Writing for the Wall Street Journal George Anders argues rising student loan default rates suggest America is in an "education bubble".
Has the U.S. created an "education bubble" fueled by easy money and overborrowing by families desperate to pay rising tuition costs?
Expect a hastily sputtered "no way" from economists, university officials and student-lending specialists. They attach a high monetary value to academic degrees, no matter how fast tuition rises. As proof, they cite the big and growing income gap between college graduates and people with just a high-school degree.
The problem with the income gap measurement: Other qualities of college attendees are responsible for much of it:
People who have the smarts, discipline, and motivation for success are going to do better regardless of whether they go to college. Granted, some college attendees learn some useful skills in college. But a lot of people earn their livings doing things unrelated to almost everything they learned in college.
This bursting financial bubble is a positive development which will cause less demand for education and hence limit tuition increases. Higher educational institutions waste huge amounts of resources. Some market discipline will force them to cut costs. Student loan providers are getting hit by rising defaults and even bankruptcies.
First Marblehead Corp. shares fell sharply Friday after the student-loan services provider reported a quarterly loss, as the market for bundles of loans stayed frozen.
The Boston company's stock dropped 25 cents, or 7 percent, to $3.47 in afternoon trading. In the past year, it has ranged from $3.12 to $42.50.
Bank of America decided to stop doing business with First Marblehead after private loan insurer The Education Resources Institute (TERI) filed for bankruptcy. First Marblehead now has lots of risks that it can't push off on an insurer. JPMorgan Chase looks likely to follow Bank of America and cut off First Marblehead dealings as well. First Marblehead just reported a $229.6 million loss.
Student loan availability has dropped.
Students in the United States have lost access to more than $6.7 billion a year in education loans since private lenders fled the market, spurring schools including Pennsylvania State University and Northeastern University to turn to the Education Department's Direct Loan Program.
Availability is dropping for a variety of types of student loans.
Hardest hit by the nation's economic woes is the single cheapest education loan, the 5 percent Perkins loan. Colleges surveyed by U.S. News said they are cutting the number and size of Perkins loans they offer students by anywhere from 10 to 50 percent.
And dozens of lenders who offered comparatively good deals on the 6.8 percent student Stafford loans and 8.5 percent parent plus loans last year have stopped making loans entirely. Surprisingly, at least a dozen lenders have also stopped making private loans, too, even though they can charge market rates that cover their costs. "I cannot get anybody to finance any alternative loans," says René Drouin of the New Hampshire Higher Education Assistance Foundation.
We need to move toward more automated ways to deliver educational services. Lectures should be pre-recorded. Tests should be delivered via automated web interfaces. Labor productivity in education is abysmally low and that needs to change. Tying up lots of smart people as college professors wastes a dwindling pool of smart people who would be better used in industry.
Educational bureaucracies lie. What, teachers don't operate noble institutions?
One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.
One third of the kids in California drop out of school. Such are the wages of Third World immigration.
Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.
California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site. Delaware reported 84 percent to the federal government but publicized four lower rates at home.
The No Child Left Behind law actually increases the incentive for schools to discourage kids from attending. A dumb kid who drops out is a dumb kid who won't pull down standardized test scores.
The lies and counterproductive educational policies will continue until cheap genetic testing allows scientists to discover the genetic alleles that cause intelligence differences. Once the low performers can be shown to have genetically caused lower cognitive abilities our elites will finally have to admit that most kids can't do college level work and a substantial portion can't even do high school senior level academic work.
Colleges and universities are anxiously taking steps to address a projected drop in the number of high school graduates in much of the nation starting next year and a dramatic change in the racial and ethnic makeup of the student population, a phenomenon expected to transform the country's higher education landscape, educators and analysts said.
I doubt the increase in smarter Asians will offset the effects of more Hispanics.
The United States can't maintain its position in the world with a decaying demographic situation. Most of all we need brains and lots of them to keep the economy growing and to stay on the technological edge.
Colleges and universities, much like American corporations, will increase their drive to reach a global marketplace of prospective customers. They will of course pretend not to notice their need to go abroad to get the brains as they trumpet the glories of diversity.
EVANSTON, Ill. --- A Northwestern University study investigating the effects of class size on the achievement gap between high and low academic achievers suggests that high achievers benefit more from small classes than low achievers, especially at the kindergarten and first grade levels.
The faithful believers in the supremacy of current environment (as compared to past selective pressures and genetic differences) think that somehow or other they can change environment and make the lower performers into higher performers. But if we just accept the overwhelming evidence that some kids are smarter than others then suddenly the world becomes so much easier to understand. High achievers are smarter, on average, than lower achievers.
Possessed with the obvious truth that some are smarter than others we can explain this reported result. Smaller classes reduce the disruptive effects of hyperactive and poorly behaving kids (fewer kids mean fewer interruptions). So more hours in the classroom get used for teaching. Well, smart kids absorb more per unit of teaching. So smarter kids become knowledgeable more rapidly than mentally slower kids given the same number of hours spent receiving instruction.
Yet another hope for how to close the achievement gap fails.
“While decreasing class size may increase achievement on average for all types of students, it does not appear to reduce the achievement gap within a class,” said Spyros Konstantopoulos, assistant professor at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy.
Konstantopoulos’ study, which appears in the March issue of Elementary School Journal, questions commonly held assumptions about class size and the academic achievement gap -- one of the most debated and perplexing issues in education today.
The academic achievement gap is perplexing? Really? Professors of education and social policy are perplexed by easily understood phenomena? How long will the standard social science model survive? When will academics embrace reality about the human mind and genes? We differ greatly in our intellectual abilities due to genetic differences. Accept this obvious truth and the world becomes such a more comprehensible place.
Update: Steve Sailer points to a WSJ article where experts can't figure out why Finns do so well on international scholastic tests. Says Steve:
Gosh, I wonder what the reason could be. I'm totally baffled. It's not like Minnesota kids usually score near the top of the NAEP tests in America.
Oh, wait, they do…
Steve, why compare to Finland to Minnesota? I'm like totally baffled. They are on different continents in different cultures and all right thinking (er, left thinking) people know that only culture and not genetics matters,.
Lots of very talented teachers only get seen by the people who physically sit in their class rooms at the times they deliver their lectures. As soon as they deliver a lecture performance that performance is lost forever. What a waste. But the move by major universities to put at least some of their courses on the web is reducing the amount of that waste. Online video courses have made an MIT physics professor popular with students from around the world
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.
Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.
These course will last longer than Lewin will teach. Every professor whose courses get recored in this fashion will add to an expanding store of valuable course work. This course work breaks students free of geographical locations, schedules, and makes a large assortment of lecture series accessible any time of the day and any day of the year.
