The education bubble

[ballz]

Certain fields of education haven't been watered down not because they are driven by industry, but because they are based on objective (measurable) criteria.  You can either do calculus, or you can't.  You either know your anatomy and physiology, or you don't.  You can either perform the skills of a trade, or you can't.  Whether you make the right sociopolitical noises to stroke the instructor's bias is irrelevant.

I agree to some extent I suppose, but those fields can still lower their standard. For example, all the Red Seal Program would have to do is say "you only need 1000 hrs of experience to be a journeyman, instead of the previous 4000 hrs" and they have made it easier to be a journeyman and therefore less capable people would be a certified journeyman entering the work force. But that is not what happens. There are good tradesmen and poor tradesman, just like there are good artists and bad artists. If you are a junk artist, you will still get your BA, if you are a junk tradesperson you will not* get your Red Seal.

*Of course, some people slip through the cracks no matter how good your certification system is, but in general the Red Seal Program has raised the standards and accountability of trades as opposed to watering them down.

 

[a_majoor]

A great article in Forbes that younger members (or our children) can use to map out their future. This is far different from the way *we* did it in the past:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemalone/2013/03/29/why-your-kid-cant-get-a-job/

Michael S. Malone, Contributor

3/29/2013 @ 12:23AM |5,989 views
Why Your Kid Can't Get a Job

This article was co-authored by veteran Silicon Valley marketing executive Tom Hayes, currently founder and CEO of MePedia.com

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, one out of every two Millennials—age 18 to 32–is either unemployed or under-employed. Numbering approximately 80 million people (there are actually more Millennials than Baby Boomers), this cohort is now the most educated, yet most-indebted generation in history. The Department of Labor estimates that some three million Americans with Bachelor degrees work in jobs that don’t require an education at all–janitors, barristas, bartenders and retail clerks.There are a lot of obvious reasons why junior is now living in your basement at age 25.

Indeed, there has been almost a perfect storm in the convergence of Globalization and the off-shoring of labor, productivity gains from information technology, the Great Recession (and the evaporation of millions of entry-level jobs), and the rise of impersonal “robo-hiring” via computer modeling and software filtering (where test scores and checked boxes count more than life experience).

Meanwhile, the confluence of social, mobile and local is seeping into the corporate world. In fact, our very idea of an ‘enterprise’ is changing. Empowering individuals weakens organizations – and thus companies are becoming decentralized, virtual, protean. Managers can look to services like Odesk and eLance to contract out virtually any task. The very nature of work and the compact between worker and workplace is changing – and society is slowly adapting to this change. It no longer makes sense to warehouse employees (even at Yahoo!) in expensive office buildings so that colleagues can spend the day texting and emailing each other anyway.

Unfortunately, the world of work isn’t adapting quickly enough for Millennials. At a time when one’s gifts are just as likely to appear in a YouTube video or pin board as in a resume, the talents of this generation are being overlooked by aging HR directors and recruiters. There’s a reason that the average LinkedIn user is 44 years old – how do you display in a line of bare text your genius at viral marketing?

So what is a kid today to do? One answer is to establish a powerful personal brand independent of work experience. Not just cobble together a few starter jobs, but pursue their own aspirations – and then learn how to define them and market them to the corporate world. Another answer is to take advantage of being a digital natives and build new kinds of networks – and a sharing economy – and find jobs for each other and hire amongst themselves. Freelancing is likely to be their future anyhow, so why not start and learn the skills (from DIY bookkeeping to marketing) of being an entrepreneur now?Young job hunters need to rethink their social media presence. Social proof is critical to employers. Ditch the frat party photos, avoid the drunken tweets. Turn your public social media presence into a showcase of your personal brand and portal of interests and skills. Connect the dots for the prospective hiring manager. The best way to combat a thin resume is with photos, video, endorsements. Be unusual and memorable: if, for example, you reached Level 60 on World of Warcraft, tell your future boss why that means you have monster leadership skills. And, show you have a big and growing network that comes with you when you get hired.

Meanwhile, whether you’ve graduated from college or never went at all, never stop learning. The Web is filled with on-line courses from Udemy to the Ivy League. And, don’t go into major debt chasing that BA: there is a growing “uncollege” movement that aims to unseat the four-year baccalaureate BA as the key measure of smarts. Expect colleges to respond with shorter degree programs and employers to start looking for better ways to evaluate talent.

