Category Archives: education

This is Why We Can’t Have Qualified Non-STEM Graduates

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Joyce Chaplin, Professor of Early American History and Chair, American Studies at Harvard—Harvard American history!—illustrated why that is with this tweet of hers:

Joyce E. Chaplin @JoyceChaplin1

The USA, created by int’l community in Treaty of Paris in 1783, betrays int’l community by withdrawing from #parisclimateagreement today

Think about that.  Don’t be distracted by her foolishness on things climate, just think about what the simulated expert on American history tweeted.

Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) did, also, and he had a couple of tweets.

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

Just sad. Tenured chair at Harvard, doesn’t seem to know how USA was created. Not a treaty. Declaration+Revolutionary War+Constitution=USA.

And

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

Lefty academics @ my alma mater think USA was “created by int’l community.” No–USA created by force, the blood of patriots & We the People.

And

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

Treaty of Paris simply memorialized that fact, of our total victory at Yorktown. Her claim is like saying a plastic globe created the earth.

Not willing to accept the correction of her error, Chaplin expanded on it.

Joyce E. Chaplin @JoyceChaplin1

Sad. US Senator, Harvard Law degree. Doesn’t know that national statehood requires international recognition.

No, Madam (hard to address you as professor), international recognition only that—acknowledgment of a fait accompli.  Recognition creates nothing.

Holy cats.

The Rise of the PRC

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Graham Allison, Director of the Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, had some thoughts in The Boston Globe.  Here’s one that’s not in the usual political or military race discussion.

In STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…[the PRC] annually graduates four times as many students as the United States (1.3 million vs 300,000).

A better measure would compare the quality of those graduates and their programs so as to arrive at similarly qualified graduates.

Still, numbers have a quality all their own.  Let’s play a bit with these two.  Suppose, for instance, that 80% or American STEM graduates actually know their material, i.e., the graduates didn’t just sleep-walk their way through a mediocre program; they actually got and understood a good, solid STEM education.  That works out to 240k solid STEM grads.

Suppose that of the PRC’s graduates only 50% measure up to that standard.  That still works out to 650k solid STEM grads, or for you non-STEM folks, 2.7 times more quality grads than we’re producing.  That’s something to take seriously.

This is a long-term, generational, race that we can’t afford to lose.

Progressive Education

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The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last Sunday in which it extolled Los Angeles voters for elected a majority to the Los Angeles Unified School District school board that openly favored charter schools and the independence of those charters.  The WSJ also described the hysteria with which the teachers unions and the ousted school board vilified these folks who so favored actually educating the city’s children over being a jobs factory for disinterested teachers and piggy bank for union coffers.

Last month the [now ousted] board voted to support three bills before the state legislature in Sacramento that aim to limit autonomy for charter schools. One would prevent charters from appealing rejections by local school boards to county and state boards. The appeals process is one reason charters in Los Angeles have been able to expand despite school-board resistance.

And

Unions tried to vilify pro-charter candidates Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez by portraying them as tools of Donald Trump, though both were endorsed by President Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the state’s progressive former Senator Barbara Boxer.

The approbation of the one and the opprobrium of the other are well deserved.  However, the paper’s editors exhibited one misapprehension in the last sentence of their piece.

There’s nothing progressive about failing low-income minority kids.

On the contrary, this is completely progressive: it feeds the Progressive-Democratic Party position of nearly 100 years that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

It is through their form of education that the Progressive-Democratic Party seeks to produce Americans who are so deficient.

Safe Spaces and Clarity of Thought

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As The Wall Street Journal pointed out in an interview with Northwestern University’s President Morton Schapiro, the University of Chicago’s President Robert Zimmer has a view of the nature of safe spaces and the relationship between them and collegiate education.

incoming freshmen [should expect] to expect discomfort—not safe spaces—on his campus.

Schapiro, instead, wants to coddle his pupils as though they’re still two years old.

Northwestern President Morton Schapiro takes a gentler approach.

He believes that because learning is frequently uncomfortable, students need safe spaces—which for him means places where people who share an identity can retreat, relax, and recoup.

Of course, they already have that: their dorm rooms, where students of like mind gather along with the room’s occupants; the school’s student unions, where several groups gather, each one consisting in the main of students of like mind.  Forcing all of that into all of the other places that a school administer deems must be “safe spaces” destroys safety for all—especially those of whom demanders of “safe spaces” disapprove.

And Schapiro had this—and he was serious:

That might mean sharing a meal with students who are all of the same color or religion or watching a movie in a house designated for students from a certain background.

Back to segregation and separate but equal.

The interview continued in that vein.

In the end, though, there isn’t any safer space than the ability to think clearly, even if clear thinking often is uncomfortable.  School administrators who cannot understand both the difference between uncomfortable and unsafe and the critical dependency between safety and clarity of thought are unfit to sit in those chairs.  Their own inability to think clearly renders their entire campuses unsafe spaces.

Medicaid Cuts?

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Some conservative Republican Senators are looking to cut Federal transfers to the States earmarked for those States’ Medicaid programs.  Others are concerned.

[T]he [conservative Senate Republicans’] Medicaid plan could affect many more people and shift significant costs onto hospitals and states.

One State’s Medicaid program, though, should be paid for exclusively by that State and not subsidized by the other 49 through those Federal transfers. Medicaid is, after all, a state program by design, and Medicaid eligibility is determined by each State.  The Federal transfer subsidies are made the more egregious by the fact that each State determines its own citizens’ eligibility for Medicaid, and that eligibility is income-based—with the maximum income for eligibility in most States being a multiple of the Federal Poverty Guidelines.  This means that in those States, a citizen can be eligible for Medicaid funds even though, by definition, that citizen isn’t in poverty.  Other States ought not be required to subsidize, through Federal Medicaid transfers, such eligibilities.  Not only are the States are defining “low income” much too loosely, other States have to pay into those definitions.

If each of those other 49 were able to keep the monies collected by the Feds for transfer, they’d also have more money—of their own—with which to fund their own Medicaid programs, and each of the States, absent attendant Federal strings, would be freer to structure their individual Medicaid programs according to their own citizens’ needs and demands.  As it is, States wanting to structure their programs must waste time and resources pleading to the Feds “Mother, may I?” and then argue the matter.

Such State-initiated restructuring—subject to central government approval—already is beginning to include things like work requirements, drug testing and time limits on coverage, all of which would free up State resources for the State’s truly poor.  Federal cuts to transfers to State Medicaid need not interfere with this; on the contrary, such cuts would encourage needed restructuring, while moving to insulate each State from other States’ decisions.

Of course, such Federal transfer cut would have complex implications and require serious Federal tax code restructure and reform—the taxes the Feds transfer for Medicaid come from a variety of sources: individual and business income taxes, dividend and cap gains taxes, and on and on.

That just puts a premium on getting started.