Tag: education

Teachers aren’t just stupid, they’re increasingly dishonest to boot:

Of all the forms of academic cheating, none may be as startling as educators tampering with children’s standardized tests. But investigations in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere this year have pointed to cheating by educators.

Needless to say, this behavior was not only entirely predictable, it was predicted by many on both sides of the test standards issue. Personally, I don’t care either way. As far as I’m concerned, attempting to fine-tune mass public education through technical measures falls well into the lipstick-on-a-pig category.

The only interesting thing is how easily corruptible the great influencers of tomorrow’s leaders have turned out to be. At least the great destroyers of the global economy were playing for personal millions. These petty thieves were willing to sell out their charges for less than $3,000!

It is amazing how people can stubbornly resist reaching the obvious conclusion:

Don’t bother showing up for school. The doors are locked and the lights are off.

Peach County is one of more than 120 school districts across the country where students attend school just four days a week, a cost-saving tactic gaining popularity among cash-strapped districts struggling to make ends meet. The 4,000-student district started shaving a day off its weekly school calendar last year to help fill a $1 million budget shortfall….

The results? Test scores went up.

So did attendance — for both students and teachers. The district is spending one-third of what it once did on substitute teachers, Clark said. And the graduation rate likely will be more than 80 percent for the first time in years, Clark said.

Imagine if they went to zero! Consider this. Children learn to crawl, walk, and speak multiple languages without ever sitting in a classroom or having a formal teacher. Why, then, is it assumed that they absolutely require one in order to learn history, math, or science? Especially when one takes into account the demonstrated ignorance of those who have had the supposed benefit of 12 or more years of mass education.

Ironically, those who constantly preach the value of a college education clearly missed economics 101:

Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.

Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments. This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up.

Going 100k into debt in order to obtain a job that pays $22 as a photographer’s assistant is not an intelligent action. The correct answer to the question about attending college is “it depends”. What college, what degree, and what job prospects? Remember, since the median debt for attending private, nonprofit colleges is $22,380, that means that you have to keep in mind the average cost of 5 years without wages, the cost of the degree, and the debt.

The statistics on the monetary advantages of a college degree are misleading because the number of college graduates has risen dramatically as have the number of women obtaining college degrees. The equation has changed, which is why it is necessary to sit down and crunch the numbers before you automatically assume that a college degree from the best university that will accept you makes any sense. I thought it was particularly interesting that the article mentioned the way in which a debt burden that can repel potential life partners… one assumes this is generally aimed at women with degrees.

Like most things, it comes down to supply and demand. Because full-time college enrollment has increased 44 percent since I graduated in 1990. The US population has increased 20 percent, thus rendering a generic college degree approximately 24 percent less valuable while the cost has risen 63 percent in constant dollars. Even if you assume that you graduate successfully, your education dollar is worth about 28 percent of one spent in 1990. And since only 53% of college undergraduates manage to graduate in six years – a statistic recently increased from the five-year measure in order to keep it above 50% – the chances are nearly one in two that you’re literally buying nothing, not even a piece of paper.

Basically, if you have to borrow money or if you are at all prone to not finishing what you start, you shouldn’t even think about going to college. And if you do go, get a degree in something meaningful, not outdated liberal arts degrees in English, Art History, or Business. You’ll learn more about business running a fast food franchise for a summer than you will in six years of college. Throw in a little reading of Peter Drucker, Sun Tzu, Malcolm Gladwell, Dilbert, and whoever the business author du jour happens to be and you’ll know more management-speak too.

Eventually the obvious percolates through to the mainstream:

The notion that a four-year degree is essential for real success is being challenged by a growing number of economists, policy analysts and academics. They say more Americans should consider other options such as technical training or two-year schools, which have been embraced in Europe for decades.

As evidence, experts cite rising student debt, stagnant graduation rates and a struggling job market flooded with overqualified degree-holders. They pose a fundamental question: Do too many students go to college?

