David Lee's List: Education

• WHAT’S the key to success in the United States?
• some would argue, rather knee-jerk: Earn a college degree.
• Perhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education.
• students who ranked among the bottom quarter of their high school classes, the numbers are even more stark: 80 percent will probably never get a bachelor’s degree or even a two-year associate’s degree.
• a lot of tuition to pay, without a degree to show for it
• A small but influential group of economists and educators is pushing another pathway: for some students, no college at all.
• steer some students toward intensive, short-term vocational and career training, through expanded high school programs and corporate apprenticeships
• College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs. Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree
• Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate).
• Professor Vedder likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees, according to a 1999 federal study.
• Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education
• some high school graduates would be better served by being taught how to behave and communicate in the workplace
• Such skills are ranked among the most desired — even ahead of educational attainment — in many surveys of employers. In one 2008 survey of more than 2,000 businesses in Washington State, employers said entry-level workers appeared to be most deficient in being able to “solve problems and make decisions,” “resolve conflict and negotiate,” “cooperate with others” and “listen actively.”
• Professor Lerman advocates a significant national investment by government and employers in on-the-job apprenticeship training
• aspiring pharmacists’ assistants work as apprentices in hundreds of stores, with many going on to study to become full-fledged pharmacists themselves
• “The health field is an obvious case where the manpower situation is less than ideal,” he said. “I would try to work with some of the major employers to develop these kinds of programs to yield mastery in jobs that do demand high expertise.”
• by urging that some students be directed away from four-year colleges, academics like Professor Lerman are touching a third rail of the education system. At the very least, they could be accused of lowering expectations for some students. Some critics go further, suggesting that the approach amounts to educational redlining, since many of the students who drop out of college are black or non-white Hispanics
• Over the last decade, she said, courses in culinary arts, nursing, dentistry and heating and ventilation system repair were eliminated.
• Perhaps 1 percent of this year’s graduates will complete a concentration in vocational courses, she said, compared with 40 percent a decade ago.
• People with college and graduate degrees generally earn more than those without them, and face lower risks of unemployment, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Even those who experience a few years of college earn more money, on average, with less risk of unemployment, than those who merely graduate from high school
• “It’s not just about the economic return,” he said. “Some college, whether you complete it or not, contributes to aesthetic appreciation, better health and better voting behavior.”
• “I’m not saying don’t get the B.A,” he said. “I’m saying, let’s get them some intervening credentials, some intervening milestones. Then, if they want to go further in their education, they can.”

21 more annotations...

• The idea that four years of higher education will translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life — a refrain sure to be repeated this month at graduation ceremonies across the country — has been pounded into the heads of schoolchildren, parents and educators.
• Perhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education.
• For college students who ranked among the bottom quarter of their high school classes, the numbers are even more stark: 80 percent will probably never get a bachelor’s degree or even a two-year associate’s degree.
• Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree
• Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate).
• this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.
• by urging that some students be directed away from four-year colleges, academics like Professor Lerman are touching a third rail of the education system. At the very least, they could be accused of lowering expectations for some students. Some critics go further, suggesting that the approach amounts to educational redlining, since many of the students who drop out of college are black or non-white Hispanics
• 1 percent of this year’s graduates will complete a concentration in vocational courses, she said, compared with 40 percent a decade ago.
• those who experience a few years of college earn more money, on average, with less risk of unemployment, than those who merely graduate from high school
• “Some college, whether you complete it or not, contributes to aesthetic appreciation, better health and better voting behavior.”

8 more annotations...

• guidelines that will affect students around the country, from kindergarten to 12th grade, for the next 10 years
• proposed amendment after amendment on social issues to the document that teams of professional educators had drawn up over 12 months, in what would have to be described as a single-handed display of archconservative political strong-arming
• The injection of partisan politics into education went so far that at one point another Republican board member burst out in seemingly embarrassed exasperation, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!”
• one reason that Texas’ school-board members find themselves at the very center of the battlefield is, not surprisingly, money. The state’s $22 billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in the country.
• Texas, on the other hand, was one of the first states to adopt statewide curriculum guidelines, back in 1998, and the guidelines it came up with (which are referred to as TEKS — pronounced “teaks” — for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) were clear, broad and inclusive enough that many other states used them as a model in devising their own. And while technology is changing things, textbooks — printed or online —are still the backbone of education.
• Robertson’s protégé, Ralph Reed, once said, “I would rather have a thousand school-board members than one president and no school-board members”
• “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
• For McLeroy, separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by secular liberals.
• “Texas was and still is the most important and most influential state in the country.” And James Kracht, a professor at Texas A&M’s college of education and a longtime player in the state’s textbook process, told me flatly, “Texas governs 46 or 47 states.”
• Jefferson said it was not the place of the president to involve himself in religion, and he expressed his belief that the First Amendment’s clauses — that the government must not establish a state religion (the so-called establishment clause) but also that it must ensure the free exercise of religion (what became known as the free-exercise clause) — meant, as far as he was concerned, that there was “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
• when Steven K. Green, director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., testified at the board meeting last month in opposition to the board’s approach to bringing religion into history, warning that the Supreme Court has forbidden public schools from “seeking to impress upon students the importance of particular religious values through the curriculum,” and in the process said that the founders “did not draw on Mosaic law, as is mentioned in the standards,” several of the board members seemed dumbstruck. Don McLeroy insisted it was a legitimate claim, since the Enlightenment took place in Europe, in a Christian context. Green countered that the Enlightenment had in fact developed in opposition to reliance on biblical law and said he had done a lengthy study in search of American court cases that referenced Mosaic law. “The record is basically bereft,” he said. Nevertheless, biblical law and Moses remain in the TEKS.
• To conservative Christians, there is no separation of church and state, and there never was.
• Barton goes on to claim, “ ‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant.” That is to say, the founders were all Christians who conceived of a nation of Christians, and the purpose of the First Amendment was merely to ensure that no single Christian denomination be elevated to the role of state church.
• Washington, in his writings, makes scores of different references to God, but not one is biblical. He talks instead about a ‘Grand Architect,’ deliberately avoiding the Christian terms, because it had to be a religious language that was accessible to all people.
• Brookhiser rather succinctly summarizes the point: “The founders were not as Christian as those people would like them to be, though they weren’t as secularist as Christopher Hitchens would like them to be.”
• She then discussed a legal practice called “incorporation by reference.” “When you have in one legal document reference to another, it pulls them together, so that they can’t be viewed as separate and distinct,” she said. “So you cannot read the Constitution distinct from the Declaration.”
• The curious thing is that in trying to bring God into the Constitution, the activists — who say their goal is to follow the original intent of the founders — are ignoring the fact that the founders explicitly avoided religious language in that document.
• “In general, the board members don’t know anything at all about content,” Tom Barber, the textbook executive, says. Kathy Miller, the watchdog, who has been monitoring the board for 15 years, says, referring to Don McLeroy and another board member: “It is the most crazy-making thing to sit there and watch a dentist and an insurance salesman rewrite curriculum standards in science and history. Last year, Don McLeroy believed he was smarter than the National Academy of Sciences, and he now believes he’s smarter than professors of American history.”
• “The process of reviewing the guidelines in Texas is very open, but what happens behind the scenes after that is quite different,”
• In the language-arts re-evaluation, the members of the Christian bloc wanted books to include classic myths and fables rather than newly written stories whose messages they didn’t agree with. They didn’t get what they wanted from the writing teams, so they did an end run around them once the public battles were over. “I met with all the publishers,” McLeroy said. “We went out for Mexican food. I told them this is what we want. We want stories with morals, not P.C. stories.”
• The Christian bloc may have determined it would be wiser to work for this kind of transformational change out of the public gaze.
• My attitude is this country was founded by a group of men who were Christians but who didn’t want the government dictating religion, and that’s exactly what McLeroy and his colleagues are trying to do.

