Bloodthirsty Liberal

Oh Lord, spare me the liberal claptrap:

In addressing our current fiscal and economic woes, too often we neglect a key ingredient of our nation’s economic future—the human capital produced by our K-12 school system. An improved education system would lead to a dramatically different future for the U.S., because educational outcomes strongly affect economic growth and the distribution of income.

What’s that? It’s not liberal claptrap?

By GEORGE P. SHULTZ AND ERIC A. HANUSHEK

…

Mr. Shultz is a former secretary of State and a distinguished senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Mr. Hanushek is a senior fellow at Hoover and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.

…

Over the past half century, countries with higher math and science skills have grown faster than those with lower-skilled populations. In the chart nearby, we compare GDP-per-capita growth rates between 1960 and 2000 with achievement results on international math assessment tests. The countries include almost all of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries plus a number of developing countries. What stands out is that all the countries follow a nearly straight line that slopes upward—as scores rise, so does economic growth. Peru, South Africa and the Philippines are at the bottom; Singapore and Taiwan, the top.

…

Current U.S. students—the future labor force—are no longer competitive with students across the developed world. In the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings for 2009, the U.S. was 31st in math—indistinguishable from Portugal or Italy. In “advanced” performance on math, 16 countries produced twice as many high achievers per capita than the U.S. did.

If we accept this level of performance, we will surely find ourselves on a low-growth path.

Take our own state of California. Once a leader in education, it is now ranked behind 40 other U.S. states in math achievement, placing it at the level of Greece and foreshadowing a bleak future of ballooning debt and growing income disparity.

But the averages mask the truly sad story in the Latino population, soon to become California’s dominant demographic group. Hispanics attending school in California perform no better than the average student in Mexico, a level comparable to the typical student in Kazakhstan. An alarming 43% of Hispanic students in California did not complete high school between 2005 and 2009, and only 10% attained a college degree.

Anyone worried about income disparity in America should be deeply disturbed. The failure of the K-12 education system for so many students means that issues associated with income distribution—including higher taxes and less freedom in labor and capital markets—will be an ever-present and distressing aspect of our future.

Examples abound of the ability to make sharp improvements in our K-12 system. By not insisting on immediate and widespread reform we are forgoing substantial growth in our standard of living.

Not bad for a couple of conservative Republicans, huh?

Americans are tired of paying taxes (excluding Stephen King, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates, of course) not because they’re stingy and mean—quite the opposite. They are tired of seeing their all too limited dollars blown on government waste and fraud, and, just as much, on outdated liberal orthodoxies. Yesterday, we reminded you of the staggering increase in welfare costs over the decades (without any accompanying increase in economic competitiveness); today, it is education.

Note the authors don’t say a thing about spending. That is the liberal approach, from local overrides to Congressional budgets (the authors cite California). Schultz and Hanushek call for reform, immediate and widespread reform. What that means is open for discussion—but I’d offer vouchers and other methods to make public schools compete for the business of a consumer class known as parents. If, after those reforms are put in place, a reasonable argument can be made for more spending than the billions already appropriated every year, we can talk then.

Don’t you hate word problems?

- Aggie

Brooklyn Middle School students win National High School chess tournament

What a hoot!

Take a bow, Justus Williams, James Black, Isaac Barayev and Matthew Kluska, stalwarts of the Intermediate School 318 Eugenio Maria de Hostos chess team out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Though only in middle school, the team won the National High School Chess Championship.

Or, to put it in Williamsburg terms: They beat the big kids. Not just any big kids; the best of America’s chess-playing big kids. No middle school had won since the national competition started in 1969.

James Black, one of the Williamsburg Chess Masters.

Way to go, Williamsburg!

- Aggie

Whatever it is about, it’s not about “fairness” or “opportunity”:

President Barack Obama’s newly-released federal budget would not provide funding to the highly-successful D.C. voucher program, despite an agreement signed by the president last year that reauthorized the program.

The American Federation —the nation’s voice for school choice—strongly decries the president’s failure to provide funding to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), which currently provides scholarships to more than 1,600 children from low-income families across the nation’s capital to attend the private schools of their parents’ choice.

Though the OSP is in little danger of going unfunded—Congress is charged with appropriating funds, and House Speaker John Boehner is an ardent defender of the program—the move by President Obama is effectively a reneging on the promise he made last April in a budget agreement he signed that helped avert a government shutdown.

