Tag Archives: education

Incompetence

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I’ve written before on Federal racism.  In the present case, though the racism may seem apparent, it looks a lot like plain and simple incompetence, instead.  Eric Falkenstein offers this hors d’oeuvre, quoting from a Wall Street Journal article:

Justice says that out of 4.4 million loans approved between 2004 and 2008, 525,000 went to African-American or Hispanic borrowers, of which some 210,000 paid higher fees or rates than the average paid by similarly situated “non-Hispanic White Borrowers.”

It goes without saying large numbers of white borrowers also paid higher than the average of all whites. It also goes without saying large numbers of minorities didn’t pay higher rates, though Justice isn’t interested in the average of what minorities paid, only that some minorities paid higher than the average of whites.

If this sounds like statistical malpractice, it’s apparently habitual. In a rare instance where defendants fought back, two Los Angeles car dealers recently won dismissal of a complaint accusing them of favoring Asian over Hispanic car buyers because 600 of 1,300 “non-Asian” buyers were charged higher loan terms than the average of Asian buyers. Notice that 600 is about half of 1,300. As the dealers noted, Justice’s claim amounts to an assertion “half of one group is above average, which means that the other half is below average.”

The WSJ article itself (also linked to in Falkenstein’s post) goes on:

…experiments…suggest salespeople make generalizations about which groups are likely to bargain hardest.  Even black salespeople have been found to lead off with a higher quote when meeting a black shopper.  Women are said to be less aggressive bargainers than men.  Other generalizations suggest themselves….

Who knows why these differences turn up in the data, but no law of nature says every cultural subgroup must be equal in its determination to cadge every nickel of advantage in every transaction.

What’s the outcome of these sorts of things?  Taking a just concluded DoJ beef against Bank of America’s Countrywide bank as an example,

Bank of America (without admitting fault) will hand over $335 million so Justice can distribute money to African-Americans and Hispanics (though not whites) who were charged more than the white average, with any surplus funds explicitly reserved for donations to…groups that typically align with the Democratic Party.

However, it’s not just DoJ idiocy.  This is the stuff on which affirmative action programs are built.  And it’s quite apart from the soft bigotry that says the victimsbeneficiaries of affirmative action programs are simply, of their nature, so incapable themselves that they must be given preferential treatment in order to keep up.

Is this actually evidence of deliberate nefariousness?  The cynic in me is conflicted.  On the one hand, it’s plainly racism by DoJ.  But on the other hand, DoJ seems entirely too incompetent to be this racist.

Government-Guaranteed Loans and Taxes

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This is a brief tale of taxes and loans as they apply to American education.

In a time when our governments think the answer to correcting our public education system’s decades-long failure to improve our children’s education, as demonstrated by poor and unimproving standard test scores, is to continue their decades-long practice of throwing our taxpayer money at the system (what was it that Albert Einstein said about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results…?), some of our state governments, and the good citizens therein, are rejecting the idea and doing something different.

As  The Daily Caller reports, in the recent special election in Colorado, the voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot proposal that would have raised, yet again, taxes earmarked for public schools, when no discernable improvements from those increases were expected (by those taxpayers).

Florida, on the other hand, has been doing something different since the turn of the century: it’s lowered taxes by giving tax credits to businesses that donate to a non-profit  K-12 scholarship program that are equal to those donations.  The scholarships then are awarded to low-income families to help pay their costs in sending their children to private schools selected by those parents.  (Notice that phrase, too: “help pay.”  The families have to commit significant funds of their own; by having their own skin in this game, they have incentive to ensure their children do well in the new school.)

The effect of this Florida program is four-fold: the public schools, now having to compete for students, are doing a better job of teaching the children they retain.  The low-income families get better choices in how to get their children educated.  The state saves money: despite losing $1 in education tax revenues, it actually saves nearly $1.50 because despite the stereotype, it’s cheaper to educate a child in a private school in Florida than it is in a public school.  The local communities come out ahead because a dollar taken in taxes is only about six bits actually spent back into the local community due to the internal friction of the various government agencies each taking their taste of that tax dollar, whereas that same dollar left in the taxpayer’s hands is entirely spent in one form or another.

Now let’s look at government-guaranteed student loans for college (those guarantees, don’t forget, are covered by tax dollars from all of us).  What are these loans used for, and what should they be used for?

This table from The Daily Caller is instructive.

Bachelor's Degrees AwardedLook at this table against the backdrop of the global economic competition in which the United States is engaged.  From business, to resource development, to production, to defense, and everything in between, the United States needs well-trained and -qualified scientists and engineers.  What are our students studying?  Visual and Performing Arts.  Education(!?).  Social Science (how are we doing in this field, by the way?).  What are international students, the students of our competitors, studying?  Engineering.  Physical and Life Sciences.

If we’re going to have a government student loan program (I think we should not, but that’s another story), might it not be a little bit beneficial to target those loans in some way?  How about, if we’re going to commit our tax dollars to covering student loans at all, we at least use the program to encourage our students to study—and to stay with through graduation—the engineering and science, technology, and/or mathematics that will actually do our nation and our society some good, instead of just spotting our unformed (and uninformed) high school graduates the bucks they want simply to follow their bliss?