UC Outdoes Itself

You know, it is hard to believe that the student politicians at the University of California who sit on the Board of Directors of the University of California Student Association (including UC Berkeley) could out-radical themselves, but they have. The student Board recently passed this mind-bending resolution Resolution Toward Socially Responsible Investment at the University of California demanding that the University of California Board of Trustees "...refrain from making further investments, and to advocate that the University of California not make further investments, in any governments engaged in the violation of human rights or other behavior that fails to adhere to the University of California endorsed Principles of Responsible Investment".

Hey, and guess what country made their list as one of the "governments engaged in the violation of human rights"?

WHEREAS, The governments of Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Israel, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, Sri Lanka and the United States have violated the universal right “to life, liberty, and security of person;” “to education;” to “privacy, family [and] home;” “to own property, and …[not to] be arbitrarily deprived of property”

Yeah, the United States. I am wondering if the student association really understands where a public University like UC gets their funding for all of those Women's Studies programs? Oh, and then there's those hefty government ("tax-payer") funded student loan programs, buildings, electricity and running water.

WHEREAS, The government of the United States of America is engaged in drone strikes that have killed over 2,400 people in Pakistan and Yemen, many of them civilians. The government oversees, by far, the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, and racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement agencies, particularly for drug-related offences. 400,000 undocumented immigrants are held in detention centers every year, and millions have been deported since the current Administration took office, and the government is directly supporting and propping up numerous dictatorships around the world with weapons sales and foreign aid.

WHEREAS, The University of California conducts research and accepts funding from the United States Department of Defense and the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), institutions actively involved in the United States’ military actions worldwide, on its Los Angeles, Berkeley, Irvine, Davis, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, San Diego, San Francisco, and Merced campuses, thereby furthering and enabling military agendas..."

Well, at least they give the US a few crumbs of gratitude for not being the worst violator on the list...

WHEREAS, All of the above mentioned governments except for the United States are ranked low in terms of freedom, human rights, and democracy according to independent monitoring organizations including Freedom House and The Economist...

I say let's give them what they want...good and hard. Or maybe we can just roll our eyes, pat them on the head, and remember that these are the children of '70's and '80's wanted-to-be hippie radicals who missed out.

Oh, yeah, a few years earlier, this same august body of students passed a similar resolution to demand divestment of all investments specifically related to issues of corporate complicity in human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and elsewhere..." Though they do not specifically name "Israel" as their target for boycott, divestment in this earlier resolution, that's what they were going for. [Hey, at least in the newest resolution they actually name Israel]

"THEREFORE BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, That the Board of Directors of the University of California Student Association calls upon the University of California to dissociate itself from companies that engage or aid in systematic prejudiced oppression, whether this system targets people based on their religion, nationality, gender identity, race or orientation, by divesting from companies that participate in or profit from human rights violations.

Oh, the irony...I guess those bombs raining down on Israel from the "Palestinian Territories" are not "human rights violations" too.

Any comments?
[Revised at 11:40am to correct title...hey, that's what Brian Williams would do, right?]

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Can You Pass A Citizenship Test?

Well, now that the holiday season has ended and we get back to our "normal" lives, it is time to take a test. Now, I have every confidence that everyone here at CommentaramaPolitics can easily pass this test, but it never hurts to review.

Playbuzz.com - Citizenship Test

And if you are really ambitious, you can try these from the History Channel Two Quizes [Caveat - These have not been updated since 2009]

I know you all did very well. And I am almost certain that you learned all the answers to these questions in elementary school. Am I right? Well, did you know that Civics classes are no longer a basic requirement in most public schools? As a matter of fact, 39 states require only one class in government or civics to graduate. If you think this is scary, watch this short video made by a couple of student journalists included in this 2012 HuffPo article - 'Lunch Scholars' Of course, it was edited to include the best "wrong answers". But when one student was asked "Who is the Vice President?" and her answer was "bin Laden", I died a little inside. There should be no student in any public school who cannot answer that question correctly.

I really have not point here except, if our students do not know the basics of when, where, what, why and how our government works, how can we reasonably expect them to be able to protect and defend our Constitution?

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If You Can Read This Then...

If you can read this, chances are you did not get your education in the NYC public school system in the last decade. Frankly, I don't understand it. There is a war going on in the NYC school system. Those who want our children to be able to learn the basic skills of being able to read and write proficiently against those who want to use learning to read, write, and basic math skills as a political "mind" field.

In anticipation of the new school year that started today, the NYC Department of Education released the 2013/2014 test scored from the New York State public school system. They were by all account appalling!

Math scores passed grades 3-8 -
Asians - 66.6%
Caucasian - 55%
Black - 18.6%
Hispanic - 23.1%

English scores - passed grades 3-8 -
Asians - 49.5%
Caucasian - 49.4%
Black - 18.1%
Hispanic - 18.3%

These are up from past scores...what??? Am I the only one who sees a huge problem? Now, I don't know what the new Common Core curriculum is suppose to be or what it is supposed to achieve, but what the hell does this mean? And this was supposed to be an improvement!

Here are some other statistics. By the way, these are the scores that our Mayor DiBlasio and the UFT (United Federation of Teachers Union) are fighting their hardest to stop. Success Charter schools founded by Mayor Diblasio's nemesis Eva Moskowitz. I am guessing that they must make the public school system in NYC look bad. You see, poor Black and Hispanic students are not supposed to be able to learn because of their background - poor, minority, deprived etc. But please explain to me how they can do this?

Now, I admit, I am cherry picking*, but...

Success Charter Schools in New York City - same poor, minority demographics; chosen by lottery, not by test scores or any other means other than a parent or guardian took the time to fill out a form to enter the student's name in a lottery:

Math - 93.1% passed
English - 64.5% passed

Demographics -
Black - 59%
Hispanic - 39%
Asians & Caucasian - 2%

Oh, Success Charter schools have a non-Union teaching staff. Explain how any school system would want to hide this. Please explain why any public school system would not want to pick the brains of the founders of this charter school system for how and why they are so successful?

In fairness, all charter schools including union and non-union charter schools -
Citywide Charter School scores with the same demographic:
Math - 43.9%
English - 28.1%

On a related note - The top high school in New York City and the state (and one of the top in the country) - Stuyvesant High School - is on the block. Traditionally, those who are allowed to attend this specialized math/science High School are chosen by test scores. The demographics of this specialized school skew mostly Asian and Caucasian. Not because they are Asian and Caucasian, but because they score the highest on a specialized test. The problem is that very few Black and Hispanics pass this test, so the demographics skew too heavily to Asian and Caucasian students (mostly Asian). Being that we have a new progressive Mayor and new progressive School Chancellor, they see a problem...a demographic problem. The answer - lower the standards to improve the demographics. So, they propose to lower the standards to improve the demographics...at the expense of that other unsung poor, deprived minority demographic that always seems to be left out of the "minority" demographic category - Asian students.

*I admit that I have skewed the statistics to make a point. The overall scores for charters are marginally better than the public school scores. However Success charters schools have 7 of the top 15 schools in all of New York state and have a majority of poor, minority students. My point is why are they being targeted by the Mayor and the school chancellor as bad for NYC and why aren't they working with the founders to find what they are doing right?

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The Education Earthquake Continues In California

Our education system has been in the middle of a decade-long reform period that is working wonders. The spread of charter schools, the imposition of standards (over Glenn Beck’s dead body), and the requirement for testing so that failing schools can be identified and overhauled are all very quickly improving education in America in a dramatic way. Now there’s a new piece of the puzzle from California.

One of the biggest problems facing the reformers (aside from the sudden outbreak of fringe idiocy) has been the opposition of unions. They have fought every single reform to the death, without a moments regard for whether or not that reform would make things better. But little by little, the unions are starting to fail. In fact, in the past decade, the left has actually come to realize that the teachers unions stand in the way of repairing and improving the system. As a result, the left is starting to abandon their defense of the unions. They’ve given up on the idea that more money will solve the problem. They are admitting that testing and standards and better teachers are required. And they are looking to weaken the unions.

That brings us to California.

