Sowell on Cosby

Thomas Sowell applauds Bill Cosby's recent remarks about the priorities of black parents and students.

Years ago, Cosby urged a group of young blacks to put more effort into their studies, the way Asian students do. "Do you know why they are called Asians?" he asked. "Because they always get A's."

The differences among all these groups are in one four-letter word that you are still not supposed to say: work.

Anyone who has taught black, white, and Asian students will know that they do not work equally. Studies show it but you don't need studies. Just go into a university library on a Saturday night and see who is there and who is not there.

In some places, you might think it was an all-Asian university, judging by the students in the library on Saturday night.

How surprised should you be when you go into a classroom on Monday morning and find out who is on top of the work and who is struggling to keep up?

What Bill Cosby said was no laughing matter. It is closer to being something to cry about.

At my kids' end-of-year awards the Cho's and the Chin's had the reading and math awards locked up. One five year old named Katie Snell did receive a reading award.

For-Profit delivers more choices for college students

Imagine being able to access all of your college textbooks online without ever having to carry heavy books for 50 percent of the cost of buying traditional textbooks. Imagine what this innovation could do for the high cost of textbooks in the K-12 sector. In the future, K-12 could combine the success of the Maine laptop program for all students with all on-line textbooks. It seems to me that every major textbook publisher should move to offer this as an alternative to heavy textbooks. it would also solve the problem of outdated text-books, as it would be much more cost-effective to update textbooks online.

And as a bonus it would bring an end to the traditional fall newspaper stories discussing student back problems, backpacks, and heavy textbooks.

Beginning this fall, students can choose to buy a print edition textbook or access the same course-critical content by subscribing to one or more of over 300 SafariX WebBooks available this year at www.SafariX.com . The WebBooks will offer all the convenience and interactive benefits of the Web, allowing students to print pages, make annotations, take notes, search the full text, and add bookmarks to organize their study, anywhere they have browser access.

Popular Gang Color

Sometimes I just can't get over how much time the g-schools waste on stupid stuff.

Hundreds of students at Ensign Middle School wore pink to protest the exclusion of six boys from a class photograph because they refused to remove shirts sporting the color.

About 400 youngsters showed up Friday in pink shirts, pants or sweatbands. A day earlier, Principal Edward Wong banned six boys from a class portrait out of concern that their shirts might be associated with dance or party crews.

Officials in the Orange County school district said such crews, which stage dance contests and raves, can evolve into gangs.

The boys denied being in a crew and refused to change or cover their shirts.

"We just wanted to stand out in the picture," said Leo Garcia, 14. "No one's gonna keep us from wearing pink, or any other color."

Students said pink has become popular because it stands out and because "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest often wears the hue.

Super "Expensive" Tuesday

California’s Proposition 55 is all about instant gratification and as such is unquestionably the work of baby boomers, who in classic Peter Principle form, are now firmly entrenched in state government, local PTA, school boards across the state, the powerful teacher unions, and at every level of bureaucracy in state. They are the same folks that can’t ignore tempting credit card mailers from Citicards and insist that if we simply vote for this $12.3 billion dollar bond issue our children’s schools will magically be transformed into well lighted, uncrowded centers of learning. And they smile as they blissfully spout economic illiteracy while assuring us that we can clearly do this without raising taxes.

On Earth, harsh reality dictates that my second grader will be paying for prop 55 long after his own kids have graduated from high school. It is the miracle of compound interest that guarantees that the $12.3 billion in upfront money will balloon to at least $25 billion over the life of the bond. Care to guess how many classrooms won’t be built with the $12.5 billion in interest California taxpayers will fork over to pay this off?

With 12 percent of the state’s students, LA Unified is slated to receive about 25 percent of Prop 55’s proceeds. Apparently this is a reward for the district’s brilliant strategy of blowing millions of dollars on the Belmont Learning Center, sited on a toxic waste heap so fetid that the school will eventually have to be torn down without a single student ever attending school there. Has anybody noticed the missing cacophony of voices from the public school establishment calling for a revocation of LAUSD’s charter over this idiocy? Silence, dead palpable silence.

