Speaking of credentialism and college tuition

I was bemoaning the fact that 18-year olds today must take on more debt to earn a college degree that will get them a lower-paid job than in previous eras, and a few minutes later came across this:

It’s been eight years since the Great Recession caused many states to scale back their higher education budgets, and the vast majority of states haven’t fully restored that spending despite improvements in the overall economy.

A new report from the research firm Young Invincibles, a millennial advocacy group, finds that 48 states -- all but Alaska and North Dakota -- are spending less per student on higher education than they did before the recession. Louisiana’s funding has fallen the most since the recession (41 percent), followed by Alabama (39 percent) and Pennsylvania (37 percent).

On average, states have cut funding per student by 21 percent since the recession. Tuition at public schools has increased 28 percent over the same period. (Private school tuition has increased about 20 percent in that period, according to the College Board.)

[snip]

Three-quarters of American college students attend public colleges.

As States Cut Funding, Tuition at Public Colleges Soars

Inflation matters, too.

In a low-inflation environment, employees have lower raises and repay debt in more expensive dollars.

Credentialism & "hiring blind"

This is interesting.

According to the Wall Street Journal, some companies are hiring "blind":

Compose is among a handful of companies trying to judge potential hires by their abilities, not their résumés. So-called “blind hiring” redacts information like a person’s name or alma mater, so that hiring managers form opinions based only on that person’s work. In other cases, companies invite job candidates to perform a challenge—writing a software program, say—and bring the top performers in for interviews or, eventually, job offers.

Bosses say blind hiring reveals true talents and results in more diverse hires. And the notion that career success could stem from what you know, and not who you know, is a tantalizing one....

In Hiring without signals, David Henderson raises the possibility that hiring blind could put a dent in credentialism. If companies hire without knowing whether a new employee had a college degree, will college degrees become optional?

I hope so.

One of the more horrifying aspects of the crash and the economic stagnation that has followed, at least for me, has been the brave new world young people must navigate:

a) credential inflation -- jobs that didn't require college degrees before the crash now do (nursing being one example) probably because employers had so many hundreds of applicants for each job that they used college degrees as a sorting mechanism
b) tuition inflation at state universities because tax revenues collapsed
c) higher debt loads for new graduates
d) far lower inflation than in times gone by, with the result that today's college graduate will be repaying student loans in more expensive dollars (and with lower raises) than previous generations

Put those four together, and we have a generation of college students forced to go into debt that's higher and harder to repay than the debt taken on by previous generations, all for the sake of acquiring a job previous generations could hold without going to college at all.

Could blind hiring change this?

Robert Pondiscio, education reform, and the white working class, part 1

Robert Pondiscio has a terrific article on Donald Trump, education, and blue collar white Americans that we've been talking about on Facebook (come join if you haven't already--!)

If my Dad were alive today—and fifty years younger—I suspect he'd be a Trump voter.

My father got a high school education, enlisted in the Army, and fought in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, he was hired by American Airlines, the only company whose paychecks he would ever cash. In forty-plus years on the job, he went from working as a mechanic to flying transcontinental routes as a flight engineer (a job made obsolete long ago by microprocessors).

He earned enough to move his family from Yonkers to Long Island, with its affordable houses and good schools. His own father had been an immigrant pick-and-shovel man. My Dad did him one better by following the playbook common to men of his moment and mindset: learn a trade, word hard, play by the rules, and things will work out. On the day he dropped me off at college (I was the first in my family to attend), he was still badgering me to learn TV repair, plumbing, or heating and air conditioning. College was fine, but its benefits seemed nebulous to Depression-era guys like Dad. It wouldn't hurt, he insisted, to have "a skill to fall back on."

Within a generation, however, his kind of life and the playbook he followed have largely ceased to exist.

[snip]

The ground has not merely shifted beneath the feet of blue collar white Americans with no college degree; it has liquefied. "You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age," Frum notes. "They are pissed off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, 'That's my guy.'" If he were my age today, my Dad would almost certainly be struggling among them. The country that allowed him to become upwardly mobile through sweat, toil, and time—not credentials and connections—is gone.

