Maggie's Farm

Sounds like a very good idea to me: Check Out This Alternative to College:

The idea is that employers can decide which certificate level they would like to see in the hands of applicants in order to match them to the job at hand. (They can also check with ACT to verify that a certificate is genuine.) The NCRC test avoids such high-school stumbling-blocks as algebra, geometry, grammar, and advanced vocabulary—the stuff of the SAT and the regular ACT test. Instead the NCRC test, designed to focus on real-world in contrast to academic aptitude, contains just three WorkKeys: "Applied Mathematics," "Reading for Information," and "Locating Information." Still, while the skills assessed in the three WorkKeys are fairly basic, (Applied Mathematics requires no more than eighth-grade math), to perform well enough to earn a Platinum-level certificate would probably challenge many college graduates.

I tried out the most difficult of the sample NCRC questions on ACT's website and found myself delving deep into memory for the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder (Applied Mathematics), attempting to correlate two complex soil-sample graphs (Locating Information), and poring over a legal document (Reading for Information). Critical thinking and the ability to use abstract data to solve concrete problems are clearly among the skills assessed. ACT has also developed a list of additional WorkKey assessments that employers in search of specific talents such as business writing or applying technology, or "soft" interpersonal skills such as listening, conflict resolution, or working in a team, can use to fit applicants to the specific demands of a job.

This thing sounds more useful than a BA.

The great Heather MacDonald on L.A.’s misbegotten teen dating curriculum.

It is difficult for me to believe that taxpayers want to pay for this crap. As she notes, if social work fixed social dysfunction, everybody would be functional by now. One quote:

Schools have been piling on social services for decades, yet the illegitimacy rate continues to rise, most cataclysmically among blacks (73 percent) and Latinos (53 percent). (Teen birth rates have gone down since the early 1990s, though they are still magnitudes higher than in Europe and Asia.) The social dysfunction that results from this spiraling illegitimacy rate provides the pretext for further increasing the school social work bureaucracy.

Via Insty, Did Utah Valley University fire business prof for being too tough?

That's what I have been talking about lately - students evaluating teachers, dumbing down to please students, etc. A quote from the piece:

According to a lawsuit filed Oct. 14 in U.S. District Court, Maranville’s lawyers allege UVU administrators justified the dismissal based on student complaints that his “capstone” course in business strategies was too rigorous and his Socratic style intimidated them.

“A number of students liked him a lot and said so. The brass came in and liked what he was doing. [Maranville] wanted students to get together in small groups and chew over the topics they were studying,” said his attorney, Robert Sykes. “They get him up here and toss him under the bus because some of the students wanted high school.”

Boo hoo. Tough Socratic teaching and interrogation is typical in elite colleges, laws school, medical school, and business school. If they think a prof is too rigorous, they oughta see real life.

Fascinating and serious essay by Hess in National Affairs: Our Achievement-Gap Mania. One quote:

Because of the way "achievement gaps" are measured — using scores on standardized reading and math tests — any effort to "close the achievement gap" must necessarily focus on instruction in reading and math. Hence many schools, particularly those at risk of getting failing grades under NCLB, have fixated on reading and math exclusively; other subjects — art and music, foreign language, history, even science — have been set aside to make more time and resources available for remedial instruction. The New York Times has reported that, in Sacramento, California, poorly performing students are permitted to enroll only in math, reading, and gym, in a mad dash to help close the achievement gap. The Wall Street Journal has reported that, facing budget pressures and a relentless press to drive up reading and math scores among the least proficient students, school districts nationwide are axing foreign-language instruction. Indeed, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, between 1997 and 2008, the share of U.S. elementary schools offering foreign-language classes fell by roughly one-fifth.

There will always be achievement gaps until 1+1=2 is the math test and "See Spot run" is the literature exam. Humans are far too variable in interests, talents, abilities, self-discipline, and motivation for it to ever be otherwise.

As somebody recently commented, "Why not aim for equality in violin, film-making, dress-design, tomato-growing, or basketball?"

It's all about this "consumerism" rage in the past two decades.

Students are consumers of education, patients are consumers of medical care, citizens are consumers of government services, prisoners are consumers of rehabilitative services.

It's a strange point of view.

