Be afraid

I had lunch yesterday with an accountant who insisted on picking up the tab. When the waiter brought the check, the accountant pulled out his calculator.

To calculate the tip.

for parents of new middle schoolers--

The single most useful piece of advice I've ever read as a parent of a middle school child:

Andromeda on organization and the middle school child.

Also, 3 years ago a lot of us wrote posts and comments about books and products that had helped our kids deal with middle school.

(fyi: the old site is broken. Can't be edited. That's why the links are slowly deteriorating with no one to fix them...I have no idea what to do about it other than get rich enough to hire someone to copy all the source code and then take the whole thing down.)


posts on middle school & organization:

• mom gets wake-up call at end of school year
  
• accordion files for middle school students
• Donna Goldberg on students' sense of time
• Donna Goldberg's web site
  
• the 3 simple building blocks of success (How to Double Your Child's Grades in School)
• an approach to reading that really works (part one) (How to Double...)
  
• an approach to reading that really works (part two) (How to Double...)
  

my two favorite middle school books:

• The Organized Student by Donna Goldberg
  
• How to Double Your Child's Grades in School by Eugene Schwartz
  

if you decide to go the expanding file route...

The Globe-Weis Fabric Poly Expanding File is amazingly sturdy.

"The Mire" and the middle class squeeze

by Will Okun

Midway through another brilliant lesson on five-paragraph essays, chaos erupts in the back row among the students who do not care. My first-period English class crashes to a standstill as several failing students ignite a hysteria of insults. Other students stew in frustration as they wait for me to restore order and continue the lesson. Sitting in the front row, Kentrail is visibly exasperated that I cannot do my job. Shatara’s teeth and fists are clenched; she stares at me with accusatory anger. Finally, Ronetta screams, “Make them shut up!” Only after the temporary removal of the two instigators six minutes later does the class return to our discussion of thesis statements.

Class time not wasted on discipline is often squandered explaining make-up work to oft-absent students or reviewing remedial skills that should have been learned in early middle school. Intelligent, motivated students like Kentrail, Shatara and Ronetta suffer the most on such days when academic progress is glacial. Too often, their individual brightness is consumed in the mire of the whole. They should not be in this class; they should not be in this school.

“It’s frustrating because we go so slow. Teachers are distracted by students who are not really trying to do anything. They get more attention than the people who are trying to learn,” fumes Shatara. “It’s frustrating when you know that other schools are doing more and learning more.”

As I have described in previous blog posts, our school has too many students who are making no legitimate effort to learn or pass classes. These students attend periodically to socialize, to sell drugs or to alleviate boredom. Some are mandated to attend by the court of law or by a relative. Others are just too young to drop out. They do not carry book bags; they are not in possession of pen or paper. When the hallways and classrooms are in order, these students mourn, “It’s dead as hell in here.” The threat of F’s, parent conferences, detentions, and suspensions are pointless. Unfortunately, no one in the family seems to care. Only the threat of expulsion garners temporary compliance.

How can dedicated students like Shatara receive a proper education amid the havoc created by such a preponderance of “troublesome,” uncaring students?

I'd especially like to hear from teachers on this one.

My own take is that everything about this scene is wrong. Everything.

First of all, the disruptive kids are in trouble. At this point every one of them would likely "qualify" for special ed, which means the school is obligated under the Child Find provisions of IDEA to identify them, test them, and refer them for services. Which the school obviously has no intention of doing.

That would suit me fine if the school went straight to remediation. Pull the disruptive kids out of the class, hire a behavior analyst, and get a behavior management plan in place now with the people to staff it. Restart these students' educations at the spot where they fell, leaped, or were shoved off the track and go from there, using supervised homework sessions, daily assessments, and all the rest of the tools a precision teacher would bring to bear on the situation.

That's for the kids whose needs are manageable within a school serving the general population. The kids who are severely mentally ill and/or dangerous move to a therapeutic school. And, yes, these schools exist; our taxes pay for them.

Every student in this story is then educated in the "least restrictive environment" that meets his needs. For the severely oppositional kids, LRE is a therapeutic school; for the not-so-severely oppositional kids, LRE is a self-contained classroom with a low student-teacher ratio and one-to-one aides if necessary; for Kentrail and Shatara and Ronetta, the least restrictive environment is a classroom filled with other Kentrails and Shatars and Ronettas, and without a bunch of hooligans disrupting the proceedings.

