From homeschool to teachers

Hmmm...The Point at Fitchburg State - From homeschool to teachers

Students Sarah Comeau and Elisabeth Beverage are ending their time at Fitchburg State to become educators. Both are hard working teachers who are ready to hit the ground running in their fields, but unlike some of their fellow education majors, they have been asked the same question over and over again; “Why did a homeschooler want to become a teacher?”

"Faith" or "Science" based education?

What kind of education is this, "faith-based" or "science-based"?

An elementary school will hold a toy gun exchange Saturday, offering students a book and a chance to win a bicycle if they turn in their play weapons.

Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill maintains that children who play with toy guns may not take real guns seriously.

"Playing with toys guns, saying 'I'm going to shoot you,' desensitizes them, so as they get older, it's easier for them to use a real gun," Hill said.

I'm sure that Principal Hill has good scientific evidence for this claim.

Not...

What does homeschooling look like?

Here's one of the things that it can look like. 


High school student in English class:

Reading Walden...

One question

This story in the Christian Science Monitor is about young adults living at home with their parents after college. But I can't get past the first line.

After graduating from Brown University in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and completing a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil, Cassie Owens was left with a few dollars on her stipend and no job in sight. So, Ms. Owens returned home to her mother in Philadelphia.

The tuition schedule for Brown University from 2006-2009 was:

Brown University - Tuition only

Academic year	Tuition
2005-2006	$32,264
2006-2007	$33,888
2007-2008	$35,584
2008-2009	$36,928
Total	$138,664

That's tuition only - no fees, no room and board.

So the one question is this - under what conditions is it rational for an 18-22 year old person to spend four years of his or her physical and mental prime, and $138,000, and receive, as a return on that expense, a degree in comparative literature?

I'm not going to say that those conditions can't exist, or that they don't in this case, but I bet there are a lot more people doing it for whom it is not a rational decision than there are those for whom it is...

Understatement

College Presidents Alarmed Over Obama's Cost-control Plan

President Obama's new plan to force colleges and universities to contain tuition or face losing federal dollars is raising alarm among education leaders who worry about the threat of government overreach. Particularly sharp words came from the presidents of public universities; they're already frustrated by increasing state budget cuts.

...

At Washington, President Mike Young said Obama showed he did not understand how the budgets of public universities work.

Glenn Reynolds observes that "it’s not at all clear that Obama understands how budgets work in general," but I disagree. I think it's quite clear that he has no understanding of budgeting whatsoever.

Follow Your Bliss—Sort Of

Megan McArdle has a good piece about that commencement address that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford several years ago.

Steve Jobs', um, job, is to tell graduates how they could be Steve Jobs. And if they are to have any chance, they do indeed need to follow their bliss and take risks rather than settling down to a degree in accounting.

But not everyone has the potential to be Steve Jobs. Not just because most people are rather more ordinary, but because there are a limited number of jobs that are really fun, greatly admired, and fairly well remunerated, which is what most people want.

She's got some valuable, mature, adult advice. It's a good read.

NFL vs. NEA

Fran Tarkenton (of all people) with an excellent thought experiment in the Wall Street Journal...

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league. It's about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player's been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

Let's face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?

No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.

Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: "They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans." The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn't help.

If you haven't figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real -life American public education system. Teachers' salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn't rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they've been teaching. That's it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you're demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation's children.

Correlation is not causation

Glenn Reynolds, with another Higher Education "Bubble" update, quotes Robert Weissberg:

Administrative bloat is a major factor in the escalation of college costs, and ‘diversity’ administrators are probably the biggest part of it.

I think that's probably exactly backwards. Looking at colleges as businesses, I suspect that administrative bloat is actually one of the major results of the escalation of college costs, and diversity administrators are one of the biggest parts of that. That is to say, costs aren't going up because colleges are hiring more administrators - they are hiring more administrators because they have more money coming in. They have more money coming in because we've made a decision, as a society, that the path to success in this world includes the credentials that come with a college degree, and because Uncle Sam has stepped in with untold billions of dollars in guaranteed loans to enable people to go.

