…the secular religionists are bad enough without bringing creationists into the fray.

Neela Banerjee in the LA Times

A flash point has emerged in American science education that echoes the battle over evolution, as scientists and educators report mounting resistance to the study of man-made climate change in middle and high schools.

Although scientific evidence increasingly shows that fossil fuel consumption has caused the climate to change rapidly, the issue has grown so politicized that skepticism of the broad scientific consensus has seeped into classrooms.

Actually, new science shows the theory to be weaker that advertised.

Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.

That sounds good — science should be vigorously debated, not marketed by the Global Warming Industrial Complex composed of legitimate scientists, hack scientists, hack politicians, watermelons (green on outside, red inside), rent-seeking crony capitalists and vacuous media twits.

Alas, the impetus for opwn debate is being pushed by those who insist on teaching creationism. This will stain those who believe AGW science is far from settled.

AGW should not be engulfed in the culture war. The arguments should be science, pure science.

Against this backdrop, the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland-based watchdog group that supports the teaching of evolution through advocacy and educational materials, plans to announce on Monday that it will begin an initiative to monitor the teaching of climate science and evaluate the sources of resistance to it.

NCSE, a small, nonpartisan group of scientists, teachers, clergy and concerned individuals, rose to prominence in the last decade defending evolution in the curriculum.

The controversy around “climate change education is where evolution was 20 years ago,” said Eugenie Scott, executive director of NCSE.

At that time, evolution — the long-tested scientific theory that varieties of life forms emerged through biological processes like natural selection and mutation — was patchily taught. Teaching standards have been developed since then, but it’s unclear how widely evolution is taught, given teachers’ fear of controversy.

Long-tested? Evolution makes sense to me (and I don’t think conflicts with religious teaching) but how does anyone test the theory? That’s nonsense.

Studies show that teachers often set aside evolution for fear of a backlash. Scott worries this could happen with climate science too.

“The question is self-censorship and intimidation. What you have to watch for is the ‘hecklers’ veto,’ ” she said. “If a teacher ignores a particular topic, it will likely go unnoticed.”

Please. Al Gore compares those who disagree with his goofy science to Holocaust deniers. That’s quite a heckler’s veto, no?

If you wonder why college costs are skyrocketing, take a look at this:

The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation’s universities. In the past decade, universities have added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers–ostensibly because of budget cuts.

In a further irony, many of the newly minted–and non-academic–administrators are career managers who downplay the importance of teaching and research, as evidenced by their tireless advocacy for a banal “life skills” curriculum. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience–one defined by intellectual rigor.

Ginsberg also reveals how the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists, which were traditionally championed by faculty members, have, in the hands of administrators, been reduced to chess pieces in a game of power politics. By embracing initiatives such as affirmative action, the administration gained favor with these groups and legitimized a thinly cloaked gambit to bolster their power over the faculty.

WSJ

DENVER—Ferrie Bailey’s job should be easy: hiring workers amid the worst stretch of unemployment since the Depression.

A recruiter for Union Pacific Corp., she has openings to fill, the kind that sometimes seem to have all but vanished: secure, well-paying jobs with good benefits that don’t require a college degree.

But they require specialized skills—expertise in short supply even with the unemployment rate at 9%. Which is why on a recent morning the recruiter found herself in a hiring hall here anxiously awaiting the arrival of just two people she had invited to interviews, winnowed from an initial group of nearly five dozen applicants. With minutes to go, the folding chairs sat empty. “I don’t think they’re going to show,” Ms. Bailey said, pacing in the basement room.

Her challenge is a familiar one to recruiters, especially in industries that require workers with trade skills such as welding. Union Pacific struggles to find enough electricians who have worked with diesel engines. Manufacturers in many places can’t find enough machinists. Oil companies must fight for a limited supply of drilling-rig workers.

“There’s a tremendous shortage of skilled workers,” said Craig Giffi, a vice chairman of the consulting firm Deloitte. A recent survey it did found that 83% of manufacturers reported a moderate or severe shortage of skilled production workers to hire.

Victor Davis Hanson:

It’s More than Just PC

The traditionalist critique of the university — I made it myself over thirteen years ago in the co-authored Who Killed Homer? — was that somewhere around the time of the Vietnam War, higher education changed radically for the worse. Note I am talking mostly about the liberal arts. America remains preeminent in math, physics, hard sciences, medicine, and engineering, subjects that are largely immune to politicization and race, class, and gender relativism. The top students, and often the more hard-working, gravitate to these fields; indeed, in my general education courses on the ancient world, I often noticed that math and science students did far better than did their sociology or anthropology counterparts.

Such excellence in math and science explains why the world’s top-rated universities in all the most recent rankings are overwhelmingly American. (Indeed, liberal arts professors piggyback on such findings and often, in a sense quite fraudulently, point to these polls as if to confirm their own superiority.)

