Tag Archives: education

Democrats Against Education

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Those of the great state of Illinois have become brazenly overt in their assault.  They’ve introduced 10 or more bills that target charter schools, seeking to restrict them severely or to shut them down altogether.

One of these bills would, effectively, cancel a law that lets charter schools to operate unhindered by state or union rules.  Imagine that.  It must be bad local control that allows a school to function without…benefit…of union oversight or absent the wisdom of the State.

Another bill would ban online classes, supported by these evil charters, that offer high schoolers things like Advanced Placement classes.  Can’t have students able to learn on their own schedules, now can we?

Yet another bill seeks to ban advertising by charters and presumes to dictate to these entities in their capacity of businesses (highly successful ones, too, from the quality of their student performances) what they’ll be allowed to pay their senior employees.  Non-union schools mustn’t be allowed to attract either customers or quality leadership.

Still another bill seeks to prevent new charters from opening in the same, or neighboring, ZIP code of a public school that closed in the last 10 years.  So much for the children of the South Side.  Where’s Eric Holder and his disparate impact?  Go figure.

The list goes on.

Will Governor Pat Quinn sign these bills?  Well, he does want to get reelected in this Blue state.

Spending on Education

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…and education results turn out to be wholly independent of each other—that is, spending more and more hasn’t produced better and better outcomes for our students—it hasn’t had any effect at all.  It’s been a waste of our tax dollars.  This is clearly indicated by Cato Institute‘s Andrew Coulson’s report State Education Trends: Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 Years.  What Coulson found is illustrated by this statement early in the report:

The state-by-state results of this investigation are reported in the subsections that follow, but the overall picture can be summarized in a single value: 0.075. That is the correlation between the spending and academic performance changes of the past 40 years, for all 50 states.

At the risk of lecturing to the choir, correlations run from 0.0 to 1.0 with 1.0 being perfect correlation—every bit of the effect being looked into is, in some sense, “explained” by the correlates.  0.0 means that there is no correlation at all, there is no connection between the two correlates at all.  In this case, 0.0 would mean there is no connection whatsoever between spending on education and educational outcomes.  That correlation of 0.075 isn’t materially different from 0.0.

This graph should drive the point home:

Notice that: spending goes up and up and up, and employment (teachers and administrators) goes up and up.  Enrollment—the number of students reached—stays flat.  The performance of that static number of students…stays flat.  As a nation (keep in mind, this is state-level spending; this study didn’t get to Federal spending, which would only add to the amounts wasted, for reasons that become obvious below), we’re spending more and more per student, we’re spending more and more per unit of student performance, and we’re not impacting that performance.  This failure has been going on for nearly 45 years, too—more than two generations of kids.  Our kids’ kids aren’t even benefitting from this government spending.

What was that about doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results?

Here are a couple of graphs for specific states, one relatively blue and one relatively red, that further illustrate the point:

And

Again, spending is up, and performance, now assessed by SAT scores, is unaffected.

Of course, there are naysayers about these results.  New Mexico Voices for Children, for instance, had this to say:

The Cato report assumes that education money is spent the same way it was in the 1960s and ’70s.  In fact, schools have been mandated to provide many more services—special education, after-school programs, computer sciences, etc—and today’s classrooms require much more technology than they did in the days of the mimeograph.

All true.  And all with no effect on those reading, math, science, or SAT scores.

Others insist that, since the number of students taking the SAT has more than doubled in the last 25-30 years, those scores would, of course, flatten out.  But this beef ignores the fact that Coulson provided such demographic adjustments (and others, based on race, socioeconomic status, and so on), and the results didn’t change.

The bottom line is that, at best, spending money (especially increasing amounts) on technology for tech’s sake, on after-school programs to provide extra time away from home for the kids, etc is a waste.  Spending money on increasing numbers of personnel to run these programs, or to supervise the additional personnel, even on more teachers per “classroom” has no effect.

We need to get back to basics, and focus spending on these subjects: reading, writing, arithmetic—the classic three Rs—and add to the mix, throughout K-12, American history/civics and budgeting/finance/economics, and teach these only.  Full stop.

Anything extra should come at the expense of the local community that wants the extra, not at the expense of other communities in a state, or in the nation.

 

h/t Watchdog.org

Unionizing College Sports

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In light of the NLRB’s ruling that Northwestern football players can join a union, I have a number of questions and concerns.

How many other college semipro sports will unionize?  Will athletic departments survive the costs of unionization?  Will ticket sales?

What will the NLRB’s ruling do vis-à-vis Title IX?

How will the vast majority of college and university programs that don’t make money from their athletic departments will survive?  How will those programs within athletic departments that don’t make money survive–will the “football” union be willing to subsidize them?  Even were they willing, will they have the money to do so for all?

Will academic students now be forced to pay union dues, since they “benefit” from the “football” union’s…bargaining?  Will other student athletes in other sports?

Unionized semi-pro athletes who happen to attend college represent a fertile training ground for future union membership.  This ruling sets up that farm system.