At the same time, employers need to start rethinking their recruiting process, notably in using sophisticated social network search tools to go spear-fishing for high potential talent, rather than waiting for applications to come across the transom. And, managers need to look for the skills that really matter today in high potential young talent, attributes like cognitive load capacity, adaptability and social media skills. That one kid with the high GPA and stellar SAT scores may just be a drudge who took a lot of prep classes –while that other kid making clever and obscene videos may have superior communications and social networking skills, a huge online following and an innate ability to redesign your company’s entire future. Employers need to start looking for these new skills, and stop hiring in the rear-view mirror. They need to find raw, adaptable, resilient people who can be molded and mentored for jobs that don’t even have titles yet. And no group is better suited for than the Millennial who made your latte this morning . . .or still lives in his old bedroom down the hall.

 

[a_majoor]

Annother innovation that could be imported: take failing schools from the public system entirely and convert them to Charter schools. The downside is the teachers would probably be replaced by the parental "owners" of the charter in order to boost performance, which would create a wave of resistence from the teachers unions, (and charter schools typically have far fewer administrative staff and educrats, further savings for the tax payers but not so good for the tax consumers). An experiment worth following:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/04/04/tennessee-hops-on-education-reform-bandwagon/

Tennessee Hops on Education Reform Bandwagon

The South is moving quickly to the head of the pack in education reform. Following the lead of Louisiana’s Recovery School District, Tennessee is taking several low performing schools out of the jurisdiction of local school boards and placing them in a state-run Achievement School District, where well known charter operators like KIPP are taking over.

The switch to charter schools has raised the usual resistance, especially from teachers whose jobs were secure under the old system. The NYT reports:
“We’re not just asking people to do something incrementally different in a system that is fundamentally broken and the same,” said Chris Barbic, the achievement district’s superintendent and a Teach for America alumnus who went on to found the Yes Prep chain of 11 charter schools in Houston. […]
Suspicion remains about what the takeover means for experienced teachers. “A lot of our teachers are going to lose their jobs,” said Charlie Moore III, pastor of the Life Changing Church of God in Christ in Orange Mound.

Although achievement district officials say they have encouraged current teachers to apply for jobs at the revamped schools, none are guaranteed a slot. Just five teachers and three administrators previously with the schools remain.

There are other potential pitfalls. Many of the teachers and administrators in charters come from racial or socioeconomic backgrounds that are very different from the students and parents they serve. Some parents in Memphis are concerned that new disciplinary measures have created an uninviting classroom culture. Moreover, the charters in this special district have more frequent testing and longer school days. We have no problem with higher performance standards, but it’s not clear to us that more time spent sitting passively at a desk is what students need in the information age.

There are some promising signs as well. Test sores for the students in these districts are rising. And many of the charters are staffed by non-unionized workers, giving those schools more flexibility to experiment with new ideas like performance pay. The program is still too young to draw any broad conclusions, but the more flexible arrangement has opened up considerable new space to experiment.

Programs like Tennessee’s are gaining traction across the country. Michigan has also formed a state district for failing schools, and Virginia just approved its own version in February. Slowly but surely, America is taking serious steps to reform its failing school systems. We haven’t found all the answers yet, but at least we’re beginning to look.

 

[GnyHwy]

I'll play the slippery slope fallacy here and say that looks very nonsecular and has much potential for biases.  Although, I can see this working for some places, I can't help but wonder how many districts are doing this just because it's anti-government.  Going even further down the slippery slope, do we expect the village elders/religious leaders to be heading up these organizations?  Because I can't think of a better way to knock ourselves back to the middleages.  I would hardly call it an innovation when it is essentially reverting back to the way things were 100 years ago.

One potential negative thing I can see coming out of this is when these students have to leave their area (if they ever do).  After getting good grades in their area, they will be very disappointed on the national or world level.  The worst thing I see coming out of this is the districts isolating themselves entirely. 

