An Interesting Thought on State Universities

Some interestingly counter-intuitive thoughts on the UC student protests against rising tuition from David Henderson of EconLog:

Taxpayer funding of higher education is a forced transfer to the relatively wealthy

Socialist author Robert Kuttner once called Proposition 13, California's 1978 property-tax-cut initiative, the revolt of the haves. The latest opposition by UC students to a 32% increase in tuition is a revolt of the "will-haves."

Milton Friedman used to remark that the California government, with its state funding of higher education, taxed the residents of Watts to pay for the residents of Beverly Hills. I think Friedman exaggerated substantially. Even though the California's tax system relies heavily on sales taxes, which probably makes the state tax system on net somewhat regressive, it's still the case that a given Beverly Hills family pays much more in taxes than a given family in Watts. But Friedman also focused on family income of the student, and that's misleading.

What Friedman could have said, and Armen Alchian did say in a classic 1968 article, is that state subsidies to higher education are a subsidy to the relatively rich.

I don't have strong opinions on this particular instance one way or the other (though with the state of California being close to bankruptcy, I don't see but what they have much choice to get more of the cost of running the UCs from the students) but it does strike me as interesting that providing more subsidies for college level education is often seen as a way of helping the poor and working class. The idea is, of course, that they don't have much money to go to college, so subsidies will allow them to go when they otherwise couldn't, and thus to improve their financial condition later in life.

The potential issue with this, as I see it, is that given that only 40% of those in the US earn a college degree, and given that those with college degrees earn a good deal more (on average) than those without, taxing everyone in order to help those who are able to graduate from college to do so with less personal debt is essentially a wealth transfer from everyone to the people who will make up the top 40% (roughly) in incomes in the long run anyway. So while there are lots of deserving people from low income backgrounds who would benefit from lower college costs, most of the time it would turn out that:

a) If they go to college and do well, they'll make much more money in the long run, and thus be in a position to pay off college debts themselves.

or

b) If they aren't actually able to do well in college, luring them in with lots of encouragement and cheap tuition won't actually achieve much other than landing them with a sense of failure and a costly delay on getting on to doing work which they would be good at.

So while as a "give everyone a chance to succeed" kind of guy, I certainly want to see everyone who needs it get the chance to go to college -- I'm also fairly comfortable with people financing their college educations through student loans, since they are, after all, the ones likely to reap significant earnings benefits from having gone to college.

The alternative, human side to all this, of course, is the plight of those who take out a lot of loans to go to college and then find, for whatever reason, that they don't make very much. The question would seem to be: is this group large enough and/or problematic enough for it to be worth while for society to heavily subsidize university tuition at public colleges, or not?

Equality, A False Assumption That We Need

[This is the first in a loose series of posts attempting to articulate the implications of inequality, of various sorts, in our society and economy. ]

It seems counter-intuitive to claim that we should hold something to be true when it isn't, but it seems to me that there are at least a few cases in which we should act as if something is true even if it is not. The example that I have in mind has to do with equality.

As Catholics we believe that all human beings are of equal dignity in the eyes of God. In the US, all people are equal in the eyes of the law. However, this does not necessarily mean that all people are of equal ability in regard to any specific quality. And indeed, it's readily apparent that people are indeed not equal in regards to ability. Some people have greater physical abilities than others. There is huge variation in mental ability, and among different kinds of mental ability. And there is a fair amount of evidence that much of this variation is either genetic, or determined by experiences so early in life as to be much more the result of your relatives choices than your own.

And yet, as I've written a couple times in discussing Charles Murray's ideas about education, most of us in American culture naturally rebel against making changes in how we educate children in our society based on "simple facts" such as Murray's:"Ability varies" and "Half of the children are below average". (If you want to test your sensibilities against this, read this 2007 WSJ piece on educating the bottom of the intelligence curve and see if you find yourself, like me, sputtering, "But, but... You can't say that.")

Some of this is just outraged sensibilities. We believe in equality, and so we rebel against hearing about a situation in which hard work and good mentoring can't make anything possible for anyone. And yet clearly, at a factual level, no matter how much we don't like it, it is not actually the case that anyone could go on to do anything. A lot of people simply don't have the abilities to "do anything". (Actually, no one has the ability to truly "do anything" -- but some people at least have the ability to truly excel in enough things that they don't worry about the rest.)

And yet, I think there may actually be a lot of good to our illusions in this case. Because while it's true that there are large differences in ability, I'm fairly skeptical of our ability to systematically identify those differences and provide people with education "suitable to their abilities" in some sort of organized fashion. There may be a certain amount of waste and heartbreak inherent in acting as if anyone could grow up to be president, or a CEO, or a concert pianist, but the risks of treating everyone as if they had great potential and then seeing who sifts out seem lower than trying to identify which people have potential, providing them with good educations, and then shunting everyone else off into some ability-appropriate program to turn them into good worker ants. There is a limit to how much money and time should be spent trying to achieve the unachievable, but going in the direction of a know-your-place, multi-track educational program such as is seen in Japan and parts of Europe seems to be an approach which would abandon something which is important and positive in the American psyche. And, perhaps because I participate in that American ideal, I find it easier to accept the idea of all people being offered opportunities, and many of them failing to reach the heights, than classifying people based on measurable ability and sending them onto an ability-appropriate track. The illusion of equality may be important here.