One of the biggest problems education reformers face is the inability to get rid of the lousy teachers. Bill Gates once noted that “if every child had math teachers as good as those in the top quartile, the achievement gap between America and Asia would vanish in two years.” Unfortunately, when you can’t dump bad teachers, you can’t do that. In only 23 states can a teacher be fired for unsatisfactory evaluations... the rest are protected by tenure.

In California, a teacher has a one in 125,000 chance of being fired for incompetence. Getting rid of teachers is almost impossible and can cost millions to make happen – California teachers get tenure after two years. And when layoffs happen, the new teachers are require to be fired first, leaving the tenured teachers no matter how they perform.

So imagine everyone’s surprise when an advocacy group called Students Matter sued California on behalf of nine minority students and argued that California’s tenure rules “allowed grossly ineffective teachers to remain in their jobs, and that such teachers were disproportionately to be found in poor and non-white areas.” Interesting. This is a brilliant attack, using liberalism against liberalism.

Well, Judge Rolf Treu bought this and struck down five tenure laws, saying they violated the constitutionally guaranteed right to equal education. In fact, he called the evidence of this overwhelming and the result “shocking.” The case is on appeal, but stands a decent chance of being upheld. From there, it is likely to spread to other states.

Naturally, the unions freaked out. They’re screaming that teachers can now be fired on unreasonable grounds and that the expensive teachers will be fired first. And with a massive amount of gall and irony, they whined that using a court to strike down these laws wrongly circumvented the legislative process... something that never once bothered them when they sued the state time and again to impose things the legislature didn’t want.

This is another piece of the puzzle and may result in a major improvement in public education. It will be interesting to see if this ruling gets upheld and if it spreads to other states.

Thoughts?

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More On Education

Two thoughts on education tonight. First, more evidence why education matters. Secondly, more evidence that American schools are better than the “Our Schools Are Failing!” Industry want you to believe.

● Point 1: The Populists Lose Another One

One of the tenants of populism is that education is a corrupter rather than an enhancer. Essentially, populism (as practiced by everyone from the left to the right) quickly devolves into the uneducated claiming that their ignorance gives them moral superiority over the elite. Hence, they attack the educated as alien and they revel in idiotic ideas like claiming that a high school education is all the education a “real” person needs. But statistics have blown a hole in that line of crap. And now we’ve added a new piece.

I’ve pointed out before that your income throughout life depends on your level of education. Yeah. “Surprisingly,” all those anecdotal accounts of Bill Gates and three other guys getting rich with only a high school degree turned out to be unique occurrences and in no way representative of the real world. Imagine that. So unless you just happen to invent a once-in-a-lifetime thing, your economic prospects in life are tied to your level of education. Indeed, according to the Census, the median income for people broken down by education level is:

$20,241 Michael Savage Listener
$30,627 High School Grad
$32,295 Some college
$39,771 College grad
$56,665 Bachelor’s Degree
$73,738 Master’s Degree
$103,054 Doctorate Degree
$127,803 Professional Degree

Note that one of those elitist professional types earns six times what a proud populist earns each year, and over a fifty year career will earn $5.3 million more. Even someone with just a generic college degree will earn almost a million more than the proud populist who didn’t need no education.

And it doesn’t stop there. The unemployment rate for low-skill/low-income workers in the US right now is 21%. That is about the same level as the unemployment rate at the worst parts of the Great Depression. However, the unemployment rate for high-skill/high-income workers in the US right now is 3.2%. That is below the level that economists traditionally consider “full employment”... think the Reagan years. So education is the difference between the Great Depression and the Reagan years for job searchers.

And now we add a new piece: how you do matters too. Indeed, the University of Miami has done a study which found that grades matter. Each point a student adds to their GPA during high school adds around 11% to their income compared to their peers when they are out in the real world. That is hugely significant. Indeed, consider that an A student likely makes 22% more than a C student and 33% more than a D student. That’s the difference between $100,000 a year and $67,000 a year. (The one exception to this is when you compare males to females, as females continue to make less than males. However, it does hold true when comparing females to females or males to males or students generally.)

The inescapable conclusion of all of this is that unless you are born rich or happen to invent something amazing, your level of education controls your future and how hard you try when you are going through your education adds a significant component of that. Sorry reel ‘merikans.

● Point 2: Statistical Chicanery

I’ve mentioned before that all these statistics you see about American schools failing are bull. Sometimes they base their claim on numbers that are within the statistical margin of error, meaning they are based on meaningless distinctions. Other times, they rig the criteria by including things that have nothing to do with education outcomes. At other times, they don’t even compare apples to apples, like when they compare all American students against only the best overseas. And once you start digging into any of these numbers, you typically find that the US isn’t at the bottom like they claim but is typically right near the top.

Anyways, there was yet another one of these “WE’RE DOOMED!” studies a few weeks ago, which I sadly cannot find at the moment. This one claimed that America’s schools are failing. And as proof, they claimed that around 35% of American high schools don’t offer algebra or advanced science classes... classes required under the new Common Core standards. Consequently, our schools are failing!!!

Wrong. When you looked into it, this number fell apart immediately. How? Well, consider the state which the study found had the lowest rate of high schools offering algebra or advances science: Georgia. Compliance in Georgia was less than 40% according to the study. However, this was actually a misunderstanding. Georgia requires that all schools teach both classes. The reason they reported they didn’t teach these things was that they name them something else in Georgia, i.e. “algebra” is “Math One.” The study authors didn’t get this.

Errors like this account for almost all of the non-compliance. As for the rest, they are rural high schools in places like Alaska where only a handful of students are taught in a single classroom and there is no ability to teach advanced classes. Those are hardly representative of "high schools" and they don’t even teach enough students to registered within the margin of error. And by counting them as “high schools,” the study distorted how real high schools are performing.

So once again, you had a study which claimed that US schools were failing. Yet, the data they used was obviously fake. A more realistic number is probably that around 95% of American “high schools” offer these courses and the 5% that don’t are specialty schools which teach only a handful of students. In other words, there is no problem here. The scare is a lie.

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Evil Toddlers

There was an interesting article the other day at Politico, which got me thinking. They missed the real story of their piece. But then, they would, because it doesn’t paint the left in a good light. The story involves race and education.

For a couple years now, Obama’s Office for Civil Rights has been collecting data on schools. They made some interesting discoveries. Here they are without comment:

● Black four-year olds make up 18% of students, but they account for 50% of those being suspended.

● Just 75% of high schools nationwide offer all the required math courses.

● Just 63% of high schools nationwide offer physics.

So what interested me about this? Well, the world of education is almost exclusively liberal. They have run it through the unions and control over the colleges of education since the 1940s. Conservatives need not apply and are typically driven out. In fact, I can count the number of conservative teachers I had growing up on one finger. Yet, these numbers suggest that these good liberal teachers are clearly engaging in massive, systematic discrimination against black kids... toddlers even. Just think about this. Black kids make up only 18% of 4 year old students, yet they account for nearly 50% of those suspended. That’s not a slight variance within the margin of error, that’s a 300% over-representation. That’s unmistakable that black kids are being singled out.

So how can this be? Well, no doubt, teachers want to blame black parents, but that would be racist. Not to mention, I doubt they would allow conservatives to make such an argument if this were the case at conservative charter schools. So I see no reason to overlook this for them. Indeed, the answer seems to be that liberals are inherently racist.

Next thought: the Politico article asked why anyone would suspend a four-year old because four-year olds are too young to understand such a lesson. This strikes me as again too simplistic. Suspending the kid isn’t necessary meant as a lesson for the student so much as a shot across the bow of the parents, who must now get involved. Moreover, it could also be that the school is simply looking to protect the other students.

Of course, there’s also the problem that a lot of suspensions these days are occurring under these asinine zero tolerance policies where action figures with guns or knives or aspirin become causes for bringing the sledge hammer of justice crashing down on unsuspecting children. Welcome to the world of liberalism.

