Dave Friedman's Soul of Wit

Universities Should Think Like Corporations

Ann Althouse has a blog post up about law professors intent when they write exams. Being too smart to have gone to law school, I don't have anything to add to the conversation about professors' intent when they write law school exams, however, one commenter alluded to the idea that there should be a more efficient way of getting a legal education than scrawling answers to a professor's questions in a blue book. I essentially agreed with this point but applied it to all of higher education, saying that higher education has become, in recent decades, unjustifiably expensive. Someone took this to mean that I was prediciting the disappearance of universities; this was not my intent, and I clarified my thoughts:

Regarding my comments above, which someone apparently took to mean that I think universities will disappear: that's not my argument.

My argumnent is that universities, as currently organized, have become bloated and expensive, and, at some point, most universities (if not all) will face the problem of students and their parents balking at the high prices charged, and will seek out better returns on invested capital.

This happened in the auto industry with the advent of Japan's entry into the US market, and it is currently happening in the airline industry. Merely because academia likes to think of itself as free from the pressures of the competitive market does not mean that academia is free of those pressures.

Academia, as with all other institutions, has to compete for scarce capital. Entities that can give consumers (students) the same education as traditional academies, while charging less, will prosper in the coming decades. Academia will stultify unless it radically reorganizes itself.

I don't mean to argue that this change will happen immediately, or that universities will disappear. I do mean to argue, however, that academics have to start thinking of their product in terms of the return on capital invested by their consumers. Otherwise they will find themselves in a declining industry.

I should add to this comment that the soon-to-retire President of my university, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, essentially agrees with this argument, in a letter sent to alumni via email:

I have, for the past year, been thinking about a book addressing American higher education in the 21st century. Some of my observations have been shared with this community and in various public talks around the country. Those who study this subject understand too well that the current model of a master passing information to a novice face-to-faceformat that has changed only slightly since the Middle Agesis on the brink of a major upheaval. Life, as we know it in the Academy, will be reintegrated on three levels: (1) how students learn and faculty teach; (2) where these activities take place; and (3) from what sources scholarship will flow. Not insignificant is a coda about how the development and transfer of new knowledge will be paid for. It is difficult to cast aside centuries of work habits, but, if the economics are to remain viable in the next 100 years, universities must change their modes of operation. And, as we have seen the last few years, changeeven when it ! is inevitable and arguably for the betterdoes not come easy. I foresee it as gradual and nationwide once it begins, taking at least a decade and ranging from coast to coast. I am prepared to further develop my ideas on this subject. I will begin by giving the Sir George Watson Lecture at Sulgrave Manor in England next November. I plan to test the hypothesis that those who can do - can also teach.

I would argue that if presidents of major universities think in the same manner as does your humble blogger about the nature of universities and their prospects in the coming century, then my argument should be heeded.

History, of course, will show whether universities are up to the task of figuring out how to right themselves.

Reading is Fundamental

Readers of a certain vintage will remember the "Reading is Fundamental" PSAs of the late 70s and early 80s.

Well, it seems the issue is not so much how kids learn to read but rather that they simply learn to read. This seemingly simple postulation--that is more important to get kids to read than to adhere to a certain pedagogical methodology--is controversial:

Kolbeck and the other teachers at P.S. 29 are following the dictates of what’s called Balanced Literacy, an equal parts celebrated and maligned teaching technique ordered into the city schools three years ago by Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein. Balanced Literacy is more of a catchall concept than an actual curriculum, interpreted slightly differently in every school system that uses it, but it is invariably rooted in an education philosophy known as whole language. Unlike traditional so-called phonics-based programs, in which kids repeat and memorize basic spelling and pronunciation rules before tackling an actual book, whole language operates on the presumption that breaking down words distracts kids, even discourages them, from growing up to become devoted readers. Instead, students in a Balanced Literacy program get their pick of books almost right away—real books, not Dick and Jane readers, with narratives that are meant to speak to what kids relate to, whether it’s dogs or baseball or friendship or baby sisters. Over time, the theory goes, kids learn the technical aspects of reading—like contractions, or tricky letter combinations painlessly—almost by osmosis. The joy of reading is meant to be the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine of spelling and grammar go down.

The one thing I remember from learning to read was being embarrassed at not knowing how to pronounce "island" (I thought the "s" was pronounced). I was reading a bunch of stories with the word "island" in them and just pronounced "izland" to myself, until one day I heard another kid read the story aloud: "island," without the "s." And you know what? I learned to read.

I don't remember doing much reading of Dick and Jane books (those seem to have been popular when my parents were kids) but I do remember a teacher speaking contemptuously of them.

Correlation

Overheard in the elevator in my apartment building.

Well-dressed thirtysomething MILF to her ten year old son: So what are you doing in school today?

Her son: I think we're doing somethiing called homonyms.

MILF: Do you know what those are?

Son: No.

MILF: Do you want to know?

Son: OK.

