Another Disparate Impact

Pie Chart: ZnU

Entry to NYC's elite schools are determined solely by test scores, 5,103 students out of >70,000 eight graders were offered positions at those schools, the racial breakdown of those admitted?

Black: 5%
Hispanic: 7%
White: 28%
Asian: 52%

In the city as a whole the racial breakdown is:

White: 44%
Black: 25.5%
Asian: 15%
Hispanic: 41%*

*Note that the Census numbers don't add up to 100 because Hispanic is not a race and overlaps other categories. 

In the NY City School System the student breakdown is:

White: 16%
Black: 28%
Asian: 15%
Hispanic: 41%

At Stuyvesant High School only 10 of the 953 spots were earned by blacks.  This was documented in an article in the NY Times "Lack of Diversity Persists in Admissions to New York City's Elite High Schools"

"The schools should more closely resemble the population of the city" ~ Mayor Bill DeBlasio

"It's critical that our city's specialized high schools reflect the diversity of our city" ~ Chancellor Carmen Farina

WHY?

Should not our High Schools, Colleges, and Universities populations reflect those with the most aptitude?  Should an Asian kid be discriminated against to allow a Black kid to attend?   

Read More:
Manhattan Contrarian
New York Times  

Our Future

President Obama reminded Democratic donors that “our future rests” on the success of people brought to the United States illegally as children, who would qualify for citizenship if Congress had passed the DREAM Act.

“About 30 to 40 percent of the kids in this school, by the way, are DREAM kids,” Obama said Wednesday evening.

National Review 

Remember the good old days?

When our future rested on the success of people born in the United States, citizens of the United States, or those that emigrated legally to the United States?

Worcester Polytechnic Institute or Woostah Polly as Ducky would call it has a student population of 5,778 students, so ask yourself, who's really paying the tuition for those 2300 Dreamers? Then answer this question, should we paying for the education of 2300 illegals or would that money be spent more wisely paying for the education of 2300 Americans?

NO CHILD IS LEFT BEHIND

THEY'RE ALL BEHIND TOGETHER

In Washington DC fully 83% of students are not proficient at reading and 81% are not proficient at math.

But don't think I'm picking on DC.  Out of possible scores of 500, DC scored 245 compared to the national average of 258 in reading and 260 compared to the national average of 276 in math. 

The US is below average in literacy and technological proficiency, and it’s third from the bottom in numeracy for 16- to 65-year-olds. The United States has high levels of education and a large percentage of its workers in adult learning and training programs, and it spends lots of money on all these activities. And yet, it does worse than many countries with few advantages and resources.

DC Schools
America's Educational Failings

No degree required?

Photo: Toby Ord

A leading Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia criticized a fellow primary opponent for having only a high school degree. David Perdue, a businessman and first-time candidate for office, was touting his experience and education to a group of voters in January when he made a reference to "a high school graduate in this race."

The Perdue campaign told the AJC in a statement that "David was simply making the case that he is the most qualified person in this race to help get our economy back on track so that we can start paying down the massive federal debt. His comment was based on facts that are a matter of public record.

Weekly Standard

Now David Perdue has a Bachelor's in Industrial Engineering and a Master's in Operations Research from Georgia Tech.  The question then, is would that make him a better politician?  I've met idiots and morons with advanced degrees, and brilliant and intelligent people without them.

Is a degree even required to be an effective politician? There have been 11 presidents without one, including Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman.

Doctor of Pornography?

 

Porn Studies

Why porn studies? Why now? As the editors of Porn Studies explain, in typical academese: The field “has taken on a new urgency and significance given the continued position of pornography at the centre of controversies around media, gender, sexuality and technology. Pornographies, their spread, their imageries, their imaginaries and their consumption always have a high profile, but in the past decade or so, interest in pornography has grown exponentially – with a concomitant increase in claims about porn’s effects, both positive and negative.” The Globe and Mail

With a Minor in Positionality

Think I'm kidding? Here's the place to start building your academic library.  Might I suggest you start with "Hard to Swallow: hardcore pornography on screen", and no, I didn't make that title up.

Pornography remains undertheorized. In the public sphere, there are very few serious ideas about what porn is or how it works or what it means to us, beside from the obvious.   The Atlantic

I have to agree with Margaret Wente

Personally, I think civilization as we know it will probably survive unreadable academic discourses on anal sex and torture porn. I’m aware that this self-indulgent garbage makes up just a teeny-tiny part of the worthy and important enterprise known as higher education. What bothers me is the utter collapse of seriousness and rigour, and the utter inability of top administrators and granting agencies to put a halt to what is essentially a con job on the public. The Globe and Mail

 

It certainly gives a new look on the ivory towers of academia

 

Towsonu2003

 

Are teachers overpaid?