On the point about calculus, this highlights one of the dangers of government data: it’s only as good as the moron who designed the survey. The idea that between 25% and 37% of high schools nationwide fail to offer core math and science classes like Calculus and Physics is pretty shocking. But is it true? Well, it turns out that there is a serious problem with this data. Consider the responses of Alaska and Georgia. Alaska noted that many of its high schools are tiny, rural schools with only 1-2 teachers handling all K-12 functions. Counting a lack of calculus in those schools against the system is rather misleading. Georgia then pointed out that it requires all high schools to offer these classes, but calls the classes “Math 1, Math 2, Math 3 and Math 4.” So when schools reported that they didn’t have "calculus," they were more likely responding to the labeling because 100% of the schools offer these classes... not 56% as the survey found.

I’m finding more and more that all these statistics about how horrible things are in schools are entirely misleading. Most fall within the margin of errors. A sizable proportion involve data collection errors or the lumping of irrelevant factors with relevant factors to lead to desired results... "Have you ever been the victim of murder, violent crime or received an overly-strong handshake?"

As for the black toddlers, by the way, the sample size was 8,000 suspended toddlers of the roughly 4 million school kids in that age range... 0.2% of the population, with no attempt being made to determine if this group is representative. So I wouldn't put much faith in the number either.

Thoughts?

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Rant of the Day - The NY Progressives' "War on Education"

I have to rant here for a minute or two. We have a war waging in NYC. You may remember that we have a new mayor in NY - Bill de Blasio - Marxist Progressive. He made all sorts of promises to make everything better for the poor, downtrodden of NYC. One of his promises was in the field of "public school education". Yes, our children were going to fare better if only he would be elected mayor. And his war will be waged against the scourge of charter schools.

Whatever you may think about charter schools, by all accounts, they are doing an amazing job in NYC. Under Bloomberg (remember him?), charter schools grew by leaps and bounds. The children who have been lucky enough to win a seat by lottery at one of our charter schools in NYC that are co-located within public school facilities, are getting the best public school education that our tax dollars can fund. These charter schools are filled with dedicated non-union affiliated administrators and teachers. The top school in the state right now is Success Academy Charter Schools founded by former City Council member and apparent de Blasio nemesis Eva Moskowitz. The students of the Success Academy, mostly poor minority students, scored the highest in math in the state of New York last year and fifth in language. That is all the schools across the state including the all of the tony, upper class school districts outside of New York City where all the upper crust, ivy leaguers moved to for "better schools" for their children. And inexplicable our new mayor is trying to shut them down. He is demanding that they move out or pay rent or, if possible just go away. It's just not right that they the charter students should be allowed to hog all the empty space and all that oxygen that should otherwise go to union teachers...I mean, regular public school students. It's not fair, it's not right, it's not equitable that any student should be learning when they do not have a union teacher to teach them.

The charter school concept seems pretty simple - set a high standard to achieve and challenge the students to meet that standard - no excuses. Understand that this is a kind of "Stand and Deliver" kind of goal. Remember that movie about Jaime Escalante, the teacher in California who decided to take otherwise underachieving minority students and challenging them to pass the AP Calculus test? All the administrators and teacher thought he was crazy and wasting his time. He and his students proved them all wrong. For almost 20 years, his students aced the AP calculus exam and went on to college when no one expected them to be able to do more that count change at a fast food joint.

This week our dear Mayor de Blasio announced that he was rescinding any further expansion of the otherwise successful charter schools mostly to appease his union buddies in the UFT. Let's just say that the otherwise compliant minority constituency of our Mayor are, as we say in the South, "loaded for bear". A huge rally by the parents and sympathizers of charter schools was held in Albany to object to the Mayor's decree. Governor Cuom, who is at odds with Mayor de Blasio for other reasons attended the rally to show his support. Fifteen thousand angry parents with their children in tow and in the snow and cold, descended on our capital to voice their strong opposition to the wrong-headedness of de Blasio's stubborn adherance to his campaign promises. They are not happy that their kids who are finally getting a real chance to break out of poverty and get the education that they deserve are being thwarted by the very people (and party) that purports to want to "help" them and are doing everything they in their power to halt their childrens' education! It was beautiful thing to behold.

For all the complaints that have been leveled at these overachieving charter school [which, btw, includes better lunch hours, better lunches, better gym hours etc], not once have I heard one union teacher, one union administrator, one union-sympathizing talk show pundit, or even the pro-UFT Mayor (see a pattern here?) ask "What are these charter schools doing so RIGHT that their students are scoring so high?". Call me crazy, but shouldn't that be the ONLY question being asked? Isn't this the point? These kids, mostly minority, who, by all that we are lead to believe, shouldn't be able to learn anything because of whatever aggrieved [fill in the blank] reason the unions can come up with, are surpassing not only their inner city, regular public school, union-teacher educated counterparts but ALL student in the state, and no one is asking "How are they doing this and how can we emulate what they are doing?". It makes me crazy...

Any thoughts?

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Teacher's Unions Struggling

American education is much better than people realize. In fact, there’s a lot of deceit in the claims that it isn’t. These claims are typically made based on raw numbers without mentioning that the numbers are typically all well within the margin of error... meaning any difference is statistically meaningless. They also use measures which don’t relate to educational performance to “measure schools.” Anyway, that’s not the point today. Today, we’re talking about unions.

The biggest impediment to improving education, aside from irresponsible parents, has been teachers unions. They stand in the way of reforms, protect rotten eggs, and generally don’t give a darn about students. Even the left is catching on to this. So it was interesting to see an article at Politico which outlined the problems the teacher’s unions are facing and why they’re on the ropes. Here is what you need to know:

● Falling Membership: Although teacher’s union membership is reported at 4.5 million, it’s actually only 3.8 million (the result of double counting people who are in both unions). The NEA has lost 7% of its membership since 2009. The reason for the fall is (1) teacher layoffs, (2) retirements, (3) the rise of non-union charter schools, and (4) states like Michigan and Wisconsin which are allowing teachers to opt-out. So things will get worse. In fact, the National Right to Work Committee is starting a campaign to end compulsory union membership in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Kentucky. In Wisconsin, after these laws were passed, the AFT lost 65% of its members in the state and the NEA lost 19%.

In response, the AFT is trying to increase their membership by expanding to public defenders, dental hygienists, police, maintenance workers, nurses, and lifeguards. Yeah, that’ll work.

● Financial Problems: While the unions bring in $2 billion per year, the number is shrinking. They also overspend. The AFT runs at a deficit, having to take out a line of credit. And the NEA has cut spending 12% to stay level.

● PR Attacks: Later this year, former Solicitor General Theodore Olson will bring suit to try to overturn teacher protections like tenure, which the unions put into California law. He intends to fight a PR campaign in the process in which he paints the unions as obstructionists who protect their members at all costs. This includes pointing out the number of teachers who have sexually harassed students, who don’t prepare lesson plans, and who come to work drunk, yet are not punished. In a famous example, the Los Angeles Times reported that the LA Unified School District spend 10 years and $3.5 million to fire seven teachers... and only managed to get four of them. He is being funded by Silicon Valley billionaire David Welch.

A similar campaign is being fought in New York by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, who will be financing a social media campaign accusing NYC unions of protecting teachers who harass students. This is on the heels of Waiting for Superman, in which a liberal filmmaker took on the unions and had a mega hit.

The NEA President squeals that this is unfair as it distorts the picture by focusing on the bad apples... waaaah!! And he argues that unions don’t protect bad teachers, they just make sure that everyone follows the process. That’s delusional and if the NEA thinks parents will buy that, then they’re crazy.

Interestingly, while the unions claim they are winning, support for labor unions has fallen below 50% for the first time in 2012. And only 32% of Americans have a positive view of teachers unions.

● Revolutions! The unions are having a lot of internal problems. A number of teachers are furious that the unions have agreed to Common Core, which they see as imposing requirements on them. Yep. A number are furious that the unions have agreed to the use of tying student testing to pay, hiring/firing, and closing of schools at the local level, even as they continue to fight against those things nationally.

More interestingly, as the Baby Boomers retire, it turns out that the replacements aren’t so enamored of a system that rewards teachers based on longevity and they aren’t as protective of pensions. These same people also have very different views about education and politics, and they now constitute about half of all teachers. So it can’t remain business as usual for the unions much longer. The unions say they are trying to “evolve” to satisfy all their members, but this is a significant divide. Interestingly, 31% of new teachers hold a negative view of their own unions, up from 17% only a few years ago.