MILF: Well, they're words that sound the same, but which are spelled differently.

Son, thinking for a second: Oh, you mean like two and too?

MILF: Exactly. It's important you learn this stuff so you can get a good education and have a good job like Mom and Dad.

I suspect there is something to the idea that a ten year old's ability to understand linguistic abstraction correlates highly to high earnings potential in the future. Of course, this does not mean that a ten year old who does not understand such abstractions will not earn a decent living in the future. It just is an example of the notion that income is highly correlated with intelligence.

Of course, there are some very stupid people who nonetheless earn large incomes: we call these people celebrities and politicians.

Finally: it is a sure bet that this ten year old kid doesn't attend public school.

Skepticism Required

Dispatches From the Culture Wars was contacted by a recruiter for the New York City Public Schools and asked to put up a blog post letting readers know that the city is accepting applications for its NYC Teaching Fellows program, in which the City will pay for a lot of the costs associated with going to grad school and getting certified.

Teaching tends to attract the idealistic, and the prospect of teaching for New York City's public schools is something that ought to be approached with a healthy degree of skepticism.

I commented:

I would advise anyone considering this route: understand what you're getting yourself into.

Teaching in NYC public schools is not for thin-skinned idealists.

This program aims to get certified teachers to teach in the city's struggling schools: you will not be teaching calculus to future Nobel laureates at Stuyvesant. Add to that the very, very poor pay and the very high cost of living in New York City.

I have nothing but admiration for people willing to teach in New York City's public schools, but, though it is a service to the community, it is a very tough job. Assess this program very critically. Make sure you do a complete assessment of your current financial position, as well as a cost of living assessment for New York City.

Make sure you understand the ways in which both the teachers' union and the city bureaucracy can and will work against you and your efforts.

Be skeptical. Be very, very skeptical and make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. This is not suburban idyll.

(Disclosure: I am not a current or former teacher in New York City. I am, however, the former spouse of a New York City public school teacher, and I saw daily the demoralizing effects of the New York City public school system.)

Grad School

I am skeptical when I hear the argument that degrees earned from grad school confer on graduates skills that are otherwise unavailable or unattainable.

Certainly, there are professions such as medicine and biomedical research where graduate school is required: the human body is too complex a subject to be understood without many additional years of post-collegiate study. And there may be a good argument that people should not be able to practice law without having attended law school: a person on death row who is relying on you to appeal his case literally places his life in your hands. I may even be willing to admit that the guy who designs the bridge you use to get to work every day should have some sort of professional training and certification because, if he gets his numbers wrong, you fall into the river and drown.

But, the vast majority of jobs out there, including, I would argue, the vast majority of lawyers' practices, can be done without the benefit of a graduate school degree. This assertion, however, does not imply that the vast majority of jobs will be done by people without graduate degrees.

Attaining graduate dergees has become a useful filtering tool for lazy recruiters. "If John Doe can survive three years of law school, then, why, he certainly can sell mortgages for XYZ bank!" Such a statement is of course a non sequitur; all a law degree does in this instance is signal that a person can master a complex body of material. If ever there was a complex body of material, it would be mortgages. But it's also an imprecise signal: the person who masters a sufficient amount of law to pass all his law school classes may be very bright, but also be terrible salesman. On the other hand, the guy who can sell ice to the veritable Eskimo, but who dropped out of college, is a salesman par excellence.

Graduate school has utility. It does not have the universal utility that its proponents and recruiters claim it to have.

Jane Galt has an interesting post about this subject.

Numeracy

Instapundit, his wife, and Ann Althouse have jumped on the boys-are-illiterate meme as of late. For those boys (and girls) who are literate, and therefore get a college degree, a greater risk awaits them in the real world: innumeracy.

There is a story that has been around for years, and I don't know if it is apocryphal or not, which says that an anti-gun organization came up with the statistic "each year since 1960 the number of children killed by guns had doubled."

Try that statistic out on someone.

Then sit down and calculate what that means: More people have been killed by guns in 2005 than have ever walked the face of the earth. Clearly, more people cannot have been killed than have walked the face of the earth--that's a paradox. A logical impossibility. Despite our ability to calculate such a number, it nevertheless could not happen.

Carl Bialik, who writes the Numbers Guy column for the Wall St. Journal notes that many journalists don't know much about numbers. He spoke with one Richard Holden, a former editor, who now runs seminars for journalists about how to use numbers correctly:

Mr. Holden focuses on numbers that probably are correct, but are poorly or mistakenly presented by newspapers. "An editor's job is to take things that don't make sense and try to make sure that they do," he says. "When readers plunk money down for a newspaper, they're not buying it to have questions raised; they're buying it to have questions answered."

I asked Mr. Holden, 56 years old, if journalists have gotten better at numbers since he began the seminars. "I haven't been disappointed in 10 years" of looking for new examples, he replied. He said attendees at his seminars often don't find the problems in his examples. "I'm surprised with professional newspaper people, how frequently it goes right over their head," he says. "Many times, I'm greeted by 30 blank stares."

