A Story from Years Ago

 At around 4 p.m., perhaps thirty-five years ago, a man in early middle age sat in a booth in the Manoa Garden, a University of Hawaii campus bar, studying a chess game out of a book. A younger man, perhaps 25 or so, asked if he might follow along. They played through a few games and the older man invited the stranger to join him and his friends later that week, in their regular Friday night session with beer and a chess clock, loser stands. The trio of friends became a quartet. Sometimes Dave, a non-player, joined the company. Once in a while Mae, a housemate and former girlfriend of the middle-aged man also sat in. Often, when the bar closed, the party would move to the house in the back of Manoa that Mae and the middle aged man shared, where, Saturday morning, the middle-aged man, an extreme lark, would find his friends asleep on the sofa or the carpet at 7 a.m. They would then go to a coffee shop and then to the beach or a hike along the coast between Koko Head and Makapuu Head or into the back of Manoa.

One day Dave, in the course of a friendly political discussion, said that his friends in the Revolutionary Communist Party had cautioned him against hanging out with that racist (the middle-aged man). That middle-aged man was me. I asked: "Against which race am I supposed to be biased?"
and Dave replied: "Every one but your own". I made no reply; the claim made no sense. Dave and I were the only haoles (White people, to Mainlanders) in our group. Mae was AJA, Chris was Chinese/Hawaiian/Haole, James was Chinese/Japanese, and Damon, whom I invited to join our group, was Afro-American. The communists might as well have said I was eight feet tall or morbidly obese. It's transparently false.

So why is "racist" the go-to slur? Perhaps because:  

Like Anita Hill's belated she said/he said sexual harassment accusation against Clarence Thomas and like Christine Margaret Blasey Ford's belated rape accusation against Brett Kavanaugh, racial bias accusations do not submit to easy proof or disproof, unless people who consider the matter know the accused personally.    

Defined by use, in modern American English, "racist" means "Caucasian who disagrees with a socialist". Imagined moral superiority provides a rewarding kick, like a hit of cocaine or heroin. 

Alao, real world complications do not taint the socialist vision. Just as distant mountains through clear air seem closer than when seen through haze, the socialist vision seems near when untainted by real world details. I suggest that devout socialists find the vision of socialist utopia so clear and rewarding that they can imagine no reason to oppose it. Only malice explains opposition to the socialist program, in the mind of the socialist faithful.     

People sometimes mistake "inevitable" for "imminent", for a related reason. If it's clear, it must be close. The inevitable expansion of the sun and incineration of Earth has no policy implications for today.  

 Anastacia Lyn Newkirk, (b. ymd = 1968-09-17). 

 Wikipedia: Elīna Garanča (born 16 September 1976) is a Latvian mezzo-soprano. 

A Comment on Nicole Asbury, "This school board can’t stop fighting. A Maryland bill aims to fix it", _Washington Post_(ymd = 2022-04-8)

The _Post_ article describes a contest to alter the governance structure of Prince George's County (MD) Public Schools. 

Prince George's County is an interesting county. PGCPS is an interesting district. The US DOE NCES  reports the following:

Maryland 2018-19 K-12 enrollment:  896,827

Maryland 2018 K-12 regular school districts: 24

Prince George's County (MD) Public Schools 2020 enrollment = 131,646

PGCPS 2018-19 revenue per pupil = $18,169

The County is 13% White, 62% Black, 18% Hispanic, and 4% Asian, with a median household income of $84,920

The school district enrollment is 4% white, 57% Black, 34.3% Hispanic, and 2,8% Asian

The _Post_ reporter relates political moves to change the Board from a hybrid elected/appointed Board to an elected Board. Nicole Asbury does not devote many words to the performance issues that motivate parents' or voters' attention. 

My recommendation: change nothing except ...                                                                              Mandate that all schools in PGCPS must hire parents on personal service contracts to provide for their children's education if (a) the parents apply for the contract and (b) the child is at or above age-level expectations on standardized tests of Reading (any language) and Math on or before the start of the contract year (i.e., the school year). Make the contract value equal some fraction 2/3 < a/b < 9/10 of PGCPS $18169 per pupil budget. Make payment contingent on performance at or above age-level expectations on standardized tests of Reading (any language) and Math on or before the end of the contract year.

