The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
That’s the “National Clearinghouse for Science, Technology and the Law” at the Stetson University College of Law from which I received a page view today from a link to my 2005 technical dissertation on “Ballistic Fingerprinting.”
Damn, I’m a resource for the National Institute of Justice! Pretty cool. Very, very low traffic, but cool!
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.
American Spectator – Angelo M. Codevilla, America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution
And the rest of us are the products of public schooling and everything but Ivy-League higher education.
As though that was the entire purpose of the educational system.
RTWT. It’s worth your time.
From Theodore Dalrymple’s speech at the Harvard Club, November 2001:
One of the things that has happened in Britain, as I said, is that people are radically disconnected from their past – from the past of the country in which they live. To such an extent, as I’ve suggested to you, that the vast majority of people don’t even know when the Second World War was. Out of hundreds of sixteen to twenty year-old patients whom I’ve seen, very few – in fact, I think about three – have known with any degree of accuracy when the Second World War took place, and they’re not even capable of deducing from the fact that there was a Second World War that there was a First World War.
And in the circumstances, I regard it as a triumph when they tell me that the Second World War took place in the eighteenth Century, because that means that they know that there was another century. And quite often if I ask them anything about history, not just of their own country, but of the entire world, what they say is, “I don’t know because I wasn’t born then.” As if one could not be expected to know anything other than by personal acquaintance. And our educators, I think, have a lot to answer for because they have suggested that education should be of relevance to the children’s lives as they are lived, and of course the whole point of education is to make the world beyond that relevant, and of course interesting and important to them, otherwise they are utterly enclosed in the indescribably miserable world in which they find themselves.
Some people are just outstanding parents / grandparents. (Hat tip to Daphne) Others should never breed. (Hat tip to U.S. Citizen.)
Discuss.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. P.J. O’Rourke says End Them, Don’t Mend Them, and the article is accompanied by this image:
Some excerpts:
The Digest of Educational Statistics (read by Monday, there will be a quiz) says inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending increased by 49 percent from 1984 to 2004 and by more than 100 percent from 1970 to 2005.
Bell bottoms and Jerry Rubin hair versus piercings and tattoos—are kids getting smarter? No. National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test scores remained essentially the same from 1970 to 2004. SAT scores in 1970 averaged 537 in reading and 512 in math, and 38 years later the scores were 502 and 515. (More kids are taking SATs, but the nitwit factor can be discounted—scores below 400 have decreased slightly.) American College Testing (ACT) composite scores have increased only slightly from 20.6 (out of 36) in 1990 to 21.1 in 2008. And the extraordinary expense of the D.C. public school system produced a 2007 class of eighth graders in which, according to the NAEP, 12 percent of the students were at or above proficiency in reading and 8 percent were at or above proficiency in math. Many of these young people are now entering the work force. Count your change in D.C.
The average IQ in America is—and this can be proven mathematically—average. Logic therefore dictates that National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth grade “at or above proficient” reading and math levels should average 50. This is true in only one of the 50 states. National averages are 29 and 31 percent. Either logic has nothing to do with public education or that NAEP test is a bear. Which I doubt.
—
Massachusetts (fifth in spending per student) and Vermont (first) do lead the reading proficiency list with 43 and 42 percent respectively. But there’s not much to choose between that and 25th-biggest spender Montana’s 39 percent. Montana, in turn, is tied with third-most-expensive New Jersey. And the four states with 37 percent proficiencies on the NAEP are sixth-in-spending hyper-literate Connecticut, 19th-in-spending rube Minnesota, eighth-in-spending canny Yankee Maine, and 43rd-in-spending hayseed South Dakota.
—
Looking at the bottom of the heap is just as confusing. Perhaps it’s possible to spend too little on public education, and 47th-ranked Mississippi is trying to prove it. The District of Columbia aside, Mississippi’s proficiency levels are the worst in the nation—17 percent in reading; 14 percent in math. However, the state that spends the least, Utah, slightly exceeds national averages. Meanwhile the second-worst state, New Mexico, is completely average in its school spending, ranked at 24. Tenth-in-spending Hawaii, with 20 percent in reading and 21 percent in math, is marginally inferior to 31st-in-spending California with 20 and 24 percent. And 49th-in-spending Arizona is a few points better than either.
—
Here’s my proposal: Close all the public schools. Send the kids home. Fire the teachers. Sell the buildings. Raze the U.S. Department of Education, leaving not one brick standing upon another and plow the land where it stood with salt.