None of that is going to happen, and few amongst us are going to know the reason why, that reason being the fact that schools are not legally obligated to educate the young people in their charge. A parent can sue a hospital that flubs his child's care; a parent may not sue a school that flubs his child's education. It's the child's fault if he didn't learn. Or the parents', or society's or what have you.

Not the school's.

So they do what they do. There's no reason not to.


the middle class, the schools, and the middle class squeeze

This situation has ramifications that go far beyond the damage being done to the individual students in this class.

The folks at Fordham may be cooing over the many "choices" available to the "middle class," but the reality is quite different, as I discovered when I dipped into The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi:

In just twenty years [1981-2001], the number of women filing petitions for bankruptcy had, in reality, increased by 662 percent. As I soon discovered, divorced and single women weren’t the only ones in trouble; several hundred thousand married women filed for bankruptcy along with their husbands.

Our research eventually unearthed one stunning fact. The families in the worst financial trouble are not the usual suspects. They are not the very young, tempted by the freedom of their first credit cards. They are not the elderly, trapped by failing bodies and declining savings accounts. And they are not a random assortment of Americans who lack the self-control to keep their spending in check. Rather, the people who consistently rank in the worst financial trouble are united by one surprising characteristic. They are parents with children at home. Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse.

[snip]

Bankruptcy has become deeply entrenched in American life. This year, more people will end up bankrupt than will suffer a heart attack. More adults will file for bankruptcy than will be diagnosed with cancer. … And, in an era when traditionalists decry the demise of the institution of marriage, Americans will file more petitions for bankruptcy than for divorce…

[snip]

The rise in housing costs has become a family problem. Home prices have grown across the board (particularly in larger urban areas), but the brunt of the price increases have fallen on families with children. Our analysis shows that the median home value for the average childless couple increased by 26 percent between 19874 and 2001—an impressive rise in less than twenty years. (Again, these and all other figures are adjusted for inflation.) For married couples with children, however, housing prices shot up 78 percent during this period—three times faster. To put this in dollar terms, in 1984 the average married couple with young children owned a house worth $72,000. Less than twenty years later, a similar family bought a house worth $128,000—an increase of more than $50,000. The growing costs made a big dent in the family budget, as monthly mortgage costs made a similar jump, despite falling interest rates….

Why would the average parent spent so much money on a home?

[snip]

For many parents, the answer came down to two words so powerful that families would pursue them to the brink of bankruptcy: safety and education. Families put Mom to work, used up the family’s economic reserves, and took on crushing debt loads in sacrifice to these twin gods, all in the hope of offering their children the best possible start in life.

The best possible start begins with good schools, but parents are scrambling to find those schools.

[snip]

Everyone has heard the all-too-familiar news stories about kids who can’t read, gang violence in the schools, classrooms without textbooks, and drug dealers at the school doors.

[snip]

So what does all this have to do with educating middle-class children, most of whom have been lucky enough to avoid the worst failings of the public school system? The answer is simple—money. Failing schools impose an enormous cost on those children who are forced to attend them, but they also inflict an enormous cost on those who don’t.

[snip]

For most middle-class parents, ensuring that their children get a decent education translates into one thing: snatching up a home in the small subset of school districts that have managed to hold on to a reputation of high quality and parent confidence.

[snip]

A study conducted in Fresno (a midsized California metropolis with 400,000 residents) found that, for similar homes, school quality was the single most important determinant of neighborhood prices—more important than radial composition of the neighborhood, commute distance, crime rate, or proximity to a hazardous waste site.

[snip]

By way of example, consider University City, the West Philadelphia neighborhood surrounding the University of Pennsylvania. In an effort to improve the area, the university committed funds for a new elementary school.

The results? At the time of the announcement, the median home value in the area was less than $60,000. Five years later, “homes within the boundaries go for about $200,000, even if they need to be totally renovated.” The neighborhood is otherwise pretty much the same: the same commute to work, the sam distance from the freeways, the same old houses. And yet, in five years families are willing to pay more than triple the price for a home.

the cost to families of declining confidence in the schools

In the early 1970s, not only did most Americans believe that the public schools were functioning reasonably well, a sizable majority of adults thought that public education had actually improved since they were kids. Today, only a small minority of Americans share this optimistic view. Instead, the majority now believes that schools have gotten significantly worse. Fully half of all Americans are dissatisfied with America’s public education system, a deep concern shared by black and white parents alike.

That was in 2003.

