October 21, 2011
Evidence and ideology.
Looking at basically the same problem, the Wall Street Journal gravitates toward reform that breaks the hold of unions, and the NYT finds new reasons to keep government spending flowing into the same old program.
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NYT translation.."Fuck the kids..we got a union to protect!"
Remember Epstein on rule of law.
Labor law violates it.
Workers B and C shouldn't acquire any more rights with respect to A by forming a union than they had individually. In particular shouldn't be able to require A to negotiate a contract with them if A doesn't want to, just as A wouldn't have to with B and C individually.
Contracts should be voluntary.
Public unions in addition don't die through the usual path of bankruptcy of the host. They go on at gunpoint.
This from the article says it all, "'This is where inequality starts,' said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students."
After almost 40 years of throwing money at public schools run by teacher unions, the results are worse than they were when Carter founded the DoEd.
Again, the Lefties love to take Einstein's line that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results defines insanity.
No, this proves it defines stupid.
One wonders how Dr (I'm sure she's a PhD) McCartney explains Herman Cain in this context.
Kristof's heart is in the right liberal place but his head is not. He cannot face the fact that no matter how much money you throw at early childhood education it is not going to stick if the child is not in a home that values education and is a safe environment for the child. Children whose single parent mother is 15 or 16 years old are not going to do well. They are virtually doomed from their first breath of entering a cycle of poverty and underachievement. Our best intentions of the 1960s have led us here.
keep government spending flowing into the same old program.
And we're progressives, dammit!
Who would expect a respect for evidence from a publication that wrote that alternative medicine piece?
NYT translation.."Fuck the kids..we got a union to protect!"
The NYT article did not mention union once. Couldn't tell you on the WSJ article as it's firewalled for me, as usual. So why link it?
Kristoff is right. The only possible alternative to disparity of income is for the state to take all children from the parents, and raise and educate them as equals.
(Or we could start telling the 15 year old single girl that to have sex and give birth is anti-social and we all resoundingly condemn it.)
(But that's just hateful.)
(We must prefer the smile and kindness that condemns kids to poverty than the harsh hateful act that saves them.)
I was struck by how the NYT lauded the Perry Project. One stat caught my eye: Among the study's major findings in the educational area are
More of the group who received high-quality early education graduated from high school than the non-program group (65% vs. 45%), particularly females (84% vs. 32%);
So assuming the preschool had equal numbers of males and females (and of course that presumes that there are only 2 genders :)
What does that say about male performance at the school and about the NYT love of cherry picking examples:
It means that the male numbers, (and if one really cared about the crisis in education, you'd want to carefully look at the numbers for poor minority boys), wel for them, the implied numbers are 46% graduation rate for boys who went through this wonder program, versus 56% for the boys in the control group.
great program :) LMAO
Garage, Do you grasp the concept of implicit, or were you publicly educated?
The unions have to keep finding ways to stay relevant so the bosses can keep their six figure salaries.
If unions really care about people then WEA Trust should open its books for a complete audit. WEA should also provide the fiscal rational as to why, before the bill passed, they were going to have to raise rates but after they can magically match any other contract out there.
How much more evidence does Kristoff need? Spending doesn't address the problem. More spending is not the cure. More spending is the disease. With spending comes mandates.
The problem, which is black kids' failure at school, will be resolved when the responsibility for the problem is once again assumed to rest entirely on the kid's families and on the kids' themselves.
So long as the assumption that black kids' failure at school is the responsibility of whites remains the foundation of public policy, black kids are doomed to fail.
Garage, Do you grasp the concept of implicit, or were you publicly educated?
I didn't see anything "implicit" in Kristof's article that related to protecting unions.
This isn't just about spending more. Libruls are pushing for more and more all-day govt paid pre-school. This is an initiative being pushed by the PEW Foundation.
A convenient thread to insert this bit of wisdom from Peter Wehner (in his discussion of Qaddafi and The One):
As a person who holds views very different from the president, I understand the impulse to deny him any credit at all—or to offer it only grudgingly when forced to. But this merely underscores a danger we all face, which is refusing to adjust our judgments in the face of facts and unfolding events. The temptation, for liberals as well as conservatives, is to make just about everything conform to our pre-existing worldview—and to deny inconvenient facts or twist them in a way that vindicates our assumptions and suppositions. But this denies a basic truth, which is that wisdom in life is based, at least in part, on adjusting our views along the way, in the face of new facts and new realities. Only an ideologue, a dogmatist, holds to a position when the evidence calls that position into doubt."
Brilliant. The conclusion then is that many in DC and the media may in fact be very smart, but few are wise.
Garage: You make a ton of money, why don't you subscribe to the WSJ? You can skip the editorial pages if you don't like their slant, but the rest of the paper is politically neutral, perhaps with a leftward lean, and has excellent coverage of financial matters.
The NYT has a great idea!! Let's create an early education program!! We can call it Head Start!! Fantastic!!