“The president says he’s for education reform, but his actions continually aim to send low-income and minority students back to schools that are failing them academically, are unsafe, or are otherwise not meeting their needs,” said Kevin P. Chavous, a senior advisor to AFC and a former D.C. Councilman. “This latest hypocrisy is just the most recent instance in which the president has stood in the way of students who are improving test scores and graduating in higher numbers.”

Since barring new students from entering the program in 2009, Obama has made a number of statements expressing support for reform that have contradicted his actions regarding the OSP. In 2010, President Obama publicly stated that he would not send his daughters to D.C. public schools, despite actively working to bar low-income families from having that choice.

If there’s any spending a conservative loves, it is spending that encourages individual effort and responsibility. Giving underprivileged kids and their parents a choice in their schools, improving their test scores and graduation rates, giving them a leg-up into the economic mainstream… how much do you want?

Instead, our “progressive” president cowers before teachers’ unions and consigns inner-city kids back to the ghettos—and voting patterns—whence they came.

Heckuva job, Barry.

Tell us what you really think, Governor Christie.

- Aggie

A few years ago, when Ahmadinejad made his first appearance at Columbia University, The Friends (Quakers) threw a big dinner party for him. At the time, I wondered if The Friends would celebrate a dictator who stoned “adulterers” as young as 13 and hung gays if he wasn’t also committed to the genocide of the people of Israel. I got my answer a couple years later when, on a return trip to NYC, they failed to throw a party for him.

But they do love the Jew-haters. And this article describes the remarkable situation of The Friends Seminary, a co-ed private school, inviting a notorious antisemite to play music for the kids in celebration of Martin Luther King Day and to spread hatred of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. Alan Dershowitz finally couldn’t take it any longer, even though his own daughter had been a student there when she was a kid.

If you want to understand why anti-Semitism seems to be increasing among young people—especially young people on the hard left—consider a recent invitation extended by a left-leaning school in New York to a self-proclaimed Jew hater.

The Friends Schools around the country are legendary. Presidents’ children attend them, my own daughter and nephew were students, and they are regarded as one of the most elite schools in the world. That is why it is so shocking that the Friends Seminary in New York has lent its imprimatur to a notorious anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Friends Seminary has a reputation for propagandizing its students against Israel, but it has now crossed a red line into legitimating anti-Semitism.

Author and jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, who was invited to be a featured performer in a celebration of Martin Luther King at the Friends Meeting House, has written an overtly anti-Semitic book entitled The Wandering Who?, which, he acknowledges, draws…much of his “insights from a man who…was an anti-Semite as well as a radical misogynist.”

Among the “insights” Atzmon seeks to share with students are the following:
While the Holocaust “was not at all an historical narrative,” and Auschwitz was not a “death camp,” the “accusations of Jews making matzo out of young Goyim’s blood” may be true.

“The Jews” caused the recent credit crunch, which the author calls “the Zio-punch.”

If Iran and Israel fight a nuclear war that kills millions of people, “some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all.’”

The “new Jewish religion…could well be the most sinister religion known to man…”

The author of the book containing these statements has told students that he cannot “say whether it’s right or not to burn down a synagogue. I can say that it is a rational act.” He has also apologized to the Nazis for having earlier compared them to Israel: “Israel is in fact far worse than Nazi Germany.”

He has written that we “must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously,” and that “with Fagin and Shylock in mind, Israeli barbarism and organ trafficking seem to be just other events in an endless hellish continuum.”

It is not as if Friends School is unfamiliar with Atzmon’s anti-Semitic rants. Atzmon was previously invited to make a guest appearance in a class last year and one of his essays was distributed to the students. The essay came from his website, which is replete with anti-Semitic “insights.”

When I heard about this bizarre invitation, I wrote the following letter to the school’s headmaster:

Your school is now legitimating anti-Semitism by inviting a self-described Jew hater, Gilad Atzmon, to participate in events at the school. This sends a powerful message to your students, and to other students around the world, that Atzmon’s views are legitimate and an appropriate subject for discussion in academic circles….If you believe these views are appropriately discussed, considered and possibly accepted by your students, then you are doing the right thing by associating your school with the man who expressed them. If not, then you are doing a terrible disservice to your students and to the values for which the Friends School purports to stand.