Stop and think about this from a business point of view for a minute. Let's assume that I'm running a college, and every year I have 1000 applicants for 800 slots in my incoming Freshman class. I go through the applicants, and, based on whatever criteria I choose, I come up with 800. Half of them can pay the nominal $15,000 per year tuition and fees, the other half get help from my endowment fund, and in the end, I end up with 800 students who are going to come in and pay somewhere around $10,000 per person, total. So I've got $8 million in revenue from that class for that year. If I drop the nominal price, I'm going to take in less, and I believe that if I raise it, I'll actually eliminate some of my applicants and probably not increase my revenue, either.

Now Uncle Sam stands up and says, "hey, you, barely literate, barely numerate graduate of our nation's fine public high schools - don't go to work in a factory or become a plumber or electrician. We'll loan you the money to follow your dream of becoming the Next Great Women's Studies Professor." And makes available to every high school graduate a $4000-per year, no questions asked loan. (You'll have to pay it off, of course, but that's out there in the future, and that Anthropology or Medieval English Literature degree will certainly vastly increase your lifetime earning potential.) What do I, as someone running a college, now see when I look out at the world?

"Hey! Every one of my applicants, every one of them, can afford to pay $4000 more per year than he or she could last year!"

Am I going to raise rates by $4000 in year one? Maybe not. But it's not going to take too long to get there. Why would I, as a greedy businessman, forgo profit that there's to be made if I can increase profits by increasing revenues? Or, to put a less cynical spin on it, why would I, as an idealistic educator, forgo the opportunity to improve my facilities and increase my endowment if the students who are growing at my nurturing institution can avail themselves of a little federal money to improve our school's general welfare?

No one's attending school anywhere because that school has "great diversity administrators!" Schools are hiring "diversity administrators" to make sure that they keep their first class seats on Uncle Sam's gravy train...

"Our pitchforks are misdirected..."

Steyn, with a must read...

So, at the News of the World, every single employee is clearing out his desk. But, at the Atlantic Public Schools, at the DEATFBI, life goes on. A curious contrast. The striking feature of Big Government, from Athens to Sacramento, is its imperviousness to any kind of accountability — legal, fiscal, electoral, popular. A media mogul, a bank chairman, an oil executive, a corporate-jet depreciation-claimant are easily demonizable: As President Obama cautioned CEOs a couple of years back, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

U.S. History as Taught at Bowdoin

I suspect that this is not what it looked like when Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was the President...

Do Bowdoin alumni know their alma mater offers not one history course in American political, military, diplomatic, constitutional, or intellectual history, and nothing at all on the American Founding or the Constitution; that the one Civil War course is essentially African-American history (it is offered also in Africana Studies); and that there are more courses on gay and lesbian subjects than on American history?

The real question, the answer to which is, I suspect, horrifying, is "at how many of our 'elite' educational institutions is the situation similar or identical?"

And how long are Universities going to be able to sell Women's Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies and African Studies degrees for over $100,000?

"Nothing dear, you're not qualified"

One of the early scenes in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life depicts a hospital birth. The focus of the doctors and nurses and administrators all clustered around is on all of the fancy equipment and even the financing of said equipment ("we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way it comes under the monthly current budget, and not the capital account!"). What they're not particularly interested in is the young woman. Anyway, at one point, as the doctors are making sure that everyone knows his or her own part in the process, the woman on the gurney asks, "What should I do?" And the response is, "Nothing, dear - you're not qualified."

For some reason, I was reminded of that by this story¹ out of Chicago...

Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school.

"Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?" the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English.

Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: "We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!"

Fernando waved his hand over the crowd and asked a visiting reporter: "Do you see the situation?"

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago's West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.

Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

"Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school," Carmona said. "It's about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It's milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception."

I suppose we should be grateful that they even make exceptions for medical issues and allergies, but I don't see why we'd assume that will remain the case. After all, if the school is omniscient enough to provide for the children without problems better than the parents can, how much longer will it be before they decide that they can care for the parents with problems better than parents can?

