7 November 2011 >>
Recently, I brought a camera and a few multiple-choice questions to Zuccotti Park, where I conducted a quiz game with some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. As a reward for getting the answers right, contestants were able to choose among several options for prizes. Unfortunately, one gentleman in the audience apparently did not appreciate the prize selections made by his fellow protesters, so he disrupted the game, bear-hugged me, grabbed the question cards out of my hand and attempted to run off with them before I stopped him.
You can watch the video embedded below, or visit YouTube:
Click through to the video page to see footnotes for the questions in the quiz.
Video >>
4 September 2009 @ 8:56AM >>
You may have heard about the uproar over President Obama’s desire to address the nation’s schoolchildren. Although the White House has not yet released the text of the speech, many people wondered whether the speech would be pushing Obama’s policy goals.
The idea that the speech would be political in nature is not something that people fantasized; it was related to the fact that the Department of Education’s lesson plan asked students to “help the president” and write about “what the president wants us to do.”
The Obama administration has since removed such language from the lesson plan, and has issued a rather lame excuse. The Associated Press reports:
Critics are particularly upset about lesson plans the administration created to accompany the speech. The lesson plans, available online, originally recommended having students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”
The White House revised the plans Wednesday to say students could “write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals.”
“That was inartfully worded, and we corrected it,” [White House deputy policy director Heather] Higginbottom said.
Of course, the only way the “inartfully worded” excuse works is if the new wording is a clearer way of saying what the original statement intended to convey.
In what universe is “what they can do to help the president” even remotely related to “how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals”?
One is not a more “artful wording” of the other. The administration’s new phrasing represents a completely different statement altogether.
If the president had intended to deliver a speech asking for students’ help achieving his political goals, I suspect this controversy will dissuade him from doing that.
Tuition has risen at twice the rate of per capita income and this year it will cost just under $50,000 to attend the average private college. If the cost of milk had risen as fast as the cost of college since 1980, a gallon would be $15.—Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vermont)
When other industries are seen as gouging the consumer, Congress likes to hold showy hearings and investigations. How long until the honchos of higher ed are hauled before some subcomittee or another?
State lawmakers are considering a bill that would grant free college tuition for some juvenile offenders. Supporters say it’s a way to encourage troubled youth to get their lives back on track. John Dixon, Deputy Secretary for the MD Department of Juvenile Services says, “The kids the department serves face a lot of obstacles and challenges when they return to the community. This bill will allow kids who are interested in attending public institution to go there tuition free.”
Delegate Norm Conway is sponsoring the bill. As an educator for 39 years, he says it’s important to help troubled teens make a positive transition. “They’re out of their own families in many instances. You’re hoping for the best possible transition and incentives that say hey if you’re willing to do your part there are some opportunities out there for you.”
Under the proposal, committed juveniles under the age of 21 would be eligible for free tuition at any public institution in the state.
Three Chinese parents in Brooklyn are expected to file a federal lawsuit today challenging a popular city-run tutoring program on the grounds it discriminates against Asians, The Post has learned.
The Specialized High School Institute preps gifted but “underrepresented” minorities to ace the competitive exam to get into top city high schools like Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech.
But the parents say it is unfair - and illegal - for the Department of Education to limit eligibility to blacks and Latinos.
“The program only selects certain kinds of minorities and unfortunately my daughter didn’t fall into that category,” said Peggy Foo-Ching, 47, a mom from Bensonhurst who said her 12-year-old daughter’s application last year was ignored.
[...]
A Department of Education internal memo obtained by lawyers trying the case indicated that eligibility criteria excludes whites and Asians.
“What this memo reveals is blatant and categorical discrimination by race. If you are white or Asian, you’re not supposed to get an application,” said Christopher Hajec, an attorney with the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative advocacy group.
“It’s not the business of the government of New York City to be counting up the Asians or whites in, say, Stuyvesant High School and concluding there are too many of them.”
[...]
The father who initiated the suit, Stanley Ng, said he understood how controversial his challenge may be viewed.
“It’s not something that I take lightly,” he said. “There are many Asian and white kids in this district who can’t pay for tutoring. What is their recourse?”
18 March 2007 >>
I just got back home from taping Hannity’s America a little while ago. It airs tonight on Fox News.
Knowing the show airs tonight gave us a hard deadline for finally completing the Indoctrinate U website. So while a total lack of sleep over the last 3 days probably didn’t help my coherence with Sean Hannity (I don’t even really remember what I said, but hopefully it made sense), at least we were able to get everything working on the site, including the trailer and an innovative sign-up feature that gave me a chance to write some code for Google Maps. More on that later. For now, I’m going to start a belated St. Patrick’s Day celebration.
Update: Wouldn’t you know it, my cable is out. So I guess I won’t be taping it... Thanks, Time Warner!
20 February 2007 @ 8:52AM >>
I don’t often find myself agreeing with the political sensibilities of Steve Jobs, but if there’s one thing the man knows, it’s how to build a successful organization. So when the founder both Apple and Pixar started talking about teachers’ unions, I was pleasantly surprised:
Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.
“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.
“Not really great ones because if you’re really smart you go, ‘I can’t win.’”
[...]
“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said.
“This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”
Public education is effectively a monopoly for the portion of the country that can’t afford private schools. And the problem with public education is the same as any other monopoly: the organization functions as though its customers are merely an annoyance only tangentially related to the organization’s survival.
That’s why you hear teachers’ unions oppose school choice on the grounds that it would hurt failing schools. But the point of public education is not to ensure the survival of schools, it’s to ensure the education of students. So what if failing schools are closed? They should close. And the only way that’ll ever happen is if less-advantaged families have an opportunity to vote with their feet and abandon the schools that are failing their children.
21 November 2006 @ 6:05PM >>
In response to my recent post on transparency in education, reader J. Gates e-mailed a link to an article from the Ludwig von Mises Institute that included this revealing snippet (emphasis added):
Excluding student financial aid, public universities receive about 50 percent of their funding from federal and state governments, dwarfing the 18 percent they receive from tuition and fees. Even “private” universities like Stanford or Harvard receive around 20 percent of their budgets from federal grants and contracts. If you include student financial aid, that figure rises to almost 50 percent. According to the US Department of Education, about a third of all students at public, 4-year colleges and universities, and half the students at private colleges and universities, receive financial aid from the federal government.
Given the amount of money taxpayers are forced to spend on higher education, we have a right to demand financial transparency from these institutions. What other industry receives this much of its funding from the public without any oversight or accountability to the taxpayers who are paying for it?
8 December 2004 @ 8:23PM >>The New York Timesreports (emphasis mine):
High school students in Hong Kong, Finland and South Korea do best in mathematics among those in 40 surveyed countries while students in the United States finished in the bottom half, according to a new international comparison of mathematical skills shown by 15-year-olds.
The United States was also cited as having the poorest outcomes per dollar spent on education. It ranked 28th of 40 countries in math and 18th in reading.
Remember that fact next time someone says the solution to our education crisis is simply to spend more money. The system is broken, fundamentally. You don’t fix a broken system by putting more money into it. Throwing money down a rathole does not result in a better rathole.
The real solution would be to give education dollars directly to parents, so that they can choose where to spend it. Otherwise, the money goes to a bureaucracy whose primary purpose is self-preservation.