One contract per child per year.

One contract per parent or parent's designated agent per year.

Parents could then homeschool, hire tutors, extend daycare to age 18, or supplement the contract amount and pay tuition to an independent or parochial school.

If your child's school offers a poor fit for your child's interests and abilities, homeschool. If you cannot homeschool, encourage your child to drop out in school. Tell teachers and administrators that your child has your permission to ignore, politely, all school instructions and to study her own material. Go ahead and accumulate a 0.5 GPA, take the GED and SAT at 16, and attend a community college.

Good luck to the parents of PGCPS.

[Readers of this blog (anyone out there?) may recognize the proposal, Parent Performance Contracting, that I outlined in 2005] 

Another _Post_ reader responded:                                                                                                    "Why?"

My answer: ...   

                                                                                                                                                                  For every locality A the term "the government of A" names the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition, after Weber). You can, without introducing significant error, model government as a territorially defined extortion racket or as a giant shopping mall operator with its own armed internal security force.

Organized interpersonal violence (i.e., government) makes no positive contribution to the education industry beyond what it contributes to the kitchen utensil industry or to the lawn maintenance industry, an original assignment of title and a stable system of contract law.

Gandhi wrote that parents are the natural teachers of their own children.

Abundant evidence from several lines of investigation supports the following generalizations:

1. As institutions take from individual parents the power to determine for their own children the choice of curriculum and the pace and method of instruction, overall system performance falls and

2. Political control of school harms most the children of the least politically-adept parents ("Well, duh!", as my students would say).

People explain social pathologies of urban Black culture as a "legacy of slavery' and in a sense that's true. The NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's facilities (which facilities many speakers of American English call "public schools") give to many normal children no reason to do what schools require. There's a reason that "academic" has become a synonym for "irrelevant". Training an artistically inclined child or a mechanically-inclined child for an academic career using the transcript as like incentive is like teaching a cat to swim using carrots as the reward.

Compulsory unpaid labor is slavery. Slavery is evil.

Twelve years of subordination harms all who endure it.

Homeschool.

Satyagraha.

Ahimsa.

The Socialist Phenomenon

 The Socialist Phenomenon  by Igor Shafarevich considers the origins of the deeply seated and popular desire for authoritarian government. This post not a review of Shafarevich's book. 

US taxpayers poured over $734 billion into the US K-12 credential industry in 2017-18, according to the US DOE NCES Digest of Education Statistics. 

The $734 billion per year budget makes the US K-12 credential industry the second-largest (after China) command economy left on Earth. The $734 billion per year figure grossly understates the cost of the US State-monopoly credential industry. Costs of this system include:

1. The opportunity cost to students of the time that they spend in school.

2. The opportunity cost to society, in the form of lost production from student non-participation in the labor force.

3. The opportunity cost to society in the lost innovation in curricula and methods of instruction that a competitive market in education services would generate.

4. Losses due to crime and the cost of prison for the poor kids whose lives we trash. The "school-to-prison pipeline". 

5. Life-long psychological damage: the legacy of K-12 slavery. 

For every locality A the term "the government of A" names the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition, after Max Weber). 

A law is a threat by a government to kidnap (i.e., arrest), assault (i.e., subdue), and forcibly infect with HIV (i.e., imprison) someone, under some specified circumstance. 

An individual B has a right to engage in activity X within locality A if the government of A has promised not to interfere with B when B engages in activity X and, further, has promised to interfere with individuals C, D, etc. if they interfere with B when B engages in activity X.

An individual B has title to a resource Y within locality A if the government of A recognizes a right of B to control the resource Y which (right) includes the authority to transfer control to individuals C, D, etc on terms mutually acceptable to B, C, D, etc. (i.e., to sell the resource and transfer title).

