It Doesn’t Even Make Sense On Its Own Merits!

Kevin Carey (via Yglesias) notes that the Cato Institute has moved from supporting vouchers for private schools to tax credits. Yglesias and Carey both go over the basic objection to this scheme: not only are all the problems with vouchers still applicable to tax credits - the results aren’t any better, voucher programs often “leave behind” kids in special education programs in public schools, they drain resources etc etc - but the credits are incredibly regressive. Carey estimates that using Cato’s “sample legislation” that a DC family making 20,000 dollars a year would only get a credit of $200, hardly enough to pay tuition at a private school. And if the credit is for income taxes, it does nothing for those who are too poor to pay income taxes - who, of course, are the very people that Cato et al want to be going to private schools.

The second part of the proposal that makes no sense is that one of the rationales is that voucher programs lead to direct taxpayer subsidy of private education options that taxpayers could object to. For example, taxpayers could well object to funding Catholic education or Islamic education. According to Cato, with the tax credits, “With tax credits, people are either spending their own money on their own children…No one has to pay for education they find objectionable.” And while the tax credit wouldn’t result in direct, compulsory funding of objectionable educational options, Cato is being sketchy with saying that there’s a substantial difference. After all, the very purpose of these tax credits is to fund private education just like vouchers, without the direct government subsidy. Carey says “The political rationale for the policy, meanwhile, rests on the fiction that there’s a difference between the government handing you a dollar and the government not making you pay a dollar you would have otherwise owed in taxes.”

Who Do Teachers Unions Advocate For?

Dana Goldstein points out that teachers unions aren’t the Galactus of the education system, sucking up all progress and goodness from it. In fact, in a non-trivial number of cases, they are on the side of the kids:

Just as it’s easy to pick out circumstances in which the interests of teachers unions seem antithetical to the interests of children, it’s easy to point to times when the two are in sync. Teachers unions advocate for smaller class sizes. Teacher’s unions advocate for newer, better supplies, from textbooks, to chairs and desks, to cleaner classrooms. Teacher’s unions advocate for more support staff, such as guidance counselors, psychologists to deal with learning disabilities and problems at home, and classroom assistants. All of that is very good for kids.

Dana is right, all that stuff that teachers unions have advocated for is good for the kids. But that’s kind of missing the point. Last time I checked, our education system was for the benefit of the children, not for the benefit of the teachers. I’m not saying that teachers have to get screwed or that their interests should be totally ignored, simply that they should not be the driving force behind any school policy. The fact that the interest of students and the interest of teachers have occasionally corresponded is not evidence that the entrenched, institutional power that unions have - much of which is used to stymie effective reforms - is a good thing for the education system.

This is not to say that teachers unions should be eliminated or anything like that, it’s just that their power ought to be substantially curtailed. That’s because they, because of their organization and governmental support, can leverage a ton of power in debates over education policy. In most union disputes, they are in a “countervailing power” relationship with management, and things generally reach some sort of equilibrium. In schools, however, there is no “students union” who doggedly advocates and organizes on the behalf of students. And as long as that essential fact of our education politics is true, then teachers unions ought to be recognized as a vastly imperfect agent for implementing good policy.

I Prefer My Discussions of Power and Knowledge Vulgar

Kathy G suggests that had the American military been told to read Orientalism by Edward Said, as opposed to the anti-Arab filth that is The Arab Mind, perhaps things would have been different:

Yet at the same time, as Foucault noted, knowledge itself constitutes power relations. Books and ideas can have a profound impact. I don’t think it would have been quite as easy for the Bush administration to do what they did if racist, imperialist attitudes were not so prevalent amongst the military and foreign policy elites. And if those same elites had read Orientalism instead of The Arab Mind, I’m not so sure that said elites would have been quite so comfortable in their racism and imperialism. A powerful book, which Orientalism (which I have read) certainly is, and which The Arab Mind (which I haven’t read) apparently is as well, can change minds. It can persuade readers who have no fixed views on the subject, and strengthen the views of those who are already inclined to agree with the author.

If Orientalism had been widely read among the military and foreign affairs folks, perhaps the attitudes of some highly influential people would not have been quite so smug. Perhaps they would have entertained a few more doubts. Perhaps the thought of torturing their fellow human beings might have made them a bit queasy.