One more itsy-bitsy step on the road to totalitarianism. We've gone from schooling for those who can afford it -> schools for everyone who wants to go -> mandatory schooling for all. We've gone from schools not feeding kids -> schools making lunch available to kids -> schools making "free" lunch available to kids -> schools making lunch mandatory for kids. (Thinking about following the history of school health -> sex ed -> condoms -> ??? to a similar and logical conclusion is ... unsettling...)

"If we can just put the right programs in place," cry the Utopians, "we can perfect the human condition, and make a heaven of the earth!" But they don't know what they don't know, and are likely - very likely - to do far more harm than good². Even in the exceptionally unlikely event that the school were to actually serve a lunch that was both a) nutritionally sound and b) tasty enough that the kids would eat it, that does not come close to justifying the infringement on parental rights and responsibilities that this mandate represents. It is appalling.

Every overstep of government power begins this way. "Her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices." Of course it is. It's trite and cliche to say that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions," but it's certainly true that the road to totalitarian government is. Every encroachment on freedom and liberty starts with someone wielding political power in pursuit of some greater good. And it may do some good for some population, but it almost invariably does some unintended harm to some other population at the same time. And, in the process, it enables the next bit of power transfer from individuals to government. It doesn't go all at once, just a little bit at a time, and the causes are always "good ones." It's "for the children" or "for women" or "for minorities" or "for the elderly." And they never even consider the possibility that they might be, you know, WRONG. "Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school," says the principal. Well, that's almost certainly true for some of the students, but it's equally almost certainly false for others. But it's obviously too expensive to treat everyone as an individual, so everyone gets the same. Better, worse, more appropriate, less appropriate, none of that matters - everyone gets the same.

FDR didn't set out to sell a program for transferring massive wealth from grandchildren to their grandparents, but that's what Social Security is. LBJ didn't (at least nominally) set out to destroy the black family, but that's been one of the significant end results of the "Great Society" programs which incentivize out-of-wedlock births and essentially punish marriage. Those programs were started with noble intentions ("taking care of the elderly" and "support for women with infant children") but the damage from the unintended consequences have dwarfed any good that they might have done.

And that's going to be the case in Chicago's school lunch mandate, too...


¹Hat tip to Tom Naughton for the link to the story...

²Everything that the Federal government knows about nutrition and promotes about nutrition is wrong. Everything that we've been told about how to eat is wrong. The food pyramid is upside down.

So, they've learned something from their teachers...

Now it's the Wisconsin high school students that are going to walk out...

In an effort to balance the importance of education with that of having our voices heard, we will walk out of class this Friday, March 11th before our last period of the day. We call for students all across the country to do the same and to take this opportunity to discuss not only the events in Wisconsin but the future of public education as a whole.

And how many of them will bring in phony doctor's notes on Monday?

'Defend the Humanities'--a Dishonest Slogan

This is an interesting article.

'Defend the Humanities'--a Dishonest Slogan

And so "Defend the Humanities" is a most attractive flag to sail under. The trouble is that for those who are now using it, it is a flag of convenience only, and a deeply dishonest one. For the conception of the humanities set out above is despised by those who now ask for our help in saving the departments they run. Long ago, they took aim at it, defeated it and abolished it, and that is precisely the source of their present troubles. The story of how they did it and why is well-known. A virulent strain of Marxist radicalism took refuge in college humanities programs just as it was being abandoned in the real world because of catastrophic results world-wide. This created a mismatch of temperaments: humanistic scholars are naturally animated by a profound respect for the legacy of our past, but all the instincts of political radicals go in the opposite direction. Their natural instinct is to denigrate the past in order to make the case for the sweeping social change that they want. That's why they don't look at the past and see accumulated knowledge and wisdom, but instead only a story of bigotry, inequality and racial and sexual prejudice that needs to be swept aside. Political radicals are interested in the utopian future and in their present- day attempts to achieve it, not the cultural past which must be overcome to get to where they want to be.

...

It is important to grasp the fact that the cry we are now hearing ("save the humanities") is not about saving the humanities. It is rather about saving the faculty, who long since destroyed them, from the devastating consequences of their own foolish actions. It asks for a bailout, so that those same people can continue enjoying the fiefdoms they created to replace what once were departments of the humanities. And to respond favorably to that appeal would be folly.