Affirmative Action and Me

It always annoys me when I am confronted with a form which demands to know my "race or ethnicity" and offers no "mixed" option. Being exactly half "white" and half "hispanic", it seems tiresome to have to pick one or the other. "Just pick the one you feel represents you most," a nice lady at the DMV once told me. But of course, what I think represents me most is being half each -- not picking one over the other. I would certainly not say that I "am" Hispanic, yet the experience of having a large Mexican-American half to the family is hardly accidental to my life experience.

One of the areas I knew this would make a more than usually substantive difference in my life was deciding how to fill out college application forms. I objected to the idea of racial quotas (something that was still going on fairly explicitly in 96/97) and I figured that with an English last name even if I were tempted to try to take advantage of "Hispanic" status, I wouldn't pass the laugh test. So I put myself down at "Hispanic" on the PSAT and "white" on the SAT, and simply refused to pick on all my college applications.

The midly interesting result of this was that I got a National Hispanic Scholar award (no money or anything, just a certificate) based on my PSAT scores, something I found a bit disconcerting given that I'd only scored in the 75th percentile nationally. However, my Ramirez grandfather was very proud of it (I was the first of the five of his grandchildren who've gone to college thus far out of 20+) so I appreciated it at that level. This also generated some rather unusual mail. Harvard sent me admissions materials in Spanish along with a letter from their Hispanic union promising that I could be provided with inculturation opportunities and remedial English help if I came to Harvard. I didn't know any Spanish, so I had to get someone to read the letter to me. They never did send me any materials in English, even based on my SAT scores which were a fairly respectable 99th percentile. Apparently a 75th percentile Hispanic student was a lot more appealing to them than a 99th percentile white one.

The basic motive behind some of this I can understand. If someone didn't learn English till he was ten years old, or struggled to get a decent education at failing inner city schools, it's likely that his scores will not reflect his actual academic potential as well as those of someone who attends an elite academy and gets tutoring three days a week. At that level, it makes total sense to me that admissions directors would make allowances for someone's background when evaluating applicants.

The problem is when this is done in a completely depersonalized and statistically-based way rather than actually based on individual circumstances. That Harvard thought I was most comfortable in reading Spanish simply because I'd checked the "Hispanic" box on the PSAT shows a certain ignorance about the realities of life for many Americans of Hispanic ancestry. Nearly half the kids I knew in my fairly working-class parish had Hispanic surnames, and few could speak more than a few words of Spanish.

It takes a lot of time (which admissions people don't necessarily have, especially at large universities) to actually figure out what challenges someone might have had in his background, while it's very quick and easy (and gets you instant political plaudits in certain circles) to filter admissions according to race/ethnicity check boxes. But it's precisely the arbitrary nature of this shortcut which causes the incredible amounts of resentment towards affirmative action policies among those demographics victimized by affirmative action. Back when I was dealing with these things, an Asian had to have SAT scores nearly 100 points higher than a white person in order to get into one of the UCs, and a white person in turn had to score a couple hundred points higher than someone who was Black or Hispanic. It's hardly surprising that this caused resentment, mainly because it completely ignored the influence of class in America and focused only on race.

Due to various legal decisions over the last 12 years, the situation has got better. But it continues to be something mildly absurd, and likely to cause at least as much racial resentment as healing. Any decision to judge people based on which racial checkbox they mark is doubtless going to continue to do so.

On Picking a College

I've got a lengthy post up at American Catholic on the choice between Catholic and secular colleges.

Reading But Not a Reader

In response to MrsDarwin's Book Check post, MelanieB mentioned Great Books by David Denby. The description appealed to me so much that when we went down to the library last night (so that MrsDarwin could look at the graphic novel 300, which is a whole other story) I looked for and found it.

Denby is a New York Magazine movie reviewer who found himself, in the early 90s, suffering from a sort of literary mid-life crisis. Among the symptoms of this was his reading lots of articles about the place of the "Great Books" in education, and finding himself angry at both his fellow liberals who decried them as the products of "dead white males" and of conservatives who he believed enshrined the Great Books as political and cultural treasures without truly encountering them. (This characterization I disagree with, but like anything I suppose it fits someone, somewhere.) After delivering one too many rants on the topic to his wife, she tells him to go back to Columbia, his alma mater, and re-take the two one year Great Books courses which he recalls enjoying as a freshman in 1961.

The book is the story of his return to Columbia and re-acquintance with the Great Books. In his first chapter, on Homer of course, I was struck by this section where he talks about realizing (as he sinks into reading "great literature" for the first time in a long while) that he had in many ways ceased to be "a reader", although he was constantly reading:

...I no longer had the concentration or the discipline for serious reading; I had lost the habit of just falling into something the way real readers do, devouring it on the bus, in the tub, at the lunch counter. Movies more than satisfied my desire for trash, but when I picked up a serious book, my concentration often wandered after twenty pages. I wanted to read it, but vagrant thoughts came charging in, and the words from the book got caught at a bottleneck leading to my attention. M rhythm had changed. I was a moviegoer, a magazine-reader, a CNN-watcher. Following a breaking story on CNN, I would watch updates at certain points of the day, and then pick up the story again when a car alarm woke me in the middle of the night, then catch the denouement in the morning. This business of being "informed" could be almost nightmarish: If you stayed with the story long enough, you began to feel as if you were a ball rolling over and over, or the hands of a clock coming back to the same point.