“Wait a minute,” the earnest liberal says, “we’ve got swell public schools here in Flourishing Heights. The kids take yoga. We just brought in a law school placement coordinator at the junior high. The gym has solar panels on the roof. Our Girls Ultimate Frisbee team is third in the state. The food in the cafeteria is locally grown. And the vending machines dispense carrots and kiwi juice.”
Close them anyway. I’ve got 11,749 reasons. Or, given the Cato report, call it 15,000. Abandon the schools. Gather the kids together in groups of 15.4. Sit them down at your house, or the Moose Lodge, or the VFW Hall or—gasp—a church. Multiply 15.4 by $15,000. That’s $231,000. Subtract a few grand for snacks and cleaning your carpet. What remains is a pay and benefit package of a quarter of a million dollars. Average 2008 public school classroom teacher salary: $51,391. For a quarter of a million dollars you could hire Aristotle. The kids wouldn’t have band practice, but they’d have Aristotle. (Incidentally this worked for Philip of Macedon. His son did very well.)
Money’s not the problem. P.J. has much more to say. Please, go read. We don’t need Aristotles, but we do need a bunch of E.D. Hirsch, Jr’s.
A while back I wrote Balkanization, a piece about the Tucson Unified School District’s “Raza Studies” program, part of its broader Ethnic Studies program. It was fairly obvious from the coverage that the “Raza Studies” program was another example of Critical Pedagogy in the public school system, and its intent is to radicalize the students involved.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne decided to do something about it. The program, in his view, encourages students to resent a particular race.
It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it.
If you read up on Paolo Friere and Critical Pedagogy as he envisioned it, that’s exactly what it does, regardless of how it’s presented as promoting “critical thinking.”
So Horne lobbied for a bill in the state legislature, and it was recently passed and more recently signed by Governor Jan Brewer.
Of course, this is just more evidence of how racist Arizonans are.
The Tucson Unified School District says that they will have no problem complying with the new law though, while continuing their various Ethnic Studies programs.
I’ll bet.
Let’s start out local.
Front page today, above the fold, in the local Daily rag newspaper:
One-third of freshmen found not ready for college courses
UA to teach high school level math in the fall
Let us fisk:
The University of Arizona will teach high school level math starting in the next school year, because a third of its freshmen aren’t ready for college level math, officials said.
Really? A third?
Back when I wrote The George Orwell Daycare Center a report had been released indicating that:
30% of students in the Tucson school districts fail basic subjects, but 90% are promoted to the next grade anyway. Plus, investigation suggests that up to a quarter of the students receiving passing grades should not be. (For the innumerate out there, that’s possibly over half, in total.) Nor is this limited to the Southwest.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.
That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
This would seen to lend further credence to those reports.
I wonder how long the U of A has been teaching remedial English?
The class will cover intermediate algebra through a lecture component, an online component and required time with trained peer instructors.
“It’s math that you would hope students already knew coming in, and a lot of them don’t,” said William McCallum, the UA’s math department head.
About a third of the UA’s 7,000 freshmen didn’t place in college math in a placement test they take during class registration time.
“We don’t want to put students into classes that they’re going to fail,” McCallum said.
Two-thirds of freshmen were ready to take college algebra, which is required for most degree programs, or “math in modern society,” a class for students whose fine arts or humanities degree programs don’t require much math.
I would love to get my hands on a copy of the final exam for “math in modern society.”
Those who take the new high school level math class – about 1,000 students per year at full capacity – also will get help with adjusting to the university culture, finding out what it’s like to take a college math class and learning which study skills are required for success.
That they SHOULD have learned before GRADUATING FROM HIGH SCHOOL.
The class doesn’t satisfy the UA’s math requirements; it just gets students ready for college algebra or “math in modern society.” The class will count as a general elective toward a degree.
Most UA students who aren’t ready for college math take intermediate algebra through Pima Community College and transfer the credit to the UA. PCC faculty taught seven sections of the class at the UA campus in the fall.
But if a student takes the class through PCC, it doesn’t count as part of the student’s full-time schedule needed to get financial aid. So students end up taking five classes at the UA plus the math class at Pima. Those underprepared and overloaded students are less likely to succeed as freshmen.
Then perhaps they should prepare before becoming freshmen?
“The main reason we’re doing this is to retain those students,” Vice Provost Gail Burd said.
Yes, you desperately need their tuition dollars.
The UA also will benefit from the tuition revenue that would otherwise go to the community college.
The university has an open admissions policy and is working on the state’s goal of producing more degree holders.