Things are worse today.


once more, with feeling

In order to free families from the trap, it is necessary to go to the heart of the problem: public education. Bad schools impose indirect—but huge—costs on millions of middle-class families. In their desperate rush to save their children from failing schools, families are literally spending themselves into bankruptcy. The only way to take the pressure off these families is to change the schools.

The concept of public schools is deeply American. It is perhaps the most tangible symbol of opportunity for social and economic mobility for all children, embodying the notion that merit rather than money determines a child’s future. … As parents increasingly believe that the differences among schools will translate into differences in lifetime chances, they are doing everything they can to buy their way into the best public schools. Schools in middle-class neighborhoods may be labeled “public,” but parents have paid for tuition by purchasing a $175,000 home within a carefully selected school district.

It is time to sound the alarm that the crisis in education is not only a crisis of reading and arithmetic; it is also a crisis in middle-class family economics. At the core of the problem is the time-honored rule that where you live dictates where you go to school. Any policy that loosens the ironclad relationship between location-location-location and school-school-school would eliminate the need for parents to pay an inflated price for a home just because it happens to lie within the boundaries of a desirable school district.

A well-designed voucher program would fit the bill neatly. A taxpayer-funded voucher that paid the entire cost of educating a child (not just a partial subsidy) would open a range of opportunities to all children. With fully funded vouchers, parents of all income levels could send their children—and the accompanying financial support—to the schools of their choice. Middle-class parents who used state funds to send their kids to school would be able to live in the neighborhood of their choice—or the neighborhood of their pocketbook. Fully funded vouchers would relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.

We recognize that the term “voucher” has become a dirty word in many educational circles. The reason is straightforward: The current debate over vouchers is framed as a public-versus-private rift, with vouchers denounced for draining off much-needed funds from public schools. The fear is that partial-subsidy vouchers provide a boost so that better-off parents can opt out of a failing public school system, while the other children are left behind.

But the public-versus-private competition misses the central point. The problem is not vouchers; the problem is parental choice. Under current voucher schemes, children who do not use the vouchers are still assigned to public schools based on their zip codes. This means that in the overwhelming majority of cases, a bureaucrat picks the child’s school, not a parent. The only way for parents to exercise any choice is to buy a different home—which is exactly how the bidding wars started.

Short of buying a new home, parents currently have only one way to escape a failing public school: Send the kids to private school. But there is another alternative, one that would keep much-needed tax dollars inside the public school system while still reaping the advantages offered by a voucher program. Local governments could enact meaningful reform by enabling parents to choose from among all the public schools in a locale, with no presumptive assignment based on neighborhood. Under a public school voucher program, parents, not bureaucrats, would have the power to pick schools for their children—and to choose which schools would get their children’s vouchers. Students would be admitted to a particular public school on the basis of their talents, their interests, or even their lottery numbers; their zip codes would be irrelevant. Tax dollars would follow the children, not the parents’ home addresses, and children who live in an $50,000 house would have the same educational opportunities as those who live in a $250,000 house.

Unfortunately, the flaw in this logic is that many children living in $250,000 houses are in trouble, too.

Still, I'd take it.

power to the people

I am seriously tired of our policy elites. (Scroll down for observation re: "[constructivism] works well enough with middle- and upper-middle-class kids who get plenty of structure in the rest of their lives.")

Do policy elites have any idea what is actually going on inside public schools?

At all?

Or do they just sit around swapping clichés?

"Middle- and upper-middle class kids who get plenty of structure in the rest of their lives:" these are not real people. Yes, I do know a number of moms who are capable of putting dinner on the table at the same time every night, and whose kids have a regular bedtime: feats the one low-income mom I know also managed to pull off when her son was a boy. One of my pals here is so on top of things I have occasionally threatened to ship C. off to her house for a week or two or possibly three. "That will straighten you out," I say.

That mom spent this year teaching her kids math.

A child can have dinner with the family at 5; he can have bedtime at 8; he still needs explicit instruction in arithmetic.

So here's my question.

Why is it that policy elites, unions, and ed schools all have say and we don't?

I'd put money on it that if you scrolled back through the years and compared parent decisions about where and how their kids should be educated^* to the corresponding decisions made for parents by policy elites, union leaders, ed schools and all the rest of the stakeholders in the system,^** you would find that parents have consistently made the better choices.

