Class Issues
drorzel | November 20, 2011Including pretty much anybody wearing a helmet in this video from UC-Davis:
That's just disgraceful, all the way around (with the possible exception of the chubby hatless cop in the first part of the video, who appears to be behaving in a more reasonable manner than his armored colleagues). I feel a tiny bit bad for the fact that the pepper-spray-wielding officer now has his name and contact information splashed all over the Internet, and the resulting world of shit that will crash down upon him. After all, as Alexis Madrgial notes, he's the product of a terrible system. But then again,…
drorzel | August 24, 2011The new school year is upon us, so there's been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I've been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of people have been referring to a "Student Loan Bubble," such as Dean Dad, who points to this graph from Daniel Indiviglio as an illustration:
That post is a week old, which is a hundred years in blog time, and I wish I'd gotten to it sooner, because it's a terrible graph. Indiviglio says:
This chart looks like a mistake, but it…
drorzel | August 11, 2011Fred Clark has an idea for you:
Start with the housekeeping staff at a Manhattan hotel. They've just learned that their next contract includes no raise, but doubles the employee share of the cost of health benefits. The Norma Rae of this bunch -- let's say Jennifer Lopez* -- convinces them to strike, but they have little leverage and she's struggling to hold the line. These women can't afford the new contract, but they can't afford a lengthy strike either.
As it happens, this very same Manhattan hotel is the site of negotiations between the NFL Players Union and the owners. Mixed up in all…
drorzel | July 27, 2011Kevin Drum is puzzled by default panic:
If we run out of money, the federal government will stop paying some of its bills. That's bad, and it will quite likely have a negative effect on the economy. Corporations are right to be apprehensive about this.
But that's all that will happen. Treasury bonds will continue to roll over and interest payments will continue to be made. That means there's no reason to sell Treasurys; no reason they can't continue to be used as collateral; no reason that access to capital should dry up; and no reason that companies will need more cash.
At least, that's how…
drorzel | July 14, 2011Via Jessa Crispin on Twitter, there's a really excellent article in the Paris Review about Harvard and Class:
When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be more of them there. That was the main reason I thought it would be a fun place to be. I don't think I was super ambitious or professional minded or even a very good student.
The thing I figured out soon after I applied was that, on Gilligan's Island, it wasn't the Professor who went to Harvard, it was Mr.…
drorzel | May 17, 2011As I noted the other day, we're entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being "back to school" time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the opinions of the general public and college presidents about various topics related to higher education. The totally neutral post title is copied from their report.
So, what do they find about general public attitudes? The usual confused muddle:
Cost and Value. A majority of Americans (57%) say the…
drorzel | May 15, 2011College graduation season is upon us, at least for institutions running on a semester calendar (sadly, Union's trimester system means we have another month to go). This means the start of the annual surge of Very Serious op-eds about what education means, giving advice to graduates, etc. The New York Times gets things rolling with an op-ed from the people who brought us the Academically Adrift kerfuffle a few months back. As I wrote at the time, I am underwhelmed by their argument. In fact, I would let it go entirely, were it not for a new bit that kind of creeps me out. In this new op-ed,…
drorzel | May 14, 2011SteelyKid is, as I have noted previously, half Korean, a quarter Polish, and an eighth each Irish and German. Her parents are irreligious, the extended family is Catholic (more so on my side than Kate's), and she goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center. In other words, a thoroughly American sort of upbringing. I can't wait to see what she finds to rebel against when she hits the teenage years.
For no obvious reason, three of the four kids she's most likely to play with on the playground when I pick her up in the evening (we play at the JCC for a while before going home, to give Kate…
drorzel | May 3, 2011Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in question (Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Eli Broad, and the Wal-Mart Waltons) sound like feckless idiots, but I can't tell if that's just bad writing.
The core of the piece is the finding that the districts these guys put money into haven't…
drorzel | May 2, 2011The New York Times ran a couple of op-eds on Sunday about education policy. One, by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari is familair stuff to anyone who's heard me talk about the subject before: teachers in the US are, on the whole, given fewer resources than they need to succeed, paid less well than other professions with comparable educational requirements, and then castigated as incompetents. And we wonder why top students aren't interested in education.
The other by R. Barker Bausell, offers a simple and seemingly objective standard for evaluating teacher performance: measuring their…
drorzel | November 11, 2010I usually have ESPN on as background noise in the morning, but I turned it off today because their increasingly fulsome tributes to Veterans Day were getting on my nerves. I'm all in favor of honoring the sacrifices made by members of the military, but a little decorum would be nice at the same time.