● Turncoats! Wealthy donors have started funding candidates who are willing to break with the unions on issues like charter schools and merit pay. Even some prominent Democrats are now on the other side. Philadelphia, Chicago and Denver all have mayors who have opposed the unions on these key issues. Jerry Brown in California actually vetoed a union bill that would have made layoffs harder and more expensive. Pension cuts are coming to, even in Democratic states.

In response, the unions are seeking Republican allies, but you know what? F-you. You can’t be the heart and soul of the Democratic Party for decades and then get us to help you just because the Democrats started cheating on you.

● Pathetic Response: To save their butts, the unions are doing a number of things that aren’t going to matter. For example, they have created a public-private partnership to revitalize schools in McDowell County, W.Va. I’m sure the meth industry will be thrilled. They are trying to come up with ways to improve innovation and they are trying to figure out how to recruit better teachers... oh, and they’re going to have protest marches. Yawn. By the time someone starts doing what they should have been doing all along to save their jobs, the writing is on the wall.

These are not good times for teachers unions. They face legal pressure, economic problems, unfriendly legislators, falling and hostile membership, changing demographics, hostile public relationships campaigns, and well-funded and determined opponents. That’s bad for unions, but great for students.

Things are much better in the education system than people realize, and look for them to keep getting better soon.

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A Conservative Agenda: Education (Part One)

All right, let’s talk about the agenda I outlined in my book. As I noted, the idea is to create an agenda that appeals to the public at large, who are not ideologues. The purpose is to spot the things that matter to average Americans and address them in ways that fit with conservative principles so they will see a reason to vote for us. Let’s start with the issue of the cost of college.

Education is one of the top priorities for most Americans, and any successful agenda must deal with this issue and must address both K-12 and college. Today we start with college. College is vitally important to people’s success and to the success of the country as a whole. As I pointed out a couple weeks ago, people with college degrees will do much, much better than the “I never needs no skooling” crowd by as much as $5.3 million over the course of their careers, depending on the degrees they choose. They are also better off in recessions and they recover quicker. Anyone who tells you we shouldn’t be encouraging people to go to college is a fool.

But there is a problem with college: cost. I first outlined this for you back in 2009. Under the current system, students are being weighed down with the equivalent of a mortgage in student loan debt just to get through college. In 1981, the average yearly cost of attending a four-year college program was $3,499 (that’s in 2011 dollars). Today, it’s up to $22,092! That means college is 6.3 times more expensive in real terms today than it was in 1980. Consequently, today’s students will pay around $89,000 for an undergraduate degree and most of that will be debt. Government figures say that students currently owe more than one trillion dollars in student loan debt.

What this means is that these students, the best and brightest among us, are saddled with a debt that will take 10-15 years to pay off. So rather than starting families, buying homes, starting retirement plans, investing, building businesses, etc., they will spend their most productive years paying off debt. That is a huge disservice to them and to our economy. It’s bad for the interior of the country too (red states) because it means the smarter kids need to stay on the coasts where they earn more to pay back their loans.

More importantly, this is an issue that resonates with the public. Parents worry that their kids can’t afford college or will be weighed down forever by this... or they dread becoming co-signers. College kids despise the debt they are being saddled with. And young professionals struggle to pay off their debts for years. Each of those groups are groups the GOP lost in a big way. Why did the GOP lose them? Well, for one thing, because the GOP response to this issue has been offensive and stupid: basically, conservatives have groused that people shouldn’t go to college. Talk about a response that’s guaranteed to lose the public!

So what should conservatives offer? Three things come to mind, each of which is designed to make college more affordable and more accessible:

(1) Free State College for the Top 15%. Conservatives should advocate letting the Top 15% of high school graduates go to any state college anywhere in the United States for free, provided they maintain a 3.2 GPA or higher.

The purpose here is to make sure that the brightest kids can always afford to go to college. It also frees these kids up from student loan debt when they get out so they can act freely within the economy. It also provides an incentive for high school kids and their parents to make sure they do their best to get into that Top 15%. And it will help state colleges attract the kids they normally lose to places like Harvard.

But what about cost? You might be surprised. In 2012, 3.4 million students graduated from high school, so 510,000 students would be eligible for this program. The average in-state tuition at the moment is around $8,000 a year. Thus, the cost of this program would be $4.08 billion if they all participate – which they won’t. This is less than 10% of the Federal Government’s current $41 billion financial aid budget, which we can probably slash in half with our next idea.

(2) Maximum Pricing Provisions. The primary reason college costs have shot up is because student loans act like a pricing mechanism which lets colleges coordinate their rates. The result is that as loan availability has gone up, so have prices because schools know students can afford it. To counter this, we would ideally drop the student loan program entirely and watch colleges dramatically slash their prices to attract the students. But that’s politically impossible and suggesting it would only hurt us. So, instead, we should advocate the government using its market power to set maximum prices. Specifically, we should propose that any institution that wants its students to be eligible to receive federal loans cannot charge those students more than the average in-state tuition charged by state schools nationwide. Further, if the students are required to live on campus, then room and board must be provided at cost to those students. This will slash the cost of college dramatically and immediately.

But wait, how can a conservative argue for a price control? Because this isn’t a price control. An actual price control is an attempt to control a free market. This is not that. This is simply a condition on the receipt of a subsidy, and if a particular school believes this is unfair, then they are free to forgo the subsidy and charge market prices instead. Moreover, keep in mind that this is hardly a novel idea. The government already does this when it issues fixed-fee contracts to contractors, when it imposes “most-favored customer” clauses or unilaterally sets prices under Medicare, and conservatives are more than happy to argue that things like welfare should come with strings attached. It’s disingenuous to say we can dictate terms to poor people but not to rich schools.

And make no mistake, these schools are stinking rich. Harvard’s endowment is more than $34 billion dollars. Sixty-nine colleges have endowments larger than one billion dollars each. All told, colleges hold $410 billion in investments. These schools do not need taxpayer dollars to survive. If they don’t like this change, then they can hope students will keep paying their outrageous prices or they can dig into those endowments to make schools cheaper for students... they can finally face the free market.

(3) Fed Discount Rate Interest Rates. Finally, we need a solution for the people who are already saddled with these debts. The Democrats talk about forgiving student loan debt, but there’s too much to forgive at a trillion dollars. A better plan would be to convert all debts to a repayment schedule of 20 years and charge students the Federal Funds Discount Rate which the federal government charges to the nation’s biggest banks (about 0.75%). Seriously, if it’s good enough for banks, it should be good enough for taxpayers as well.

Think about what this agenda does. First, it promises the people most concerned about education that their kids can get a good college education for free (or very cheaply). It slashes the subsidy that has been ensconced in the law to support ultra-rich schools. It cuts the cost of college probably by a factor of 3 or 4, which will help current and future students. By all but eliminating interest rates, it helps the young professionals who are struggling with college debt. And its costs can be absorbed within the present system. Offering this will go a long way toward winning over the college students, the young families, and the minority families we have lost in record numbers.

Thoughts?

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Don't Fall For Scaremongering

Have you ever noticed that Americans do really terribly on international tests and surveys? The latest example involves a survey that purports to show that American adults rank 21 of 23 in math and 15 of 23 in literacy among the developed world. Panic!!! Hold on. This number is misleading, as are many such numbers. Let’s discuss.

Fear sells. If a magazine put “Everything is fine!” on its cover, then no one would buy. So instead, they push fake crises. Politicians do this too, as do businesses who want your money. This is how numbers like the 21/23 and 15/23 come about. They are meant to scare you. They are meant to shock you: “You mean we aren’t the best in the world?! Something has gone wrong! Ahhhhhh! We must ____!” And when you are sufficiently panicked, they will happily fill in that blank for you. Don’t fall for this. Always look behind the numbers. Observe.