Although I have an quasi ironic respect for Edward Said and hold the view that the last few years have tragically vindicated Orientalism’s thesis (trust me, it’s very complicated) I think Kathy is ignoring how a more straightforward discussion of knowledge and power could explain why The Arab Mind found its way onto military reading lists. That’s because it’s a whole lot easier to launch a war against utter savages, as opposed to rather normal human beings whose reactions are very similiar to ours. I mean, anyone would know that breaking into people’s homes, taking the men out of the houses, humiliating them and forcing black hoods on their heads would anger your average European, but for Arabs, it would make them fear and respect us.

The Iraq War was what social scientists like to call “overdetermined” - it had a whole lot of caues, one of which was the Fouad Ajami-style depictions of Arabs as simplistic brutes who could be cowered into submission and parliamentary democracy. But I don’t think you needed that intellectual substructure for the war to happen, it was just one of many causes.

And on the subject of Orientalism more broadly, it’s odd how it’s come under such fearsome assault, as it’s thesis was being so decisively proven. That thesis, being “that when it came to “the East” scholarship itself had become a means of serving and legitimating imperial dominance over the Oriental “other.”” And so, more than 30 years after Said’s book we are in the midst of an imperial war in the Middle East, which was partially justified on the back of depictions of middle easterners as alien, other and totally opposed to the “West.”

And so, is Said being recognized as a prescient, far seeing public intellectual? Sure, those who originally read the book and subscribe to The Nation think he’s the shit, but in more conventional liberal circles, he’s the avatar of anti-American intellectuals that one can look really good loudly bashing. The Eustonite Left, Marty Peretz and that whole gang are only upping the ante in Said bashing. In the past few years, we’ve seen a a proliferation of anti-Said tracks. At least 1/3 of the issues of Democratiya - the Eustonite British politcal journal - have included some sort of denunciation of Edward Said. Many of his critics, who aren’t scholars of the Middle East but instead political opponents, point to Roger Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge. While Dangerous Knowledge itself is a legitimate scholarly work that takes issue with Said’s treatment of specific Orientalists, especially those Germans who were actively opposed to Imperialism, it largely misses the forest for the trees. Although Irwin is certainly right that Said plays a tad fast and loose with the facts in order for them to fit his thesis, the basic thrust of Orientalism is undeniable: Western imperialism and Orientalist scholarship were “co-productive” in producing the conditions to subjugate the East. Daniel Varisco and Ibn Warraq  have also both written book length criticisms of Orientalism. Although Varisco is broadly sympathetic with Said’s political agenda and Warraq is incredibly hostile, it’s no surprise that Democratiya is trumpeting them as weapons to wield against the Saidite menace. Said’s ghost haunts more than just discussions of his own book. All of the hysteria we see surrounding Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies Department and abominable treatment of Nadia Abu El-Haj can be explained as the expression of the endless frustration that “pro-Israel” types and conservatives felt at never being able to take Said off his pedestal.

This is not to say that I endorse all of Said’s political stands. On Israel, Kosovo and the first Gulf War, I think he was profoundly wrong. But on his main scholarly point, he was unfortunately correct.

Go Wildcats!

So not only does my future school deny Jeremiah Wright an honorary degree, despite having Bernandine Dohrn on their faculty, they’ve also hired the infamous Priya Venkatesan, the professor at Dartmouth who thinks that students disagreeing with her is a  violation of her civil rights and  was an example of  especially pernicious ““subversiveness.”

Now, many are using this Ventkatesan incident as a way to blast the bugagboos of the humanities - critical theory, literary theory, postmodernism or anything with a French last name. Now, I’m much more sympathetic to these strands of thoughts than most, and I hardly want to be part of a backlash that is often dishonest, borderline-xenophobic and genrally uninformed. If we can instead just focus on the core of the Venktasean case, which is that we seem to have a narcissistic, control freak, authoritarian and all around ineffective professor, we’d all be better off.

Of course, this suggested switch in focus doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to be attending school that hired her. Go Wildcats!

PS - In case anyone cares, my partner and I went 4-3 at the TOC, thus failing to get into elimination rounds.  A slightly disappointing end to our national circuit debate careers, but hardly a distressing one. We debated some amazing teams, and the teams we lost too all did really well.