Proponents argue that schools are overcrowded and badly in need of repairs. Indeed, schools well may be overcrowded, but don’t forget that state law prescribes a maximum body count per classroom in Kindergarten through third grade classes of 20 students per teacher. That doesn’t sound terribly overcrowded, except the law suddenly created a demand for classroom space that didn’t exist prior to the reduction in classroom size. It is also instructive to remember that although everyone takes the overcrowding question at face value, statistically, across the country, there is no correlation between class size and student achievement.

Another stated problem and a corollary but unanswered question is why schools neglected long-term and short-term maintenance of schools? California already spends almost half of all tax revenue on public schools. If routine upkeep and capital improvements are being shunted to the sidelines, what, exactly, are the schools spending the money for? And if kids are foremost on everyone’s agenda why are school unions in places like San Diego putting the muscle on volunteers who provide services to neighborhood schools for free?

Prop 55 provides that local schools must provide 40 percent matching funds to receive funding from this bond issue. That sort of backwards incentive almost guarantees that Irvine schools are going to receive bond money that Compton just isn’t going to see.

On every level California refuses to think creatively about how to provide classroom space, consistently and predictably invoking the Temptations approach that “more taxes will solve everything.” The end result of that process faces us today and it certainly isn’t pretty.

And the Band Played On.

Glassy Eyed No More

Joanne Jacobs has a compelling piece in the Christian Science Monitor on watching the transformation of a ninth grade underachiever from a blank looking "exotic doll" to a real student at the charter school where she volunteers.

Then one day, Selma asked me a question, listened to the answer, and set to work. No more questions. No more helpless act.

And, I noticed, less makeup. (The use of makeup among ninth-grade girls is inversely correlated to their dedication to schoolwork.)

Something had happened. From that day forward, Selma did her own work. She was a student.

High School Drama

Over at Reason, Cathy Young examines feminism's troubling classic and points out that in addition to being inappropriate the high school production of the "Vagina Monologues" sends some pretty bizarre messages.

Rogue School Administrators

This is a bit overtime, but a school administrator’s attempt to frame a high school student for possession of marijuana backfires.

Terrorist Organization!!?

U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige called the NEA a "terrorist organization" at a National Governor's Association meeting. Even though it was a joke, expect much outrage.

O'Reilly Update

Every time I am invited to be on television there is a chance that the segment will be bumped or will not air. But this time the O'Reilly people assured me that everything was set, they were sending a car to pick me up, Reason and I sent out e-mails about the show, and I waited in the green room and everything seemed fine. Then the cameraman's assistant (or whoever wires the guests for sound, etc,) wired the wrong guest in the wrong order and did not check our names. Bill O'Reilly got mad and killed the school lunch segment. They apologized (four people called). And perhaps they will reschedule the segment.

Lessons from Florida

My February School Reform News column examines what has gone wrong with the oversight of school choice programs in Florida and how to monitor these types of programs without over-regulating them.

The publicity in Florida over the lack of oversight has led school choice critics to call for regulating the state’s choice programs far more tightly than needed to prevent fraud and ensure fiscal integrity. For example, the Palm Beach Post and other Florida newspapers have editorialized in favor of requiring testing of all school choice students, adding restrictions to special education vouchers, and imposing credentialing and accreditation regulations on private schools and their staff.

The Proverbial First Grader

Tyler Cowen links to a list of proverbs completed by first graders:

"Better to be safe than punch a fifth-grader."

"Don't bite the hand that looks dirty."

"A penny saved is not much."

"Don't put off till tomorrow what you put on to go to bed."

"You can lead a horse to water, but how?"

Tyler points out that "All, I might add, appear to show a familiarity with economic reasoning, with the possible exception of number four, which to my mind makes no sense whatsoever."

Grade Markets

Via Tyler Cowen and Marginal Revolution:

A school in China is allowing students who don't do well in tests to borrow a few extra marks as long as they pay them back with interest.
The scheme was recently introduced by Penglai Road No 2 Primary School in the Huangpu District of Shanghai, reports Xinhua.

Students who do poorly on a test can ask their teachers to lend them a few points to improve their grade, but twice as many points must be paid back on the next test, assuming they achieve a better mark.

If they don't, interest on the loan continues to run at 100% per test until it is paid off.

It is reported that about 40% of students at the school have taken out such loans.

See the full story here.