I flatter myself that I've never quite reached this point, but one of the reasons I try to make sure I read at least a couple "serious" books each year is that I do often feel this sort of approach to reading/information creeping upon me, though in my case my downfall is the internet and the endless reading and conversation it allows. The staccato tempo of read this, follow a link to that, respond to this, go back to the first, read a bit more, open a linked piece is a separate tab, go back to reading, switch tabs, etc. is addictive, and I often fear that I feel it creeping into how I read "real" things as well as blogs and online articles.

As exemplified by the fact that I stopped reading this book in order to type up this post...

Inequality and the New Aristocracy

Running into this article the other day, I was startled to find how many of my own intellectual hobby horses it touched upon. Arnold Kling and Nich Schulz are economists, and their topic is in equality in the modern economy. They cite Google co-founder (and billionaire) Sergey Brin as an example of many of the forces they believe are driving inequality and list the following major forces:

Technology: Brin’s wealth comes from the famous search engine he pioneered with cofounder Larry Page. Their company is a mere ten years old. And yet in the blink of an eye, he has become one of the richest men in the world.

Winners-take-most markets: Certain mass-market fields tend to simulate tournaments in that they produce just a few big winners along with many losers. These include technology/software, as in the case of Google, but also entertainment (Céline Dion), book publishing (Stephen King), athletics (Tiger Woods), and even some parts of academia, finance, law, and politics (as the impressive post-presidential earnings of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton demonstrate).

Family structure: Both of Brin’s parents were highly educated mathematicians. This increased the likelihood that Brin, too, would be well educated. He studied computer science at the University of Maryland and was in graduate school at Stanford when the Internet business he had built lured him away.

Immigration: Brin was born in Russia, and his family moved to the United States when he was six. He and other foreign-born executives such as Andy Grove of Intel have built wealth at the top of the income distribution. At the same time, a large influx of hard-working but low-skilled immigrants has enlarged the bottom of the income distribution, at least until they achieve the assimilation that historically has required a couple of generations.

There are, I think, a pretty good list of the factors that lead to inequality in the modern economy. Particularly incisive too, I thought, was a distinction they make between kinds of inequality:

Income inequality in the United States consists of two gaps. The first gap is an upper-lower gap, between those with a college education and those without. The second is an upper-upper gap, between those with high incomes and those with extraordinarily high incomes.

The upper-lower gap reflects changes in the structure of the economy. New technologies place a premium on cognitive ability. Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have dubbed this “skill-biased technological change.” In today’s economy, more value added comes from knowledge work, and relatively less comes from unskilled labor.

The widening gap between the incomes for college graduates and those for workers who never attend college raises a question. Why doesn’t the supply of college graduates increase? Indeed, despite the benefits that come with higher education, the rate of high school graduation is actually falling, according to the American Bar Foundation’s Paul A. LaFontaine and Nobel laureate James Heckman of the University of Chicago.

It's a little simplistic to use college education as a stand-in for skilled versus unskilled workers, but you get the point. What I do think is quite important, though, is the three-way distinction drawn between lower, upper and upper-upper. The upper-upper group is honestly very, very small. And since one only gets that rich by owning or running companies (directly or via investments) the fact that the upper-upper group is so rich doesn't strike me as worrisome. They may make a good bloody shirt to wave for those wanting to stir up class envy, but they are not "keeping us down" in any economic sense.

The upper group is not keeping the lower one down either, but it is a more troubling barrier because it is in some ways less porous. There are still plenty of jobs to be had that rely primarily on direct manual labor (skilled or unskilled) but as productivity increases, the number of people required to do the work goes down. This has been happening in the manufacturing sector over the last half century:

And happened in agriculture in the first half:

[Source]

Compounding this is the danger for those going into highly manual work of this kind, is the danger that if one's industry dries up when one is middle aged, it is a lot more difficult to switch to one of the more productive "knowledge worker" industries in middle age. One is more likely to be sucked down into low wage service industry work, which is less amenable to being eliminated through productivity gains -- but tends not to be valued very highly.

The predictor of where one will fall in this income spectrum is, they write, family structure much more than class, ethnicity or nation of origin:

The Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz, in her book Marriage and Caste in America, has documented that for upper-income Americans marital stability has recovered from the disruptions of the 1970s. But for lower-income Americans the problem remains. Since 1980, the proportion of never-married mothers among college graduates has stabilized near 3 percent, while the proportion among high school graduates has risen from 3 percent to 10 percent, and the proportion among high school dropouts has doubled to nearly 15 percent. These figures are important because, as Hymowitz points out, “Virtually all—92 percent—of children whose families make over $75,000 are living with both parents. On the other end of the income scale, the situation is reversed: only about 20 percent of kids in families earning under $15,000 live with both parents.”

Their next argument is, however, a bit of a reach:

A trend is underway in America for marriage to be increasingly “assortative.” That means children of well-educated parents tend to marry one another and the children of less educated parents tend to marry one another. This was less the case a few generations ago. For example, sociologists Christine Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin and Robert Mare of UCLA found that beginning in the early 1970s there was a striking “decline in the odds that those with very low levels of education marry up.” And they found that between 1940 and the late 1970s the likelihood that someone with only a high-school diploma would marry someone with a college degree dropped by over 40 percent.

What they're not taking into account here, I think, is that there was a major change in social conventions between the 40s and the 70s. In 1940, it was not at all required that an upper class young woman go to college, though she certainly might. By 1970, it was an absolute assumption that members of the upper class would send their daughters to college. So I doubt that we're seeing increased like-to-like marriage here so much as that a college education has become more universally the marker of a certain social and economic class.