A legal environment is called "market-oriented" to the degree that resources move between individuals through the system of title and contract law. 

Federalism (subsidiarity, many local policy regimes) and competitive markets in goods and services institutionalize humility on the part of State (i.e., government, generally) actors. If a policy dispute turns on a matter of taste, federalism and competitive markets in goods and services leave room for the expression of varied tastes, while the contest for control over a State-monopoly provider must inevitably create unhappy losers (who may comprise the vast majority; imagine the outcome of a County-wide vote on the one size and style of shoes we all must wear. If a policy dispute turns on a matter of fact, where "What works?" is an empirical question, federalism and competitive markets in goods and services will provide more information than will a State-monopoly enterprise. A State-monopoly enterprise is an experiment with one treatment and no control group, a foolish experimental design.  

After the fall of the Soviet State the British poet and historian of that State, Robert Conquest wrote that people in the West had incompletely learned two important lessons: (a) the limits to the amount of good that organized interpersonal violence (i.e., government) can accomplish and (b) the stultifying effect of bureaucracy, public or private.  

 Between "forbidden" and "compulsory" there's room for "we don't recommend it, but we won't stop you", "who cares?", and "we recommend it, but we won't make you".  

Why is the State (i.e., government, generally) in the education business at all? This "Why?" question has three interpretations (answers below):

1. The historical "Why?" What motivated Massachusetts politicians in 1647 to introduce compulsory attendance laws? What motivated politicians of New England and Pennsylvania in the early decades of the 19th century put compulsory attendance laws on the books and to restrict parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' sub-adult education subsidy to schools operated by government employees?

2. The welfare-economic "Why?" What do children, parents, prospective suppliers of education services, or taxpayers get from a State role in the education industry that they would not get from a voucher-subsidized competitive market in education services or from an unsubsidized, minimally-regulated competitive market in education services?   

3. The political science "Why?" What motivates politicians today to sustain the current US State-monopoly school system? 

I have been participating in discussions of education policy in the comments section of _Washington Post_ Education articles since the nomination of Elisabeth DeVos as Secretary of Education. The challenge of the discussion has prompted me to seek more information and to simplify, as much as possible, my arguments. 

One recent comment added a consideration to my understanding of the socialist phenomenon. 

Hannah Natanson, "Va. parents file lawsuit, schools vow resistance against Youngkin’s order making masks optional", _Washington Post_ (ymd = 2022-01-18)

Comment thread ... 

(Malcolm Kirkpatrick): " The CDC reported 444 deaths "with" the novel coronavirus between 2020-01-01 and 2022-01-01 to people in the age 5 to 17.99 cohort. The commute to school poses a greater threat to people in this age cohort.

The number 444 Covid deaths in two years exaggerates the threat to people in this age cohort, since if a Covid+ person broke up with is girl and shot himself in the head, the CDC would count that death as a Covid death."

(anon): "Wrong. Cause of death is exactly what it sounds like, what event caused the death. If a terminal cancer patient dies in an auto accident, that's the cause of death not the cancer."

My critic erred. CDC counted as Covid co-morbidities deaths by suicide (firearm). Why did s/he/it so confidently assert: "wrong"?

"Anon's" apparent trust in government employees has added something to my understanding of the socialist impulse.

1. Mises (_Socialism_) suggests that socialism originates in a primitive revenge fantasy.

2. Envy is a sin for a reason. Morality evolves. Given the prevalence of envy, envy, like gluttony, expresses an evolved appetite that must have contributed to reproductive success during the millions of years that proto-humans lived in 30-person extended-family bands of hunter-gatherers. If the best hunter in the group looks like Tom Sellek and sings like Sam Cook, the only way I get my chromosomes into the next generation is to arrange a little accident. Once humans started living in communities of a few thousand mostly distantly-related individuals, the primitive hunter-gatherer strategy became mal-adaptive. If twenty weavers or potters do better work than I, I will get caught and killed before the strategy that envy inspires makes a big enough dent in my competition to enhance my chances of reproductive success.

3. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell suggests that socialism originates in a hypertrophied sense of order, what today we would call OCD, like the people who rearrange the socks in the underwear drawer twenty times a day.

4. Elsewhere (e.g., "Raffles and Mrs. Blandish", "Inside the Whale"), Orwell suggests that a predilection for authoritarian politics originates in vicarious sadism.

5. My critic's comment caused me to add Stockholm Syndrome. Once you have handed control over your life to the goons with the guns (the government), the idea that they don't and won't care for you is too horrible to contemplate, so reason just shuts down.

Answers:

1. Search "That old deluder, Satan". Search "Bible riots". The US State monopoly school system originated in theocratic imperatives in the religious colonies of British North America and, later, anti-Catholic bigorty.    

2. Nothing. This is my basic text:

Eduardo Zambrano

Formal Models of Authority: Introduction and Political Economy Applications

Rationality and Society, May 1999

"Aside from the important issue of how it is that a ruler may economize on communication, contracting and coercion costs, this leads to an interpretation of the state that cannot be contractarian in nature: citizens would not empower a ruler to solve collective action problems in any of the models discussed, for the ruler would always be redundant and costly. The results support a view of the state that is eminently predatory, (the ? MK.) case in which whether the collective actions problems are solved by the state or not depends on upon whether this is consistent with the objectives and opportunities of those with the (natural) monopoly of violence in society. This conclusion is also reached in a model of a predatory state by Moselle and Polak (1997). How the theory of economic policy changes in light of this interpretation is an important question left for further work."

3. Strident lobbying by dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel. 

Selection Bias

 Neo ponders: "Why didn't more professors oppose the Gramscian march or at least stick up for free speech?"

One participant to the discussion mentions academic hiring practices in the 1960s. I would add that patriots served in Vietnam and wound up four years behind the NLF  sympathizers who hid out in college.  

Last.fm/music: "Jeannie Kendall was born November 13, 1954 in St. Louis, MO."  
Still kicking and, thanks to modern technology, immortal. 
Some other sources give a different birthday. 

Alma Deutscher, Homeschooled

Homeschooled? How would it work otherwise?

Scott Pelly, "Alma Deutscher, The Prodigy Whose First Language is Mozart", _60 Minutes_, 2019-Aug.-11

"Even the real world is magical. The Deutschers moved to the English countryside to be near a famous school of music. Alma is privately tutored and homeschooled alongside her sister Helen who also knows her way around the piano and the tree house."

World Champion, Homeschooler

Shanna McCarriston, "U.S. Women's Gymnastics Wins Record-tying fifth Consecutive World Championship as Simone Biles Makes More History" CBS Sports, (2019-10-09)
"The team was led by the now most-decorated female gymnast Simone Biles, who has 15 world championship gold medals with 21 medals total. The Olympian also now has two new moves named after her, one on floor and one on beam, which will be called the "Biles II" and "Biles" respectively, after being the first to ever execute them on an international stage." 

(Wikipedia): "In 2012, Biles switched from public school to home schooling and the change allowed her to increase her training from approximately 20 hours a week to 32, which led to her improved success during the 2012 season. Biles spent all her secondary education as a homeschooler and graduated in the summer of 2015. Biles verbally committed to UCLA on August 4, 2014, announcing her decision on Twitter.^[18] She planned to defer enrollment until after the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. In November 2014, Biles signed her National Letter of Intent with UCLA.^[19] However, on July 29, 2015, she announced that she would turn professional, forfeiting her NCAA eligibility to compete for UCLA.^[20] In January 2018, it was announced that Biles had enrolled at the University of the People to study business administration and become the university's brand ambassador."

Nanci Griffith, (b) 1953-07-06. Still kicking and, thanks to modern recording technology, ageless.

Wikipedia: "Patricia Janečková (born 18 June 1998) is a German-born Slovak operatic soprano." 

She Travels Fastest Who Travels Alone

Homeschooled Hou Yifan, 2651 FIDE, marks 23 years on Earth today (2017-02-27). Olympic skater Kristi Yamaguchi was homeschooled, as was skater Michelle Kwan, after 8th grade. You can add to the list.