You can watch Professor Lewin teach 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics from Fall 1999, 8.02 Electricity and Magnetism from Spring 2002, and 8.03 Physics III: Vibrations and Waves from Fall 2004. Most of MIT's online courses do not come with full audio and visual. However, look at MIT's complete list and note the icons that tell you what is available for each course.
Meanwhile, the wealth gap between the Ivies and everyone else has never been wider. The $5.7 billion in investment gains generated by Harvard's endowment for the year that ended June 30 exceeded the total endowment assets of all but six U.S. universities, five of which were Ivy Plus: Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, and Columbia. Ivy dominance extends to fund-raising. A mere 10 schools accounted for half the growth in donations to all U.S. colleges and universities last year. All of the top five on the list were Ivies, led by Stanford, which set a record for higher education in 2006, collecting $911 million in gifts.
During 2006-07, the Ivy "Big Three"—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—collectively spent $6.5 billion on operations, up over 100% from a decade ago. This was more than double the 41% average budget increase for all U.S. colleges and universities over this period and quadruple the 26% rise in the consumer price index. The Big Three sank a further $1.2 billion into new construction and other capital spending last year. "Yale is wealthier now, so we can add resources in almost every dimension," says its president, Richard C. Levin.
The people who attend the Ivy League are selected for in large part for their future prospects for success. This becomes a virtuous cycle (at least for the Ivies) as very successful alumni make big donations to their alma mater which increase the prestige of these schools and hence their appeal to those who are most likely to achieve big successes in business and finance.
What I wonder: Could second tier schools more precisely target the future wealthy and get a competitive edge against the top tier? Consider, the top tier hobble their institutions with racial preferences and wide humanities and social sciences offerings as well as other majors that do not give as big a leg up on the road to success. A more narrowly focused institution could profile prospective students more narrowly based on odds of financial success.
The second tier could also shape their general education offerings and programs for internships with the single-minded aim at getting their students aimed at investment banks, venture capital start-ups, and other higher potential careers. Why train future botanists when you can train future genetic engineers and medical doctors? Recruit students who claim they want to start their own business.
What I also wonder: Are these huge donations to the Ivies a waste? The billions of dollars can't be improving the quality of undergraduate instruction all that much. Some of those donations just go toward making the undegraduate experience more plush. So that part's a waste. But the portion that goes toward science buildings and higher pay for research superstars pulls smarter people into research and outfits those people with more of what they need to perform.
To the extent that Ivy fund raisers get rich people to fund R&D who otherwise would spend that money on conspicuous consumption (or even worse: leave their money to heirs who then become unproductive) the Ivies are serving a constructive purpose. But if wealthy people want to speed up the rate of research in some area of interest they ought to think about more efficient ways to do that. For example, fund highly talented young researchers regardless of which institution they are at.
BusinessWeek has an interesting article about a small number of colleges which charge no tuition.
They range from an urban college like the Cooper Union in New York's East Village to Deep Springs College, a remote, all-male school deep in the California desert. Many are specialized institutions, often focusing on engineering, such as the F.W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass.; or on music, like the Curtis Institute in Pennsylvania. A handful—the College of the Ozarks or Berea College in Kentucky—have mandatory work-study programs. Perhaps the most well-known of them is the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., which offers free college tuition in exchange for five years of service after graduation.
Students who attend these schools walk away from college with little to no loans, debt, and financial worries after they graduate. In most cases, the only fee students need to pay is room and board, a cost separate from college tuition.
Cooper Union College in New York City has a $600 million endowment it uses to pay full tuition costs of students. This puts Cooper Union in an interesting position: It is its own biggest customer. Therefore it has an incentive to keep its own costs down. I would be very interested to see how its costs compare to the costs of similar sized colleges that offer similar courses of study.
Higher education costs so much in large part because it is so labor intensive. This suggests the most obvious way to cut costs: reduce labor needs. How? Stop delivering most courses live. Use high quality video recordings instead. Also, use online tests. Make the delivery of instruction and the testing of students totally automated.
Check out a slide show of tuition-free colleges. This seems like an attractive option for those who want to study engineering. Some of the engineering schools in the slide show have fairly high admissions standards.
Columbia University journalism school professor Samuel Freedman, writing in the New York Times, reports that teachers increasingly find themselves competing with electronic gadgets for the attention of their students.
All the advances schools and colleges have made to supposedly enhance learning — supplying students with laptops, equipping computer labs, creating wireless networks — have instead enabled distraction. Perhaps attendance records should include a new category: present but otherwise engaged.
In the past three years alone, the percentage of college classrooms with wireless service has nearly doubled, to 60 percent from 31 percent, according to the Campus Computing Survey, an annual check by the Campus Computing Project of computer use at 600 colleges. Professor Bugeja’s online survey of several hundred Iowa State students found that a majority had used their cellphones, sent or read e-mail, and gone onto social-network sites during class time. A quarter of the respondents admitted they were taking Professor Bugeja’s survey while sitting in a different class.
Isn't this an argument for delivering lectures as recorded videos? If lecturers really are competing with Blackberry chats and web site reading in real time shouldn't lectures cease to get delivered in real time? Let students start and stop lecture playback during the slices of time when the students want to pay attention.
Scheduled lectures amount to an assertion of an absolute top level of priority at class times by lecturing teachers for the attention of students. Why make those times be the only times you can hear the material? I do not see this absolute rigidity of scheduling as serving a productive purpose.
Professor Michael Bugeja, who teaches journalism at Iowa State University, wants contemplative students. Um, good luck with that one.
“Education requires contemplation,” he continued. “It requires critical thinking. What we may be doing now is training a generation of air-traffic controllers rather than scholars. And I do know I’m going to lose.”
Seems to me that the new media formats are what Prof. Bugeja's students are going to end up writing for. They are immersing themselves in the new media while in class in spite of their professor. That seems like the professor's mistake. I can understand why the teachers object. The professors want to engage in exchanges with their students where their students react to what they've just been taught. Okay, how about doing this in a more modern fashion? How about moving those exchanges online and let those exchanges happen at more irregular times of the day? Create chat rooms for Blackberry exchanges about course topics.
Another option for schools: Create class rooms that block out most cellular signals. Don't want the students distracted? Remove their ability to communicate with anyone not in a classroom. Oh, and while you are at it: Build concert halls that block cellphone signals. Then we can sit in concerts without hearing the sound of cellphones ringing.
Private college admissions coach Michele Hernandez charges as much as $40,000 to help students get into top colleges. Hernandez says she makes nearly $1 million per year helping kids get into the Ivy League.