Big Ed is most definitely ripping us off...

The biggest consumer ripoff in America today -- and the next economic bubble to burst -- is higher education.

Tuition and fees at colleges and universities rose 439 percent between 1982 and 2007. Median family income rose just 147 percent during that period.

Median household income has fallen 6.7 percent since June 2009. The cost of attending the average public university rose 5.4 percent this year. (Jack Kelly)

Closer to home, are primary and secondary teachers overpaid?

It's a complex question, and I'm not one of those who automatically say that they are.  God knows you could not pay me enough to put up with what our public school educators must endure on a daily basis.

The Atlantic published an excellent article asking Are Teachers Paid Too Much? In it they cite four studies, two saying yes and two saying no. It's an short and interesting read.

Two scholars, one from American Enterprise Institute and the other from The Heritage Foundation conclude that Public School Teachers are not Underpaid.

Public school teachers do receive salaries 19.3% lower than similarly-educated private workers, according to our analysis of Census Bureau data. However, a majority of public school teachers were education majors in college, and more than two in three received their highest degree (typically a master's) in an education-related field. A salary comparison that controls only for years spent in school makes no distinction between degrees in education and those in biology, mathematics, history or other demanding fields. 

Education is widely regarded by researchers and college students alike as one of the easiest fields of study, and one that features substantially higher average grades than most other college majors. On objective tests of cognitive ability such as the SAT, ACT, GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and Armed Forces Qualification Test, teachers score only around the 40th percentile of college graduates. If we compare teachers and non-teachers with similar AFQT scores, the teacher salary penalty disappears. (WSJ)

They conclude by explaining how teachers' benefits are far superior what non-public sector workers receive. Here's a link to the study.

Unleash The Market Forces!

My own conclusion, based on what I've read and the many conversations I've had with the many teachers I've known, is that the teachers unions are protecting too many overpaid bum teachers, the education bureaucracy is way too fat, and that results in the good teachers being underpaid.

The free marketplace has price signals and other market indicators that drive employee wages; the public sector does not.  Also, companies must keep bureaucratic overhead to a minimum in order to remain competitive; government agencies feel no such pressure.  This doesn’t make government jobs less worthwhile than those in the private sector, but it does lead us to endless arguments over what a public employee is worth.

Privatizing all education would end this controversy.  Consumers (parents) voting with their dollars would quickly sort the wheat from the chaff and result in the superstar teachers getting the paychecks they deserve, while driving the bums out and into other fields of employment.

This is Not a Blog Post

Obama's latest in a series of panders is to those with worthless college degrees who are up to their ears in student loan debt

My post on the most worthless college degrees sparked some great back and forth on the relative merits and demerits of different degrees. As always, the conversation was lively.

My bottom line is that I don’t care what degree you get so long as you're not reaching into my pocket to pay for it.  Major in dwarf tossing or gerbil ranching for all I care, but do it on your own dime, and don’t take to the streets screaming in outrage when you can't find a job.

I am against the federal government handing out money to college students

All it ends up doing is inflating the cost of higher education many times greater than the overall rate of inflation. If government must hand out money, it should only subsidize that which we need more of and that which will benefit the nation. As it stands, we do not produce enough STEM graduates (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) or medical doctors, so if we must hand out money for college, that is where it should go.

Countries that provide free or highly subsidized college are spilling over with pseudo-intellectual mental manipulators and professional troublemakers with advanced degrees.

Indeed, places like Italy and Paraguay enjoy a surfeit of tour guides and bartenders with PhDs who can quote great passages of Foucault and explain how Middle Ages scholasticism smuggled its way through The Renaissance to reemerge as the modern-day republican party shorn of all knowledge and possessing only the narrow-minded hatred of all that is non-white or female.

In those countries, ordinary people pay no attention to such fanciful pedantry, since it sprouts like weeds and serves no practical purpose to a society that cannot afford frivolities.  The incoherent and impenetrable psychobabble of these self-styled thinkers never makes it out of the corner wine shops, shabby union halls and dilapidated communist party storefronts.  It does, however make for lively intellectual conversation among the unemployed.

Extra-Spicy Political Thought

I’ve been there, I’ve seen it. I was in Quito, hanging out with a very leftwing crowd I'd gotten chummy with, great people. I did music sets every weekend at a little artsy combination folk museum, coffee shop, restaurant and bar overlooking the Cumbaya Valley.