As this new sobriety over the issues animating Trump supporters, if not Trump himself, settles in, I'm hoping for a parallel rethinking among education reformers. What, if anything, can be done to bring this huge contingent of pissed-off Americans, or at least their children, in for a softer landing before they give up entirely?

Frankly, we missed it. With our focus on closing the achievement gap between blacks and whites, framing reform as the "civil rights issue of our time," and the attention and praise we have heaped on inner-city charter schools—one of reform's few bona fide success stories—we have tacitly made education reform a race-based endeavor. In doing so, we largely overlooked a crisis that's been hiding in plain sight for years. There are about twice as many non-Hispanic whites as blacks living below 150 percent of the poverty line in the U.S. It's a fair bet that their kids aren't doing very well in school—and that they see Donald Trump as "my guy."

A couple of things.

First (and I can't remember whether I've been saying this on ktm, believe it or not), although I was a strong (and public) supporter of NCLB from the get-go, I realized pretty early on that the race-based aspect of NCLB was a problem.

Being from the heartland myself, it's possible I was more aware than some of the changes taking place outside big cities and affluent suburbs. I've gone home to central Illinois every year of my adult life; I've seen those changes firsthand. (Of course, I've seen the same changes taking the Amtrak out of New York City into the small towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.)

However, as a white parent sending children to predominantly-white suburban public schools, I had another vantage point that may have been more eye-opening: the new law and its supporters gave districts like mine a free pass.

Once NCLB became law, our district became high-quality by definition. No matter what our administrators did, no matter what cockamamy programs they embraced, no matter how many tutors we parents hired, no matter how much reteaching we did, our school was good because our kids did better on the state tests than underprivileged black and Hispanic kids attending urban schools.

Virtually everyone I knew believed (and still believe today) that all white suburban schools are better than all urban schools, period.

A couple of you will remember my adventures trying to get my district simply to perceive the fact that KIPP, in the Bronx, had an algebra pass rate that was double my district's. Doug Sundseth actually created a bar chart to illustrate.^* 

I couldn't do it. I would look people straight in the eye and say "KIPP has 80% of its 8th grade students passing Regents 1 in 8th grade; we have 40%" and ---- nothing. Blank stares.

The one time I did manage to get a rise out of a fellow parent, she protested, saying: "KIPP has to have higher scores. They have to fundraise."

Which, actually, is true: KIPP had to show results, my district didn't.

But no one saw the problem with this state of affairs. By definition, no matter what, our schools were superior because our schools were affluent and white. The great injustice of the day was that inner-city black and Hispanic kids couldn't attend excellent schools like ours.

Before NCLB, I'm told, my district was much more modest in its claims, and much more realistic. Each year students in all grades took a standardized test, much like days of old when each year students took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills or some such, and each year the then-superintendent would tell parents that student achievement in our district fell roughly in the middle of student achievement across all Westchester schools.

Roosevelt's minimum wage

Education reform's race-based narrative has always reminds me of a story my mom told me about my grandfather during the Great Depression.

He was working at a gas station when Roosevelt created the minimum wage.

His boss immediately lowered my grandfather's wage to the minimum.

That was NCLB in my district.

Again, I say this as a person who supported the law privately and publicly--and who would support it still today, in some variant.


^* I can't link to Doug's chart because, lo and behold, the original kitchen table math is down because Outlook has been down so I didn't get the email invoice etc, etc, .... dealing with all that now & will include the link when the site is back up.

Liberal education is more fun

In the Telegraph:

What's wrong with education for education's sake?
Should a career be the focus of education? Michael Mercieca, CEO of Young Enterprise says 'yes', Kieran McLaughlin, head of Durham School says 'no'

Kieran McLaughlin, head Durham School

"What’s the point of an education? It’s easy in this time of measurement, targets and league tables to lose sight of what the primary purpose of our schooldays should be: to acquire a knowledge of the culture, history and intellectual progress of our civilisation, as well as of those that have gone before.

