Category Education

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The Supposed Gender Gap in Education

Apr 21, ’10 9:36 AM

If you consume any quantity of news at all, you will already be aware that right now The Gender Gap is one of those stories that’s just bubbling under the surface, with its proponents trying to spin it up into the National Crisis Of The Week some time soon.

The Gender Gap, this time, has to do with young men not graduating from high school, or going to college, at the same rate as young women. The graduation and college-attendance rate of young men isn’t falling; in fact it’s rising; but the women’s rate is rising faster.

There are a whole lot of annoyances here. The first is that there’s this underlying assumption, never explained or even directly stated, that Of Course this is some sort of Problem. Why is should be a problem is never really expressed; ‘collidge ejuhcashun’ is just taken as an a priori good, for everyone, all the time.

Second, and somewhat related, is that I don’t think the real story is being told. Private and good public schools have been sending a high proportion of both sexes to college for a good long while now. What has changed is that a lot of people from the kinds of schools that graduate a lot of students who aren’t strictly literate are now ‘going to college’. And in this community of barely literate scholars, women are very, very strongly overrepresented. It’s not that women are stupid; but that, these days, stupid (or at least mis-educated) women tend to go on to something called ‘higher education’, while stupid or mis-educated men tend to just get jobs digging ditches.

But because the associate’s-degree program in Word Processing at Bongwater State U. is ‘college’ in the statistics in exactly the way that Harvard and MIT are, people are panicking over the ‘gender gap’ in education. What they really should be worried about is the amount of money and time these women are wasting on what amounts to very expensive vocational training for low-wage jobs.

Seriously: I looked at the ‘areas of study’ web page for a state university not far from here, and found, among other things:

  • Administrative Assistant (certificate)
  • Child Care & Guidance
  • Child Development
  • Child Life Services
  • Child Studies (apparently there are differences between these)
  • Coaching
  • Communication Disorders
  • Companion Animal (presumably training them, not being one)
  • Corporate Video (not to be confused with Communication Disorders above)
  • Criminal Justice
  • Exercise Science
  • Family Life
  • Family Studies
  • Fashion Merchandising
  • Fitness & Exercise Science (different from plain Exercise Science above apparently)
  • Head Start
  • Health Promotion
  • Outdoor Adventure Leadership
  • Recreation
  • Retail Management
  • Sustainable Energy Systems Management

This kind of thing isn’t education. It’s vocational training, at best.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with vocational training; but it’s not like studying Philosophy or Physics or Math or Literature. The chief difference is the specificity of the courses. The Head Start major includes classes like “U.S. Political Systems” — showing that they understand what Head Start is really about — and “Relationships in the 21st Century” and “Guiding Alternatives” (seriously, that’s the name of a required class), and so on and so forth. Vocational. Training. But it comes with a bachelor’s degree at the end.

Lately, a lot of these stories on the Education page of the newspaper have been next to other stories wherein the local college is patting itself on the back for holding tuition increases down to a bare 6% this year. If the reporter is any good, the story might mention that while this year’s increase might be only 6%, the cumulative increase in tuition and fees over the past 20 years has been something like 400%.

The local college will rarely, if ever, be asked to comment on this.

What’s going on is that there’s an enormous bubble in higher education; everyone is told that they absolutely must consume this product if they’re to have any kind of future that does not involve grease under the fingernails (and grease under the fingernails is assumed to be a terrible thing), and further the product is heavily subsidized.

So people go to college in vast numbers, and because of this increased demand tuition rises even more, and the product seems even more attractive as a result, because if it weren’t something that’s absolutely necessary and wonderful, they wouldn’t be packing the dorms full every fall at $20,000 and up a head, would they? And so the demand rises even more, and the subsidies rise, and so on and so forth.

At the same time, the real market value of the product falls, because the world is over-supplied with bachelors of arts. The result is to spur demand for more specifically elite education, since the the Bongwater State U. degree has been so devalued in the university’s rush to accommodate more and more and more students, many of whom should not be there in the first place.

This cannot go on forever, and I think the ‘gender gap’ is actually a sign of the beginning of the end. I think it’s being seen as a ‘gender gap’ for two reasons:

  1. The people doing the studies of such things are typically academics themselves, and so are going to tend not to entertain the notion that the academy is perhaps going off the rails;
  2. Women are, comparatively, herd animals.

Now I know I’m going to get attacked for that last one there, so let me explain what I mean. For a variety of reasons, the average American woman seems to be less likely to be a trend-bucker than the average American man. I think that some of this results from women being taught from a young age to value security and predictability, and to go with the group. Before leaving angry feminist rants in the comments, you should consider that this is the flip side of the feminist trope that women somehow innately value ‘consensus’ and ‘community’ and negotiation and harmony over conflict.

Men, on the other hand, are taught from a young age to value self-reliance. Very few men are self-reliant, and a lot more men than women get themselves killed while doing things that the consensus has already determined is a very bad idea, like driving a hopped-up Honda Civic down the freeway at 120 mph.

But the same cultural baggage that causes Johnny Patchbeard to bolt a fart-pipe onto his car and then wrap it around a tree also results in him being more likely to question whether spending more money than he’s ever had in his life to become an official Companion Animal Technician is really worth it. After all, he could always set up his own fart-pipe-and-ridiculous-car-stereo installation company.

This is the guy who isn’t on campus. Four years from now, he’ll either be established in the fart-pipe trade, or possibly doing something else; his girlfriend will be deep in debt and eligible for the specific dead-end job she trained for at Bongwater State.

(And this is before you consider that the Women’s Studies/Women’s Center/Runaway bigotry calling itself feminism culture on many campuses pretty effectively communicates to men that their kind really isn’t wanted there.)