I spent a great deal of my life in the university as a student and professor and now as a researcher. Higher learning in the arts and humanities has enriched American life for 200 years. Small liberal arts colleges like Hillsdale, St. John’s, St. Thomas Aquinas, and dozens of others continue to be models of enlightened learning. But all that said, increasingly public universities and the larger private institutions have become morally and fiscally bankrupt. Here are some reasons why.

Monotony of Thought

By 2011 we all know that faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. That in and of itself would not be so alarming if they were not activist as well. By that I mean academics are not just interested in identifying supposed past American sins, but also in turning disinterested instruction into political advocacy, especially along race, class, and gender lines. Rosie the Riveter, the Japanese internment, and Hiroshima all deserve study, but they are not the sum total of World War II. Today’s average undergraduate may know that African-Americans were not integrated into American units during World War II, but they have no clue what the Battle of the Bulge, a B-29, or Iwo Jima were. They may insist that global warming is real and man-caused, but would have trouble explaining what exactly carbon is.

The effect of politicized learning on the quality of education was unfortunate in a strange sort of cyclical fashion. The more “–studies” classes saturated the curriculum, the less time there was for classical approaches to literature, philosophy, language, or history. The more the profile of the student body became more important than its preparation, the more these classes had to be watered down, as if thinking the right thoughts could justify the absence of the old rigor.

Deans begin quoting the ethnic profiles of the incoming classes, the supposed expanded diversity of the faculty, their own commitment to various progressive causes, and kept absolutely mum about the average GPAs and SAT scores of the new student body or the content of the new curriculum. And why not? No provost was ever fired for having fewer students graduate with less skills; many were for not “reaching out” to “underrepresented” groups.

A Blank Check

We know all the other pathologies of the modern university. Tenure metamorphosized from the protection of unpopular expression in the (more…)

When I attended the University of Maryland, Penn State’s football team beat us every year. Joe Paterno was coaching Penn State back then, and I’m 62 years old.

That’s quite a career, but it doesn’t excuse his handling of a sexual predator on his coaching staff, who was seen anally raping a 10 year old boy in the team’s locker room shower.

Somehow the enormity of Paterno’s failure to act decisively was lost on some Penn State students.

Happy Valley was in bedlam early today as angry, chanting students ran amok in a bizarre climax to an unforgettable day that ended with the unthinkable: the firing of football legend Joe Paterno.

Chanting “Joe Pa-ter-no!” and “One More Game!” students raced to the stately Old Main administration building to express their anger that the winningest coach in major-college football history was out – fallout from the child-sex scandal involving his former top assistant, Jerry Sandusky.

More than 1,000 students rioted and rallied at Old Main and on frat-house-lined Beaver Avenue. Riot cops, fire trucks and ambulances were on hand after midnight, amid reports that tear gas was being used to disperse the crowd.

Demonstrators overturned a TV news van, toppled street lights, shook stop signs and threw toilet paper. From rooftops and in the streets, they yelled “F— Sandusky!” and “We Want JoePa!”

The campus chaos began shortly after 10 p.m. with the announcement by the board of trustees that Paterno, 84, who had said earlier in the day that he would retire at the end of the season, was instead fired over the phone and denied a chance to end his career on the playing field.

Andy Kessler ventured out to the OccupySF gathering and reported this nugget:

I spoke to a young woman who had clearly bathed more recently than most. I asked her why she was at OccupySF. She told me she’d done all the right things. Studied hard. Graduated college. (She was an art major.) And now she can’t get a job. It didn’t matter. It’s all messed up. She was lied to.

Of course she was. She’s a member of the Trophy Generation. Win or lose, you get a trophy. We embraced mediocrity to an entire generation of kids during good times who are now finding themselves mediocre in bad times. There still is that American dream: Go to college, get a job, buy a Prius. But like it or not, studying art or humanities or gender studies won’t get you there. Marissa Mayer at Google complains she can’t find enough computer-science majors. Civil engineers are getting hired sight unseen.

The self esteem movement that began in California muddled plenty of middling minds, especially among educrats.

I gritted my teeth through three middle school graduation ceremonies — they were actually called that — as my children advanced.

Apparently, the educrats forgot that having “an eighth grade education” used to mean you were uneducated.

This recalls a conversation from The Incredibles:

Helen: I can’t believe you don’t want to go to your own son’s graduation.

Bob: It’s not a graduation. He is moving from the 4th grade to the 5th grade.

Helen: It’s a ceremony!

Bob: It’s psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional…

Indeed, if someone is truly exceptional and becomes wildly successful, employs thousands of people, generates wealth for many and more for himself, he’s not to be celebrated by scorned for his corporate greed.

Somehow, the coming theocracy failed to halt this.

At Wonderland Avenue Elementary School in Laurel Canyon, there are lesson plans on diverse families — including those with two mommies or daddies — books on homosexual authors in the library and a principal who is openly gay.