The Problem of Integration

Dana Goldstein reminds us of one of the most despressing realities in the United States - that kids who go to majority black schools do worse than kids to who attend majority white or integrated schools. Specifically, gifted black children, who have comparable academic achievement with white kids at at young age, by the time they go to high school, are doing much worse:

“If instruction is aimed more to the middle of the distribution, then black children are less likely to have cognitively stimulating opportunities—not because anyone is being racist, but because the thing to do is aim instruction to the average level of the school,” he said.

The conclusion here is pretty obvious. Class and race are still inextricably linked in our society. Lower class students who are black likely attend schools that are overwhelmingly poor and black, or black and Latino. As a result, the most talented kids in those schools have few opportunities to benefit from the kind of education upper middle class, white gifted children receive, in large part due to the pressure their affluent parents put on schools. The solution is also obvious, and has been for decades: integration

While Goldstein is right to recognize that gifted children as less likely to meet their full potential when they are in bad schools, I think the idea that “integration” can solve this problem isn’t exactly right. First, it depends on what you mean by integration. If you mean integration by getting high achieving, rich, white students to attend black schools, well, good luck.

The one truth of American education reform has been that you don’t mess with the status quo level of people’s education in the name of equality. There’s a reason busing promoted such backlash, and it wasn’t just racism. There’s also the problem of focusing on the gifted in poor-performing schools. If the problem is that there are gifted kids in schools with low-mean performance, and so the instruction is aimed at the low average, then the clear solution is to “equalize up.” By that I mean putting those gifted kids into better schools. This would be “public school choice”, an initiative that Dana has championed. But even this strategy has myriad problems. If the gap is so large by high school, then it will be hard for parents to accept taking in these kids that would be low performing. The toher problem is of the poor, low performing, majority black school get “left behind” by the high performing kids. If the problem is that the average is too low to provide quality instruction to good students, then letting the good students fufill their potential at other schools will only make the average even lower, thus making the education worse for the remaining kids.

So we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. This is not to say that people like Dana shouldn’t try to think up and advocate solutions to this dire problem, but we should all recognize how tricky it really is.

I Guess Humanities Grad Students Learn How To Do Something

Like how to write pitch perfect guides to 91% of conservative writing on higher education.

Girls who are boys Who like boys to be girls

Alissa Quart’s New York Times Magazine feature on the challenges facing transmen and genderqueers in women’s colleges is exceptional for mainstream journalism about the gender nonconforming community.  For one, Quart is clearly familiar with the community itself as well as with the theory that goes behind these identities.  Also, Quart is sympathetic with the people she’s writing about and presents their stories and opinions in a highly non-judgmental manner.  But the heart of the article - the story of a female-to-male Barnard student named Rey - raises some incredibly interesting questions about the place of transgendered people in educational environments and the purpose of women’s colleges.  It’s both odd that gender nonconformists and women’s colleges seem to mesh so well together, and also perfectly natural. 

On one hand, the women’s college is a conservative, gender essentialist institution.  Many women’s colleges - Barnard, Smith, Wellesley - were originally started as something approximating finishing schools, but also educated the most accomplished and progressive women because paucity of elite, coed higher education opportunities.   Today, however, they appear to be increasingly outdated.  After all, in the undergraduate environment, women outperform men in nearly all metrics, both in admission and in academic performance. And so these colleges are in a weird place.  Some, like Vassar and Goucher, just abandoned single sex education entirely. 

But they’ve also become destinations for people who grow up as female and then slide into gender nonconformity.  That’s because they’re safehavens from male sexual and emotional violence.  But there’s an obvious conflict here.  How are schools whose core identity and value is exclusively derived from their adherence to essentialist notions of what it means to be a woman supposed to deal with students who have very little interest in those basic definitions?  For Rey, at least, it wasn’t easy:

But as a transmale student in a sea of women at Barnard, he felt alone. He longed to be with his girlfriend, Melissa, and with transmale friends, some of whom, like Rey, were attending women’s colleges. Even as he sought to adopt a more conventionally male appearance, he wanted to maintain his ties with his former self. “I am all for not rubbing out my past as female,” he told me.