20 more annotations...

• social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create
• ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it
• the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers
• the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years
• their justification: in order to serve the needs of others properly, professions must be accountable only to themselves
• interdisciplinarity, practical training, and time to degree
• The profession has just gotten used to a serious imbalance between supply and demand.
• Students are told from the very start, almost from the minute they apply to graduate school, that they are effectively entering a lottery.
• the conversion of the professoriate into a group of people who were more likely to identify with their disciplines than with their campuses
• Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.
• ABDs—graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations. There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs
• upward movement in only two major liberal-arts areas: psychology and the life sciences
• BGN—business, government, and NGOs
• the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life
• graduate-school dropouts: Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, Richard Bernstein, David Lehman
• The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years.
• only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years
• Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious.
• They like being in a university, and, since there is usually plenty of demand for their quite inexpensive teaching, universities like having them.
• It takes three years to become a lawyer. It takes four years to become a doctor. But it takes from six to nine years, and sometimes longer, to be eligible to teach college students for a living.
• students who spend eight or nine years in graduate school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available
• If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.
• there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get
• The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals.
• Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes.
• Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected.
• It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate.

25 more annotations...

• One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.
• Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics.
• the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have.
• To succeed in a profession or as managers, whites needed an average I.Q. of about 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of just 93. In short, Chinese-Americans managed to achieve more than whites who on paper had the same intellect.

2 more annotations...

• Whatever half-baked idea they had, they ran with. They put their KIPP proposal together within a few hours of being inspired by Rafe Esquith, an award-winning elementary school teacher from Los Angeles whose speech in Houston the two young teachers almost missed because they were too tired and disheartened by their failures in the classroom.
• During the drive home, Levin and Feinberg could not stop replaying what they had heard and seen. They did not see problems anymore, only opportunities.
• “Work around them, do it anyway,” Esquith said. Obstructionist administrators were no better than furniture, he said, and should be treated as such.
• He was eventually so discouraged he told Feinberg he was quitting and coming back to Houston to help his friend with his own mushrooming crises. Then, ashamed of himself, he changed his mind and forged ahead in the Bronx.
• They created a nine-and-a-half hour school day and frequent Saturday sessions. They required summer school. They regularly visited students’ homes. They told students to call them at their apartment if they had homework questions. They organized field trips, music, sports, and jokes. Some ideas worked and some did not.
• Don, 71, and Doris, 68
• it dawned on him that schools were a business, and charter schools in particular were a business. They needed principals who were trained in management fundamentals and could make their own decisions.
• Feinberg, Hamilton, and Levin were pleased that Tyson, unlike other business school deans they contacted, did not suggest they involve education school faculty in the project. All three of them distrusted education schools. Feinberg and Levin planned to do most of their recruiting among Teach For America veterans like themselves. They thought such people would have the most drive and imagination, and the most experience improvising in difficult circumstances.
• Hamilton, Feinberg, and Levin had no business training. He figured they would make mistakes. He explained to Hamilton, based on a half-century of experience, that it was much better to get started and address problems as they came up, rather than sit at a desk and try to plan for everything that could go wrong.
• It was just what Feinberg and Levin wanted to hear. One of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs was telling them he liked to charge into new projects too, even if he was not ready.
• A sample of somewhat more than one thousand eighth graders who had been at KIPP schools for four years went from the 32nd to the 60th percentile in reading and from the 40th to the 82nd in math. Gains that great for that many low-income children in one program have never happened before.
• Some children could not adjust to the long school day and high standards and went back to their regular schools. Young teachers could handle the long hours, but they wanted to create a system where mid-career educators could also prosper.

10 more annotations...