But even at this school, teachers and administrators are flummoxed about how to carry out a new law requiring California public schools to teach all students — from kindergartners to 12th graders — about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans in history classes.

“At this point, I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Principal Don Wilson said.

Atul Gawande writes in the New Yorker about the role of coaches. Elite athletes rely on them to keep them at their best. Why shouldn’t surgeons? Or teachers?

It’s a good read.

I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.

During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. It’s not about hand-eye coördination—you have that down halfway through your residency. As one of my professors once explained, doing surgery is no more physically difficult than writing in cursive. Surgical mastery is about familiarity and judgment. You learn the problems that can occur during a particular procedure or with a particular condition, and you learn how to either prevent or respond to those problems.

Say you’ve got a patient who needs surgery for appendicitis. These days, surgeons will typically do a laparoscopic appendectomy. You slide a small camera—a laparoscope—into the abdomen through a quarter-inch incision near the belly button, insert a long grasper through an incision beneath the waistline, and push a device for stapling and cutting through an incision in the left lower abdomen. Use the grasper to pick up the finger-size appendix, fire the stapler across its base and across the vessels feeding it, drop the severed organ into a plastic bag, and pull it out. Close up, and you’re done. That’s how you like it to go, anyway. But often it doesn’t.

Even before you start, you need to make some judgments. Unusual anatomy, severe obesity, or internal scars from previous abdominal surgery could make it difficult to get the camera in safely; you don’t want to poke it into a loop of intestine. You have to decide which camera-insertion method to use—there’s a range of options—or whether to abandon the high-tech approach and do the operation the traditional way, with a wide-open incision that lets you see everything directly. If you do get your camera and instruments inside, you may have trouble grasping the appendix. Infection turns it into a fat, bloody, inflamed worm that sticks to everything around it—bowel, blood vessels, an ovary, the pelvic sidewall—and to free it you have to choose from a variety of tools and techniques. You can use a long cotton-tipped instrument to try to push the surrounding attachments away. You can use electrocautery, a hook, a pair of scissors, a sharp-tip dissector, a blunt-tip dissector, a right-angle dissector, or a suction device. You can adjust the operating table so that the patient’s head is down and his feet are up, allowing gravity to pull the viscera in the right direction. Or you can just grab whatever part of the appendix is visible and pull really hard.

Once you have the little organ in view, you may find that appendicitis was the wrong diagnosis. It might be a tumor of the appendix, Crohn’s disease, or an ovarian condition that happened to have inflamed the nearby appendix. Then you’d have to decide whether you need additional equipment or personnel—maybe it’s time to enlist another surgeon…

Modern living.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to sweeping revisions in the way it teaches students learning English, as well as black youngsters, settling a federal civil rights investigation that examined whether the district was denying the students a quality education.

…The Education Department launched the probe last year, at first to determine if students who entered school speaking limited English, most of whom are Latino, were receiving adequate instruction. The nation’s second-largest school system has more students learning English, about 195,000, than any other in the United States — about 29% of the district’s overall enrollment.

Let’s break this down:

• The federal government has a constitutional duty to protect our sovereign borders, but does not.
• Millions of Spanish speaking people walk across the border and burden our schools with kids who can’t speak the language.
• The federal government, who really has no business nosing around local schools, butts in with demands.

With a child at UCLA, where the costs have jumped 47% in 18 months, I am comforted to know the folks in charge are working hard to keep college affordable.

UCLA is reportedly considering allowing male and female students to room together.

Suzanne Seplow of UCLA’s office of Residential Life tells CBS News that the possible change comes on the heels of universities finding ways to accommodate transgendered students. Many have decided to allow students born as males, for instance, but living as females to room with other female students.

As that becomes more common, some colleges have considered doing away with the often-employed rule against opposite-sex roomies.

“UCLA is just following suit of this national trend,” said Seplow.

Seriously, how many transgender people are there?

…that parents are forced to take such drastic action for the sake of their children. Shame on the NEA and their captive politicians for the condition of public education.

Obama exhorted his Congressional Black Caucus members to put on their marching shoes. This is the same Obama that killed a popular voucher program in Washington DC that benefit black kids.

Michael Flattery

In case you needed further proof of the American education system’s failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That’s the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio’s Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.

An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher’s license she had been working on.

Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher’s license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.

These arrests represent two major forms of exasperation. First is that of parents whose children are zoned into failing public schools—they can’t afford private schooling, they can’t access school vouchers, and they haven’t won or haven’t even been able to enter a lottery for a better charter school. Then there’s the exasperation of school officials finding it more and more difficult to deal with these boundary-hopping parents.

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they “belong” at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep “illegal students” from entering their gates…

A UC Berkeley student group is stirring support and outrage nationwide over its planned bake sale Tuesday that is pricing items according to a buyer’s race, ethnicity and gender.

