Tag: education

Regulation doesn’t work

Those who put their faith in government control of society always turn to the same solution when it is pointed out that people simply don’t follow government dictates because their behavior has been dictated. But regulation never creates compliance unless it is backed up by the use of consistent and inordinate force, which is why it consistently fails. Consider the way in which English school employees are resisting being held accountable for their failing educational products:

A report published in the Times Educational Supplement on Friday outlines a number of tactics used by schools to outwit official inspectors. It was based on a TES internet forum that received 110 submissions from anonymous teachers in a month.

Cases highlighted included:

• Certain poor teachers being told to go off sick when Ofsted was due in;

• Schools sending badly behaved pupils on a trip – or telling them to take the day off – to hide them from inspectors;

• Pupils being required to learn decent lessons by heart and perform them in front of Ofsted officials;

• Top teachers from a school being put “on standby” to pose as staff at neighbouring schools “at 45 minutes’ notice”.

In 2010, a leading supply teacher, Tom Trust, told the Commons education select committee that he had been asked to take the place of teachers who had trouble controlling “terrible classes” during an inspection.

And in 2004, a secondary school in Hull was criticised after sending nine pupils on a week-long course and drafting in four teachers from another school to coincide with an Ofsted visit.

The lesson is that you can’t take a fundamentally bad concept and fix it by regulations and inspections. As Charles Murray has pointed out for years, the majority of the population doesn’t benefit from, isn’t interested in, and really isn’t capable of learning for learning’s sake. Instead of admitting this and allowing parents to have free rein in deciding what, and if, their children learn anything, the government engages in a vast and expensive system that is riddled with fraud and pretense from start to finish.

The concept of mass schooling is more than 100 years out of date. The shift from an industrial society to an information society rendered it not only irrelevant, but counterproductive. There is simply no reason for children to sit in classrooms with thirty other children staring at a teacher and a blackboard for eight hours a day; it’s not even effective propaganda anymore. They would learn more and get equally indoctrinated by spending an hour each day reading the New York Times and watching CNN.

The cruelty of affirmative action

Jeff Jacoby spells out the obvious consequences of affirmative action in education:

The inability of racial preferences to vault more minority students into high scholastic achievement shouldn’t come as a surprise. When an elite institution relaxes its usual standards to admit more blacks and Hispanics, it all but guarantees that those academically weaker students will have trouble keeping up with their better-prepared white and Asian classmates. Minorities who might have flourished in a science or engineering program at a middle-tier state college are apt to find themselves overwhelmed by the pace at which genetics or computer architecture is taught in the Ivy League. Many decide to switch to an easier major. Others drop out altogether.

This is the cruelty of affirmative-action “mismatch’’ — the steering of minorities to schools where they are less likely to succeed.

I saw this happening to quite a few black students at my university. Because I was a 100m sprinter, I was in the track team’s sprinter/jumper/hurdler group, which did all of its training and ate most of its evening meals together. It was probably the most racially mixed group in a predominantly white university. And it was really disturbing to see what a difficult time many of my black teammates had with collegiate academics, despite the fact that they were very diligent and hit the books extremely hard.

This wasn’t true of all the blacks on campus. One of my friends from the soccer team was also black, but he was a very smart guy, a doctor’s son who had attended an elite prep school. He was not the beneficiary of affirmative action, had no academic trouble, and went on to graduate from med school and become a doctor.

Affirmative action is disastrous because it doesn’t help people, but rather, sets them up to fail.

Homeschool or die part 422

One would imagine that the logic behind sending children to public school because otherwise they won’t learn how to read or do math would demand revisiting given the failure of one of the basic premises:

“The remedial numbers are staggering, given that the Cal State system admits only freshmen who graduated in the top one-third of their high-school class. About 27,300 freshmen in the 2010 entering class of about 42,700 needed remedial work in math, English or both.”

Note that this would tend to indicate 88 percent of the California high school seniors are graduating without reaching what is considered a high school graduate’s level of reading and/or mathematics.

Failing the stupid test

It’s not quite as dumb as buying a lottery ticket, but I’d be disinclined to hire someone who went and got a master’s degree instead of working because it reveals both a lack of foresight and an inability to understand basic economics:

I advise my own students, employees and relations to think carefully before signing up for expensive masters’ degrees. Most of the successful journalists, NGO leaders and authors I run across don’t have masters’ degrees and when the subject comes up they don’t recommend them to young people interested in these fields. There are exceptions where top teachers who are also leading people in a given field can become your mentor and help you enter a challenging and rewarding profession, but you have to look hard to find these.