…

In the first week of September, he found out that his roommates had complained to the college’s freshman housing director about being asked to share their rooms with a man. They wanted Rey to find somewhere else to live. According to Dorothy Denburg, the dean who spoke to Rey about the situation, these young women were disturbed when Rey told them on the first day “that he was a transboy and wanted to be referred to by male pronouns.” Rey’s roommates had, after all, chosen to attend a women’s college in order to live and be educated in the company of other women.

Rey ultimately transferred to Columbia proper, but the questions his experience raises are difficult.  Should women’s colleges be expected to greet with open arms those students who don’t want to be “female?”  And is Rey right to criticize Barnard students for not accepting him fully when he clearly didn’t want to buy into the most basic principle the school is based around?

It’s certainly a tough issue, because gender and sexuality are fluid, continuous phenomena.  You’d hardly want a women’s college to not be accepting of a students who don’t present in a stereotypically feminine way, but there seems to be a difference when those who wholeheartedly reject the biological, cultural and social place of womanhood want a place in a woman’s institution.  You can’t help but smell a whiff of opportunism, as Phoebe Maltz put it, “Rey… want[s] approval, to count as …female…when it suits him, while simultaneously declaring those who believe that rules restrict who can call themselves female to be parochial, backward-minded rubes.”

So I think that the onus rests on co-ed universities to make themselves safe, welcome environments to those who have little interest in conforming to gender roles or identities.  Because otherwise, we’re in this weird situation where people want to join institutions (women’s colleges) that derive their unique value from a basic essentialism and exclusion, and yet also criticize those same institutions for not being open to people who reject what makes these places distinct.

Those Selfish Belgians Shouldn’t Be in Jail, They Should Be Under House Arrest

Nothing brings out the liberal fascist in me like people who refuse to take vaccines.  And so when I read about four Belgians parents who are facing jail time for refusing to make their kids get polio shots, I couldn’t help but admire Belgium for taking real public health interventions as seriously as we ought to.

Vaccinations are excellent for showing how coordinated, state action is the only necessary way to deal with a certain public policy issue, and also how simplistic concepts of individual autonomy are not useful in all situations.  Now, in most cases, I’m a total Millian individualist - I think that people should have as near unlimited freedom of choice, assuming they don’t harm others or violate their freedom of choice.  And it’s part because of this combination utilitarianism/individualism that I come down so hard on vaccine rebels.

That’s because, as Megan McArdle so well explained, vaccines are only effective when everyone, and I mean everyone, takes them.  That’s because vaccines do two things.  They protect the people who take them from contracting an infectious disease, and they also create “herd immunity” which means that they prevent the disease from incubating in the population.  This means that if vaccines become ineffective, there won’t be any disease left to contract and that they also protect those who are unvaccinated.  So we have a free-rider problem - there will be those, who because of the small risks associated with vaccination, think that because everyone else is protected, they don’t need to take the shots.  The problem is compounded when just a few brave souls - like these Belgian parents - get away with not vaccinating.  Why are other parents supposed to let their kids shoulder the burden of vaccination risk if only the other 90% of kids need to get vaccinated.  When you have a collective action problem, and you can’t get everyone on board, it makes sense for everyone to defect.  So how do we prevent defection?  By coming down hard on those first few free-riders so that we can make the cost to not vaccinating high enough to outweigh the low risks of vaccination.  This means that kids shouldn’t be allowed to go to school if they aren’t vaccinated and/or their parents should pay fines or even go to jail.  Of course, we should also make vaccinations free and easily available.  I don’t want to see any parents get punished, but I want to threat of harsh punishment to be there.

A Wee Bit Too Late For Me

Starting about a year ago, my school’s college counselors gravely informed us that because of demographics, this year would be the hardest ever to get into college.   According to the Times, however, the number of high schools seniors is going to peak in about two years, making about 99% of colleges less selective:

Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students likely finding it easier to get into college.