What makes her own story so compelling is that Hernandez is an insider-turned-outcast. A former admissions officer at Dartmouth College, she dared to reveal secrets of the opaque selection process in her book, A Is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting Into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges, and then to build a thriving business that helps people game the system. As she says to parents: "You don't want to pay $180,000 for some piddling school when, by spending a little extra, your kid could get into Yale." She insinuates herself so deeply into her students' lives and is so unabashed about her money-making that she has come to be regarded either as operating at the leading edge of her profession or its cynical extreme.
She claims a very high success rate. But if so she's probably picky about who she takes on as clients. Plus, the parents who have the money to pony up are smarter on average and therefore have smarter kids on average.
I can see that she can show the students how to write a more appealing application and direct them toward extra-curricular activities that look great to Ivy admissions officers. She might also be very motivational and drive kids to study harder in high school. But there's a limit to how much training courses can boost the crucial SAT scores. Still, I would expect kids who follow her advice to get into higher ranked schools than they otherwise would manage to get accepted to.
She structures the lives of her students.
Families pay Hernandez as much as they do because she promises not just substitute parenting but parenting in the extreme. She selects classes for students, reviews their homework, and prods them to make an impression on teachers. She checks on the students' grades, scores, rankings. She tells parents when to hire tutors and then makes sure the kids do the extra work. She vets their vacation schedules. She plans their summers.
She's also written other books that help to promote her to parents: Middle School Years : Achieving the Best Education for Your Child, Grades 5-8 and Acing the College Application: How to Maximize Your Chances for Admission to the College of Your Choice (Acing the College Application). So she's marketing herself through books in order to recruit customers that she markets to colleges. Then the kids use their college degrees to market themselves to prospective employers.
Our lives seem more driven by marketing than was the case in the past. Hernandez shifted her own marketing efforts toward increasingly younger kids going back to 8th and 9th graders in order to provide more time in which to shape each kid into a brand. Yes, you aren't just a kid growing up. You are developing your own unique brand. She calls it "Brand Me". A life lived to create a brand to sell to college admissions officers. Wow.
Are these kids getting trained for jobs in advertising agencies?
Our rulers are desperate to turn all kids into Lake Woebegone children who are all above average.
New York City is about to start paying some of its students for good grades: A perfect score on a state exam will pay fourth-graders $25. Exemplary attendance will also bring a reward.
There's an obvious glaring problem with this approach: A reward for a top score is no incentive to the vast bulk of the students because few are smart enough to achieve perfect scores no matter how hard they study. Financial incentives for study should be based on the intelligence level of each kid. A smart kid should have a much higher bar of knowledge to achieve to earn a reward than a dumber student. But our liberal elites have decided we can't think of people as innately different in ability. IQ is taboo even as the liberals are fascinated by the topic. Now that discussions of sexual desires and behavior are out in the open IQ has replaced sex as the unmentionable topic that everyone thinks about.
How to reward kids that already get everything?
I started to take in a big gulp of air. Would every goal attained by my two children fetch a reward? A high GPA? A good class ranking? Would sports achievements be included in this reward system: soccer goals, touchdowns, runs-batted-in? What about orchestra? Would first chair pay more than second? I'd be broke by eighth-grade graduation.
Then I thought of the family down the block with the five kids, their basement overflowing with multiple sets of Polly Pockets and American Girl Dolls, their yard littered with trampolines and electric scooters.
Parents who want to reward for performance are going to have to give their kids fewer gifts in order to leave more things available to be earned.
We are probably less than 10 years from discovering the genes that govern intelligence. Once that happens will it become technically possible to select among embryos to choose ones which will produce smarter children. At that point I expect most of the energy directed at trying to improve school student performance will be redirected toward promoting eugenics.
People from different countries practice each others' languages using cheap internet phones.
Maurice Acker, a junior at Marquette University in Milwaukee, practices Spanish with natives from Spain every Friday morning at the school's language lab. They talk about sports, cultural differences – the usual stuff of student conversations – but there's a twist: Mr. Acker has never met any of his conversational partners in person.
That's because Marquette's Spanish and Italian curriculums use Skype, a free Internet phone service, to connect students with "language partners" all over the world.
Typically, students practice Spanish for 25 minutes and then switch to English for 25 minutes (it's an exchange: Their partners want to practice speaking English). All the students need is an Internet connection, a webcam, a microphone, and headphones.
"I feel more comfortable speaking in class than I did before," says Acker, who adds that his conversations over Skype have helped his Spanish improve much faster than drills in class.
Students don't need to all come to the same room to do this. They can do it from any location that has a broadband connection.
Imagine something like this approach applied to other subjects. Why not form virtual communities online that debate and discuss an assortment of course topics. Want to learn Greek philosophers? Roman history? Macroeconomics? Study discussion groups could form virtually to allow people to chat with each other about topics they are learning. Then they could take online tests to see if they've learned enough to earn college credits.
Lectures will still have a place. But most lectures can be recorded. You could take a practice test and then in the areas you are weak you could listen to lectures, register indicating an interest in discussions on those topics, and do exercises in interactive learning software.
We all prize innovation, and with good reason. Innovations improve the quality of our lives and enrich our experience. Innovations often solve practical problems we face in our daily lives. Well, education is marked by a real deficiency in innovation where schools and colleges keep doing things the same old ways because they enjoy oligopoly power and an excessive amount of respect. So it is always a happy thing when an innovation manages to emerge in educational institutions. Our schools sorely need more innovation. We should therefore celebrate as an Oklahoma math teacher writes to Steve Sailer to report on a new breakthrough in educational terminology, an innovation that enables greater communication in educational settings. "low confidence leaners" is an innovative new euphemism in educational circles that provides teachers and our liberal press a way to refer to dumb people as a category without mentioning that they are dumb.
"At my professional development class for math teachers, I'm starting to hear the term "low confidence learners" as a euphemism for the d*mb kids.
Note how this teacher spells dumb: d*mb. Yes, dumb is a 4 letter word. No wonder we aren't supposed to call people dumb, no matter how dumb they might be.
"I think this is great! Having a euphemism for the single biggest reality that we teachers wrestle with everyday -- some kids are smarter than others -- means that at least the concept is officially thinkable. Before we had a euphemism, we had to pretend that everybody was equal in their math capabilities, which was hugely dysfunctional from a teaching standpoint in all sorts of ways, as you can easily imagine.
I think this is a great euphemism whose use should be promoted. We need a way to refer to dummies. I hope you will all do your part and find ways to refer to low confidence learners in everyday conversations.
Another related term used in educational circles: self efficacy. It is kind of like self esteem but with more of an educational branding. So "educators" can refer to self esteem while maintaining their distinct brand identification.
If reality can sneak in through euphemisms at least it can be discussed. Though we really need purer doses of reality in order to make sense of the world around us. I know very bright people who are closet realists about human nature and human biodiversity. Yet since they can't fully articulate their private thoughts they trip up and make mistakes in their reasoning that they wouldn't make if they could be more honest in intellectual discussions. Most of these people won't use ridiculous euphemisms either.