I cannot overemphasize how serious this matter is. Legitimating the oldest form of bigotry is a moral and academic sin. I cannot remain silent in the face of complicity with bigotry. Nor should you.

The Headmaster did not respond to my letter, but he had the director of development (the fundraiser) send me an email saying that Atzmon was invited “solely for his musical accomplishments” and that the invitation was extended by “the Meetinghouse Jazz Orchestra.”
Atzmon performed on January 13 to honor a man—Martin Luther King—who despised anti-Semitism and would have been appalled by Atzmon’s hateful words. Students cheered his performance and conversed with him.

I cannot imagine an overtly homophobic, sexist or racist musician being invited by any group in any way associated with Friends “solely for his musical accomplishments.” (I hear that David Duke, the white supremacist perennial candidate, plays a mean saxophone). Atzmon is famous (really infamous) not because he is a distinguished musician, but rather because he is a notorious anti-Semite whose blogs are featured on neo-Nazi websites all over the world. He never would have been invited but for his well publicized bigotry.

Friends Seminary is well known for inviting artists whose politics and ideology are consistent with the values of the school. Indeed, the poster advertising his featured appearance at the “22nd Annual Martin Luther King Concert” at the “Meetinghouse at Friends Seminary” included a description of him as a “writer” and “political activist.” Moreover, when he was previously invited by the school to address a class, the teacher distributed one of his bigoted essays from his anti-Semitic website.

However the school may try to spin this invitation, the end result will be that Atzmon’s bigoted views will have been given the imprimatur of the Friends Seminary. Shame on Friends.

Beautiful. Now I expect the usual haters to write and say that Gilad Atzmon grew up Jewish. Hitler grew up Christian, boys and girls. There are nut jobs everywhere. Alone neither he nor Atzmon could have done much damage. It is when the rest of us jump on the bandwagon, especially those who claim a higher moral ground, like the Quakers, that we have real trouble.

- Aggie

At least one fatality

They lined up well before dawn, some driving from the deep countryside with bags of fluffy blankets and neatly packed sandwiches, to wait for the gates to a new life to open. They hoped for a shot at a coveted spot at one of South Africa’s public universities, and with it a chance to escape the indignity of joblessness that afflicts more than a third of the nation. By morning, the line was more than a mile long.

As the gates were about to open at 7:45 Tuesday morning, thousands of students, many accompanied by their anxious parents, surged forward, desperate to win one of several hundred last-chance places still open at the University of Johannesburg. Amid shoving and screams, one woman, the mother of a prospective student, was trampled to death and several others were badly injured in a frantic scrum.

The stampede embodied the broad crisis in South Africa’s overstretched higher education system as it struggles to extend opportunities once reserved for whites to all South Africans. It is a problem of grade school mathematics: Too many students are seeking too few seats at the country’s public universities, which turn away more than half of their applicants, leaving few options for most high school graduates.

Speechless.

- Aggie

Money doesn’t made the school, “culture” makes the school.

And even that statement obfuscates the truth that parents make the school.

Think of the ingredients that make for a good school. Small classes. Well-educated teachers. Plenty of funding. Combine, mix well, then bake.

Turns out, your recipe would be horribly wrong, at least according to a new working paper out of Harvard. Its take away: Schools shouldn’t focus on resources. They should focus on culture.

The study comes courtesy of economist Roland Fryer, an academic heavyweight who was handed a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” earlier this year for his research into the driving forces behind student achievement. Fryer gathered extensive data from 35 New York City charter schools, which generally cater to underprivileged and minority communities. He interviewed students, principals, and teachers, reviewing lesson plans and watching classroom video, to try and pinpoint factors that correlated with higher test scores.

His findings could add some new fire to the debate about what makes a good school. Fryer found that class size, per-pupil spending, and the number of teachers with certifications or advanced degrees had nothing to do with student test scores in language and math.

In fact, schools that poured in more resources actually got worse results.

What did make a difference? The study measures correlation, not causation, so there are no clear answers. But there is a clear pattern. Schools that focused on teacher development, data-driven instruction, creating a culture focused on student achievement, and setting high academic expectations consistently fared better. The results were consistent whether the charter’s program was geared towards the creative arts or hard-core behavioral discipline.

Let’s compare this with life. If you organize yourself, and work towards your goals in a consistent way, you have a better chance of success. If you set high goals, and work hard, you have a better chance at making something of yourself. This is news?