Said degrees which are becoming almost as worthless as a High School Diploma. But that’s what happens when something becomes an entitlement – its value declines, sometimes precipitously.
“My attitude is: If we admit students who are not sufficiently prepared in mathematics, we have some sort of obligation to help them,” McCallum said.
Perhaps then you shouldn’t admit them??
The UA’s undergraduate council came to the same conclusion, said Jake Harwood, a UA communication professor and the council chair.
Color me shocked.
The council, composed of faculty members and others who make curriculum decisions, at first was concerned about starting down a slippery slope of teaching remedial classes, but the faculty has to work with the students it gets, Harwood said. So the council approved the class.
Because otherwise the University might have to get smaller, and who would THAT benefit?
“If we’re admitting you, we’re saying you’re ready for college,” Harwood said. But if students aren’t ready, especially in a fundamental area such as quantitative skills, the UA should help them instead of telling them to sink or swim, he said.
How about “If you’re not ready, we’re not ADMITTING YOU”?
Doesn’t anybody in administration do logic anymore, much less math?
I thought this was an appropriate place to put that.
Next up: The Standford School of Education!
Over the weekend, both in email and in a comment, Unix-Jedi sent me links to a heartwarming story:
It sounded like a great idea: Stanford education professors would create a model school to show how to educate low-income Hispanic and black students.
Or, as it’s turned out, how not to.
In March, Stanford New Schools (aka East Palo Alto Academy) — a charter high school started in 2001 and elementary grades added in 2006 – made California’s list of schools in the lowest-achieving five percent in the state.
This month, the Ravenswood school board denied a new five-year charter. The elementary school — now with K-4 and eighth grade — will close in June. Another year or two wouldn’t be enough to improve poor student performance and weak behavior management, Superintendent Maria De La Vega told the board.
The high school will get two years to find a new sponsor: the local high school district has said “no,” but there are other options.
How did it happen? Stanford New Schools, run by the university’s school of education, seems to stress social and emotional support over academics.
Stanford New Schools hires well-trained teachers who use state-of-the-art progressive teaching methods; Stanford’s student teachers provide extra help. With an extra $3,000 per student raised privately, students enjoy small classes, mentoring, counseling and tutoring, technology access, field trips, summer enrichment, health van visits, community college classes on campus, and community service opportunities. The goal is to send graduates to college as critical thinkers, lifelong learners, and “global citizens.”
“Global Citizens” who are illiterate and innumerate, have no knowledge of history or civics or science, but by God they have a HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA and they FEEL GOOD about themselves!
The school provides students a web of support, reports the New York Times:
High school students have one teacher/adviser who checks that homework is done, and when it is not, the teacher calls home. Teachers know students’ families and help with issues as varied as buying a bagel before an exam to helping an evicted family find a home. Teachers stay late and work weekends, and tend to burn out quickly — causing a high rate of turnover.
EPA Academy enrolls very disadvantaged students: Most are the children of poor and poorly educated Spanish-speaking immigrant families; the rest are black or Pacific Islanders. Their English skills are poor. Those who come in ninth grade are years behind in reading and math.
In comments on the news stories that have run, I see a common refrain: It’s impossible to teach these kids. Not even Stanford can do it.
Ahem. Time once again for Den Beste’s Definition of Cognitive Dissonance:
When someone tries to use a strategy which is dictated by their ideology, and that strategy doesn’t seem to work, then they are caught in something of a cognitive bind. If they acknowledge the failure of the strategy, then they would be forced to question their ideology. If questioning the ideology is unthinkable, then the only possible conclusion is that the strategy failed because it wasn’t executed sufficiently well. They respond by turning up the power, rather than by considering alternatives. (This is sometimes referred to as “escalation of failure”.)
But no, no! says Ms. Jacobs:
But other schools with demographically identical students are doing much better. The top-scoring school in the district is East Palo Alto Charter School (EPAC), a K-8 run by Aspire Public Schools, Stanford’s original partner. An all-minority school, EPAC outperforms the state average.
Rather than send EPAC graduates to Stanford’s high school, Aspire started its own high school, Phoenix, which outperforms the state average for all high schools. All students in the first 12th grade class have applied to four-year colleges.
All of them. And I’m willing to bet that 30% aren’t going to have to take high-school level algebra, either.
But wait! It gets better!
Aspire co-founded East Palo Alto Academy High with Stanford, but bowed out five years ago. There was a culture clash, Aspire’s founder, Don Shalvey told the New York Times. Aspire focused “primarily and almost exclusively on academics,” while Stanford focused on academics and students’ emotional and social lives, he said.