Part of the problem is embedded in the culture of the profession, Mr. Holden says: "Journalists always prided themselves on knowing so little about math." (Specialists in business, economics and sports were notable exceptions.) He also points out that many journalists can sail through college and journalism school without taking a class in math or statistics. Numerical knowledge often gets acquired on the job. "You learn by doing, and learn somewhat from your mistakes," he says. "Hopefully we're kind of spreading the word a little bit by doing this."

Bialik ends his column with a quiz based on examples of erroneous or illogical thinking about numbers. I've copied the quiz here, and inserted my answers. I think I did fairly well:

1. Boosting the state's economy was a central tenet of Governor Smith's campaign as a challenger in the 2002 election. His supporters note that statewide economic growth of 3.5% in 2004 was a new record under Gov. Smith. This doesn't tell us anything about economic growth under other governments. For all we know the economy could have shrunk markedly in years prior to 2004. Growing an economy from a smaller base isn't necessarily an accomplishment, especially if the economy is still smaller than its largest size.

2. A crowd of 93,356 saw the U.S. women's soccer team beat China, 1-0, to clinch the World Cup. That was the largest crowd to witness a women's athletic event since the 1996 soccer final at the Atlanta Olympic Games, which drew a record 84,975 fans.
What year did the US women's soccer team beat China 1-0? For all I know this happened prior to 1996. (I actually know that this happend *after* 1996, but how many readers pay that close attention to the successes of US women's soccer?)

3. Visa announced that its new credit card will carry an adjustable rate set monthly at four percent above the prime rate, in line with other variable-rate cards.
What's the prime rate? Does the prime rate change on a monthly basis, which this sentence implies? According to Wikipedia, the prime rate is not adjusted frequently, so does it really make sense to say it's "set monthly at four percent above the prime rate"?

4. The glaciers that span much of Greenland are melting quickly; one of them has more than doubled in speed, moving at a rate of 5.2 miles an hour, compared with 2.3 miles an hour a year earlier.
Is the rate of 5.2 miles an hour unprecedented, or is the rate of 2.3 miles per house unusually slow? There is no context given to relate the speed of 5.2 mph to historical averages or medians.

5. College grades carry the most weight, making up 56% of the final score. Fourteen percent is composed of test scores, recommendations and activities. The final 29% comes from 10 other criteria.
56 + 14 + 29 = 99. Where's the other 1%?

6. Since the displaced soil had a volume of more than 450,000 square yards, construction required many cranes.
What's the capacity of one crane? What's the time frame in which the displaced soil had to be moved? What's the normal number of cranes to be used to move displaced soil? This is a statistic without context: it gives the reader no information regarding the volume of displaced soil, whether that amount is unusual, what the rate of displaced soil removal would be with one crane, etc.

7. The charity said it would keep 30% of the funds it raises, with the remaining 70% divided as follows: grants to professors, 35%; grants to students, 20%, and grants to universities, 15%.
35% + 20% + 15% does not equal 100%. So, where does the remaining money apportioned to grants go?

8. Battling Hunger, a food pantry, said it delivered 110,000 tons of food to Detroit last Thanksgiving. The food was delivered to help residents there overcome the effects of a severe economic slump, particularly in the automobile industry.
How many tons of food is normally delivered to Detroit?

9. The football program has a 100% graduation rate, near the top of Division 1 colleges. The national average is below 50%.
How does a college graduate more than 100% of its football players?

10. Chipper Jones is batting just .176 in 85 at-bats with the Braves. But he has had more success as a pinch hitter, with five hits in 30 at-bats, including one that clinched a playoff spot.
Hitting five times in 30 at bats gives a batting average of 16.6% which is less than 17.6%. How is a lower percentage of successful at bats "more successful"?

The English Language

George Orwell is most well known for giving us the concept Orwellian, as expressed in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. What he is less well known for is his essay "Politics and the English Language" which, along with Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, serves as a primer on cogency and clarity in writing.

Orwell concludes his essay:

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Orin Kerr notes that many academics fail to heed these writers' advice, to the detriment of the advancement of knowledge:

Blogging pushes you to write clearly and simply; the format rewards clarity of expression more than traditional law review articles do.

I think Kerr makes a very good point: too many academics, perhaps inured to the prose stylings of their peers, ignore clarity in favor of obfuscation.

On a related note, I am in the middle of reading physicist Brian Greene's book The Elegant Universe. Greene's prose is elegant and literary in the same way that Stephen Jay Gould's and Oliver Sacks' is: accessible, engaging, and, well, literate. Would that there were more academics like Kerr, Gould, Sack, and Greene who understand the importance of conveying their ideas clearly. Many would find, I suspect, a far greater audience for their ideas were they able to express them concisely and congently.

Derrida et al would have done well to heed Orwell and others of his ilk.

