The idea that students’ repayments to state or federal governments for supplying them with the money for college should depend on how much they earn after graduation has been hot recently. I don’t think it’s a good idea, though, and argue against it here.

A new book entitled Rethinking Mathematics aims to help teachers incorporate left-wing political ideology into their math lessons. In one example, the book suggests presenting math poblems that involve calculating how many of America’s founding fathers owned slaves.

And in another chapter:

Geometry teacher Andrew Brantlinger chronicles how he turned an ordinary lesson about calculating the area of a circle into an analysis of the South Central Los Angeles community that rioted after the 1992 “Rodney King” verdict.

During Brantlinger’s lesson, students learned that in 1992, South Central L.A. had no movie theaters or community centers, but it had 640 liquor stores. That led one student to conclude, “All they want them to do is drink.”

Apparently, in some quarters, teaching kids to add sums is less important than teaching them to multiply their racial grievances.

You can read more about Rethinking Mathematics here.

It’s that time of year again: college ranking season.

Last week, Forbes and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity released their annual ranking of America’s best colleges. But what was most notable wasn’t what colleges made the list—it was those that were conspicuously missing.

Claremont McKenna, Emory, Bucknell, and Iona were all absent from the ranking. Why? Because they had all been falsifying the data they reported to the Department of Education and others.

At Forbes.com, Abram Brown explained:

Claremont McKenna isn’t the only top college that lied. Bucknell University doctored SAT results from 2006 to 2012; Emory University provided numbers for admitted students rather than enrolled ones for more than a decade; and Iona College lied about acceptance and graduation rates, SAT scores and alumni giving for nine years starting in 2002. . . . As a penalty for their dishonesty . . . we are removing the four institutions from our list of the country’s best schools for two years.

It is only natural that, when high-stakes rankings depend on self-reported data, the pressure to cheat will be immense. That’s why ACTA’s independent study of core curricula relies on the kind of assessment schools cannot easily game.

Ultimately, we need to replace our broken accreditation system with a requirement that colleges provide the public with independently certified annual data on a variety of outcome measures. If schools cook the books, their access to federal funds should be cut off.

It is hard enough for parents and students to get the information they need to make informed choices about a college education. We don’t need dishonest college administrators making it any harder.

Penn State isn’t even over its last embarrassment and now it has unleashed an authoritarian decree regarding its employees and their medical information. The foremost opponent of this initiative (Penn State’s Sam Adams, so to speak) is Professor Matthew Woessner, who has written an open letter calling for university employees to engage in some civil disobedience.

Today’s Pope Center piece by Duke Cheston covers the recent policy changes to North Carolina public education (higher-ed and K-12) that take some serious steps toward greater freedom and lower costs.

The GOP-controlled general assembly and Governor Pat McCrory, who was elected last year, are showing what can happen when a state is run by people who are not beholden to the education establishment. Just to point to one example, teachers who obtain master’s degrees will no longer automatically get pay increases. That merely inflated the demand for feeble credentials that do nothing to improve teaching ability. The siphoning of money away from taxpayers to be shared between the university MA programs and the teachers who obtained the degrees will stop. Other states should take notice.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has this piece on the substantially reduced enrollments for the coming year at Loyola in New Orleans and other private colleges and universities.

The old sales pitch that a college degree is a great investment evidently is no longer working with many students and parents.

Over the past twenty years, the state of Georgia has paid out $1.5 billion in Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally (HOPE) scholarships — payments covering all or most of college tuition for those high school students who have at least a B average and who maintain a B average in college. Their popularity makes them a “third rail” if anyone politician dares touch them. But, as Jesse Saffron points out on the Pope Center site, this middle-class entitlement is paid for by the Georgia lottery, supported mostly by low-income people. And two-thirds of the recipients lose the scholarships because they can’t keep up the grade average.

Tom Burnett, who wrote a good piece about American Indian colleges for the Pope Center recently, sent me this e-mail:

A young friend, who has hit the $50,000 borrowing limit, asks why “they” won’t just break loose with another $10-$15,000 to make it possible for him to finish his last 18-24 months. (I wonder who he thinks “they” are.)”What’s another $10-$15,000 when I’m in this far?” Or maybe it was, “What’s another $10-15,000 when they are in this far?”
I asked him how much his payments would be if he graduated today. 
He said, “I have no idea.”

I came home and looked online at a college finance site with a calculator: $575 per month.
Recommended income to service that, given his family size: $81,000.
Good luck getting that on day one.

Just proves the point that student borrowing is not seen by the student as a cost. Consequences and reckonings are too far off.
Most students bear few costs associated with their education, leading them to make un-economic choices.