The satirical event — titled the Increase Diversity Bake Sale — is a reprise of similar cookie sales held on college campuses by Republican clubs over the years. It was scheduled to counter another student-led effort urging Gov. Jerry Brown to sign a bill to allow California’s public universities to consider race, ethnicity and gender in student admissions as long as no preference is given.

Leaders with the Berkeley College Republicans said their intent was to highlight the impropriety of basing decisions on race or gender. The sale, according to a posting on Facebook, will offer five pricing levels, with pastries described as “White/Caucasian” going for $2, “Asian/American American” for $1.50, “Latino/Hispanic” for $1, “Black/African American” for 75 cents, and “Native American” for a quarter. A 25-cent discount will be offered to women.

Ridicule social engineering? How gauche. How retro. How “racist.”

At the heart of the controversy is SB 185, which the student Senate unanimously endorsed earlier this month. Authored by state Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina), the bill would allow the UC and Cal State systems to consider — but not give preference to — applicants’ race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, geographic origin and household income — along with other relevant factors.

“Consider but not give preference to”? Wink wink.

California voters in 1996 approved Proposition 209, which forbids using ethnicity as an element of college admissions decisions. In a legal brief filed recently in support of a federal lawsuit seeking to deem the initiative unconstitutional, Brown cited a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found race could be considered in admissions if it did not involve quotas or predetermined weight in decisions.

The Supreme Court ruled on a Constitutional matter. California has its own specific law banning the practice.

Associated Students President Vishalli Loomba said that while debate over the merits of the legislation was welcome, “I think their tactics are inappropriate. There are a lot of other methods. This method makes students feel uncomfortable and unwelcome on campus.”

Oh, boo hoo. Unwelcome? That’s how campus conservatives feel.

As is common these days, it’s the “progressives” carrying the pitchforks and the censor’s pens.

A professor has been censored twice, reported to the “threat assessment team,” and threatened with criminal charges because of satirical postings on his office door.

Campus police at the University of Wisconsin–Stout (UWS) censored theater professor James Miller’s poster depicting a quotation from actor Nathan Fillion’s character in the television series Firefly, and the police chief threatened Miller with criminal charges for disorderly conduct. After UWS censored his second poster, which stated, “Warning: Fascism,” Miller came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

“Colleges and universities are supposed to foster brave and bold environments of freewheeling intellectual inquiry and expression. If a quote from a network science fiction show is a bridge too far, something has gone seriously wrong,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “As both president of FIRE and a huge Firefly fan, I call on the chancellor of UW–Stout to rein in his overreaching administration and to restore both free speech and basic common sense.”

On September 12, 2011, Professor Miller posted on his office door an image of Nathan Fillion in Firefly and a line from an episode: “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.” On September 16, UWS Chief of Police Lisa A. Walter emailed Miller, notifying him that she had removed the poster and that “it is unacceptable to have postings such as this that refer to killing.”

Lord knows what havoc a poster might unleash.

But then Shakespeare’s play are replete with killing, so they’d better ban him too.

Read the whole article — it gets even more absurd.

Scores on the critical reading portion of the SAT college entrance exam fell three points to their lowest level on record last year, and combined reading and math scores reached their lowest point since 1995.

The College Board, which released the scores Wednesday, said the results reflect the record number of students from the high school class of 2011 who took the exam and the growing diversity of the test-taking pool – particularly Hispanics. As more students aim for college and take the exam, it tends to drag down average scores.

Still, while the three-point decline to 497 may look small in the context of an 800-point test, it was only the second time in the last two decades reading scores have fallen as much in a single year. And reading scores are now notably lower than scores as recently as 2005, when the average was 508.

Average math scores for the class of 2011 fell one point to 514 and scores on the critical reading section fell two points to 489.

Christian Schneider at The Corner

Wisconsin Teachers Head for the Exits

Pity Ginny Fleck. She is a 69-year-old German teacher in the Green Bay Public School District who has decided to retire as a result of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s requirement that teachers now pay in to their pension accounts.

According to the state Department of Public Instruction, Fleck’s total compensation package was $88,292 last year ($58,750 in salary, the rest in benefits.) She estimates Walker’s reforms will cost her $8,000 this year — so her compensation package would only be around $80,000 — an apparent slap in the face for a teacher nearing 70 years old. According to this Associated Press article, Fleck has decided a salary of zero would be preferable to taking eighty grand of Walker’s blood money.

In retiring, Fleck has joined with nearly 5,000 other public-school employees in hanging it up this year. That is nearly twice the number of retirements Wisconsin school districts traditionally see in any given school year — 2,527 called it quits in 2010. That’s 5,000 teachers who have decided, in the words of a famous Pearl Jam song, that they would rather starve than eat Scott Walker’s bread.