Okay, boys and girls, say it along with me! “Which philosophy WORKS?!?“
But Cognitive Dissonance is still in effect:
Deborah Stipek, Stanford’s dean of education, says the elementary school is too new — in its fourth year, but with only two years of scores — to be judged. Stanford considers the high school a success.
In an email to Alexander Russo, Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who helped create the high school, defended the high school’s “strong, highly personalized college-going program.” The graduation rate of 86 percent exceeds the state average. “In addition, 96 percent of graduates are admitted to college (including 53 percent to four-year colleges) — twice the rate of African American and Latino students in the state as a whole.” Half the students enroll in Early College classes on campus.
Given the horrendous drop-out rate for Ravenswood students who go to large public high schools — it’s estimated only one out of three receives a diploma — EPA Academy is helping students stay in school.
But its graduates are not prepared for college.
I won’t rain on Ms. Jacob’s follow up, but I want to interject here: Fifty-three percent of East Palo Alto Academy High’s students get admitted to a four-year school (and we’ve seen what the requirements for that have declined to), but ALL of the graduating class of Aspire’s Phoenix high school have applied to four-year colleges.
Same student demographics, massive disparity in philosophy, and massive disparity in outcome.
Ms. Jacobs:
The 96 percent college admission rate is meaningless, since it includes community colleges, which take anyone, and California State University campuses, which admit students with a B average or better, regardless of test scores.
EPA Academy students are graded on a five-dimensional rubric, based on (1) Personal Responsibility; (2) Social Responsibility; (3) Communication Skills; (4) Application of Knowledge; and (5) Critical and Creative Thinking.
Only 20 percent of the grade is based on knowledge, notes Michele Kerr, who taught an ACT prep course for disadvantaged students at a nonprofit from 2007-09. Compared to district high school students, East Palo Academy tutees had “the lowest skills and the highest grades,” Kerr recalls. Students with high A averages turned out to have very poor reading and math skills, though their writing was relatively strong.
Lowest skills, highest grades.
Yup, that’s modern teaching!
EPA Academy students got into CSU on their grades, while much stronger students with lower grades were shut out, says Kerr, now a Stanford-trained high school teacher.
On CSU’s test of college readiness, no EPA Academy 11th graders were deemed ready for college English; only 11 percent were deemed ready for college-level math. Of course, they might catch up in 12th grade. But the state exam shows 11th graders are far behind. In English Language Arts, 54 percent are below basic, 40 percent basic, and only 6 percent proficient. No students tested as proficient in Algebra II or chemistry, 9 percent in biology, and 6 percent in U.S. history.
They’re in school five days a week, supposedly taking six hours of class per day. WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY BEING TAUGHT?
The median scores for SAT takers are in the high 300s in each section, about the 15th percentile. ACT scores average 15, equally low.
Apparently nothing that anybody tests for.
And we return to Sowell’s Social Visions once again. Had anybody asked me back when Stanford New Schools started their experiment, I’d have predicted precisely this outcome. I wouldn’t have understood as well as I do now why it would have been the right prediction, but I’d have made it: Total Failure.
The Unconstrained (“Progressive”) vision doesn’t work. But that vision embraces cognitive dissonance and hangs on for dear life in the face of all the evidence. Jacobs concludes:
When I started the reporting that led to my charter school book, Our School, I planned to write about the Aspire-Stanford school. I was at the school board meeting when Aspire-Stanford got the charter. I talked to East Palo Alto parents eager for a high school in their own town. I interviewed Shalvey and Darling-Hammond, who took the lead in getting the high school started.
However, I couldn’t get the access I needed — the inexperienced teachers didn’t want a writer taking note of their mistakes — so I ended up at Downtown College Prep, a charter high school in San Jose designed for underachievers from Mexican immigrant families.
As at East Palo Alto Academy, DCP started with a progressive philosophy and very high ideals. But the two high school teachers who started the school had no trouble acknowledging mistakes. When things didn’t go as they’d hoped — which happened a lot — they tried something else. No time or energy was wasted blaming the students’ poverty or the tests. The unofficial motto was: We’re not good now but we can get better. And they did.
Will Stanford education professors learn from their mistakes? I fear they’ll write off the elementary, claiming the program didn’t get enough time, and continue to claim the high school as a success. That would be a waste of a “teachable moment.”
Pointy-headed professors of Education admit error?
Inconceivable!