Here's Joe Williams:

One of the most overlooked tools of modern school reform is the concept of power--who has it, who wants it, and who needs it. One reason so little changes in education is because the people who hold the cards are always the same, no matter what the popular reforms of the day involve. We have tried centralization of decision-making power and decentralization of decision-making power. We've raised standards and enacted zero-tolerance policies. We've beaten into the ground such catch phrases as "lifelong learners" and "capacity building." Yet, in all these reform efforts, parents have never really been allowed to be the ones who get to make the ultimate decision: choosing their child's school. Bureaucrats and politicians always seem to get the last word, even though parents have the best odds of making decisions that put their kids first.

Cheating Our Kids
by Joe Williams
p. 214-215

I've decided to start a collection of what do parents want stories.

This one's my favorite:

One of the most interesting aspects of FT that is rarely discussed in the technical reports is the way schools selected the models they would implement. The model a school adopted was not selected by teachers, administrators, or central office educrats. Parents selected the model. Large assemblies were held where the sponsors of the various models pitched their model to groups of parents comprising a Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) for the school. Administrators were usually present at these meetings and tried to influence parents' decisions. Using this selection process, the Direct Instruction model was the most popular model among schools; DI was implemented in more sites during FT than any other model. Yet among educrats, DI was the dark horse. Most educrats' bets would undoubtedly have been placed on any of the models but the Direct Instruction model. The model developed by the Illinois preschool teacher who didn't even have a teaching credential, much less a Ph.D. in education, was not expected by many educrats to amount to much, especially since it seemed largely to contradict most of the current thinking.

The Story Behind Project Follow Through
by Bonnie Grossen

^*on those few occasions when parents were allowed to make a decision, that is
^**note: I exclude students and parents from that category

Grade compression at colleges and universities, II

It's inevitable that, the more students catch on that B's are the new low, the more fervently they want A's.

As the dual forces of student evaluations and cynical burnout continue to exert upwards pressure on faculty grading practices, wants becomes expects becomes deserves.

Only those few who believe that grades should still mean something, and that they should somehow reward those whose work is truly distinguished, get to see the somersaults that the mediocre majority will turn to argue for A's.

From two of my B+ students (all identifing details removed):

I am writing to you with concern regarding my grade... I was just wondering what areas you felt I needed to improve on to earn an A because I completed all of my work, papers and participated in class as best as I could have. Is there anything I can do to have my grade reconsidered?

-----

I just checked my final grade online and saw that I got a B+. Can you tell me the breakdown of my grades? Most of my problem sets were V+ [no, they weren't] and I attended every class and tried to participate in lectures. The only reason why I am asking is because I felt confident that I would receive an A in the course.

What surprised me about these two students in particular was that each seemed to be putting in so little effort (as evinced, for example, by their papers--thickets of typos in what looked like stream-of-consciousness keyboarding, printed out and never actually read) that I'd assumed they were at peace with B grades. It never dawned on me that they might be expecting A's.

At least as disturbing is the most likely explanation for this expectation: presumably, all their other professors are giving them A's--along with every other student who shows up and turns things in.

All the worse for those who actually deserve top grades--particularly the left-brained crowd whose greatest strengths are typically more in academics than in extracurriculars and other varieties of resume-stuffing, not to mention career networking, schmoozing, and grade grubbing.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

speaking of politics

Well, now that Rory has weighed in on John Edwards, I'm inspired to fill you in on my brief email exchange with Joe Williams. Joe is Executive Director of Democrats for Education Reform and the author of Cheating Our Kids, which is a fantastic book: a page-turner. Somewhere in Cheating Our Kids (I can't find the page & neither can he) Joe predicts that when the leadership of civil rights organizations passes from the WWII generation to younger leaders, the alliance between the teachers' unions will end and the power the unions wield over the Democratic Party will weaken significantly.

I asked Joe whether this development means that day has arrived, and he replied that if it hasn't, it's close.

If so, we are living in interesting times, all of a sudden.

my progress bar

Here's today's progress bar from my Scrivener program.

This little doohickey is incredibly motivating and reinforcing, although when you go into word deficit by cutting sections things can get hairy, motivation-wise.

Say you start a writing session by cutting a thousand words. The Session target bar doesn't count anything you write until you've made up the lost thousand. Scrivener needs to create a Session target for revising & cutting.

The first chapter of Temple's & my new book was huge....was it 60 pages? 80? I've forgotten. It was so out of control that our editor told me not to revise it until I'd revised all the other chapters. That way I'd know what needed to stay and what could go.

So that's what I did, and when I finally re-read the first chapter, a year after I'd written it or thereabouts, I was aghast. What a mess --- what a long-winded, barely comprehensible, almost psychotically verbose mess!