The epitome of an education should be the Arnoldian “best of what has been thought and said” and the measure of any civilisation, of any culture, is the extent to which learning is held as important.

From the ancient Greeks, through the Arabic, Chinese and others up to the present day, the cultures which have most achieved greatness have been those which have fostered learning for its own sake and a scholarly endeavor.

To continue to make this progress, to develop technologically or to simply think about things in a different way, we need the bedrock of our forebears’ knowledge to build on.

Newton’s famous quotation that he stood on the shoulders of giants applies to more than just science, and new ideas across the disciplines come from a constant reworking of the old.

However there is a much more immediate reason for pursuing learning for its own sake: it’s great fun.

Anyone who has ever taught a child – whether it be how to ride a bike, why the dinosaurs became extinct or how to use Pythagoras’ theorem – will have seen the light in their eyes when they have finally mastered a tricky concept.

Those Eureka moments are what make teachers continue in the profession, as they find joy in witnessing the joy of learning.

Intellectual thirst is hard-wired into us as human beings and it continues in us beyond childhood. A greater knowledge and understanding of the world leads to a greater appreciation of its beauty and rigour, and as a society and as individuals we are the richer for it."

Fans of liberal education are on the defensive.

Expert witness, 8th grade edition

This "Op Doc," a verbatim re-enactment of a legal transcript, is both obnoxious and hilarious.

Obnoxious because the filmmaker elected to give the smart person a Northern accent, the dumb person a Southern accent.

Hilarious because the expert witness, who was paid $940 for his services, actually cannot do middle-school math.



Verbatim: Expert Witness

The “expert witness” in this case would not answer questions without his “formula sheets,” which were computer models used to reconstruct accidents. When asked to back up his work with basic calculations, he deflected, repeatedly derailing the proceedings. The lawyer’s questioning became increasingly specific, until the conflict revolved around two short words with very different meanings: “won’t” versus “can’t.”

The deposition is a warning for experts who rely heavily on technology. When it comes to expertise, knowing how to plug numbers into software is not a substitute for understanding the subject matter.

Jerome Groopman on replication

I've been mulling over the replication issue, not least because I was using a lot of social science research for the book. Given that our topic is the cognitive unconscious, I was especially worried because the research on priming may be especially suspect.

I ended up jettisoning studies I had originally intended to include, just to be on the safe side (assuming there is a safe side).

I find this observation by Jerome Groopman helpful:

I have been intrigued by the controversy over the Open Science Collaboration, a loosely organized group of researchers who seek to reproduce the findings of published studies in a variety of fields. As the head of a laboratory, I know how daunting this can be. Even the most trivial deviation from a technical protocol—culturing cells, quantifying proteins, detecting RNA—can make an experiment difficult to replicate. A basic-science laboratory like mine is a relatively controlled environment compared with the human body, so it’s not surprising that confirming findings from clinical research, particularly experiments involving the mind and behavior, is even harder. In August, the Open Science Collaboration reported that it had reattempted a group of studies from the fields of cognitive and social psychology and failed to reproduce the results of nearly two-thirds of them. This should not be taken as an indication that the original researchers were either sloppy or dishonest. But it does suggest that we should regard such results with a skeptical eye, especially since experimental studies in psychology are too quickly touted in the general media as revealing fundamental truths about our nature.

The Most Notable Medical Findings of 2015

Il Est Ne Le Divin Enfant

Merry Christmas

(I'm going to see if we can get an in-focus photo taken on Sunday...)

2015

A big year.

Andrew graduated high school in June and, in August, moved into Jimmy's group home.

His move was sudden and a shock to everyone's system; we hadn't planned to move him to a group home until he was 22. But a room came open in Jimmy's house, which is of course where we had hoped Andrew would live, and the system changed, so if we didn't take that spot, we wouldn't have a spot at all.

