Culture matters

Rich, Black, Flunking:

The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense.

[..] [Professor Ogbu] and his research assistant moved to Shaker Heights for nine months in mid-1997. They reviewed data and test scores. The team observed 110 different classes, from kindergarten all the way through high school. They conducted exhaustive interviews with school personnel, black parents, and students. Their project yielded an unexpected conclusion: It wasn't socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students' poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents.

Ogbu concluded that the average black student in Shaker Heights put little effort into schoolwork and was part of a peer culture that looked down on academic success as "acting white." Although he noted that other factors also play a role, and doesn't deny that there may be antiblack sentiment in the district, he concluded that discrimination alone could not explain the gap.

"The black parents feel it is their role to move to Shaker Heights, pay the higher taxes so their kids could graduate from Shaker, and that's where their role stops," Ogbu says during an interview at his home in the Oakland hills. "They believe the school system should take care of the rest. They didn't supervise their children that much. They didn't make sure their children did their homework. That's not how other ethnic groups think."

(reddit, 1200 comments)

Zero tolerance

In Denver, a kid was suspended for bringing a nerf gun to school.

Remedial math education

"[Here] is an especially tremendous letter about a Cal State professor's experience teaching students who often failed out. It's lengthy and fascinating."

"You have been the victims of a terrible swindle"

In the interest of airing all perspectives, this is a letter from Berkeley professor Michael O'Hare to his students:

Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public university in the world. Meet your classmates, the best group of partners you can find anywhere. The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you, over twenty years in the best job in the world.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits. And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine. This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.

Swindle – what happened? Well, before you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future. (Not from California? Keep reading, lots of this applies to you, with variations.) They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job.

Young people who enjoyed these ‘loans’ grew up smarter, healthier, and richer than they otherwise would have, and understood that they were supposed to “pay it forward” to future generations, for example by keeping the educational system staffed with lots of dedicated, well-trained teachers, in good buildings and in small classes, with college counselors and up-to-date books. California schools had physical education, art for everyone, music and theater, buildings that looked as though people cared about them, modern languages and ancient languages, advanced science courses with labs where the equipment worked, and more. They were the envy of the world, and they paid off better than Microsoft stock. Same with our parks, coastal zone protection, and social services.

This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves. “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s? Posterity never did anything for me!” An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.

Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that. Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.

I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat (though your children will be even worse off if you don’t take charge of this ship and steer it). Your education was trashed as California fell to the bottom of US states in school spending, and the art classes, AP courses, physical education, working toilets, and teaching generally went by the board. Every year I come upon more and more of you who have obviously never had the chance to learn to write plain, clear, English. Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.

Many of your parents took a hike as well, somehow getting the idea that the schools had taken over their duties to keep you learning, or so beat-up working two jobs each and commuting two hours a day to put food on the table that they couldn’t be there for you. A quarter of your classmates didn’t finish high school, discouraged and defeated; but they didn’t leave the planet, even if you don’t run into them in the gated community you will be tempted to hide out in. They have to eat just like you, and they aren’t equipped to do their share of the work, so you will have to support them.

You need to have a very tough talk with your parents, who are still voting; you can’t save your children by yourselves. Equally important, you need to start talking to each other. It’s not fair, and you have every reason (except a good one) to keep what you can for yourselves with another couple of decades of mean-spirited tax-cutting and public sector decline. You’re my heroes just for surviving what we put you through and making it into my classroom, but I’m asking for more: you can be better than my generation. Take back your state for your kids and start the contract again. There are lots of places you can start, for example, building a transportation system that won’t enslave you for two decades as their chauffeur, instead of raising fares and cutting routes in a deadly helix of mediocrity. Lots. Get to work. See you in class!

Naturally I agree that California is an ungovernable mess, broken by a referendum system that allows simultaneous popular demand for services and lower taxes.

Rather than raising taxes, I would like to see California's public sector spending pared down to the level of (let's say) Texas.  Important services like Oakland's 911 could be re-funded if we cut enough handouts and nonessential services from elsewhere.

