Education

The New York Sun has an interesting column on education in America:

The report on reforming our school system just released by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce urges that my experience be less unusual for American students. One of its main ideas is that mandatory schooling begin at age 3 and end after 10th-grade. After that, going on to colleges and universities would be one of several choices available. Another choice, equally typical and just as well-funded, would be vocational training.

This idea would hardly surprise our great-grandparents. Before World War II, fewer than half of students went beyond the ninth-grade. The concept of a four-year college education as a rite of passage to middle-class adulthood only developed in the wake of the GI Bill. It has become a waste of resources, both monetary and personal.[...]

Obviously, however, the solution is not to strand students with an eighth-grade education as it currently stands in America. Rather, education should be “front-loaded.” In much less time than we take students’ time up with now, they could be given a substantial but no-nonsense education tooled to preparing them to be productive citizens. This can be done without the pretense that any but a few Americans need to be plied with “book learning” over several years beyond this basic toolkit.

The past gives hope here. Although there is a certain idealization of public schooling in the days of yore, the typical eighth-grader a century ago had a facility in, for example, writing that few of today’s college graduates could even approximate. The eloquent letters written by Civil War soldiers are a famous example.

I agree that for many jobs in which a college degree is believed to be required, a full college education isn’t strictly necessary, and I have previously wondered whether American society would be better served if there were a distinction between universities (for academic and research studies) and some form of business/vocational schools (for professional, non-academic education).

However, heading down that path of thinking, one quickly runs into an important question — if there’s a distinction between “necessary and practical” education and “over-education”, what subjects constitute “over-education”?

It seems to me that part of the value of the college experience in American society is that students end up being exposed to a broad range of subjects, giving them the opportunity to explore a different path than perhaps they may have chosen, as well as to develop a broad base of basic knowledge that should be considered necessary to support an informed citizenry, one that doesn’t simply have to trust the pronouncements made by our leaders.

Another part of the value of college, in my opinion, is that it serves as a beneficial transition from childhood, where a person is protected by his/her parents and local community, into adulthood by being exposed to a broader range of people from various backgrounds, and different ideas.

Maybe the entire process of educating our children is a bit too long, and the last couple of years of high school and the first couple of years of college could be compacted together. Or perhaps there are other ways to provide the intangible benefits of the college experience more efficiently and cost-effectively.

It’s interesting stuff to think about, at any rate.

This story in today’s Hartford Courant brings a smile to my face for so many reasons….

An obscure college in Canada lacking the prestige, wealth or political clout of Yale University has one selling point it wants to share with the world:

President Bush didn’t go there.

Lakehead University featured George W. Bush in an ad last month that mocked the president’s intelligence and brought a flood of publicity to its small campus in northwestern Ontario, at the head of Lake Superior. The ad showed Bush staring solemnly from a black void. “Yale Shmale,” it proclaims. “Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.”

Last week, I “gave credit where credit was due” for improvement in standardized test results in the Windsor town schools, given that I had ranted a bit about poor performance in light of the schools’ ever-growing share of the town budget.

Perhaps I shouldn’t feel quite as guilty. Over the weekend, Windsor Watch offered a reality check on the results:

In 2005, 61 students who had stayed back the previous year were nevertheless allowed to take the CAPT test. That was a departure from normal practice and only occurred for 2005. Since students that stay back generally do poorer on standardized tests than the rest of the students, 2005 saw a sudden increase in the number of poor test takers compared to prior years. The opposite effect occurred in 2006, when fewer poor test takers were given the test (for scoring reporting purposes), since they had their scores reported for 2005.

The net result is the overall 2005 CAPT scores were lower than they otherwise would have been and overall 2006 CAPT scores were higher than they otherwise would have been. This leads to the appearance of a more dramatic improvement than really occurred if only the overall scores are examined and the 61 students are not accounted for. Increasing the appearance of dramatic gains in a 2005 to 2006 comparison was the abysmally poor performance of males on the 2005 CAPT test, even after accounting for the addition of the 61 students that stayed back.