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush cooked up to improve education in America, does not appear to have changed the rate of improvement in test scores.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2007 – As Congress reviews federal efforts to boost student performance, new research published in Educational Researcher (ER) reports that progress in raising test scores was stronger before No Child Left Behind was approved in 2002, compared with the four years following enactment of the law.
The article “Gauging Growth: How to Judge No Child Left Behind?” is authored by Bruce Fuller, Joseph Wright, Kathryn Gesicki, and Erin Kang, and is one of four featured works published in the current issue of ER—a peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the American Educational Research Association.
One explanation for this result is that in the years before the act was put into place schools had already squeezed most of the learning improvements possible for dumber students. Though these academics aren't going to entertain that idea.
Proficiency levels for 4th graders improved in math but worsened in reading.
The university team focused on 12 states, including Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington. They selected these states because they are demographically diverse, geographically dispersed, and were able to provide comparable test score data over time.
Following passage of the ‘No Child’ law, federal reading scores among elementary school students declined in the 12 states tracked by the researchers – after climbing steadily during the 1990s.
The share of fourth-graders proficient in reading, based on federal NAEP results, climbed by one-half a percentage point each year, on average, between the mid-1990s and 2002. But over the four years after the legislation was passed, the share of students deemed proficient declined by about one percent.
The annual rise in the percentage of fourth-graders proficient in mathematics improved slightly in the same 12 states, moving up from 1.6 percent per year before ‘No Child’ was signed to a yearly growth rate of 2.5 percent following enactment of the law. This is the one out of six federal gauges where a post-NCLB gain was observed by the research team, tracking NAEP results.
To understand what is really going on we need to look at the data broken down by race.
The full text of the study is available in PDF format.
The dismal record for NCLB outlined above comes at a cost. Time spent teaching other subjects has been cut back in order to produce the meager to nonexistent scholastic improvements.
WASHINGTON – July 25, 2007 – A majority of the nation’s school districts report that they have increased time for reading and math in elementary schools since the No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2002, while time spent on other subjects has fallen by nearly one-third during the same time, according to a report from the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy.
The report, based on a nationally representative survey of nearly 350 school districts, finds that to make room for additional curriculum and instructional time in reading and math – the two subjects tested for accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act – many districts are also spending less time in other subjects that are not the focus of federal accountability.
About 62 percent of districts reported increasing time for English language arts and/or math in elementary schools since school year 2001-02, and more than 20 percent reported increasing time for these subjects in middle school during the same time.
Among the districts reporting increased time for English and math, the average increase was substantial, amounting to a 46 percent increase in English, a 37 percent increase in math, and a 42 percent increase across the two subjects combined.
Meanwhile, 44 percent of districts reported cutting time from one or more other subjects or activities at the elementary level, including science, social studies, art and music, physical education, lunch and recess. On average, the cuts amounted to about 30 minutes a day.
The report, Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era, also finds that overall, the decreases represent an average reduction of 31 percent in the total amount of instructional time devoted to these subjects since 2001-02.
I can see only one way to make substantial improvements in scholastic outcomes: teach smarter kids more rapidly. The smarter kids have the potential to learn more rapidly. With easy access to recorded video lectures, online texts, and online tests that allow them to earn college credit starting the smartest kids could learn more rapidly.
Some day drugs, gene therapies, and cell therapies will enhance the intellectual abilities of the dummies. Until genetic evidence demonstrates how deeply differences in scholastic performance is driven by genetic differences dishonest politicians will pretend that educational policies can help.
Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.
And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.
Professors cost more in fields where the graduates get paid more.
Such moves are being driven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatures to approve general tuition increases, university officials say.
Modest proposal: Record the lectures of a few highly paid professors and thereby drastically cut down the cost of delivering lectures by showing prerecorded lectures. Universities could approach graduate students and poor assistant professors and offer them big one-time fees in exchange for recording entire courses worth of lectures with unlimited distribution rights owned by the universities. Then universities could trade each other lectures series as a way to offer more courses and more experts giving their take on the same subjects.
Iowa State engineering students are going to feel an increasing pinch due to rising costs of engineering faculty.
Undergraduate juniors and seniors in the engineering school at Iowa State last year began paying about $500 more annually, he said, and the size of that additional payment is scheduled to rise by $500 a year for at least the next two years.
The use of prerecorded lectures will free up lots of professors to go out and work in the professions for which they are trained. By freeing up time of people whose time is highly valuable the video lectures will boost economic productivity and increase economic growth. The videos will also enable more people to get educated and to do so more conveniently, quickly, and cheaply.
Private school tuition is rising up out of reach of the British middle class.
Private school fees have soared by 41% since 2002 - at more than twice the rate of inflation, effectively pricing more parents out of privately educating their children, research showed today.
Figures showing the rising cost of private tuition came as leftwing thinktank the Fabian Society, chaired by the secretary of state for children, schools and families Ed Balls, suggested the government introduce a tax on private school fees to halt the exodus from state education.
Are the Fabian socialists oblivious to the trend which is already putting private education out of the range of an overwhelming majority of the British population and even of much of the middle class? Or are they incensed that the upper class can still afford to send their kids to private schooling even as private schooling rises above the reach of the middle class?
What can drive such a big increase in prices? Higher demand or higher costs? Also, what's driving the rising demand? Perceived greater return on educational investment? Need to get one's kids away from immigrant kids who are ruining the local school? Other?
In 2007, the average annual cost of sending a child to private day school was £9,627, compared with £6,820 in 2002, according to research by Britain's largest mortgage lender Halifax Financial Services.
That is nearly $20,000 at today's exchange rates. So put 20 kids into a classroom. Charge, say, $19,000. That's $380,000 for a classroom. How can it cost that much? Surely the teacher's seeing only a small fraction of that. How much do elementary school teachers make in Manchester or Liverpool or Cardiff?
A lengthening list of occupations do not pay well enough to make private schooling of children affordable.
Key public sector workers can no longer afford private education for their children. For teachers, average school fees for day pupils represent 28% of the average salary and 36% for nurses.
Only 13 occupations can now afford fees, compared with 23 in 2002, according to Halifax. Lecturers, scientists, engineers, journalists, writers, trading standards officers and computer programmers would now need help paying the fees they could afford in 2002.
The article says private school enrollment rose by 6% from 2001 to 2006. In the face of these higher prices that suggests a decline in middle class enrollment combined with a big increase in enrollment of children of high income parents.
Why didn't the enrollment rise more rapidly with less of a price rise? Are private school buildings already full? Does expansion really cost so much that high demand gets met with big price increases?