The same thing happens, I think, at all levels of education. I obviously haven’t been in elementary school for a very long time, and I’m aware of the dangers of trusting the accounts of journalists; but everything I read — in blogs from teachers as well as newspapers and magazines — suggests that every year the stuff the schools teach gets less and less relevant to anyone except education wonks. The cost keeps rising, and we constantly hear about the need to lengthen either the school day or school year, or both. Nobody ever says that maybe schools should be pared back to essentials; the closest you’ll see is people arguing for teaching only the essentials, but ten hours a day and eleven months a year.

None of this is never addressed in these stories, even in passing. Boys not doing well in school, and not going to college? They must be dumber! This is more or less what people said about girls and women a hundred years ago, and today you’d be savagely attacked for even hinting that females are in any way at a natural disadvantage.

Suggest today that the problem with educational consumption is some innate failing of half of the population, though, and you can be a respected education pundit — if that half of the population is the male half. That’s far safer than suggesting that extraordinarily expensive has limited appeal.

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Public Education and Victimism

Oct 15, ’09 11:56 AM

I have found — and I think that the truth of this can be confirmed by simple observation — that people tend not to achieve what they think they’re not going to achieve. There are other explanations for failure, of course, but very, very few people ever manage to do something that they really and truly believe they can’t do. Logic dictates that you shouldn’t even attempt to do something that you can’t do.

There are enormous numbers of small examples of this: Billy not asking Susie to the prom; Joe not starting that company to make widgets; half the population being afraid of their computers because they think they can’t possibly figure out how to use them properly.

But there are more visible and more specific examples, too. One of the ones I trot out all the time is Marion Barry, the erstwhile mayor of Washington, DC. Mr. Barry is a smart and skilled politician, but his career has been derailed time and again by his inability to control his personal life. He doesn’t pay his taxes, he hires hookers and smokes crack with them, he stalks girlfriends, and he sits in his car snorting coke. He has been arrested for all of these things.

Why does such a smart guy have such a hard time bringing his life under control? Presumably Marion Barry has his own personal demons working on him, but it’s also partly because he doesn’t see himself as responsible for any of this. Every time he’s arrested, he complains that he’s being discriminated against because of his skin color. Marion Barry is African-American.

By claiming that his problems are all the result of racism — and there is no doubt in my mind that Marion Berry believes with all his heart that this is the case — he manages to move the responsibility for his problems — and for solving them — from himself to Society at large. Marion Barry could refrain from smoking crack with hookers, but Marion Barry can’t — nor, I presume, would he want to — do anything about the color of his skin. By seeing his problems as originating in his melanin, in his genes, and in the attitudes of others toward those, he defines his problems as something over which he has no control whatsoever, and so he can go on being arrested and yet think of himself as a basically good, responsible person.

I’m using Barry and his claims of racism here as an example, but the same thing is true for members of other official victim groups as well. Everyone has met at least one incompetent woman who was sure she was being held back by ‘sexism’. There are people who can barely speak English who say they don’t get jobs because of ‘xenophobia’. Et cetera.

Racism, sexism, and xenophobia all exist, but far more crippling than prejudice is the ability to blame your failings on someone else. The inability to shift blame is one reason why white men tend to get ahead, and I’d say a bigger one than that they are the beneficiaries of racist and sexist attitudes. The incompetent white man has only had things like ‘office politics’ to fall back on as an excuse, and that’s hard to keep up after he finds the same politics — i.e. politics that find that he’s a jerk and an idiot — in many successive offices. This kind of guy is gradually turning to blaming affirmative action for his troubles, and thus in some way leveling the playing field.

What this has to do with education

But my real topic here is public education. I still believe that public education should be abolished, but now I have yet another reason. Many public schools, particularly the very well funded ones you find in central cities, are very bad. This is a big enough problem, as these schools waste a lot of time and money without achieving much.

But I’m beginning to think that the public schools actually make things worse by giving their students and graduates yet another external thing to blame for failure. Nobody but nobody seems to think that the students of these schools have any responsibility at all. The left wing blames inadequate funding, racism, sexism, etc., etc. for the failure; the right wing blames the teacher’s unions and bureaucracy.

The students notice this, and kids are great excuse makers. The habit of making excuses is (hopefully) bled out of us as we mature and, in fact, become more personally responsible for our lives. Children and teenagers, as a rule, have no shame about placing blame on anything but themselves. And the state of the public schools — both their real deficiencies and the exaggerations of the same for political purposes — effectively creates official Victims of public school students.

These natural excuse-makers spend all day in institutions that are, according to everyone who cares to weigh in, sub-standard. The public schools are underfunded! The teachers’ unions insist on keeping incompetents on the payroll! American kids don’t know anything and are falling ever further behind their peers in Japan/Sweden/Germany/Canada/China/Botswana/YouNameItStan!

(This last one, in particular, has been in constant use since at least the 1950s. American schools have allegedly been turning out idiots since time immemorial; the Reckoning, the decline of the United States, has always been just around the corner.

Only in the U.S., reported Flesch, is there any remedial-reading problem. In Britain, kindergarten children read Three Little Pigs; in Germany, second-grade pupils can read aloud (without necessarily understanding all the words) almost anything in print. By contrast, average U.S. third-graders have a reading mastery of only 1,800 words.

That’s from Time magazine’s issue of March 14, 1955; note that it’s not even really a matter of complaining that the schools stink; it’s a matter of complaining that American schools uniquely stink.)

So do you think that the kids — and teachers and administrators, for that matter — see this kind of thing and vow to do well, to prove these critics wrong? Of course they don’t. They all have a ready-made excuse for their failure, and the teachers and administrators in particular have a financial interest in failure — failure leads to claims that The Schools Are Clearly Underfunded etc.

All of this goes right back to my claim that public education should be abolished. It’s not that I don’t think that people should be educated. I even think that education is a Public Good, and thus one of the few things that can legitimately be done by the government.