Predictably, some school-district superintendents are hyperventilating about the mass exodus, complaining about all the classroom experience they’re losing. Yet in most cases, they are able to fill those positions specifically because of Walker’s reforms. The increased pension and health contributions now required of teachers will help fund the new positions — so while Walker’s plan might be driving teachers out, it is also attracting fresh young teachers into the public education system.

Furthermore, many older teachers may simply see the writing on the wall. Teachers’ unions inordinately represent older (more…)

College will not only cost parents a fortune, it will expose their sons and daughters to twits who honor mass murderers.

Mark Seelinger at The College Fix:

It’s not often that I have the opportunity to comment on the goings-on of NC State, UNC’s friendly, down-the-road school of engineering and pig farming. But it seems that the Mao Infatuation Virus has spread to Raleigh. In an email sent to students in NC State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS), Dean of the College Jeffrey P. Braden writes,

“Finally, a bit of advice. The friends you make in college will be your friends for life, and will influence what you do and how you think throughout your life time-so choose wisely. Some of the best friends I made as a student were Plato, Henry David Thoreau, Mao Tse-tung, Margaret Mead, and Maya Angelou. My colleagues are eager to make similar introductions for you!”

Let’s just briefly recount some of the Great Mao Zedong’s accomplishments:

1. Caused approximately 40 million people to starve to death during the Great Leap Forward

2. Instigated a reign of terror and chaos in the course of the Cultural Revolution

3. Killed millions more during his purges of the 1950′s

And let’s not forget his warm and friendly relationship with that other great thinker of the twentieth century, Joesph Stalin.

Colleges have no incentive to be efficient: if they jack up costs, the government kicks in more money. IBD:

College students and their families have struggled to pay for the rising cost of tuition, a cost that has been driven in part by swelling administrative expenses.

Over a 20-year period, the growth in administrative personnel at institutions of higher education has outpaced the growth in both faculty and student enrollment.

Critics refer to this as administrative bloat and contend it shows that universities and colleges are inefficient institutions.

Defenders say colleges are adding administrative staff to meet student needs.

An IBD analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that from 1989-2009 the number of administrative personnel at four- and two-year institutions grew 84%, from about 543,000 to over 1 million.

By contrast, the number of faculty increased 75%, from 824,000 to 1.4 million, while student enrollment grew 51%, from 13.5 million to 20.4 million.

The disparity was worse at public universities and colleges, where personnel in administration rose 71%, faculty 58% and student enrollment 40%. Private schools also saw administration and faculty growing faster than student enrollment, although faculties slightly outpaced administration increases…

John McCormack in the Weekly Standard:

Emily Koczela had been anxiously waiting for months for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s controversial budget repair bill to take effect. Koczela, the finance director for the Brown Deer school district, had been negotiating with the local union, trying to get it to accept concessions in order to make up for a $1 million budget shortfall. But the union wouldn’t budge.

“We laid off 27 [teachers] as a precautionary measure,” Koczela told me. “They were crying. Some of these people are my friends.”

On June 29 at 12:01 a.m., Koczela could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The budget repair bill​—​delayed for months by protests, runaway state senators, and a legal challenge that made its way to the state’s supreme court​—​was law. The 27 teachers on the chopping block were spared.

With “collective bargaining rights” limited to wages, Koczela was able to change the teachers’ benefits package to fill the budget gap. Requiring teachers to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary toward pensions saved $600,000. Changes to their health care plan​—​such as a $10 office visit co-pay (up from nothing)​—​saved $200,000. Upping the workload from five classes, a study hall, and two prep periods to six classes and two prep periods saved another $200,000. The budget was balanced.

“Everything we changed didn’t touch the children,” Koczela said. Under a collective bargaining agreement, she continued, “We could never have negotiated that​—​never ever.” Koczela, a graduate of Smith College and Duke University Law School, is no Republican flack. She says she’s a “classic Wisconsin independent. I vote both parties. I voted for Senator [Russ] Feingold but I voted for [Republican state] Senator Alberta Darling too.”

John Tierney in the NYT on why academia is ruled by liberals.

Why are conservatives such a minority at so many graduate schools? Conservatives like to blame liberal bias. Liberals like other explanations.

One — the most tactful hypothesis — is that conservatives just aren’t interested in academic careers. Another — the most smug hypothesis — is that conservatives are just too close-minded and dimwitted.

Now, fortunately, we have something beyond hypotheses, courtesy of scholars who have been taking a close look at their colleagues. Some even conducted a small sting operation that they believe is the first field experiment on political bias in academia. The perpetrators include Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, whose previous work showed that Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 4 to 1 among professors, by at least 6 to 1 at elite universities, and by still higher ratios in departments of the humanities and social sciences.

For this field experiment, Dr. Gross, himself a Democrat, and his co-authors posed as undergraduates checking out grad schools. They sent e-mails to the directors of graduate studies at the top 75 departments (as ranked by U.S. News & World Report) of sociology, political science, economics, history and literature. Each director received an e-mail from a fictitious male student describing his interests and credentials, and asking whether the department would be a good fit for him. In some letters, the student mentioned having worked on the Obama presidential campaign; other letters mentioned work on the McCain campaign.