And as The Wall Street Journal cites NLRB’s Peter Sung Ohr [emphasis added]:

[C]ollege players aren’t student athletes who get an academic scholarship in return for competing in a sport. They are “employees” and thus eligible to have a union collectively bargain with their university employer.  Mr Ohr explains that college players spend 40-50 hours a week at their sport during the season, often more than on class work, and that they are essentially paid for their work via a scholarship that covers tuition, fees and room and board worth about $61,000 a year.

Not a trace of irony there.  No, Sir.

The WSJ added this parting point:

Don’t look for the football players to give up their gourmet training tables in solidarity with the geeks majoring in pre-med.

Be all right with me if colleges shut down their athletic programs, converted them all to IMs, converted existing athletic scholarships to academic scholarships of the same value, and stopped offering athletic scholarships altogether.  Put the “student” back in “student athlete.”

Are Liberals Embarrassed by Patriotism?

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Or are they just afraid of it?

Fort Collins High School won’t allow its students to celebrate America and Americanism.  Full Stop.

Administrators’ pseudo-rationale is this:

  • they didn’t want to offend anyone from other countries or immigrants
  • they didn’t want to be exclusive to any other country
  • they just really did not want to make anyone feel uncomfortable

Yet the students are required to participate in Cinco de Mayo celebrations.  The students, though, aren’t as dumb as the high school’s…management team…thinks they are.  One student, all of 16 years old:

There are men and women fighting for our country and we should be able to celebrate that and be proud that we live in a country where we are allowed to vote—the right to free speech. They won’t even let us celebrate it.

Never mind that “anyone from other countries or immigrants” are here to be in American, to reap the benefits of American culture.

Never mind that there isn’t any other country here, so that exclusivity is a cynical red herring.

Never mind that these administrators make the rest of us Americans, including their own students, uncomfortable with their…attitude…or that their attitude is offensive to the rest of us Americans.

Americans don’t count in Liberal minds.

As Todd Starnes put it

shame on the administrators at Fort Collins High School for treating American school children like second-class citizens.

Update: Fort Collins High School Principal Mark Eversole may have seen the light, or at least he’s reversed course and is allowing the students to put on their ‘Merica Monday–renamed America day.  Here’s the letter he wrote to parents:

We apologize for our recent decision regarding My Country Monday and that it was seen as not patriotic. This could not be further from the truth. The original intent of Spread the Love week at Fort Collins High School was to unify the student body. When students first proposed “Merica Monday,” we felt that it was against this unifying theme and disrespectful to our country. Merica is a slang term that is often used in a negative stereotypical way to describe life in the United States. This is what led us to discuss alternatives with students. We were surprised that our community interpreted our actions as anti-American. We are a proud public school in America and support many activities to celebrate our great nation. Due to this outpouring of sentiment and misinterpretation of our intentions, we have decided to rename the first day of Spread the Love week to “America Day” as opposed to “Merica Day.” We look forward to enjoying the creativity and energy of our students as they celebrate their patriotism next week.

This doesn’t entirely settle the matter, but it’s a step–however grudgingly taken–in the right direction.  Todd Starnes has more.

As do I: Merica is a slang term that is often used in a negative stereotypical way….  Maybe I’ve lived a sheltered life, but I’ve not heard it in any way other than neutrally.  Be that as it may, there’s also a so what factor, and another one: so were Yankee and Yankee doodle slang terms used in negative stereotypical ways.  Eversole would do well to review some American history the next time he thinks about deprecating American patriotism.

Income Inequality and Education

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Senators Lamar Alexander (R, TN) and Tim Scott (R, SC) are proposing legislation that would address income inequality (while acknowledging that income inequality by itself is not, of necessity, bad) by addressing a critical aspect of opportunity equality (or inequality): education.

While I disagree with the details of the plans, the two Senators most assuredly are on the right track.

Alexander’s proposed bill, the Scholarships for Kids Act, would transfer Federal dollars to States, and each State then would determine how parents could apply the funding.  Scott’s proposed bill, the CHOICE Act, would use Federal transfers to States to facilitate each State’s ability to supplement existing scholarship programs for “military families, those with children facing physical challenges, and students in impoverished areas.”

I remain adamantly opposed to using our Federal tax code for social engineering; that simply distorts the market being engineered.  Such Federal transfers have two additional seriously negative aspects: they maintain State addiction to Federal handouts, and they transfer citizens’ Federal tax dollars from, for instance, those of bankrupt Illinois to those of more flush Iowa.

It is encouraging, though, to see Alexander and Scott acknowledging the need for each State to be responsible for its own education spending (albeit with OPM) and for identifying and addressing its unique education needs.  We just need to eliminate Federal involvement (and resulting Federal diktats) from the equation.

For all that, the proposed legislations are steps in the right direction, and I don’t oppose them outright—but we need to take care in the next Congressional session to move these programs, and other programs involving Federal transfers, in the direction of eliminating the transfers altogether by eliminating the taxes that produce the funds being transferred.  Those funds should not be taken out of the pocketbooks of those who earned them.

Equality of opportunity will inevitably lead to unequal incomes (and to unequal outcomes, generally), but that opportunity will allow everyone to prosper to the extent each one is willing to work and has the talent to do so.  Education is one of a very few critical aspects of that opportunity.