The rankings above are the result of a random survey of 5,000 people. They took a quick test which was ranked between 0-500 points. The results were then averaged and fed to the news as the latest example of how bad things are in America. But these numbers don’t actually say that. How can I be sure? Well, each score is within +/- 4% of the median. Why does this matter? In a normal survey, that would put them well within the margin of error. Here they claim that is not true because the survey size was large – at 5,000 people. Thus, the margin of error is around 1-2%. But that’s misleading. That margin of error only applies to the median because that’s the only number created by all 5,000 people. When you look at each country’s score, what you find is that only around 220 people were tested in each country. That means that margin of error for any particular country score is closer to +/- 8%. That means that every country is within half the margin of error. That means that mathematically speaking, there is NO difference between these countries that we can say with any degree of certainty.

But that’s not scary, so they cite this number as if it really has meaning.

It’s the same thing with so many other numbers. When they talk about test scores of high school kids, for example, those numbers are so close that using those numbers to rank countries is like ranking toothpicks by height when the issue is comparing toothpicks to yardsticks to trees. Other numbers meant to scare us are similarly warped. People point to meaningless differences, ignore key facts, and make wrong comparisons.

For example, did you know that Mohammed is the number two name for children born in Britain? Wow, that means they must be awash in Muslim kids, right? Panic!! When someone says that Mohamed is number two, people wrongly assume (1) that there must be millions of these Mohameds being born otherwise they wouldn’t be near the top of the list, and (2) if it’s the number two name, then there must be almost as many Muslims being born as Christian British. And that is what the scaremongers want you to believe. But is this right? Hardly.

First, being number two isn’t that big of a deal. Do you know how many Mohamed were born last year? 7,549. That’s it. And that’s out of 706,248 child born. Essentially, 1% of children born in Britain were named Mohamed. Not so scary anymore, is it? And what about this idea that being second means there must be an equal number of Muslims as Christians being born? People forget that almost all Muslims name their sons Mohamed, whereas whites don’t do that, i.e. we don’t all name out sons Jesus. Thus, Mohamed’s high ranking is deceptive because Muslims are more likely to name their children Mohamed whereas people wrongly assume a normal distribution similar to Christian behavior. In other words, the high number of Mohameds does not imply an equally high number of Omars and Saddams. So how many Muslims do think there are in the UK? All of 2.7 million... 4.8% of the population. Not so threatening anymore, is it, certainly not compared to hearing that Mohammed is now the number two name!!

All right, so what about this 47% of the public who pay no taxes? (The number actually fell to 43% in 2013, but that’s neither here nor there.) I bought this one at the time, but I shouldn’t have. Let’s take a closer look at the figure than we have in the past. Consider this: 27.3% of the population is under 20 and 12.8% of the population is over 65. Combined, these two groups account for 41% of the population and most members of these two groups likely pay no taxes. If you subtract them from the 47% figure, then you get 6%. In other words, only 6% of working age Americans pay no taxes. That’s a very different world than the one painted by the assertion of the 47% figure.

Folks, America ain’t so bad, and things are nowhere near as dire as people want you to believe with these headline grabbing, but ultimately false, numbers. When we look at things to worry about and talk about plans to fix them, let’s be sure we know what the real extent of the problem is.

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The Economic Effect of Education

Let me use a real moron to make a point. Today’s moron is Jaden Smith, the son of Will Smith. What he said was laughably stupid and completely not self-aware, but sadly, it matches so much that is being said these days about education. So let’s mock this spoiled dumb*ss and then I’ll debunk the “you don’t need no edukation” crowd.

Jaden... Jaden... Jaden. //snort Jaden made a three part statement that started this way (excuse his inability to use capitalization correctly... the boy ain’t learned):

“People Use To Ask Me What Do You Wanna Be When You Get Older And I Would Say What A Stupid Question The Real Question Is What Am I Right Now.”

Ok, stop right there. What is Jaden right now? Well, he’s a stupid kid who doesn’t seem to get the fact that if he weren’t the son of Will Smith, he would be headed for a job as a janitor. He wouldn’t have “starred” in a failed film. He wouldn’t have twitter followers. And he wouldn’t make the news unless he shot up a 7-11. And an attitude like his shows the exact kind of disregard of the future that leads to people being broke, hopeless and wondering how it all went wrong. That's nothing to be proud of.

The boy genius continues... “All The Rules In This World Were Made By Someone No Smarter Than You. So Make Your Own.”

Bzzzzz. False. I can assure you, Jaden, that everyone who made the rules is smarter than you. In fact, let me point out that it’s not even intelligence that is needed to make rules, it’s experience. Rules are made to regulate human conduct based on prior experience. Sometimes, rules are made by idiotic bureaucrats (though Jaden probably likes those rules), but usually they are the result of generations of humans observing how other humans act. That means rules are based on an understanding of cause and effect, an idea that clearly eludes Jaden.

Finally, we get to the main point. After telling us that “education is rebellion” (whatever that means) and that school is the tool used to “brainwash the youth” and that newborn babies are “the most intelligent beings” on the planet, idiot boy declares:

“If Everybody In The World Dropped Out Of School We Would Have A Much More Intelligent Society.”

Oh boy. This is painfully stupid. Does Jaden actually think that the people who designed his car, his phone, or the power station that gives him electricity could have done that without education? Does he really want a doctor who never went to school? I doubt it. And even if his assumption was correct that you could develop these skills without school, would we really want that? For one thing, think of the waste as every engineer would need to invent engineering himself before he could do something. How long would that take and what are the chances he gets it all right? Seriously, why reinvent the wheel over and over and over when someone else can explain it to you? Oh wait... that would be “brainwashing.” //rolls eyes Moreover, how does society know it can trust this self-taught engineer? Not only do we have no way to know what he did or did not do to further his training, but who would be qualified to judge? Essentially, Jaden’s moronotopia is a world where we need to take everyone’s claims about their own abilities at face value and then pray that the guy wasn’t lying when he said he knew how to build a bridge, or a car, or operate on a patient.

Anyway, I wouldn’t care about the ramblings of a moronic child of privilege if it weren’t for the fact that so many wannabe “populists” keep sending this same message. Indeed, you get this message all the time in a steady drumbeat of opposition to education: education doesn’t make you smart, real life experience makes you smart! Educated people are elitists and elitists are bad! Teachers are incompetent and schools are nothing but indoctrination centers for commie-libs/capitalist pigs! Most people shouldn’t even go to college! And so on.

This is bunk. Education is the key to the future and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying... or a moron. And if you want proof, consider this. According to the Census Bureau, here are the mean incomes by education level:

$20,241 Learned everything he needed to know in kindergarten
$30,627 High School Grad
$32,295 Some college
$39,771 College grad
$56,665 Bachelor’s Degree
$73,738 Master’s Degree
$103,054 Doctorate Degree
$127,803 Professional Degree

So one of those elitist professional types earns six times what a proud populist earns each year, and over a fifty year career will earn $5.3 million more. Even someone with just a generic college degree will earn almost a million more than the proud populist who didn’t need no education.

And it doesn’t stop there. There was a new report the other day about the effect of the recent recession on different income groups and it showed what we’ve always known: the better educated you are, the safer you are from economic shocks. Consider these facts:

● The unemployment rate for low-skill/low-income workers in the US right now is 21%. That is about the same level as the unemployment rate at the worst parts of the Great Depression. However, the unemployment rate for high-skill/high-income workers in the US right now is 3.2%. That is below the level that economists traditionally consider “full employment.” That means there are more jobs than workers at that level and those workers have power to bid up things like income.

In effect, it’s boom times for the well-educated and depression for the unskilled. Yet, the populists want you to join the ranks of the unskilled. Don't fall for that.

● It gets worse. As jobs vanish during a recession, higher skilled workers who lose their jobs take lower skilled jobs and in the process push out lower skilled workers. Economists call this “bumping down” or “crowding out.” What this means is anytime there is an economic shock, the higher-skilled workers will land on their feet one way or another – either by getting their jobs back or a comparable one, or by taking one from the unskilled. The unskilled can do nothing about this. This happens in every downturn.

There is no doubt about the statistics. If you don’t get an education, then your hopes of making good money are limited, your chance of getting a job is much lower than for others, and you will be sacrificed in every recession... unless your father is Will Smith. That’s a big price to pay for just being able to claim false moral superiority.

