Category Archives: education

Mamdani’s Procrustean Education Bed

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The Progressive-Democratic Party’s proudly Socialist candidate for New City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced that he wants to truncate children under the age of 5 years to shorten them to fit his short Education bed.

Zohran Mamdani said late last week he wants to end the gifted and talented program for kindergartners in New York’s public schools. News reports say he’d allow this accelerated instruction only beginning in grade 3, with a campaign spokesman arguing 5-year-olds shouldn’t be “subjected” to a policy that “unfairly separates them right at the beginning of their public school education.”

The only equality that socialists will allow is the equality of outcome, which guarantees equality at the lowest level. They cannot tolerate equality of opportunity, an equality that acknowledges all Americans’ right to achieve their full potential in life, an equality that respects all Americans, including those whose full potential might be less than that of others.

Socialism, instead, demonstrates its contempt for Americans by saying none of us can compete on our own, so government must eliminate competition.

Wrong Answer

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This time it’s Jason Riley, of The Wall Street Journal, who’s missing the street for the potholes. He wrote in his Tuesday op-ed,

The latest results from the National Assessment of Education Progress were released earlier this month, and they weren’t pretty. High-school seniors recorded the worst reading scores since 1992, and math scores were the lowest since the current test began two decades ago. Elementary-school students have also lost ground. Just 31% of eighth-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the science assessment.

And,

The ramifications extend far beyond our borders. The Program for International Student Assessment exam is a global assessment of 15-year-old pupils. In 2018 only 8% of US test-takers scored in the top tier in mathematics, compared with 15% in Canada, 18% in Japan, and 29% in Hong Kong. Today’s students will populate tomorrow’s labor force, and employers who rely on workers with math, science, and engineering backgrounds have been complaining for decades that too many Americans are uninterested or ill-prepared to fill these jobs.

 

But then he wrote,

Which brings us back to Mr Trump, who wants to make it harder for US companies to hire foreign nationals. On Friday the president announced that he was imposing a new $100,000 fee on applicants for H-1B visas, designated for skilled migrants who disproportionately specialize in science, technology and math occupations.

It’s true enough that we benefit from suitably skilled foreigners who enter our nation legally—those immigrants and Riley’s “migrants.” But the problem, which seems to have blown right by him, even as he wrote it, is identified by those employers…complaining for decades that too many Americans are uninterested or ill-prepared to fill these jobs.

The answer to the problem is not making it easy for qualified immigrants to enter our nation legally, even as that helps at the margins. The answer is to fix our education system. That must begin with eliminating, root and branch, the rent- and fee-seeking teachers unions who collect massive dues and lobby (too successfully) for government money while they work just as assiduously to block local, State, and Federal efforts to improve the public school systems those unions hold in thrall. An early move in this beginning step would be to recognize that teachers and their unions who work for public schools are public servants and public service unions just as are the civil servants and their unions working for any other arm of government, and bar them from striking, just as many civil servant unions are barred.

Our education system would be further improved by getting those unions and their hip-pocket politicians at the various levels of government out of the way of voucher and charter schools and home schooling, accepting that competition works toward product improvement in education as well as it does in industry.

At that point, the cherry on top would be to have local, State, and Federal funding not go directly to the schools, but instead follow the student to the school or home to which he transfers, or with which he stays after having transferred, for use then by the school or parent receiving the student.

What is their Value, Really?

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What is their Value, Really?

In a Sunday Wall Street Journal article on universities’ penchant for investing their endowments in private equity (as opposed to instruments bought and sold on public exchanges, these are bought and sold in private deals between the university and one or another private (i.e., not traded on an exchange) entity, or rarely a private deal to which a publicly traded entity might also agree.

A few exceptionally talented, or lucky, endowment managers seemingly did very well in this environment. Yale’s late David Swensen got an annualized return of 13% over the course of his management.

But how valuable are those investments, really? The WSJ‘s subheadline reads

Universities and other institutions have built up large private-equity holdings, but they are now lagging behind the S&P 500 and aren’t easy to shed

And this:

And much of what those funds earned for their investors in that time was on paper; endowments and other institutions were getting less and less cash that they could put to work in the booming stock market.

