The Gatekeepers

Accreditation agencies protect the education industry from the market forces that raise quality and reduce costs in competitive industries. Unelected and largely unreported, they define "quality" in terms of inputs and so protect the jobs and revenue stream of the US K-PhD education industry. The role of accreditation agencies receives attention here and here.  Credit by exam would bust this racket.

Is Water Wet?

Katherine Beals asks: Are Grading Trends Hurting Socially Awkward Kids?

Yes. Next question?

Sp-ed costs above the regular-ed per-pupil average provide one more reason to offer credit by exam for all courses required for graduation. Moving all children through the one-size-fits-all curriculum at a uniform pace creates expensive problems out of potentially low-cost students who will happily work faster alone. 

Missy Gray

Missy Gray of the wonderful Heartschooling blog died in childbirth six years ago today. Remember. I stumbled upon her blog just a few weeks before she passed. As a non-parent I couldn't use most of what she wrote, beyond her example of compassion.

To My Legislators

Education and the State Budget
Governments at all levels have made more promises than they can keep. Governments will default. Governments with the authority to print money will disguise default through inflation (a tax on savings that makes private-sector investment difficult in proportion to the uncertainty in the rate of inflation). Governments without the authority to print money may either default openly through legal bankruptcy or disguise default through ex post reductions in promised benefits. Some people claim that the US debt does not matter because "we owe it to ourselves". Default will matter to people whose retirement plans include pensions and health care benefits that they will not receive. The Tax Foundation ranks Hawaii ninth among US States in per capita bond debt.
Unfunded pension obligations will constrain future State spending: "Moody’s initial numbers have revealed which states face the largest problems once unfunded public pension liabilities are accounted for: Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey and Rhode Island all face the highest levels of indebtedness."

The range of options narrows as governments defer addressing debt and spending issues. Remaining options become increasingly unpleasant. Governments cannot raise taxes to cover their debts. Higher rates will drive productive activity overseas or underground and reduce funding for productive private-sector activities that support all services, including government. Either government's share of total GDP falls or total GDP falls. Government planners will not effectively address this issue hunting quarters under sofa cushions. Well-intentioned government planners will reconsider major budget items sooner or accept the consequent forced reductions later. The biggest ticket in the Hawaii State budget is the government's K-PhD school industry. NCES puts direct support for Hawaii's K-PhD schooling at 28% of combined State and local budgets.


In 2008-2009 Hawaii's direct expenditures on K-PhD schooling totaled $3.557 billion, out of a $12.638 billion budget.

The Cost of the State's K-PhD School System

"The public school system" (K-PhD) includes land and buildings that are thus unavailable for other purposes. "The public school system" (K-PhD) includes a tax-generated revenue stream (and consequent deadweight loss due to taxation)."The public school system" (K-12)" includes compulsory attendance statutes (truancy) applied to children and compulsory education statutes (educational neglect) applied to parents. "The public school system" (K-PhD)" includes policies that restrict parents' options (K-12) and students' options (post-secondary) for the use of the taxpayers' K-PhD budget to schools operated by dues-paying members of the UHPA/HSTA/HGEA/UPW cartel. $3.557 billion understates the cost of this system. The cost of this system includes the opportunity cost to students of the time that they spend in school, the cost to society of the lost productivity that students might have generated in gainful private-sector employment, the lost innovation in educational technology and methods that a competitive market in education services would generate, and losses due to crime.

Roland Meighan
"Home-based Education Effectiveness Research and Some of its Implications"
Educational Review (1995)

The issue of social skills. One edition of Home School Researcher, Volume 8, Number 3, contains two research reports on the issue of social skills. The first finding of the study by Larry Shyers (1992) was that home-schooled students received significantly lower problem behavior scores than schooled children. His next finding was that home-schooled children are socially well adjusted, but schooled children are not so well adjusted. Shyers concludes that we are asking the wrong question when we ask about the social adjustment of home-schooled children. The real question is why is the social; adjustment of schooled children of such poor quality?
The second study, by Thomas Smedley (1992), used different test instruments but comes to the same conclusion, that home-educated children are more mature and better socialized than those attending school.
So-called 'school phobia' is actually more likely to be a sign of mental health, whereas school dependancy is a largely unrecognized mental health problem.

