Education: July 2006 Archives

While some people are working two jobs to put food on the table and others are fighting for freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, some Americans are whining because they've got to pay for their own master's degree in "public administration". That sounds like a major designed for people who want to live their lives on the government payroll, which isn't surprising considering the tenor of this editorial.

Is access to graduate education in America exclusively for the upper class?

As a first-year graduate student struggling to make ends meet, I believe the answer is yes. In my experience, searching for funding to pay the extensive costs of my higher education has been an upward climb leading only to dead ends.

I am a single mother who qualifies for the maximum amount in federal aid for graduate students. But this amount barely covers my tuition; paying for housing, books and living expenses is up to me.

I have no college fund, trust or inheritance. I don't independently qualify for private student loans because I lack the substantial credit or employment history that is required, and I do not have the luxury of having a willing and eligible co-signer. Furthermore, I can work only part-time jobs while in school; otherwise I would not qualify for child-care assistance.

Boohoo. I paid my way though grad school the old-fashioned way: I got a job! If you can't afford to go to grad school, get a job, save up some money, and build the credit and employment history necessary to get some loans. I'm sure the author has plenty of debt she's already used to buy a car, clothes, vacations, and all the other nonsense Americans put on their credit cards, so why can't she save up a few years for school? Next thing you know she'll be expecting the government to buy her a house, which are expensive for all the same reasons.

Plus, here's a tip for Sui Lang Panoke: keep your legs closed for a while so you don't have any more kids you can't afford to take care of.

(HT: James Taranto.)

Although there are a ton of jobs available in the video game industry, they tend to be the computer science equivalent of the Southeast Asian sweatshop. Game developers work extremely long hours, under tight deadlines, and for comparatively little money. Still, there's a movie star sort of status associated with working on a popular game, which is why video game camps are sprouting up around the country for aspiring game slaves.

While some 12-year-olds spend the summer playing video games, Alex Sanford learned how to create them.

Alex, who's a student at Dana Middle School in Hawthorne, was one of a handful of South Bay kids who participated in the two-week video game design camp at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

"I want to be a movie director," Alex said Friday, the last day at camp. "Some of this stuff helps to figure out special effects."

Most of the students had no programming experience before the camp, said course instructor Jacob Thompson, who is a USC undergraduate majoring in interactive entertainment.

"They've really grown in knowledge of programming," Thompson said. "And actually having to finish a project by a deadline is impressive by any standard."

Well, as opposed to "having to", actually finishing a project by a deadline is impressive.

Even my little brother is in on the action.

Andy Kaneda, 11, has plans to become a video game designer and wants to learn more about the industry. The incoming Dana Middle School student, the youngest in the program, has been playing video games since he was 7.

I can attest to that!

Anyone interested in education simply must go read Clive Crook's recent piece in its entirity: "The Lure Of Education". (This means you, mom!) He echos many of the points I made in my previous two posts on this topic, "Education: America's Panacea" and "Education: America's Panacea 2", but since he's surely more prominent than I am perhaps he will be more listened to. He starts by pointing out that education has been hailed as the solution to every social ill, and that vast sums of money have been poured into our public education system for decades now, with negative results. It's easy to propose "better education" as a solution to a problem because it will take years or decades for you to be proven wrong, and even then, no one may believe it.

"Better education" is something all sides agree on, as a remedy for almost anything. Stagnant real wages for the middle class? Better education. The decline of civility in public life? Better education. The obesity epidemic? Better education. The China and India challenge? Better education. ...

And the issue has not just been serving rhetorical time. Things have happened. In America -- as in Britain -- the past 25 years have seen a torrent of educational reforms, and school systems have been deluged with cash. Per-pupil spending in the United States is way up, compared with 20 years ago. Educational systems have been in a decades-long state of permanent and well-financed revolution, with issues such as organization, management, curriculum, training, accountability, and the rest perpetually in motion. Everything has been tried, it seems. And, apparently, nothing works. After more than 20 years, you only have to consider [insert policy issue here] to realize that the country still cries out for better education.

Standards of achievement in schools have flatlined for years. In math and science, American high school students are among the poorest performing in the developed world. Remembering that the money spent has vastly increased, the productivity of the system has collapsed. If you measure it by national test scores divided by per-pupil spending on education, school productivity was two-thirds higher in 1970 than 30 years later at the end of the 1990s.

Summing up, the orthodoxy to emerge from all this is (a) better education is the answer to all our problems, and (b) improving education is extremely difficult to do (see how hard we tried?).

And then he continues by arguing that neither of these is true, and that improving education would actually be quite simple if we greatly reduced government interference.

I think this is wrong on both counts. We do know how to improve education, and, politics aside, it is not even that difficult. That is the good news. Unfortunately, if we ever get around to it, we will find that most of the problems we were trying to solve will refuse to go away. Improving education is enormously desirable in itself. Especially at the bottom of the skills pyramid, it requires no ulterior justification. We should do it. But for society at large, it is not the panacea that so many people take it to be.

What, then, is this easy method for improving education? Competition among schools.

Americans have a strange attitude toward competition. They take it for granted -- much more than most foreigners -- that competition is vital to ensure the highest standards in almost any kind of endeavor. But some things -- such as education and health care -- are then deemed "too important" to be left to the market, too important to be thrown open to competition. This makes no sense. I for one would far rather have my car or my shoes or my breakfast cereal issued to me by officials in the D.C. government than to have those officials in monopoly control of the school my children attend or the hospital my kids get taken to when they are sick. Some things are just too important to be sheltered from competition. Education is one.

There is no great mystery, no great controversy over the facts. Competition among schools raises standards. The United States has been experimenting, far too timidly, with two ways of creating educational competition: vouchers and charter schools. Economists have been tracking these initiatives. Their findings are in: The schemes work. And this is not just because charter schools are better than public schools (though often they are), or because vouchers let low-income parents opt out of failing public schools (which they do). It is also because, under pressure, the existing public schools get better. Amazing! Who would have guessed? A charter school opens, or a voucher program gets started, and before you know it, the neighborhood public schools are offering extra classes after school, Saturday morning openings, new tutoring and mentoring schemes. Why didn't we think of this before?

Mr. Crook continues by (rightly) denigrating "whole language" reading programs that have created a generation of illiterates whose teachers couldn't be bothered with phonics, and he explains why this would never have happened in an education system in which schools competed for students. He then puts his finger on an issue that I've decried for years:

School systems in this country are run to protect the interests of producers (teachers and educational bureaucrats), not consumers (parents and children). That is what happens when you declare something "too important to leave to the market." Please, no more hand-wringing about how hard it is to fix education. If anybody truly wants a solution to the problem, it is there in plain sight.

Exactly right, and refreshing to read from someone else's fingertips. Mr. Crook is on the money with this essay, and I hope he forgives my extensive quoting but I'm very excited to see my own opinions given such a skilled rendition and broad exposure. Go read the whole thing!