The congressional wheeling-and-dealing over student-loan interest rates has dominated the higher-ed headlines for weeks now. But the issue isn’t just student loan rates – it’s that students have far too much debt. Whatever Congress does, it won’t solve the problem of skyrocketing student indebtedness until it turns to the structural problems in higher ed.

A good place to start: breaking the link between federal student aid and accreditation.

Our current college accreditation system turns regional accrediting agencies into the gatekeepers of federal dollars. Not only have these accreditors failed to assure academic quality, but they drive up institutional expenses while discouraging new delivery models that could actually cut costs. If students are ever going to escape the crushing burden of college debt, then we can’t just subsidize loans – we need to lower the price of earning a degree.

With the Higher Education Opportunity Act up for renewal in 2014, we finally have a chance to re-shape this distorted and out-dated system. ACTA has offered an alternative to the existing system in hearings; the Heritage Foundation, Hudson Institute, and New America Foundation have all published on the issue; some in the press are even beginning to lend their voices to the chorus. Let’s not miss this opportunity to put an end to this costly regulatory failure.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I write about the recent analysis of American education schools by the National Center for Teacher Quality.

NCTQ’s study is helpful in separating the wheat (it found a small number of programs to praise) from the chaff (most are mediocre or worse) and should spark discussion about how the country goes about training teachers. In my view, the necessary and sufficient solution is to get rid of teacher licensing requirements that ensure the ed schools a market no matter whether their graduates are any good or not. We should allow school principals to choose those individuals whom they think have the most promise without regard to where or how they studied. Private school officials who are free from the mandate to hire only government certified teachers who have taken the prescribed ed-school program manage to hire and train very competent teachers. I don’t think we will get any appreciable progress until ed schools have to pass the test of the market.

While sorting through an old filing cabinet, a librarian at Yale Law School has found the long sought-after National Conversation on Race, university officials announced yesterday. It had been misfiled, and was in a folder along with a notebook belonging to then-student William J. Clinton and a plastic bag containing an unidentified vegetable substance.

The conversation is recorded on an eight-track tape and lasts less than a minute. The voices are unidentified, but there are apparently several million of them. A transcript follows:

A. It’s a bad thing that this country had slavery and Jim Crow, and that there is still racism.

B. That’s true, but there’s certainly a lot less of it now.

A. That’s true, too! And we have to admit that there are other problems now bigger than racism facing African Americans, like out-of-wedlock births, black-on-black crime, and believing that working and studying hard is “acting white.”

B. You’re right! Of course, we also have to admit that no group has a monopoly on bad behavior. You know, we should try to judge all people as individuals.

A. Right! And we should also all take responsibility for our own lives and take advantage of the amazing opportunities that this country offers all of us.

B. Agreed! Well, you have a nice day! 

A. You, too! See you at work tomorrow!

President Obama, who had been critical of those calling for a national conversation on race in his impromptu remarks last Friday, expressed relief at the discovery. “Thank goodness we’ve found it so we can all agree that there’s nothing else to say and we can all talk about something else,” he said in a prepared statement.

The Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were more disappointed but accepted the finding. “Well, naturally we’re not happy about losing our jobs, but come to think of it, we guess there really isn’t a lot more to say,” they agreed. The two are now planning to open an upscale haberdashery for clergymen, “Man of the (Cool) Cloth.”

You may never have heard of Chief Dull Knife College, but it spends almost as much for each degree it grants as MIT does — $309,000 vs. $341,000. In a dismaying story, Tom Burnett, a retired Montana legislator and businessman, describes tribal colleges. Mostly created following a 1978 congressional act, the 35 colleges attempt to train American Indians for jobs on the reservations and, at the same time, preserve the language and culture of the various Indian tribes. They aren’t doing a very good job of achieving either goal, in spite of the high cost to the taxpayer.  

Harvard apparently thinks so, since it has just established the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship in honor of the multi-platinum recording artist more commonly known simply as “Nas.”

Professor Emery Petschauer concurs:

Dr. Emery Petchauer, an assistant professor of teacher development and educational studies at Oakland University and Diverse blogger, concurred, describing the fellowship as “an incredible honor for Nas to be recognized by an institution of higher education” with Harvard’s considerable prestige.

“It’s another iteration of higher education institutions aligning themselves with hip-hop,” says Petchauer, who specializes in investigating and demonstrating how K-12 teachers can utilize hip-hop culture and art in the classroom.

If utilizing hip-hop can somehow help inner-city students learn better, fine — but I’m skeptical about that claim.

An article some months ago in The Atlantic revealed how a certain high school turned around its dismal record in student writing simply by going back to basics. The school had tried a number of reforms recommended by both conservatives and liberals — firing bad teachers, using technology, and offering after-school programs — but nothing worked until they went to ground zero: day-by-day instruction in grammar, parts of speech, and complex sentences with dependent clauses.