Apparently New York is now filled with aging parents living with aging developmentally disabled children ... and so far I haven't been able to figure out what, exactly, is going on.

It's possible there's another 'reform' underway, similar to deinstitutionalization; the literature we've been given to read inveighs against the horrors of developmentally developed adults having to share bedrooms in group homes. Apparently, living alone in an apartment with a succession of aides coming in and out respects human dignity; living with 6 other people in a house with aides coming in and out doesn't. That seems to be the idea.

Beyond that, the other concept seems to be that developmentally disabled adults should have homes of their own ----- funded and staffed by parents?

I can't tell. (Very odd not to be able to parse the politics of a situation you're directly involve in.)

So that's Andrew. Safe and sound, it looks like.

Now that he's settled, we know where we want to be next: down the road from the group home, in walking distance. So we're working on that.

Chris is in his senior year at NYU (imagine!) -- and, very big news, has just learned he's been accepted by NYC Teaching Fellows for next year! He found out on the way home when he checked his spam filter.

As for me, I've finished a draft of my book, and have two final exercise sets to edit and revise (Katie Beals did first drafts, thank heavens .... )

The sad news: Surfer and Abby have died, both on the day after Thanksgiving. Abby's death has hit me especially hard. She was with me all the time, often sitting directly on my feet if possible.

The happy news: I've regained my composure sufficiently to have figured out what's next, and that is a puppy from MuddyBay Retrievers.

Last but not least: I have blogging time again!

Very excited to get back to ktm... I've been away far too long.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

"Sit and get"

I actually hadn't heard that one. (Well, I think I had, but I'd forgotten....)

So we've got:

Sit and get
Drill and kill
Talk and chalk
Guide on the side

Did traditional teachers have slogans about the badness of student-centered classrooms?

I don't think they did.

Comments needed

If you have time to comment on Barry and Katharine's new article at The Atlantic, please do!

Help desk - is this question worded properly?

This problem is from Engageny math. Here's the sheet I assume it appeared on. Grade 2 - Module 3.

Here's Andrew Gelman.

Speaking as a writer, and as a parent who spent a lot of time teaching my son and myself grade-school math, I don't like the wording at all.

"Sally did some counting" ---- the word "count" means count by ones, especially to a 2nd grade child.

Plus the question about why Sally did what she did invites commentary on Sally, not Sally's method.

Is there a way to ask this question that makes more sense?

And is there a reason to ask it this way -- to ask a student to analyze Sally's answer -- rather than to ask the student to use 1s and 10s to count up to 214?

I have to say .... offhand, I see no reason to ask this question this way.

I would much rather see this as a story problem about giving change.

Sally has pennies and dimes in her pocket.
Her friend Jane sells her a glass of lemonade for $2.14.
Sally gives her $1.77.
How many more pennies and dimes does Sally owe?

That wording doesn't produce the specific sequence, of course ....

What if you just said, "Count up from 177 to 214 using the fewest (whole) numbers you can. You can count by 1s or skip-count by 10s."

Here's a question.

Does "skip counting" by 10s only mean 10, 20, 30, etc.?

Can it mean 177, 187, 197?

Against grit

Give Up 

New research shows that grit can be costly and unnecessary.

What if it’s more important to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, and know when to walk away?

For a recent study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, researchers from the University of Southern California and Northeastern University put hundreds of participants through a series of three studies on grit. In each, the researchers quizzed subjects about how “gritty” they are, based on how much they agree with statements like, “Setbacks don’t discourage me” and “I finish whatever I begin.”

The first test was a set of anagrams, or word scrambles, which participants were rewarded for solving by being entered into a $100 lottery for each correct answer. Sprinkled amid the do-able anagrams were 16 unsolvable words and 21 very difficult ones, like “kismet.” The participants who ranked higher on the grit assessment attempted fewer anagrams overall—a sign they didn’t skip the difficult or unsolvable ones like their less determined peers did.