Sunshine!

A link I haven't hit in months provided wonderful news: Sunshine survived the surrender by US President Obama of her country to ISIS. The young woman was a child when she started to blog about life in a war zone (Mosul). Wish her well.

Not Really Education-Related

Two libertarian-oriented sites (Samizdata, Bizzyblog) and one feminist/socialist blog (the name of which I cannot remember) banned me for, ostensibly, arguing in favor of population control. Two socialist/atheist sites (Internet Infidels, International Skeptics) banned me, Internet Infidels for protesting a moderator's use of a banned insult ("racist") in response to my "what do you mean 'we', paleface?" and International Skeptics for modifying and reposting a comment that the Climate discussion moderator had deleted. In the latter case I suggested that one of their fair-haired children ("Trakar") had "stepped on his dick" when he (Trakar) disputed a comment that a climate scientist on his side of the argument had made. For the second time I tricked Trakar into disputing an argument from his side by representing it as my own. I thought that the moderator's objection was the coarse language, so I reposted the comment without the crude language. The moderator still took offense. Both Trakar's response and the moderator's response look tribal to me. Mark Kleiman's blog "The Reality-based Community" banned me for mentioning too often that contributors had participated in Ezra Klein's Journolist. One feminist/hippie-spiritualist blog, "Mahablog" (which smells of patchouli and probably thinks that quartz crystals cure herpes) banned me for defending (with quotes from John Kerry, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, etc.) the proposition that Bush II told the truth (as the CIA presented it to him) abut Iraq's WMD.  JayMan banned me from his HBD blog for disputing his argument that parents make no significant  non-genetic contribution to their children's success. JayMan is very much worth reading. Mahablog has a thoughtful analysis of how the Clinton campaign bought  and then crashed the Democratic Party. 

Funny thing: although they should take greatest offense to my materialist, pro-abortion views, no Christian site has banned me.

P.Z. Myers issues the latest ban: "Buh-bye, Malcolm Kirkpatrick! Not a fan of racist creationist climate-change-deniers around these parts." He omitted "homophobic, sexist, Zinovievite running dog lackeys of American imperialism".

Myers and I crossed tracks perhaps ten years ago when I disputed his contention that the taxpayers of Minnesota could cut administrative costs with school district aggregation. I observed that, across the US,  costs rise and performance falls as school districts increase in size. That is a verifiable fact (well, statistical generalization). That governments realize economies across nationalized industries (e.g., "bend the (health care) cost curve downward") is an article of unshakable faith to the socialist faithful. That dispute over Minnesota district costs ended when Mike Antonucci (The Education Intelligence Agency) somehow noticed the discussion and took my side.

The latest ban followed these comments:
When Our Institutions Fail Us
Comments
(10. Malcolm)

(Tuttle): “The livelihoods of so many [astronomers and astrophysicists] are tied directly to funding that is controlled now by an erratic leader …”
That was your first mistake. I can see a decent “public goods” case for the search for Earth-crossing asteroids and the study of sun-like stars. Otherwise, why not let non-State organizations fund space research?

(Tuttle): ” … We have elected someone who doesn’t believe in climate change.”
Seems to me it’s the people who suggest that Earth’s climate would be stable absent anthropogenic CO2 who “don’t believe in climate change”.

(Myers): “His team is lead by Steve Bannon, a notorious racist, anti-semite, and misogynist.”
Evidence? Accusations by SPLC don’t qualify. Genuine –quotes– from Bannon or convictions for bias crime qualify.
You will find nothing like that.  

(11. Malcolm)

Question for all you proudly pro-science people: Do you exempt from natural selection the human nervous system in the last 100,000 years? Do you take as axiomatic that regional varieties of human cannot, axiomatically cannot, vary in nervous system function? If so, why?

(13. Malcolm)

“Steve Bannon, a notorious racist …”.
Defined by use, in modern American English, “racist” means “Caucasian who disagrees with a socialist”.