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An Interesting College/CEO Survey

There was a study the other day that I think provides us with an interesting insight into the relationship between Big Business and college. It dealt with which schools produce the most Fortune 500 CEOs (either as undergrads or through their master programs) and its results are pretty surprising.


Here’s the list:

1. Harvard – 25 CEOs
2. Stanford – 11 CEOs
3. U. Penn – 8 CEOs
4. MIT – 7 CEOs
5. Cornell – 6 CEOs
6. Chicago – 6 CEOs
7. Northwestern – 6 CEOs
8. Columbia – 6 CEOs
9. Yale – 6 CEOs
10. Southern Methodist University – 5 CEOs
11. University of Southern California – 4 CEOs
12. New York University – 4 CEOs

At a glance, this list may not seem that surprising, but it is. The most interesting point is that the top 12 schools only account for 94 CEOs out of 500, or 18%. That’s a lot lower than most people would have guessed. In fact, if you believe the conspiracy fringe, you would have expected all of them to have come from evil Harvard (which only produced 5%).

Moreover, when assessing these numbers, keep in mind that certain schools, like Harvard, Standard, Columbia, Penn and Chicago are known for their MBA programs. In other words, those are places people go after they have degrees and are already on the rise. You would think that would mean that most top CEOs would have a degree from one of those programs. Yet, the numbers don’t show that. In fact, the low number of CEOs with such a degree is actually kind of shocking.

What this suggests is that Big Business is not a closed system where only those who went to the right schools need apply. How does this matter politically? Well, it tells us to stop looking at universities as the cause of the current business culture. Harvard is not the boogeyman controlling all things as some want you to believe. Instead, this means the problem with Big Business’s attitude on loyalty to America and advocating crony socialism is not coming from Harvard, it’s coming from elsewhere. And fixing it will require more than bashing Harvard.

The second thing to note is that the regional bias isn’t as high as one would expect either. While there is a northeastern bias here, as one would expect, it’s certainly not dominant. Of these 94, 5 come from Texas, 15 come from California, and 12 come from Chicago. Moreover, the “northeast” breaks down as well, with 8 from Philly, 16 coming from New York and the rest from the New England. What this suggests is that you can come from any region and still reach the top.

All in all, I think this is interesting because it suggests that while there is an obvious benefit to going to an elite school, that benefit is certainly not as big as you would think. And with 82% of CEOs coming from places other than these elite schools, it’s certainly not controlling.

That said, however, there is a warning here for conservative states. Except for SMU, each of the above colleges resides in a liberal state. That has very bad consequences for conservatives. First, it means that the best and the brightest will abandon conservative states for liberal states to go to college. That loss of brainpower and motivation and ability will depress the economies of conservative states. That in turns hurts jobs and depresses incomes in those states. Indeed, the areas around these schools have all become hotbeds of research and economic activity. This is where things get invented, designed and brought to life in America. This is what drives our economy, creates well paying jobs, and attracts more people... and it’s happening in blue states, who are doing it by pulling away the best and the brightest from around the country and the world.

If red states don’t want to be left behind, then conservatives better start thinking of ways to get more red-state colleges on this list. That means investing in colleges, hiring the best professors, making sure they offer programs that attract the best and brightest students from everywhere, cutting costs to students... doing all the things a business does to attract customers... and embracing education again.

This survey is good news because it shows that fears of a Harvard-run economy are false, but it also presents a warning that the best and brightest American kids have reason to go to blue states to start their economic lives.

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Common Core: Si oder nyet?

I shudder to bring this issue up, as I fear it will only lead to denunciation of conservatives for being paranoid or whatever. But education stuff interests me and it is kinda big news at the moment, so let's talk about Common Core.

No doubt you've at least heard the term before now, but if you're unclear on the details, well, Common Core is just what it sounds like--an effort to standardize the curriculum and objectives in primary and secondary schools nationwide. According to the official website, the standards, which so far have been adopted by all but five states, "focus on core conceptual understandings and procedures starting in the early grades, thus enabling teachers to take the time needed to teach core concepts and procedures well." Erm, okay. In layman's terms, it basically means "teach more stuff sooner."

Not a bad idea, though whether the suggested benchmarks per grade will accomplish that is anyone's guess. Third-graders should have basic comprehension of fractions and their place on the number line, while sixth-graders should begin learning about ratios, probability, and some basic statistics. In language arts, fourth-graders ought to be able to "compare and contrast a firsthand and secondhand account of the same event or topic; describe the differences in focus and the information provided"; for eighth-graders, it's "analyze how a modern work of fiction draws on themes, patterns of events, or character types from myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible, including describing how the material is rendered new."

Okay, especially in the reading category, there's no way this won't get dumbed down quite a bit in the classroom. But it seems fairly innocuous on the surface. And yet, it's gotten a ton of pushback, especially from grassroots conservatives and some religious (especially Catholic) groups. Why?

Well, in summary, a lot of people see it as No Child Left Behind, only more invasive and altogether crappier. A lot of objections have been made about the quality of education kids would be receiving under these goalposts. High schoolers, for example, would be reading far less literature in favor of nonfiction texts, and many important documents, historical as well as literary, would be presented with little or no explanation of background context. Or, students will have to comprehend them through lots of "creative" mechanisms, like featuring the Gettysburg Address as a "word cloud." (If someone knows what this is, please explain it to me.) So, long story short, there's a lot of concern about the complexity and sheer novelty of the project.

Others are worried not only about this, but about the government possibly using this to create a national database tracking all our kids and so on. Blogger Michelle Malkin, for example, has argued that Common Core is connected to new federal programs requiring schools to track everything from household voting status to religious affiliation to dental records. Some Catholic publications, meanwhile, have claimed that this data-collection effort is completely unsupervised, and expressed concerns that it might be used to force more direct oversight of diocesan and private schools.

So how realistic are these worries? Hard to say. It's not exactly like this was the product of any left-wing Obama goons (at least to begin with); it originated under Dubya in '07, making it brought to you by the same guys who gave you those fluorescent bulbs and the jacked-up Daylight Savings Time schedule. And whatever claims may be made about it being a plot by D.C. to subvert the states, the Common Core standards were largely developed by state governors and their advisers, as defenders of the program have pointed out. Besides, it's not hard to find liberals who also are not fans of the program, or at least aspects of its implementation. Even many urban school teachers are siding against the new curriculum, because of its lack of balance and flexibility. As for the privacy concerns, I don't blame those who are objecting, especially in the wake of all the agency corruption scandals this year; but it's not clear whether all this will pan out.

In my opinion, the real problem with Common Core isn't necessarily any tracking database, or even the controversial educational standards themselves. The problem is this persistent notion of a "one-size-fits-all" approach, especially when applied from the top down. When you consider the wide range of school conditions across the U.S.--urban, suburban, and rural; some with strong academic histories, others not so much--it should be obvious that they can't all be made to meet a single benchmark. Plus, it goes completely against the decentralized ethos that is so much a part of American conservatism. Schools need some oversight, but that should be as localized as possible. Even at the state level, there are problems in trying to run too much; taking it to the national level is just asking for trouble.

Common Core probably won't be as bad as some of its critics worry. But it's probably not the best way to improve education, either.

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Are You Smarter Than An 8th Grader...in 1912?

Okay, before we get started on the test...What? You didn't know there was going to be a test? Uh-oh, so why didn't you come to class? Oh, no! Is this the first time you remembered to come to class? Ooooh, that's bad...

WAKE UP!!! WAKE UP!!! Phew! What a nightmare...a very, very common nightmare. Oh, don't get me wrong. There is going to be a test, but this is a test for which you can't really study...and one more than likely your great-grandparents might have taken.

As it so happens, the test results of the latest Regents exams were made public this week in New York State. Parents and the general public were warned beforehand that the the Regents exam was going to be much harder, so we were prepared for much lower test scores as in previous years. As expected the scores were abysmal. 7 out of 10 students in our NYC schools tested below grade level.