I will reiterate my ongoing argument:
On Tuesday this week author Jerry Pournelle wrote an interesting piece he entitled The Education Mess. I strongly suggest you read it. Here are a few interesting excerpts:
Diane Ravitch was one of the architects of No Child Left Behind, but in her new book she now admits that it isn’t working, and is in fact helping kill the kind of education she advocates. She continues to believe that the American public schools do a poor job, and that we can build a much more successful system of public education.
I agree with her on the first point. She’s dead wrong on the second. We can’t build a better system.
That’s not a cry of despair, it’s a statement of fact. There is never going to be a national school system much better than what we have now. It may get worse, but it won’t get much better.
—
In 1983 the National Commission on Education, headed by Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, wrote that “If a foreign nation had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.” I’ve been pointing this out for years. We have a system of public education indistinguishable from an enemy attack — and it has been getting worse since the Seaborg report.
In 1983.
I graduated from High School in 1980.
The whole thing is quotable, and I’m going to archive it in my records, but I came across something else today that is a perfect companion to Pournelle’s spot-on diagnosis. From a comment at American Digest to his piece Somebody’s Been Raising A Generation of Schmucks:
As the webmaster of an educational resource site for the humanities, we hold focus groups of teachers to get feedback on our site and its content. One teacher from one of D.C.’s tonier private schools pointed out that they no longer teach the “military aspect” of our nation’s wars. She said (in refrence to WWII in particular) they focused on things like the home front, Japanese internment, A. Phillip Randolph and civil rights — you know, the important stuff — but NO “military history.” An astonished history teacher at the table turned to her and asked, “but Susan, do your students at least know who WON World War II?” – Don Rodrigo.
It’s already worse. The suck just isn’t evenly spread around.
Via Instapundit:
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) intends to purchase twenty-seven (27) REMINGTON BRAND MODEL 870 POLICE 12/14P MOD GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14″ – PARKERIZED CHOKE: MODIFIED SIGHTS: GHOST RING REAR WILSON COMBAT; FRONT – XS CONTOUR BEAD SIGHT STOCK: KNOXX REDUCE RECOIL ADJUSTABLE STOCK FORE-END: SPEEDFEED SPORT-SOLID – 14″ LOP are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.
The required date of delivery is March 22, 2010.
So the Department of EDUCATION is not only buying twenty-seven shotguns, it has an existing inventory of shotguns similar if not identical to these already, and these are short-barreled (14″) shotguns with Knoxx stocks.
Excuse me, but WHAT THE FUCK DOES THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION NEED WITH RIOT GUNS?
Are they perhaps concerned about what some disgruntled teachers might do?
Markadelphia emailed me this story with the following comment:
Well, it’s not nuking the site from orbit but . . . it is something. And, yes, I agree with President Obama … this was a good and necessary thing. I hope it happens more frequently and then, perhaps, teachers will get the message that if they continue to be lazy, they will be shown the door.
Perhaps if they do the same to the administrators we might get some actual improvement, but here’s the story:
School’s Shake-Up Is Embraced by the President
A Rhode Island school board’s decision to fire the entire faculty of a poorly performing school, and President Obama’s endorsement of the action, has stirred a storm of reaction nationwide, with teachers condemning it as an insult and conservatives hailing it as a watershed moment of school accountability.
The decision by school authorities in Central Falls to fire the 93 teachers and staff members has assumed special significance because hundreds of other school districts across the nation could face similarly hard choices in coming weeks, as a $3.5 billion federal school turnaround program kicks into gear.
While there is fierce disagreement over whether the firings were good or bad, there is widespread agreement that the decision would have lasting ripples on the nation’s education debate — especially because Mr. Obama seized on the move to show his eagerness to take bold action to improve failing schools filled with poor students.
The reaction was swift and predictable:
Mr. Obama’s endorsement of the Rhode Island board’s tough action infuriated many of the four million members of the two national teachers’ unions, thousands of whom campaigned vigorously for him in 2008.
“I ripped the Obama sticker off of my truck,” said Zeph Capo, a midlevel official at the Houston Federation of Teachers who trains classroom teachers. “We worked hard for this man, we talked to our neighbors and our fellow teachers about why we should support him, and we’re having to dig the knife out of our back.”
Officials at the two unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, were so angry in the hours after Mr. Obama first endorsed the firings that an irreconcilable break with the administration seemed possible, perhaps bruising Democrats’ electoral chances in November.
Like they needed any help with that.
No, it’s not nuking the site from orbit, but it’s not status quo ante either.