Either way, the students got a prompt response, and there was no statistically significant difference in the level of enthusiasm, leading the researchers to conclude: “It is unlikely that discrimination is a major causal factor accounting for professorial liberalism.”

Keep reading until the end.

The WSJ Weekend Interview of Bill Gates tops three posts on education reform. Gates heads the largest philanthropy in the US, with assets larger than the Ford Foundation, Getty and Robert Wood Johnson combined.

One initiative was to fund a group of small schools.

“But the overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about—whether you go to college—it didn’t move the needle much,” he says. “Maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn’t dramatic. . . . We didn’t see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that.” Still, he adds, “we think small schools were a better deal for the kids who went to them.”

Now, he’s focused on research into learning what makes a good teacher good.

Instead of trying to buy systemic reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent.

“I bring a bias to this,” says Mr. Gates. “I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.” Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. “That’s partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don’t think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research.”

One wonders, we have the Department of Education and thousands of colleges teaching educators.

Has any of them done this kind of fundamental research? One would think not, otherwise Gates wouldn’t be doing it.

Teachers have long been shown to influence students’ education more than any other school factor, including class size and per-pupil spending. So the objective is to determine scientifically what a good instructor does.”We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year,” he says. “Well, I’m enough of a scientist to want to say, ‘What is it about a great teacher? Is it their ability to calm down the classroom or to make the subject interesting? Do they give good problems and understand confusion? Are they good with kids who are behind? Are they good with kids who are ahead?’

“I watched the movies. I saw ‘To Sir, With Love,’” he chuckles, recounting the 1967 classic in which Sidney Poitier plays an idealistic teacher who wins over students at a roughhouse London school. “But they didn’t really explain what he was doing right. I can’t create a personnel system where I say, ‘Go watch this movie and be like him.’”

Instead, the Gates Foundation’s five-year, $335-million project examines whether aspects of effective teaching—classroom management, clear objectives, diagnosing and correcting common student errors—can be systematically measured. The effort involves collecting and studying videos of more than 13,000 lessons taught by 3,000 elementary school teachers in seven urban school districts.

Clive Thompson writes in Wired about the Khan Academy’s revolutionary approach to education.

“This,” says Matthew Carpenter, “is my favorite exercise.” I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It’s an inverse trigonometric function: cos^-1(1) = ?

Carpenter, a serious-faced 10-year-old wearing a gray T-shirt and an impressive black digital watch, pauses for a second, fidgets, then clicks on “0 degrees.” Presto: The computer tells him that he’s correct. The software then generates another problem, followed by another, and yet another, until he’s nailed 10 in a row in just a few minutes. All told, he’s done an insane 642 inverse trig problems. “It took a while for me to get it,” he admits sheepishly.

Carpenter, who attends Santa Rita Elementary, a public school in Los Altos, California, shouldn’t be doing work anywhere near this advanced. In fact, when I visited his class this spring—in a sun-drenched room festooned with a papercraft X-wing fighter and student paintings of trees—the kids were supposed to be learning basic fractions, decimals, and percentages. As his teacher, Kami Thordarson, explains, students don’t normally tackle inverse trig until high school, and sometimes not even then.

But last November, Thordarson began using Khan Academy in her class. Khan Academy is an educational website that, as its tagline puts it, aims to let anyone “learn almost anything—for free.” Students, or anyone interested enough to surf by, can watch some 2,400 videos in which the site’s founder, Salman Khan, chattily discusses principles of math, science, and economics (with a smattering of social science topics thrown in). The videos are decidedly lo-fi, even crude: Generally seven to 14 minutes long, they consist of a voice-over by Khan describing a mathematical concept or explaining how to solve a problem while his hand-scribbled formulas and diagrams appear onscreen. Like the Wizard of Oz, Khan never steps from behind the curtain to appear in a video himself; it’s just Khan’s voice and some scrawly equations. In addition to these videos, the website offers software that generates practice problems and rewards good performance with videogame-like badges—for answering a “streak” of questions correctly, say, or mastering a series of algebra levels. (Carpenter has acquired 52 Earth badges in math, which require hours of toil to attain and at which his classmates gaze with envy and awe.)…

Heather MacDonald:

California’s budget crisis has reduced the University of California to near-penury, claim its spokesmen. “Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,” the university system’s vice president for budget and capital resources warned earlier this month, in advance of this week’s meeting of the university’s regents. Well, not exactly to the bone. Even as UC campuses jettison entire degree programs and lose faculty to competing universities, one fiefdom has remained virtually sacrosanct: the diversity machine.

Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.