Next came a computer-game exercise, which the researchers rigged such that some participants would feel like they were losing for much of the game. The grittier subjects worked harder when they were losing, but not when they were winning.

For the final test, the researchers gave the subjects a math game, which was also rigged so that some of the participants felt like they were fighting an uphill battle. They also gave the participants an offer: When things got tough, they could either drop out of the experiment and get $1 for their troubles, or they could press on and get $2 if they won, but nothing if they lost. Grittier people didn’t solve any more math problems than their lazier counterparts, even though they felt more optimistic about the test than the others. They were, however, more likely to continue the game when they were losing, even though they risked walking away with nothing.

It would seem, then, that grit comes with a downside.

Campaign

Save Our Schools

My district has completely lost its mind.

• Super’s plan: replace college prep with “workplace” prep
• Teacher-centered v. learner-centered classrooms 
• "Fast trends"
• Teachers “taking risks”

I'm hoist by my own petard, of course.

All that time spent ousting the last superintendent, only to amass further evidence that it can always be worse.

Varsity math

At the Wall Street Journal.

Not sure whether it's behind a pay wall.

Looking for puppies...

This is funny.

(To me.)

I've mentioned several times becoming a Fed watcher in the wake of the crash. Which puts me in a tiny little group of about 5 people in the country:

Using polling data for the US, Binder (2015) documents that the US public lacks knowledge about monetary policy. In particular, only one in every three Americans was able to correctly identify the chair of the Federal Reserve System. Very few were able to predict low levels of inflation when asked about inflation over next ten years. Nor did they appear to display much eagerness to learn about the Fed and monetary policy. In terms of social media, numbers of Twitter and Facebook followers of the Federal Reserve System do not appear remarkable. In fact, FBI, the CIA, and Paul Krugman, among others, have more followers than the entire Federal Reserve System. Google searches confirm this paucity of interest. Total online searches for macroeconomic variables like GDP, the unemployment rate, and inflation are consistently topped by online searches for puppies.

Inflation Targeting and Expectations

Well....one thing I will say.

It's a lot easier to find puppies on the Internet than GDP (never went back to trend), the unemployment rate (employment to population ratio still up by 3 points, even for prime working age adults), or inflation (low and going lower).

Saving the hard stuff for home

Auntie Anne writes:

This has been our experience as well. Teachers are always trying to make "learning fun!", which means no boring stuff like worksheets and drills, but lots of group chatting/working, lots of craft work, lots of "exploration" in the classroom.

Still, the hard stuff has to happen, so they just send it home at night. Instead of school being where kids work, and home being where they can play and relax, the opposite is now true.

Meanwhile, the people who have the burden of getting kids through the not-fun part of their education end up being the parents who have to get their kids to get their homework done.

That's what suddenly hit me, the other day, talking to the mother of a second grade child who is melting down over her homework.

What is her child doing during the day?

I also realized that one aspect of Morningside Academy I haven't stressed is the fact that students there don't do homework.

Interestingly, I don't recall Kent Johnson telling us that Morningside kids don't do homework. I found out later, when I visited a precision teaching school in CT, where the kids did lots of homework. The principal told me that Kent's philosophy was that Morningside students worked hard during the day and should be free to play after school. She may have been wrong, of course, but in fact I don't think I saw children take homework home during the two weeks I attended the Summer Institute.

I definitely didn't see teachers collect homework.

So think about that.

Morningside teaches children in grades K through 8.

It guarantees that each students will make two years' progress in one year's time, in their subject of greatest difficulty, or tuition will be refunded. Most or all students are there because they're having difficulty in their regular schools.

And they make two years of progress in just one year without doing homework.

I know I've told this story before, but by the time we finally pulled C. out of our schools here, I had recurring images of the school scooping up heaping armloads of his childhood and tossing them in the trash.