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I agree to some extent I suppose, but those fields can still lower their standard. For example, all the Red Seal Program would have to do is say "you only need 1000 hrs of experience to be a journeyman, instead of the previous 4000 hrs" and they have made it easier to be a journeyman and therefore less capable people would be a certified journeyman entering the work force. But that is not what happens. There are good tradesmen and poor tradesman, just like there are good artists and bad artists. If you are a junk artist, you will still get your BA, if you are a junk tradesperson you will not* get your Red Seal.

*Of course, some people slip through the cracks no matter how good your certification system is, but in general the Red Seal Program has raised the standards and accountability of trades as opposed to watering them down.

1000 hours is not a lot of time in the metal cutting trades. It's very little time to become a well rounded machinist, moldmaker or toolmaker. By lowering the standard all you end up with is a lot of overpaid lathe hands or drill press operators making journeyman wages for turning the same spindle or drilling the same hole every day. 3-4 years of schooling in those trades, for your Red Seal, does nothing to let you practice it properly in 1000 hrs.

Industry are the ones that should decide apprenticeship criteria. However, a big downfall with the system is the way the government lets the Unions administer that criteria. Limiting the amount of apprentices that a journeyman can supervise freezes people out of the trades and keeps wages artificially high. A plumber costs more for a house call than a doctor.

 

[a_majoor]

I'll play the slippery slope fallacy here and say that looks very nonsecular and has much potential for biases.  Although, I can see this working for some places, I can't help but wonder how many districts are doing this just because it's anti-government.  Going even further down the slippery slope, do we expect the village elders/religious leaders to be heading up these organizations?  Because I can't think of a better way to knock ourselves back to the middleages.  I would hardly call it an innovation when it is essentially reverting back to the way things were 100 years ago.

One potential negative thing I can see coming out of this is when these students have to leave their area (if they ever do).  After getting good grades in their area, they will be very disappointed on the national or world level.  The worst thing I see coming out of this is the districts isolating themselves entirely.

Not quite tracking here. The experiment is taking place in the United States and the Charter Schools are run by the parents of the children in these schools.

Outcomes can be substantiated through use of standard test methodologies like SATs or other test methodologies (ideally ones that are created and administered from outside the school board/charter schools). So long as these are standard tests and accepted by a large number of outside organizations like the SATs, then the idea that students from the Charter Schools will be isolated or non competative is mooted.

 

[Nemo888]

I don't think calling it an education bubble is correct. Education in North America is being commodized and the standards are falling. Joining an expensive club basically. When you leave North America to one of the Asian tigers it is exactly the opposite. Standards and outcomes are getting better every year. The difference is that in Asia corporation and industry pay big money to get the graduates they need. It is reminiscent of here 40 or 50 years ago.

The need for well educated grads left with the jobs I suppose. 

 

[GnyHwy]

Not quite tracking here. The experiment is taking place in the United States and the Charter Schools are run by the parents of the children in these schools.

Outcomes can be substantiated through use of standard test methodologies like SATs or other test methodologies (ideally ones that are created and administered from outside the school board/charter schools). So long as these are standard tests and accepted by a large number of outside organizations like the SATs, then the idea that students from the Charter Schools will be isolated or non competative is mooted.

I was just assuming the worst and also assumed that the districts leading the charge are very "Red" districts.  Not that they're all wrong, but I see them as potentially anti-government first and for their children second, although they would believe that they are the same thing.  I also saw it as very negative when they mention of replacing teachers with parents.  Why did they train the teachers in the first place and what makes parents think they are any more capable?  They are certainly less qualified.  The kicker for me was this line - "lot of our teachers are going to lose their jobs,” said Charlie Moore III, pastor of the Life Changing Church of God in Christ in Orange Mound.  That just wreaks of nonsecular.  Although he may be very educated, it doesn't give his credentials, other than being a pastor.

Perhaps I am inferring way too much, but this just seems like a way for the local community leaders to instill what they think should be taught, rather than what actually might be good for their kids.  I know, now people would say "who knows what's better for their kids than their parents"?  Well there are plenty of parents that don't know squat and perhaps if they were more proactive prior to this, they might not be in this position.

Lastly, I get that there are national standards with SATs, but since these parents are likely very unqualified and have their children's success in their hands, all I can see happening is them teaching to the tests, which will give a skewed result of what the kids actually know.  Or worse, with propaganda and in isolation, they can make their regular day to day marks whatever they want them to be, giving the "everything is OK" impression.