Bill's Iraqi Education Adventure

Hoover Institute's Bill Evers has a great piece in today's Wall Street Journal on his experience with restructuring education in Iraqi. The stories about the children and parents love of education and even standardized testing are very heartening. They don't want to fight they want to learn. As they say, read the whole thing.

You come in-country on a military cargo plane, traveling from a military airfield in Kuwait. Your plane comes down steeply from the sky (to avoid Saddamist rocketeers) to the military side of the international airport in Baghdad. You're a senior adviser on education for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), recruited by the White House and the office of the secretary of defense and approved by Ambassador Paul Bremer. Your five-month mission is to help revive teaching and learning in a country on the mend from a fascist despotism. What's it like?

• It's gratifying. The Iraqi children and grown-ups smile, always say "Welcome" and wave. The teachers and administrators are friendly and dedicated to academic success. You could enter a classroom in the Kurdish north, in rural parts of the Sunni triangle, or in Shiite sections of urban Baghdad, and sense that students are eager to learn. Iraqi parents love standardized testing and were fervently concerned not to let either the war in March and April, or the subsequent guerrilla skirmishes, interfere with the nationwide testing program.

• It's busy. The education advisory office is in Saddam's main palace in the protected Green Zone, which is like a college campus (with bombed-out ruins) situated in the middle of Baghdad. The senior advisers for all the ministries have a meeting every morning (except Friday) at 7:30. It is usual for senior advisers and their top staff to still be working at 10:30 at night. People in Mr. Bremer's office start even earlier and work later.

• It's not Afghanistan. I saw girls in school all over Iraq. In primary school, 45% of students are girls; in secondary school, 40%. All statistics about Iraq (including these from U.N. agencies) are shaky. But these percentages are consistent with what I myself observed. Iraq has a tradition of valuing education and a reputation for having produced, in the pre-Saddam era, some of the best architects, doctors and engineers in the Arab Middle East.

• It's not as scary as it looks on TV. But you do have to exercise reasonable prudence. I traveled in Baghdad and around the country more than most civilians who worked in the Baghdad palace. Usually I traveled with guards armed with assault rifles. I personally found it a bit nerve-racking whenever I was stuck in a traffic jam. But in five months I never saw a firefight, a bleeding wound or a dead body. I felt and heard explosions, but none were closer than several football fields away. Watching TV coverage of Iraq is much scarier than being there.

Arnold's 2004-2005 education budget

Over at Reason Public Policy Institute, I analyze the education portion of my Governor's 2004-2005 budget.

Imagine if my kids had a constitutional right to a weekly allowance that was 5 percent of my total income every year and that they could never receive less money than the year before plus a cost of living increase. If I made $30,000, my kids would get a generous allowance of $25 dollars a week. However, if I made $50,000 my kids would get $45 dollars a week and if I made $100,000 my kids would get $90 a week. If I lost my $100,000 a year salary, I still must pay my kids $90 a week plus a cost of living increase. This is how we finance schools in California, and this is why school districts have no incentive to ever reduce spending. The Constitution guarantees that education spending will always go up by at least a small amount, even during economic downturns.


This also explains how Governor Schwarzenegger could give schools $2 billion less of a $4 billion automatic spending guarantee based on total state revenue collections and still be increasing the education budget by more than $2 billion.

I look at structural reforms for education funding in California and conclude that:

At some point a reasonable Governor (however unlikely), might question the sacred cow of Proposition 98 funding by asking why education funding should be determined by a percentage of state revenue, no matter how high the revenue climbs. However, even if one concedes the questionable fundamental fiscal premise of Proposition 98, that schools should always get more money when state revenues increase (over and above cost of living and enrollment growth), the current structure of categorical and revenue limit spending and the legal barriers to school outsourcing ensure that those ever-increasing resources are not targeted toward classroom level spending. While Arnold's education budget is a first step toward reducing categorical administrative costs, the next step is to move toward structural school finance reform that ties funding to the characteristics of individual students and encourages schools to more efficiently target their resources to the classroom.

Whole thing here.

Same Old-Same Old

In a post aptly titled "Those Who Can't Score Teach," Reason's Chief Nick Gillespie, takes on the usual arguments to improve teacher quality.

Recommended fixes for the problems include paying teachers more, giving principals the right to hire and fire teachers, and making licensing requirements tougher.