"Creationist"? How did Myers deduce that? I made an explicitly evolutionary argument for divergence of regional varieties of human.
"Climate-change denying"? Exactly backwards. As  I indicated, geological evidence of past climate change is an element of the AGW skeptics' case against the anthropogenic CO2-induced climate change hypothesis.
"Racist"?
Let me tell a story.

Perhaps twenty five years ago, as I sat nursing a beer in the UH Manoa Garden bar and studying a chess game out of a book, a young man whom I did not know asked if he might join me and follow along. We went through a few games and I invited him to join me and two of my friends for beer and chess in our regular Friday meeting. He did. The new guy, Damon, worked as a computer-literate sub for one of those temporary help agencies like Manpower, Kelly Girl, and Altris. Chris studied Physics. James, the best chess player in our group, maintained machinery in a hotel. Sometimes my ex, Mae. would sit with us. Sometimes James' friend Dave would join us. Dave would occasionally play, but he wasn't our strength. Chris, Damon, and I were about 1700 to 1800 USCF at the time. James was much better. 2000+, I'd guess. He was in the game against Judit Polgar once in a tournament game until his position fell apart around move 25. I wouldn't last past move 15.

Sometimes, after the bar closed, the party would move to the house I shared with Mae and another renter, Catalina. We would play until I crashed (I'm an extreme morning person). They would be asleep on the couch and on the carpet when I arose. Then we would go to breakfast at some coffee shop and then go to the beach or for a hike.

I enjoyed talking politics with Dave and Damon. Chris and James were not much interested. Dave used to hang with his friends in the Revolutionary Communist Party at an off-campus café, The Bread Line. One day Dave told me that his communist friends had advised him to avoid that racist, Malcolm Kirkpatrick. I asked "toward which race am I supposedly hostile?" and he answered "every one but your own". I did not bother to answer. They might as well have said "he's eight feet tall".  Mae is Japanese. Catalina is African-American. Damon is African-American. James is Japanese/Chinese. Chris is Chinese/Hawaiian/Caucasian. Dave and I were the only Caucasians in the group.

Let me tell another story.

I shared for a year the rent on a house on St. Louis Heights Drive with a gay friend. Two of my friends, a Math professor and a Public Health professor, are gay rights activists. Three of my friends died of AIDS. I visited one, Robert, in the hospital during his last stay. I changed the bedpan when the nurse was busy elsewhere. The stool was slimy and watery. Mae visited Robert some days later and she told me that Robert asked how my contest with the Hawaii DOE was going. May we all go out with as much class.

Between 1996 and 2006 I ran for Board of Education every election cycle, sometimes for the Honolulu District seat and sometimes for the Oahu at-large seat. One year the issue of including sexual orientation as a category protected from hate speech (section 19, Student Code of Conduct) arose. At a public forum a reporter raised the question to the panel of candidates. When the mike came to me I said "I don't want to minimize the harm that verbal abuse can inflict but it seems to me if you live in a democracy and you believe in free speech you have an obligation to grow a thick skin".  A few seats down the line another candidate agreed. The Honolulu Advertiser reported that candidate's agreement, but did not credit me with the initial answer. I was by then a non-person to The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, The Honolulu Advertiser, and The Honolulu Weekly .

Some organizations send to all candidates a standard questionnaire. One year the issue of same-sex marriage appeared. I opposed (and still oppose) same-sex marriage; it's a court-imposed tax increase on married heterosexual couples and all unmarried taxpayers. My Math Professor friend endorsed my candidacy in a newsletter. It wasn't personal; it was strategy. As the non-incumbent, I would have less power from accumulated seniority (not that the Hawaii DOE performs marriages). The fact that he knew me personally was unrelated to his argument. My Public Health Professor friend told me that the question "What about that bigot, Kirkpatrick?" arose among his activist friends and he told them "We've been neighbors for thirty years and I never got any of that off him." Verdict for the accused. Case closed.