This article illustrates why I do not trust inflation indexes. If you looked at a market basket of goods and services bought by British engineers, scientists, first level managers and others who can't afford to send their kids to private school you wouldn't find private school as an expense for them. So the rise in private school costs wouldn't show up as inflation in their market basket.
Also, if the demand for private schooling comes as a result egalitarian educational policies that force dummies and smarties into the same classrooms then the quality of publicly provided service has declined and that doesn't show up in price indexes either.
Test-prep giant Kaplan has paired up with publisher TOKYOPOP to offer a series of manga novels (Japanese-style comics). Released earlier this month, each of three popular stories was rewritten to include more than 300 words commonly tested on the SAT and ACT. (Cost: $9.99.)
"Van Von Hunter" stars a raven-haired hero who vanquishes evil in the land of Dikay. In just the first few pages, you'll find words like "inviolable," "nefarious," and "subvert." Underlined words are defined in a box on the same page.
"By having the combination of the visual story and the words popping out on the page, students can ... really retain the words, versus just memorizing a list," says Kristen Campbell, Kaplan's national director of SAT and ACT programs in New York. With librarians and even classroom teachers tapping into this popular genre, she says, it made sense to add it to the test-prep options.
If a CD can help rapidly boost vocabulary tests doesn't that suggest that software can both more effectively and more rapidly boost educational productivity than more teachers or higher paid teachers?
Vocabulary Accelerator, by Defined Mind Inc. in New York, serves up rock, hip-hop, and R&B songs on a CD with a workbook of related exercises (www.defmind.com, $25 for the set). One ninth-grade teacher reported that after just a few weeks of incorporating the program into her lessons, her class's average score on vocabulary quizzes went up from 40 to 84 percent.
We need games and other software that teaches and tests for a much wider range of subjects. We also need ways for high school students to earn college credits in a variety of subjects by taking tests online. We need to speed up and lower the cost of education. Make it easy for kids to learn at any time and any speed rather than when classes get held and at the rate at which classes get held.
Getting rid of the SAT will destroy the coaching industry as we know it. Coaching for the SAT is seen as the teaching of tricks and strategies—a species of cheating—not as supplementary education. The retooled coaching industry will focus on the achievement tests, but insofar as the offerings consist of cram courses for tests in topics such as U.S. history or chemistry, its taint will be reduced.
Yes, the achievement tests are more constructive. But Murray does not go far enough. The Advanced Placement tests are even more constructive because they yield college credits. What we need is a massive increase in the ability of students to earn college credits without ever stepping foot on a bricks-and-mortar college campus.
Let students watch high resolution video lectures and take practice tests on the web for most undergraduate courses. Let them show up in a proctored room once a month to take tests in any subjects where they think they've learned enough to earn college credits. This would be cheaper and much more open to the lower classes, to the bright kids born on the wrong side of the proverbial tracks.
While Murray thinks the SAT is highly accurate and hard to game he thinks a widespread belief that upper class kids can get trained for it reduces its legitimacy.
A low-income student shut out of opportunity for an SAT coaching school has the sense of being shut out of mysteries. Being shut out of a cram course is less daunting. Students know that they can study for a history or chemistry exam on their own. A coaching industry that teaches content along with test-taking techniques will have the additional advantage of being much better pedagogically—at least the students who take the coaching courses will be spending some of their time learning history or chemistry.
The lower or even just middle income students have the sense of being shut out of a lot more than the mysteries of SAT coaching schools. In the world of higher education the use of the SAT is a symptom of a much larger problem. We need to move away from the extremely expensive elite school model and move toward much more accessible educational materials.
Murray says a greater emphasis on achievement tests will cause a bigger focus on the quality of high schools.
The substitution of achievement tests for the SAT will put a spotlight on the quality of the local high school’s curriculum. If achievement test scores are getting all of the parents’ attention in the college admissions process, the courses that prepare for those achievement tests will get more of their attention as well, and the pressure for those courses to improve will increase.
I think the spotlight should shift away from high schools and colleges and toward ways to empower individuals to learn as much as they want and can handle.
In spite of co-authoring The Bell Curve Murray imagines there's some way to reduce the role of cognitive status symbols in American society.
The final benefit of getting rid of the SAT is the hardest to describe but is probably the most important. By getting rid of the SAT, we would be getting rid of a totem for members of the cognitive elite.
But totems for signaling higher intelligence help to make the labor market much more efficient and accurate. We need ways for employers to identify job applicants who are smart enough to do the most cognitively demanding jobs.
Education costs too much. Way too much. That is a bigger obstacle than differences in SAT test scores. Educational institutions are also highly inconvenient. You have to set aside 3 months of your life to take some semester-length courses and have to do so where a college is located that offers what you want and that will accept you. You can't choose when the 3 month period starts.
We need to replace the education system that uses the SAT rather than replace the SAT.
A recent Sloan Consortium report about online higher education finds that online education is rapidly expanding.
Background: For the past several years, online enrollments have been growing substantially faster than the overall higher education student body. However, last year’s study, while reporting the same numeric increase as the previous year, had a lower percentage growth rate. Could this be an early indicator that online enrollment growth has finally begun to plateau?
The evidence: There has been no leveling of the growth rate of online enrollments; institutions of higher education report record online enrollment growth on both a numeric and a percentage basis.
- Nearly 3.2 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2005 term, a substantial increase over the 2.3 million reported the previous year.
- The more than 800,000 additional online students is more than twice the number added in any previous year.
My take: faculties at colleges and universities mostly fear online education and see it as a threat to their job security. But administrators and boards of trustees probably are starting to feel more fear of competing institutions which start offering online education and start grabbing away student customers. Yes, customers. Online education will force colleges to compete more directly and to start treating students more like customers.
The shift in the dynamic away from fearing entrenched internal bureaucratic interests and toward fearing online competitors at other existing accredited bricks-and-mortar institutions should accelerate as more students start choosing online courses. Existing institutions have to either rapidly embrace online education or dwindle. The elite schools can ignore it for the longest period of time. The lower ranked schools do not have that luxury.
The bigger schools and the schools with lots of researchers (i.e. lots of brain power) have the most online offerings.
More than 96 percent of the very largest institutions (more than 15,000 total enrollments) have some online offerings, which is more than double the rate observed for the smallest institutions. The proportion of institutions with fully online programs rises steadily as institutional size increases, and about two-thirds of the very largest institutions have fully online programs, compared to only about one-sixth of the smallest institutions. Doctoral/Research institutions have the greatest penetration of offering online programs as well as the highest overall rate (more than 80%) of having some form of online offering (either courses or full programs).