Professor O'Hare complains of teachers' "mindless administrative duties" and insufficient support from real school administrators and staff.  But why not just do away with half these administrative demands?  Let's spend less money on education and administration; get the government out of the business of directly employing teachers and administrators.  Privatize everything with charter schools and vouchers, allowing families to choose the schools they consider best.  You know, a market in choice and competition rather than this state-run bureaucratic nightmare with a monopoly on public funds and unionized teachers who can't be fired for poor performance.

Tenure sucks

So it is noted.

The value of student evaluations

Via Mankiw, fascinating findings from Scott E. Carrell and James E. West:

Results show that there are statistically significant and sizable differences in student achievement across introductory course professors in both contemporaneous and follow‐on course achievement. However, our results indicate that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement, on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes. Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value‐added but positively correlated with follow on course value‐added. Hence, students of less experienced instructors who do not possess a doctorate perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course but perform worse in the follow‐on related curriculum.

Student evaluations are positively correlated with contemporaneous professor value‐added and negatively correlated with follow‐on student achievement. That is, students appear to reward higher grades in the introductory course but punish professors who increase deep learning (introductory course professor value‐added in follow‐on courses). Since many U.S. colleges and universities use student evaluations as a measurement of teaching quality for academic promotion and tenure decisions, this latter finding draws into question the value and accuracy of this practice.

Teacher's unions still huge obstacle for education reform

Megan and the NYT explain.

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

California may move to block the Texasbook changes.

Notes from a high school civics class

My teachers were never this awesome.

Play them stereotypes

Texas to have the largest city in America without a bookstore.

Link blag

DIA: The fierce urgency of whatever

NYT: It's a fork, it's a spoon, it's a...weapon?

ABC: Tennessee woman arrested for poking someone over Facebook

WSJ: Reagan's secretary of state says the drug war is not working

Cato: Paul Krugman continues to be wrong

And the award of "best headline for something I skipped reading" goes to:
"Will Stimulating Nominal Aggregate Demand Solve our Problems?"

Calculus in 20 minutes

Part 2

Flight of the wingnut

Quote of the day

DIA:

"I don't recall ever having a sitting president addressing schoolchildren. For major events, maybe, but not the first day of school. The whole thing makes me angry as an American."

—Andrew Palomo, the parent of a student at Barrington Middle School in Illinois, panicking about the president's planned address to schoolchildren on September 8th. George H.W. Bush actually addressed schoolchildren in a national broadcast 18 years ago. It's odd what makes people angry these days.

Level playing field, hah

Jon Henke at TheNextRight:

Democrats argue that a Public Option won't crowd out private health insurance. It will just give them "healthy" competition. I'm skeptical, in large part because the government can and will simply legislate away the normal aspects of competition (the need to balance the books, to make cost/benefit calculations, and to negotiate on price/quality, rather than on "...or else we'll regulate you into submission").  Policies designed to keep down health care spending will not survive against politicians up for reelection.

The people responsible for Trillion dollar deficits are unlikely to usher in an era of health care spending restraint.

Other Democrats have just come right out and acknowledged that a public option would eventually crowd out private health insurance.

A public insurance plan able to use Medicare's bargaining power to secure deep discounts for its customers and ensure the maximum possible network would be cheaper and more efficient than private insurers. Over time, this increased efficiency would make the plan more attractive because it could offer more coverage for less money. As consumers recognized this fact, they would increasingly migrate towards the plan, and the public insurer would become, if not a de factosingle payer system, something close to it. The public insurer, in this scenario, is a game changer. [...] Insurers, predictably, howled that a public insurer with access to Medicare's market power would put them out of business. (Generally speaking, liberals agreed with that.)

Still other Democrats have pointed to the education system as an example of universal coverage with private alternatives.  On Twitter, Pandagon's Jesse Taylor argued that a Public Option wouldn't affect private insurance...

What healthcare choice can you exercise right now that a.) would be gone under a public option and b.) couldn't be taken away currently?

Politicians who make this argument should be confronted with this question: What school choice can you exercise right now that would be gone if we had vouchers and school choice for everybody?