Click the link, read it all. There is a lot of good information in there, and it's absolutely right...

But don't you dare question his patriotism...

"Mexicans" Were Here "Long Before America Was Even An Idea"

"Long before America was even an idea, this land of plenty was home to many peoples. The British and French, the Dutch and Spanish, to Mexicans, to countless Indian tribes. We all shared the same land," President Obama told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Do you suppose that in 2012 we could elect a President who, you know, likes America? Or is that too extreme a concept?

Governor Christie Responds To Teacher During Town Hall

In New Jersey, of all places, there's a Governor doing his job the right way...

Scrap the department of education!

Mona Charen:

It is not kooky to favor the elimination of the Department of Education. That this proposal is routinely labeled "extremist" is a reminder of the one-way ratchet that operates in government. Enshrine something in a federal agency and it becomes sacrosanct. Democrats cheerlead for federal programs because they are the party of government, and Republicans quietly go along because they're afraid.

But if Republicans know how to argue for smaller government -- as Gov. Chris Christie is demonstrating in New Jersey -- they need not be intimidated. There are hundreds of federal programs that could be eliminated tomorrow with only the happiest consequences for the nation. And yes, the whole Department of Education could be scrapped. It vacuums up money and produces ... what exactly

I've long been in favor of abolishing the department of education, because I don't believe that there's any consititutional authority for the federal government to be involved in education, and I don't think they contribute anything beyond bureaucracy and regulation, neither of which provides much "education," at least not in the way we want to think about education. But I quoted this because I love the bolded part. It's a great statement of one of the big problems facing us as a nation right now.

Click over, read it all - it's an excellent piece.

Why we homeschool, parts ... well, I've lost count, but trust me, there are many reasons...

But a couple of stories from the past couple of days. First, we've got the American students at an American high school who were sent home from school for having the temerity to wear, on a Mexican drinking holiday, clothing displaying the American flag:

On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galli and his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag. But Cinco de Mayo is not any typical day especially on a campus with a large Mexican American student population.

Galli says he and his friends were sitting at a table during brunch break when the vice principal asked two of the boys to remove American flag bandannas that they wearing on their heads and for the others to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out. When they refused, the boys were ordered to go to the principal's office.

"They said we could wear it on any other day," Daniel Galli said, "but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it's supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it today."

The boys said the administrators called their T-shirts "incendiary" that would lead to fights on campus.

If t-shirts showing the American flag are "incendiary," if they could "lead to fights on campus," well, the school and the community have far greater issues to address than could possibly be addressed by having the kids wear the shirts inside-out.


And up in that bastion of liberal tolerance and open-mindedness, Ann Arbor, Michigan, there's a school principal who sees nothing wrong with choosing a subset of a class to receive a special educational experience based on nothing but race...

An Ann Arbor elementary school principal used a letter home to parents tonight to defend a field trip for black students as part of his school’s efforts to close the achievement gap between white and black students.

Dicken Elementary School Principal Mike Madison wrote the letter to parents following several days of controversy at the school after a field trip last week in which black students got to hear a rocket scientist.

...

“The intent of our field trip was not to segregate or exclude students as has been reported, but rather to address the societal issues, roadblocks and challenges that our African American children will face as they pursue a successful academic education here in our community.”

A handful of parents have complained to district administrators about the trip, the group and Madison. More than a half-dozen parents contacted AnnArbor.com to raise the complaints, but none would agree to talk on the record, citing concerns of reprisals to their children by Madison.

While there’s no clear agreement between the two sides about exactly what happened, most of the controversy centers on a field trip taken last week by the Lunch Bunch for African American boys and girls to hear a black rocket engineer talk.

District spokeswoman Liz Margolis said after the trip was over, those who went returned to their fifth-grade class and were greeted by boos by those who didn’t go on the trip. Margolis said Madison, who is black, heard the boos, and went to talk to the class. She said he and the class had a “discussion” about race issues.

“He wasn’t yelling at them. He was very passionate about it,” Margolis said.