On Elitism and Perpetuating the Myth of the Ivy Leagues

As the son and grandson of Ivy Leaguers (Princeton and Cornell, respectively, if you must know) people look askance at me when I tell them my alma mater is a member of the A-10, and not the Ivy League. (The Ivy League refers to an athletic league, the members of which happen to be some of the most exclusive schools in the nation.)

It is apparent that the utility of an Ivy League degree is questionable, as the higher education market has become more competitive over the past several decades. A graduate of my college can speak with, understand, and repudiate the arguments of any Ivy League graduate. My father, I'm sure, will attest to my strong will and my ability to refute arguments put forth by him or another Ivy League product.

The point is an essential one: the cognitive differences between an Ivy League graduate and a non-Ivy League graduate are not very substantial if the non-Ivy League graduate went to a relatively competitive school. All this raises the question: why does the lore of the Ivy League persist, despite ample evidence that it remains a relic of outdated thinking?

Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for that question; however, the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell attempts to explain the Ivy League's tortured history of race, college admissions, and that liberal bogeyman, diversity:

By the nineteen-sixties, Harvard’s admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into one of twenty-two dockets, according to their geographical origin. (There was one docket for Exeter and Andover, another for the eight Rocky Mountain states.) Information from interviews, references, and student essays was then used to grade each applicant on a scale of 1 to 6, along four dimensions: personal, academic, extracurricular, and athletic. Competition, critically, was within each docket, not between dockets, so there was no way for, say, the graduates of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant to shut out the graduates of Andover and Exeter. More important, academic achievement was just one of four dimensions, further diluting the value of pure intellectual accomplishment. Athletic ability, rather than falling under “extracurriculars,” got a category all to itself, which explains why, even now, recruited athletes have an acceptance rate to the Ivies at well over twice the rate of other students, despite S.A.T. scores that are on average more than a hundred points lower. And the most important category? That mysterious index of “personal” qualities. According to Harvard’s own analysis, the personal rating was a better predictor of admission than the academic rating. Those with a rank of 4 or worse on the personal scale had, in the nineteen-sixties, a rejection rate of ninety-eight per cent. Those with a personal rating of 1 had a rejection rate of 2.5 per cent. When the Office of Civil Rights at the federal education department investigated Harvard in the nineteen-eighties, they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates’ files. “This young woman could be one of the brightest applicants in the pool but there are several references to shyness,” read one. Another comment reads, “Seems a tad frothy.” One application—and at this point you can almost hear it going to the bottom of the pile—was notated, “Short with big ears.”

Gladwell continues:

At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. Fuelling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take two students with the same S.A.T. scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the Ivy Leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road.

The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modelling agency than like the Marine Corps, and, sure enough, the studies based on those two apparently equivalent students turn out to be flawed. How do we know that two students who have the same S.A.T. scores and grades really are equivalent? It’s quite possible that the student who goes to Harvard is more ambitious and energetic and personable than the student who wasn’t let in, and that those same intangibles are what account for his better career success. To assess the effect of the Ivies, it makes more sense to compare the student who got into a top school with the student who got into that same school but chose to go to a less selective one. Three years ago, the economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale published just such a study. And they found that when you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears.

...

Krueger says that there is one exception to this. Students from the very lowest economic strata do seem to benefit from going to an Ivy. For most students, though, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person you’ll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school. You’ll make good contacts at Penn. But Penn State is big enough and diverse enough that you can make good contacts there, too. Having Penn on your résumé opens doors. But if you were good enough to get into Penn you’re good enough that those doors will open for you anyway. “I can see why families are really concerned about this,” Krueger went on. “The average graduate from a top school is making nearly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, the average graduate from a moderately selective school is making ninety thousand dollars. That’s an enormous difference, and I can see why parents would fight to get their kids into the better school. But I think they are just assigning to the school a lot of what the student is bringing with him to the school.”

Krueger's point is a good one: the school from which one graduates matters relatively little; a better predictor of financial success is related to one's character. George Bush did not become President of the United States merely because he has an Ivy League resume. He has an Ivy League resume, and he was able to use his personality to cultivate relationships with those who were in a position to elevate him to an office of power. One can be the smartest person in the world, and not have any interpersonal skills. With the possible exception of wallowing in the sheltered halls of academia or the law, there is very little room in modern society for a genius devoid of interpersonal skills, to advance very far.

Raw intelligence is not what matters. It is useful, just as brute strength is useful to a baseball player. But the strongest man in the world will not do very well if his teammates don't like him, and he develops a reputation as a cantankerous and aloof person.

Gladwell continues:

In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended [Hunter College Elementary School, in New York City] between 1948 and 1960. This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157—three and a half standard deviations above the mean—who had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they weren’t nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be. “Although most of our study participants are successful and fairly content with their lives and accomplishments,” the authors conclude, “there are no superstars . . . and only one or two familiar names.” The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender. Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. “Non-intellective” factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, “after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives.” It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough.