The light went on when one teacher assigned the class to write a sentence beginning with “although.” The class must have been reading Of Mice and Men, a high school favorite. The teacher asked her students to complete a sentence beginning with “Although George.” Many wrote something like “Although George and Lenny were friends.” Period. The teacher realized that her students didn’t know how to construct a dependent clause and how to use coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. Many of the teachers had thought the students were just not smart enough for high school because even when they talked, they couldn’t seem to go beyond simple sentences. The truth was, they couldn’t write or even construct their thoughts because they didn’t understand how language works.

All the teachers wondered how their students could possibly have arrived in high school without knowing the parts of speech. If they weren’t being disingenuous, not only did the teaching profession lose contact with the basics, it forgot how it lost contact and where it put them in the first place.

In the newest Prager University course, Philip Howard, founder of nonpartisan reform coalition Common Good, discusses the effects of public service union contracts on cities’ balance sheets.

In light of the Motor City bankruptcy, this course is quite timely.  

Tenure is the only thing that stands between us and an intellectual orthodoxy imposed by power-crazed corporate interests who wish to stifle the free exchange of ideas. Fortunately, we have guaranteed life-long employment of academics ensuring academic freedom to keep the open dialogue going.

If you buy that, there is some oceanfront property in Afghanistan you might also be interested in. John Brown University philosophy professor James Bruce suggests the unthinkable in this Pope Center article by pointing out that the tenure process itself can stifle the dialogue more completely than forces outside the academy are likely to do. For young professors must be acceptable to colleagues to gain tenure, and if those colleagues are pony-tailed Marxist retreads from the 1960s, as is often the case, or even hipsterish Occupy Wall Street sympathizers, as is increasingly the case, there isn’t much deviation from the party line permitted. Eliminating tenure can free professors from the need to conform to such collegial rigidity.

In this Freeman piece today, Jeff Tucker examines our mania for pushing most young people into college, and he looks at the alternatives.

He mentions a conversation he had recently with a young man in graphic design who said, “In my field, the employers regard college as evidence that you are willing to waste lots of time and money doing not much of anything productive. I decided to gain the competitive advantage and jump into the workforce at 20, get experience, and start climbing the ladder.”

That’s very interesting. It used to be the case that earning a college degree was a mark of distinction that gave you an advantage in the competition for jobs. Apparently, the pendulum is swinging back — getting a degree is now so easy that there is little distinction in it and the advantage goes to those who are willing to forgo the “five year party” (that’s the title of a recent book on college) and start working.

I agree with Tucker’s conclusion: “The path toward a freer educational market will be paved by private entrepreneurial efforts to meet the human needs that government programs leave unserved.”

Inside Higher Ed has a story today, “The Upside of Law School” which tries to make the case that although lots of recent law grads are unemployed or working in low-paying jobs that may or may not have anything to do with the law, things will get better and once again the JD will be “a million dollar degree.”

I find this sort of thing objectionable for the same reason I find it objectionable for the college-industrial complex to tell kids that getting a BA adds a million (or any amount) to their lifetime earnings. Even if the legal industry eventually rebounds (and it might not; during this slump, I suspect that many businesses have found that they can nicely do with less legal advice than in the past), many students who go through law school will find that the best law jobs they can find don’t pay particularly well.

This week’s Pope Center Clarion Call is by Shira Hedgepeth, formerly employed at Winston-Salem State University, one of the HBCUs in the UNC system. In it, she tells a story reminiscent of the Atlanta teachers who changed student answers on tests so as to make the schools look better. Similarly at WSSU, administrators seem more concerned with making the university look good (and keeping students happy) than with academic integrity.

Ilya Shapiro writes here about the Court’s next big “affirmative action” case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. That’s the case arising out of Michigan’s Proposition 2, passed in 2006, forbidding state entities from using racial preferences, including in college admissions. The Sixth Circuit reached the absurd conclusion that the Equal Protection clause prohibits the people of Michigan from insisting that all citizens receive equal protection. The argument that enacting a constitutional prohibition somehow is “unfair” to minorities is pathetically flawed. For one thing, even if we assume for the sake of argument that affirmative action is a benefit for some minorities, it is harmful to others. Moreover, the political battle over Prop. 2 was not the Goliath versus David affair that you might assume, with the proponents of doing away with preferences controlling the airwaves and outspending the opponents. Actually, it was exactly the other way around. Almost all of Michigan’s heavy hitters either sided with the opponents or stayed out of the battle, and the anti-2 forces outspent their opponents by about 4 to 1. If those people want to take the matter back to the voters and seek to repeal the preferences ban, they are not at any disadvantage.