(Does anyone remember Carolyn J. setting up the "FWOT" category on the old ktm? I sure do. Had never encountered the acronym before.)

More from Anonymous:

Yup. This was our experience as well. Soft, touchy feely classroom activities, and the hard stuff came home. Not only did it come home, it came home with a child who hadn't received any instruction about how to do whatever it was (and this was middle school).

Why can't they get it all done in the 6-7 hours the kids are in school? There should be no homework in K-8. Frankly, I don't think there should be homework in high school either unless they go over to a university model and drastically reduce the amount of time in class. K-8ers need time to be kids, and high school students need time to learn who they are beyond their schoolwork.

And chemprof:

The whole idea of homework with kids this age does mean that you are asking them to do the most intense academic work when they are totally wiped out.

That said, by second grade she needs to know her addition and subtraction facts (and if she doesn't, that's something they should be working on at home). They are starting to do multi-digit addition and subtraction, and that's tough without knowing the facts. That's where we are right now (2A Singapore Math), and without those math facts, we'd have lots of tears.

Since we are homeschooling, we do a lot of our heavy work in the morning or early afternoon. Sometimes we do work in the evenings, but only if she's in the mood. But we are also working on a checklist, so she's got a lot of control over what she does on a given day.

This is a great example of how FedUpMom says our educational system is neither traditional or progressive, but the worst of both. A real traditional system would have them doing the hard work all day, with a little homework to reinforce it at night. In a real progressive system, students would do projects and group work all day in school, with a lot more choice of activity, but then not have homework. Instead, they do the projects but follow up with homework that they aren't prepared to do.

And--ding! ding! ding!--lgm's district takes the cake yet again:

Well, the hard stuff didnt come home here. The tears come during prep for the state math test...when the district tries to cram the top kids into earning a 3. Most of the year is spent in remediation to benefit the included and poverty. The parent of the lad needs to afterschool like everyone else that is serious.

My conclusion: things have gotten worse.

C. didn't have lots of onerous homework to do--and I did start taking his math homework away from him & doing it myself at one point, as education realist advises.

Taking homework away from a conscientious child, by the way, is easier said than done. I took C's math homework away because I was trying to accelerate him so he could take algebra in 8th grade, which meant that he needed to do math practice well ahead of the homework being sent home. But C., only in 5th grade at that point, absolutely could not stand the idea that we were lying to the teacher and doing things wrong. So I didn't do it often.

Anyway, C. didn't have lots of onerous homework, so our time was taken up with reteaching, as opposed to reteaching and beaucoup homework, which may be where things stand today.

Help desk - math HW

What's the story with this little boy's homework? (And how old do you think he is? I'm guessing 2nd grade - ?)

If you click on the link, you'll see a photo of a little guy crying, presumably about his math homework. The worksheet is titled "Using Mental Math to Add" or "Doing Mental Math to Add."

This photo was posted. Watch what happened next.

Assuming he's crying over the worksheet (I have no reason to think he's not) -- what's the problem?

By this point, would he know his addition facts?

Or is he having to do these problems without knowing his facts by heart?

Is there something else going on?

One thing I've become concerned by of late: children spending their days engaged in mini lessons and peer discussion, then doing the 'hard stuff' at home, when they're tired.

I was talking to the mother of a second grade child here who has some sensory issues. The little girl is getting completely overwhelmed at night, trying to do her homework. She melts down and sobs unless her other is in the room with her. Even with her mother by her side, she struggles to get through the work.

I asked how much homework she's doing, and it sounded like a lot. Too much. In math alone, she has a full worksheet to do and several minutes of computer practice.

Listening to the mom, I suddenly realized: it's entirely possible students here are doing no worksheets during class time at all.

The kids have to do worksheets because Common Core, but worksheets aren't constructivist and we are now a Tony Wagner district so .... maybe all the worksheets have to happen at home. Out of sight, out of mind.

But that means kids go through a full day of school and a full raft of after school activities before they start the real work.