Why do they do this? Myers, for example,  might say "Malcolm Kirkpatrick endorses laissez faire capitalism because he pulls down $20 million per year as  CEO of a multinational corporation with an annual revenue stream in the billions" and the refutation would be immediately obvious. Would I wear these  clothes and drive this beat-up truck if I were wealthy? Better to suggest some invisible thought crime: racist, sexist,  creationist, climate denying homophobic free market ideologue.  

Perhaps it works on people who have no access to contrary information, but ...
(a) it makes the accuser look like a fool or a liar and a bully to the accused, such as Trump voters who have had it up to here with Political Correctness and know that the intrusive welfare State is bankrupt.
(b) It makes the accuser look like a fool or a liar and a bully to any outside observer who can read. Backtrack to the comments that set Myers off. Creationist? Obviously not. Climate-change denying? Obviously not. Racist? On what evidence?

Related: Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias, "Careful Who you call Racist".

Again, why do they do this? Some HBD blogger suggested a phenomenon he called "boiling off" to explain cult devotion. Whatever it takes to accept, say, membership in the Amish community varies between individuals. "Amishness" is heritable. As the less faithful fall away, the devout reinforce the faith by endogamy. Perhaps the strategy is instinctive. Myers, while often reasonable on questions biological, has a foul mouth. His cult may shrink as his foul mouth and patently absurd arguments (e.g., college professors are "lower-middle class") drive wavering members away, but the fraction that remains becomes, by the distillation process, increasingly devout.

Welcome to Hawaii

Read this.

"I'm just trying to do my work as best as I can. . I'm not getting the support from above," Friel told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. "The pushback is coming from those that I'm investigating, which are actually management that has been in place before I came on the various islands. There's a lot of politics being played here."

When I would describe waste and fraud within the DOE to employees of other State and County agencies, they would typically respond: "You should see where I work." People apparently believe "if it is this bad everywhere, the State would fall apart". It is this bad everywhere and the State is falling apart.  

Two Important Posts from Dedicated Homeschoolers

One: “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.” 
Two: " ... all the things they did in preschool I do better or at least as well at home."

Happy Birthday, Friedrich Hayek

Don Boudreaux notes Today is the 117th anniversary of Hayek’s birth.

Update: Recommended reading ...
The Road to Serfdom
The Constitution of Liberty
"The Use of Knowledge in Society" (American Economic Review, Sept, 1945)

The Basics

(CNN): "Principal Diane Daprocida of P.S. 94, an elementary school in the Bronx, says she has been waiting for one thing since she started running the school 10 years ago. .. a way to teach her teachers, many of whom have four years or less of teaching experience, how to teach reading.'

"Our universities do not teach teachers how to (teach reading) at the undergraduate level, ... It's philosophy of education, sociology of education, classroom management. I mean, I can't even remember. It's been so long since I've been to school, but they are coming through a traditional track not knowing how to teach reading, just the overall basic components of it."