The notion that students evaluate profs as if school were American Idol seems perverted to me. School is not infotainment. I can be an entertaining speaker and did some litigation in my distant past, but I would never teach where my career, even in part, depended on student evaluations. When teaching, I like to be a demanding SOB, intolerant of anything short of excellence and keeping people on their toes. In the end, people are thankful for my demanding attitude.

Article: Who Wants to Be Evaluated by Students?

Essay of the above title at Chronicle. One quote:

Her experience, she explains, "led me to one of the most sobering insights I had as a professor-turned-student: how little intellectual life seemed to matter in college. This is not to say that no one cared about her education or that everyone cut all his classes. Rather, what I observed was that engagement in the philosophical and political issues of the day was not a significant part of college student culture."

Katrina provided the opportunity to reconstruct NO education from the beginning.

The Big Easy's School Revolution - John White, superintendent of New Orleans' public schools: 'In other cities, charter schools exist in spite of the system. Here they are the system.'

Why the remarkable proliferation of law schools? Because schools make a lot of money from them. In my youth, in the 1800s, we learned law from books and apprenticeship. Law school was not a requirement for joining the bar until 1906, which is long after I was admitted to the bar. Why they jumped from 0 years to 3 years of formal education, I do not know.

Paul Campos posts: There are a lot of bad reasons to go to law school. Here are some of the most common...

I happen to believe that legal training is good training for all sorts of things that a person might want to accomplish. However, the legal field is looking a little shaky these days unless you want to chase ambulances and have strange hair like John Edwards. The Obama recession is hurting everybody, dentists and lawyers, plumbers and electricians, doctors and churches, handymen and builders.

The SAT was designed to produce a more egalitarian, less elitist American college student, yet few are ever really happy with it. I tend to view it roughly as an IQ test, but one which conflates the upper end to eliminate the upper outliers (it's not fair to the others to be too good).

From Steve Sailer's Asians, aptitude, and achievement: a positive sum reform proposal (h/t AVI):

...once the Ivy Leagues started trying to find the most promising non-upper class kids from the rest of the country, they needed something more objective about individuals than just grades. Another issue is that high school grades have certain inherent shortcomings. The future Nobelist in physics might not care about his social studies class and thus wind up with a lower overall GPA than the well-adjusted grind. Plus, grades have a ceiling. Even an A+ in physics doesn't really tell you that much. Moreover, lots of future successes are alienated in high school. Some people who get all As in high school might not have the upside to continue to do so in college. Incentives toward grade inflation at the high school are built in. And so forth ...

What will they learn in college? Not much

College: The disruption is here:

As of yet, there's no market mechanism to reward high levels of student success for the least possible cost. This is irrational. Thiel’s critique is based on an unstated assumption: market forces are starting to unleash on institutions that have not had to learn to thrive in a post-Internet, mobile device-oriented, and competitive marketplace. Indeed, few are currently asking themselves the important questions and embarking upon the dramatic transformations that will allow them to thrive.

Perhaps the SAT does roughly correspond to IQ, but the reason to use IQ is to take into account unrealized potential in those who have had the misfortune of not being exposed to adequate education or of stimulating environments.

Admittedly, most people with intellectual ambition and special ability find a way to pursue it in youth, but there are surely plenty of diamonds in the rough out there with undiscovered glitter. If I were a college admissions officer, I'd want a kid with a 160 IQ and mediocre SATs over an over-achiever with decent SATs and a mediocre IQ.

Mind you, this is all about academic potential, not life potential. That's an entirely different topic. Only God can measure a life.

Is there a meaningful difference between an 800 and a 770 on the Math section of the SAT?

My proposal for the SAT exams (which, for our overseas readers, is used to measure something called "college readiness" - although in the US today college readiness can mean ability to pay or to obtain loans and grants to pay. American colleges are full of kids who cannot even do basic trigonometry) is to make three sections, each with a fairly steep slope of demands from basic to subtle and advanced:

- Scientific and quantitative

- Literary, reading comprehension, and writing

- General academic information (ie history, the arts, religion, geography, etc)

Then to score each section with the usual academic letter grades, A+ to F (with A+ reserved for a perfect score because that means you know it all and can execute it without sloppiness).

If I had my druthers, I would add a regular IQ test also, but in the current atmosphere I don't think that would be accepted despite the fact that plenty of grad schools do require it. (I had to take an IQ twice, once for the army and once for grad school. I think maybe we had to take one in grade school too in order to assess our academic potential.)