It occurs to me, though, that what we really need is not yet more extravagant orations of thanks on Veterans Day, but rather a "Pre-Veterans Day." A day when we think about the men and women of the armed forces before they've had to make terrible sacrifices for the country. This would, ideally,…
drorzel | October 19, 2010As mentioned in the previous post, there has been a lot of interesting stuff written about education in the last week or so, much of it in response to the manifesto published in the Washington Post, which is the usual union-busting line about how it's too difficult to fire the incompetent teachers who are ruining our public schools. Harry at Crooked Timber has a good response, and links to some more good responses to this.
I'm curious about a slightly different question, though, which is in the post title. There's a lot of talk about how incompetent teachers are dragging the system down, but…
drorzel | October 6, 2010Via Steve Hsu, a GNXP post about the benefits of elite college educations, based largely on a graph of income vs. US News ranking. While the post text shows some of the dangers of taking social-science data too literally (the points on the graph in question are clearly binned, so I would not attribute too high a degree of reality to a statement like "The marginal benefit of getting into the next highest ranked school is actually higher the higher the rank of your current school. In other words, Yale grads should really really want to go to Harvard"), the apparent effect is pretty significant…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There's been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times's investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using "Value Added Modeling," which basically looks at how much a student's scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and Kevin Drum has some reactions of his own, along with links to two posts from Kevin Carey, who blogs about this stuff regularly. Finally, Crooked Timber has a post about a recent study showing that value-added models aren't that great (as CT is one of the few political…
drorzel | August 17, 2010At Inside Higher Ed this morning, they have a news squib about a new report blaming the high cost of college on "administrative bloat." Coincidentally, the Dean Dad has a post pre-emptively responding to this in the course of arguing with a different group:
In terms of administration, what would you cut? Should we stop trying to comply with the ADA? Should we stop evaluating faculty altogether, and just trust that everybody is perfect? Perhaps we should stop giving financial aid, since it requires so many staff. Who cares about accreditation? Who cares about IT? Who cares about payroll? (…
drorzel | August 11, 2010First Matt Yglesias and then Kevin Drum nail the current source of my occasional spasms of liberal guilt, namely the unequal distribution of the current economic troubles. They both note that the unemployment rate for college graduates is less than half that for folks without college degrees (Matt looks at total unemployment, Kevin at long-term unemployment), and Matt notes:
Virtually every single member of congress, every senator, every Capitol Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every major political reporter is a college graduate. What's more, we have a large…
drorzel | July 27, 2010Via Inside Higher Ed this YouTube video is pretty much a distillation of faculty reaction nationwide to higher education's response to the world economic crisis:
The IHE link gives a little more context to the video, and some of the reaction to it. The arguments here are not all well-founded-- science and engineering will necessarily receive more funding than the liberal arts because teaching and research in science and engineering are vastly more expensive than in the humanities, and many of those central administrative salaries are going to support multicultural and mental health programs…
drorzel | June 1, 2010Thinking from Kansas, Josh Rosenau notices a correlation in data from a Daily Kos poll question on the origin of the universe:
Saints be praised, 62% of the public accepts the Big Bang and a 13.7 billion year old universe. Democrats are the most positive, with 71% accepting that, while only 44% of Republicans agree (38 think it's more recent, the rest are undecided). I've said it before and I stand by it: conservative Republicanism is incompatible with science.
But looking at the finer details tells us a lot. The only group - gender, race, or region - with anything like the Republicans'…
drorzel | May 27, 2010
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on DIY U
"Eleemosynary institutions have real and serious flaws, but they exist to empower the weak. They are necessary to empower the weak. If you rend them asunder, you will expose the weak to the predations of the strong. This is so fundamental that I'm surprised it even needs to be brought up. If it weren't scandalously unethical, I'd propose an experiment: take two sets of kids who barely got through a weak school district. Send one set to the local community college, and tell the other set it's free to educate itself under digital…
drorzel | January 27, 2010This Timothy Burke post on the current political moment deserves better than to be buried in the Links Dump. He's beginning to despair because it looks like "there are many things which could happen which would improve the lives of many Americans which are not going to happen and perhaps cannot happen."
Take health care, for example. I can read and parse and think about the proposed legislation that actually exists and see it without hyperbole, as an okay if scattered series of modest initiatives. Whatever. I think I have a fairly good handle on the underlying cultural and social…