As we debate the cause - crowded classrooms, lack of funds, union intransigence, Mayoral tinkering etc. the fact is that little Billy and Betty Lu ain't learnin' nothing these daze. Most of our children have libraries (including unlimited resources online), multiple teachers and aides, and all of the opportunities to obtain reading materials in every single language in the world (and even some that Hollywood has invented) at their fingertips, yet our children cannot read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Our children are failing or, more accurately, we are failing our children.

It just so happens, that a few years ago, a donation was made to the Bullitt County History Museum in Kentucky of an Eighth Grade Exam for Bullitt County from 1912. As is described on the museum's website:

"Bullitt County Schools were mostly one-room schools in those days, scattered around the rural county. Students came together at the county courthouse once or twice a year to take this "Common Exam." It was apparently a big deal....[s]ome scholarships were provided to those who passed to go on to high school, which was also a big deal back then. In those days, high school was sometimes another county away and a rare thing for many farm children to be able to otherwise attend."

Of course there are obvious differences. First, the 1912 exam was a short,straight exam with 57 questions for which the exam taker had to write out the answers. The Regents exam is much longer, but all with multiple choice answers. What did we do differently when our children learned in one room schoolhouses with multiple grades with limited resources and supplies that we are not doing now? There is another big difference - very few children in 1912, especially in rural areas, advanced to high school and most stopped their formal education at the 8th grade. But they completed the 8th grade with at least the skills to read, write, and do arithmetic.

So, just for fun, let's see if you are smarter than a 1912 rural Kentucky 8th grader! I have extracted some of the questions that these students had to answer for the 1912 exam. Let's see if you could have advance to that 1912 High School with a scholarship and a chance to leave the farm for college.

Here are the rules. I know, we at Commentarama do not like rules, but try anyway to adhere to these few. Each question will count for 100 points. You must earn at least 70% to advance. There is no time limit, and I will post original questions and answers at around Noon Eastern standard time. And NO CHEATING by doing internet searches for your answers either!

Something else to remember, this is test from 1912, so some of the answers may have changed in the last 100 years. There will be extra points given for those who can come up with the correct answer from 1912 and 2013! Give your final test scores (be honest) and we will see if you are smarter than a 1912 8th grader!

Okay, open up your exam books and......begin!

Spelling:
Okay, really, we can't do the spelling portion, but extra credit will be given if you can reasonably explain why! [In the original exam, there were 40 words that were given by the exam giver that the student had to spell]


Arithmetic:
1. A man bought a farm for $2400 and sold it for $2700. What percent did he gain?

2. A school enrolled 120 pupils and the number of boys was 2/3 the number of girls. How many of each sex were enrolled? [Look! A question about sex!]

3. At $1.62 1/2 a cord, what will be the cost of a pile of wood 24 ft. long, 4 ft. wide and 6 ft. 3in. high?

[Personally, I have never been very good at math, so there will be no bonus question.]

Grammar:
1. How many parts of speech are there. Define each.

2. What is a Personal Pronoun? Decline "I".

3. Diagram - The Lord loveth a cheerful giver.

Bonus if you known what "decline" means.
Extra Bonus if you know what it means to diagram a sentence.

Geography:

1. Locate the following countries which border each other: Turkey, Greece, Servia, Montenegro, Roumania [Remember, it's 1912]

2. Name in the order of their size the three largest States in the United States [in 1912]. [Extra points for what those three states are today]

3. Through which waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal?

Bonus: Name and give the capitals of the States touching the Ohio River.

Physiology:
1. Name the organs of circulation.

2. Define Cerebrum; Cerebellum.

3. Why should we study Physiology?

Bonus: Give at least five rules to be observed in maintaining good health.

Civil Goverment:
1. To what four governments are students in school subjected?

2. Name and define the three branches of the goverment of the United States.

3. Name three rights given by Congress by the Constitution and two rights denied Congress.

Bonus: What is a copyright? Patent right? [Andrew: you are precluded from earning any bonus points for this question...]

History:
1. Who first discovered the following places - Florida, Pacific Ocean, Mississippi River, St. Lawrence River.

2. During what wars were the following battles fought: Brandywine, Great Meadows, Lundy's Lane, Antietam, Buena Vista.

3. Name 2 presidents who have died in office; three who were assassinated. [Extra credit for one more in each category]

Bonus: Who invented the following - Magneto, Telegraph, Cotton Gin, Sewing Machine, Telephone, Phonograph?

So, what's your score? Remember 100 points for each correct answer. The person who makes the highest score will win a free invisible T-shirt with "I Am Smarter Than A 1912 Bullitt County Kentucky 8th Grader" on it and the bragging rights that go with it!

UPDATE: As promised, here are the links to the original test with all of the questions and the answers.

Full Exam

Full Answers

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Too Much Love

As you know, I am no fan of contemporary society in most respects, and have spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what its main flaw is. Recently, though, a commencement speaker hit on a point which I think explains a lot of the craziness going on today. See what you think.

I refer in this case to a WSJ article by Carl McCoy, who lambasts a lot of the advice regularly offered to college graduates this time of year. You know the drill: shoot for the stars, discover yourself, fifty-three other shallow platitudes, and in this particular instance, "do what you love." McCoy takes real issue with this phrase. There's nothing wrong with trying to find a career in something you enjoy, he points out; but it's a serious mistake to think that you can always pursue such enjoyment and make good money from it and flatter yourself that what you're doing is just as important as anyone else's job. As the writer puts it:

Some will soon go on to better jobs, but many will stay in [their] 'day jobs' for years, waiting for their big break, waiting to be discovered--or simply waiting to find out what exactly it is that they truly love....As someone who has tried living as a starving artist, I can attest that there's nothing romantic or noble about being impoverished in pursuit of doing what you love.

He suggests that college graduates reverse the process, finding a line of work they're capable at and then feeling a sense of purpose and accomplishment from that, rather than finding something they love first.

Good advice, I think. But then, I like seeing meaningless catchphrases get dissected and debunked like that. More importantly, this has a lot to say about conservatism versus liberalism in general.

Despite the many turns it has taken, liberalism has always had a strong element of self-expressionism within it, especially when directed against bourgeois society, aka "The Man." Being in touch with one's emotions and personal fulfillment was just as important to, say, Rousseau in the 18th century as it is to New Ager hippies today. Yes, the Left is very collectivist, but in this respect it's also radically individualist: A liberal, especially a young liberal, has a strong urge to reject any traditional obligations to family or society, with the expectation that someone else (i.e., the state) will come in to pick up the tab.

Contrast this with conservatism. A healthy degree of individualism can be found on the Right, of course. But rather than egotism, it encourages channeling one's personal ambitions and energies into activities that increase the common good and the well-being of society in general. This is one reason why conservatives are often so unfriendly toward posturing "artistes"--it's just hard to see what they're doing as necessary to the functioning of that society.

Anyway, broadly speaking, this clash of personal prescriptions is what's going on the WSJ article I began with. While not completely ruling out personal passion, McCoy definitely places "constructive" occupations like medicine or teaching above others which, though not useless, involve a high degree of self-love.

This point isn't too fleshed out, of course, and there's a lot of wiggle room. But it does kind of get at the fundamental difference between the essentially emotional basis of liberalism and the more practical nature of conservatism. And it applies to other aspects of our culture as well. In particular, this emphasis on personal expression and such is, in my opinion, a lot of what drives the current obsession with self-esteem and, in turn, the anti-bullying witch hunts. There are lots of other things also going on, naturally; this is just one lens through which to view things. But I do think it's an important one.

Any thoughts?

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Female Teachers Are Sexist

One of the more interesting facets of political correctness is the number of contortions the politically correct must go through to avoid stating the obvious. The latest example involves a study which dances around the question of why girls do better than boys in school, but then do worse than boys on standardized (objective) tests and once they leave the school environment. The obvious answer from their study is that female teachers are sexist, but saying so is taboo.

Before we delve into this, here’s a quick reminder of how political correctness works. The politically correct separate people by race and gender and then assign goodness/badness based on those groups or genders. If you happen to be in a “good group,” then nothing bad may be said about you. In fact, to say bad things about you would be labeled racist or sexist. And if you happen to be in a bad group, then nothing good can be said about you or that would be labeled racist or sexist as well. Girls are in the good group. Boys are in the bad. Hence, thou shalt not criticize girls or praise boys. If there is a gap where girls do worse than boys, that is the result of bias. But if there is a gap where boys do worse than girls, that's because boys are bad students.