A loss is a loss

x = opening balance, index fund
y = monthly deposit to index fund
z = 1 - % by which market has declined. (For example, if the previous balance was $100, and the market was down by 2%, z would equal 0.98.)



I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Ed and I were trying to figure out what to do about our 401(k).

What we're told to do, and what we did do during the 17-month bear market of 2007-2009, is nothing.

That's John Bogle: "Don't do something. Just stand there."

That's what we did.

We stood there for the entire 17 months.

Worse than that: we continued to contribute money.

Ed finally took a close look at his Vanguard statement last week. Seven years later. He found that for the first several months of the bear market, his balance stayed the same.

Which meant that every penny he and NYU were putting into the fund, month after month after month, was instantly burned up in the market. Every penny. Not one survived.

Then at some point, presumably in October 2008, the account balances started going down. Which meant that not only was every new penny being burned up, but now the old pennies were being disappeared as well.

17 months of this.

We're not doing that again.

A paper loss is a real loss

The money we lost didn't come back.

New money came in.

That may sound like a distinction without a difference, but it's not.

The reason the market made such huge gains after 2011 was that the Fed did quantitative easing. If the Fed hadn't done quantitative easing, there was no reason for stocks to go back up. The Bank of Japan didn't do quantitative easing when they hit zero, and Japan's stock market declined for two decades, losing 3/4 of its value in that time.

This is America, and the Fed did do quantitative easing, so all things equal I assume they'll do it again if need be.

But I don't assume they'll do it before the market loses more than it has already. The Fed obviously wants, desperately, to tighten money, and tight money is bad for markets.

If, at some point during those 17 months, Ed and I had redirected his monthly deposits to a money market, we would be far ahead of where we are now.

We couldn't have timed the move exactly, of course. We would have sustained losses for a few months going into the bear market, and we would have missed the return of the bull market for a couple of months on the other side.

Doesn't matter. We'd still be far ahead because when we got back in we'd have had lots more to invest than we did when we got out. We've have had all the money we'd protected by putting it in a money market instead of the stock market.

The trend is your friend

The reason people like us are told to put our money in index funds and forget about it is that people like us can't time the market.

(I used to think no one could time the market, but a friend of mine, whose money is managed by Neuberger Berman, tells me she's been earning 1% above market returns, after fees, for years.)

It's true that I can't time the market.

But there's no trick to timing a market that goes down 17 months and loses 56% of its value. That's not a blip. It's a trend.

My new rule: if the trend is up, we're in the market. If the trend is down, we're not in the market. If the market is moving "sideways," which is more or less what it's doing now, we're also not in the market, but we're paying attention so as not to miss too much of the bull market when the bull market returns.

My Fed watching hobby helps with all this, needless to say.

Because the Fed is a monetary superpower.

Another one bites the dust

Carol Dweck's "growth mindset" has been hijacked by constructivists:

Recently, someone asked what keeps me up at night. It’s the fear that the mindset concepts, which grew up to counter the failed self-esteem movement, will be used to perpetuate that movement. In other words, if you want to make students feel good, even if they’re not learning, just praise their effort! Want to hide learning gaps from them? Just tell them, “Everyone is smart!” The growth mindset was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them. It is about telling the truth about a student’s current achievement and then, together, doing something about it, helping him or her become smarter.

I also fear that the mindset work is sometimes used to justify why some students aren’t learning: “Oh, he has a fixed mindset.” We used to blame the child’s environment or ability.

Must it always come back to finding a reason why some children just can’t learn, as opposed to finding a way to help them learn?

Carol Dweck Revisits the 'Growth Mindset'

Yes, Carol, it must.

All cool-sounding psychology concepts will be used to justify the fact that some children aren't learning.

Growth mindset, grit, noncognitive skills, what have you.

Whatever you've got, it will be used to blame failure on children and parents (and poverty, where  applicable).

Not on teachers, administrators, schools, ed schools, teaching philosophies, curriculum, or lack of curriculum.