It's true that once a family tree moves into the upper tiers they are unlikely to send many members back down again, but the reason is, I think, cultural rather than class-based in the sense in which "class" was used in the past. As the society of the US and other developed nations becomes ever more affluent, it becomes necessary to work in very high productivity, high skilled occupations in order to "keep up". And as research increasingly shows, one of the determining factors for education and the ability to deal with knowledge intensive work is the extent to which one is read to and otherwise placed in a learning-friendly environment during one's first four years of life. Thus, people who do "knowledge work" have a much increased propensity to raise children capable of doing the same.

The good news in regards to this kind of class barrier is that it's eminently bridgeable. Any parent with the determination to do so can raise his or her children to be readers and learners (and workers of sums and figures). But it's a much more difficult task for those who lack that background themselves, and thus come to it late. In that sense, the truism that education is today's civil rights issues is... true.

Efforts to Stem Dropouts

Sorry things have been slow on the posts this week -- things have been getting busier for me at work lately, and I find that the authorial mind is best at producing ideas in whatever are one's mind has been on the most, which for me has been politics lately, resulting in lots of American Catholic posts, but few here.

There was an interesting article earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal about big cities attempt to stem the rising tide of high school dropouts:

According to one study, only half of the high school students in the nation's 50 largest cities are graduating in four years, with a figure as low as 25% in Detroit. And while concern over dropouts isn't new, the problem now has officials outside of public education worried enough to get directly involved.
...
"In a global economy, the single most important issue facing our country is an educated work force," says Houston Mayor Bill White. "Somebody who lacks a high school education will have lifetime earnings that are only about 60% of those of somebody with that education. That's just the impact on personal income. There are the social costs as well."
...
Detroit has the lowest four-year graduation rate in the study, at 25%, according to America's Promise. Officials there are revamping the high schools. So far, the school system has started a high school redesign at five sites. Among the steps being taken are better counseling services and efforts to design curricula at schools in particular locations geared to industries in the same area.

"The number of students are falling away at such a large percentage that you can't point to any one factor or any one solution," says Steve Wasko, spokesman for the school system.

Houston has embarked on a wide-ranging plan, including a program called Reach Out to Dropouts, where volunteers, including Mayor White and school superintendent Abelardo Saavedra, visit the homes of students who haven't returned to school.

Several things struck me reading this:

• It's rather inspiring, in a way, to hear about officials right up to the mayor of a major city taking these issues seriously enough to invest the personal time and effort in going door to door -- though the businessman side of my mind can't help wondering if that's the most effective use of the mayor's time when it comes to reducing dropout rates.


• I suppose I'd be considered a wishful thinker in regards to education -- especially considering the dire straights that many in Detroit and similar cities must already be in by the time they arrive in high school -- but I can think of few prospect more likely to inspire in one the desire to drop out (out of sheer boredom if for no other reason) than a curriculum geared to my local industries. Idealist that I am -- I can't help thinking that the best way to keep people in school is to teach them something interesting.


• To college-educated-America, this must be a nearly invisible problem. I recall being shocked to read that nearly seventy percent of Americans do not have a BA or above. If you'd asked me before, I would have guessed that half of Americans had completed college.

The Peripatetic School of Russian

I did indeed follow through with my intention of starting to learn a new language, and the language I eventually picked was Russian. The more I thought about it, Russian was the logical choice because I have a great fondness for Russian literature, and so I'd be much more likely to use a knowledge of Russian and keep it up. While Persian and Arabic strike me as interesting because I'm interested in Islam and the Middle East (and because I just find the Arabic script which both languages use attractive) but present rather less that I'd be actively interested in reading. (Though I did pick up a few books on Persian from the library and get through learning part of the alphabet.)

So I ordered a copy of the Penguin Russian Course by Nicholas Brown from Amazon, and from the library I picked up Pimsleur's Basic Russian at the library.

I've been progressing through both programs slowly. In the Penguin text, I've worked through the alphabet and some basic words, but am taking some time to be able to write reliably, due in part to the fact that handwritten Russian script is in a few cases drastically different from the printed alphabet. For example: the Russian "t" sound is represented by a letter that looks pretty much like an English "t" or Greek tao -- but the cursive version looks like an English cursive M. Almost makes me tempted to forget about cursive (as I long ago did in English) and just write the exercises as if they were typed. But some it seems like one ought to try to do the thing properly.

With the Pimsleur audio course, I've been extracting the lessons to my iPod and listening to them while taking my afternoon walk around the corporate campus. I'm now moderately proficient at saying things like "Excuse me", "Hello", "Goodbye", "Do you understand English?", "I don't understand Russian very well", "I'm American", etc. However it's been making me realize how essential spelling (and the instincts coming from knowing the phonetics of English, Latin and Greek) is to my language acquisition skills. In English, and to an extent in Latin or Greek, I can hear a word and pick it up pretty quickly because I'm fairly confident as to what phonetic sounds make it up. I know enough of those languages to know how a word is likely to be spelled -- and thus what phonetic sounds I am likely to be hearing.

However, I have no such instincts when it comes to Slavic languages as of yet, and so I find it very difficult to tell if what is being said and say it correctly. For instance, the word for "hello" is (spelled very roughly phonetically) edravstvoyte. However, to hear it (even with many, many repetitions) it was hard for me to tell if it ended in an "itche" or "oyte" kind of sound.