So what am I talking about?

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development just completed a study of 17 countries and they discovered something interesting. For quite some time now, it’s been true in most countries that girls get better grades in school. They graduate in higher numbers, get more degrees, and generally have better grades. Hence, girls appear to be better students. BUT there is this pesky problem that boys routinely beat girls on standardized tests and in the real world of employment. In fact, this study found that if you compare standardize tests to grades, the boys grades are way below what the standardized testing would predict. Up to now, the explanations offered by feminists have been to assume that the grades must be right because girls are good and thus a result which shows girls being better must be right, and they've explained away the standardized test problem as the testing being biased in favor of boys. They also claim that income disparity is the result of sexism.

Well, this study has uncovered a wee bit of a problem with this. According to the study, the gender divide in grades is the result of the teachers judging the girls to be better behaved... not better students. This is purely a subjective measure and the study actually termed this "bias." That's a huge step toward truth. Of course, they did their best not to call this gender bias/sexism, but that's what it is. Instead, they said it was bias toward the well-behaved and against the not well-behaved, but that's nonsense. For one thing, the label of which was well-behaved and which wasn't was subjective and is a tautology, i.e. circular reasoning: teachers favor the well-behaved, who are girls, because we have defined girls as well-behaved. Break that down logically and you will see that "well-behaved" is just another word for "girl" and you get "teachers favor girls."

And this is borne out by the standardized testing because it shows that boys do better than the girls in terms of what they really learn. That means that when the students are tested objectively, i.e. in an arena where the teachers cannot warp the grades, the girls do much more poorly than they do when the teachers are able to warp the grades. Logic tells us this means the teachers are favoring girls unfairly. Basically, women teachers favor female students because they like girls better even though the girls are not better students.

Moreover, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The study found that because of this bias, the girls benefited from better grades which meant better opportunities and the boys were harmed because they were denied the opportunities and they were told to lower their expectations. Thus, the teachers set the boys up by giving them worse opportunities and then held that against them when they graded the boys. This, frankly, calls into question the validity of the entire system.

Think about this in terms of race because that will clarify this. Imagine if black students sat through classes taught by white teachers and they were marked down repeatedly, consistently and across-the-board by those white teachers on the subjective scoring system used by the teachers. But once those black students were allowed to take standardize tests, i.e. tests that do not know if a student is black or white or male or female and which the white teachers cannot grade in a way to favor the white students, the blacks suddenly did much better than the grades they were given and in fact outperformed the higher-graded white kids. How fast do you think everyone would start yelling racism? And don't you think they would be right?

Yet, because of political correctness, women are per se considered incapable of being sexist. Thus, even though the obvious answer to the facts presented above is that female teachers (who make up 84% of teachers) are systematically lowering male grades because they don't like the males as much as the females, no one is talking about that because they don't want to raise the issue of gender discrimination by female teachers. But that is exactly what is going on.

And to be clear, sexism doesn't even need to be intentional to make this happen. As has been shown in any number of contexts, bias can take many forms, including a simple lack of empathy or devaluing of traits that are more common with the other gender/race and overvaluing traits that are more common with your own race. Thus, for example, a creative writing teacher might grade a lousy essay on a subject they sympathize with higher than a brilliant essay on a subject they care little for. That's human nature, and study after study has shown that people do behave this way, even if they don’t think they do. So why do we ignore the obvious effects of bias when a system where 84% of teachers are females uses subjective criteria (like classroom participation) to determine that girls are better than boys even as objective criteria expose those subjective criteria to be wrongly applied?

If you want to improve the education system, the first thing to do, honestly, is to stop avoiding the obvious problems just because it's politically correct to do so. The problem isn’t that boys are somehow incapable of learning as well, it’s that female teachers favor girls. And the way to fix that is either to hire more male teachers and to make sure kids get both, or to separate kids by sex... or start using standardize tests to set grades (hint, hint).

Thoughts?

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Liberal Education: A House of Cards

I've said before that left-wing ideology and truth in academia have not mixed well. That's hardly surprising. What does continue to surprise me, even now, is how often their interpretations of the past are based on ramshackle beliefs that are easily refutable with even a little research. Scholars should know better.

Earlier this week, an article appeared at NRO about how historians interpret the Haymarket Square riot--or rather, how they fail to interpret it. For those of you who snoozed through that particular part of your U.S. History course (because labor relations are boring), the Haymarket Square riot was an outbreak of violence in 1886 Chicago where several policemen breaking up an anarchist rally were killed by a bomb and subsequent gunfire. You can read about it in more detail here; I won't totally swipe the story. Point is, historians, especially but not only those of a leftist persuasion, have generally adopted the line that there was no evidence tying the anarchists to the policemen's deaths; that the four men eventually hanged for it were wrongly convicted and martyrs to the cause of workers' rights; and so on. For decades, this has been one of the big events for Labor and the Left in America.

That began to change a few years ago, however, when a labor historian in Ohio (one who voted twice for Obama, incidentally) began researching some discrepancies in the various accounts of the Haymarket Square incident. This led to a full-scale reconstruction of events, leading him to the conclusion that not only were the anarchist protestors--like OWS, generally described as "peaceful"--armed and shooting at police officers, but that the bomb was almost certainly made by one of the men convicted. Practically everything historians have relied on in touting the conventional view of events comes from propaganda put out by defense attorneys during the trial. In most professions, this is known as "not doing your research."

When the prof's research was released to his peers, other historians were skeptical but fair-minded and professional in their response denounced him to high heaven for besmirching those "humane, gentle, kindly souls." No, really, a professor said that, adding that anyone who accepted these findings would have "the sickly sweet repugnance of blood on our lips." Seriously. Another snarked that "Perhaps Romney will put the book on his reading list" (I refer you to the previous paragraph). There has been a slow, grudging acceptance of the Haymarket research, but it's facing an uphill battle.

This is hardly the only example of the consensus among historians, of beliefs nearly every scholar takes for granted, being flat wrong. Take the Australian aborigines. The common assumption about European settlement of Australia is that, much like our settlement of the American West, it involved a lot of unprovoked violence and even genocide against the natives. There is some truth to this, but it is now clear that large portions of the tale aren't based in reality. An infamous frontier massacre of aborigines in the '20s, for instance, was taken as fact despite the absence of any eyewitnesses, any human remains, and the fact that those allegedly killed turned up alive and well years later. In another case, a statistic on white settlers killed by natives was portrayed by a later historian to mean the number of natives killed by whites. That is, a record of 10,000 settlers killed by aborigines in Queensland was "re-interpreted" to state that settlers had killed 10,000 aborigines. Forget not doing your research, these are just pernicious lies.

What's the deal? One more sensible scholar, reviewing cases of distortion like these, blames the influence of postmodernism, namely its claim that all truth is relative (a self-refuting claim, I might add); that the historian is incapable of writing outside his political and cultural biases and thus cannot be objective. Therefore, the theory goes, more enlightened academics ought to use their position to write histories "empowering the powerless," attacking the system, blah blah blah. No more, he adds, can a historian simply strive for a factual account of the past:

This has become the most corrupting influence of all. It has turned the traditional role of the historian, to stand outside his contemporary society in order to seek the truth about the past, on its head. It has allowed historians to write from an overtly partisan position. It has led them to make things up and to justify this to themselves on the grounds that it is all for a good cause.

It's this lack of emphasis on knowing the facts about history, this placing of "power relations" and whatever theory happens to be popular at the time before accuracy, which results in these cases of willful ignorance and incoherent, crumbling ideas about the past among liberal academics. And it's not getting better. I know of fellow grad students who are unaware of who was President during the Trail of Tears; because hey, they're all rich white guys, right? Oy vey.

As Ronald Reagan said, "It's not that liberals don't know anything, it's that they know so much that isn't so."*

*If I got that quote wrong, don't tell me. I don't want to look bad.

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