And this [emphasis added]:

…making it hard for managers to get the prices they want for the companies in their portfolios. Meanwhile, institutions have struggled to find investments that hedge against stocks and private equity without further eroding returns—and the problem has gotten worse with the stock market’s latest rally.

The value of any investment is what someone is willing to pay to get it. The initial value of those private equity investments in these endowments is what the endowment managers paid to get the private entity or a piece of it. Now they’re moving to sell some/most/all of these privately held pieces, but there are few to no buyers at those initial prices or anywhere near those prices.

This is Yale’s continued position:

Yale said in a statement that it remains committed to its private-markets strategy. “We trust that sophisticated investors, especially our partners who know us best, understand this,” the school said.

That sounds like the typical arrogance of Know Betters.

What is, in the end, the true value of those privately held pieces? It’s still whatever a buyer is willing to pay for them. And that calls into question two things: an accurate valuation of those entities and the wisdom of relying so heavily on non-publicly traded entities for endowment investments.

Former Yale endowment private-equity manager Tim Sullivan:

One of the reasons we hire these guys is because they know when’s the right time to sell an asset[.]

The problem here is that a potential buyer won’t necessarily agree that it’s the right time to buy that asset.

It’s tough to grow, or even just to maintain the value of, an endowment based on phantom valuations of its holdings.

Not Entirely Sufficient

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Harvard University and the Federal government apparently are nearing a deal that would pressure Harvard to abide by federal regulations around merit-based hiring and admissions as well as protecting students’ civil rights in return for a $500 million payment to “workforce and vocational programs.”

Pressure only, though, no overt, absolute requirement.

The administration wouldn’t appoint a monitor to oversee Harvard’s compliance with the deal. The university would pledge to continue to abide….

That’s a serious weakness in the supposed deal. Harvard’s management team already isn’t abiding by those regulations, and it already isn’t protecting its students’ civil rights—much less better reducing the school’s antisemitic bigotry and its pro-terrorist stance. Since it’s not doing, it can’t be continuing.

An addition to this deal is needed: Harvard should be required to put up a cash bond, say $500 million, for 10 years against its performance of its pledge. At the end of those 10 years, should the university actually have abided, the principal would be returned, and the accrued earnings on the principal paid to those workforce and vocational programs.

School Choice and a Teachers Union

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In Wyoming, the State’s legislature passed and the governor signed legislation to create school choice for the State’s parents and children.

Wyoming lawmakers created the state’s first K-12 education savings account (ESA) program in 2024, effective in the coming school year. This spring they expanded eligibility to families of any income. The $7,000 accounts can be used for private-school tuition, tutors, homeschooling, or other education expenses. Nearly 4,000 students applied for them this fall.

In the first year, those 4,000 students amount to about 3.5% of the State’s K-12 population (some arithmetic involved), a pretty rapid start to the take-up. The main teachers union in the State, the Wyoming Education Association, is busily objecting and hailing the State into court to get that legislation overturned. The union is claiming that the State’s constitution requires the Legislature to maintain a “complete and uniform” public school system, the State cannot fund “private education that is not uniform.”

This is a distortion of the facts, including of what the State’s constitution says. This is that constitution’s Art 7, Sect 1, in its entirety:

Legislature to provide for public schools. The legislature shall provide for the establishment and maintenance of a complete and uniform system of public instruction, embracing free elementary schools of every needed kind and grade, a university with such technical and professional departments as the public good may require and the means of the state allow, and such other institutions as may be necessary.

That’s the short and sweet of it. There’s nothing in there that would preclude the State from establishing, supporting, or merely funding alternative means of education. Indeed, that last clause, and such other institutions as may be necessary, being separate from the clause mandating a system of public instruction, explicitly authorizes alternative means of education structured entirely differently from, or the same as, the public system.

This is just another example of a teachers union trying to deny parents their right to see to their children’s education in their own way. It’s the union way or nothing. That’s just union abuse of education and of the students in it out of its own greed: those alternative means would not be controlled by the union.

The Wyoming constitution can be read here.