From Wemyss' Broken Britain in the NER:

...the sentimental idea that the intellectual differences between children are not real - or that they are real, but too upsetting to acknowledge - has taken hold of the popular imagination, whereas once such nonsense could only have been believed by a sociologist.

My son went to one of the comprehensives that replaced academically selective grammar schools. He is now studying law at university. Since he was likely to be correct about which of his peers would have passed and failed the eleven-plus had it still existed, I asked him if any of the likely failures had gone on to do surprisingly well under the comprehensive system.

Not one. I then asked if any of those whom he would have expected to pass the eleven-plus had gone on to do less well than he would have expected.

Several.

And then of course there is the question of the content of the education, even for those who “do well”. My son would be quick to acknowledge that he is an academic success but that he knows virtually nothing of British or European literature prior to the twentieth century. Indeed, he knows little of British or European history, even including the twentieth century. He knows nothing of the Bible, or the Christian tradition. Luckily, he is genuinely intelligent, and has a magpie-like gift for intellectual theft, seeing much of an idea from even the tiniest stolen morsel.

Read the whole thing. It's about "enforced compassion" and egalitarian ideology.

Academia seems torn between utter decadence and Spanish Inquisition-like puritanism. Peter Wood discusses Higher Sex Ed:

Educate about “sexual harassment and sexual violence” on one hand, and promote sexual license and vulgarity on the other hand? This may not be a complete contradiction, but it is pretty close to one. License and restraint are awkward partners. Campus culture currently decrees that we should want both: It decrees that we should strive to liberate students from conventional morality in favor of free-wheeling sexual expression, while at same time we should instill an ethic of male restraint hedged by severe penalties.

Containing one's sexual and romantic impulses is one of the more difficult things that adult humans are called upon to do in civilized life. Academia reflects that human challenge in warning guys never to touch a girl on their way to their exciting Porn and Perversion Studies class.

From the venerable Mead:

...as their financial prospects darken, students’ educational costs are exploding. Like the health care system, the educational system is being overwhelmed by rising costs and rising demand. And as misguided government policies contributed to the real estate bubble by artificially inflating demand, government programs are burdening students with unpayable loans and contributing to relentless and unsustainable inflation in school costs.

And so, dear students, welcome back! Your generation is going to have dig its own way out of the hole my generation has dug for you (thanks for the Medicare, kids, and sorry about the deficit!), but here are a few tips that may help you get the best out of your college years.

Good tips for the students, there. For example:

I’m sorry to bring you bad news, but your generation faces the toughest competition any American generation has ever known.

Your competition isn’t sitting in the next library carrel. Your competition is in China and India – and your competition isn’t hanging out at frat parties or sitting around watching sitcoms with dorm-mates. It isn’t getting stoned and it isn’t putting its energy into chasing the opposite (or apposite) sex. Your competition isn’t taking lots of courses on gender studies; it isn’t majoring in ethnic studies, or (unless it is planning to go into movie making) the history of film.

Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning. There’s nothing written in the stars that guarantees Americans a higher standard of living than other people. Those of you who spend your college years goofing off in the traditional American way are going to pay a much higher price for this than you think.

A RAND report shows New York City’s bonus program for teachers did not leave to improved student achievement. Why?

Here’s a conclusion that follows straight from common sense: Don’t make your incentive scheme the subject of a complex negotiation with a bunch of stakeholders. Keep it simple. Hold people accountable for things they actually have control over, and give them a chance to correct their course along the way. If you discover your rules are lousy—that you made things too easy, or too hard—it’s OK to change them. But never do it in the middle of a game.

Everybody knows that incentives work in real life, but teaching is not exactly real life. How many talented teachers does it take to teach a kid Algebra? One, but the kid has to want to learn.

I hope I am not boring my readers with all of my posts about the college bubble and the meaninglessness of the current American college degree. From The Case Against the College Degree:

College degrees are poor proof of learning, and perhaps a barrier to it

Students want jobs and respect. Degrees bring both. Employers, meanwhile, want smart, capable workers. A degree is a decent enough proxy for intelligence, but we want it to be more than that. We want degrees to mean that students have learned the foundations of human knowledge literature, chemistry, physics, composition, metaphysics, psychology, economics and so on. If we didn t, we d replace degrees with inexpensive vocational exams.