In short, as I have been saying for years, yes. Education is a fine thing. Knowledge is wonderful. Most people aren’t actually interested in either. But what amused me most was this quote: “‘It’s sad to know she’s going to miss that mind-opening effect of an undergraduate degree,” Popkes said. “To discover new ideas, to become more worldly.'”

I don’t know how to break this gently to Mrs. Popkes. But there is nothing terribly mind-opening about learning how to do keg stands, provide adequate blow jobs, or do the walk of shame after getting banged silly by a drunken 20 year-old. And it is most certainly not worth an investment that is measured in tens of thousands of dollars. Frankly, her daughter could obtain all that vital knowledge for free in a single night at the right suburban house party.

I was asked to provide my opinion about this situation.  And my opinion is that Marquette absolutely did the correct thing.

On Thursday, university officials announced that they withdrew an offer to Seattle University professor Jodi O’Brien to serve as the dean of Marquette’s College of Arts and Sciences. The university said in a statement that O’Brien “was not the person who could best fill this very important position”and that the school had made “oversights” in their search process. According to the Associated Press, O’Brien’s scholastic writings include sociological studies that detail lesbian sexual activity.
The professor expressed her disappointment to the AP in a recent email.

“At this time the only comment I can offer is to confirm that I was offered the position of Dean and I accepted it, but there was an intercession by the President before my appointment was announced officially,” O’Brien wrote. “I’m very disappointed. The College of A&S at Marquette is strong and vibrant and I was looking forward to working with the students and faculty there.”

Several faculty members and students protested the decision, claiming that O’brien’s sexual orientation was the reason the university decided to rescind the offer.

First, the university’s reason for rescinding its job offer to the woman is totally irrelevant.  The Constitutionally protected right to free association means that the university is free to employ or not employ anyone, for any reason.  While it’s true that this right has been massively and persistently violated for decades under the dishonest facade of “civil rights”, discrimination is, in fact, still practiced at every American university.  The only difference between the past and present is the targets of that discrimination.

Second, academia would not be in the dire straits in which it finds itself now, a ludicrous and increasingly irrelevant joke to the genuine intellectuals of the world, if more of the Christians who founded most of the world’s great universities had not fallen for the lie “academic freedom”.  “Academic freedom” is a transparent fraud; it is the university version of the dictator’s democratic mantra: one man, one vote, one time.

These results from a recent Pew Survey are precisely why I am so often amused when atheists point to the lower percentage of religious belief among the young compared to the elderly as a sign of anything but the inexperience and ignorance of youth.  While it is true that a few of the idiot teens of today will be the influential decision makers of tomorrow, they are as unlikely to retain their political, religious, and philosophical attitudes as they are to retain their hairstyles and drinking habits.

There is, after all, something that will happen to these 18-29 cretins.  It is called experience of the real world.  The opinions of maleducated ignoramuses who have been purposefully sheltered from not only real economics, real decision making, real independence, and real work, but from the benefit of the experience of the best minds in human history as well, are no more relevant than the opinions of the millions of hamsters kept as pets in America’s households.

Of course the 18-29 crowd is pro-progressive and uncertain about whether socialism is to be preferred to capitalism.  They’ve been indoctrinated by anti-capitalist progressives for between 12 and 18 years without ever being forced to knowingly confront the consequences of progressive politics and socialist economics.  But their opinion about capitalism is no more significant than their opinion about gravity or the universal principle of entropy; as Greece is learning, you can vote for all the progressive politics you want but eventually the market forces you deny will swamp you in the end.

It’s not just the youth who are fools, though.  The general dichotomy between the dislike for militias and the support for state and civil rights underlines what everyone here already knows.  Most people are idiots.

Okay, these murderous attacks on Chinese schools are getting to the point that it is straining even my dark sense of humor to find the comedic silver lining:

Seven children at a nursery school in north western China have been hacked to death and at least 20 more injured in the ninth attack involving children in just over a month…. the Chinese government has ordered intense security at all schools, redeploying thousands of troops and equipping security guards with restraining poles and pepper spray. In Beijing, the police say they have stopped seven more attempts on schools in the past month. However, the extra security has so far been unable to protect children in the countryside, and parents have voiced their panic.

