California’s public universities, though heavily subsidized, are failing to give the citizens much for the money, writes Jill Stewart. In particular, teacher education is a mess.

California Education Secretary Richard Riordan says teacher colleges “are probably the worst thing about California public education. The teacher colleges produce certified teachers who can’t teach.”

. . . One problem is that skills such as arithmetic are rejected by many teachers as “drill.” Professor (David) Klein blames UC and CSU teacher colleges who hammered that view into teachers.

At Cal State Northridge, Klein is required to allow the use of calculators during finals. “My students who are going to become middle-school teachers leave Cal State Northridge unable to do long division or to multiply. … Then they go off to teach math to teenagers — but can’t do it.”

Because of the state budget crisis, UC and CSU are underfunded to meet the demand. Yet 58 percent of incoming CSU freshmen need remedial English or math or both. (Stewart notes these students can pass out of remedial classes without retaking the test they previously flunked.) It seems inevitable to me that the public universities will limit enrollment by raising standards, sending the least capable remedial students to community college.

Students are now using cell phones with built-in cameras and e-mail to cheat on tests, reports the Contra Costa Times.

Betsy, who’s a teacher, suggests not allowing test takers to have anything out on the desk.

If the U.S. can’t produce an educated workforce, jobs will go overseas in search of skilled workers. Chester Finn cites a speech by Alan Greenspan on the role of education in the global economy. Finn writes:

The fed chairman observed that the greatest source of wealth creation in America (after the rule of law) is “the level of knowledge and skill of the population.” He pointed to the mismatch between the rising human-capital needs — the knowledge and skill requirements — of a successful modern economy and the woefully low knowledge/skill level of much of the American workforce. Then he made a powerful case for K-12 education reform.

. . . After praising community colleges, he explained that our key problem isn’t too few people with postsecondary degrees. Rather, we must look farther “back through our education system. Many of our students languish at too low a level of skill and the result is an apparent excess of supply [of low-skill workers] relative to a declining demand. These changing balances are most evident in the failure of real wages at the lower end of our income distribution to rise during the past quarter century.

In the 20th century, our education system adapted to the changing demands of the economy, Greenspan says. The 21st century requires more knowledgeable workers with the ability to learn new skills for new jobs.

Education Secretary Rod Paige has apologized for calling the National Education Association a “terrorist” group. He was joking, apparently. Not a rollicking sense of humor there.

I fear that “terrorist” is joining “Nazi” as an all-purpose word meaning “someone of whom I disapprove.” There are real terrorists out there.

I’ve got a column running in the Christian Science Monitor today. I don’t like the headline, but what the heck. I should learn not be such a control freak.

Police searches found no drugs at Mohr High School in Michigan. So the assistant principal, who kept confiscated drugs in his desk, decided to plant marijuana in the locker of a student he suspected of dealing. The police dog failed to sniff the marijuana, and the assistant principal, now facing a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge, has resigned.

(Pat) Conroy told police he came up with the idea of placing marijuana in the student’s locker early last year after several locker searches by the South Haven Police Department’s drug dog, Herbie, turned up no drugs at the school.

Why no criminal charges for the attempt to frame the student? For once, I hope there’s a lawsuit. That kid could have been the one with a criminal record, as well as being expelled from school. And all because the assistant principal wouldn’t take no for an answer. (I do wonder if Herbie’s lost his nose.)

Via Drug War Rant. Here’s the Smoking Gun.

I can’t link to all the posts about academia’s left-wing tilt, but let me recommend this post on the class issue in graduate school. Belle writes about a grad student in classics at Berkeley who’d taught himself ancient Greek while serving as a Marine.

C. felt like a fish out of water among the (for the most part, pretty rich) Ivy Leaguers around him, and he resented being told by people who had been to Yale and come out without any debts that he was the recipient of vast privileges because he was a white man. I think it would be fair to say that most of his fellow students regarded him as a big freak at best, and possibly an evil person at worst. This is not to say that most people weren’t nice to him, to his face, but they did all think he was crazy because he wasn’t a lefty. I mean, really crazy. And dumb.

Also read Edward Feser’s hilarious TechCentralStation column on how leftish academics proved his point about intolerance of conservative opinions.

Professor Brian Leiter, who fancies himself an arbiter of all things academically respectable, disagrees with my assertion that conservatives are treated with condescension and hostility in the modern university. His way of proving me wrong is to call me “embittered” and a “crackpot,” a “lunatic” whose “ranting” and “paranoid” “lies” are not only “embarrassing,” but raise “a serious psychological question” about my mental stability. Then, calling in the heavy intellectual artillery, he links approvingly to another blog which characterizes my article as “bullshit” and “total crap,” and me personally as “nuts,” a “Neanderthal,” “stupid,” “dim-witted,” “a twit,” “a moron,” a product of “the breeding ground of chaos and hate in this country [which] lies nested in the pathological conservativism of murderous anti-abortionist goons, right-wing militias, and wanna-be theocrats,” and — the coup de grace — “Ann Coulter’s long lost fraternal twin.”

Mike Adams a professor at University of North Carolina at Wilmington, posts an e-mail from a UNC-W administrator telling others not to use e-mail to discuss regulation of student groups so as to avoid tipping off Adams. The university wants to limit the number of Christian groups on campus, says Adams’ informer; it already has “de-recognized” a Republican group for limiting membership to Republicans.

Update: Big Arm Woman brilliantly summarizes the Feser-Leitner debate.

In northern India, a headmaster shot and killed a student for cheating during an exam, reports Cronaca. Now there’s a zero tolerance policy.

It’s my daughter’s birthday today. We celebrated last night so she can devote today to watching the final episode of “Sex and the City” with her friends.

Winston’s Diary links to a passage from Iain Pears’ Death and Restoration (Art History Mystery), which features Jonathan Argyll, an art dealer and professor. Argyll’s head of department is critiquing his lecture.

“You didn’t show many pictures. Risky. They like looking at pictures. You don’t show pictures, they’ve not got anything to do. Except listen, and think. And lectures. Dear me. A bit authoritarian, you know? Don’t you think a group interaction module might be better?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s where you break down hierarchy. They teach themselves.”

“But they don’t know anything,” Argyll protested. “How can you teach yourself if you don’t know anything to start off with?”

“Ah. You’ve spotted the snag. However, that one is easily solved. You are confusing knowledge with creativity. You are meant to be encouraging their self-expression. Not stifling it by the imposition of factualities over which you deny them control.”

“Factualities?”

The other man sighed. “I’m afraid so. Don’t look at me like that. It’s not my fault.”

Like Winston, I’m a fan of Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost and The Dream of Scipio. There are quite a few factualities in both books.