In Hawaii, juvenile arrests fall when school is NOT in session. Consider this.

Numerous lines of evidence support 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.
2. Political control of school harms most the children of the least politically-adept parents.

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  important question left for further work.

Marvin Minsky
Interview
Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (July 1994)

(Minsky): "...many of our foremost achievers developed under conditions that are not much like those of present-day mass education. Robert Lawler just showed me a paper by Harold Macurdy on the child pattern of genius. Macurdy reviews the early education of many eminent people from the last couple of centuries and concludes (1) that most of them had an enormous amount of attention paid to them by one or both parents and (2) that generally they were relatively isolated from other children. This is very different from what most people today consider an ideal school. It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do."

Minimum wage laws, child labor laws, and compulsory school attendance laws put on-the-job training off limits to many children. Just as early exposure to language enhances language fluency, so early exposure to machinery enhances mechanical fluency, early exposure to herbs and spices enhances culinary fluency, early exposure to music enhances musical fluency, etc. See Kolderie: "Is it Time to Reconsider the Notion of Adolescence ".
The cost of this system depends, in part, on the annual per-pupil budget, the number of students in the system, and the time that they spend in the system. The simplest, least intrusive way to reduce current costs and taxpayers' exposure to uncertain (but large) future retiree benefit costs is to reduce the number of students in the system. The simplest way to do that is to mandate that the Hawaii DOE administer the GED at age 16 (as the publisher allows) or A-levels at any age and accept that a passing score qualifies a student as exempt from compulsory attendance.

Clive Harber
"Schooling as Violence"
Educatioinal Review

(Quoting) "...It is almost certainly more damaging for children to be in school than to out of it. Children whose days are spent herding animals rather than sitting in a classroom at least develop skills of problem solving and independence while the supposedly luckier ones in school are stunted in their mental, physical, and emotional development by being rendered pasive, and by having to spend hours each day in a crowded classroom under the control of an adult who punishes them for any normal level of activity such as moving or speaking."

Furthermore, according to a report for UNESCO, cited in Esteve (2000), the increasing level of pupil-teacher and pupil-pupil violence in classrooms is directly connected with compulsory schooling. The report argues that institutional violence against pupils who are obliged to attend daily at an educational centre until 16 or 18 years of age increases the frustration of these students to a level where they externalise it.

E. G. West
Carleton University, Department of Economics,
Ottawa, Canada
"Schooling and Violence"

We conclude that so far there is no evidence to support the 19th century Utilitarian hypothesis that the use of a secular and public school system will reduce crime. Beyond this there is some evidence indeed that suggests the reverse causality: crime actually increases with the increase in the size of the public school sector. Such findings will undoubtedly stimulate further work, and clearly more research would be helpful. But if further investigation confirms the findings of Lott, Fremling, and Coleman, we must reach the verdict that the cost of public schooling is much higher than was originally believed. Published figures show that the conventional cost of public schools, on average, are already just over twice those of private schools.11 When we add to this the extra social costs of increased delinquency, the full seriousness of the inefficiency of our public school system is more starkly exposed.

San Francisco Chronicle (1-Nov.-2005)

The UC Berkeley-Stanford study found that all children who attended preschool at least 15 hours a week displayed more negative social behaviors such as trouble cooperating or acting up, when compared with their peers. The discrepancies were most pronounced among children from higher-income families.

Children from lower-income families lagged behind their peers who didn't attend preschool an average of 7 percentage points on the measure of social behavioral growth. But children from higher-income families lagged 9 percentage points behind their peers. These wealthier children did even worse when they attended preschool for 30 hours or more: They trailed their peers by 15 percentage points.

"It's not clear why children from higher-income families exhibit more negative behaviors than their stay-at-home peers. Fuller speculated their peers might be in enriching home environments that include things like trips to the library as well as dance and music lessons. Other studies have found childcare centers negatively affect children's social development", said Jay Belsky, director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues at Birkbeck University of London, in an e-mail interview.