Clearly, we must originally learn language without giving any thought to spelling, but it seems that I at least have lost much of any ability to address things in that manner. I find it very hard to feel confident in using a word if I don't know for sure what phonetic sounds compose it, and in a langauge I'm not yet very familiar with, I can't feel confident in knowing the phonetic compostion without knowing the spelling.

So while I'm enjoying the walking and listening approach (and it assures that I get my daily dose of Russian) I'm finding that as of yet there is no replacement for book learning.

Some Thoughts on Homeschooling Young Children

In the week after young Jack's birth, I was doing the full time Daddy thing and had the opportunity to start the homeschooling year out with our two oldest (ages 5 and 6). Knowing that we had a baby due in early September, we hadn't really got going prior to this, and being tied up with baby things, we hadn't done a great deal of thinking about it either. So this represented a simultaneous launch of the new school year and planning session of what we're going to do differently from last year.

First off, here's the new schedule that we worked up:

Morning Read Alouds:

Religion - a short saint's life, story from the bible, or lesson from Faith & Life Book 1 (from Ignatius Press)

Written Work:

Math: Julie (5) is pretty good at math, while Eleanor (6) struggle a bit more, so they're effectively at the same point. Both spend 15-30min on a workbook page. After this week's experience I decided to ditch last year's Modern Curriculum Press workbooks and ordered the first book of Miquon Math from Key Curriculum Press. (Recommended by Opinionated Homeschooler, whose family knows a bit about math.)

Handwriting/Spelling/Grammar: The three are currently all rolled into one. Current format is each girl gets a sheet of lined paper. (We picked up some K and 1 size handwriting paper at a teachers' supply store.) I ask each girl for a topic and then write out a sentence to be copied. We discuss what makes the sentence a complete sentence, any any tricky spelling rules which the sentence illustrates. Then each one copies out her sentence carefully for handwriting practice, and illustrates it with a picture. Picture drawing goes on for a while, so this is a 30-60min block.

Reading Practice:
One or both girls take a turn at practicing reading while the other is still coloring and writing. (It's especially important to keep the elder away while the younger is reading, because otherwise miss first grade wants to butt in and do all the reading herself.)

Julia (K) is finishing Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons and Eleanor (1) is working through selected short stories and Beverly Cleary's The Mouse And The Motorcycle. (more on that in a minute)

Closing Read Alouds:
Selections from 2-3 different books so that each of History, Literature and Science are covered at least 3 times a week.

Last week we were covering the first couple chapters of E. H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World and stories from Tales From Near And Far for history.

We read from After The Dinosaurs (about pre-historic mammals -- it's a Golden Book from the early 90s, but I can't seem to find it online) for science.

And we read a few Grimms fairy tales and the first couple chapters of Stuart Little for literature.


One of the big issues I found myself bumping up against in both reading and real alouds is age. The two "in school" are 5 and 6.5, and we've got little miss 2.5 running around and wanting to be involved too. (She works on her alphabet coloring book during writing practice.) This gets tricky because while the eldest had hit an age where she really enjoys things like detailed science picture books and Gombrich's Little History, but the younger two are left pretty cold by these. Being energetic little girls, when the younger two are bored, crazy things tend to happen. And the eldest is still young enough that when crazy things happen, she wants to go join in. (Sending the younger two off to play doesn't work well either, as then the eldest wants to go going them.) So balancing the interests of all three girls without things exploding into chaos is very tricky -- and sometimes frustrating.

The other tricky thing about age is finding good stuff for Eleanor (age 6.5) to read. Over the last year her reading has become quite good -- probably something like a 4th grade level so far as I can tell from what she can read. However, her interests and experiences are still very much those of a six year old. So much of the things available to read at a level that stretches her simply aren't that interesting to her. After a couple of false starts, we're currently trying The Mouse And The Motorcycle, which has the benefit of being about an animal and a piece of machinery, two things generally dear to Eleanor's heart.

It does, however, underline for me that there's a limited virtue (other than bragging rights at gatherings with other parents) to a child that young reading far beyond his or her age level. By age eight or nine, there are a wide variety of books written for a general audience that will be interesting, but at age six there's a lot that just doesn't hold her attention (and that she wouldn't understand at all even if she did spent the time to read it) even if she could theoretically read it. So while we're trying to make sure that she keeps reading stuff that's at the outer edge of her abilities for practice, she's mostly reading much easier picture books which are more at her interest level. If you can't get your child to take off on reading level until a year or two later, it seems to me like it's nothing much to stress about. Sure, if you could somehow get your seven year old to read War and Peace you could annoy numerous other parents at social gatherings by talking endlessly about it, but the seven year old would get basically nothing from the experience.

Learning to Like Childrens Literature

As our oldest has reached the ripe old age of six-and-a-half, she's come into a new appreciation of stories and poems I actually find it interesting to read. Thus, for instance, she sat raptly listing to Paul Revere's Ride the other night, while the two younger girls preferred to stage their own revolution against authority by jumping off beds and running around the room.

Similarly, she is now interesting in listening intently to everything from books about dinosaurs and the Egyptian mummies to the original Grimm's Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson, Greek myths, and selections from the Red Fairy Book, Blue Fairy Book, etc. The just-turned-five-year-old will listen for a while to such stories if they involve dancers or princesses, but her retention is not necessarily very good, and her attention wanders if the story goes into much narrative detail. (Or lacks pictures.)

And miss two-and-a-half prefers very short stories with lots of pictures, at which point she seizes the book herself and points out all relevant parts of the illustration, shouting over your attempts to read if necessary.