I don't think calling it an education bubble is correct. Education in North America is being commodized and the standards are falling. Joining an expensive club basically. When you leave North America to one of the Asian tigers it is exactly the opposite. Standards and outcomes are getting better every year. The difference is that in Asia corporation and industry pay big money to get the graduates they need. It is reminiscent of here 40 or 50 years ago.

The need for well educated grads left with the jobs I suppose. 

I believe this is mentioned a bunch of posts back.  There are some CBC links that talk about this.  Also about our universities not being required to coordinate the countries needs rather than pumping students through a mill of unrequired skills and diplomas.  Our government needs to get with this program the same way many European governments are.  The country needs electricians?  Well guess who is getting the subsidies.  You want to learn how to be a street performer?  You're doing that on your own dime.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Perhaps I am inferring way too much, but this just seems like a way for the local community leaders to instill what they think should be taught, rather than what actually might be good for their kids.  I know, now people would say "who knows what's better for their kids than their parents"?  Well there are plenty of parents that don't know squat and perhaps if they were more proactive prior to this, they might not be in this position.

What he said,..in triplicate.

 

[a_majoor]

I think you are conflating a number of different things.

These are Charter Schools, which means the parents control the resources but the educators are still hired teachers. The primary difference between a Charter School and a Public Schools is that if the children are falling below whatever standard has been set for scores like SATs or whatever methodology has been chosen, teachers will be replaced by ones who are capable of doing the job. The curriculum is set AFAIK by the State educational authorities. Canadian charter schools in Alberta operate in much the same manner, and provide impressive results. Public schools in Edmonton (not sure about other districts) have chosen to compete against charters by specializing; students can choose to go to school "X" for the theater program, school "Y" for the science and technology program or school "Z" for music or whatever specialty program they want to offer, and are also getting better results than conventional public schools.

What you seem to be talking about is parochial private schools and home schooling, which are two entirely different subjects.

On the subject of qualifications, parents fall in the bell curve like everyone else, but some of the parental home schoolers are either ex teachers themselves, or hold advanced education or degrees (and a fraction will have advanced degrees, and be more qualified than the teacher with a BA.), so home schooling success is more due to motivation than intrinsic qualifications or credentials.

WRT "teaching to the test", my children have been in the public system in Ontario long enough for me to see how the Ontario "standardized tests" for literacy and numeracy are handled by the school...one guess as to how the schools spend an academic year to prepare.

 

[cupper]

I think you are conflating a number of different things.

These are Charter Schools, which means the parents control the resources but the educators are still hired teachers. The primary difference between a Charter School and a Public Schools is that if the children are falling below whatever standard has been set for scores like SATs or whatever methodology has been chosen, teachers will be replaced by ones who are capable of doing the job. The curriculum is set AFAIK by the State educational authorities. Canadian charter schools in Alberta operate in much the same manner, and provide impressive results. Public schools in Edmonton (not sure about other districts) have chosen to compete against charters by specializing; students can choose to go to school "X" for the theater program, school "Y" for the science and technology program or school "Z" for music or whatever specialty program they want to offer, and are also getting better results than conventional public schools.

What you seem to be talking about is parochial private schools and home schooling, which are two entirely different subjects.

On the subject of qualifications, parents fall in the bell curve like everyone else, but some of the parental home schoolers are either ex teachers themselves, or hold advanced education or degrees (and a fraction will have advanced degrees, and be more qualified than the teacher with a BA.), so home schooling success is more due to motivation than intrinsic qualifications or credentials.

WRT "teaching to the test", my children have been in the public system in Ontario long enough for me to see how the Ontario "standardized tests" for literacy and numeracy are handled by the school...one guess as to how the schools spend an academic year to prepare.

To further add to it, a lot of the Charter Schools are actually run by Educational Corporations or Educational Foundations which promote their specialized methods of teaching, or gear the curriculum to a specific stream (e.g. Engineering and Technology, The Arts, and so on).

Regardless of what form of schooling the child receives, the state mandated curriculum must be taught, and the state mandated standards must be met.