Although it’s certainly true that good schools have gotten more selective, there’s a bit more to this trend then simply admittance percentages going down.  The first oddity is that while the elite schools have gone from incredibly selective to total crapshoot (Harvard, Yale and Princeton admit less than 10% of their applicants, despite 85% being perfectly qualified to go), the number of good, selective schools has skyrocketed.  Schools like Emory and USC, which only a decade or two ago were considered mediocre rich kid schools, have, because of their bulging endowments, been able to snatch up the best professors and students.  USC, for example, will not only offer scholarships to good students, but just straight up hand out cash.   Also, due to the increasing returns to a college education, the number of objectively highly qualified students, with good SAT scores and what, has also increased.  This means that, from the other end, the number of good schools has to go up because there’s been a downward flow in where the good students are going to school.  Add on the fact because of applications being predominately online and most schools accepting the common application, it’s become much, much easier to apply to a bunch of good schools, acceptance rates have to go down.

But while the stress and amount of work associated with trying to get into a competitive school has certainly gone up - as I can attest - the actual quality of American higher education, at the highest level, has probably gone up more.

Cross-posted at campusprogress.org/blog 

I’m Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf, But Many Are

Mike, who has some serious disagreements with me on what should be included in the literary canon and what its purpose is, admits that he doesn’t really like Toni Morrison or Virginia Woolf.  Now, having read both Woolf and Morrison in high school, I can definitely sympathize with him.  Beloved, while telling an amazing story about the horrors of slavery that most people are rarely exposed to, has an entire section that is just bewilderingly obtuse.  It also didn’t help that us reading Beloved sophomore year appeared to just be compensation for reading Huck Finn.   And Virginia Woolf, well, she is  early 20th century modernism at either its greatest or its worse.  As an example of why some people love her and (most) find her to be frustrating is that To The Lighthouse has about a 3″ x5″ notecard worth of quoted dialog.  And at one point, the house is the main narrating character.

What’s odd about Woolf’s inclusion in some high school curricula is that it’s almost certainly a token pick.  Becuase if you wanted to expose some brave high schoolers to modernism, there’s enough Joyce and Faulkner to go around.  But you really don’t want high schoolers to read Joyce and Faulkner, because amazingly obtuse, multi-perspective narrated novels with little plot and almost deliberating confusing narrative devices aren’t exactly the best stuff to mull over in a 45 minute high school English class.  But if you have a woman writing that type of book, then there’s a good reason to include it.  But the weird thing about To the Lighthouse is that it’s not particularly feminine, and while it does have a feminine and domestic perspective that many male-written novels lack, it’s that it’s particularly difficult to read and is probably unlike anything read in most high schools until then.

And that’s the great trick of including Virginia Woolf in high school curricula; you put her in for the same reason that you include tripe like House on Mango Street, and you expose high schoolers to some very legitimate literature that will challenge them in ways they haven’t really anticipated literature challenging them.  That or they will hate it and never read Woolf or any modernist literature ever again.

Some Friday Thoughts on Education

When I read this Policy Review article on the sorry state of teacher pay, I get depressed as I always do when I think about education.  The problems are numerous — the unions oppose making it easy to fire bad teachers, pay teachers based off their performance or pay teachers who teach more in-demand specialties more than others.  What makes this so infuriating is that no other successful organization pays people more based simply on how many graduate certificates they get and on how long they’ve been working.  No other successful organization makes it near impossible to fire incompetent employees or to pay people based on their performance.

But when I was talking to a friend of mine, we realized something.  Teacher quality — or even school quality –  probably doesn’t matter that much.  For some background here, I live in a small, affluent community with its own school district.  While our local public high school is amazingly well funded by city-taxes, it’s still a school that faces all the problems that any public school does.  It’s still impossible to fire entrenched, crappy teachers and there’s high turnover among good, young, energetic teachers.  But yet, the results are amazing.  It’s test scores are among the best in the state, its graduation rate is in the 90s and it sends an amazingly high number of its students to four year colleges - and a good number to very good colleges.  Can these results be explained by funding or school quality?  Partially, but there’s a much more important variable at play: parents.