"It is time to come to grips with what all too many have denied for all too long, namely, that all disconcerting news about adverse effects cannot be attributed to low-quality care, which has been more or less the mantra of the field of child development and the child-care advocacy community for decades", Belsky said.

Creative Destruction

Here.. Leo Linbeck: "According to the Washington Post (h/t Instapundit), Washington DC’s public school district is planning to close 15 under-enrolled traditional schools:..."
Read and enjoy. The author makes a larger point:

But the subtext here is more important than the top-line. The stories from Washington DC and New Orleans are not about the failure of public education; they’re about the importance of competition in creating a sustainable society.

The great political scientist E. E. Schattschneider, in his seminal book The Semi-Sovereign People, emphasized the importance of conflict (the word he uses for the competitive struggle over a political issue). "The role of people in the political system is determined largely by the conflict system, for it is conflict that involves the people in politics and the nature of conflict determines the nature of public involvement."

The “conflict system.” In other words, the structure of political competition matters.

An underappreciated story of the Progressive Movement and its progeny (The Fair Deal, The New Deal, The Great Society, The New New Deal, and so on) is its emphasis on collaboration over competition. FDR put it this way: "Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off."

This has it exactly backwards. It is cooperation that is useful to a certain point, and then we must rely on competition.

Charter schools offer viable options (when they aren't choked by regulations and budget restrictions). Still, Parent Performance Contracting would work better.

I blame Horace Mann.

Why We Lost The Republic
Tim Daughtry

Now, after years of patient effort, the teachers' unions have turned America's schools into a wholly owned subsidiary of the political left. Conservatives have complained when reports surfaced about students being taught to sing hymns of praise to Obama, or when conservative students were harassed in class, or when examples of blatant liberal bias in textbooks came to light, but somehow we allowed ourselves to write off public schools as a lost cause. Homeschooling and private schools gave some relief, but the idea of getting public schools to transmit a love of liberty and appreciation for free enterprise seemed hopeless.
...
As long as the left has controlled the schools, time has always been on their side. We lost the Republic in the classroom long before we lost it in the voting booth.

It's unreasonable to expect teachers in government schools to argue against the existence of their industry. "Public education" (i.e., tax subsidization of  schooling and policies that restrict those subsidies to schools operated by government employees)  originated in mid-seventeenth century Protestant evangelism and early nineteenth century anti-Catholic bigotry. We live with the consequences of a centuries-old mistake.

Update

The terrifying thing about modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past, every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted because of "human nature," which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that human nature is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows. The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern state. The radio, press censorship, standardized education and the secret police have alterted everything. Mass suggestion is a science of the last twenty years, and we do not know how successful it will be.

George Orwell, Review of Russia under Soviet Rule by N. de Basily (George Orwell, Essays, Knopf, 2002).

Survivor Bias

Following links from Joanne Jacobs to Brian Caplan to Megan McArdle, we find this criticism of the "stay in school" answer to the question "How do I escape poverty?": ...

14. Not everyone likes school. I've always been struck by this passage of Orwell's in The Road to Wigan Pier:

The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and university education and found it a 'sickly, debilitating debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.

It's still true: the mania to get more and more people into college is the brain child of people who think that school is fun, and that anyone who doesn't go is being deprived of something like a trip to Disneyland packaged with a job guarantee.
Lots of people think school is rather miserable, and they wish to leave as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the "school is fun" crowd has made an education a virtual pre-requisite for a stable and well paying job in this century. If you don't like school, and aren't good at it, what do you do? Spend the rest of your life popping chicken tenders into the deep fry at Popeye's? Or deal drugs?

McArdle might also have observed that the people who get elected to office and those who compose education policy are good at school. School worked for them. A strong element of self-flattery contaminates school policy prescriptions. Legislators and policy wonks would discredit their own credentials if they doubted the value of school.

My sisters give me great books for Christmas. I had forgotten Orwell's criticism of school in The Road to Wigan Pier.   