Charles Murray, a fellow at American Enterprise Institute, calls for just that in a recent book, Real Education. He argues that too many kids who lack the ability to complete a liberal arts education are being pushed into four-year liberal arts schools, because there s a steep societal penalty for not getting a degree. Schools, in turn, have made their degree programs easier. Murray provides a sample of courses that students used to fulfill core degree requirements at major universities in 2004, including History of Comic Book Art (Indiana University), History and Philosophy of Dress (Texas Tech University) and Campus Culture and Drinking (Duke). He documents not only falling standards but rampant grade inflation.

Read the whole thing. He has an interesting suggestion too, but colleges won't go for it. For their own survival, they are committed to their marketing of their expensive credential, whether it means anything or not. In my experience over recent years, it means little-to-nothing.

You used to know what assumptions you could make about somebody with a BA. Not any more. Now, they don't even need to know basic calculus. That's crazy.

Why is a college degree diminishing in its economic and social value?

Because so many people are going, nowadays. It's not special anymore, and unselected people are getting degrees today who could not have gotten near higher ed one generation ago. It's a consumer-oriented biz now, desperate for gullible consumers. From our IBD link this morning:

A recent example of this exaggerated view of the value of higher education is "The Undereducated American," a paper by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.

The authors argue that the United States needs to produce far more college graduates than it currently does.

Their evidence is that there is a significant wage "premium" for those who graduate from college — across all fields of work. They argue, in effect, that the high return on investment applies regardless of whether the graduate becomes a financier or a dishwasher.

But they fail to look at generational differences.

Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that gains for recent college graduates have been declining for more than 10 years.

Roger Simon on Is Rick Perry a Dope?

I can also attest to the fact that an Ivy League education isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Whatever small accomplishments I have in life are not easily traceable to my academic achievements (even though I was considerably closer to Clinton than Gore in class ranking). Arguably, the most successful president of the post-war period, Ronald Reagan, attended the ultra-obscure Eureka College. I don’t know what his grades were and I don’t much care. All I know is he got Gorbachev to “tear down that wall.” (Not exactly, but you know what I mean.)

Turning to Perry, he was a mediocre student at Texas A & M, a school that emphasizes a more practical form of education than Yale. What does this mean? Don’t know, but these days going to an Ivy no longer appears to be the royal road to career success it once was. This study of Top 10 Job Placement Colleges only shows one Ivy, Cornell, in the tenth position. Number one, not surprisingly, is The University of Texas at Austin.

Perhaps more importantly… and amusingly… this study from the Wall Street Journal shows Perry’s Texas A & M the number two choice of corporate job recruiters with nary an Ivy in sight until Cornell (again) at fourteen. Harvard, Princeton and Yale did not make the top twenty-five.

Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers - When Everyone Makes the Grade (h/t reader via Insty via Inside Higher Ed).

One quote from the conclusion:

Low grading standards in university education departments are part of a larger culture of low standards for educators, and they precede the low evaluation standards by which teachers are judged in K-12 schools. The culture of low standards for educators is problematic because it creates a disconnect between teachers' perceptions of acceptable performance and the perceptions of everyone else.

It's difficult for me to form a strong opinion on the grading topic because I have no idea what Education Majors learn or study. Maybe it's so easy and simple that anybody can master it readily, and all deserve As. Maybe they have full-semester courses in making Lesson Plans, and full-semester courses in Social Justice. Beats me.

However, it does not escape me that no profs in higher ed have ever taken a teaching course (outside of those profs in the Education Dept.). Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, not one of my kids was ever taught by anybody with an education degree.

(A reader asked the question. Yes, very expensive private schools. Private education is the only way to not be taught by people with ed degrees, if such things matter to you. Most of my kids' teachers had done a lot in life before they decided to follow their hearts and teach. Their Latin teacher was a professional actor on the side, their math teacher a retired Wall Streeter, their English teacher a retired Sports Illustrated writer, etc.)

I think it would be constructive to abolish the entire notion of the Education Major. Let people who feel called to K-12 teaching study something like everybody else does and, if they want to take some courses on the side on primary school education or Special Ed or whatever, OK. It seems to me that most teachers ultimately learn their trade by being assistant teachers - by apprenticeship and supervision, not in education departments.