But when they’re run by the government, too many people have an interest in complaining about how awful the schools are — and this talk is, eventually, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Euphemism Watch

Jan 4, ’09 2:02 PM

Via Fark: Primary drops ‘school’ from title.

The decision was defended by headteacher Linda Kingdon. She told The Sheffield Star: “We decided from an early stage we didn’t want to use the word ‘school’.

“This is Watercliffe Meadow, a place for learning. One reason was many of the parents of the children here had very negative connotations of school. Instead we want this to a be a place for family learning, where anyone can come.

I find self-euphemism particularly interesting, since it can only come from an acknowledgement that something is wrong but that, usually, the conclusions has been drawn that the terminology, and not the underlying reality, is the problem.

There is a revolving door of euphemisms for people with one kind of disability or other: in the case of physical disability, we have gone from crippled to handicapped to disabled to differently-abled — and there’s probably some new term that I’m unfamiliar with. The problem, though, isn’t the term but, you know, the actual inability to do something that most people can do.

At least those do have subtly different meanings, though. Better are the euphemisms for mental handicaps, where, for example, we’ve gone from retarded to developmentally delayed, which is simply a substitution of English for Latin. Kids will soon be calling one another ‘developmentally delayed’ on the playground just as they once called one another ‘retard’; and the ‘place for learning’ will acquire the same ‘negative connotations’ that now attach to the term ‘school’, unless the people in charge thereof actually solve the underlying problem.

And that doesn’t seem too likely, given that they appear to be the kind of people who can’t resist the urge to self-euphemize. A strong and successful institution, group, company, etc. doesn’t need to introduce new terms, because they set the evolving definition of the old one. The National Association For The Advancement of Colored People has not found it necessary to change its name as successive waves of euphemism for what we currently call ‘African-American’ have come into use. Referring to ‘Colored People’ in general will get you shouted down these days (though, mysteriously, ‘people of color’ is currently not only not seen as rude, but in fact as extraordinarily ‘sensitive’), but the NAACP does not need to change its name because the organization defines what the name means, rather than letting the name define what the organization means.

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Achtung, Babies!

Jan 10, ’06 11:07 AM

The Dallas Morning News reports:

Lancaster [Texas] schools Superintendent Larry Lewis said students should have opened more than presents during their holiday break.

He wanted them to open their books during the three-week break because he feared that some would forget things they had learned.

Between 750 and 1,000 students had not completed assigned holiday homework upon returning to school Monday, and hundreds of them were suspended. There are about 5,770 students in the Lancaster school district.

ATTENTION EMPLOYERS AND COLLEGE ADMISSIONS OFFICERS: Be sure not to hire or admit any products of the Lancaster, TX school system more than three weeks after graduation. The head of the school system himself does not believe that anything they teach those kids will stick any longer than that.

I’ll give them credit for at least having ‘zero tolerance’ for, you know, poor academic performance, rather than random and pointless ordnung. But I have to question not just their logic but their sanity on two points:

First: If your students are really forgetting things they’ve learned after three weeks, does it even occur to you that maybe your education is not all that effective?

Second: Does it really make sense that the punishment for not doing schoolwork should be not being allowed to come to school? Is that going to be an effective punishment? Or is it more likely to make the problem — or at least the problem as the school people see it — even worse?

If they forget what they’ve learned in three weeks, how much more are they going to forget while they’re suspended?

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Confusing Cause and Effect

Aug 24, ’04 10:23 AM

So now teachers are being told to use purple ink instead of red when correcting students’ papers, according to the Boston Globe.

Purple is less hostile and threatening than red, apparently:

A mix of red and blue, the color purple embodies red’s sense of authority but also blue’s association with serenity, making it a less negative and more constructive color for correcting student papers, color psychologists said. Purple calls attention to itself without being too aggressive. And because the color is linked to creativity and royalty, it is also more encouraging to students.

“The concept of purple as a replacement for red is a pretty good idea,” said Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute in Carlstadt, N.J., and author of five books on color. “You soften the blow of red. Red is a bit over-the-top in its aggression.” [...]

“I do not use red,” said Robin Slipakoff, who teaches second and third grades at Mirror Lake Elementary School in Plantation, Fla. “Red has a negative connotation, and we want to promote self-confidence. I like purple. I use purple a lot.” [...]

Sheila Hanley, who teaches reading and writing to first- and second-graders at John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Randolph, said: “Red is definitely a no-no. But I don’t know if purple is in.”

Hanley said a growing contingent of her colleagues is using purple. They prefer it to green and yellow because it provides more contrast to the black or blue ink students are asked to write in. And they prefer it to orange, which they think is too similar to red.

Hm. So we’ll try a little experiment:

hithere

getbent

Quick: which of those statements is more hostile?

See, in reality ‘Get bent, jackass’ is more hostile, because it’s a rude imperative and it calls you a jackass. But you were fooled because the benign and even friendly ‘Hi there, darling’ is in red, and thus hostile.

What? You say that you noticed that the statement that called you a jackass was more hostile, regardless of its color? Amazing.

Color psychologists have all kinds of theories about how the feelings that different colors appear to inherently bring about in people. Green is supposed to be relaxing, and blue is supposed to make you either feel cold or not hungry or both. There may be something to this, I don’t know.

But the reason that red markings on their papers cause students stress is not that they’re red: it’s that more often than not they indicate that the student has done something wrong. Mark errors in purple, and students are going to stress out over seeing their papers covered with purple marks. And all of this is without even examining whether it’s necessarily a bad thing for students to be jarred by seeing that they’ve made a lot of mistakes. If you really wanted to eliminate stress, you could just not mark the paper at all and give everyone an A+. But is the point self-esteem, or education?