Privatization motives

A writer for Education Week criticizes Louisiana school choice policies:

According to many would-be reformers of our education system, the free market will bring innovation to education, and when consumers are empowered with choice, the best products will rise to the top. We are getting a chance to see how this works in the real world in some parts of the country. The State of Louisiana is engaged in an active experiment that allows us to see the effects of this philosophy, when schools themselves are turned into "products" on the open market. Governor Bobby Jindal has embraced the preferred policies of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Here are the actions we are seeing so far from this new direction.
...
The latest budget signed by Governor Jindal eliminates state funding for public libraries, cutting close to a million dollars out of their budgets.
...
This week a Federal judge ordered Superintendent John White to appear in a case brought by a local school district, to explain why vouchers are not guilty of shifting local public funding away from public schools and into private and parochial ones.
...
This latest conflict reveals the hidden agenda driven by the choice movement. The schools are being rapidly re-segregated, with the full benefit of public funds.

Diane Ravitch agrees. 

The expansion of vouchers and charters will facilitate the re-segregation of the schools, he predicts.
Governor Jindal eliminated all funding for public libraries in his new budget.

Ravitch makes an instructive factual mistake here. Anthony Cody wrote that Governor Jindal eliminated "state" funding from public libraries, not "all" fumding. Ravitch apparently equates "state" and "government", while Anthony Cody explicitly does not. More important, Ravitch and Anthony Cody simply presume the benefits of a State (government, generally) role in the education industry. Ravitch openly imputes racist motives to a parent-commenter who defends school choice.

 Anthony Cody's blog requires subscription to Education Week. Ravitch does not. Perrhaps the comment below will appear on Ravitch's blog.
 
 Markets and federalism institutionalize humility on the part of government policy makers. If a policy dispute turns on a matter of taste, numerous local policy regimes or competitive markets allow for the expression of varied tastes while the contest for control over a State-monopoly provider of a good or service must inevitably create unhappy losers (who may comprise the vast majority; imagine the outcome of a nationwide vote on the one size and style of shoes all 14-year-olds must wear. Children are not standard). If a policy dispute turns on a matter of fact, where "What works?" is an empirical question, numerous local policy regimes and competitive markets in goods and services will provide more information than wil a State-monopoly enterprise. A State-monopoly provider of a good or service is like an experiment with one treatment and no controls, a retarded experimental design.

The arguments for State (government, generally) operation of schools do not withstand even cursory examination, and the arguments for subsidy are weak. In abstract, the education industry is a highly unlikely candidate for State (government, generally) operation. The education industry is not a natural monopoly. Beyond a very low level there are no economies of scale at the delivery end of the education industry as it currently operates. Several lines of evidence support the following generalizations: (a) As institutions displace parents in education decisionmaking, overall system performance falls, and (b) Political control of school harms most the children of the least politically-adept parents ("Well, duh!" as my students would say). Education only marginally qualifies as a public good as economists use the term, and the "public goods" argument implies subsidy and regulation, at most, not State operation of an industry. Furthermore, the commonly drawn implication of the public goods argument, that society as a whole benefits from tax subsidization of public goods, contains a flaw: the State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". Operationally, State institutions define terms (such as "school" and "education) with rules, laws, and procedures. Corporate oversight is a public good and the State itself is a corporation. Oversight of State functions is a public good which the State itself cannot provide. State assumption of responsibility for the provision or subsidization of public goods transforms the free rider problem at the root of public goods analysis but does not eliminate it.

Across much of the US, State constitutions, laws, and district policies restrict parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' K-12 education subsidy to schools operated by dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel. This policy originated in Protestant evangelism and anti-Catholic bigotry. The taxpayers' $500 billion+ per year K-12 education subsidy has become an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded construction and consulting contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination. If this is not so, why cannot any student take, at any time, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers' $12,000 per pupil-year age 6-18 education subsidy toward post-secondary tuition or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified private-sector employer?

Please read James Tooley's __The Beautiful Tree__.

Homeschool.

Bureaucratic Bloat

Hawaii gets first mention in this survey of bureaucratic bloat in government K-12 schools.