The problem with the Charter School movement is that State funds are shifted from the Public system to the Charter system through vouchers. As Public School enrollment decreases, the funding gets reduced and the cycle of the self licking ice cream begins.

 

[a_majoor]

Depends on your desired outcomes. The recent strike by schoolteachers in Chicago highlighted the woeful performance of students in the public system when contrasted to the children in the Chicago charter schools. Detroit is another example of a totally broken public system, with a graduation rate of 25% in 2007, climbing to 65% in 2011 (although it is difficult to determine how the figures are computed; Ontario also has a much "higher" graduation rate after the "reforms" of the McGuinty government; most of which had to do with watering down standards).

Even if we accept that the 65% meet high standards of literacy and numeracy, that is still very low, particularly compared to the massive amounts of inputs in time, money and other resources spent on public schooling. Detroit does not have competing charter schools to compare with, and private and home schooling in Detroit exist in too small numbers and limited demographics to meaningfully change the outcomes.

I look at these contrasting results and see Charter schools, vouchers and other alternatives in the lower level of schooling as more a means of efficient resource management (resources go to schools, programs and teachers that deliver results), which really is just using market mechanisms to allocate resources to education. Similarly, alternatives to higher education like "on line" universities represent efficient resource allocation towards an outcome based on learning and education vs credentials.

The right balance has not been struck by any means, and we are in a period of evolution and adjustment, so some of the ideas being presented on this thread may never come to fruition or become extinct due to market or political pressures.

 

[GnyHwy]

Interesting you mention Detroit.  That is a great place to get your point across with stats for public schools.  If you took stats from the greater Detroit area, which is a few million people, you would probably come up with fairly normal stats, comparable to the rest of the country.  Taking stats from within the city limits of about 5 or 600 000 is taking from a sample that is pretty much a third world country.  Those people are just trying to find their next meal and a roof over their head rather than thinking about education.

There does seem to be a divide and difference of purpose of these type schools.  The upper class that are likely bored with the standards, have the resources and can afford it, will take their kid's education to an even higher level.  The lower class will do it out of desperation and scrape by with whatever they can muster.

The title of this thread seems fitting to me.  Any further separation of the classes will only inflate the bubble that much more.

 

[a_majoor]

In economic terms a "bubble" is a market that has been artificially inflated due to some external factor, and when that factor is removed or no longer valid, the bubble OS and the market resets to a new, lower equilibrium level.

Education has been artificially inflated through monopolization by the State, social and cultural factors that promote the idea that high level education credentials are more desirable than lower or no credentials at all and the pumping of even more money into education through such factors as student loans. Since the outcomes have not really changed all that much, there has been a great deal of manipulation (looking at a bell curve, you and I know there is no way that the vast majority of any class in any subject can be getting A's]

The explosion of people with university level degrees has also resulted in a situation where the person serving you a coffee at Tim Horton's or Starbucks might have more "education" than you do. The ultimate result of this artificial inflation of grades and credentials is an "Education Bubble", and like all economic bubbles in all times and places, it will "pop"

 

[a_majoor]

It would be interesting to see if any Canadian Universities have been playing shenanigans with their budgets while crying poor and demanding ever more money. Frankly, since this is taxpayer money, the State Legislature should simply take it back, or failing that adjust any requests for funding by extracting it from this "sluch fund" first before releasing new dollars:

http://www.rightwisconsin.com/perspectives/203782191.html

BREAKING NEWS - Massive University of Wisconsin Slush Fund Discovered
Published: 1:30 PM April 19, 2013


Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Hoarded as Tuition Skyrocketed

UPDATE:  From a Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo confirming the existence of the massive UW Slush Fund:

The UW System had a tuition balance of $414.1 million as of June 30, 2012. By comparison, the UW System's tuition balance was $212.8 million as of June

30, 2009. During this time period, base resident undergraduate tuition increased by 5.5% annually.

It should be noted that the UW System's tuition balance increased significantly at the same time that the UW System has been subject to significant GPR funding reductions and lapses.

While the University of Wisconsin has been raising tuition and clamoring for more taxpayer support they have been stockpiling hundreds of millions of dollars in unspent tuition and federal grant monies.

Sources in Madison familiar with the discovery tell RightWisconsin that the total of non earmarked funds in the massive UW Slush Fund is at least $450 million.