I went at that thing with a buzz saw.

After our editor read it, she called and said, "You cut that thing to pieces."

She sounded surprised. Surprised and happy.

Scrivener needs a doohickey that rewards and reinforces reductions in Word Count.

Edwards is a son of a ....

Edwards admits to extramarital affair - CNN.com

Edwards is a son of a something... besides for being a son of a mill worker.

lagging technology diffusion in real life

Remember this observation from The Race Between Education and Technology?

It is clear that the farmer with a relatively high level of education has tended to adopt productive innovations earlier than the farmer with relatively little education.

Greenscaper Bob describes the same phenomenon in indoor plantscaping, where he says the U.S. is 30 years behind Europe:

If we don't understand the difference between capillary action and osmosis, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we don’t understand that plants have no intelligence to start and stop “drinking” water, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we believe a clay pot and saucer is the best way to maintain plants in containers, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we think the term “self-watering” is synonymous with sub-irrigation, it's a symptom of an education problem.

I see these beliefs expressed every day of my blogging research on the web. They lead to an opinion that our level of science education in the field of gardening and horticulture is woefully weak. Is this an anomaly peculiar to the field of horticulture or is it symptomatic of our overall education?

David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece yesterday titled The Biggest Issue and benchmarked our education decline around 1975. I’ve been an eyewitness to much of this in the field of “ornamental” horticulture, which attracted high school students to land grant colleges by the thousands in the ‘70s.

This was the time of the biggest houseplant boom of all time. Ferns in macramé hangers were everywhere. As a mid-life career changer from IBM and the business of data processing I was caught up in it too. I seriously thought of buying a plant shop in Southern California. Instead, I found my way into the field of interior plantscaping.

That was the beginning of my discovery about the techno-averse, anti-business character of the ornamental horticulture world. As I discovered the prevailing practice of “poke and pour” interior plant maintenance, I started looking for better ways to water and found them.

I didn’t have to look too far. Sub-irrigation planters were already well established in Europe by the 1970s. They were, however, essentially unknown here in the U.S. Over thirty years later, thanks to our woefully deficient science education they still are.

Our education system is the top rung issue that will most likely guide my vote in the coming presidential election. I believe it is the issue that will have the greatest impact on the quality of life of our young people and future generations. We simply cannot afford to have “flat earth” believers competing in a flat earth global economy.

Greenscaper Bob
It's Our Education, Stupid
Inside Urban Green

Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

C-a-l-cu-lus AP, hardest class in his-to-ry

New words for a song stuck in my head.

Hilarious argument for school choice

You can’t make this stuff up. Although this clip is from the popular "Yes Prime Minister” British TV series, it seems to reflect many real life discussions about school choice that take place in our country.

But apparently The YM and YPM series are admired for showing the reality of political life combined with British humor. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was very impressed with the series and once stated: "Its closely observed portrayal of what goes on in the corridors of power has given me hours of pure joy".

yes (Prime) Minister

This clip is chock full of tragicomic lines and it’s hard to pick a favorite. Certainly this one where Humphrey attempts to defend the very existence of the national education department is priceless.

Humphrey: “Who would plan for the future?

Prime Minister: Are you
saying that education today in Britain is what the department PLANNED?

Humphrey: Well, uh, no, of course not!

H/T to Jay P. Greene.

the unbearable earnestness of PaperToolsPro

STUDENT PITFALLS WHEN WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

1. Writing research papers is not perceived to be fun.
2. Writing note cards is tedious.
3. Writing research papers requires organizational skills students often lack or do not apply to research assignments.
4. The value of documenting the source of information does not make sense to students.
5. Students often think they put information in their own words, but they don’t.
6. Beginning an outline or draft from a blank screen is intimidating.
7. MLA, APA, Chicago Style…Students don’t understand it is important to format documentation accurately.


I'd say that about covers it.


I didn't mean it

I shouldn't be making sport of PaperToolsPro, which looks like it may be a terrific program for students -- (here's the description on the Scrivener web site).

The pitfalls list reminded me of my all-time favorite National Enquirer headline: "Do You Know the 1,110 Reasons Why Marriage Makes Women Sick?" So I had to post.

But if PaperToolsPro has actually done something about all of these pitfalls, a copy of it may be in my future, too, along with SuperMemo.

Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve

(full-size figure here)

I've always wanted to know this!


PaperToolsPro explains the chart:

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve reveals that we forget new information rapidly unless we review it.

