Education: July 2004 Archives

Tyler Cowen, one of my favorite econobloggers, extols the virtues of the Center for Talented Youth program for smart and curious teenagers. I participated in the program myself for the three summers before 8th, 9th, and 10th grades and enjoyed it immensely, taking courses in Japanese, Algebra 2, and Computer Science. A good time was had by all, and there was quite a bit of learning, too.

Anyone who doubts that public schooling can be improved upon by privatization should look into the CTY program and examine its successes. I learned more over those summer than I did in whole years of public high school, and more cheaply when you take into account the taxes my parents pay.

Update:
Jacob Levy has many more comments and says:

In retrospect, my admission to and financial aid for CTY (math, 1984) provided a pretty tranformative experience for me, and one of the major mechanisms for my own social mobility. The other major mechanism was my scholarship to Exeter. CTY made me realize how desperately I wanted to go to an academically first-rate boarding school. Once I was through Exeter, my course was pretty well set; at that point there was effectively no chance of my not going on to a good college and beyond. Had I stayed in my medium-town New Hampshire public school system-- which was fine but nothing like the public-preps of wealthy suburbs-- I would have stayed pretty miserable and continued to get full-time negative reinforcement for intellectual excitement and curiosity. I wouldn't have understood the range of possibilities that were really open to me, and would have had my sights set much, much lower than they were ultimately set. And I do think I would have ended up internalizing (what I perceived to be) the hostility to nerdiness among my peers. It seems pretty unlikely that I would have ended up in nerd heaven, here at the University of Chicago. After CTY and Exeter excited me to possibilities I hadn't understood existed-- and that, it turns out, provide a path to significant social mobility.

I wouldn't say CTY had the exact same effect on me, but I can certainly relate to Mr. Levy's experience with public schools.

FoxNews has a couple of articles up that are bound to disappoint supporters of our leftist American education industry. First, Joanne Jacobs describes the ghetto of bilingual education in New York (pointing to a NYT article by Samuel Freedman):

Bilingual education became a source of patronage jobs, Freedman writes. It has defied reform. Its advocates are bureaucrats and teachers. Its opponents are “Spanish-speaking immigrants who struggled to reach the United States and struggle still at low-wage jobs to stay here so that their children can acquire and rise with an American education, very much including fluency in English.”

It’s not just New York City. In my experience, Mexican immigrant parents in California prefer teachers who can talk to the family in Spanish but teach in English. Non-English-speaking parents are very aware of the handicaps of not being fluent in the language of the country.

And in California we eliminated bilingual education in 1998 overwhelmingly, and with great success (and over the heads of our legislators).

Begun with the best of theoretical intentions over thirty years ago, bilingual education has proven itself a dismal practical failure. For decades, millions of mostly Hispanic immigrant students have remained trapped in these Spanish-almost-only classes.

Then in 1996, immigrant parents began a public boycott of Ninth Street Elementary in Los Angeles after the school administration refused to allow their children to be taught English. Their example inspired the 1998 California "English for the Children" initiative, which won in a landslide and successfully dismantled most bilingual education programs in that state. As a direct result, the test scores of over a million Hispanic students rose by an average of 40% in just two years.

Ms. Jacobs also links to an article by Clarence Page, who claims that immigrant minorities outperform native minorities because they work harder. Almost unthinkable, I know.

Meanwhile, Marie Gryphon, with the Cato Institute, writes that affirmative action is a failure because preferences can’t deliver the results desired.

But affirmative action in this sense is a myth. Admissions preferences do not offer practical empowerment to struggling citizens. They do not bridge society’s racial chasms. They do not address real social problems.

For one thing, affirmative action does not send more minorities to college. Most four-year colleges and universities in America are not selective; they take anyone with a standard high school education and a Pell grant (search). ...

The reason that more minority students don’t get college degrees has nothing to do with competitive admissions policies. The truth is that most minority students leave high school without the minimum credentials necessary to attend any four-year school, selective or not.

Freshmen must be “college ready” at virtually all four-year colleges. This means that students must be literate, must have a high school diploma, and must have taken certain minimum coursework. Overwhelmingly, minority students are not college ready. Dr. Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute found that only 20 percent of black students and 16 percent of Hispanic students leave high school with these basic requirements.

Minority under-representation in college is the direct result of the public schools’ failure to prepare minority students. It is a failure that affirmative action does not remedy – college-ready minorities already attend college just as often as their white counterparts.

But getting into a top university is the key to success, right? Or do people mistakenly think that getting into a good school is success itself?

But economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger found that name-brand colleges are the modern equivalent of the Dutch tulip craze (search). Prices go up and up, but elite colleges offer no financial benefit that less selective schools do not.

Dale and Krueger compared students rejected by selective colleges with students who attended those schools. They discovered that when students’ entering credentials, such as high school grades and test scores, were the same, the rejected students made just as much money as those who attended “top tier” universities.

The failures of bilingual education and affirmative action should deal stunning blows to the left's educational philosophy and approach to racial equality, but instead many leftists fight tooth and nail to maintain these programs just because they feel -- to them -- as if they should work. The fact that they don't work is irrelevant. If anything, it means we need to try harder and spend more money. But you can try as hard as you want and spend as much money as you want on the wrong things and never see a positive result. That's what the left can never admit.

Aaron has another data point to justify my suspicions: "University English Departments Are Frauds".

I’d make the same argument for Ivy League English departments which, if you subtracted the faculty renowned for activism, would be decimated. Below is a set of links to all 8 Ivy English department faculties and the results confirmed
my suspicions.

There is hardly a professor who wasn’t a gay, black, latino, Marxist, or feminist activist. It is hard to argue that even a single dollar tuition paid for Ivy English department courses (outside of Freshman Composition) is well-spent. I’m not joking. A handful of legitimate scholars doesn’t justify the leftist-makework program for failed 1960’s radicals. It’s hard to argue that there is any groundbreaking research left in English departments. The country would be better off if most college English professors were fired and were compelled to teach junior and senior high school students how to write coherent sentences and paragraphs.

(HT: Walloworld.)

Wow, this is such a surprise: teachers helping their students cheat.

A recent study shows as many as 200 teachers in California were caught cheating to help their students perform better on rigorous new standardized tests, which are part of the President Bush's "No Child Left Behind (search)" education plan.

Next thing you know, judges will be helping suspects flee from the cops.

As for punishing teachers who have been caught cheating, the state of California says it's up to local districts to decide what to do. Some have been fired and some have even received jail time.

Interesting. They should all be fired, but jail time seems a bit harsh to me.

Michelle Malkin writes that some school teachers are forsaking Shakespeare for Tupac in an effort to "reach" inner-city youths.

Have you checked your child's summer reading list? Beware: Some lame-brained school officials have decided to ditch the sonnets of Shakespeare for the tripe of Tupac.

That's slain gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur -- the drug-dealing, baseball bat-wielding, cop-hating, Black Panthers-worshiping, convicted sexual abuser who made a fortune extolling the "thug life" before he was gunned down in Las Vegas eight years ago.

Teachers in Worcester, Mass., have embraced Shakur's posthumously published book of poems as a way to get middle school students' attention. "We wanted to include books that kids would want to read," Michael O'Sullivan, a member of the summer reading list selection committee, explained to the Telegram and Gazette of Worcester last month before school let out. ''Reading counterculture in schools, and to get kids to read anything that is not completely objectionable, is the goal,'' Deputy Superintendent Stephen E. Mills echoed.

Amazing. We spend more and more on public education each year, and that's the highest goal our educators can set and meet? Getting kids to read something that isn't completely objectionable? That's crap.

Teachers need to be held accountable for doing their jobs and actually achieving. Many teachers complain that they shouldn't be evaluated based on student performance because some students don't try, and so forth, but I'm getting past the point where I care. More than anything, it looks like many teachers (and the unions that protect them) are just lazy and incompetent.

On the other hand, am I expecting too much? Is it possible that anyone who would voluntarily babysit hundreds of apathetic kids for minimal pay is really capable of understanding Shakespeare's writings, much less teaching them?

Public education is a joke. Not a funny joke, either. It's a waste of money and resources. No one values what they get for free -- not the parents, and not the kids.

(HT: Clayton Cramer.)

Wow, this is bizarre. I've lived in California my whole life, and taken numerous IQ tests, and I never knew that a 1979 judicial ruling prohibits giving IQ tests to black kids.

Pamela Lewis wanted to have her 6-year-old son Nicholas take a standardized IQ test (search) to determine if he qualifies for special education speech therapy. Officials at his school routinely provide the test to kids but as Lewis soon found out, not to children who are black, due to a statewide policy that goes back to 1979.

At that time, many black kids performed poorly on the IQ test and wound up in special education classes. A lawsuit claimed the test was biased and a judge agreed — banning public schools from giving the test to black children while allowing it for everyone else.

It's amazing to me how much bigotry and discrimination get institutionalized by those on the left who claim to want everyone to be treated equally under the law.