Gladwell concludes with the most salient point of his article: perpetuating the myth that the Ivy Leagues confer upon their graduates a ticket to a halcyon world of achievement and gloy is an exercise in brand management:

I once had a conversation with someone who worked for an advertising agency that represented one of the big luxury automobile brands. He said that he was worried that his client’s new lower-priced line was being bought disproportionately by black women. He insisted that he did not mean this in a racist way. It was just a fact, he said. Black women would destroy the brand’s cachet. It was his job to protect his client from the attentions of the socially undesirable.

This is, in no small part, what Ivy League admissions directors do. They are in the luxury-brand-management business, and “The Chosen,” in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years. In the nineteentwenties, when Harvard tried to figure out how many Jews they had on campus, the admissions office scoured student records and assigned each suspected Jew the designation j1 (for someone who was “conclusively Jewish”), j2 (where the “preponderance of evidence” pointed to Jewishness), or j3 (where Jewishness was a “possibility”). In the branding world, this is called customer segmentation. In the Second World War, as Yale faced plummeting enrollment and revenues, it continued to turn down qualified Jewish applicants. As Karabel writes, “In the language of sociology, Yale judged its symbolic capital to be even more precious than its economic capital.” No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain. The admissions directors at Harvard have always, similarly, been diligent about rewarding the children of graduates, or, as they are quaintly called, “legacies.” In the 1985-92 period, for instance, Harvard admitted children of alumni at a rate more than twice that of non-athlete, non-legacy applicants, despite the fact that, on virtually every one of the school’s magical ratings scales, legacies significantly lagged behind their peers. Karabel calls the practice “unmeritocratic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst,” but rewarding customer loyalty is what luxury brands do. Harvard wants good graduates, and part of their definition of a good graduate is someone who is a generous and loyal alumnus. And if you want generous and loyal alumni you have to reward them. Aren’t the tremendous resources provided to Harvard by its alumni part of the reason so many people want to go to Harvard in the first place? The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let in—that those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.

Back in the Real World

One of the untold truths about public education is that our government-funded educational system exists not to educate children, as its apologists would have it, but, rather, public education primarily exists to protect the jobs of teachers.

Consider: most public school districs operate at the whim of their intransigent teachers' union; the union's ability to extort taxpayers and parents of schoolage children is a function of society's desperation to turn out children who can read and write at sophisticated enough levels so that America's economy can perform well in the future.

Education matters, in other words. Combine that leverage with the legal responsibility states have to give their children a sound education, and the teachers' unions have every incentive not to worry about actually teaching students but rather insuring that their rank and file are protected. Thus, teachers are irrelevantly granted tenure, teacher placement is decided on the basis of "seniority" rather than competence and educational background, and teacher certification processes serve as a hurdle to protect unions' turf from otherwise well-qualified, non-traditional teachers.

Public education is a morass of entitlement and incompetence, and there is no more moral basis in supporting it, at least as it is currently structured in the United States, than there is in supporting any other unionized industry.

In consideration of this, it's interesting that, as A Constrained Vision notes, the superintendent of the Arlington, VA public school system has written into his contract with the school district that he shall be subject to the same performance pressures as are routinely expected of non-unionized employees. In other words, this superintendent's compensation is determined, in part, on whether he performs:

Nate Levenson is betting a chunk of his paycheck that he can improve Arlington's public schools. If he loses, it will cost him nearly $7,000 a year.

In a rare pact with a school system, Arlington's incoming superintendent recently signed a contract that would cut his pay by 5 percent -- or raise it by 10 percent -- depending in part on how well students do. The barometers the school system could use include MCAS scores, how many students graduate, and even which colleges accept Arlington graduates.

Suprerintendents, of course, are members of unions as well, and Levenson's union must be none too happy about the precedent that his actions create.

(Unions do not like when one of its members does not toe the official line because that precedent can be used as future leverage by management to force the unions to cow to demands. Witness the Boston Red Sox' inability to sign Alex Rodriguez. They were not willing to pay him the contractually obligated amount, and he was willing to take a pay cut in order to play with him, but the players' union nixed that deal for the reason that it would establish a precedent deleterious to their future interests in negotiations with team owners over other players' salaries.)

In any event, I am somewhat skeptical about the outcome of such a performance-based system. It's a good start, and it should be done elsewhere, but one major component of the equation, namely, the incalcitrant teachers' unions, will prove a tougher nut to crack. A superintendent, after all, has his hands tied to a great degree, in terms of what he can demand of teachers. Teachers have little incentive to respond to demands to improve their performance, when their jobs are secured by their union's extortion of government and its taxpayers.

Liberal Professors

Betsy Newmark writes about the prevalence of liberal college professors.

The assertion behind many of these stories is that the New Left Review crowd is corrupting our young minds with Marxist rhetoric.