If small classes, credentialed teachers, and plush budgets aren’t adding up to successful students, then what is? Fryer measured school culture in a way no academic before him had. He looked at the number of times teachers got feedback. The number of days students got tutored in small groups. The number of assessments for students. The number of hours students actually spent at their desks. Each correlated with higher student scores.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, schools that claimed a “relentless focus on academic goals” also tended to produce better test scores. Schools that focused on self esteem and emotional health? Not as much. (Sorry Gen Y.)

So we have to go to the link to learn if the P-word (parents) gets mentioned. And of course it should. Because these are charter schools, and parents went to the trouble to figure out how to get their kids into those successful schools. They were starting on a different plane.

- Aggie

An LA teacher fired for antisemitic comments on youtube

Surprisingly, the Huffington Post made us aware of this, but the second video was done by Fox. The link above is very interesting. And one of the most interesting things about it is that the commenters all seem to be Jew-haters. There will always be a Left.

Here she really gets into it, followed by an Occupy leader who refuses to totally condemn this, and ending with a very interesting conversation with the journalists themselves:

LAUSD Teacher Fired after Anti-Semitic Comment on Camera: MyFoxLA.com

- Aggie

Hey, Mchlle…yum-mm-mmph…wnna fry?

Congress is fighting to keep pizza and french fries on school lunch lines, picking apart an Obama administration proposal to make school lunches healthier.

A spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards proposed by the Agriculture Department earlier this year, forcing USDA to pull back an attempt to limit potatoes on the lunch line, delaying limits on sodium and delaying a requirement to boost whole grains.

The spending bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The department’s proposed guidelines would have attempted to prevent that.

The changes had been requested by food companies that produce frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers. Some conservatives in Congress have called the push for healthier foods an overreach, saying the government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat.

In a bill summary released Monday, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee said the changes would “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations and … provide greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals.”

Reagan always told us ketchup was a vegetable.

Look, I don’t want my kids loading up only on pizza and fries, but I’d rather they ooze fry fat and pepperoni grease from their clogged pores than see the government stick its nose in.

And why is the government feeding them anyway—and looking to add school dinners? The parents are too poor? We already give them food stamps, so why not throw in a few more for Wonder Bread, Oscar Mayer, and French’s mustard? I made lunches for my kids every morning for over a decade. I didn’t see Michelle Obama in a housecoat and slippers next to me, spreading the peanut butter and polishing an apple.

It doesn’t take a village to raise a child. It takes a parent who gives a damn. Get the government out of the kitchen.

Just imagine, if you will…

Parents of Emerson Elementary in Compton are up in arms over the school’s decision to invite former porn star Sasha Grey to read to a group of first and third-grade students, at an National Education Association-sponsored event called Read Across America.

TMZ obtained photos of the session, but when they contacted administrators, they were less than forthcoming about the decision to invite the winner of the 2010 AVN award for best anal sex scene.

The school district flatly denied inviting the former porn star, telling TMZ, “we have several celebrities who read to our students each year. The actress you have indicated [Sasha] was not present.”

But Grey herself tweeted about the experience.

“Spent the am with Read Across America Compton, reading to the sweetest 1st & 3rd grade students @ Emerson Elementary,” read a November 2nd post.

Grey is an author herself, having published “Neu Sex,” a collection of artistic photos and essays, back in March.

After the photos were released, she defended her decision to participate in a statement, saying “I have a past that some people may not agree with, but it does not define who I am. I will not live in fear of it. To challenge non-profit education programs is an exercise in futility, counter-productive and anti-educational.”

Perhaps the administrators initially thought that Grey’s recent career change toward more mainstream roles made her a more appropriate elementary school guest. The actress, who once won a Best Oral Sex award for her film “Throat: A Cautionary Tale,” has since acted in a film directed by Steven Soderbergh and appeared regularly in HBO’s Entourage.

“From now on I will not be playing roles where I play a version of myself, or a hooker, for a very long time,” she told Fox News. “I think ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ and ‘Entourage’ were the best places to play those two roles and it can’t get any better. I don’t want to repeat myself, and I think if I continue to take those types of roles I will only be given those roles.”

“The National Education Association and their local partners should take steps to insure that the Read Across America program does not introduce children to notorious performers of pornography,” Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council told The Daily Caller. “Parents have every right to be outraged about her appearance.”