Carl Lindner, Jr. died a few days ago at the age of 92. Net worth $1.7 billion, dropped out of school at the age of 14 deliver milk and sell ice cream for his families dairy.
I've seen studies that toddlers learn best from following their parents around and learning from those experiences and interactions. Of course, when your parents are divorced, crackheads, not so smart themselves, etc, even this method doesn't work all that well.
I didn't see anything "implicit" in Kristof's article that related to protecting unions.
If you see it, it's not implicit, is it?
I didn't see anything "implicit" in Kristof's article that related to protecting unions.
Well that answers the question.
What in the hell does early childhood education [the subject of Kristof's article] have to do with unions?
as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students."
I'd bet $100 that this discrepancy goes away entirely if you control for single parenting.
lyssalovelyredhead said...
I'd bet $100 that this discrepancy goes away entirely if you control for single parenting.
I'll take the bet, j/k,
I agree with you except I'd only attribute "most" rather than "all"
control for parent's education gets you a chunk of the remaining difference. Education isn't the same as wealth. And a kid of a HS drop out is going to have less educational prep than a kid of a college grad, on average, YMMV
Lyssalovelyredhead: "I'd bet $100 that this discrepancy goes away entirely if you control for single parenting."
You would win that bet. You could win another if you bet that there is not a single book in the control group's homes. Or that the single parent did not finish high school. Or that the vocabulary of the single parent was very very limited.
These are not problems that lend themselves to being fixed by money. These are deep social problems, cultural problems, that are only going to get fixed if we revert to a more judgmental society willing to shame those who veer so far from the right course.
What in the hell does early childhood education [the subject of Kristof's article] have to do with unions?
Who belongs to teachers' unions? What unions benefit when you create more jobs that can only be filled by members or a union?
A non-union question: what major/area of college graduates are generally among the lowest performers on measures such as the Graduate Record Exam (GRE)?
There's good news. People who belong to unions hate the fact that politicians have written the laws that make union dues ... something automatic that gets deducted from paychecks.
You know, unions grew because labor, before we had "8 hour rules" ... and age requirements. The labor force was abused. And, angry.
Never underestimate the power of anger.
Oh. And, if you think "education" would be better without unions ... then you don't know how malfeasance among politicians ... and the power of money ... would corrupt our system even worse!
Plus, whoever came up with the idea that all poor people deserve nice houses? And, all kids can receive a great education ... even if they're too dumb to sit in class? (Dubya.)
I think tearing after people who have jobs ... is insane.
Controlling what politicians did with pensions ... however, should have put the blame squarely on the shoulders of politicians. Coupled to the citizens who keep electing these stinkers.
There's plenty of blame to go around.
And, NO SAINTS!
Who belongs to teachers' unions? What unions benefit when you create more jobs that can only be filled by members or a union?
That's quite a strain. Head Start and the Perry Preschool are not unionized. Kristof makes a persuasive argument bolstered by evidence. But it runs into conservative dogma, so it must be dismissed.
Head Start and the Perry Preschool are not unionized.
I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about the NYT's position.
DADvocate,
LOL, The only aggregate scores worse than "Education - Early Childhood", were the social work majors.
Sad, Feminism and breaking out of the pink ghetto did that :)
My mother was a teacher. Graduated from HS at 15, college at 19. In those days, the brightest women were teachers, nurses, or social work (Granny was a social worker).
The Pink professions. Once smart women had other options, education majors became to place for the dregs.
Smart Democrats are getting off the union bus before it hurts them in the ballot box. Because, it's becoming increasingly difficult to sell themselves to those who vote in cities with non-functional, union-ridden public schools.
For example,
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/06/democrats_support_of_pension_r.html
or
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-09-02-democrats-teachers-unions_N.htm
It's a shame there don't seem to be any equally smart Democratic poltiicians in Wisconsin- OUR Democrats will stay on that bus even if it goes over a cliff.
Because "it's for the children." Isn't it?
My mother was a teacher. Graduated from HS at 15, college at 19. In those days, the brightest women were teachers, nurses, or social work (Granny was a social worker).
I had some pretty smart teachers back in the day. The best I ever had, at any level, was a woman. There are still some good ones out there but fewer than before.
We don’t want to get too excited with these statistics, or those of the equally studied Abecedarian Project in North Carolina. The program was tiny, and many antipoverty initiatives work wonderfully when they’re experiments but founder when scaled up.
Isn't that an argument to put education back into local instead of national control?
That's quite a strain. Head Start and the Perry Preschool are not unionized. Kristof makes a persuasive argument bolstered by evidence. But it runs into conservative dogma, so it must be dismissed.
But doesn't this run completely counter to the lets-be-more-like-Finland narrative?
They don't start formalized school until 6 or 7 years of age, correct?
So that's what Nick Kristoff looks like!
My local rag's byline photo of Kristoff is circa 1982.
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