Every ten years or so, the officially acceptable way to refer to what I would call a retarded person changes. The Binet-Simon scale used to include moron to describe people with IQs from 50 to 69, imbecile for 20-49, and idiot for anyone under 49.

These words are all insults today, but they were just clinical terms to begin with, meant, in fact, to refer to these states of intellectual development without being insulting. Moron is from Greek, meaning, well, moron. Imbecile is from an obsolete French word meaning ‘weak’, and idiot is ultimately from idios meaning ‘own’ or ‘private’; an idiot, the lowest on the scale of feeble-mindeds, lives in his own world.

But moron, imbecile, and idiot are all insults today. So is retarded, which was used after moron etc. came to be seen as offensive, and special, which replaced retarded after people caught on.

Today I think the official term is developmentally disabled or mentally handicapped. These probably have too many syllables to really make the jump into common usage, but I still think I can already see these terms’ obsolescence on the horizon. Mental retardation is not something that people will ever look on neutrally, like hair or eye color. No matter what you call the mentally deficient, that term will come to be an insult when applied to people of ordinary intellectual capacity, and not long after it will be seen as an insult to the true idiots, imbeciles, and so forth.

You cannot hope to ever turn mental retardation into just another one of a person’s many characteristics, no matter what euphemisms you cook up. And you cannot hope to ‘lessen the blow’ of a school paper that’s full of mistakes simply by changing the color of the ink you use to point out these mistakes. It’s the condition, not the term retarded, that’s ultimately undesirable in a person, and it’s the error, not the circle around it, that is undesirable in a school paper.

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Oh Thank Heavens

Mar 31, ’04 9:57 AM

A school system in Merrillville, Indiana is finally doing something about the real issues in education. Here’s the whole story, with my emphasis added::

MERRILLVILLE, Ind. — Officials have banned pink clothing for the remainder of the school year out of concerns that the color has become associated with gang activity.

Administrators last week told students at the city’s high school and two middle schools to avoid wearing pink clothing or accessories, said Michael Berta, associate superintendent in the Northwestern Indiana district.

“There is no evidence of gang activity. But because of the growing use of the color pink we decided to be proactive. Girls and boys are supposed to avoid wearing pink,” Berta said Monday.

None of the district’s 6,500 students have been disciplined for wearing pink, he said.

Berta said the issue came up at a recent administrator’s meeting when a principal remarked that there were more students wearing pink. “Not only were there more kids wearing pink T-shirts and pink hats, but also pink shoelaces, which was unusual,” he said.

Clothing retailers said pink is a popular color in current styles.

“About 30 percent of my items for this season are pink. It’s ‘in.’ I have pink in every shade,” said Amanda Zipko, owner of Amanda Gayle’s boutique in Schererville.

The school authorities notice that ‘more students’ are wearing pink; so it simply must be some kind of ‘gang’ symbol. Oh, brother.

And people wonder why I call for the total abolition of public education. B.S. like this is just one small part of it.

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Darwinian Education

Mar 5, ’04 12:28 PM

Woe is us, the Republic is doomed! We’ve got nothing to look forward to except a slide into mediocrity and third-worldness, and all because Johhny Can’t Read.

I’m not sure that there’s anything to worry about, in part because Why Can’t Johnny Read was published in 1955. As far as I can tell, there has never been a time or a culture where people were not moaning about how things are going to hell because the kids today aren’t learning anything. If American schools were already so terrible in 1955, you’d think we’d have seen some effects of that by now. Instead, we have the baby boomers — who were in school in 1955 — whining about how bad things are now. (I have written about this before.)

I have no doubt that there were some kids — maybe a lot of kids — who weren’t learning to read in school in 1955. There are certainly a lot of kids who aren’t learning to read today. I’m no fan of our system of education, largely because it seems to go out of its way to make sure that it doesn’t satisfy anyone involved. Children are incredibly curious creatures; effective teaching is mainly a matter of channeling that curiosity into certain areas. A child whose curiosity is thus channeled will, instead of fully understanding the fluid dynamics of mud pies, learn to read or to do math or whatever other useful skill is on offer.

This is, of course, hard to do. When you’ve got a room full of children, it’s very hard if not impossible to do any of this nurturing and channeling of curiosity garbage. To be able to do anything at all, you’ve got to maintain some kind of order, and this generally involves squashing curiosity. Once you’ve done that, you’ve got the class under control, but at the expense of making the real goal, education, that much harder to achieve.

There’s nothing wrong with Summerhill, but this is a very resource-intensive approach to education, and one that doesn’t scale very well. Summerhill is education, but it isn’t really a system of education. The entire Summerhill philosophy is that good education is something that is impossible, or at best very difficult, to systematize. If you accept that you have to do mass education — and, to keep costs low and for a lot of other reasons, I think that’s not an unreasonable conclusion — you have to systematize it. And everyone seems to be agreed on one thing: that the American system of education sucks. Even John Kerry and George Bush seem to agree on this point, even if they disagree about what should be done to change that.

And here’s where I disagree with both John Kerry and George Bush. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that there’s anything wrong with the American education system. Instead, I think that a lot of people are mistaken about what the system really does, and what we genuinely want and need it to do.

One hundred percent of educators are themselves well-educated white-collar workers, so they don’t see this; and this influences the way most of them see the world: they believe that the education system is designed to produce teachers — or some other kind of well-educated white-collar workers, anyway.

But it’s not. We don’t need that many teachers, or that many investment bankers, or that many lawyers, or that many novelists or computer programmers or architects.

As the saying goes, the world needs ditch-diggers, too. That’s an inelegant way of putting it, but the reality is that the world’s computer programmers, lawyers, and so forth need their garbage collected and their plumbing plumbed. Some people are also not well-suited to what is often referred to by the horrible phrase ‘knowledge work’; for these people, a career as a lawyer would be an algebra class that never ends.