It’s not surprising that the new vice chancellor’s mission is rather opaque, given its superfluity. According to outgoing UCSD chancellor Marye Anne Fox, the new VC for EDI “will be responsible for building on existing diversity plans to develop and implement a campus-wide strategy on equity, diversity and inclusion.” UCSD has been churning out such diversity strategies for years. The “campus-wide strategy on equity, diversity and inclusion” that the new hire will supposedly produce differs from its predecessors only in being self-referential: it will define the very scope of the VC’s duties and the number of underlings he will command. “The strategic plan,” says Fox, “will inform the final organizational structure for the office of the VC EDI, will propose metrics to gauge progress, and will identify potential additional areas of responsibility.”

What a boon for a taxpayer-funded bureaucrat, to be able to define his own portfolio and determine how many staff lines he will control! UC Berkeley’s own vice chancellor for equity and inclusion shows how voracious a diversity apparatchik’s appetite for power can be. Gibor Basri has 17 people working for him in his immediate office, including a “chief of staff,” two “project/policy analysts,” and a “director of special projects.” The funding propping up Basri’s vast office could support many an English or history professor. According to state databases, Basri’s base pay in 2009 was $194,000, which does not include a variety of possible add-ons, including summer salary and administrative stipends. By comparison, the official salary for assistant professors at UC starts at around $53,000. Add to Basri’s salary those of his minions, and you’re looking at more than $1 million a year.

UC San Diego is adding diversity fat even as it snuffs out substantive academic programs. In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master’s program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature. At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. The cultivation of “a student’s understanding of her or his identity,” as the diversity requirement proposal put it, would focus on “African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or other groups” through the “framework” of “race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age.” Training computer scientists to compete with the growing technical prowess of China and India, apparently, can wait. More pressing is guaranteeing that students graduate from UCSD having fully explored their “identity.” Why study Cervantes, Voltaire, or Goethe when you can contemplate yourself? “Diversity,” it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism…

John Stossel

What do Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Mark Cuban have in common?

They’re all college dropouts.

Richard Branson, Simon Cowell and Peter Jennings have in common?

They never went to college at all.

But today all kids are told: To succeed, you must go to college.

Hillary Clinton tells students: “Graduates from four-year colleges earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates, an estimated $1 million more.”

We hear that from people who run colleges. And it’s true. But it leaves out some important facts

That’s why I say: For many people, college is a scam.

I spoke with Richard Vedder, author of “Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much,” and Naomi Schafer Riley, who just published “Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For.”

Vedder explained why that million-dollar comparison is ridiculous:

“People that go to college are different kind of people … (more) disciplined … smarter. They did better in high school.”

They would have made more money even if they never went to college.

Riley says some college students don’t get what they pay for because their professors have little incentive to teach.

“You think you’re paying for them to be in the classroom with you, but every hour a professor spends in the classroom, he gets paid less. The incentives are all for more research.”

The research is often on obscure topics for journals nobody reads.

Also, lots of people not suited for higher education get pushed into it. This doesn’t do them good. They feel like failures when they don’t graduate. Vedder said two out of five students entering four-year programs don’t have a bachelor’s degree after year six.

“Why do colleges accept (these students) in the first place?”

Because money comes with the student — usually government-guaranteed loans.

“There are 80,000 bartenders in the United States with bachelor’s degrees,” Vedder said. He says that 17 percent of baggage porters and bellhops have a college degree, 15 percent of taxi and limo drivers. It’s hard to pay off student loans with jobs like those. These days, many students graduate with big debts.

Good news for Wisconsin schools.

“This is a disaster,” said Mark Miller, the Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader, in February after Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed a budget bill that would curtail the collective bargaining powers of some public employees. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law — a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials, and protesters in the streets.

Now the bill is law, and we have some very early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it’s a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous…

Very.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has enacted a new policy saying that homework can count for only 10% of a student’s grade.

The policy is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district’s mostly low-income, minority population. It’s also aimed at supporting L.A. Unified’s increasing focus on boosting measureable academic achievement.

According to the new policy, “Varying degrees of access to academic support at home, for whatever reason, should not penalize a student so severely that it prevents the student from passing a class, nor should it inflate the grade.” It was distributed to schools last month.

Does this mean that English students must now write their essays in class? Or will they just do away with writing projects?

Critics — mostly teachers — worry that the policy will encourage students to slack off assigned work and even reward those who already disregard assignments. And they say it could penalize hardworking students who receive higher marks for effort.

Q. How did such idiots come to be in charge?

A. California is a one-party state.

We take you now to San Francisco where the liberal fascists want to ban pets.

The first vision was simple and straightforward: To curtail puppy mills and kitten factories, the sale of cats and dogs should be banned in San Francisco, where the loving guardians of animal companions come to regular blows — politically — with the loving parents of children.

The ban was put on hold last year after animal advocates broadened it to include anything with fur or feathers. Now it’s back, with a new name and a new strategy: More is more. The Humane Pet Acquisition Proposal is on its way to the Board of Supervisors, and it hopes to protect everything from Great Danes to goldfish.

