were not. ...

In its complex analysis, UC found that in 2003, African Americans and Latinos were admitted at higher rates than predicted at its six selective campuses - Berkeley, UCLA, Davis, San Diego, Irvine and Santa Barbara. Fewer Asian American students were admitted than predicted at those campuses, except UCLA.

It's important to note that Mr. Moores' report only dealt with SAT scores, while admission to the UC as a whole is determined by:

... a complicated model that accounted for grades, SAT scores, income level and other quantifiable factors to predict admission. Prediction rates did not include intangible admissions criteria, such as leadership potential and overcoming personal hardship.

I have no problem with such intangible admissions criteria -- in theory -- as long as they aren't used as a cover or excuse for racism. In my tentative opinion, the numbers from this study show a vast improvement over the situation in 1997, when racial criteria were initially banned.

At UC Berkeley for example, the analysis predicted that 234 African American students would have been admitted in 2003, while 355 actually were. By contrast, 4,433 Asian American students were predicted to have been given an offer to Berkeley; 4,214 were. At UC Davis, 1,953 Latino students were predicted to have been admitted; 2,020 were. ...

Those differences however, are much smaller compared to data from 1997, the last year UC could use race. That year, for example, UCLA admitted 456 African American students, nearly triple the 160 predicted by the model.

I'm not a big fan of increased spending on education, and I opposed California's recent Prop 55 which floated a huge bond for "necessary education facilities to relieve overcrowding and to repair older schools". We wouldn't need bond money to pay for these things if we didn't waste huge amounts of regularly-budgeted money.

Here's the story of what's being cut in one small school district for lack of funding. Note: most of these cuts don't bother me one iota.

The West Contra Costa school district Monday night voted to eliminate high school athletics, close all its libraries and lay off 10 percent of its employees as part of $16.5 million in budget cuts. ...

On the chopping block are 407 positions, or roughly 10 percent of the district's employees, including psychologists, speech therapists, teachers, principals, counselors and custodians.

Of all that, what I'd least like to see cut are the libraries... but let's be serious. Are school libraries really important in this day and age? Even ten years ago when I was in high school we never used the library, and these days I bet 99% of students go to the internet for research long before they hit the school library. I don't know if this school district has computer labs, but I bet they do. If not, they should definitely cut the libraries and librarians and replace the 50-year-old books (that have never been checked out) with $500 desktops.

The single most effective step that could be taken to improve our public schools would be to eliminate the tenure system that pointlessly protects mediocre teachers. Teachers unions fight like crazy against any attempt to evaluate teachers based on merit and achievement, so we shouldn't be surprised that our kids aren't learning. How well would you do your work if you knew you would never be evaluated and could never be fired for doing a poor job?

As a scientist, I'll say of course! But really, it's an interesting question, especially considering the common opinion that science is for the smart, and English is for the dumb. Eli Lehrer goes into the question in great detail, but the essence of his position is that bright students can succeed in any field, and tend to move towards those that are more profitable. I agree with that, but Mr. Lehrer thinks this trend can (and should) be changed by redirecting private and public funds towards the humanities; I don't see why.

For instance, he laments a lack of funding for undergraduate research in the humanities, but,

Of course, assisting in research is more problematic for students in the humanities. "I can’t really send an undergraduate to the library to read an article because he might get something totally different out of it than I would," says Carol Kaske, an English professor at Cornell. "We can’t do undergraduate research the same way they can in the sciences."

Going to the library to read an article isn't real research. Real research is what you do after you know all the background information. Real research is the process of discovering or creating something new. Real research is standing on the shoulders of giants, not just looking around for giants. Going to the library (or the internet) can be part of it, but I get the feeling that what passes for research in most humanities departments is wholly different from scientific research.

From the humanities classes I took as an undergrad, my impression is that the vast majority of humanities study consists of activities smart people do on their own in their free time: read stuff, think about stuff, and then talk about stuff with their friends. It doesn't take someone with a Ph.D. to discern the symbolism in a Robert Frost poem or to speculate on demographics and voting patterns. There are certainly some excellent professors in these fields that add an enormous amount to the knowledge base (and write the books we love to read), but most of that is incidental to the actual study of humanities in most universities. This is probably why many smart students feel bored and apathetic towards the humanities.

An example from my own life. As a requirement for graduation I had to take three "cohesive" upper-division courses in a field unrelated to my own; I chose to take some film classes, because there weren't any annoying prerequisites. I took "History of American Film", "History of German Film", and "Musicals" -- all upper-division classes, and all filled with film majors. I had to write several essays for each course, and I was afraid that I wouldn't know what to write about because these were the first film classes I'd ever taken. Nevertheless, I my fears abated after the first few discussion sections when it became obvious that everyone was free to write about whatever they wanted, and most of the film students were about as deep as Sean Penn. I got As on all my papers with minimal effort, despite rarely going to class other than when the professor was showing a movie I particularly wanted to see.

The point isn't that the sciences are "better" than the humanities -- whatever that even means -- but that there are fewer people who can succeed in the sciences than who can succeed in the humanities. Here's a Venn diagram.

Glenn Reynolds has been drawing attention to the recent accusation of intellectual homogeneity by the Duke Conservative Union against the faculty of Duke University, so I thought I'd post some numbers the American Enterprise Magazine published in September, 2002.

"L" stands for faculty members who are registered in leftist parties (Democrats, Greens, &c.), and "R" stands for those registered in rightist parties (Republicans, Libertarians, &c.). Here's the numbers for my university, UCLA.

University of

California at

Los Angeles

                               L            R

English                       29            2

History                       53            3

Journalism                    12            1

Political Science             16            1

Women's Studies               31            2

TOTAL                        141            9

Of the registered voters in these departments, 6% are righties. Just imagine the howls of oppression we'd hear if the ratio were reversed.

My own department, Computer Science, isn't mentioned here. I could speculate on the affiliation of my professors, but I won't because I can't recall a single instance of politics intruding into my CS classes, from any direction. Which is as it should be!