Most countries handle this by deliberately sorting children at a certain point. Everyone gets more or less that same elementary education, learning basic history and to read and to do basic math. After the local equivalent of sixth or seventh or eighth grade, the kids are either put on a track that might lead to university, or what in the United States we generally call a ‘vocational’ track.

In the U.S., we’re culturally unable to do this. The United States has no established church, but it has what amounts to a state religion in our cultural belief in opportunity. There’s no way we could set up a system where children’s opportunities were curtailed in any official way. Mistakes would occasionally be made in the sorting, but even if the system were perfect, the Lake Wobegon syndrome has a strong hold here; we wouldn’t readily accept being told that any child was below-average. We still need to sort people into the smart and the not-smart, though, so we have a deliberately Darwinian system of education. It’s certainly possible to get a good education from any public school system in the U.S., but it’s by no means assured.

If you’re smart, and if you have the necessary cultural values to succeed in school, and if you are motivated to succeed, you will — no matter how ‘bad’ your school is. If you do not bring those things in with you, you will not, no matter how good the school: it’s that simple. Our schools are like the rest of our society in they provide opportunities for the people who can take advantage of them. In American schools, as in American society generally, success is up to the individual.

A lot of people think that there’s a problem with American society’s intense competitiveness; they say that it’s unfair, racist, sexist, or whatever else. But the strange thing is that everyone thinks that there’s a problem with the education system, even those who see the value of Darwinian competition in other areas of society.

Some schools have attempted to eliminate or curtail explicit direct student competition by banning competitive games on the playground and by eliminating contests like spelling bees. The thought is that such competition hurts the losers’ self-esteem, by proving that they’re inferior to some other kid in some specific thing. (Of course then there’s the question of whether it’s a good idea to maintain ‘self-esteem’ by simply denying the child the opportunity to understand his own limitations; but that’s a topic for another day.)

To the best of my knowledge, though, nobody has even attempted to address the real competition in schools, that between those who can get something out of the whole education system, and whose who cannot: the system is always blamed, despite the fact that ‘bad’ urban schools turn out the occasional success, and that ‘good’ schools in wealthy suburbs turn out some ne’er-do-wells.

It’s possible that we shouldn’t try to eliminate this competition, this individual scramble for an education, from schools. There’s probably a very good and tidy scientific word for this, but I don’t know what it is: so I’ll say that American schools work very well as efficient difference amplifiers. When kids enter school at age 5, they’re all at about the same intellectual level. Some of them can read, and some cannot; some can tie their shoes, and some cannot. But the ones who can read can’t, generally, read very well, and the ones who can tie their shoes are clumsy at it. The differences between the smarties and the dummies are small.

As they progress through the system, the smart kids — the ‘able kids’, really, because it’s not all about innate intellectual capacity — get smarter and more able at a much faster rate than do the dumb or ‘unable’ kids. By the time high school graduation rolls around, the differential is vast: the smartest kids are reasonably well-read, and they have a basic understanding of science, math, and history. The dumbest kids still can’t read — and in some cases, I’m sure, they still can’t tie their shoes. The smart kid goes on to university, and the dumb one to Wal-Mart or the Public Works Department. Society needs both of them.

I suggest that this differential-amplification is a necessary and proper part of any effective system of education, but that deeply-ingrained cultural values in the United States require that we not consciously acknowledge this. We believe that everyone has opportunity; and, given equal ability, everyone does. That abilities and thus opportunities differ from person to person is widely-understood and accepted.

We like to see limitless potential in children, though, and so we pretend that these realities of life do not apply to them; that they all have the ability to do anything at all, and to do it well. As much as we like to see potential in a child, we understand on some level that maintaining that illusion into the child’s adulthood would require some kind of Harrison Bergeron nightmare.

We cannot ‘reform’ education in the United States until we fully understand what we want education to do.

That the debate is thoroughly politicized doesn’t help: the teachers’ unions and the educational establishment in general say that more money and thus more educational establishment is the answer. Fundamentalists of one stripe or another, be they religious or political, complain that the schools are ‘indoctrinating’ the youth to think thoughts that the parents would rather they not think. Politicians and the general public are up in arms because the ‘quality’ of the schools — which in practice means the number of kindergartners who go on to be qualified to work in the education establishment — very directly affects the value of real estate and thus general tax rates and revenues.

A lot of our issues with education could be solved, I am convinced, by de-monopolizing the system: in short, by taking the state out of education, there would be more flexibility in education, and people would be more able to get an education that suits their individual needs. (Taking the state out of the equation would also eliminate a lot of the terrible second-order effects — a lot of them impacting urban planning — that result from the effective state education monopoly: but that’s another subject.)

Would every child then be college material? No, but this isn’t how we should measure the ‘success’ of education — and this shouldn’t be seen as a problem by anyone except those who have spent millions of dollars to build superfluous colleges.

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Respect, Culture, Violence, and the Schools

Mar 3, ’04 10:10 AM

From The Washington Times:

D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams has approved a security plan for Ballou High School that would include armed police officers patrolling inside the building, X-ray machines to inspect all bags and packages, and secure doors that would remain locked except in an emergency.

The plan, prepared by Metropolitan Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey and released yesterday at the mayor’s weekly news briefing, comes in response to the Feb. 2 fatal shooting of James Richardson in the cafeteria at Ballou High School. Another student has been charged in the slaying.

“Our concept as we move forward will be to individually assess the security needs of our schools on a case-by-case basis and design and implement security plans that will work and will fit with each school,” Mr. Williams said. “Now we’re starting with Ballou, but we’re not stopping after Ballou.”

The plan, which Mr. Williams described as “custom-designed” for the Southeast high school of 1,097 students, will include up to 30 police officers and security guards patrolling the building in a combination of fixed and roving patrols during school days. The 24 security guards, six police officers and one school investigator called for in the plan will be under the command of a police sergeant. [...]