There’s more, along with a caution about how the town’s now set up to appear to have a dramatic worsening of CAPT scores in 2007. An additional thought from WindsorWatch:

While I can understand why Windsor school administrators and Windsor elected officials would want to toot their horn after years of sometimes taking an undeserved beating, current tooting on the 2006 overall CAPT scores could cause CAPT score explanation difficulties for 2007. The 2007 CAPT demographics of test takers will be more similar to 2004 and not like the oddities of 2006 or 2005. [...]

Hopefully, politicians won’t be trying to explain 2007 CAPT results by multiple years of “bare bones” or “austere” Board of Education budgets.

Amen!

A couple of months ago, I was rather vocal here in griping about the performance of the local schools as compared to their growing consumption of the town budget.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out this notice from the Windsor Public Schools:

The State has released the results of the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT). They reveal dramatic increases for Windsor students in all four testing areas. Connecticut 10th graders took the CAPT in March 2006.

On all four tests, when compared to performance on the 2005 CAPT, there is 1) a significant increase in the percent of Windsor Public School students who reached or surpassed Goal and in the percent of students scoring at or above the Proficient level, and 2) a considerable decrease in the number of students who scored at Basic or Below Basic levels (meaning that a substantial percentage of students moved up and now are at the Proficient Level).

Windsor Watch has a few additional numbers, as usual.

So, maybe I do feel a little guilty about being vocal in griping about the proposed tax hike, which was eventually shaved back. But only a little. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that even with the improvements, Windsor schools still fall out of line in terms of performance versus town demographics. I still also think that the town ought to be a bit more proactive about adopting some sort of a tie to future requests to increase school funding to attaining measurable goals.

The Naples Daily News is carrying a story on the challenges being faced by local schools in getting property insurance coverage.

Lee County will pay 75 percent more in premiums but get less than one-sixth of the coverage it had last year. Instead of insuring $300 million of the district’s $1.4 billion insurable property, the district will receive $48.6 million in coverage, cobbled together from 10 different companies. That’s about enough to build one high school from scratch.

Rucker says the district struggled to get even that much.

“One of our biggest problems is just getting insurance at all,” she said.
DeBaun said it was not just Hurricane Wilma that caused the district’s premiums to go up. It was hurricane damage from Katrina and Rita, as well as tropical storms on the East Coast, that contributed.

Yes, I know, it’s yet another version of the same story. The market has hardened dramatically after two extraordinary storm seasons. The schools’ headaches may be aggravated as property insurers seem to like large schedules of property less than they have in previous years, because of the increased awareness of geographic concentrations.

Schools and municipalities also might have the extra whammy of the nature of their reconstruction efforts. I’ve sat in on some claims calls pertaining to school district losses, where the back-and-forth caused by the politics of a government entity trying to decide what it wants to do have been nontrivial issues in the settlement process.

While I’m not an underwriter, perhaps it would be wise for municipalities and school districts to include some pre-made disaster/reconstruction plans in their broker submissions when shopping for coverage, to make their risk look a little less intimidating.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The conservative school board last year passed the standards, which recommend teaching alternative theories to evolution, by a 6-4 vote. Moderates challenged three of the conservatives in the Republican primary but were unable to oust two. In western Kansas though, challenger Sally Cauble appeared to have defeated incumbent Connie Morris.

For the two GOP-ers who survived the primary, I can easily imagine what their opponents will be campaigning about.

I realize that I’ve ranted quite a bit in the past few months about the local (Windsor, Connecticut) school system, inasmuch as its performance is disappointing as compared to its level of funding.

In my daily reading, I came across this Cato commentary that I’m so very tempted to send to the town Board of Education:

Many readers will remember the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, celebrating real-life Los Angeles public school teacher Jaime Escalante. Mr. Escalante painstakingly built a rigorous math program at Garfield High School, enabling an unprecedented number of its low-income, mostly Hispanic students to take and pass the Advanced Placement calculus test.

His results were so good that many observers literally couldn’t believe them, and his students were forced to retake the test – on which they succeeded admirably once again.

In a competitive industry, a star like Mr. Escalante would have been rapidly promoted. He would soon have been designing curricula and training teachers for the benefit of thousands or even millions of children. He got threats and hate mail instead.