After 20 minutes, we recall 58.2%

1 hour 44.2%

9 hours 35.8%

1 day 33.7%

2 days 27.8%

6 days 25.4%

31 days 21.1%

SuperMemo is in my future, but I haven't figured out which one.

I'll probably have to try the online version, depending on whether I can figure out the user interface.

help for the afflicted, part 2

I've launched my anti-procrastination project this summer, and have just this afternoon made a major discovery: Scrivener has a progress bar! (source: Wine on the Keyboard)

This isn't a great photo of it, meaning you may not be able to see, from this image, how reinforcing this thing is.

I'm trying to get a revision of my book proposal started, which means I'm in Writer Hell, so I set 500 words as my "Session target" (a reasonable goal) which meant that I could see progress at once.

The reason I haven't posted a Screen Grab of my own highly reinforcing "Project Target" icon is that it disappears the minute I open Screen Grab.

Also in the category of riveting computer problems: I can't log onto flickr anymore, although I can still upload photos from my Desktop for some unknown reason.

These are the kinds of distractions the "Project Targets" progress bar was designed to defeat.

I love Scrivener. Love it, love it, love it. I wrote all of Temple's (2nd) book on it, and I have everything in ONE Scrivener Project: all the drafts, all the research, all the interviews --- plus all my ktm stuff, which is a whole lot of stuff.

I love Scrivener so much I'm going to try to see if I can get C. to use it. Thus far, he's been resistant.

Oh, well. He may have to wait until school life gets a whole lot more painful to see the beauty of this thing.


bonus points

I just noticed this comment under the "writer's paradise" post:

For longer blog articles scrivener is a god send. It tends to be a little overkill for shorter ones.

(off topic, you write about apple and just now found out about scrivener? What next, iPhoto?)

Scrivener
Scrivener - A Writer's Paradise
help for the afflicted, part 1
procrastinating chickens (the perils of long-duration behavior)
Piers Steel's meta-theory of procrastination
"Structured Procrastination" by John Perry

news flash: happiness inequality down

from the TIMES:

Despite the fact that income inequality — the chasm between rich and poor — has grown to levels rarely seen outside the third world, happiness inequality in the United States seems to have declined sharply over the past 35 years. And that is not because everyone is just that much more cheerful.

According to new research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the happiness gap between blacks and whites has fallen by two-thirds since the early 1970s. The gender gap (women used to be happier than men) has disappeared. Most significant, the disparity in happiness within demographic groups has also shrunk: the unhappiest 25 percent of the population has gotten a lot happier. The happiest quarter is less cheerful.

It seems odd that happiness would become more egalitarian over a period in which the share of the nation’s income sucked in by the richest 1 percent of Americans rose from 7 percent to 17 percent. In fact, the report does find a growing happiness gap between Americans with higher levels of education and those with less, which is roughly in line with the widening pay gap between the skilled and unskilled.

from the author of the paper:

Two trends are pretty clear. First, average happiness is roughly unchanged since the 1970’s. And second, happiness inequality — measured here as the variance of happiness — fell pretty dramatically from 1972 until the late 1980’s; this compression has since stalled, and about one third of the total decline has subsequently been reversed.

[snip]

The good news is that the unhappy end of the distribution has become somewhat happier; the bad news is that the happy end has become less happy.

Apparently women either are or are not getting less happy as a group. Who can say?

Off the top of my head, I'm going to guess that it was more fun being rich when you could live off your interest as opposed to the 100 hours of billable time the working rich have to put in these days. When I say "have to," I mean have to, at least in the case of rich attorneys; apparently judges don't give a lot of incompletes.

NBER digest of the shorter hours paper available here.

Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Blooming High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

your afterschooling problems solved!

Ken has posted a link to a fantastic idea for an afterschool program.

You must go and vote; the winner gets $10,000 seed money.

Bronze Inc

A program like this would have solved soooooo many problems for me. Instead of death-marching my middle school school boy through hours of afterschooling, he could have been zipping through these programs, studying and competing with peers (he's so much more focused studying with a friend), developing great study habits, learning high-quality content, earning points, and playing video games after all this has occurred instead of before.

This summer has been great, precisely because I'm not death-marching my kid through hours of summer math and reading. With his massive summer assignment list from Hogwarts, he has more work to do than I ever dreamed of giving him, and he's doing it cheerfully and happily because somebody else, not me, told him to do it. In 7 weeks he's read A Raisin in the Sun, Fahrenheit 451, Angela's Ashes, Last Days of Summer, Angels and Demons, and Guns, Germs, and Steel while also attending Teenscape, the fantastic program our local rec department puts on for 7th & 8th grade kids.