Chief Ramsey said police will complete initial security assessments at the District’s 14 other high schools within 30 days to get a better idea of how many officers will be needed. He said he would like to see legislation allowing police officers to work part time in the schools, in addition to their regular shifts, a proposal the mayor said he would support.

Other changes at Ballou will include the purchase of four metal detectors, three X-ray machines, a computer system with a photo-ID database that will include student schedules and disciplinary infractions. Images from the school’s 53 surveillance cameras also will be fed to the police department’s Joint Operations Command Center.

So to protect a population of 1200 or so people, the city is going to spend — how much? The article doesn’t say; Chief Ramsey said “a cost analysis has not been completed because the plan first had to be approved by the mayor,” which directly contradicts the first sentence of the article.

We’ll just take it as read that the D.C. public schools — and ‘urban’ (i.e. poor) school systems in general — spend a lot more money per pupil than your average suburban school system, and achieve a lot less. There are a lot of reasons for this, including an entrenched and bloated bureaucracy. Another cause is the values and culture of the students (and their parents), which culture involves things like shooting your classmates.

Only a tiny minority of D.C. students do things like this, of course, but this tiny minority is still far larger than it is in most school districts. And while education is inherently inexpensive — all you really need is a teacher, a student, and a log — security is inherently expensive, and effective security particularly so.

And so I find it strange that nobody is trying, or even suggesting, the simple expedient of saying publicly that these people carrying guns etc. into the schools are jackasses. The school authorities, the police, the news media all talk about the need to spend lots of money — money the city won’t spend on things like education, sewer repair, pothole filling, etc. — to combat these kids. And that’s got to be quite a boost to the ego: these teenagers are, the city acknowledges by its actions, more important than the streets, the sewers, the parks, and the libraries — and certainly more important than the education of their non-violent classmates.

Low-class people seem to be quite enormously concerned with the issue of respect. This is most often discussed as it applies to poor, uneducated inner-city blacks (because of the common slang use of ‘dis’, from ‘disrespect’, to mean any kind of slight from a dirty look to an attempted murder), but you see the same thing among white hillbillies, too. Any of these people are liable to start hollering at you for some insult they perceive in the way you’re dressed, in how you speak, in your hairdo, car, shoes, etc., etc., etc. — what you might call the ‘cut of your jib’.

I have nothing against people going around armed for purposes of self-defense, but it’s a problem when you have armed people who see a knife or a gun as ‘defense’ against someone calling them a name, or not showing them enough ‘respect’.

Having an itchy trigger finger doesn’t exactly inspire respect, though, of course; it inspires fear. If you’re not picky, though, you might not mind being feared instead of respected, because the superficial results are similar. You defer to the man you respect because he’s likely to be right; this tendency to be right is why you respect him. You defer to the man you fear because he’ll plug you if you don’t. Whether you’re respected or feared, people are more likely to agree with you.

So what do we do when these people with a chip on their collective shoulder use violence or threats of violence to make things difficult for everyone else? In this case, we make it clear how difficult it is for the city to overcome their will. The city shifts the schools’ focus from education and more toward opposing these would-be violent miscreants.

Better to more sharply distinguish between respect and fear by making it abundantly clear that the low-lifes are, in fact, low-lifes; that they are clowns. The military achieves discipline in boot camp not by working through the problems of recruits who step out of line, but by ridiculing them and by belittling them in front of their peers. The recruits, or most of them anyway, don’t conform to the rules because they understand that rigid discipline is necessary for an effective fighting force; they conform because they don’t want to be made fun of as the weak link.

If there’s a genuine risk, I’m not against taking measures to secure the school (or whatever) and its occupants against harm — just as the military removes from its ranks the truly dangerous recruits who don’t respect themselves enough to fall into line.

But along with this should come a healthy dose of scorn, and not the staged and false disdain that you see a lot of social issues these days: Smokers are jokers! Users are losers! Drinking is wack if you’re a teen! I cruise without booze!

Something like that will achieve precisely the opposite of the intended result, because the only people who take to heart such bland slogans are themselves Tools. You need to be truly rude for this to work.

I recommend use of the words ‘jackass’, ‘idiot’, ‘moron’, and so forth. Suggest that these people — they’re almost but not quite exclusively male — are violent because they have underdeveloped genitalia. Imply that they’re gay and trying to hide it through macho posturing. I’m sure that the gay lobby wouldn’t like this (probably with reason), but there’s no better weapon against a teen boy who thinks he’s tough than to suggest that he’s a homosexual. (And most hair-trigger idiots are teen boys at heart, whatever their age.)

Neither small dicks nor closeted homosexuality actually lead to violence, but the junior-gangster set would be horrified if anyone thought either that they had a small dingus or that they were fruity. Stop glorifying these people, and start belittling them, and the problem will abate.

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School Performance, Poverty, and 'Diversity'

Oct 14, ’03 11:58 PM

There’s a story in today’s Washington Post about the Montgomery County school system.

Montgomery County, Maryland, is a relatively wealthy jurisdiction just north of Washington, DC. It’s also quite ‘diverse’. ‘Diverse’ here is a code word for ‘non-white’. If your county is entirely black, it’s ‘diverse’. If it’s entirely white, it is, obviously, not.

As it happens, Montgomery County is actually diverse, when you’re talking about skin color, in a sane sense as well; which is to say that many different color of skin are represented there.

Montgomery County’s public school system is a good one, taken as a whole. But.

One-half of its schools, in a vast ring of communities from Chevy Chase up to Damascus and down through Olney, represent the historical image of Montgomery County’s student population: mostly white and relatively affluent.