Yes, goldfish. And guppies, gobies, gouramies, glowlight tetras, German blue rams. No fish, no fowl, no reptiles, no amphibians, no cats, no dogs, no gerbils, no rats. If it flies, crawls, runs, swims or slithers, you would not be able to buy it in the city named for the patron saint of animals.

Walter Russell Mead:

When it come to excellence in education, red states rule — at least according to a panel of experts assembled by Tina Brown’s Newsweek.  Using a set of indicators ranging from graduation rate to college admissions and SAT scores, the panel reviewed data from high schools all over the country to find the best public schools in the country.

The results make depressing reading for the teacher unions: the very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in red states.

Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas — the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst.  Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools.

Newsweek isn’t alone with these shocking results.  Another top public school list, compiled by the Washington Post, was issued in May.  Texas and Florida rank number one and number two on that list’s top ten as well.

There’s something else interesting about the two lists: on both lists only one of the top ten public schools was located in a blue state.  (Definition alert: on this blog, a blue state is one that voted for John Kerry in 2004; red states cast their electoral votes for Bush.)

There were no top ten schools on either list from blue New England states like Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut.  Nor were there any in the top 25.  By contrast, Alabama made both the Newsweek and the Washington Post top ten.  Only two public schools from these states made the Washpost top fifty list; zero made it into Newsweek‘s elite.  150 years after the Civil War, South Carolina is kicking New England’s rear end when it comes to producing great public schools…

Iowahawk did a withering comparison between Texas and Wisconsin schools last March.

Marcus Winters in City Journal:

Last fall, I took my wife—a well-informed, intelligent professional who unintentionally married into the contentious world of education reform—to see Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about the plight of America’s public schools, Waiting for Superman. She left the theater convinced that our schools face clear problems that have some clear solutions. But she was puzzled about why reforming the system was so difficult. She knew that the teachers’ unions had something to do with what was wrong with the schools, but just how they wielded so much power baffled her. How is it that the unions manage to protect preposterous arrangements like lifetime job security and seniority-based layoffs while forcing students to attend schools that everyone knows are failing? I’d guess that many people emerge from Guggenheim’s film asking similar questions.

In his new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe provides the answers. Moe traces the sources of the unions’ power and explains why they behave as they do. In the process, he blows apart several pervasive myths that have been used for far too long to let teachers and their unions off the hook. The book is a must-read for anyone frustrated by the slow progress toward improving America’s public schools. Readers familiar with the education reform debate will not be surprised by the list of clearly harmful policies that the unions support and commonsense reforms that they work so hard to impede. But those new to the topic will be shocked at the lengths to which the unions will go to defend an indefensible system.

What separates Special Interest from other books is its sharp dissection of the union party line. Moe brings to the subject his skills as one of the nation’s leading political scientists (he’s better known in the academy for his work on the American presidency). What’s shocking and, frankly, embarrassing for those of us who write about schools, is that this is the first serious study of the most powerful force in education policy.

Education policy isn’t made in a vacuum. It is negotiated in the political system, where the unions enjoy several advantages and dominate the debate. The most important source of union influence is financial and human resources. Taken together, over the last two decades, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have been by far the nation’s leading political donors in federal elections, contributing about 30 percent more money than the second highest contributor, AT&T. Teachers’ unions are either the Number One or Number Two political contributor in 60 percent of U.S. states. The unions further shape the political process by providing countless volunteers to operate phone banks and knock on doors. Using these resources, they have essentially taken over the Democratic Party, which receives 99 percent of their political contributions…

You might call it chasing the short bus.

A SoCal attorney has been running an aggressive ad campaign on AM radio for her services. Her niche is representing parents of special education students.

I am very close to a special ed teacher. It’s not an easy job working with kids who have drawn the short straw in life. Each has unique learning potentials and needs. You might say that each is a custom job.

But that job became more difficult, and contentious,  once Congress butted in with the Individual with Disabilities Education Act.

It imposed hundreds of requirements relating to special education programs, including identification, assessment, and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).

The IEP entails creating a custom learning program with identifiable goals for each child in concert with the parents.

Some parents have unrealistic expectations. As a parent of normal children, I can only imagine the pain these parents must experience as they try to prepare their kids for life.

But that doesn’t change the facts.

My special ed teacher had one couple who couldn’t accept their child’s limitations. The IEP meeting consumed seven hours as they went over item after item. Preparing for the seven hour meeting required an equal amount of time.

IEPs are conducted with the parents, teacher, department heads and others. It adds up to a lot of staff time. Just imagine what bringing a lawyer into the equation can do. (If nothing else, it squelches any chance of people speaking freely.)

By law, schools are forced to spend precious resources on children who have severe limitations. At some point one has to wonder whether normal children with potential to learn are being cheated out of opportunities because of a mandated sense of compassion.