Ace’s pre-school teacher acquaintance was arguing that real-world experience is a plus, so there’s no denying that surviving knife attacks is not only educational, but should serve the survivors well in preparing for a future battling against seven-foot tall irradiated cockroaches that shoot fire from their eyes. Of course, given that the latest Chinese caedophile also killed the kindergarten teacher, she might not be around to make the argument.

It is becoming ever more clear that we are approaching the madness season. I know there are plenty of smart people who are dubious about the concept of history’s engine, but it has to be admitted, the science of mass human emotion did predict an increase in this sort of behavior. What is frightening is that we are still at the peak of Wave 2… it’s hard to imagine what chaos will rule at the depths of Waves 3 and 5.

Since we’re on the subject of homeschooling, here is an amusing, if slightly bitter one courtesy of Secular Homeschooling:

1 Please stop asking us if it’s legal. If it is — and it is — it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?

2 Learn what the words “socialize” and “socialization” mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts.

3 Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.

4 Don’t assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.

5 If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a “reality” show, the above goes double.

6 Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You’re probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you’ve ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.

7 We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.

8 Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.

9 Stop assuming that if we’re religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.

10 We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.

I have to admit, I don’t mind in the slightest when people start asking me about homeschooling in an offensive manner. Being an Award-Winning Cruelty Artist, I tend to rather enjoy seeing how speedily I can force them to retreat from a prosecutorial pose to the position of a desperate, wild-eyed defense attorney who knows his client is headed straight for the chair.

I find these administrative shenanigans to be more than a little amusing:

More than 22,620 Texas secondary students who stopped showing up for class in 2008 were excluded from the state’s dropout statistics because administrators said they were being home-schooled, according to Texas Education Agency figures. But that’s where the scrutiny of this growing population seems to end, leaving some experts convinced that schools are disguising thousands of middle and high school dropouts in this hands-off category. While home-schooling’s popularity has increased, the rate of growth concentrated in Texas’ high school population is off the chart: It’s nearly tripled in the last decade, including a 24 percent jump in a single year.

“That’s just ridiculous,” said Brian D. Ray, founder of the National Home Education Research Institute. “It doesn’t sound very believable.”

Now, keep in mind that the public school administrators who are cooking their attendance books this way are the very bureaucrats that some misguided individuals genuinely believe should be in charge of deciding whether parents are permitted to homeschool their children or not. But at least it is clear that the administrators have finally come to terms with accepting that homeschooling is here to stay.

There can be little question that this malfeasance by the public school officials will be utilized as an excuse to justify calling for more administrative control over homeschooling in Texas. But even an education major should be able to detect the ironic weakness in that argument.

School choice advocate Charles Murray attacks standardized testing:

The evaluation by the School Choice Demonstration Project, a national research group that matched more than 3,000 students from the choice program and from regular public schools, found that pupils in the choice program generally had “achievement growth rates that are comparable” to similar Milwaukee public-school students. This is just one of several evaluations of school choice programs that have failed to show major improvements in test scores, but the size and age of the Milwaukee program, combined with the rigor of the study, make these results hard to explain away.

So let’s not try to explain them away. Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another?

This is tremendously amusing to me, as a longtime opponent of school vouchers and the various permutations of the conservative goal to fix the public schools. But you cannot fix that which is working precisely as designed! Murray simply doesn’t understand that group schooling doesn’t work any better than group reading or group training does.

Imagine if the only way you could read was to get together in a group of 30 and have a professional reader read out loud to you. How often would you read? How fast would you read? How much would you read? The excellence of the reader, the mellifluousness of his voice, would be largely irrelevant. The primary problem with education is the group fetish that has pervaded it ever since the Prussians pioneered the one-size-fits-all approach.

The failure of school choice to provide results was bound to end up in an attack on the standard, just as the many failures of various teacher-based programs always have. As Rothbard explained, empiricists always abandon their empiricism in favor of ex post facto rationalizations whenever they don’t get the results they expected.