This is all, so far as I can remember, part of normal development towards a real interest in reading. However, as I was congratulating myself the other night that my oldest was finally starting to be able to enjoy some "interesting stuff", it struck me that a parent has a duty of sorts to develop an actual interest in children's literature. Some people are blessed to have this on their own. Reading Tolkien and Lewis's writing about "fairy stories", you can tell that both of these men had a real and deep appreciation for stories written at a child's level.

I do not, to any great extent.

And yet it seems to me, now I think about it, that reading to one's children will not go as well if one sees it as a duty until they become old enough to enjoy "interesting stuff". Rather, one must be able to develop some degree of appreciation for children's literature for what it is.

So over the last few weeks I've started paging through our older treasuries of children's literature trying to find stories that I like, so that I can bring some genuine enthusiasm to reading to the younger girls. I'm not sure how far I'll be able to get in this. Most of what I truly like in the realm of literature and essays is not written at a level which is fully accessible (or indeed appropriate) for children. But I think I need to come up with some degree of appreciation for the sort of stories and poems which are accessible to 2-6 year olds if I'm to be able to start them on really enjoying reading early enough for the habit to stick.

Sex Ed Does Not Work

Several times -- when I have observed that I know from my own experience that if one simply does not have sex until getting married, one will in the normal course of things successfully avoid STDs and unplanned pregnancies -- I have had quoted to me the "well known fact" that abstinence only sex education does not work. A quick browse around for studies showed several solid ones, including one commissioned by congress and the Department of Health and Human Services. These all showed that rates of sexual activity, pregnancy and STD infection were not decreased by "abstinence only" sex ed programs.

This didn't really seem like a surprise to me. That a school makes kids sit through several years worth of classes which emphasize that they should wait until marriage to have sex does not by any means mean that the students themselves will resolve to follow that course of action. Heck, schools try hard to teach history, reading, math and science, and students often don't absorb those lessons either -- despite the fact that there is nothing but upside to knowing about those subjects. One must assume that students will be even more unlikely to absorb lessons about abstinence -- since that involves "not getting any" and being something of a social oddity.

I and a number of my peers avoided sex until marriage, but that's because within our particular sub-culture of orthodox Catholics there was a strong reason not to -- something called "mortal sin" that we all believed in. If I had not believed that it was a mortal sin to have sex before marriage, and belong to a peer group that strongly supported that belief, it seems highly unlikely that I would have followed that course. MrsDarwin and I had been dating for nearly four years by the time we were finally able to get married. If we hadn't had a very, very strong motivation to wait -- then why do it?

So I'd essentially figured that the reason why abstinence education "didn't work" was because most of the kids were just sitting there in class thinking "this is stupid" and didn't make any particular effort to be abstinent.

I continue to think I'm right on that, but I ran across a post by Megan McArdle who pointed out something that I hadn't noticed: The most comprehensive recent controlled study to date, the one commissioned by the DHHS, found that groups of student put through several years of one of four commonly used abstinence-only programs did not abstain from sex (or get pregnant or get STDs) at different rates from those in the "control" groups. In two of the studied school districts, the control group was receiving only a "health and science" class which provided little to no information on contraception and STDs. In the other two districts, the control group received a fairly comprehensive sex ed program centering on contraception.

In all four districts, there was no significant difference between the students getting abstinence-only education and those in the control group.

What that means is not just that "abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work", it means that neither form of sex education significantly changes the way teenagers behave. There might as well be no sex education at all -- which to my mind would be just fine. This is one of those areas in which any particular approach to teaching on the topic is going to go against the sensibilities of at least some parents. And results like these only serve to underline that there are some areas which public schools (or indeed schools in general) simply don't have much ability to change behavior. This is one of for the parents and culture, not the schools.

More on Murray and Education

Apparently National Review has a series of short interviews with authors of newly released books. Yesterday I ran into this one with Charles Murray about his new book on education. (I wrote a bit about a Murray WSJ column discussing his proposals in this post.) It's just a ten minute interview, and it's worth a quick listen if you get the chance.

This is the sort of thing that can easily feed Darwin dinnertime conversation, though the girls can get a bit antsy when we spend too much time discussing topics other than princesses and dinosaurs. Murray proposes four "simple truths" about education, two of which are "Ability varies" and "Half of the children are below average".

Both of these are obviously true (at least, outside of Lake Wobegon) and yet I wonder if focusing on them can lead us to give up on far too many people far too early. Murray argues that only 30% of students are capable of ever meeting the standards for math and reading set forth in No Child Left Behind. Not being a fan of Left Behind novels or legislation, I'm not familiar with the reading and math standards involved, but I'm a bit dubious that any significant portion of the population is inherently unable to perform at what we would consider a decent high school level of reading, writing and math. (Though I'm willing to admit, this may be the result of imposing the experiences and abilities of myself and those I know on lots of people that I don't.)

Apropos of that, I also ran into yesterday this article from the American Thinker entitled "Why Shakir Can't Read". (Avoid the comments, they can lower your intelligence.)

One hopes that what the article describes is an exaggeration or is at least rare, but one fears that it is not. It wouldn't surprise me if, by age nine, or even age six, a child raised amidst instability and neglect, never read to and left to amuse himself with television and whatever action he can find on the streets of the 'hood, has been rendered unable to progress (at least without effort more intensive than most schools will ever be capable of giving) beyond a certain point. So maybe its problems like the ones Shakir faces in the article that create the 70% unable to meet standards that Murray talks about.