Parents have complained he was yelling at the class and belittled a Muslim girl who said she also had experienced racism and discrimination.

Your tax dollars at work. I guess racism and discrimination are only bad when they come from white people...

Obama adminstrator manipulates system, favors political allies

Obama Education Secretary"manipulated system," "favored political allies":

Chicago Breaking News reported late last night that former Chicago schools chief and current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan manipulated a system to favor powerful political allies by placing their children in the schools of their choice. The discovery of a list, the existence of which had been long denied by the city, and its composition of mainly high-powered political figures calls into question the appeals system used to reconsider applications that had been denied by the top Chicago-area schools:

While many Chicago parents took formal routes to land their children in the best schools, the well-connected also sought help through a shadowy appeals system created in recent years under former schools chief Arne Duncan.

Whispers have long swirled that some children get spots in the city’s premier schools based on whom their parents know. But a list maintained over several years in Duncan’s office and obtained by the Tribune lends further evidence to those charges. Duncan is now secretary of education under President Barack Obama.

No need to worry though - there couldn't possibly be favoritism and manipulation of resources when the government runs health care...

They'd better be doing a GREAT job with the middle schoolers...

Like everyone else, North Carolina is worried about its children's education. But they're going to do something about it...

As the North Carolina curriculum stands now, ninth-grade students take world history, 10th-graders study civics and economics and 11th-graders take U.S. history going back to the country's founding.

Under the proposed change, the ninth-graders would take a course called global studies, focusing in part on issues such as the environment. The 10th grade still would study civics and economics, but 11th-graders would take U.S. history only from 1877 onward.

Really, why would anyone bother reading the Declaration of Independence after fifth grade? Or the Constitution? And surely they'll know everything they'll ever need to know about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and John Adams and The Civil War and the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark and Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolution before they get to high school. What could possibly go wrong?

And I bet that "global studies" course curriculum will be written by non-biased educators on both sides of the political spectrum, concerned only with teaching and having no interest in indoctrination.

Yeah. That'll work. They're going to create a generation of kids who lack the intellectual context for understanding Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure...


Remember the logic of failure?

1. Something needs to be done.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, this must be done.

How could this possibly go wrong?

Lying with facts - Taunton school edition

Here is a followup to Tuesday's story, about the boy from Taunton who drew the crucifix, that demonstrates how easy it is to lie without actually giving any false facts.

Although reporters regionally and nationally jumped on a story about a 9-year-old boy supposedly suspended for drawing a stick-figure Jesus on the cross, it now appears the tale was overblown.

Contrary to news reports -- including a story on ParentDish -- the boy was never suspended. He and his classmates at Maxham Elementary School in Taunton, Mass. (40 miles south of Boston), were never given an assignment to draw pictures that reminded them of Christmas.

Lie number 1: "The boy was never suspended." According to the boy's father, and, as far as I know, neither addressed nor contradicted by anyone in the school department, he was told that he could not return to school until he had gone through a psychological evaluation. Was he removed from class before the school day was over? Were his parents called to come get him? Were they told that they couldn't come back until he'd been evaluated?

After being removed from the school on Wednesday, he finished that evaluation on Monday, and returned to school either that afternoon or the following morning. Assuming that this is true, he may not have received a nominal suspension, but he certainly received a de facto suspension.


Lie number 2: "He and his classmates...were never given an assignment to draw pictures that reminded them of Christmas." According to the father, they were given the assignment, two days after their Thanksgiving break, of drawing something that reminded them of their Thanksgiving holiday, which had just finished. And the boy had visited the La Salette shrine with his family over the holiday weekend.


In other words, this news report attempts to debunk the story without actually contradicting anything the father said. Given how careful the Superintendent is being with the words she's using, I assume that the father is right. They aren't saying that the boy wasn't given an assignment to draw a picture about their holiday, only that he wasn't given an assignment to draw something about "Christmas or any religious holiday." They aren't saying that he wasn't banned from the school until after an evaluation, only that he wasn't "suspended." Those are weasel words. Rather than debunking the story, they tend to confirm it. I believed it the other day when I posted it - the officials in the Taunton school system have, thus far, strengthed my belief.