I showed up one afternoon after work and it was an anthill of excited activity, with people smoking even more than usual. Rigoberta Menchu was coming! Yes, the discredited lying Nobel Prize winner, and she had at that time already been discredited, but not among the highly educated Latin American left! I wisely shut my mouth and went out drinking with an Army buddy.

Having a degree doesn't make you smart

Government subsidy of non-productive, easy-to-get degrees just produces entitled people who confuse having a degree with being smart. It encourages, resentment, sneering condescension, sloth and social agitation.

Conservative American scientist Razib Khan makes a compelling case for how liberalism has skewed the social sciences, and his anecdotes about the ignorance he encountered among the supposedly well-educated reminded me of a few of my own.

A year of so after the Iran Contra scandal, I thought I'd impress a pretty young Social Sciences major I met at a New Years Eve party by telling her I'd just gotten back from a tour in Central America.  She completely deflated me by responding, "Oh?  Oklahoma?"  That was almost as bad as the Political Science undergrad I engaged in conversation with on an airline flight who said she enjoyed reading Political Science books.  "Locke, Marx perhaps?"  No.  John Grisham.  

This is the equivalent of an Electrical Engineering major telling you he's recreating Frankenstein's science experiments using electricity to revive the dead.  People are entitled to their ignorance, but not on my dime.

So what is the meaning of your life? That should drive your degree choice. I was not smart enough to be a doctor, and I don’t possess the skill and daring of an entrepreneur.  My conscious choice put me on a path to wage slavery, and I will never be a millionaire, but I am happy.

Please see also:  Jack Camwell's blog post response

When a School District is a Prison Sentence

Veronique de Rugy makes an excellent case for privatizing education by comparing private sector manufacturing (where productivity has increased) with public education (where productivity is decreasing):

Since 1975, manufacturing output has more than doubled, while employment in the sector has decreased by 31 percent. […] These statistics reveal that the average American manufacturer is three times more productive today than in 1975 — a sure sign of economic progress.

That’s exactly the opposite of what the government does. With government, you get, at best, the same service at a higher cost over time.

Take K–12 education, for instance. For years, we have been throwing money at poorly performing schools, yet it has not moved the needle on performance. Over the last 40 years, the federal government has spent $1.8 trillion on education, and spending per pupil in the U.S. has tripled in real terms.

Despite the dramatic increase in spending, there has been no notable change in student outcomes. (National Review)

The message is not that government is inherently bad; it’s not. The problem is that government failures are rewarded with more money so they can continue to fail in bigger and more spectacular fashion; private sector failures dry up and blow away, freeing up capital and people for potentially successful projects. The same needs to happen in education.

Instead, we get stuff like this that really pisses me off…

An Ohio mother's attempt to provide her daughters with a better education has landed her behind bars.

Kelley Williams-Bolar was convicted of lying about her residency to get her daughters into a better school district.

"It's overwhelming. I'm exhausted," she said. "I did this for them, so there it is. I did this for them." (ABC News)

She should get a medal for exposing an unjust law!
A mother lies about her residency in order to get her kids out of a failed school and into a better district and now she’s going to jail. This is an outrage. Will her kids really be better off with their mother in jail?

School districts are in place not for students, but to protect real estate values, ghettoizing the poor in low-property tax areas that doom the underfunded schools to failure.

District boundaries should be erased and all schools should receive more equitable funding. I know I sound like a liberal on this, but if we’re going to publicly fund education, it is illegal and immoral to give the poor and minorities the crappy end of the stick.

The free-market answer is to privatize it all
Let entrepreneurial teachers form small business teaching companies and shop their services. Collapse the department of education and return the money to the states. This will result in the good teachers rising to the top and getting paid more. The bad ones will be looking for another line of work.

Every parent can go shopping, voucher in hand. The bad schools will lose business, forcing the teaching company that runs it to lose its contract, making way for a new cadre of teachers to try their hand.

True, the rich will take their voucher and put their own money on top of it and go shopping for elite private schools, and some teaching companies will specialize in that, but there is no way in a free enterprise system that such activity will consume the entire market. Someone will have to go teach the poor kids for the basic price of the voucher, and there are plenty of great teachers who do that right now. Going free market won’t change that. Teachers teach because they love it, and many enjoy the challenge of teaching “the unteachable.”

If we want to improve education in this country, we need to free teachers from their bureaucratic shackles and stop jailing parents for violating illegitimate rules and boundaries.

Here’s to you Ms. Williams-Bolar. You are a hero in my book, as are those teachers who tirelessly toil in our nation’s worst school systems