Why are we spending so much on education...

...for such poor results?

1 in 4 Americans think that the sun orbits the eath.

For years, we've been spending more and more on education, we have lotteries that pay more to education, we don't dare touch the education budget because that would harm children...

...so (a) how come education is so awful and (b) where does all the money go?

Apart from teacher's retirement and benefits, it goes to "diversitycrats" according to Michael Barone:

College and university administrators have been happy to scoop up all the money by rapidly raising tuitions and fees. Higher-ed expenses have been rising much more rapidly than inflation for three decades.

And what has the money been spent on? Some of it presumably goes to professors in the hard sciences and the great scholars who have made American universities the best in the world. Well and good.

But many university administrators have other priorities. The University of California system has been raising tuitions and cutting departments. But, reports John Leo in the invaluable Minding the Campus blog, its San Diego campus found the money to create a new post of "vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion."

That's in addition to what the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald calls its "already massive diversity apparatus." It takes Mac Donald 103 words just to list the titles of UCSD's diversitycrats.

The money for the new vice chancellorship could have supported two of the three cancer researchers that the campus lost to Rice University in Houston, a private school that apparently takes the strange view that hard science is more important than diversity facilitators.

This doesn't just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.

But, to quote George W. Bush, is our students learning? Not very much, concludes the California Association of Scholars in its 87-page study of the University of California system.

Students aren't required to study American history or Western civilization. But they're subjected to a lot of political indoctrination by leftist activists. "Far too many" have not learned to write effectively to read "a reasonably complex book."

"In recent years, study after study has found that a college education no longer does what it once did and should do," the report concludes. "Students are being asked to pay considerably more and get considerably less."

What's more important for America? Being able to solve quadratic equations or feeling that just the right number of transexuals are being admitted into your college?

Great Question - What's more important: being able to shoot a 25 foot jump shot or...

...being able to solve a quadratic equation? Which is going to strengthen our country more.

Dr. Ben Carson writes:

"Many teachers have told us that when we put a Carson Scholar in their classroom, the GPA of the whole class goes up by as much as a whole point over the next year, because now the kids have something else to focus on. They begin to realize they can get just as much attention for solving a quadratic equation as they can for shooting a 25-foot jump shot. Those are the kinds of things that will strengthen our nation."

Dr. Carson has a book out which may be worth reading: America the Beautiful.

Reynold's Law.

Subsidize middle-class status markers and you don't get more of the middle-class, you get fewer people with the virtues that make the middle class possible.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Dwindling Power Of A College Degree.“Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.”
Of course, one reason why a bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability is that a bachelor’s degree has gotten much easier to get, as part of a conscious strategy of giving everyone the markers of intelligence and capability. Remember Reynolds’ Law:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Liberalism, fads and the soft science...

....""Your mind can’t be broadened if you barely use it."

Here is an interesting discussion of whether colleges should push "STEM" subjects, i.e., science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and de-fund soft sciences like anthropology. It sounds like it might be worth it just to make a bunch of obnoxious leftists find work:

As you can see, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in anthropology is about 30:1. This obviously has an effect in the orientation of the discipline in terms of the values which they impart to their students. A substantial number of anthropologists don’t consider themselves scientists. Quite often they’re clearly activists, and you know very well what direction their activism is going to go. As one of five non-progressive people involved in science communication I have seen firsthand how narrow-minded and partisan people who come out of the social sciences aside from economics can be. While a liberal biologist is strongly influenced by their political outlook and will defend it forcefully, anthropologists seem trained to throw around scurrilous terms and associations as if that was the ultimate training of their profession. While normal people believe that their ideological opponents are wrong, it seems that many anthropologists as activists believe that their political enemies are malevolent demons. Who wants to continue funding wannabe-kommissars?

And there is this:

To recap, here is my main issue with the current proponents of the liberal arts:


1 – The professoriate seems inordinately hostile to half the political spectrum. That’s fine if you’re drawing from private resources, but this is not usually the case.

2 – Those without social capital derived from family connections need to accrue specialized technical skills to compensate for their deficit. Upper class and upper middle class individuals with an entree into white collar jobs by virtue of their class status can afford to focus on becoming more polished. Everyone should not be given the same advice, because not everyone starts from the same life circumstances.

3 – The average American college student doesn’t learn much, because they aren’t that bright or intellectually oriented. They don’t do their reading until the last second, and have only marginal passion for the books which they purchase. Your mind can’t be broadened if you barely use it.