Classroom teachers have offered the same criticisms of their wasted hours in Education courses for decades, as have several studies of the relation between teachers' College of Education coursework and student performance. Colleges of Education add nothing to teacher competence.
Colleges of Education degrade teacher performance, as measured by student performance, below the level that teachers with degrees in their subject would achieve. The current State-monopoly system presents an incentive structure that rewards inefficient instruction at all levels. At the early-education level, the system degrades performance below the level that parents with no college at all would achieve. Basic Reading and basic Math instruction provide examples of the fundamental failure of Colleges of Education. Remember Whole Language? Colleges of Education promoted this incoherent strategy of basic Reading instruction for years. Mounting evidence of failure did not dissuade the "expert" advocates of Whole Language in Colleges of Education. Whole Language fell to an argument from authority in the form of a critical open letter  in the New York  Times to which academics with superior credentials at prestigious institutions (e.g., Steven Pinker, MIT)  attached their names. Colleges of Education continue to promote "Discovery" methods of Math instruction, despite as thorough a refutation (Project Follow-Through) as Whole Language suffered.
Why expect otherwise? The mystique of expertise sustains the professional Education industry. Why, otherwise, would parents surrender their children to experts to attain a result that they (i.e., individual parents) could attain? Benjamin Franklin, who attended school for a total of two years between age 10 and 12, wrote that he could not remember a time when he did not know how to read. At age eight or so my older sister taught my younger sister, age four or so, to read as an accidental result of playing "school".  Basic Math (counting,  the decimal digits, place-holding notation, whole number addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division)  requires even less expertise in an instructor than does basic Reading.  
Expertise matters. Few unsupported homeschooling parents could extemporaneously provide the breadth and depth of instruction that a full-service high school provides. Since few high school teachers can, either, this observation fails as a defense of Colleges of Education, compulsory attendance statutes, or of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers' K-12 school  subsidy. While, above the level of basic Reading and basic Arithmetic, experts have something to offer, the experts need not deal with children in person. Books crystalize expertise. The decidedly non-expert Education majors in US middle school History and Math classes use this crystalized expertise. So, also, can non-expert homeschooling parents use the crystalized expertise that books embody. Colleges of Education have nothing to offer. Colleges of Education disguise their irrelevance with strident political advocacy in the form of "philosophy of education, sociology of education, classroom management".     
The current structure of the US Education industry relies on the mystique of "expertise". The costs of this structure include the $600 billion+ per year tax subsidy to K-12 schools and the subsidies that Colleges of Education receive. This total provides a lower limit of the costs of the current structure.  A more accurate total would include, additionally, the opportunity cost  to students of the time that they spend in school (otherwise, why the need for compulsory attendance statutes and child labor laws), losses due to crime, the lifetime cost of prisons for the poor children whose lives we trash, losses from depressed lifetime productivity, and the opportunity cost to society of the lost innovation in education technology that an unsubsidized competitive market in education services would generate.
Which brings us back to our starting point: why Colleges of Education fail at their basic task. "What works?" is an empirical question to which an experiment will provide more reliable answers than will the self-interested Divine Inspiration that College of Education faculty offer. In public policy, "experiment" means federalism or competitive markets in goods and services. A State-monopoly provider is an experiment with one treatment and no controls, a maximally ineffective experimental design.  In the current institutional/legal environment, efficient performance does not pay. A $600 billion+ per year K-12 revenue stream and the thousands of College of Education faculty positions across the US  depend on K-12 enrollment. Curricula that would allow K-12 teachers to produce a 14 year-old actuary, electrical engineer, mason, programmer, or welder would allow homeschooling parents to do the same. Efficiency does not pay.  
And that is why, oh best beloved, after nearly two centuries of existence the US State-monopoly K-12 school system hires teachers who learn their craft from Professors of Education who do not know how children learn to read.

Adios, Andrew Coulson

Neal McCluskey  and Jason Bedrick mark Andrew Coulson's passing, far too early. Andrew and I corresponded some years ago via email and he  he asked if I would send the statistics I had compiled on the relation between age (start) of compulsory attendance and NAEP test scores (positive. Later is better) and district size and NAEP test scores (negative. Smaller is better). He said that he would pass these to Caroline Hoxby, a far more statistically sophisticated analyst than I. Perhaps she needed a laugh. Coulson's  Market Education makes the historical case that the education industry thrives without State (government, generally) compulsory attendance, subsidy, regulation, or direct operation.      

Confirmation Bias?

Teacher credential requirements maintain the mystique of the education industry. Otherwise, why not let parents decide what, where, and how their children learn? I found one class (Statistics) in the College of Education useful. Professor Ayabe suggested a year-to-year recursive grading system. Based on my experience of the useless College of Education coursework and later analysis of State-level credential requirements and State-level NAEP performance, I oppose State-imposed restrictions on whom principals may hire (aside from excluding pedophiles and other dangerous criminals).

Anyway, I am quite prepared to believe this:

Take the evidence on GPA and SAT scores. Some research suggests that these screens can predict teacher effectiveness, but the differences are small, and there’s no clear tipping point guiding states on where to set their expectations. The evidence on coursework and certification requirements is even weaker..