Which is to say the same-old same-old. It's bad the poor kids get stuck with the least-experienced teachers (though it's not clear that more experience necessarily translates into more learning; it could also simply mean more teacher burnout). It's also not clear to me that losing 20 percent of new teachers after three years is a higher attrition rate than you would find in most occupations. Similarly, it's not clear that just giving more pay to people in the system will improve performance.

But the real problem with these sorts of recommendations are twofold. First off, if you want to lure smarter people into teaching (which presumes that they will be more effective), you shouldn't raise the pay of all teachers. What you need to do is make it clear that good and excellent teachers will be rewarded commensurate with their success. The current system is not set up that way and likely never will be. Second, making licensing requirements tougher will almost inevitably mean taking even more of the idiotic education courses that every teacher I know complains about. That, and other bureaucratic hoops that will make just about anyone contemplating a switch into teaching think twice. Instead, why not open the schools to people with proven knowledge bases in subjects (as determined by having a college degree in the area or similar work/life experience) and give them on-the-job training regarding the specifically pedagogical elements of the job?

Most important, though, the commission's reforms leave out parents, who are ultimately the arbiter of their children's education; they are the customers who need to be satisifed. Empower parents to pick and choose schools by giving them the freedom to go wherever they want and the "school crisis" will disappear as educational institutions change and evolve--and go out of business--trying to meet those needs. It won't even take a majority of parents moving their kids (and their money) around--as the charter school experience has shown, even a small percentage would be enough to jump start meaningful reform.

Fun, Sun, Gun

My husband and I were shocked that Katie had "gun" as a word on a worksheet in her Kindergarten class-complete with (gasp) a picture of a gun. My husband said he was going to call the school to complain--just to yank the school administration's chain. I forbid it, of course.

Head Start Can't Compete

In addition to showing slim academic benefits to preschoolers, it appears that more parents prefer to pay for child care than enroll their children in free Head Start programs. The program is under enrolled thanks to competition from private daycare, less poverty, and competition from other childcare subsidies.

And the government typically cannibalizes its own customers, offering duplicative programs and childcare subsidies.

Thank God for Alabama and Mississippi

Today's Sacramento Bee on NAEP results--

California's average reading scores for students who were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches were the lowest of any state in the nation, at both fourth and eighth grade. Sixty-seven percent of California's poor fourth-graders scored "below basic" in reading (meaning they could not even demonstrate "partial mastery" of the subject matter for their grade level). In New York, 49 percent scored "below basic"; in Texas 52 percent; Florida, 51 percent. In eighth-grade math, the percentage of California poor children scoring "below basic" was 62; only Alabama and Mississippi had more low-scoring students.

It's a sad day when Californians can look at test scores and say, "thank God for Alabama and Mississippi."

Real neighborhood schools

People sometimes find it hard to imagine how schools might look under a competitive system. One specific neighborhood in Milwaukee offers a glimpse of the real choices available to parents and their kids when a single provider no longer has a monopoly over local education dollars.

Hickenlooper said he was impressed by a unique partnership he saw among schools in the largely black community of Garden Homes.

The private Lutheran school there also houses the Garden Homes Montessori School, a public "contract" school similar to a charter school. Across the street is the neighborhood public school, Garden Homes Community School.

Officials of all three schools advertise their options in one brochure given to neighborhood families.

Garden Homes Lutheran School Pastor E. Allen Sorum said the partnership came together because families were sending their children to schools outside Garden Homes. A church survey asked families what they wanted for their children. Some said Montessori; others wanted a Christian education but couldn't afford it.

The church then worked with Milwaukee Public Schools to add a Montessori program and vouchers to help families pay tuition at the Lutheran school.

Proficiency Doublespeak

The new test results from the federal NAEP, reveal how arbitrary and low many state proficiency levels are:

Thursday, the day that the U.S. Department of Education released the 2003 NAEP results, Achieve Inc., a nonprofit group that works to lift academic standards, put out a report comparing 2003 state testing results with 2003 NAEP results.

Of 29 states giving tests in eighth-grade reading, all but Louisiana and South Carolina came up with more proficient and advanced readers than did the nation's report card.

And Maryland's discrepancy was small compared to most others. Texas found 90 percent of its eighth-graders reading at the proficient and advanced levels. The national test of the same middle-schoolers found 26 percent at those two levels.