The other half, a swath of communities from Takoma Park in the southeast up to Gaithersburg in the county center, educate the vast majority of Montgomery’s poor and immigrant children. “It is a racially, economically and language-identifiable geographic area,” [Montgomery County schools superintendent Jerry D.] Weast said, similar in size and makeup to some of the nation’s larger urban school districts. “If it was a stand-alone system, it would be called a failing system.”

This despite being part of a school system which demonstrably does not waste much of its money on bureaucracy and aggrandizement of its own honchos; the system has no trouble educating half of its students. The Montgomery County schools have even taken special steps to help students in the ‘red zone’:

Weast called attention to the dichotomy when he became the Montgomery superintendent in 1999. He named the affluent area the “green zone” and the more diverse area the “red zone,” and since then he and the school board have focused $20 million in extra resources on the latter — most notably, to reduce class sizes and introduce all-day kindergarten

It hasn’t worked, of course. Even within a good school system, and even with more resources being focused on the ‘red’ schools, the children of the poor still lag behind.

And the situation is not going to improve until it becomes socially acceptable to address the real problem: that, within the United States, there are cultures which tend to lead their members to success, and cultures which tend not to lead their members to success.

Many ‘minority’ American cultures are not ones that lead to success. I’m not going to go into this at length here.

Gasp! Shock horror! Can’t say that, it’s racist!

Well, no it isn’t, unless you think — as most of the Left does these days — that skin color is the major determinant of your character. Let’s leave skin color out of it, and examine the facts. Or, rather, the fact that seems to be universal in all the education hand-wringing: poor children do less well in school than wealthier children.

Children don’t work, of course, so poor children are the children of poor parents. Parents who are poor are people who have not figured out how to succeed — economically, at least — in our society.

Wealthier parents have, by definition, themselves been more successful in our society. They know how to play the game, and they teach this — often unconsciously — to their children.

So rather than saying black children don’t do well in school or Hispanic children don’t do well in school or even poor children don’t do well in school, we might say: children of unsuccessful parents tend to be unsuccessful in school.

There are exceptions, of course, just as some millionaire’s sons get expelled. But generally, it holds true. And it’s because poor parents are poor because they don’t have the skills to be successful. They’re not lazy; they’re not stupid; they’re not genetically inferior. Poor people — most of them — merely lack the knowledge necessary to not be poor.

As with the millionaire’s son, there are exceptions. Some people are poor because they are genuinely unable to acquire any valuable skills; there are a lot of smart poor people, but very few genuinely stupid and incapable wealthy people (except heirs). Some people are poor because of bad luck; certainly a lot of wealthy people have happened to be in the right place at the right time (like, dare I say it, heirs). Some people are poor because they’ve made a positive decision to live their lives in some way that’s not particularly remunerative.

Most poor people, though, are poor because they don’t know how not to be poor. They’d like to be more successful, but they don’t know how: they have some vague ideas about education, and working hard, and so on, but they don’t really have much of an idea of what ‘education’ means, other than ‘schooling’. They know about working hard, but they work hard at the wrong things. And their kids learn these things from them.

What’s needed isn’t No Child Left Behind, or federal breakfast programs, more money, or all-day kindergarten, or any of the other garbage that passes for Educational Reform. What’s needed is a public acknowledgment by mainstream society that certain behaviors and values tend to lead to success, and that certain behaviors and values don’t. And that the values and behaviors that tend to lead to success are those held and practiced by the ‘majority’ culture.

It’s possible to be a great success in the United States without being able to speak English, and it’s possible to get rich while remaining ‘true’ to some ghetto culture. It’s far more likely that you’ll get rich while wearing a tie, and while speaking the langauge of the majority. Once you’re rich, you can do pretty much whatever you like within the walls of your compound.

Is this what’s likely to happen, now that we’ve seen children within a single school system but from varying cultures have different rates of success? Of course not.

[Gary] Orfield [professor and co-director of Harvard University's Civil Rights Project], who researched Montgomery County for his book “Dismantling Desegregation,” said policymakers should look at ways beyond the schools to maintain true diversity, in which populations — and therefore political power and family resources — are more evenly balanced.

Think about that: Policymakers should look at ways … to maintain true diversity, in which populations … are more evenly balanced.

Which seems to mean that where you’ll be allowed to live should depend on your skin color. If a neighborhood is too white, it’ll be ‘diversified’ by the addition of some ‘minorities’. If it’s too black… well, you’d think that with today’s emphasis on diversity über alles, this would be good, but no, it’s ‘gentrification’ and it’s bad. So I’m not sure what would happen in that case. And I have to assume that mixed-race people would once again be classified as ‘quadroon’ and ‘octoroon’ and all manner of idiotic BS, and used to fine-tune ‘neighborhoods’ where only three-quarters (or three-fifths) of a white person needs to be balanced.

But in any case, ‘true’ diversity must be achieved at all costs, it seems. And note than while the problem is one of academic achievement (and, by my assessment, social skills and wealth as a proxy for those skills), the civil rights poobahs immediately turn it into one of race. Race, the topic that can’t be discussed in America.

White people living as black people do in America’s cities and cheaper suburbs would be told, in no uncertain terms, to stop living that way; that their poverty, unhappiness, and failure was the result of their lifestyle.

The race-hucksters, though, have managed to convince a large enough majority of the people that, somehow, living off the government dole, working miserable jobs, and going through life with a only a rudimentary education (if that) are authentically black, and that somehow being successful in the mainstream society means selling out to The Man. We hear people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice called ‘sellouts’ and ‘house slaves’. People say that Tony Wililams, the mayor of Washington, DC, isn’t ‘black enough’; presumably, Marion Berry, the unbelievably inept and corrupt crack-head prior mayor, was ‘black enough’.

So the ambitious ‘minority’ person not only has to fight against a lack of social knowledge about how to succeed in our society, but he’s got to deal with jackasses who tell him that by following his ambitions, he’s somehow less authentically himself.

