Tag Archives: education

College for Everyone?

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Maybe not.  I’ve written about the question of college for everyone elsewhere.

A report on a different subject, The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America, posted at Knot Yet, has this in its “Conclusions and Implications:”

2 – How do we improve the job prospects for young adults who will not get a college degree but are willing and able to receive vocational training?
Surely improving the economy overall will help young adults without college degrees, as a rising tide lifts many boats, but how can these young adults be better prepared to enter the labor market even when the economy isn’t booming?  Even during recessions, there are decent jobs that go unfilled due to a lack of qualified applicants.  How can education and industry leaders work together more closely to target high-demand occupations that pay good salaries and formalize pathways into jobs in these sectors?  Countries like Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom are achieving good success with vocational training, apprenticeship programs and placements for their young adults in industries as varied as nursing, information technology, and advanced manufacturing.  There certainly seems to be untapped potential for the United States to follow in their footsteps….

The Urban Institute‘s report, “Expanding Apprenticeship: A Way to Enhance Skills and Careers,” identified in a footnote to the above quote, points out that apprenticing—a natural extension of VoTech training (and given the modern responsibilities of office occupations—these aren’t your grandmother’s secretarial jobs—to Office Occupations training, also)—offers significant economic benefits to non-college graduate graduates (using middle-skill jobs as the baseline):

Looking at earnings impacts during the first 2.5 years after exiting [an apprenticeship] program, [Kevin Hollenbeck] estimated that the net social benefits to apprenticeship were about $50,000 per apprentice, far more than minimal gains accruing to community college students and WIA trainees.  In other words, it takes little time for a significant payoff to apprenticeship training to accrue to the worker and society at large.  On a lifetime basis, Hollenbeck projects the present value of earnings gains less costs at $269,000 per apprentice, compared to $96,000-$123,000 per community college attendee, and about $40,000 per WIA trainee.

We need to bring the VoTech and OO programs—updated to today’s technologies and business needs—back into our high schools, including public, private, parochial, charter, and make all of these programs voucher-accessible to the extent the programs are not already.

The UI report is well worth reading in its entirety, as is the Knot Yet report for its separate, main subject.

A New Phase

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…in the Obama administration’s war on education.

The DoJ and the Department of Education have sent out another of their Dear Colleague letters, this time concerning the disparate impact of punishing minority students in our public schools.  Investor’s Business Daily summarized the letter,

Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Wednesday issued “recommendations” urging schools to find ways to avoid suspending or expelling students who act out.  …

The two Cabinet members argued that suspensions deny minority students time in the classroom….

And suspensions of “majority” students don’t have the same effect?  No, that’s not Eric Holder’s and Arne Duncan’s argument.  They argued in their 32 pg letter that “minority” students get the treatment disproportionately—disparately.  Never mind that these students misbehave…disparately.

The danger of applying this pernicious and racist disparate impact meme is clearly identified by Commissioner Gail Heriot of the United States Commission on Civil Rights in her remarks on the Commission’s School Discipline and Disparate Impact report:

There are two sides to the “disparate impact” coin.  Secretary Duncan focuses only upon the fact that, as a group, African-American students are suspended and expelled more often than other students.  By failing to consider the other side of the coin—that African-American students may be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms—his policy could easily end up doing more harm than good to the very group he is attempting to help.

Indeed.  This disparate impact policy on school discipline will have a disparate impact on minority students’ ability to get an education in a classroom full of disparate impact-protected misbehavers.  All while carefully ignoring the underlying causes of one group having a higher misbehavior rate than another group.

More, a footnote in Heriot’s remarks also hints at the fundamental lawlessness of the Obama administration [emphasis added]:

4 [page 98 of the report, the same page as the portion of Heriot’s remarks quoted above] I agree with Commissioner Gaziano that Title VI simply does not permit the Department of Education to proceed against schools on a disparate impact theory and that the Department’s regulation nonetheless adopting that theory, 34 CFR sec. 100.3, is therefore unauthorized by law.  It requires actual discrimination.  See Section 601 (Title VI) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 USC sec. 2000d (No person shall “on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”).  See also Alexander v Sandoval, 532 US 275 (2001). I also agree with Commissioner Gaziano that the problem with disparate impact analysis is not simply that it goes beyond what Congress authorized in Title VI; it actually contradicts Title VI.  If one group receives more school discipline than another because (for whatever reason) its members violated more school rules than the other, race-conscious efforts to alter the “disparate impact” are usually themselves discriminatory.