According to the study, virtually all 50 states saw “bloat” or an excessive increase in the size of non-teaching personnel compared to student population. Among the states with the most disproportionate increases were:

• Hawaii. Student enrollment increased 2.7 percent while administrators and other non-teaching staff increased 68.9 percent from FY 1992 to FY 2009.
• Ohio. Student enrollment increased 1.9 percent compared to a 44.4 percent increase in administrators and other non-teaching personnel during the same period.
• Minnesota. Student enrollment increased 8.1 percent compared to an increase in administrators and non-teaching personnel of 68.2 percent.
• New Hampshire. Student enrollment increased 11.7 percent while administrators and non-teaching personnel increased 80.2 percent.

Invest in Education: Get a Job

Here.

In Switzerland, even though university education is free, the vast majority of students opt for a vocational training instead. Take Jonathan Bove. This spring, after he completed his three-year business training at an insurance company, the 19-year-old was hired by a telecommunications firm; his job as a customer care representative offers a starting salary of $52,000 a year, a generous annual bonus, and a four-week paid vacation – no small potatoes for the teenager who is still living at home and has no plans to move out.

Note that "after ...his three-year business training...the 19-year-old was hired...(at) $52,000 a year..." On-the-job training since age 16. It's not only college that this young man skipped. What, aside from the HSTA/HGEA/UPW cartel, blocks this path for Hawaii's young people? Parent Performance Contracting would expand the range of education options available to children and parents and reduce the taxpayers' exposure to open-ended retirement benefits for public-sector employees.

Food for Thought

Let's read this and comment later.

Updates to come.

(2012-10-23) By several measures, the US standard of living improved enormously in the 19th century, when far fewer people completed high school, much less college. International differences in economic freedom contribute more to differential growth than do international differences in years of school attendance or differences in per pupil financial support contribute to differential growth. Minimum wage laws, child labor laws, compulsory school attendance policies and policies which restrict parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' pre-college education subsidy to schools operated by State (government, generally) employees reduce parents' ability to allocate the human capital embodied in their children. Thus, this is no surprise:...

...Rigorous studies confirm that students in countries that for historical reasons have a larger share of students in private schools perform at higher levels on international assessments while spending less on primary and secondary education. Such evidence suggests that competition can spur school productivity. In addition, the achievement gap between socioeconomically disadvantaged and advantaged students is reduced in countries in which private schools receive more government funds.

Finally, Accreditation in Question

Accreditation agencies play a critical role in the maintenance of the current ponderous structure of the US K-PhD school industry. These agencies deserve far more scrutiny than they normally receive, given the cost of the current system. US taxpayers spend over $700 billion per year to operate this system. In the school year 2008-2009, NCES reported $593 billion K-12 and $267 billion post-secondary, according to the US Department of Education. This figure does not include the opportunity cost to students of the time that they spend in school. It does not include lost lifetime income to poorly-educated students or losses due to crime committed by drop-outs with few decent career options. It does not include the cost to society of the lost innovation that a competitive market in education services would generate. Finally, someone pays attention.

That accreditation is a barrier to entry--enforcing inappropriate input and process requirements--is bad. That a consequence of this is the suppression of innovation is unforgivable. Figuring out how to educate more students with less money is perhaps the most important national goal right now, and it requires innovation, but accreditation sabotages the necessary innovation. It is time to redesign the accreditation system.

Thanks, Instapundit.

Be Somebody or Do Something

Star Parker on Republicans and school choice. Here. Why compete for political office if all you do when you win is turn your back on suffering? Many politicians, apparently, would rather be somebody than do something.

Freedom for Parents, Elsewhere

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser recently reported that NAEP Science scores put the Hawaii DOE in the national cellar, as usual. Meanwhile, Arizona's legal environment moves toward greater parent control over schooling and more financial accountability for schools, as the Friedman Foundation reports here:

Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law yesterday the expansion of an Arizona school choice program, explicitly making children of active military members eligible to participate - a first nationwide. The expansion of the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program also makes students in failing public schools or school districts and those adopted out of the state foster care system eligible starting in the 2013-14 school year. Currently, Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) are available only to Arizona children with special needs. The program allows parents to withdraw their children from public district or charter schools and receive 90 percent of their state funding deposited into an account. Children’s ESA funds can go toward private school tuition, online courses, tutoring services, textbooks, and even future college expenses. Qualifying families do not have to meet income requirements.

