Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling folly free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

The Truth About Tuition

tuition, supply and demand, subsidy, government

Subsidize something, and you tend to get more of it.

But wait, what if you subsidize demand for something, but don’t really allow (or continue to disallow) increased supply?

Then prices for that something go way up.

This is elementary economics — nothing controversial about it.

Except that politicians and bureaucrats who make public policy tend not to acknowledge this aspect of reality when they propose subsidies. Instead, they expect praise for their “heroic” and “caring” program of destruction.

They need to be educated. But, alas, all this applies best to college education. How does one educate the educators?

A new study, which reliable economists tell me is “sophisticated,” finds that the bulk of recent college tuition price inflation can, indeed, be directly linked to the federal government’s loan subsidies.

This study makes for some opaque reading, alas: “Essentially, demand shocks lead to higher college costs and more debt, and in the absence of higher labor market returns, more loan default inevitably occurs.” Yikes.

The college education bubble has been much talked-about for years, at least amongst skeptics of government policy. But in hushed tones — the big fear, here, is that a bursting of the bubble will lead to — who knows what? I mean, who-knows-what policy reaction.

Probably just more government subsidy and control. And even higher tuition still. Double yikes.

Thankfully, while the brick-and-mortar higher education institutions suck up more and more government-backed money, the Internet is enabling some great alternatives. The future, I think, does not belong to the university system as we have known it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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tuition, supply and demand, subsidy, government

 

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education and schooling folly ideological culture responsibility

Anti-Lynch Lynch Mob

racism, political correctness, progressivism illustration, common sense, trigger warning, micro-aggression,

America’s worst racial and sexual injustices were institutionally addressed years ago, in the Sixties and soon after — by folks in the Civil Rights movement, everyday citizens, and their representatives.

So what do today’s earnest, Johnny-and-Jilly Come Lately “Social Justice Warriors” have left to complain about?

Why, building names, of course!

The local college in Annville, Pennsylvania, has been embroiled in a bizarre civil rights complaint about their Lynch Memorial Hall. Named after one Dr. Clyde A. Lynch, a Depression Era benefactor, some SJW students are demanding that it be changed, because of, get this, “associated racial connotations.”

“Lynch,” you see. It triggers them.

I kid you not.

Colin Deppen, writing last week on pennlive.com, explained how Dr. Lynch had nothing to do with the lynching of African-Americans in Jim Crow days. The extra-legal hanging tradition began much earlier, in the Revolutionary War, “with a Captain William Lynch of Pittsville, Virginia.” This fellow “headed a self-constituted court with no legal authority that persecuted suspected British loyalists.”

Lynching’s origins? White-on-white violence, not white-on-black.

SJW students, mostly ignorant and incurious, prefer coming off as whiners or moral scolds than learn something.

Or let a coincidence go.

The problem is this: the closer some people get to reaching their goals, they have less and less to do. Yet many “late adopters” covet the moral authority of their predecessors. So they pack all their frustration and passion into making more and more unreasonable demands.

But this may be self-correcting. They look like idiots. And they have obtained our attention. This Lynch Mob nonsense could be the sign of their end times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture

Doing Anti-Racism Wrong

yoga, racism, political correctness, racism, colonialism, Common Sense

The number of crazies out there may be fewer than they seem.

This weekend, at Townhall, I wrote about the University of Ottawa’s suspension of a free yoga class. What was deemed “problematic” was the class’s “cultural appropriation” of an ancient discipline.

But why was yoga a problem, -atic or otherwise?

Well, in the words of the “fainting heart” who made the decision to nix the program, because yoga hails from cultures that “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy. . . .”

Robby Soave, at the Daily Beast, pushed a bit deeper than I did: “Cultural appropriation first became a talking point in sociology circles in the 1970s and ’80s. Explicitly racist and exploitative incidents from the past — like 19th and early 20th century blackface — were deemed wrong, not merely because they were horribly insulting to black people, but because they stole from black culture.”