At this point he's 120 pages ahead of schedule and hasn't broken a sweat.

Afterschooling is a tough row to hoe.

A DI/Core Knowledge afterschool program ----- woo hoo!

golden oldy

February 1994:

It's time to recognize that, for many students, real mathematical power, on the one hand, and facility with multidigit, pencil-and-paper computational algorithms, on the other, are mutually exclusive. In fact, it's time to acknowledge that continuing to teach these skills to our students is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive and downright dangerous.

[snip]

Shouldn't we be as eager to end our obsessive love affair with pencil-and-paper computation as we were to move on from outhouses and sundials? In short, we know and should agree that the long-division "gazinta'' (goes into, as in four "goes into'' 31 seven times ... ) algorithm and its computational cousins are obsolete in light of everyday societal realities.

It's Time to Abandon Computational Algorithms
by Steven Leinwand
Education Week

I wonder whether he regrets writing that piece?

Possibly not.

Tyler Cowan on The Race

The most commonly cited culprits for the income inequality in America — outsourcing, immigration and the gains of the super-rich — are diversions from the main issue. Instead, the problem is largely one of (a lack of) education.

[snip]

Starting about 1950, the relative returns for schooling rose, and they skyrocketed after 1980. The reason is supply and demand. For the first time in American history, the current generation is not significantly more educated than its parents. Those in need of skilled labor are bidding for a relatively stagnant supply and so must pay more.

The return for a college education, in percentage terms, is now about what it was in America’s Gilded Age in the late 19th century; this drives the current scramble to get into top colleges and universities. In contrast, from 1915 to 1950, the relative return for education fell, mostly because more new college graduates competed for a relatively few top jobs, and that kept top wages from rising too high.

Professors Goldin and Katz portray a kind of race. Improvements in technology have raised the gains for those with enough skills to handle complex jobs. The resulting inequalities are bid back down only as more people receive more education and move up the wage ladder.

Income distribution thus depends on the balance between technological progress and access to college and postgraduate study. The problem isn’t so much capitalism as it is that American lower education does not prepare enough people to receive gains from American higher education.

[snip]

It doesn’t suffice simply to increase the number of people in college; rather the new students must be prepared to learn. There is, however, no single magic bullet.

Pessimists like Charles Murray, co-author of the much-debated 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” have argued that only so many individuals are educable at a high level. If that were the case, current levels of inequality might be here to stay.

But the evidence suggests that when additional higher education becomes available, it offers returns in the range of 10 to 14 percent per year of college, at least for the first newcomers to enroll.

Nonetheless it will, sooner or later, become increasingly difficult to deliver the gains from college — not to mention postgraduate study — to the entire population. Technology is advancing faster than our ability to educate. So even if inequality declines today, it may well intensify in the future. Even if American education improves at every level, the largely not-for-profit educational sector may simply be less dynamic than the progress of new technologies.

The lesson is this: Economists are homing in on the key to the inequality problem, but don’t think any solution will necessarily last for long.

Why Is Income Inequality in America So Pronounced? Consider Education
Tyler Cowen
Published: May 17, 2007

Ultimately, this is my question: does the race never end?

Or does "skill-biased technology change" just keep going and going and going until pretty soon you have to know calculus to turn on the TV. Speaking of which, we're not too far from that point around here, I often feel. At a minimum, being able to turn on the TV in our family room and actually watch something on it requires either genius-level working memory or months of deliberate practice. The set-up alone is complicated enough, but on top of that Verizon keeps changing the channel line-up. Seeing as how the cheapest package Verizon offers gives you 6 or 7 hundred thousand different channels to choose amongst, knowing where on the number line USA Network is located today is a job for SuperMemo.

I've got to get back to ALEKS. Soon.

Anyways...assuming the education system or the business world is able to create and distribute highly effective, efficient, and advanced education to the masses (the business world appears to be trying), presumably there's still going to be a limit on how far people can go in higher education, or how far they want to go, or maybe just how many genius trainers we can recruit who are patient enough to teach vector autoregression incrementally to the rest of us, step by step, day by day, until we finally get it 10 or 20 years down the line.

Once we reach that limit, then what?