Quite simply, we have a community based around good public education.  The reason so many families are willing to put with absurd housing costs is because of the school district.  Parents are actively involved in the administration and operation of the schools from kindergarten through 12th grade.  They insist that the school be well funded, have harder classes and are a constant source of pressure to make the schools better.  But more importantly, they raise good students.  Piedmont students don’t only go to a well funded school, they are instilled at an early age with the notion that academic success is important and that certain behaviors are necessary to be successful.  It’s not school funding that makes kids care about academic sucess,  that makes them want to take hard classes, that gives them an internal check against turning in their homework late.  It’s this — not the funding — that makes the schools so excellent.  Or as my friend put it when I regaled him with the depressing tales of impossible-to-fire teachers, “as long as the parents are actively involved in their kids education, the teachers could spend all day smoking crack in the union hall.”

While that characterization may be extreme, it does express the depressing truth of education well.  The depressing truth is that interventions to make schools better, to get kids into private schools, to improve teacher quality are likely to not do much absent parents who are actively involved in education.   It turns out that when you control for demographic factors, private schools aren’t all that much better than public schools.   This is depressing because, on the actual education policy end, there’s little one can do.  Instead, we have to redress issues of poverty and inequality that are the root cause of poor performance.  Even more dauntingly, we have to change the behavior and values of parents so that they raise kids who are oriented towards academic success.  And that’s hard, if not impossible, for the government to do.

Which SATs?

Michicko Kakutuni confuses her standardized tests:

 posing annoying paradoxes that do little but remind the reader of the ordeal of taking SATs. (“What is the smallest number of guests who need be present so that it will be certain that at least three of them will know each other or at least three of them will be strangers to each other?”)

While those types of logic problems sure are annoying, they (thankfully) aren’t part of the SAT, the last SAT with logic-problems was given in 1929.  They do however, get an entire section on the LSAT.  I may sound kinda analy in demanding such exact test specification, but with the amount of blood, sweat and tears me and my legions of high-achieving, upper middle class high school students put into standardized testing, it would be nice if our endeavors could be accurately identified.

FIRE Burns Too Hot

FIRE, the campus civil liberties group, is beloved by conservative as a cudgel with which to bash their most hated enemy: liberal academics.  One often wonders, when reading their reports on alleged free-speech abuses on campus, how reliable their reports are. Not only does FIRE clearly have a point of view they want to advance, but they can’t actually be on every campus to get their information from all sources.  So they often depend on the aggrieved parties to provide details of these incidents, which leads to a definite bias in their work.

All of this is just a long introduction to my Campus Progress blogeague Justin Elliot’s defnitive take-down of FIRE’s allegation of religious discrimination at Brown.  As expected, FIRE presented a one sided, incomplete view of a controversy surrounding a Christian student group that makes Brown administrators out to be members of the “rigid, intolerant liberal orthodoxy, squashing… religious freedom.”  Like Elliot, FIRE’s distortions of the incident certainly make me question the rest of their claims.

Boys, Girls and Math

Scientific American has what appears to be the definitive article on gender differences in mathematical ability and pursuing science careers. It’s full of interesting data, one of which is a confirmation of a suspicion I and many others had about male and female math ability: that boys aren’t necssarily better at math, it’s just that their ability is more spread out (has a greater standard deviation). This means that there are more boys are the best at math, while there are more girls in the pretty good to very-but-not-amazingly good range. Another way of saying this is that the boys who are best, among boys, at math are better than the top girls (and that the boys who are worst at math are worse than the worst girls). There’s no need to despair, or to think that these differences in the distributions are necessarily fixed. In fact, the number of girl “math wizards” has been going up a lot in the past 20 years:

Although it has drawn little media coverage, dramatic changes have been occurring among these junior math wizards: the relative number of girls among them has been soaring. The ratio of boys to girls, first observed at 13 to 1 in the 1980s, has been dropping steadily and is now only about 3 to 1. During the same period the number of women in a few other scientific fields has surged. In the U.S., women now make up half of new medical school graduates and 75 percent of recent veterinary school graduates. We cannot identify any single cause for the increase in the number of women entering these formerly male-dominated fields, because multiple changes have occurred in society over the past several decades.

This period coincides with a trend of special programs and mentoring to encourage girls to take higher-level math and science courses. And direct evidence exists that specifically targeted training could boost female performance even further. A special course created by engineering professor Sheryl A. Sorby and mathematics education specialist Beverly J. Baartmans at Michigan Technological University, for example, targeted improvement in visuospatial skills. All first-year engineering students with low scores on a test of this ability were encouraged to enroll in the course. This enrollment resulted in improved performance in subsequent graphics courses by these students and better retention in engineering programs, which suggests that the effects persisted over time and were of at least some practical significance for both women and men.