Democrats refuse to level the playing field between the public and private options in education.  They will do the same thing in health care.

Hope for vouchers?

NewMajority:

On July 31, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) - one of the moderates from Maine - co-sponsored the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act (SOAR) along with Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Senator George Voinovich (R-OH). The bill would reactivate the D.C. School Voucher program, which is in danger of being eliminated after the current crop of students graduate. All Republicans should follow Collins’ lead.

This is a program that is great for the students, their families, their neighborhoods, etc. Both parents and students are happier, and the students are a full third of a grade ahead of their D.C. public school counterparts in math after only three years, as well as ahead in reading. The program costs between one-fourth and half of the normal cost of publicly-funded education in D.C. (depending on whether you believe CATO’s numbers or the Heritage Foundation). In return, the nation receives better-educated students who will help create a larger tax base in the future while diminishing their own odds of delinquency.

This program, however, was killed by teacher’s unions, who support Democratic candidates for congressional office and our current president. These same elected officials often talk about the big money special interests hurting Americans through Washington… Officials such as President Obama, whose children go to private schools. Such a shame the same opportunity doesn’t apply to poor minorities.

In short, the program is wildly successful and popular. If we want to help future generations be safer, more economically successful and help lead this country in the 21st-century, we would be wise to follow Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman on this issue.

At the very least, we would be holding the Democrats responsible for their claims of attempted fiscal responsibility- saving between $7,500 and $20,000 per student for 1,700 students (plus future participants in the program) saves at least $12,750,000 for the taxpaying citizens of this country. And all it would take is a simple vote. Easiest $12.75 million ever saved in Washington.

In sum, voucherizing private education results in:

- Happier families
- Better education
- Lower costs

It's win-win on everything except supporting that favored Democratic constituency: public schoolteachers' unions.

Misunderstanding markets, school vouchers edition

Schwenkler explains the basics.

Against Pat Buchanan

Buchanan mocks Sotomayor:

[Sotomayor] went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children’s books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you’re, frankly if you’re in college and you’re working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don’t think that’s college work.

Yglesias responds:

Learning a foreign language, if you’ve ever tried, is really hard. Meanwhile, it’s clearly also important for people living in the United States of America to do their best to learn to speak and read standard American English. But this takes hard work. Sonia Sotomayor, like many Americans, was born into a Spanish-dominant family. But she worked hard, learned English, went to Princeton, then Yale Law School, then had a successful career as a lawyer, as a District Court judge, as an Appeals Court judge, and now as a [nominee for] Justice of the Supreme Court. This is, as I’ve said before, a good inspirational story that parents are going to tell their kids to encourage them to work hard in school.

Unless, that is, you’re Pat Buchanan in which case you take a cute story about Sotomayor spending her summers re-reading classic children’s books she hadn’t had a chance to read as a kid and turn it into a pretext to mock her:

[..] normally Buchanan claims that Hispanics need to work harder to learn English. But faced with an actual example of someone working to learn English, he has nothing but scorn and spite.

I think the most unfortunate thing about The American Conservative (which Buchanan co-founded) as well as paleoconservatism in general is its association with Mr. Buchanan's classless racism (including antisemitism).

Ordinarily bad apples won't hurt the whole too much—you can find plenty of prominent rotten lefties and movement conservatives with similarly disturbing views or lack of class. See Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michele Bachmann, Michele Malkin, et. al.—they get called for it regularly.

But paleocon-ish numbers are few, so Pat Buchanan's prominence creates a disproportionate image problem for the related ideas of figures like Andrew Sullivan, Daniel Larison, and Ron Paul.

So I cringe whenever I see Buchanan's name mentioned—paleoconservatism would be much better off if he'd shut the hell up.

Deep thought

If Sonia Sotomayor isn't an intellectual heavyweight, what does that make Harriet Miers?

Voice of experience

"I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools."

—Karl Rove, arguing that Obama';s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor may "not necessarily" be smart.

DIA notes:

Mr Rove is most famous for managing the two gubernatorial and two presidential campaigns of George W Bush, who graduated from Yale University (1968) and Harvard Business School (1975).