4 – Those liberal arts graduates who are very bright are too often enamored of the latest intellectual fashion, and are keener upon signalling their ideological purity and intellectual superiority than actually understanding anything.

I would think it was high time to acquaint the pervert's knees with my baseball bat.

Robert Stacy McCain asks:

. . what would you think about someone who wanted to talk to your 11-year-old about masturbation, anal sex, “doggie style” and how to perform oral sex if you’ve got braces? Welcome to New York City in 2012:

New York City 11-year-olds will soon be learning sex education from workbooks that include instruction on “mutual masturbation, French kissing, oral and anal sex, and “intercourse using a condom and an oil-based lubricant.”

The shocking revelations were uncovered in “recommended” workbooks reviewed by The New York Post. . . .

One of the preferred resources for students is Columbia University’s website, “Go Ask Alice,” the Post reported. That site includes discussions on topics ranging from “doggie-style,” oral sex with braces, fetishes, and “sadomasochistic sex play.”

The New York Post reports:

Starting in the spring, the DOE will require one semester of sex ed in sixth or seventh grades and one in ninth or 10th.

It says schools can pick any curriculum but recommends the widely used HealthSmart and Reducing the Risk programs and trains teachers to use them.

Seriously, if any random stranger tried to talk to kids about stuff that schools teach in sex-ed classes, parents would be calling the cops. It’s just downright creepy to teach this kind of stuff to sixth-graders.

But, heck, at least they are constitutionally spared from the horror of school prayer.

It's almost as if the modern university system was designed to create a servile class of students who lacked the ability to question if they were actually getting an education.

Victor Davis Hanson observes:

So here is where the last thirty years all led: to too many students who are indebted, poorly educated, and without skills like high-tech engineering, sophisticated medicine, or computer design that the country needs. They are consumed with contemporary furor as the education bubble of nearly a trillion dollars in debt is about to burst. They are mad at the system that they were taught oppresses them, but also at themselves. Who would not be after spending so much money for something of so little value? Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than arrogance coupled with ignorance — and spiced with occasional glibness and the slow realization that they’ve been had.


Beyond Reproach

It is taboo for the Obama technocracy to consider exploiting the vast natural riches of America. And how can one admit that printing money destroys prosperity? Who can confess that expectations of government subsidy ruin personal initiative? So how, then, can students question the utility of their educations? They don’t dare object to the university’s manner of operations, or how their loans underwrote the need for a six-figured assistant provost of internal development or associate vice president for diversity awareness — or a vast number of new hip professors who just thirty or forty years ago would not be seen as professors at all.

I think in over twenty years of teaching I received about 5,000 memos warning me about insidious practices of sexism, racism, classism, or other sorts of oppression, what the chair, dean, provost, president was doing about it (usually setting up a watchdog faculty committee) — and not a single one wondering how we could bring rigor to the curriculum and real learning to the students.

The best class - the very best - I ever had in High School was...

...typing.

It was a summer school class that I took because I couldn't get into any real class - like Chemistry or History - and I fought the very notion of taking typing.

However, over my college, law school and business career, I've discovered that my ability to "touch type" paid dividends that more than made up for learning to type "the quick brown fox..."

Not surprisingly, my one contribution to my oldest daughter's class schedule was trying to get her into a typing class.  She didn't get into a typing class; she was put into a computer program course where they taught her about various spreadsheet and word processing programs, but not typing per se.

Apparently, typing is no longer being taught on the assumption that students come to school with keyboard familiarity.  But keyboard familiarity doesn't teach efficient touch typing:

There has been, since the late 19th century, a "right way" to type. In 1889, there was a "duel" between two teachers who claimed to have devised the best methods. The winner, who used something called "home keys," typed a then-astonishing 126 words per minute. Afterwards, the inventor, Frank McGurrin, toured the country, performing his feat in front of large crowds. Over the next few decades, international typing races—a sort of So You Think You Can Type? trend—were the craze. Touch typing was eventually taught in high school.