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

closed shop

After nearly 20 years of working as a television writer, I made a radical life decision: to teach English at an L.A. public high school. I felt it was time for me to make a difference, to share my passion for language and literature with the next generation....I braced myself to keep going even if there were times of struggle, of heartbreak, of feeling inadequate and humiliated, even if there were times when I wanted to weep from frustration, even if I sweated through dark nights of the soul overwhelmed by the futility of it all.

And indeed, I have experienced all that. But what's crazy is that I haven't even set foot in a classroom yet.

By state law, I cannot teach in a California public school without a credential from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

[snip]

But just applying to a teaching-credential program has taken me months of pointless, numbing, bewildering toil. I've submitted stacks of applications, online and on paper, along with college transcripts and letters of recommendation. I've written a five-page letter of "self-reflection," completed 45 hours of early field experience, endured a TB test and had my fingerprints taken to prove that I'm not a convicted felon. And that was just to start the actual work: proving I am "highly qualified."

[snip]

I have a bachelor of arts degree in English from Bryn Mawr and have spent my entire adult life as a working writer -- and all I want is to sign up to take the education classes I need before I walk into a classroom. Won't my degree and my life's work qualify me at least to sign up for those classes? Not even close.

Testing my patience
Ellie Herman
LAT

Presidential politics and school vouchers

Will both presidential candidates end up supporting vouchers for public charter schools?

John McCain endorsed the Education Equality Project, thus aligning himself with Al Sharpton and Joel Klein on calling for immediate steps to “Empower parents by giving them a meaningful voice in where their children are educated including public charter schools.”

Strange bedfellows, right?

From McCain’s speech to the Urban League:

If I am elected president, school choice for all who want it, an expansion of Opportunity Scholarships, and alternative certification for teachers will all be part of a serious agenda of education reform.

[Snip]

Under my reforms, parents will exercise freedom of choice in obtaining extra help for children who are falling behind. As it is, federal aid to parents for tutoring for their children has to go through another bureaucracy. They can't purchase the tutoring directly, without dealing with the same education establishment that failed their children in the first place. These needless restrictions will be removed. If a student needs extra help, parents will be able to sign them up to get it, with direct public support.
Some of these reforms, and others, are contained in a Statement of Principles drafted by a group dedicated to finally changing the status quo in our education system. The Education Equality Project has brought together leaders from all across the political spectrum, including school Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City. Chancellor Klein is a strong supporter of charter schools, because he understands that fundamental reform is needed. As he puts it, "in large urban areas the culture of public education is broken. If you don't fix this culture, then you are not going to be able to make the kind of changes that are needed." Among others who share this conviction are Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, Chancellor Michelle Rhee of Washington, and Harold Ford, Junior. You know that a reform movement is truly bipartisan when J.C. Watts and Al Sharpton are both members. And today I am proud to add my name as well to the list of those who support the aims and principles of the Education Equality Project.
But one name is still missing, Senator Obama's. My opponent talks a great deal about hope and change, and education is as good a test as any of his seriousness. The Education Equality Project is a practical plan for delivering change and restoring hope for children and parents who need a lot of both. And if Senator Obama continues to defer to the teachers unions, instead of committing to real reform, then he should start looking for new slogans.

Sounds like a challenge to Obama, who has not formally signed on with either Education Equality Project or the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. It has been reported that Obama agrees with the goal underlying both statements that schools need to improve for all children, but has not stated a preference for one approach or the other.

It will be interesting to see how the debate shapes up as we get nearer to the November elections. Although education may not be the top issue of this presidential race, its relationship to our economic well-being may be garnering the attention of more voters, perhaps helped in part by discussions about this book.

According to some survey results, most African Americans and Hispanics support vouchers. Additionally, in Florida they found that combining a voucher proposal with a requirement that 65 percent of every education dollar be spent in the classroom dramatically increased its support among voters.

I think it’s likely that Obama will come out in support of school vouchers, modifying his position in the same manner he did when he came out in support of offshore oil drilling last week. He may already have a script for supporting vouchers while not totally dismissing the concerns of the teachers unions and other interested groups. How about this?

"At some point, people are going to have to make decisions, do we want to keep on arguing or are we going to get things done? What I will not do, and this has always been my position, is to support a plan that suggests that drilling is the answer to our energy problems vouchers are the answer to our education problems. If we've a plan on the table that I think meets the goals that America has to set, and there are some things in there that I don't like, then, obviously, that's something that, you know, I would consider because that's the nature of how we govern in a democracy.”

I’m as cynical as most anyone when it comes to politics, but I do think it would be a good thing for both presidential candidates to endorse vouchers.