However it strikes me that although there is a real, inherent educational attainment limit for people, what we are generally seeing in current statistics is a created limit which results from bad parenting, bad culture and bad schools. And so while Murray is doubtless right that there is a limit beyond which it is not possible to push people, it does seem to me that there is still room for broad-based improvements in education if we manage to clean up American cultural attitudes (and particularly those of some sub-cultures in America) towards education -- and also refocus our schools on real teaching.

While there are doubtless limits (both inherent and created through early mis-formation) to educational attainment, I can't help fearing that focusing too much on them encourages us to only solve some problems (like better education for the "gifted") and not others like our overall cultural attitudes toward education, the family and child rearing.

Murray on Testing Out Of College

Charles Murray has an instict for disruptive ideas. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, he had an editorial entitled "For Most People, College is a Waste of Time" in which he argued that the BA should be almost universally dropped as a job qualification and that instead there should be developed a set of comprehensive national tests (not national as in government administered, but nationally recognized like the CPA exam) in various subjects which would show to what degree people actually possessed skills or knowledge in certain areas.

The merits of a CPA-like certification exam apply to any college major for which the BA is now used as a job qualification. To name just some of them: criminal justice, social work, public administration and the many separate majors under the headings of business, computer science and education. Such majors accounted for almost two-thirds of the bachelor's degrees conferred in 2005. For that matter, certification tests can be used for purely academic disciplines. Why not present graduate schools with certifications in microbiology or economics -- and who cares if the applicants passed the exam after studying in the local public library?

Certification tests need not undermine the incentives to get a traditional liberal-arts education. If professional and graduate schools want students who have acquired one, all they need do is require certification scores in the appropriate disciplines. Students facing such requirements are likely to get a much better liberal education than even our most elite schools require now.

Certification tests will not get rid of the problems associated with differences in intellectual ability: People with high intellectual ability will still have an edge. Graduates of prestigious colleges will still, on average, have higher certification scores than people who have taken online courses -- just because prestigious colleges attract intellectually talented applicants.

But that's irrelevant to the larger issue. Under a certification system, four years is not required, residence is not required, expensive tuitions are not required, and a degree is not required. Equal educational opportunity means, among other things, creating a society in which it's what you know that makes the difference. Substituting certifications for degrees would be a big step in that direction.

The incentives are right. Certification tests would provide all employers with valuable, trustworthy information about job applicants. They would benefit young people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional four-year college. They would be welcomed by the growing post-secondary online educational industry, which cannot offer the halo effect of a BA from a traditional college, but can realistically promise their students good training for a certification test -- as good as they are likely to get at a traditional college, for a lot less money and in a lot less time.

Certification tests would disadvantage just one set of people: Students who have gotten into well-known traditional schools, but who are coasting through their years in college and would score poorly on a certification test. Disadvantaging them is an outcome devoutly to be wished.

As with many disruptive ideas, this one has a lot of interesting elements, but it's hard to see how one gets there from here. One of the senses in which I consider myself a conservative is that it seems to me that large institutions (among which I would class our country's education and business infrastructures and cultures) do not tend to move in starkly new directions unless there is some sort of total collapse and rebuilding involved -- and total collapses are generally to be frowned upon.

Still, perhaps such a thing could be backdoored in, beginning rather like the GRE or G-MAT as something taken after college, but allowing those without an undergraduate degree to take it as well. Perhaps if it gained respect over time, the bachellor's degree would fade in importance compared to the tests.

However, I found myself thinking while reading the article that employers do not really treat the BA as a measure of competance anyway, except in a few fields such as engineering or if you're going on to get a graduate degree in the same topic. Even for a first job out of college one is invariably asked about experience: Show me something you've written. Do you have any examples of programs you've written? What's a site that you've designed? Describe an example of a situation in which you took leadership. Describe a time when you provided excellent customer service. Etc.

And most cynically of all: College is partly a way of keeping people under 22 out of the full time work force, while trying to encourage them to develop the ability to schedule their own time, work hard and live on their own. Sure it's silly to demand a BA or BS for many of the jobs for which it is listed as a requirement, but in many ways it's just a shorthand for: "We'd like somoene 22 or over with some degree of adult responsibility and work ethic."

Still, its a fascinating idea, and it makes me curious to read Murray's forthcoming book.

Education and American Progress

Gene Expression Classic had a post last week linking to a David Brooks column about America's history of educational excellence, and it's leadership in the world economy. Brooks set the stage as follows:

Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.

Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.

As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.

America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.

This threatens the country’s long-term prospects. It also widens the gap between rich and poor. Goldin and Katz describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

Brooks goes on to discuss the "skills gap" which has allowed the US economy to continue becoming more and more productive, in great part as the result of technological innovation created and used by the educated elite. (Just under 30% of the US population aged 25-34 has a bachelor's degree or higher.) Brooks argues that the US educational system lost steam and direction in the 60s and 70s, resulting in our relative loss of global competitiveness since that time (the US remains one of the strongest economies in the world, but it's not as much stronger than the rest of the world as it used to be). I think his analysis on why this happened and what to do about it gets a bit more spotty, though:

...Using his own research, Heckman also concludes that high school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability. He uses common sense to intuit what these traits are, but on this subject economists have a lot to learn from developmental psychologists....