Those classes are gone. Ironically, in our era of keyboard ubiquity, typing has fallen out of the curriculum.) Nor has anyone invented a rival to the home keys method (that we still cling to the QWERTY keyboard, despite the advantages of other layouts, is yet another puzzle). Since most students come to school familiar with keyboards, including cell phone keypads, educators are letting the ad hoc habits of six-year old computer gamers stand, although these same teachers spend hours laboriously showing their pupils how to hold a pencil and the correct way to write a cursive capital G—skills that the kids will likely rarely use once they get to high school, when typed assignments are the norm. (Not to mention how little handwriting will figure into their adult lives). As a K-3 technology teacher in a Philadelphia area public school explained to me, "I only see students at most for one 45-minute period per week, and it may be the only time the students have on a computer that week. With various other projects, there is no time for real keyboarding instruction and practice."

Does it matter how we type? Yes. Touch typing allows us to write without thinking about how we are writing, freeing us to focus on what we are writing, on our ideas. Touch typing is an example of cognitive automaticity, the ability to do things without conscious attention or awareness. Automaticity takes a burden off our working memory, allowing us more space for higher-order thinking. (Other forms of cognitive automaticity include driving a car, riding a bike and reading—you're not sounding out the letters as you scan this post, right?) When we type without looking at the keys, we are multi-tasking, our brains free to focus on ideas without having to waste mental resources trying to find the quotation mark key. We can write at the speed of thought.

Many of us, and particularly digital natives, have practiced elaborate hunt and peck methods enough for them to be automatic and allow us to look at the screen, not our fingers (it requires about 400 hours of practice to achieve the reflexes to become a skilled typist, another 600 to be expert. However, the home keys method is, as far as extant research goes, the fastest technique. And it is not going out on any limb to suggest being able to type fast without looking at the keyboard is a 21st century basic skill.

But the letters keep shifting below our fingers. Keyboards morph, and smart phones and tablet computers render the home keys method almost impossible. Most iPad users hunt and peck: the technologies so many Americans are clamoring to adopt are far less effective for writing than previous devices. Strangely, we are adopting new devices at the cost of cognitive automaticity. On the iPad, tweeting, e-mailing and Facebooking takes more time, requires lots of looking down at the touch keypad. Hopefully someone out there is tinkering with a new typing system for the iPad, as Frank McGurrin did for the typewriter (although then we may have to practice it for 400 hours to master it).

It seems that students who know how to touch type are going to have a competitive edge in the workplace.

A modest proposal.

Victor Davis Hanson has a suggestion about reforming California's higher educational system that is just so crazy that it might work - raise admission requirements:

The CSU system — California’s multi-campus university system, and indeed the largest in the world — is once again faced with a $1 billion annual funding shortfall, and might have to raise tuition by 30 percent. The usual accounts of frozen salaries, unfilled positions, and cancelled classes flood the news. But rather than damn the voters or the Republican legislators who in the past have proved reluctant to increase California’s 10 percent–plus income tax, nearly 10 percent aggregate sales tax, and the nation’s highest gas taxes, it might prove wiser to look inward.


What percentage of the faculty enjoy released time from classes? Are the numbers of administrators necessary, and might they take a pay cut? In my over two decades of experience with CSU students, about 65 percent attend class after the third week; will tuition hikes discourage those who otherwise would have gone to, but did not belong in, college? We hear of student outrage, but most faculty at CSU would probably admit privately that a large minority of their students simply do not do the work or attend class regularly, and that a larger percentage still are laden with electronic appurtenances and drive nice cars. The point is not to bash the students or the faculty, but to ask the university to reexamine the way it does business.

Maybe raising admission standards would improve the quality of student, end the trend toward watered-down classes, and encourage those who do not belong at CSU to invest their time more productively in the work place. As it is now, over 50 percent of incoming freshmen in CSU must take remedial classes to qualify for university courses; why are they there in the first place?

Faculty could reexamine release time and ensure that those who are not teaching full loads justify such subsidies by demonstrating greater output of research and publication. My experience is that all too often, sabbaticals and release times did not result in publishable scholarship. I think everyone in the system accepts that there are vastly too many CSU administrators, and their pay and spiked pension perks were long ago unsustainable.

In other words, before we get the annual student/faculty/administrator assault on the legislature and tax-strapped people of California damning their stinginess, there should be some introspection that the most highly taxed state in the nation may well not be getting a first-class university system that is turning out well-educated graduates in four years. When most CSU student do not enter college prepared to take college courses, and when most do not graduate in four years, something is terribly wrong — and that wrong may well not be remedied by ever larger budgets.

Governor Christie on Teachers Unions.

Great slogan: "You punch them. I punch you."

There is a fundamental dysfunction in a system that takes money at gunpoint from people to elect people to extract more money from the same people.