Sadly, this phase, in addition to denying minority students access to their education, is also another example of the unconscious racism of the Left.

Union…Hubris

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Neal Erickson, was convicted last spring of the repeated rape of a young boy from 2006-2009.  He was, at the time of his crime, a teacher at Rose City Middle School in Rose City, MI.

Erickson’s fellow teachers and his/their union, the Michigan Education Association, think that’s no big deal: they argued for leniency at the time of last spring’s sentencing, and now they’re looking for severance pay–$10,000—for Erickson.  Fellow teacher Sally Campbell wrote a letter to the presiding judge:

Neal made a mistake.  He allowed a mutual friendship to develop into much more.

Much more.  Yeah.  For three years, Neal made his “mistake.”  Hey-ho, nothing serious though, nothing to see here, says the union.  Even the district’s school board condones Erickson’s behavior; that body has refused to take any action against the teachers who rallied to Erickson’s excusal—not even public condemnation of their behavior.

When it became clear that the other teachers in the school were actively supporting Erickson, downplaying his rape behavior, and that the school board was refusing to do anything on its own, parents started taking their children out of the school.  Enrollment is down some 87%.

West Branch-Rose City School Superintendent Daniel Cwayna is all wide-eyed innocence:

I can’t speculate as to why the students have left, but there were certainly parents who vocalized that they were pulling their children out of school because of the teacher’s support[.]

Here’s a thought: maybe it’s because a teacher crew, a union, and a school board that condone child molestation can’t be trusted with children.

School Choice

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The Arizona State Court of Appeals (a level junior only to the State’s Supreme Court), Division One, ruled on a suit against that state’s creation of an education savings account (officially, Empowerment Scholarship Account) for grades K-12.  The Arizona ESA is designed to provide state funds to help parents send their children to schools of the parents’ choice (and away from failing schools), which might have included church schools.  The state had been sued on that last basis—the potential for state funds to be used in a religious environment.

The Appeals Court, politely, waved the BS flag at the suit:

The ESA does not result in an appropriation of public money to encourage the preference of one religion over another, or religion per se over no religion.  Any aid to religious schools would be a result of the genuine and independent private choices of the parents.  The parents are given numerous ways in which they can educate their children suited to the needs of each child with no preference given to religious or nonreligious schools or programs.  Parents are required only to educate their children in the areas of reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies, and science.

The ESA is neutral in all respects toward religion and directs aid to a broad class of individuals defined without reference to religion.  The ESA is a system of private choice that does not have the effect of advancing religion.  Where ESA funds are spent depends solely upon how parents choose to educate their children.  Eligible school children may choose to remain in public school, attend a religious school, or a nonreligious private school.  They may also use the funds for educational therapies, tutoring services, online learning programs and other curricula, or even at a postsecondary institution.  We therefore concur with the trial court that the ESA does not violate the Religion Clause.

Attorney General Eric Holder might want to keep this in mind as he sues Louisiana over that State’s use of state funds to subsidize parent choice.  The Louisiana case isn’t about separate of church and state, but it is, as was the Arizona case, very much about parents’ choice of schools for their children.

“Parents are required only to educate their children in the areas of reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies, and science.”  They can’t do that much when their children are trapped in failed schools.  Holder needs to get out of the way; the only serious outcome of his winning his suit is to keep Louisiana’s children trapped in that state’s failed public schools and so trapped in poverty.

Failed education is the first, and most important, link in the cycle of poverty.  By functionally denying children an education, Holder will be making it extremely likely that his victims grow up into either of two adult cycles of poverty: poverty and crime, or poverty and government dependence.

 

h/t AEIdeas