It's not Parent Performance Contracting, but we're closing on it. The most effective institutional accountability mechanism that humans have yet devised is a policy that lets unhappy customers take their business elsewhere. "You cut, I choose" is the formula for fair sharing of resources. In public policy, where insider interest groups like public employee organizations have a strong incentive to run up the bill, policies that empower customers with the power to apply their share of the budget to institutions other than those which insiders control create escape options for customers and incentives for insiders to limit demands on taxpayers. Hawaii's legislature remains indifferent to the welfare of children and taxpayers. Update: Here. To quote one of the Scottish nobles after Mel Gibson's Wallace torpedos negotiations with the English commander at Stirling: "That was rather less civil than he was used to".

Ban Chores!

Child labor laws will not end with a ban on farm chores, but if busybodies get their way, they pass through that point on the way to a ban on household chores like washing dishes. Becker (Human Capital) defines "school" as an institution which has education as its principal product. This requires a prior understanding of "education". It also suggests that many institutions that people commonly call "schools" are not schools; failing "schools" primarily produce make-work for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel and padded construction contracts for politically-connected insiders.
Inevitably, for each child, somebody or some body decides what education that child shall receive. That decision includes the choice of venue (e.g., home, school, farm, or factory). Compulsory attendance statutes, minimum wage laws, and child labor laws put on-the-job training off limits to many children. Compulsory schooling is one particularly expensive and long-lived instance of "industrial policy", the idea that government planners know best where to invest society's resources. Twelve years of State-enforced uselessness benefits no one but school employees.

Update: Over at Cato, Andrew Coulson expresses a related view.

Happy Birthday, Gordon Tullock

Don Bordeaux, of Cafe Hayek, reminds us that Gordon Tullock arrived among us on this day (1922-Feb.-13) ninety years ago.

Head Start Flop

From The American Interest (via Instapundit), an overdue federal assessment of the Lyndon Johnson-era Head Start program. It does not work.

Is Your Fifth Grader Smarter than Your Fifth Grader's Teacher?

From the Washington Post's The Answer Sheet (2011-12-05):...

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.
...
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate."

Perhaps a serious criticism of standardized tests impends. Or not. Later we read this...

The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year.

Follow the link and the success and Math test performance are explained:...

Roach was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. For the last 25 years he has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states.

That explains the "big house in a good part of town", the "paid-for condo in the Caribbean" and the "influential friends". While this:...

He holds a bachelor of science degree in education and master of arts degree in education and educational psychology

...explains the dismal 10th grade Math performance.
The volunteer victim makes some decent points:...

“Many of the kids we label as poor readers are probably pretty good readers. Here’s why.

“On the FCAT, they are reading material they didn’t choose. They are given four possible answers and three out of the four are pretty good. One is the best answer but kids don’t get points for only a pretty good answer. They get zero points, the same for the absolute wrong answer. And then they are given an arbitrary time limit. Those are a number of reasons that I think the test has to be suspect.”
*The math section, he said, tests information that most people don’t need when they get out of school.

“There’s a concept called reverse design that is critical,” he said. “We are violating that with our test. Instead of connecting what we learn in school with being successful in the real world, we are doing it in reverse. We are testing first and then kids go into the real world. Whether the information they have learned is important or not becomes secondary. If you really did a study on what math most kids need, I guarantee you could probably dump about 80 percent of math scores and leave high-level math for the kids who want it and will need it.

*His final conclusion on the FCAT:

“They are defending a test that has no accountability.”

"Accountability" is a matter of feedback. We deal with a system that responds to political feedback and resists market feedback mechanisms. System insiders dominate the political feedback systems, which explains "the margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen". Ten-to-one he gets the Florida teachers' union endorsement. Still, there is a point here. Why do schools require their particular course material? The State (government, generally) cannot require attendance at school without a definition of "school". The State cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". These definitions then bind students, parents, real classroom teachers, and taxpayers.
Consider again "IIf you really did a study on what math most kids need, I guarantee you could probably dump about 80 percent of math scores and leave high-level math for the kids who want it and will need it."
Seems to me if you really did a study on what schooling most kids need, you could probably dump about 80 percent of schooling and leave everything beyond fifth grade reading and Alg I for the kids who want it and will need it.