On this ground, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is intolerably racist.

Idiotic. Let me repeat what I wrote this weekend:

  1. Cultural appropriation is a good thing; that’s how we progress. We emulate the good in other cultures. We discard practices that do not suit us. That is what good people do.
  2. Those people who, afflicted by the mind-virus of today’s neo-progressivism, think that “cultural appropriation” is racist are themselves racist.

How are they racist? By judging a cultural matter as racial.

Racists make too much of race. So does this new breed of self-defined anti-racists.

But remember, it was just one complaint that led to the yoga class being nixed. Had the person who addressed the complaint dared snort in derision, the whole absurdity might have stopped before it started.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

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yoga, racism, political correctness, racism, colonialism, Common Sense

Photo credit (endorsement of this message is not implied): Steven Depolo on Flickr

 

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Accountability education and schooling

A Public Fraud in the Midwest

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Chicago, school, education, graft, corruption, illustration, Common Sense, Paul Jacob

The standard case for government-run industry runs like this: some goods, by their very nature, are best provided by government . . . to ensure high quality and low cost.

City sewers, firefighting, roads and education are traditionally explained as requiring government operation, organization, and tax funding.

The trouble is, it’s no longer plausible, really, to say that one of the most expensive and omnipresent of these industries, “public education” (government schooling) guarantees much of anything.

Certainly we aren’t getting quality at low cost.

But a few folks do get wealthy.

I wrote about Barbara Byrd-Bennett a few weeks ago. She’s the Chicago public school administrator who had to resign her CEO-ship because of the overwhelming evidence against her scamming Chicago’s schools . . . for over $2 million in kickbacks.

And now, it turns out, she has a prehistory — in the Motor City. “Federal investigators were looking at Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s role in a $40 million textbook contract that was awarded while she worked in Detroit,” explains the Chicago Sun-Times, “long before she became Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s schools chief. . . .”

Republican, democratic government relies upon an alert press and citizenry to catch folks like Byrd-Bennett. Why? Because government, by its nature, is most efficient in delivering wealth from many into the hands of the few. Having it serve the many is difficult, and requires eternal vigilance.

Which is one reason why we need limited government: the more extensive government’s scope, the harder to keep track of all the frauds and exploitative con jobs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Chicago, school, education, graft, corruption, illustration, Common Sense, Paul Jacob

 

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Common Sense education and schooling national politics & policies

Diversity Double-Talk

Diversity, schools, collage, photomontage, Jim Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

“Black teachers flee schools, leading to concerns about diversity,” warned the Washington Post headline. I’m less concerned about “diversity” and more about why teachers — black or otherwise — would “flee.”

The study found a significant drop between 2002 and 2012 in the percentage of teachers who are black in nine large city public schools systems — Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

In New Orleans, the percentage of black teachers fell from 74 to 51 percent, while the percentage of white teachers rose from 25 to 43 percent. In the nation’s capital, black teachers tumbled from 77 to 49 percent, while white teachers went from 16 to 39 percent.

“The whole effort . . . toward minority-teacher recruitment . . . [has] been an unheralded victory, really,” argues the University of Pennsylvania’s Richard Ingersoll. “The problem is with retention. Minority teachers have significantly higher quit rates than non-minority teachers.”

Some argue the problem is a system that micromanages teachers. Others cite the expansion of “teacher evaluation systems.” Neither reason explains the racial discrepancy.

However, black teachers do appear to be overrepresented in rougher, lower-performing schools — often with large minority populations. That may be causing a higher “quit rate.”

It may also be purposeful. As The Post article informs, “[R]esearch has suggested that students who are racially paired with teachers — black teachers working with black students and Hispanic teachers working with Hispanic students — do better academically.”

So, all the talk of diversity is aimed at keeping students and teachers with their own race?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Note: My Townhall column last Sunday was a longer treatment of this subject.