Y’all should read the whole thing. Like so much research about genetic bases for sex differences, there’s a lot we don’t know and it’s nearly impossible to figure out what extent these differences are the result of a variety of social factors and to what extend they can be explained by genetic/physiological dimorphism. What we do know, however, is that the current gender disparities in science careers can not be fully explained by innate differences, but instead reflects some open discrimination, the challenges of having a family, subconscious discrimination against women and a variety of remediable factors.

Cross-posted on campusprogress.org/blog

Postal/College Bleg

I’ve done my best to avoid haranguing you, dear readers, with the trivial and annoying discussions that applying to college can so often bring about. But let me note one thing. Don’t you find it odd that in this day and age, some schools — for me, just a certain one — still find it necessary to send their admissions letter in the mail. Like, the old school mail, with the truck and the mailman and everything. Why do they decide to agonize their students this way? Is the ability to set up camp by your mailbox an admissions criteria these days?

UPDATE Just checked the mail….no letter.  Now I have to wail until Monday.  Grrr.

The Proles at the Private School

I’ve been trying my best to avoid blogging about the college admissions process and all its assorted issues because, frankly, I spend enough time thinking about those issues as it relates to myself.  But MeganMcArdle had this to say about the incredibly generous financial aid packages that Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League are offering:

“So those schools are less than 2% of the total American school system,” he said. As far as I can tell, that disparity has only grown in the intervening years; thanks to unfavorable demographics, getting into college now is much more competitive than it was in my day. As long as you’re drawing half your student body from schools that charge tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition, playing with your financial aid package is the poverty-fighting equivalent of sending a complementary fruit basket to the local orphanage at Christmas.

While it’s true that Ivy League schools, despite their strikingly egalitarian financial aid policies (zero loans, all grants for families earning up to 50-60 thousand, very generous after that) mostly draw from the upper crust, private schools themselves also offer quite a bit of financial aid.  While I’m sure Megan will use her own private high school as an example, at my own high school, over half the kids receive some form of financial aid. Of course, these numbers vary from high school to high school andultimately we shouldn’t use percentage of students from private high schools as a proxy for class diversity — we should just use income numbers.

It’s also unreasonable to expect Ivy League schools to be truly reflective of the country’s income numbers — dispute the level correlation between inteligence and income all you want, but it’s certainly true that there are more qualified applicants in the top quartile or quintile than in the other ones.  But in so much as Ivy League schools can be egalitarian, they are taking all the right steps and should be commended for doing so.

College Rankings

Kevin Carey has a very insightful criticism of the US News and World Report College Rankings:

That translates into incentives that virtually guarantee inefficiency and constantly rising costs. If a university were able to figure out how to reduce its costs by, say, 10 percent, while holding quality constant, and it chose to pass those savings along to its customers in the form of a tuition decrease, its U.S. News rankings would go down. If, on the other hand, it became 10 percent less efficient and passed the cost onto customers in the form a tuition increase (not a hard thing to do if you’re a selective college), its ranking would go up. All of this stems from a deficit of reliable, comparable, institution-level measures of quality. Thus we have this crazy higher education market with no value proposition, one where cost and quality are assumed to be the same thing — and in the sense that high-end higher education is a luxury good that primarily serves to signal your exclusive ability to acquire and pay for it, they are the same thing.

There are a whole host of other issues with the rankings, like the ridiculousness of schools limiting class size to 49, so they can boast a higher percentage of classes with “less than 50″ students, which is part of the ranking.  But Carey, Yglesias and many critics of the rankings are missing something.  The point of the rankings isn’t to say what school is most appealing to wonks, but rather to prospective college students.  Now a big part of that is students and parents who desire to go to a prestigious school, which they believe is determined by the rankings (of course, Duke and Wash U aren’t more prestigious than Brown, but that’s neither here nor there).