This makes sense intuitively for a number of reasons. First off, a large school can amortize their online web site administration costs over more courses. Second, the larger schools have more courses and departments and so have more choices on what to put online. Plus, some of the public universities have state mandates to provide continuing education to adults (e.g. University of California Extension) and online courses offer more convenient and cheaper ways to do this.
I see an opening here for private foundations which want to spread ideas and improve education: Film great lecture series on topics you want to promote. Then develop web site software for delivering online courses, lectures, course materials, and automated tests. Then offer all this for free to smaller colleges to let them get started in online education. I've pitched this idea to a couple of foundations recently. Hope they pick up on it.
Chief Academic Officers do not see quality as a barrier to the spread of online learning.
Background: The first study in this series found that a majority of Chief Academic Officers rated the learning outcomes for online education “as good as or better” than those for face-to-face instruction. The following year’s report displayed similar results. Do academic leaders hold the same opinion today, given the rapid growth in the numbers of online students?
The evidence: By an increasing margin, most Chief Academic Officers believe that the quality of online instruction is equal to or superior to that of face-to-face learning.
- In 2003, 57 percent of academic leaders rated the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face. That number is now 62 percent, a small but noteworthy increase.
- The proportion who believe that online learning outcomes are superior to those for face-to-face is still relatively small but has grown by 40 percent since 2003 from 12.1 percent in 2003 to 16.9 percent.
In the long run the percentage who see online outcomes as superior should rise. The small number of very best lecturers on each topic get seen now only by a small group of people in a single room at a single moment in time. But video recording of lectures will enable each student to see the best lectures and even see multiple excellent lecturers each tackle the same topic. What caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? Why not watch a half dozen historians argue their interpretations? Want to understand theories on the biology of aging? Again, watch several experts offer their own reviews of the evidence.
If by "online education" they mean over the internet then that's really a subset of computer-based education. Whether one loads a video off of a web site or a DVD is an implementation detail. The DVD delivery mechanism is very important because it unchains the learner from the internet. Ditto for learning game cartridges. Computers should provide instruction just as well if you are sitting in the middle of a forest or on an airplane or tethered to the internet in a city apartment.
Education has become far too expensive and slow. Many leave college with a degree after 5 years burdened with 5 and 6 figure education debts to start off their working lives. Their living standards remain low for years and their parents suffer lower living standards as well.
College is also incredibly inconvenient in an age where convenience defines so many other parts of life. Want to go to a grocery store at 2 AM? One's probably open. Want cash from a bank on a Sunday? Find an ATM machine - and many are located away from banks in shopping malls. Want to book an airline flight? Do searches online and choose from dozens of choices. By contrast, colleges make you take courses in bricks-and-mortar buildings at the hours and days of their choosing and at the rates that were chosen by centuries old traditions. Your course will last a semester of about 12 weeks. It will start on a particular day. It might only get offered once a year. Take it or leave it. Your instructor might be bored, unenthused, and perhaps not even speak English very well. You'll have to buy a big thick textbook and lug it around. This is all incredibly inconvenient. I say down with tradition. Time to automate and make education cheap and convenient.
Southern online enrollments are growing at twice the rate as the rest of the nation; there are now over 1.1 million students taking at least on online course at southern institutions.
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The sixteen southern states represent over one-third of total online enrollments, with over 1.1 million students taking at least one online course in the fall 2005 term.
Why is that? One possibility: Conservative Southerners are less enthralled with liberal-dominated higher educational institutions and perhaps their boards of directors have pressured the universities and colleges to move online more rapidly.
The Sloan Consortium also has a Midwestern edition of their online education reports.
The Sloan Consortium (funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which was funded with money from the guy who built up GM into a massive corporation) produces interesting reports about education, especially about online education. A recent Sloan Consortium report finds widespread and growing use of online education for kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12).
1. Almost two-thirds of the responding public school districts are offering online courses:
- 63.1% had one or more students enrolled in a fully online or blended course.
- 57.9% had one or more students enrolled in a fully online course.
- 32.4% had one or more students enrolled in a blended course.
The quantity and quality obviously varies. But offerings will continue to improve on both scores.
School districts expect big growth in the use of online courses.
2. Over 60% of school districts with students enrolled in online courses anticipate their online enrollments will grow. Over the next two years districts predict online enrollments will increase by 19% and blended enrollments by 23%.
3. The overall number of K-12 students engaged in online courses in 2005-2006, is estimated at 700,000.
4. Respondents report that online learning is meeting the specific needs of a range of students, from those who need extra help to those who want to take more advanced courses and whose districts do not have enough teachers to offer certain subjects.
5. School districts typically depend on multiple online learning providers, including postsecondary institutions, independent vendors and state virtual schools as well as developing and providing their own online courses.
6. Perhaps the voices heard most clearly in this survey were those of respondents representing small rural school districts. For them, the availability of online learning is most important in order to provide students with course choices and in some cases, the basic courses that should be part of every curriculum. These rural districts might be providing models and lessons for other districts facing teacher shortages in high-need subject areas such as science and mathematics.
7. While concerns about the quality of online courses, funding, and teacher development were expressed, it appears that many of these issues are gradually being resolved.
Note in item 6 the benefit to rural schools. They have smaller student bodies and can't offer as much different specialized classes. But with online courses and video recordings (and some of the online content is very likely streaming media) the kids in rural areas can watch lectures on a huge variety of topics.
High bandwidth web connections and growth in content deliverable over the web will reduce the educational advantages of cities and suburbs. Also, online content will increase the value of home schooling. Why waste a kid's time with bus and car rides back and forth to school if a parent can supervise video viewing and use of interactive learning software? If a kid fails an online test a parent can receive an automated email notification. Or a page can show a report of current scores in all subjects and how far along each child is on each course.
A lot more of the smart kids will zip through elementary school and high school at faster speeds when they gain the ability to pace their own learning. Some will study 12 months of the year and watch more lectures, do more learning exercises, and take more tests when they gain the ability to work on courses any hour of the day or night and any day of the year.
This trend is going to change demographic patterns since parents will not need great schools to provide their kids with first class educations. While parents will still want to avoid dangerous areas the need to live in a top notch school district will lessen. The lower costs of online learning will reduce demands for greater school spending and reduce support for bricks and mortars schools.
More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate -- including the House's second-ranking Republican -- will introduce legislation today that could severely undercut President Bush's signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates.
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Among the co-sponsors of the legislation are House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a key supporter of the measure in 2001, and John Cornyn (R-Tex.), Bush's most reliable defender in the Senate. Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), the House GOP's chief deputy whip and a supporter in 2001, has also signed on.
No Child Left Behind is better labelled No Lie Left Behind. The most noteworthy thing about it is the sheer size of the lie by which it was justified. It is based on the idea that America's children all live in Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average". Schools which can not get dumber children to perform like higher IQ college bound kids are punished for the genetic endowments of their students.