Update: The Headmistress over at the Common Room provided this link to a version of the Florida Math test. If this test reflects the 10th grade curriculum, then that curriculum is "a mile wide and an inch deep".

Technology, Education, and Collaborative Learning Systems (Guest post by Lindesy Wright)

Updated with links.
The use of technology in the education of younger children, from kindergarten to grade school, has become an important tool in modern education. By effectively integrating new technologies into both individual and collaborative lesson plans, parents and educators can drastically improve the educational experience of their children. Furthermore, the importance of classroom technology has grown as computer literacy becomes vital to a child’s later success in society.

By the virtue of being capable of modifying the lesson to the child's strengths, educational technology focuses on those areas most difficult to address in the general classroom setting. Educational programs to assist in reading or math can adjust their questions and procedures to match the child's growing knowledge of the subject. This permits an individualized educational experience, where children of all skill levels can all benefit equally from using the same program.

Classroom technology also can be designed to be entertaining, such as planing a lesson around an educational computer game. The use of interactive learning games and activities can help maintain the child’s interest in the activity, long after a simple book would have palled. The value of this approach is well know, but the introduction of learning technology allows it to become far more integral to the student’s learning experience.

Beyond the use of computerized games and activities, the growth of technology, such as the adaptation of eBooks to the educational process, has vastly expanded both the amount and accessibility of resources available to the children and educators alike. eBooks now have a variety of features, including text-to-speech systems that make it much easier for non-native speakers to adapt to both the spoken and written word. The inclusion of integral dictionary, spelling and thesaurus functions can also assist students in the process of independently exploring their reading material.

The use of such computerized learning systems not only helps students learn the basics, but also prepare students (even kindergarten or grade school level students) for a future where computer literacy and skill will become ever more vital. In fact, one of the greatest benefits of classroom technology is that it will ensure that even low-income students, who might not have access to computers at home, are not left behind in their understanding of technology and its uses.

Classroom technology also assists with the collaborative learning process. Via the use of school intranets, online classes, as well as chat and other social media, a child can learn with other students, even when they are not physically together. This has already become one of the strengths of classroom technology as applied to developing nations, and is growing in importance in developed nations as well. This process will assist in the development of interpersonal social skills both in and out of the classroom setting.

Finally, interactive and collaborative classroom technology makes it far easier for parents, teachers, and administrators to observe and examine the child’s progress. By making use of a variety of computer based grading and evaluation processes, it is possible to continue to tailor the educational experience to best assist the student. In addition, this permits the student’s progress to be tracked throughout his or her educational career, which can be important in detecting the early signs of learning disabilities.

The use of computer assisted classroom technology, has been demonstrated to produce better results when compared to other methods. By adopting such techniques and tailoring them for kindergarten and grade school, students, teachers and parents will all benefit greatly. Given the now ubiquitous nature of the use of information technology in society, classroom technology is not only valuable for educational purposes, but as a method to prepare children for the information age.

Liberal Arts: Personal Investment, Public Good, or Luxury Good?

Higher Education Bubble

After decades of selling college as an “investment” — and pricing it accordingly — it’s going to be hard for the higher education establishment to pivot to a college-as-personal-fulfillment argument. If it’s the latter, it’s a consumption good, priced on a par with a Porsche or Ferrari. Those shouldn’t be financed by debt, or bought by 18-year-olds. If college liberal-arts degrees, on the other hand, are to be sold as a public good, benefiting society so much that society should pay the freight, then (1) Society should have a much bigger say in what’s being taught; and (2) It might be nice to see some actual, you know, evidence of that.

Consider three possibilities:
1. The post-secondary Liberal Arts curriculum is an investment from which students will reap a financial return.
2. State support for Liberal Arts degrees provides a "public good".
3. The Liberal Arts curriculum provides "psychic income" to consumers (students) that is independent of any financial reward.

These are not mutually exclusive, but the implications, which are left as exercises for the reader, for the arguments for tax support are wildly different. Of course, there remains...

4. The post-secondary Liberal Arts degree is an employment program for due-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, which this suggests.