I’m sure there must be some published authors with fancy literary degrees, but the strange thing is that barely any of the actual authors I know studied any form of writing in college whereas none of the English majors with advanced degrees I know have actually published anything.

And of the hundreds of guys I know in the game industry, I can’t think of a single one who has one of those ridiculous game development-related degrees.

Then there is this: “About one-third of people with master’s degrees make less money on average than a typical bachelor’s degree holder, said Stephen J. Rose, a labor economist with Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, citing U.S. Census data.”

Homeschool or die

I’m about as cynical about the basic concept of public schooling as it is possible to be. And yet, the American “education” system still regularly manages to surprise me to the downside:

A 7-year-old boy is being investigated by his South Boston elementary school for possible sexual harassment after kicking another boy in the crotch. The first grader’s mother, Tasha Lynch, says she was shocked by the school’s decision.

“He’s 7 years old. He doesn’t know anything about sexual harassment,” she said.

Lynch’s son, Mark Curran, said the boy that he kicked had been bullying him on the school bus ride home from Tynan Elementary last week.

“He just all of a sudden came up to him, choked him. He wanted to take his gloves, and my son said, ‘I couldn’t breathe, so I kicked him in the testicles,’” said his mother.

Lynch described a phone call she received from the school explaining that the case will be treated like sexual harassment, due to what it considers inappropriate touching.

“‘Your son kicked a little boy in the testicles. We call that sexual harassment,’” Lynch said the school told her.

Apparently the schools wish parents to teach their children to die when they are being choked. Or something. In any event, it does suggest an alternative strategy for kids who are being bullied. The moment that a bully lays so much as a finger on you, charge him with sexual harassment. That should keep him and his parents busy for the next few weeks… and if he dares to say anything about it later, it’s a simple trip down to the counselor’s office to lay a second charge.

Of course, if you’re a parent, what on Earth are you thinking to leave your children in what has clearly become a complete madhouse? I know, I know, your school is different. The teachers are excellent. Your kids are more than fine. And you know absolutely everything that goes on inside their school building for 36 hours every week, right?

Parents of kids in public school are almost uniformly idiots, at least in this one regard. They always claim to know everything about their children’s schools, and yet I’ve never met a single one who could even tell me the ratio of teachers to administrative staff or the average number of children in a classroom. Most of them can’t even tell me what classes their kid has, let alone his daily schedule. Yeah, you totally know what’s going on there.

The secularist’s dilemma

It’s hard to feel a whole lot of sympathy for the secular scientists who, in their ignorance of history, failed to understand that by attacking Christianity, they were opening the door to much less reasonable opposition:

Professors at University College London have expressed concern over the increasing number of biology students boycotting lectures on Darwinist theory, which form an important part of the syllabus, citing their religion. Similar to the beliefs expressed by fundamentalist Christians, Muslim opponents to Darwinism maintain that Allah created the world, mankind and all known species in a single act.

Steve Jones emeritus professor of human genetics at university college London has questioned why such students would want to study biology at all when it obviously conflicts with their beliefs.

He told the Sunday Times: ‘I had one or two slightly frisky discussions years ago with kids who belonged to fundamentalist Christian churches, now it is Islamic overwhelmingly.

What is particularly ironic is that the only reason all of those Islamic students are at English universities is because the secular humanists have lobbied for and defended open immigration for decades. It should be interesting to see what form the cognitive dissonance will take once the Islamic students start beating up their professors for theological impurity as they are known to do in their own countries. I suspect our brave secular scientists will be recanting their belief in Darwinian evolution faster than you can say “Neo-Darwinian synthesis”.

It’s rather like watching a Lovecraft novel in real-time. “We’re just going to open this little dimensional gate here. I’m sure whatever walks through will be friendly and behave in perfect accordance with my beliefs.”

No doubt all this will inspire an even more fervent attack on the danger to science posed by Christian Creationists and stickers on elementary school textbooks by the usual suspects. Then again, it may not be long before the first Somalis begin to show up in the Fowl Atheist’s biology classes…. It is funny. It is also well-merited. But don’t be mistaken, it is going to be ugly indeed. The only good that may eventually come of it is that the secularists may finally get on board with the great clash of civilizations that has been inevitable ever since the oil-hungry West woke the sleeping giant of expansionist Islam. But it’s entirely possible that they may prefer the collapse and/or subjugation of the West to the restoration of Christendom, once they realize that their shiny, sexy, secular society isn’t going to happen.