Well, I majored in English, one of the hotbeds of professorial liberalism, yet I'n no pinko. Surely the mere presence of liberal college professors does not indoctrinate kids. Something else must be at work. Naivete and ignorance come to mind,

Startling Statistic

Diane Ravitch writes at the New York Times about abysmal achievement among our nation's schoolchildren:

While the problems of low achievement and poor high-school graduation rates are clear, however, their solutions are not. The reformist governors, for example, want to require all students to take a college-preparatory curriculum and to meet more rigorous standards for graduation. These steps will very likely increase the dropout rate, not reduce it.

To understand why, you have to consider what the high schools are dealing with. When American students arrive as freshmen, nearly 70 percent are reading below grade level. Equally large numbers are ill prepared in mathematics, science and history.

For a long time I was quite ignorant about the education most children receive in our nation's school. The public school system that I went to, from first grade through eighth grade, is routinely called one of the best in the nation, and the parents of its children typically are white collar professionals who are willing to pay a lot in real estate taxes to insure that their children's schools are have sufficient resources to devote toward education. While I intuitively understood that not all people came from a similar socioeconomic background, it was not until I was out of college for a few years and in the workforce that I saw firsthand how woefully unprepared many people were for the world of work.

Cream rises to the top, of course, and it is virtually inevitable that a person with a college degree will earn far more than a high school graduate. The shame, of course, is that many of the most promising industries require college as a minimal entrance requirement.

Link to Ravitch's column via Joanne Jacobs.

Reading

Betsy Newmark notes that boys don't like to read. But I'm not sure this is entirely accurate. I think kids' reading habits are a function of their parents' reading habits. Children of well-educated, professional parents are highly likely to be readers; children of auto mechanics and cashiers are more likely to spend their youth zoned out in front of the TV.

Betsy quotes this Washington Post story, which reports, in part:

Teachers and parents have said boys generally prefer stories with adventure, suspense and fantasy and tend toward reading nonfiction stories and non-narrative informational books, as well as magazines and newspapers.

Young boys revel in what Hoffman calls "potty humor," material many parents don't think is appropriate but that helped get her son interested in books. Boys like graphic novels, too, but not stories about relationships.

My personal, admittedly anecdotal, take on boys' reading habits is that, again, what a kid reads is a function of his parents' educational attainment. A child whose parents read the local tabloid likely will think ESPN a form of news. A child whose parents read the New York Times (political bias is irrelevant here) will likely think ESPN only a form of entertainment and will go elsewhere for edification.

As always, the influence of parents is not emphasized enough. Want your kids to be readers? Pick up a fucking book, turn off the TV and use your brain. Works wonders on your kids. Trust me.

Are Law Professors Intelligent?

Presumably, law professors are smarter than you or I. After all, they claim to have a special insight into how the law works. Supposedly, that means they are smarter than the average bear. Not Susan Estrich, allegedly a law professor at the University of Southern California.

Link to this condemnation of feminism via Betsy's Page, which observes:

Susan Estrich can't be bothered to engage the arguments of what the [Independent Women's Forum] says and advocates and just slams them without any evidence. I just say an IWF event on C-Span last week on Tom Wolfe's new novel. They're like any think tank. That's what think tanks do. They do research, issue reports, hold events, write editorials and go on TV. Perhaps Susan has heard of such things?

Ann Althouse, who manages the amazing accomplishment of being (1) a woman, (2) a law professor, and (3) intelligent and coherent, is instructive on the subject of the left and their reactionary posture here:

Based on my experience, I don't think lefty bloggers are interested in advice from anyone they perceive to be on their right -- which is, of course, part of the bigger pattern of behavior of isolating themselves from people they need to persuade in order to be politically successful.

She is also instructive here. In responding to a public attack which cast aspersions on both her sanity and her integrity, she responds to Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly:

One of the comments over at the Washington Monthly link abuses me for not allowing comments on my blog, which is just rich: I was forced to cancel the comments function over here because I had no way to block the commenters who were resorting to abusive, ugly forms of expression that I did not want on my blog. You can go over there and see the kind of comments that are being made about me, which would be smeared all over my blog if I had comments. Here, I explain why I cancelled the comments. It's a little funny to me to reread that post today, where I summarized the nasty things that commenters were saying about me, becuase some of the comments over there at Washington Monthly fit the categories I came up with last spring, especially: "I claim to be a moderate, but I'm only posing as a moderate for some nefarious reason."

Now, I'm a simple man. I'm no law professor. But it's clear to me that both Susan Estrich and Ann Althouse (to say nothing of Betsy Newmark, or the Independent Women's Forum) are women. Althouse is clearly a law professor, in that she is intelligent and coherent; Estrich is allegedly a law professor but sounds like a raving lunatic. Why can't they all be intelligent like Althouse?

Because asking a liberal to be intelligent is like asking a priest to be promiscuous.

Did Affirmative Action Cause Ward Churchill?

Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, argues that affirmative action allowed an unqualified "scholar" such as Churchill to be hired:

Academics claim to despise censorship, but the truth is we do a remarkably good job of censoring ourselves. This is especially true in regard to affirmative action. Who among us can claim to have spoken up every time a job candidate almost as preposterous as Churchill was submitted for our consideration? Things like the Churchill fiasco are made possible by a web of lies kept intact by a conspiracy of silence.

The University of Colorado hired Churchill onto its faculty because he claimed to be an American Indian. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with research universities can glance at his résumé and state this with something close to complete confidence.

Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university's willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom. Or at least we can hope so.

Campos goes on to note that he supports affirmative action in principle, and that he benefited from affirmative action, in that he and his parents emigrated from Mexico. The theory, oft-repeated by proponents of affirmative action is that attracting students (or professors) from different backgrounds enhances the university environment, exposing students (and professors) to others' experiences, which exposure they otherwise would not have had. There is something to be said for the argument that exposing yourself to another culture, or to the people of a different socioeconomic class, enhances your education. Well-traveled people have a greater frame of reference for events in their own life than do those who have stayed in one country or region their entire lives.

But there is a world of difference between exposing yourself to another culture by venturing outside your own, and exposing yourself to another culture by dint of the fact that the guy that sits next to you in Statistics is Jewish and you are a Mormon. I think my college experience is fairly typical and therefore, some conclusions can be made about the theory Campos discusses. If you look at my picture on this blog you will see that I am a white male, and, though I am Jewish, I certainly am not a minority. Therefore, my education should have been "enhanced" by my university having practiced affirmative action.

I certainly learned nothing about other cultures or socioeconomic classes, outside of material covered in class. Now, we could argue that my failure to have learned about other cultures or socioeconomic classes points to a failing on my part: I could have tried harder. But advocates for affirmative action don't argue that, in order for one to learn about diversity, one has to take it upon oneself to seek out such information. Rather, advocates for affirmative action argue primarily that the mere existence of diverse cultures and socioeconomic classes enhances everyone's education. This argument rests on the dubious assuption that students are willing and able to discuss their backgrounds relative to other people's, and, to do so in the context of a classroom.

This is silly. Anyone who has spent any time in a college class knows that the majority of the students present would rather stick a pencil in their eye than to speak extemporaneously in front of their peers about anything, let alone their personal experiences. The mere existence of people from backgrounds different than yours in your class does nothing to enhance your education. Affirmative action is a sham.

Link to Campos' article via Instapundit.

Leftist College Professors

A lot of noise has been made about leftist college professors pontificating on political matters (allegedly) unrelated to the course material. Conservative students are upset that their ears should be defiled with words with which they disagree. Conservatives allege that being a college professor requires the professor to hew solely to the material being presented. Therefore, if the professor is discussing Shakespeare, her opinions on abortion, birth control, evolution, gun control, or religion have no place.

This is ignorant thinking for a couple of reasons. First, students go to college to be educated. Education, in part, deals with exposing yourself to views with which you are not familiar, or, better, views with which you disagree. How the hell are you supposed to develop a cogent argument in favor of your position unless you are able to understand the terms on which the opposition argues? Any lawyer worth his salt will tell you that his arguments are only as good as the degree to which he can predict the opposing argument. Similarly, any person is only well-educated to the degree that he can understand the opposing argument, anticipate its assumptions, and destroy it. Arguing that, if you are politically unaligned with your professor, you should not have to hear her thoughts on abortion, or evolution, or whatever else is the current bogeyman of conservative thought, is silly and does nothing to advance your education.

Seth at Say Anything writes about a "socialist" professor of his, who, based on his description, sounds like a first-class idiot. He would not be doing himself a favor by limiting his educational experience to exposing himself only to those people with whom he disagrees. If she's an idiot, let her pontificate, so that you can form better arguments to advance your cause. A student achieves nothing by claiming he should be protected from speech with which he disagrees.

Note, of course, that this logic applies equally if the student is a liberal and the professor is a conservative.

UPDATE: Coincidentally, Volokh posts thoughts on the argument that professors should not discuss certain things during class which students may conclude are irrelevant to the course material:

Several correspondents have argued that university faculty should be treated no differently from other employees. Here's an example:

Personally, I think "academic freedom" is grossly overrated. Anyone working in practically any industry other than academe who said what Churchill said would lose his job yesterday, and few of us would have a problem with that. Perhaps a case can be made that academics are "special" and should be guaranteed a right to speak freely in a consequence-free environment, but if so, I've yet to hear it.

Here's the case, in a nutshell (though it would take volumes to explore all the implications): In most industries, people are hired to do a good job, and part of doing that has to be getting along with people -- supervisors, colleagues, customers, and potential customers. If you do something that offends people enough, you're no longer doing a good job.