Our intellectuals, such as they are, made the No Lie Left Behind legislation possible. What I want to know: which motivations are most important for the telling of these lies? One of the motives is the desire to avoid saying something that'll hurt the feelings of others. Don't want to tell a person or a group their kids are dumb. Is that the biggest motive?
Another motive for lying about relative abilities is the desire to reshape and remold society. This is a milder version of the dream to create New Soviet Man.
NCLB might yield one benefit: All the effort to achieve NCLB goals will fail. The educrats are going to have a hard time explaining why testing, teaching to the tests, longer school days, smaller classes, more school days per school year, and more money did not help. But I'm confident they'll make like our elites and come up with some suitable lies.
Why have tuition costs risen faster than the rate of inflation for decades? Rising demand fueled by tax money increases the cost of higher education.
Undergraduates at in-state institutions were not significantly affected by tuition increases linked to rises in Pell grants between 1989 and 1996, economists Larry D. Singell Jr. and Joe A. Stone report in a paper to appear in the journal Economics of Education Review. The study is available online.
“For private colleges, the response to Pell grants is no different from their approach to tuition pricing and awarding of differential scholarships to students based on need,” said Singell, head of the UO department of economics. “So we are not much surprised by our findings. We were also not surprised to find no significant effect for Pell grants on residential tuition at public colleges.”
Some students, whose families’ incomes make them ineligible for Pell, have faced tuition hikes that sometimes match almost one-to-one any dollar increases in Pell grants when they enroll at out-of-state public institutions or private schools. However, rather than having the effect of turning away the poorer students with Pell grants, tuition redistribution allows these institutions to accommodate lower-income Pell recipients, said Stone, the W.E. Miner Professor of Economics at the UO.
“A lot of people have looked at the Bennett hypothesis,” Stone said. “I think our study is the most comprehensive one in terms of the types and numbers of schools and the long time period we examined. We found that Pell increases do expand the opportunities for students entering their in-state public schools without seeing a directly related increase in tuition. For students going to private schools and non-residents going to public schools, we found that access to those schools increases, too, but it comes at the expense of higher overall tuition paid by wealthier students.”
So the government spends more on education and people too affluent to qualify for student aid pay higher tuition as well.
Most people think colleges ask for financial information from parents so they can identify parents whose kids deserve price breaks. No, that is not it. The colleges use the financial information to identify parents who they can soak with higher tuitions. The official public tuition level is what they'll charge you if you can afford to get milked. If they had no way to tell how much each parent can afford to pay they'd have to offer lower official tuition levels.
Some of the Pell grant money goes toward allowing poorer students to attend more expensive schools.
Bottom-line results were that in-state public tuition has risen nationally, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. It rose by $359 per $1,000 of Pell awards in a standard statistical analysis but by just $130 per $1,000 when other effects were considered. The researchers theorized that the difference suggests that Pell grants tend to assist recipients in attending the more costly public institutions within their own states.
At public universities, out-of-state tuition went up the most in the West and Northeast, increasing at $804 per $1,000 of Pell grants. Tuition at private institutions, which get very little state support and rely more heavily on endowments, also rose, with the sharpest increases in the same regions. The rise related to Pell grants was $863 per $1,000, approaching a one-to-one effect. Stone and Singell also conclude that students who obtained larger Pell grants are drawn more to private schools with lower tuition rather than those with higher tuition.
These numbers above are a sign that colleges operate like oligopolies. Competition ought to drive down costs. But the main goal of colleges is not to provide the best education for the dollar. The main goal is to allow people to show how high their IQs are by saying which college they graduated from.
In practice the smartest kids have to pay the most to demonstrate how smart they are. The elite schools charge the most. The smarter kids tend to have smarter and more affluent parents. So the elite schools have customers who both are smarter and whose parents have deep pockets.
If employers could easily test for IQ then the need for smarter kids to spend more on expensive schools would go away. This would save them money by allowing them to go to cheaper schools. This would also drive down tuitions at the most expensive schools.
Another way to introduce more price competition: Have standard tests for major subjects with many sites offering the tests. If, for example, one could earn a degree in chemistry by taking all the standard tests of the American Chemical Society for undergraduate chemistry then a person could buy their prerecorded college chemistry lectures separately from their tests and earn a degree for a small fraction of current costs. No need for lots of expensive lecture labor and buildings with lecture halls. Watch lectures any time of night and day and go through a course as fast as you can push yourself.
Thomas Wagner, a former New York City public school English teacher, says grammar isn't taught very much in the NYC public school system and the teachers there are increasingly unable to teach grammar and writing.
I retired in 2002, after 29 years as a public-middle-school English teacher in Jackson Heights, Queens, a stable working-class neighborhood in New York City.
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In my final year, the assistant superintendent dropped by my class with the principal and later told her that it was nice to see a teacher still teaching grammar. There was no hint that a curriculum policy might be re-examined—just a wistful comment about the winds of change. To get to the point, there is no sequential program of language development that can be assumed in the New York City public-school system. While the word “curriculum” is now in vogue, there is little awareness that this might require the actual specification of academic content to be taught in each grade.
That this near-anarchic approach to teaching English had repercussions was brought home to me in the year following my retirement, when I was hired by my union, the United Federation of Teachers, to teach two sections of a six-session course to prospective teachers. The class was designed to help them pass the essay part of the New York State Teacher Certification exam. My students—all college graduates—were generally bright, dedicated, decent people, but most of them had a lot of difficulty organizing their thoughts into the form of a short essay and a limited knowledge of the mechanics of writing.
In fact, most of my students had already failed the licensing exam.
He says the inability of the teachers to teach writing is a reflection of their own inadequate education in the schools that taught them. But my guess is these prospective teachers aren't as smart as he's making them out to be. I'd love to see IQ tests administered to teachers in various public school systems. Do their skills in writing and grammar track with their IQ scores? Or is there a real decay in the level of proficiency of English writing skills adjusted for the intelligence of those teaching?
The smartest people do not go into teaching. Before women made their way into higher paying professions like law and medicine many smarter ones became teachers and nurses. But since so many more doors are open in business, higher education, and higher paying professions the elementary and high schools have probably suffered a brain drain of teaching talent. Plus, even smarter men find more demand for their skills in industry. So teaching suffers from an IQ problem.
If students need to receive instruction from brighter and more highly educated teachers the best way to address that need is to use more video lectures either recorded or delivered live to many classrooms simultaneously. The small number of very best and brightest teachers could teach tens and hundreds of thousands of students rather than just the small number of students who can fit in a single classroom. Average quality of viewed lectures could rise substantially. Also, software can automate testing and practice exercises.