And so, even when the laboratory of Montgomery County has shown us how students from different cultures perform differently in the same school system, we can’t even publicly acknowledge that the problem might, just might be the culture that the unsuccessful kids come from. Ah, yes. Of course.

Until we can’t face the fact that the worship of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ for diversity’s sake short-circuits cultural evolution, we will not be rid of these problems. Our society was poorer in the past for the suppression of the cultures of blacks and other ‘minorities’; it’s poorer now for the unexamined celebration of these cultures.

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'Affordable' Housing and Public Servants

Sep 26, ’03 1:59 PM

So it appears that Prince William County, Virginia, may wind up building a housing project for its workers to live in.

Prince William, which has long been a middle-class suburb favored by military families and government workers, now struggles with a problem more commonly associated with wealthy resort towns or maturing, affluent suburbs. The willingness of leaders to consider teaming up with developers to build apartments or houses for county employees shows how concern about affordability has spread outward to the fringe of metropolitan Washington.

A hot real estate market in Prince William has driven costs higher in the last several years, and the county has encouraged the building of high-end housing after years of booming townhouse construction. To complicate the matter, Prince William has relatively few apartments, which would provide more options for young and lower-paid workers. There are nearly three times as many apartments per person in Arlington County and Alexandria as in Prince William.

And, of course, it is totally out of the question to just allow builders to build the kind of housing that’s, you know, actually in demand in the county.



County planners and officials are considering a range of possibilities, including more help for workers in getting low-cost loans, working with nonprofit groups to subsidize mortgages, and working with developers to build apartments or even group homes meant for younger, single workers. Those units might be clustered in a workers’ “village,” officials said.

So their options are either to subsidize people to live in places they really can’t afford, or building a worker’s village or group homes. It’s really a shame I can’t italicize that group homes further, to show the how mind-bogglingly idiotic I think this is.

Let’s step back a bit, here. In the United States, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., representatives of the government are talking, with presumably straight faces, to the Washington Post, about building group homes for ‘younger, single workers’. Talking about building what amount to worker’s hostels, something they’re even getting away from in eastern Europe and Russia.

The apartments or houses would be built with private money, and the county would guarantee a certain number of rentals at a set price, officials said. The county would pay the rent on any units that weren’t leased.

Because it would be unheard-of for a builder to construct apartments that he then attempted to rent in a free market. This never happens.

Of course, it does happen in some places, but rarely these days in American suburbs. At the same time people are complaining about the lack of affordable housing — the cost of housing actually has increased much faster than the general rate of inflation in recent years — their elected representatives continue to allow builders to build nothing but classic high-cost suburban development.

The elected representatives do this because they don’t want to spend any more money than is absolutely necessary. If you’ve got 100 acres, you can zone it for apartments or townhouses at 5 units per acre, and wind up with 500 families living there, and possibly 1000 kids for the local school.

If you zone the same land for houses on 5-acre lots, not only do you have fewer roads to maintain, but you only have 20 families living there, which means only 40 or 50 kids to educate — or fewer, because they’re more likely to attend private schools than poorer kids. People who can afford those houses tend to burden the police less with knife-fights, too. You collect less in property taxes on the twenty five-acre lots than on the 500 1/5-acre lots, but the county’s expenditures are cut even more.

So the land gets zoned for five-acre lots in order to save money on the schools; and then what schools there are become a problem, since there’s no place for the teachers to live. The county is attempting to cherry-pick, to avoid marginal uses. The trouble is that the people making high-dollar uses of land — $500,000 houses, fancy office parks, giant malls, etc. — require some marginal uses of land to support them. The $500,000-house-dwellers need to be able to buy gas and Slurpees, and they need teachers for their kids; the office-park-workers need to be able to eat lunch and get their oil changed; and the mall needs somewhere for its workers to live. If you make all these supporting activities more or less illegal, the value of your high-value land-use goes down.

I may be making some inaccurate assumptions about my readership, but Prince William county is likely not a place you’d want to live. It is emphatically not a swank area. The traffic there is bad, and there’s nothing to do except go to the local megaplex to see Space Mutants IV, or go to a chain restaurant to get even fatter. It’s a very long way from being the worst place on earth, certainly, but there’s very little to distinguish it from any of dozens of other places nearby, or around the country.

Yet the average price of a single-family house in Prince William county is $258,000, and the average apartment there rents for $862 a month. By way of comparison, the average price of a single-family house in New York city is $203,000, and the average apartment there rents for about $750.

Now, those average New York prices span everything from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to the far reaches of the Bronx and Queens. And the average apartment in Prince William county is larger, newer, and in many respects nicer than the average apartment in New York.

But you’d expect that, because the average apartment in Prince William county costs 15% more than the one in New York. Why? Because, as distorted as the New York real-estate market is, the market in this undistinguished suburb of Washington is even more distorted, largely to save money on schools.

All of this is why I’m firmly of the opinion that the government should not be involved in the education of children. Aside from the perversity of putting the government in charge of teaching the next generation of voters, it distorts housing markets beyond recognition. Perfectly reasonable houses might be worth little because the school that you’ll be paying for if you move in stinks; lousy houses are overvalued because they happen to be within a given school district.

And this distortion is before one of the main goals of urban planning becomes minimizing government expenditures.

Eliminate the county’s obligation to educate children, and the county becomes interested in fostering the construction of the most-desirable housing possible. In some places, this will mean houses on five-acre lots; in others, high-rise apartments. The inhabitants could then send their kids to the school of their choice, paying directly — rather than through property taxes — for the privilege.

The problem of unequal school funding gets a lot of press; schools are funded through property taxes, so the people with the most-expensive houses tend to get the best schools. A lot of people get exercised about this, and it isn’t even the biggest problem that results from property-tax funding of schools.

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