But university professors are supposed to do a good job by saying what they think is right, even when that's offensive or alienating to people. Such an ability to express highly controversial views, even views that many people find deeply offensive, is critical for the effective functioning of universities as institutions. If university professors know that expressing controversial views about the war effort, about racial differences, about sex or sexual orientation, and so on will get them fired, then effective scholarship and public debate about these issues would be very much stifled. A "don't offend the customers" or "if it's controversial, don't say it" approach may be perfectly sensible for many kinds of businesses or even government agencies. But it would be awful for universities.

Amazon Supports Term Paper Mills

Term paper mills, those companies that sell pre-written term papers to "students" who want to do no work, advertsie on Amazon.com.

Cheer for Lost Jobs

Joanne Jacobs reports that Detroit has to close some of its public schools:

Enrollment in Detroit's district-run public schools is plummeting as students enroll in charters or leave the city. Detroit Public Schools officials predict the district will have to close 110 schools -- leaving 142 open -- and cut the budget by a third over the next three to five years Detroit could be down to its last 100,000 district students in 2008, "a little more than half of its enrollment before the state takeover in 1999," the Free Press reports.

Public school teachers are known for caring about their students' education and should be happy that their students have found alternative schools to attend, right? Because unions exist to insure that kids get a good education, right?

Yeah, and if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Culturally Relative Polynomial Equations

If the headline of this post means nothing to you then read this post from Joanne Jacobs.

Key question:

But do students whose ancestors came from Africa, Mexico, China or India understand math differently from students descended from Norwegians, Greeks or Russians? If math is universal and learnable by everyone with a gray, wrinkly brain, then why teach culture in math class? I wonder if the education school has a class on how teachers teach math in high-scoring countries like Singapore and Japan.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for the multiculturalists to answer her questions.

Academic Freedom

One of the problems with "academic freedom" is that, taken to its logical extremes, anything is permissible under the rubric of intellectual inquiry.

It's a nice principle in theory, but in practice it has some bizarre consequences.

Unions Suck

The American Federation of Teachers--whose organization should rightly be called the Association of Feral Traitors in consideration of their treacherous treatment of the students they are suppose to teach--has initiated a spamming campaign against the Wall St. Journal because said newspaper had the temerity to publish an article critical of teachers' unions.

The union should have to serve detention for gross and abject stupidity.

Statistics, Damn Lies and Statistics

Numbers confuse people, statistics obfuscate, and people don't know how to interpet them.

There is a (hopefully apocryphal) story I recall in which some gun control nut claimed "every year since 1960, the number of children killed by firearms has doubled. Which means that by 2005, 35,184,372,088,832 kids (thirty-five trillion, one hundred eighty-four billion, three hundred seventy-two million, eighty-eight thousand, eight hundred thirty-two) kids would have been killed in the previous year.

That is close to six thousand times the Earth's population of around 6 billion people.

To get an idea of why this is so, consider:

1960: 1 kid killed
1961: 2 kids killed
1962: 4 kids killed (from this point forward, each successive line is another year; I won't continue this progression to 2004 but you should get the point)
8 kids killed
16 kids killed
32 kids killed
64
128
256
512
1,024
2,048
8,192
16,384
32,768
131,072
262,144
524,288
1,048,576
2,097,152
4,184,394
8,388,608

In other words, by 1981--the year my brother was born, close to 10 million children would have been killed by firearms, assuming the statement above was true (or even plausible). The numbers just get more egregiously impossible the longer into Reagan's presidency you go.

I mention this because the Wall St. Journal online has started a new column, free to non-subscribers, exploring the way "numbers are used, and abused, in the news, business and politics." The author of this column, Carl Bialik, is identified as having a degree in mathematics and physics from Yale, and therefore presumably has something to tell the less numerate among us about the abuse of numbers among so-called educated people.

In his first column he describes the difficulty epidemiologists have in assessing the precise number of people infected with the Asian bird flu:

The most responsible answer, then, to the question of how many people the flu will kill is, "We don't know." But big numbers get headlines while honest uncertainty usually doesn't. And the WHO has been sharing big numbers, like two million to seven million people dead world-wide. At a press conference in Hong Kong two months ago, one official went further, saying this hypothetical pandemic could kill as many as 100 million people. The WHO always cautions that these aren't sure numbers, but the group shouldn't be surprised that the press often skips the complexity.

The 100 million figure was reported widely, including in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Online, CNN, Newsweek and the U.K.'s Observer; but without much caution about how arbitrary it is.

This is a vital service for a newspaper like the Wall St. Journal to provide. All too often, our so-called leaders invoke numbers and statistics without really understanding their limitations, but speak about them as if they came from a resolute and oracular source whose veracity should not be impugned. That is, leaders and pundits pontificate about the numbers that describe our world as if they were discussing the value of gravity at sea level. Few things are that certain, unfortunately, and it behooves people to think about numbers critically, not faithfully.

Ours should be a far more numerate society than it is; how can we expect to become so when people so willingly bandy about numbers without understanding their significance or limitations?