But at another level, the rankings, especially the input measures that Yglesias and Carey criticize actually say a lot about the school.  As someone who just finished an early application to an undisclosed college and spent a lot of time visiting schools, I can say that those who were clearly spending a lot of money on their students (Emory and Pomona spring to mind) really did seem more appealing.  This poses a problem for Carey, because measures like “damn, how awesome is it that we have this sweet, super technologically advanced computer lab designed by students with huge ass bean bag chairs all over it” (Emory) can’t really be included under “educational outcomes.”

Sleep

I’m writing this now because I don’t have class until 9:20 - here’s Ezra Klein on the virtues of sleep:

We also get some data on the commonly heard, and totally accurate, complaint that schools start too early. “in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis…the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable.”

In middle school and the high school I would have gone to, class starts at 8:05, while at the school I attend now, classes start at 8:35, and if you’re lucky, you can a first period free at least once a week.  Speaking as a sleep starved teenager, those extra 30 minutes in the morning are incredibly valuable.  How any school could ever start before 8:00 is simply astounding and probably proof that teachers or some other force has become too powerful in the district, because starting times that absurdly early are never in the interest of the students.

The Columbia Follies

One would think that after the entire Ahmadinejad incident, Columbia could get a break and just go trying to educate their students without a huge media event taking away their attention.  One would be wrong:

 A hangman’s noose was found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office at Columbia University Teacher’s College on Tuesday morning, prompting the police to start a hate-crime investigation.

Detectives with the New York Police Department’s hate-crime task force were investigating whether the noose, which was discovered on the fourth floor of the college at about 9:45 a.m., was put there by a rival professor or by a student who was angry over a dispute. Colleagues of the professor identified her as Madonna Constantine, 44, a prominent author, educator and psychologist. Ms. Constantine is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia and has published several books on race relations, including “Addressing Racism” in 2006 and “Strategies for Building Multicultural Competence in Mental Health and Educational Settings” in 2007.

While it is awful this type of lame racial intimidation is happening at a place like Columbia, the fact that I’m blogging about it and that it is on the front page of the Times website exposes one of the weird tics of the Times being the paper of record.  That tic is the nation reads about anything and everything about Columbia.  From Ahmadinejad, to the Minutemen controversy, to the tenure decisions in their Middle Eastern Studies department, Columbia is always a national news story.  Add on the fact that the Sun and the New York Post seem to have multiple reporters dedicated to exposing every bit of anti-Israel or biased wackiness that comes out of Columbia and one would think that the university was the most important in the universe.  Just another side effect of our New York-DC centric media universe.

The Lottery

There’s a great story in yesterday’s New York Times concerning state lotteries. It turns out that they aren’t the best way to fund public education:

For years, those states have heard complaints that not enough of their lottery revenue is used for education. Now, a New York Times examination of lottery documents, as well as interviews with lottery administrators and analysts, finds that lotteries accounted for less than 1 percent to 5 percent of the total revenue for K-12 education last year in the states that use this money for schools.

In reality, most of the money raised by lotteries is used simply to sustain the games themselves, including marketing, prizes and vendor commissions. And as lotteries compete for a small number of core players and try to persuade occasional customers to play more, nearly every state has increased, or is considering increasing, the size of its prizes — further shrinking the percentage of each dollar going to education and other programs.

The article goes on to detail how lotteries are sold as a cure-all for education funding and then actually don’t do very well at funding education. More disturbingly, voters think that lotteries are providing the lion’s share of school funding, and are thus less likely to use more reliable mechanisms, like bond measures or tax increases, to fund education:

Surveys and interviews indicate that many Americans in states with lotteries linked to education think their schools are largely supported by lottery funds — so much so that they even mention this when asked to vote for tax increases or bond authorizations to finance their schools.

A lottery, besides being a poor way to fund schools, is a voluntary, regressive tax on the poor, stupid and impulsive. Why then, do states and voters like them so much? The most obvious answer is that a lottery is an apparent free lunch: instead of just raising taxes on a broad base, you get to have dumb gamblers voluntarily fund your state’s education needs. When states cap revenue streams like property taxes, pass TABOR or just generally denigrate taxes as a way to pay for state services, like education; they are forced to resort to these unsustainable, ill advised funding gimmicks. And, in the end, the lotteries are ineffective at funding education at any more than a trivial level. But they are effective at making real funding increases more difficult, preying on the vulnerable and stupid and keeping lottery operators in business.