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Diversity, schools, collage, photomontage, Jim Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

 

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Common Sense crime and punishment education and schooling folly general freedom national politics & policies

Another Leaf Out of Gov’t’s Playbook

Zero Tolerance, schools, hysteria

Could government be a suck-hole for intelligence? Could one’s proximity to government reduce one’s IQ?

America’s public (read: government) schools too often serve as Wisdom-Free Zones.

The Ahmed Mohamed story shocked a lot of people. A kid with a clock was mistaken for a terrorist with a bomb and the school and local police threw reason and procedure and everything else out the window. But no one should be shocked. Every week, maybe every day, news creeps out of America’s “common schools” to prove, once again, that its administrators and teachers seem to be deficient in common sense.

When I wrote about Ahmed’s timepiece yesterday, I mentioned several examples of public school hysteria over fictitious, symbolic, or non-existent weapons. Such stories are Old Faithfuls here at Common Sense. But one case I haven’t written about* is the six-month-old tale of the Bedford County, Virginia, lad who was expelled from school for possession of a marijuana leaf.

The police dropped the drug case upon testing the leaf in evidence. It was not Cannabis sativa but Acer palmatum, the Japanese maple leaf, a harmless shrub.

Still, the school stuck to the year-long suspension, wouldn’t let up. Zero tolerance.

Now, the 11-year-old boy had supposedly boasted about having marijuana. And schools do have rules against “look-alike” drugs. I just wonder why the student received zero due process and how we expect youngsters to grow up in a world without even a tidbit of tolerance.

This dysfunction is not racism or fear or Islamophobia, as some claim in the Ahmed case.

It’s just the inflexible witlessness of those with too much unchecked authority.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Coming, as it did, immediately on the heels of the infamous Pop Gun Tart insanity. . . .

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Zero Tolerance, schools, hysteria

 

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Common Sense education and schooling folly general freedom tax policy

Money (for Us) Good, Profit (for Them) Bad

Teacher's Union

“One thing that we’ve done,” Dennis McBride of Support our Schools-Wauwatosa told a crowd at a free event hosted by the non-profit Wisconsin Public Education Network, “is we’ve made sure every time one of our legislators pops up his or her head above the foxhole, we’re there to shoot at them.”

The crowd laughed, reports the watchdog John K. MacIver Institute, which ran the story under the headline, “Panelist Jokes About Shooting Legislators at Public Education Summit.”

No worries, though: it was just a metaphor.

The genuinely kooky thoughts were less figurative.

One speaker encouraged the audience never to say the two words, “Scott Walker,” for fear of giving “the Wisconsin governor” higher name-recognition.

“Some of the first voucher supporters,” asserted Jonas Persson of the Center for Media and Democracy, “outside of this kind of new right core group of ideologues and wealthy entrepreneurs, were white supremacists. . . .”

Incredibly, he insisted that this movement “drew most of its support from, quote, ‘white flight areas*.’”

Somehow, no one mentioned voucher program successes, or the grassroots support for vouchers in African-American communities.

“The ultimate goal is about breaking down public schools and to be honest with you,” said Jennifer Epps-Addison of Wisconsin Jobs Now/Schools and Communities United, “it’s about profiting off of the education of our kids.”

Heavens! Making a profit by serving parents and children “consuming” education? Unthinkable.

Meanwhile, Epps-Addison pushed the “Wisconsin Freedom Compact,” which calls for doubling the tax dollars going to public education.

Will she guarantee that no one will profit from that?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

*Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article contained the term “white flight Aryans” in Jonas Persson’s quote. After review of notes and audio recordings, the phrase has been corrected to read “white flight areas.” The context and overall significance of Persson’s statements are not changed, but the quote is updated for accuracy.

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Teacher's Union

 

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education and schooling free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

The Pushers

Lunchroom Black Market

When I was a teenager, my mom attended nursing school and became very interested in nutrition. This had consequences.

She stopped buying sugary cereals, for instance. Well! We could not supinely accept this. My younger brother hid Cap’n Crunch and other stuff like that under his bed; and when we wanted a bedtime snack, we’d find him and barter on the black market.