Brooks argues that for the long term, the "skills gap" is the largest single contributor to inequality and thus middle class angst, much more so than energy prices and globalization. However, since it's hard to fix the education system, no one is emphasizing it much, though he says:

...[I]t’s worth noting that both sides of this debate exist within the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant. If you look at Barack Obama’s education proposals — especially his emphasis on early childhood — you see that they flow naturally and persuasively from this research. (It probably helps that Obama and Heckman are nearly neighbors in Chicago). McCain’s policies seem largely oblivious to these findings. There’s some vague talk about school choice, but Republicans are inept when talking about human capital policies.

It seems to me that there's a serious lack of imagination here. If, as Brooks cites Heckman to say above, many of the educational/developmental problems that we're seeing appear by age five, it's hard to see how public education policies (including Obama's desire to have full 0-5 public education available) are going to make the difference. Public schools and public daycares (or private ones, come to that) are not well suited to forming the minds of those under five so that they will be good learners and stable personalities in the years to come. That's what families are for. So if we're seeing children who by age five are already seriously unsuited to learning and stability, what we're seeing is probably at least as much family and cultural break-down as an educational one.

TangoMan of Gene Expression points out that part of the problem in this regard may center around immigration.

Having an immigration policy which pulls in tens of millions of 6th grade educated, Spanish-speaking immigrants is a policy that creates inequality. Goldin and Katz would do well to control for immigrant status, legal and illegal, in the ranks of the low skilled.... [D]emography matters. When we celebrate diversity and when we hold all cultures to be equal then we discount the importance that cultural practices, traditions and views have on real world factors, like education and economic productivity. Heckman notes that "some children" benefit from family practices that promote human capital development, but that many don't. I'm willing to wager that racial and cultural factors correlate to a good deal of this disparity....It's fantasy to posit that the skills gap is independent of group measures of human capital stock. ParaPundit shows the dismal embrace of higher education by Hispanics even after 4 generations in the US.

This may be something of a factor, but frankly, there was plenty of immigration in the first half of the 20th century, and in the 19th, and those immigrants often had much less than a 6th grade education. But there is, clearly a stark difference. Schools thrived even among the immigrant communities (whether they were often seen as the means to improving your economic status) during the period that Brooks identifies as the boom time of American education and economic expansion. Not only the public schools, but the Catholic school system, Hebrew schools, etc.

Given the 60s/70s inflection point at which we seem to see a downturn in American education (and the appearance of the "skills gap") I can think of two clear areas for improvement:

Rediscovering Education -- By almost any standards, our public education system fell apart in the 70s. Educational theories came and went, and it became fashionable to suggest we should only teach what is "relevant" to students. Traditional ideas of the Three Rs and classical liberal education were left behind as wonky ideas ranging from the "new math" to "Afrocentric curriculums" were attempted. In many ways, the broader educational system has never recovered, in part because administrators and teachers are now almost all people who received non-educations back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And anyone who deals with todays college students can attest that 12 years of education often results in someone with no logical skills, poor reading comprehension, and no writing ability. And that's among the half of high school students who actually go on to attempt college! We desperately need a return to basics: reading, writing and arithmetic in the early grades; the liberal arts and sciences in the later grades.

The Family as Foundation -- Just as importantly, however, we need to develop the cultural understanding that parents and families hold the primary responsibility for educating their children. Much of the education, after age five or so, may often go on in schools with teachers, but parents are still responsible for providing children with the understanding that education is important and worth doing, and providing them with the family support, motivation and help to be successful in education.

And for too many people, the two income family in which both husband and wife have full time "fulfilling careers" while raising their children is not only the normative way of life, but the only imaginable way of life. Some families may have little choice in that matter, in that where they live and how much they earn require both parents to work. But there is, I think, a need to recenter cultural expectation (especially for the earliest years of a child's life) to see child rearing and early education as something that deserves the full time attention of a parent if at all possible. (Something which, at least in the corporate world that I find myself in from eight to six, seems an alien concept to many.) Professional help is all very well, but it can never be as personal and as concentrated as that of a parent or other relative.


Clearly, there's much room for improvement in US education, both culturally and institutionally. However, I'd disagree with Brooks as to where we need to look for solutions on the political spectrum. First of all, our biggest problems are cultural, not policy. And so the solutions we need most involve cultural change which can perhaps be advocated by politicians, but can certainly not be ennacted by them. Much though we often wish to solve our problems by simply electing some particular politician, I don't think this is one that politicians can solve for us. And to the extent that it is, I don't see an emphasis on parents taking primarily responsibility for education and a return to classic liberal education as being something we're going to see out of the Democratic party any time soon. Seeing as what we need in our education is a rollback of much of the progressive educational theory of the last fifty years, it would seem an odd thing to come from the left. Also, too many proposals from the left (and, indeed, from the mainstream right) put the focus on the professionals: testing, schools, public daycare and pre-K, etc. These might be nice-to-haves, but they do nothing either to change our understanding of what education is, or to bring families back to the center of education. That, indeed, seems to be something that simply does not fit in the current political axis -- and which is advocated by occasional voices of both the intellectual left and right, but few in the political or party establishment.

Finally, I think we may need to ask ourselves: At what point does a "skills gap" become inevitable? I'm sure that we can do a much, much better job at education and culture than we do now, but is there some point we could take our technology and economy to where a significant percentage of the population is simply not capable of keeping up?

I don't really want to think that, as I find the idea of IQ and objectively limited intelligence unappealing. I would prefer to think that everyone is capable of being highly intelligent and educated if given the right upbringing and education. And yet, I'm not sure that this tabula rasa view has support in reality. Is it possible that in a highly technological society a "skills gap" becomes inevitable at some point?