Theft by bureaucrat

Keep this in mind the next time a bond issue comes up for a vote:

Cities and states across the country are using money designated for specific purposes—such as fixing roads or sewers—in order to fill financial holes elsewhere, according to public officials and records. The moves are exposing municipalities to controversy, as federal regulators and local auditors are more heavily scrutinizing their finances to protect bond buyers and taxpayers.

This isn’t exactly new. When voters pass a school bond, they usually do so under the impression that the school will hire more teachers or buy computers. But, as has increasingly been the case over the last three decades, the school districts are hiring employees with no teaching function, to such an extent that half of all public school employees now are not teachers.

The corruption in America is both endemic and structural. This was probably the most shocking thing I realized after moving to Europe, where the corruption is more readily recognized and apparent. It wasn’t that there was more corruption, but that it was only a different form of it.

The amusing thing is the notion, popular among bureaucrats, that it isn’t stealing if you put it back after you get caught. “The city is cooperating fully with the investigation,” said Ivan Harris, an attorney at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP who is representing Miami in the SEC matter. He said the city “stands by the accounting for the transfers” because some of the funds had been unused for their designated purposes and other funds were replaced.

I’m surprised more bank robbers don’t give that excuse a whirl.

Republicans: the debate summary

Stephen Green renders it unnecessary for anyone to actually watch the debate:

6:09PM From Twitter: Explain and Co-opt Occupy Wall Street.

6:10PM Cain: Get a job, you filthy hippies.

I paraphrase, but not by much.

6:11PM Paul: “Cain has blamed the victims.” And then something about the Federal Reseve and bubbles and SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK.

6:11PM There were wild cheers, a few, to the chicken part.

6:12PM Paul: “I work on the assumption” that government is bad at almost everything.

And now I relove him.

This is the difference between a man who understands the core principles involved and a man who has absolutely no idea why things are the way they presently are. According to the principles of the international free traders and the Wall Street supporters, the jobs those “filthy hippies” should be pursuing are now in Korea, India, and China. The problem is that there are no shortage of highly educated, less expensive Koreans, Indians, and Chinese available to work those jobs.

Many young Americans went into debt, and were heavily encouraged to go into debt, in order to obtain unnecessary degrees for nonexistent jobs. Given that I was one of the first media figures to publicly call into question the value of a college education while many readers on this very blog argued vociferously against the anti-college case I was presenting, it is astonishing that so many people suddenly want to blame the young college graduates for believing in the inflated value of a college education and doing exactly what they were expected and instructed to do.

Education and the Iron Law

In which millions of university students are going to learn that they should have taken economics in high school:

MILLIONS of school-leavers in the rich world are about to bid a tearful goodbye to their parents and start a new life at university. Some are inspired by a pure love of learning. But most also believe that spending three or four years at university—and accumulating huge debts in the process—will boost their chances of landing a well-paid and secure job….

The supply of university graduates is increasing rapidly. The Chronicle of Higher Education calculates that between 1990 and 2007 the number of students going to university increased by 22% in North America, 74% in Europe, 144% in Latin America and 203% in Asia. In 2007 150m people attended university around the world, including 70m in Asia.

It’s not rocket science. If supply is increasing faster than demand, then wages for university graduates are going down even as tuitions rise. Any given university degree may or may not still be worth buying, but it is as stupid to attempt to determine if going to college today is worth it or not based on your experience of 20 years ago as it is to think you’re going to get a gallon of gas for $1.14. Value isn’t merely subjective, it’s dynamic.

Supply, demand, and education

It is ironic indeed that those who make a fetish of education are themselves so badly educated that the are unaware of the Law of Supply and Demand. It genuinely appears to surprise them that increasing the supply of university graduates would lower the value of a university degree.

More than a quarter of graduates do not have a full-time job three and a half years after leaving university. A staggering 115,000 youngsters who graduated in 2007 have been consigned to the unemployment scrapheap, lumbered with a dead-end part-time job or are still in education, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

The research will raise serious questions about the value of getting a degree when tuition fees increase from £3,290 to £9,000 next year…. It follows a study last week which revealed that one in five graduates earns less than a person who left school with as little as one A-level.

There is no question about it. The value of getting a degree declines with every additional degree that is granted. And as the number of less educated, more highly skilled workers declines, their value will increase. Furthermore, the expansion in the number of university graduates has coincided, unsurprisingly, with a significant decline in the quality of the educations they have received.