Automation of teaching and testing is the path to both higher quality and lower costs.
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. - High school seniors take harder classes and earn higher grades than they used to but continue to fare poorly on achievement tests, according to reports released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Education.
Nationwide, just 1 in 4 high school seniors tested in 2005 ranked competent in math and barely a third read at grade level, the reports show. Reading scores are the lowest since 1992, with students in the Western United States performing worse than those in the Midwest and Northeast.
Despite the decline in achievement, students take the equivalent of 360 more hours of class than seniors who graduated in 1990.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores provide still more evidence that the mainstream debate on social policy in America is conducted based on a set of lies about human nature.
Within America's Lake Woebegone mythology (or, if you prefer, Bright Shining Lie) how to explain the failure of more instruction hours, more instruction in advanced topics, and standardized testing to raise test scores? How to explain the failure of more money to raise test scores? How to explain the failure of charter schools to raise test scores? How to explain the failure of the No Child Left Behind Act? After all, it had No Lie Left Behind. How to ignore the elephant called IQ standing in the room? Time for a new phrase, a new formulation. How about a "rigor gap"?
"How is it that our high school students can earn more credits, get higher GPAs, but yet not perform any better?" said David Gordon, member of the National Assessment Governing Board and Sacramento County, Calif., schools superintendent. During a Thursday press conference, Gordon termed the problem a "rigor gap."
The lies have some years to run yet. But the more vigorously the politicians try policies based on false assumptions the closer we get to the collapse of the old mythology.
We should be getting better if we live in wonderland.
The new reading scores show no change since 2002, the last time the test was given.
"We should be getting better. There's nothing good about a flat score," Winick said.
But our schools have gotten better at lying to parents about how well their kids are doing.
In 2005, high school graduates had an overall grade-point average just shy of 3.0 - or about a B. That has gone up from a grade-point average of about 2.7 in 1990.
Junior is getting better grades. Well, that's great news. What a nice lie those teachers are willing to tell.
The average kid was doing better in the good old days of 1992.
Nationwide, 73 percent of 12th-grade students achieved a ``basic'' reading score in 2005, down from 80 percent in 1992, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a sampling test the government calls the ``nation's report card.'' Sixty-one percent scored at or above the basic level in math.
At the same time, 68 percent of high school graduates completed at least a ``standard'' curriculum, up from 59 percent in 2000, with the overall grade point average about one-third of a letter grade higher than in 1990, the department said in a report. The figures raise questions about the quality of the courses being taught at U.S. high schools, it said.
As Hispanics continue to grow as a percentage of the total population average NAEP scores are going to fall further. No educational reform can overcome the demographic force of ethnic groups which score lower in standardized IQ tests.
Steve Sailer says there's a wide gap between private beliefs and public utterances.
Here's the really fascinating thing about the broad support for NCLB.
In private, virtually every single person in America understands that human beings are highly diverse in mental capabilities.
They just won’t acknowledge it in public.
So why the massive widespread lying that forms the basis for educational policy in America? Liars who lie to protect the feelings of others are more popular.
Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period. More interestingly -- and Libby might see this as the silver lining if he is found guilty -- Feldman also found that liars tend to be more popular than honest people.
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Saxe found in one experiment that nearly 85 percent of college students had lied in the course of a romantic relationship, most often about another relationship. (These were lies that people voluntarily admitted to Saxe, which means the actual number of lies and liars was probably higher.) Nearly to a person, the liars said they were trying to protect the feelings of someone they cared about.
But on some topics where the lies get translated into government policy the lies are very damaging. We need more honesty. We are hurting ourselves with these lies.
George W. Bush wants to expand the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation which is coing up for renewal this year. NCLB is based upon the biggest and most popular lie of our era: the idea that everyone is capable of learning and performing intellectually difficult tasks. Bush is proposing a number of new policies to scale up the pursuit of NCLB's unachievable goals - just like his Iraq policy.
The expansion of the NCLB requirements into still more areas won't make the whole undertaking finally start to work. The Bushies have been trying solipsism for 6 years now and it has been a dismal failure. How about a more empirical approach to policy based on what we know about human nature rather than pretty lies?
Bush lives a very active fantasy life.
President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law in 2002. It requires schools to test students in reading and math annually in grades three to eight, and establishes progressively more severe penalties for schools that fail to make adequate progress, including shutting the schools altogether.
Administration officials said there were currently about 1,800 of these schools across the country, where students have failed to meet state targets for reading and math for more than five years. But they said that loopholes in the current law allowed them to avoid serious action indefinitely.
“We all have to answer the question what are we going to do about that,” Ms. Spellings said in a telephone news conference. “This is the president’s answer to, Is the promise of No Child Left Behind real?”
We can bring liberal democracy to Iraq. We can also make all kids above average like in Lake Woebegone.
"I see this as a very vigorous package of proposals that are sound and make sense if taken together," said U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. "This is the president's answer to the question, `Is the promise of No Child Left Behind real?' If this proposal is not what Congress had in mind, then we all have to ask them what they have in mind."
Schools should be measured by starting with the IQs of their students and then ask whether each kid is developing to that kid's intellectual potential. Do not deceitfully grade a school as failing when it has kids with an average 90 IQ and the kids are learning about as much we can expect 90 IQ kids to lean. NCLB school grades are based on a lie. Our elites should stop telling so many big lies.
Charles Murray has written a 3 part series for the Wall Street Journal on education and intelligence differences. In the first article Murray argues that we can't think rationally about education policy and proposals to improve education without considering differences in levels of intelligence.
Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.
One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.
Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.
Murray argues that we can't hope to raise school test scores all that much because kids can't perform beyond their intellectual capacity. But one of the modern American myths is that each individual can achieve anything given sufficient will power and a good enough environment. That myth, which appeals to people on the political Left and Right for different reasons, is behind a many bad policies in education, welfare, workplace laws, and other areas of public policy.
Murray also notes that no researchers have ever tried to figure out what level of IQ is needed to achieve a passing score on the US government's National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. With that information children who are scoring below their potential could be identified. Give kids an IQ test. Then give them a NAEP test. Kids that are scoring lower on NAEP than their IQ test results suggest they are capable of would be candidates for greater attention to change how and where they are taught.
Murray says there's no Golden Age of education we can return to.
The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."
I call No Child Left Behind (NCLB) by a more accurate phrase: No Lie Left Behind. The law is based on false assumptions about human nature that commissars on the Left enforce by attacking and marginalizing anyone who violates their taboos about human nature. NCLB's goals are unachievable and policies formulated to achieve those goals waste resources and do wrong by children.
The topic yesterday was education and children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Today I turn to the upper half, people with IQs of 100 or higher. Today's simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.
Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.
These are not devastati