Tag Archives: education

The NAACP is Right on This

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There’s a school district in Prince George’s County, MD (which works out to suburban DC), that’s looking to set up two public (not private) high schools for immigrants and second generation students who don’t speak English—and to teach in their old country language.

The NAACP is objecting, and they’re right on this one, albeit for some wrong reasons. Bob Ross, president of the Prince George’s County branch of the NAACP, had this:

It risks turning Prince George’s County into a segregated school system[.]

He said the setup is a violation of Brown v Board of Education, and he’s close. He’s also worried that this will divert resources from the existing school system, and he’s right here, too. This objection, though, isn’t that important; any effort to add schools will divert those resources.

Tehani Collazo, Senior Director of Casa’s Schools and Community Engagement section, disagreed, also with reason:

If we are saying all [English-language-learning] students must go to these schools, that’s one thing. But we are not.

Like the many that already exist across the country, the International Schools are schools of choice. They are built on an innovative and proven model that will help support the needs of our most struggling group of learners—English Language Learners.

They’re both missing the larger point, though, about American education in this context. The segregation argument is close, but it misses.   Brown was about forced segregation; this is voluntary.

On the other hand, “schools of choice” are appropriate for a lot of things, but not in this context. There can’t be any choice about being taught in English.

Immigrants need to assimilate into American culture; it’s our culture that has created the opportunities we have and that underlie our enormous success. Our culture isn’t learned by students and their families holding themselves apart from it, which is what happens when students go to American schools to learn in their own language instead of in English.

Language is thought, and English is the language of American culture. It’s entirely likely that English needs to be taught with greater emphasis in those of our public schools that have large fractions of their student populations who don’t speak a version of English natively. However, public funds should not be spent on public schools that will teach only in a foreign language. That’s not how American culture will be learned; that’s not how immigrants will assimilate.

Academic Apostasy

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What are our post-high school academic institutions coming to?

Dartmouth Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Mike Mastanduno said this:

More than I’d like to, I hear this: “It’s really hard to teach on Thursday morning because of what the students do on Wednesday night.” I hear that from faculty. What I never hear, and what I’d love to start hearing from students is, “It’s really hard to do what we want to do on Wednesday night because of what’s expected of us on Thursday morning.”

Dude—party, man. It’s what we’re here for.

Maybe things might change a little, though. Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon is looking to make changes.

He wants to reorganize the dormitory system into “house communities” in which students will tend to reside for their college career instead of moving around frequently. Shockingly, they will

have dedicated space for study and social interaction….

Say, what!? Dude, chill.

But wait—there’s more:

I am asking the faculty to consider a number of ways to increase the rigor of our curriculum—from curbing grade inflation, limiting lay ups, to not cancelling classes around celebration weekends, to earlier start times for classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Dude, hold up—don’t listen to that Dean….

 

Dude….

Even the AP Is Catching On

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They fact-checked President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, and they found these things.

OBAMA: At this moment—with a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry and booming energy production—we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth.

THE FACTS: Job growth has been…fueled in part by lower-paying jobs…which have replaced many higher-paying positions…. Part-time jobs also remain elevated: there are still 1.7 million fewer workers with full-time jobs than when the recession began in December 2007.

[F]aster hiring hasn’t pushed up wages much. They have been growing at a tepid pace of about 2% a year since the recession ended 5 1/2 years ago. That’s barely ahead of inflation and below the annual pace of about 3.5% to 4% that is typical of a fully healthy economy.

And

OBAMA: I am sending this Congress a bold new plan to lower the cost of community college—to zero.

THE FACTS: Zero for qualifying students; an estimated $60 billion over 10 years to the treasury.

And

OBAMA: Thanks to a growing economy, the recovery is touching more and more lives. Wages are finally starting to rise again. We know that more small-business owners plan to raise their employees’ pay than at any time since 2007.

THE FACTS: A survey of small businesses by the National Federation of Independent Business does show that a rising proportion plans to raise wages. But plans to raise pay aren’t the same as actually raising them.

Average hourly earnings rose just 1.7% in December from 12 months earlier, according to the Labor Department. That’s about half the rate that is typical of a healthy economy….

And on.

Colleges, Again

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Frank Mussano and Robert Iosue opened their op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with this claim:

College tuition rates are ridiculously out of hand.

They’re right, too. College costs, and not just their tuition costs, are way out of whack with the value received. One evidence of that (eliding interest costs) is the extreme difficulty too many college graduates have paying back their student loans out the salaries their degrees get them.

They continued:

[T]uition has surged more than 1,000%, while the consumer-price index has risen only 240%. The percentage of annual household income required to pay the average private four-year tuition reached 36% in 2010, up from 16% in 1970.

They spent much of their piece describing where a college’s money goes, a number of a college’s cost drivers, and the way in which much of the money is outright misallocated, and they’re not far wrong.

Mussano and Iosue then suggested that one way of getting costs back under control would be to do a business model-type financial audit of the schools.

However, they missed one important driver of cost: demand. I’ve written before about the lack of any universal need for a college education.

We as a society need to de-stigmatize the lack of a four-year degree. College isn’t for everyone. Not everyone is cut out for college, especially right out of high school; colleges don’t always teach what the student wants, or needs, on a practical level; and where they do, they’re not cost competitive with other sources of that knowledge and training.

Trade schools, office skills training, and the practical, hands-on here’s-how-you-do-this-stuff-to-make-a-living-at-it training available at junior colleges (two-year colleges that are nearly always cheaper than two years at a four-year college) are excellent places to learn to earn a living.

The trades are critical skills, too. Who can build a house or an office building—or live or work in one—without a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter? Who can build a road or an internet or telephone network without heavy equipment operators, electricians, someone who understands networks at the construction level?

Skills like these don’t need a four-year degree, especially in women’s studies, or anthropology, or English, or even STEM. Yet without those skills, our country would come to a screeching halt. There’s a crying need for STEM graduates, even for English and anthro majors. But there’s a bawling need for the trades. We can’t use the STEMs or English and anthro types without them.

Oh, and demand: with the commensurately lowered demand for college, watch tuition and other college costs come down.