Because he successfully taught difficult material to classrooms of 50 or more students, Mr. Escalante drew the ire of his own colleagues. The local union contract stipulated that teachers could not serve more than 35 children per class, and Mr. Escalante’s achievements made that stipulation seem gratuitous and self-serving. The union balked, the threats started, and Mr. Escalante’s chairmanship of the math department was revoked in 1990. He left a year later.

The dysfunctional incentive structure of our public school monopoly is not only incapable of sustaining excellence, it actually works to crush it by setting the interests of school employees against those of students and parents.

No, that’s probably not quite the situation locally. However, that story struck me as a perfect example of idiocy that can emerge sometimes in union-negotiated contracts.

No, I’m not saying that unions are necessarily bad or idiotic. However, when justification for increases to the school budget are “contract obligations”, and performance isn’t improving..it seems that common sense has gone out the window.

Unions and contracts do not alleviate the need of employer and employee, or citizens and government to expect that some measure of common sense, fiscal responsibility, and accountability be maintained.

(Via Overlawyered) Back when I was in high school, the thought did occur
to me that if only there were some way I could get the time pressure eased
off when sitting for my SATs, I’d be safe from the few stupid mistakes that
would cost me a perfect score.
According to this Boston Globe article, I’m not
the only person who’s had such thoughts:

A Wayland High School guidance counselor has questioned the
unusually high number of suburban students who receive extra time on the SAT
college entrance exam because they have a learning disability, warning that
some may not be truly disabled.

“Like everything else in life, the rich have access to things that others
don’t, and kids with subtle learning issues can afford to pay a psychologist
to call it a disability” and gain an edge on the test, said Norma Greenberg,
guidance director at Wayland High School. “There are a hell of a lot more
doing this now.”

Statewide, about 5 percent of students are granted accommodations
(usually extra time) on the test, more than twice the national average of
about 2 percent.

In Wayland, 12 percent of students get accommodations, said Greenberg,
who injected herself into a national debate over the issue when she was
quoted on network TV earlier this spring.

Since moving to Connecticut, a couple of things about schools up here have baffled me, a product of the public school system in
Memphis, TN. One of those items has been school scheduling — the sheer number of odd little holidays that students up here have,
which cause the school year to run into June (and not in the year-round-schooling sense). Another of those items has been in how
much more use school busses see up here than in other areas where I lived.

Perhaps I’m more aware of school busses up here because of the nature of my commute, versus that of prior jobs/places I’ve lived.
However, an article in yesterday’s
Hartford Courant may help explain my observation:

The state Supreme Court has ruled that municipalities are not obligated to bus preschool children to charter schools
within their communities, because state law requires transportation only for those students in grades kindergarten or
above.

I wonder if there’s an implication here that Connecticut requires a higher level of transportation than does other states. It seems
like just about every schoolkid around here rides the bus, whereas in other places where I’ve lived, it seems that only children who
had no other transportation options rode the bus.

This pondering, of course, leads to other questions, such as how much are we taxpayers paying for this mandate? Perhaps this makes
sense in conservation terms…but I’m not sure that I’m happy about chipping in a few bucks just so a well-off parent doesn’t have
to arrange transportation for his/her child to/from school.

There’s story in the Hartford
Courant regarding the challenges Manchester may because the ethnic balance in Manchester schools is becoming too unbalanced
under guidelines laid out by state law.

The article mentions that these concerns may be rendered moot because of the interaction between forecasted changes in demographics
and the terms of the state law, but I did find some of the solutions being considered, should mootness not occur, to be interesting:

The racial-balance remedy that is getting the most attention is redistricting. Under a preliminary scenario, about
1,000 of Manchester’s 3,000 elementary school students would be sent to a different school starting in 2008. As a result, schools
would all have a minority percentage between 30 percent and 56 percent.

The district also is considering a “sister schools” plan that would have students from paired schools attend kindergarten through
second grade in one building and grades 3 to 5 in the other.

A third option is “controlled choice,” which would call for a fixed number of slots to be reserved at each school for white and
minority students. Under that plan, parents would rank their preferred elementary schools and a lottery would determine a student’s
eventual placement.

It’s a shame that we still haven’t reached a point where ethnicity is irrelevant to the quality of education that one receives, and
that all this shenanigans has to be undertaken to move towards the perception of fairness.