UPDATE: Click Here for the Fiscal Bureau Memo Detailing the Slush Fund (as posted by The Wheeler Report).

News of the massive UW Slush Fund prompted a strong reaction from legislative Republicans.

Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), Joint Finance Co-Chairs Senator Alberta Darling (R-River Hills)and Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette) and Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder (R-Abbotsford) issued the following statement regarding the UW System’s surplus:

"We are outraged with the mishandling of taxpayer dollars and the pattern of incompetence shown by  university system administrators. We want the citizens of this state to know that we will examine the gross  mismanagement of the system’s finances. We will demand accountability and transparency.

"At a time when the UW System is asking for more flexibility and funding from the state, this situation clearly  illustrates the need for strong legislative oversight. Our state deserves better from the institutions that are educating our students and future leaders. It is not only unfair to the students and their parents who keep  getting hit with tuition hikes; it’s unfair to the taxpayers of Wisconsin.

"We want to assure the university students and their parents that, at a minimum, this budget will include a twoyear tuition freeze. We will work closely with Governor Walker to address this substantial accounting error and explore pursuing a comprehensive investigation into the management of UW System finances. "

The University has always had a carryover from budget to budget, but the amount has skyrocketed in recent years, resulting in the current massive UW Slush Fund.

The discovery of the massive UW Slush Fund comes as the legislature's budget writing Joint Committee on Finance prepares to review formal budget motions. The first votes are expected on April 25. The panel will continue work on the budget through the next several weeks.

The existence of the massive UW Slush Fund is particularly troubling when juxtaposed with comments UW officials have made in recent years about available 'resources.'

UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Michael Lovell said the cuts and decreased staff could make it more difficult for students to enroll in the classes they need to.

Lovell said 41 UWM faculty and staff have left the university since the initial cuts were announced.

"That number is much greater than I expected," Lovell said. "These are the top performers on our campuses that are being poached away from other universities in other parts of the country."

"Prominent businesspeople have stepped forward to assert that cutting the UW so disproportionately is bad for business in Wisconsin," Reilly said.
December 12, 2011 - Wisconsin State Journal



"To put this in another perspective, $46 million is equivalent to a full year's worth of state support for 11,360 UW students or 511 faculty and staff positions," Reilly wrote.

"President Reilly has asked all UW System employees to call or email your legislator and ask them in your own words to help the UW System in any way they can," reads the email from Rosemary Potter, governmental relations director for Colleges and Extension.
December 23, 2011 - JSonline


It was just four months ago that Gov. Scott Walker proclaimed Wisconsin's budget as "balanced" and the state on "a path to prosperity." Now, he is raising the specter of an additional $300 million in spending cuts over the next two years. The University of Wisconsin System, already reeling from $250 million in cuts from Walker's budget, would absorb roughly 38% of the new reductions - a draconian hit that is over five times greater than the UW System's share of the state budget.

This is not only unfair but bad public policy: Economic growth and job creation in Wisconsin require increased investment in education, certainly not the disinvestment proposed by Walker. This state has thrived historically with a public higher education system that has been the envy of the nation. The shortsighted budgetary policies of the Walker administration undermine that legacy and threaten to choke off prospects for future growth in the state.
November 15, 2011 - JSOnline Op ed by two UW-Milwaukee Professors


When asked about why he chose to leave UW, professor Suri remarked, "If our institution isn’t given the resources or allowed more flexibility from state oversight, we’re going to be stuck in place."
October 19, 2011 - Badger Herald


Regent Regina Millner urged Board members to remember that belt-tightening cannot proceed indefinitely without compromising the quality of the product. "There is some point when you’re eliminating fat, you’re also eliminating muscle," she said.

"I’m already worried about degrading the quality of the educational experience for students," Lovell said. He pointed to already high ratios of students to providers of student services such as mental health counselors and academic advisers. He also noted that the availability of fewer class sections would lengthen students’ time to degree, thereby increasing their costs.
UW Regent Regina Miller, June 2012

How could this massive UW Slush Fund grow over time without notice? Will this impact their standing with lawmakers? Will this give renewed focus on the push for a tuition freeze?

RightWisconsin will have more on this developing story of the massive UW Slush Fund, including reaction from legislators and UW officials.