But Frederick Hess, and education policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute doesn’t see what the big deal is.

“If she was talking about adult films or other inappropriate subjects, thats obviously another question. But only problem I have with this … is the district’s lack of candor,” he told TheDC.

Emerson Elementary School principal Sydney Ritchey-Burnett and the NEA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

According to the NEA’s website, Read Across America is “an annual reading motivation and awareness program that calls for every child in every community to celebrate reading on March 2, the birthday of beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss.”

She read “Dog Breath,” by Dave Pilkey.

Your tax dollars at work.

- Aggie

Societies collapse, suddenly

Fifteen years ago, I noticed that when things change, they change suddenly. One day there was Hitler and the German population strutting their stuff, but within short order you couldn’t find a Nazi in Germany anywhere. None of them had supported the Nazi party. All those pictures of hundreds of thousands of cheering Germans were but hallucinations.

We saw the same thing happen with the internet bubble – riches to rags in a few months. September 11th took us from a comfortable, silly society in which our biggest problem was summer shark attacks to the society we have today. In short order.

It turns out that this has been studied:

Don’t call me a “declinist.” I really don’t believe the United States—or Western civilization, more generally—is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline.

But that’s not because I am one of those incorrigible optimists who agree with Winston Churchill that the United States will always do the right thing, albeit when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

If you don’t know what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights of the Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.

The notion that civilizations don’t decline but collapse inspired the anthropologist Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, Collapse. But Diamond focused, fashionably, on man-made environmental disasters as the causes of collapse. As a historian, I take a broader view. My point is that when you look back on the history of past civilizations, a striking feature is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause.

The Roman Empire didn’t decline and fall sedately, as historians used to claim. It collapsed within a few decades in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders and internal divisions. In the space of a generation, the vast imperial metropolis of Rome fell into disrepair, the aqueducts broken, the splendid marketplaces deserted.

The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to internal strife and external invasion. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse comes suddenly, just think of how the postcolonial dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East imploded this year. Twelve months ago, Messrs. Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi seemed secure in their gaudy palaces. Here yesterday, gone today.

What all these collapsed powers have in common is that the complex social systems that underpinned them suddenly ceased to function. One minute rulers had legitimacy in the eyes of their people; the next they didn’t.

Think Occupy Movement. Do they consider The Constitution of the United States to be legitimate?

Remember that poster that used to hang in every college dorm, of a runaway steam train that has crashed through the wall of a rail station and hit the street below, nose first? The caption was: “Oh sh*t!” I believe it’s time to ask how close the United States is to the “Oh sh*t!” moment—the moment we suddenly crash downward like that train.

The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that I call the “killer applications”:

1. Competition. …

2. The Scientific Revolution. …

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government….

4. Modern Medicine. …

5. The Consumer Society. …

6. The Work Ethic. …

For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call “the great divergence”: the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world.

In 1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. By the late 1970s the American was more than 20 times richer than the Chinese. Westerners not only grew richer than “Resterners.” They grew taller, healthier, and longer-lived. They also grew more powerful. By the early 20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.

Beginning with Japan, however, one non-Western society after another has worked out that these apps can be downloaded and installed in non-Western operating systems. That explains about half the catching up that we have witnessed in our lifetimes, especially since the onset of economic reforms in China in 1978.

Now, I am not one of those people filled with angst at the thought of a world in which the average American is no longer vastly richer than the average Chinese. Indeed, I welcome the escape of hundreds of millions of Asians from poverty, not to mention the improvements we are seeing in South America and parts of Africa. But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.

Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans.

…

He is going over his points in the current context. I’m skipping most of them, but this is interesting:

The rule of law? For a real eye-opener, take a look at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Opinion Survey. On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection. On every other count, its reputation is shockingly bad. The U.S. ranks 86th in the world for the costs imposed on business by organized crime, 50th for public trust in the ethics of politicians, 42nd for various forms of bribery, and 40th for standards of auditing and financial reporting.

I mention this because I think we have a problem with corruption in our legal system, and that corruption really threatens the sturdiness of our whole society. If we can’t trust the court system to be above board, we might as well let organized crime run things.

He’s kinda glum:

If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle.

Ya’ know… people are busy. Voting is an inconvenience and trying to understand these complex issues is just a waste of time. Barry will handle it.

We’ve delegated our future.

- Aggie