I cite those halcyon days of determined resistance as a relatively benign example of adults regulating kids. Parents have that job. Mom was certainly within her rights. Yet children, although they should gladly obey all reasonable parental injunctions, can only be expected to resist when parental prerogatives stray into sugary-cereal-banning territory.

How much more enthusiastically, then, must we cheer kids who valiantly evade not the proper authority of parents but the improper, pushy, Puritanical programs of joy-stomping institutional busybodies?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Are you by any chance referring to the efforts of Michelle Obama and snivelingly acquiescent educrats to expel anything tasty from school lunchrooms across the land, as if innocuous condiments were the equivalent of strychnine?” Correct!

I’m also talking about kids “caught bringing — and even selling[!!] — salt, pepper, and sugar” to rescue their taste buds from the arbitrarily bland fare.

Good going, guys! And if moms and dads want to take this Declaration of Independence even further, let them yank their kids out of these places and find another way to teach them the ABCs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Lunchroom Black Market

 

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education and schooling national politics & policies

The Bloomberg Limit

Bloomberg Votes

Afraid that scandal-alluring Hillary Clinton may prove too flawed a presidential candidate, some Democrats are talking to billionaire and former three-term New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg about a 2016 presidential run.

Mrs. Clinton’s “slide is accelerating,” writes New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin. “A damaging new poll goes to the Achilles’ heel of her candidacy: People simply don’t trust her.”

Goodwin gushes, instead, at the “intriguing” possibility of Mr. Bloomberg.

“Wall Street wants Michael Bloomberg to run for president,” reports Business Insider, “but the billionaire isn’t budging.”

And for good reason. He can’t win.

It’s not just me saying so; it’s Michael Bloomberg himself. Last year, he told CBS Face the Nation that he’d consider running . . . “If I thought I could win.”

His honor should know, having spent more of his own money chasing public office than any person in American history.

Why did incumbent Mayor Bloomberg have to spend so much dough? He double-crossed voters on term limits. Bloomberg promised to oppose city council attempts to weaken the limits, but flipped to grab a third mayoral term for himself.

Voter anger “over his maneuver to undo the city’s term limits law,” reported The Times, became . . . well, a big problem. “To eke out a narrow re-election victory over the city’s understated comptroller, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spent $102 million of his own money, or about $183 per vote,” explained the New York Times in 2009, “. . . making his bid for a third term the most expensive campaign in municipal history.”

A similar price tag in a presidential race stands at roughly $23 billion. That’s a lot for anyone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bloomberg Votes

 

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education and schooling folly

Learning Zone or War Zone

College Safe Zones

Given the stated purposes of the university — discovering, learning, teaching, engaging in open intellectual discourse — you might suppose that the pitched battles on campus would be primarily intellectual in nature. Persons set forth a view, others criticize it or elaborate a positive alternative, etc.

Open intellectual change, however heated, is indeed often what transpires.

But on many campuses, we also witness efforts to muzzle opponents of ideas or policies. The censors contend that disagreement as such constitutes a kind of assault on them, one from which their delicate selves must be forcibly and un-delicately protected.

Thus, campus activists at Northwestern University have reported Professor Laura Kipnis for “sexual harassment” for arguing, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that “Sexual Paranoia [Is Striking] Academe,” as exemplified by prissy new rules about dating, jokes, the simplest of standard human interactions. According to her accusers, her article somehow creates a “hostile environment” for students eager to impose not only a Victorian screen on dating and talking, but also a screen, or lid, on any discussion of the Victorian screen. It’s just one example of a syndrome that could be multiplied ad infinitum.

What to do?

One thing, if you’re applying to college: omit as a prospect any school rife with the politics of repression. Boycott the anti-academic academy.

The second, larger solution: bypass the modern university altogether.

Modern technology can help with that. There are more and more ways to learn, and teach, with every day that passes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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College Safe Zones