Click here to see table chronicling  the growth of UW tuition over the last decade.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This is an American story but it is illustrative of the problem the educrats, the education establishment, create for those who want a real education for their children and grandchildren. It is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from AEIdeas the quite conservative American Enterprise Institute's blog:

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/05/a-case-study-in-the-government-as-enemy/

A case study in the government as enemy

Charles Murray

May 24, 2013

For several years now, parents in Frederick County, Maryland, where I live, have been struggling to start a charter school that uses a classical curriculum—heavy on history, literature, languages (including Latin and Greek), and science, instead of the pablum that teachers are forced to use in ordinary Frederick public schools like the ones my children attended (I described just how bad that curriculum is in Real Education).

From the beginning, the administrators of the Frederick County Public Schools (FCPS) were openly hostile to the idea of a classical curriculum and threw up one frivolous bureaucratic roadblock after another. Now, in the last months before the school is finally scheduled to open this fall, the FCPS has informed these parents that they can’t hire the nine teachers that they had selected after vetting 300 applications. Instead, under Maryland law, the school can be forced to accept teachers on the county’s “to be placed list”—in other words, teachers who the FCPS would otherwise let go. Furthermore, the parents running the school cannot even interview them—nor learn their names, nor have any other way to get an idea whether these teachers have any understanding of the classical curriculum or the ability or motivation to teach it. The FCPS can simply force placement of the teachers it can’t use in any of its other schools.

This is not an isolated case. The charter school movement can supply hundreds of them. It just happens to be one that has happened close to me. It is representative of the kind of naked display of power that increasingly happens throughout government—in the schools, the regulatory agencies, the tax authorities, at the county, state and federal levels alike. Americans who are acting in ways our civic culture has traditionally celebrated—harming no one, just trying make a living or build a business or, in this case, collaborate to educate their children—find themselves balked, forbidden, and in some cases prosecuted, by bureaucracies that increasingly exist to protect themselves and their own interests, and have gathered unto themselves the power to do so. This is not a partisan issue. It represents a betrayal of what America is supposed to be about.

Charles Murray is a libertarian scholar and the author of several controversial books including The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994) and Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012)

 

[GnyHwy]

Interesting the way you introduce the writer as "libertarian", which is suppose to do what?  Give him the moral highground?  All this does is create an immediate divide based on peoples assumptions, making any type of progress impossible, much like the stalemates we see in everyday politics.

No doubt the school systems have issues and probably need a good *** kicking in order to remove their heads, but there needs to be better solutions other than creating an even larger rift in society.

 

[ballz]

Interesting the way you introduce the writer as "libertarian", which is suppose to do what?  Give him the moral highground?

I'd call it disclosure, but I'm sure Mr. Campbell can speak for himself...


As for the article... This charter school idea is new to me and I need to read more about it. The ability to influence the curriculum is a double-edged sword. My first concern is how much the school can deviate from a curriculum that's been set as the "standard" that all kids must learn, but of course, this ability to deviate can be used to produce a much better education than the current standard.

In the US, I'd fear that a lot of charter schools would be popping up in "like-minded" regions that simply want to brainwash their kids into thinking the way their parents and neighbours think. As much as I a Libertarian should worry, and has every right to worry, what ideas his son's Communist teacher is filling his head with, it's also a bad thing if his kid doesn't learn the pros/cons of the other walks of life.

There are some regions where the charter school would probably be more focussed about enforcing religion rather than educating people.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Interesting the way you introduce the writer as "libertarian", which is suppose to do what?  Give him the moral highground?  All this does is create an immediate divide based on peoples assumptions, making any type of progress impossible, much like the stalemates we see in everyday politics.

No doubt the school systems have issues and probably need a good *** kicking in order to remove their heads, but there needs to be better solutions other than creating an even larger rift in society.

It is the way he describes himself; given his books I thought that his profession of author/social scientist would be self evident and, given the source of his comment, so would his association with the American Enterprise Institute.

 

[GnyHwy]

Apologies if you thought I was targetting you.  Perhaps I jumped the gun, but I get uppity and find it pointless when someone introduces themselves with their political affiliation; especially with a topic such as education where bipartisanship is necessary.