Teaching is not hard work, if you know your topic. I've done it. It's fun (but some kids can't learn and some don't want to. Many are not interested in anything academic.). In fact, every parent becomes an amateur teacher. Much more primary education is ultimately home schooling than schools might want to admit. (In my state of CT, the "quality" of the schools across towns correlates exactly with the levels of average education and income of the adults in the town - regardless of teacher pay etc - suggesting to me that it is, in part, education-minded parents who make their schools look good.)

Maybe most of the world is on vacation now, or taking breaks from their information-gathering and opinion-surfing. Still, I expected more interest in my racism post yesterday. Perhaps it is all old hat to our readers. I thought I did an OK job of pointing out that multiculturalism, when extended to acceptance and "tolerance" of self-destructive cultures or subcultures, is not a particularly noble or constructive mission (despite its obvious political motives).

Star Parker has a piece on the topic today:

 ...for the highly politicized parts of black America, the point has always been to keep race in American politics.

For black political culture that dominated after the Civil Rights Movement, the point was not just equal treatment under the law, but special treatment under the law.

Plus the assumption that more black political power -- defined by more blacks holding office -- would mean that blacks would be better off.

In other words, post-Civil Rights Movement black political culture embraced an agenda exactly the opposite of what the civil rights movement was about.

Its agenda was to get laws and policies that were not neutral but racially slanted and to put individuals in power based on their race and not on their character and capability.

So, according to the script of this political culture, election of a black man as president meant more than an end to racism. The conclusion had to be that if the man holding the highest political office in the nation was black, it must follow that blacks would be better off.

Anyway, I am back to my education beat today.

One of my repeated claims here has been that those who deserve advanced education are those who pursue it on their own. After high school, nobody should want or need to be force-fed most (I'll make an exception for Physical Chemistry and Calculus) of what they need or desire to know, so the only test of their desire is whether they pursue it on their own (rather than the simple credential-buying).

All learning is self-education, and "going to college" does not make anybody "educated." Furthermore, true students study throughout their entire lives. There is no finish line, and you do not have to be in academia to do that.

Dinocrat reminded me of iTunes U.

Of course, at Maggie's we are Teaching Company addicts. What's on TV? Joy of Mathematics

Scores show students aren’t ready for college - 75% may need remedial classes.

So why do colleges admit these kids? Because they need the money and the warm bodies. It's an industry now. Low-tier colleges around here will take anybody who applies, and they will never flunk you out because they want the income.

I agree with Mead here. And I do not blame the high schools at all. I do not blame the kids either, who are neither academically ambitious, don't want to spend the money, or who just don't have what it takes but are happy to take 4 years of partying and extended avoidance of adulthood.

Furthermore, I believe that many "college-ready" kids should not bother. 12 years of education ought to be a good enough start for anybody who was paying attention. American high schools offer everything anybody might want or need, but they can't make anybody take what they offer.

I think lots of kids, especially boys, just want to learn how to do something practical as soon as they can. Most people are not natural scholars, and many natural scholars never went to college either.

I suspect something around 5% of kids can make good use of higher ed. If people really want education, you can tell, because they make great efforts to educate themselves in their spare time. If they don't do that, I'd have doubts about whether they are really suited for higher ed of the liberal arts type.

40% of American college admits require some remedial education. I am not surprised. It's not  to blame the secondary schools. It's just that we have people going to college who aren't college material - at least not yet. 

The fact is that higher education is a booming industry in America, subsidized and supported by countless state and federal programs. Many of these schools are desperate for warm, paying bodies to fill their seats. Anybody can get into some college today, and they will do their darndest to keep him there because lower-tier schools need the income to survive (and need to report decent graduation rates).

We have become a nation of degree mills producing meaningless pieces of very expensive paper. I have interviewed many such people from lower tier schools and can report that they should not have bothered. They had the illusion that we might pay them more to do a clerical job if they had that degree from Eastern CT State College. Surprise, surprise - they can't do algebra, compose a literate and grammatical business letter, or get their minds around an abstract concept.

Who is the bigger sucker: Me, whose taxes subsidize the school? Or them, for wasting years when they could have been doing or learning something useful?

Here are the Five Myths of Remedial Ed.