Comments on: Impolitic

By: Malcolm Kirkpatrick

Malcolm Kirkpatrick — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:16:59 +0000

Student motivation is the single most important policy variable which influences differences between school systems. The slavery analogy is exact, and explains quite a lot about observed system and student performance. Students act dumb to reduce overseers’ expectations. Students make life miserable for teachers’ pets and hoop-jumping ass-kissers because these raise overseers’ expectations of what others can accomplish. Homeschoolers accomplish miracles, compared to conventionall-schooled students, because children, especially very young children, don’t respond to adult incentives but will work their hearts out for the love of mom.

By: NDC

NDC — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:29:09 +0000

Malcolm, that just seemed a little nutty to me, particularly the slavery comment, but to each his own, I guess.

By: Malcolm Kirkpatrick

Malcolm Kirkpatrick — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:56:12 +0000

1) I use “State” to mean government, generally. I capitalize “State” to mock believers’ faith in The God that Failed.
2) Attendance at State (government, generally)-operated schools is compulsory for all children whose parents are (a) too poor to afford the ransom charged by the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel’s accomplices, the exclusive private schools (I exempt parochial schools) and/or (b) unable to sacrifice an income to homeschool.
3) Compulsory attendance (truancy) statutes apply to children.
4) Compulsory education (educational neglect) statutes apply to parents.
5) Restrictions on homeschooling vary widely from State to State.
6) Culture is certainly important, and relates in several important ways to differences in school performance between groups. One large cultural difference is that between the white-collar academic culture of legislators, bureaucrats and curriculum designers, on the one hand, and the blue-collar culture of many students’ families, on the other. For many people “academic” has become a synonym for “irrelevant”.
7) Compulsory, unpaid labor is slavery, black or white, male or female, young or old. There are two reasons to combine pre-18 escape options and to use the taxpayers’ age 6-18 education subsidy to support post-secondary education or on-the-job training for early escapees:
7.1) To create incentives for students trapped in a system which currently offers to many students few reasons to do what schools require, and
7.2) To drain resources from this parasitic institution and so cut the positive feedback loop between government school budgets and insiders’ lobbying muscle.

By: NDC

NDC — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:04:35 +0000

Malcolm,

What question were you answering?

We don’t have “State-operated, tax-subsidized, compulsory school” systems anywhere, do we? Are there states that don’t allow private school enrollment or home schooling? Being able to demonstrate that you are educating your child between the ages of six and sixteen typically seems to be required by law, but I don’t think anyone is being help prisoner by the public schools. Are things different in Hawaii?

I’ve got no problem with allowing students to test out whenever they are ready, but I don’t feel like taxpayers should have to continue to pay for their educations for a pre-set number of years, simply as an entitlement. Decide what they ought to know and get them out, I’d say.

Catch Thirty-Thr33, you’ve never observed that race and ethnicity are often tied to culture? Interesting. I agree that race and ethnicity don’t say anything especially valid about any particular person, and yet general trends do exists, it seems to me. Otherwise why would we see Asian SAT scores typically being higher than Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, even when controlled for income or parental education level? I agree that it’s tied to family culture, but culture is often tied to race and ethnicity.

By: Malcolm Kirkpatrick

Malcolm Kirkpatrick — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:09:58 +0000

If school is a means, not an end in itself, then it makes no more sense for all children to be in school than it does for all children to be hospitalized. It does not take 12 years at $10,000 per year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Real-world experience works better than classroom lectures for much vocatioal training.

The socialization argument does not support compulsory attendance for the sub-adult population generally. School is bad socialization. In Hawaii, juvenile arrests for assault, drug possession, and drug promotion fall when school is not in session. Juvenile hospitalizations for human-induced trauma fall when school is not in session.

Einstein opposed compulsory attendance at school. Gandhi opposed compulsory attendance at school.

If it is fraud for a mechanic to charge for the repair of a functional motor, and if it s fraud for a physician to charge for the treatment of a healthy patient, then it is fraud for a teacher to charge for the instruction of a student who does not need our help. If the State-operated, tax-subsidized, compulsory school system is not an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination, why cannot any student take, at any age, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers’ age 6-18 education subsidy toward post-secondary education at any VA-approved post-secondary institution or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified (say, has filed W-2 forms on a least three employees for at least the previous four years) private-sector employer?

By: Catch Thirty-Thr33

Catch Thirty-Thr33 — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:48:56 +0000

Maybe Biden can get Neil Kinnock’s help again, if he’s still available…

In the meantime, one day people are going to wake up and see that the cause of underperformance in schools among different ethnic and racial backgrounds has NOTHING to do with ethnicity of race and EVERYTHING to do with culture. If you come from a family that does not value education, chances are you will not do so well in school, and that goes for everyone, regardless of ethnicity or race.

By: Cal

Cal — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:01:29 +0000

“That last paragraph [on the vocabulary gap] is very true.”

There’s no evidence of causation. In other words, students in poorly educated households have a vocabulary gap, but there’s no evidence that access to vocabulary (or lack thereof) is the cause.

By: NDC

NDC — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 01:26:06 +0000

Malcome Kirkpatrick,

Do you think that the children of the “least politically-adept parents” as you put it would be best served by their parents home schooling them?

It’s one thing to conclude that the relatively small group of parents who have already chosen to home school instead of using the public school generally provides a better education than the public schools, but quite another to conclude that therefore all or most students would be better off being home schooled, don’t you think?

By: Walter E. Wallis

Walter E. Wallis — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:33:28 +0000

Jeane is your mother.

By: Malcolm Kirkpatrick

Malcolm Kirkpatrick — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 21:01:44 +0000

Across the US, the coefficient of correlation(%20K+, score) is negative, where “%20K+” is the fraction of total enrollment assigned to school districts over 20,000 enrollment (or 15,000 enrollment, depending on which year of the Digest of Education Statistics you use) and “score” is 4th or 8th grade NAEP Reading or Math scores. I have used Math composite scores, Numbers and Operations subtest scores, and Algebra and Functions subtest scores. I have used mean scores, percentile scores, proficiency scores, mean scores by parents’ race and level of education. Large districts drag scores down. These results are consistent, with an interesting exception: the coefficient of correlation (%20K+, score) is positive for children of college-educated white parents.

Across the US, the coefficient of correlation(age-start, score) is positive, where “age-start” is the age at which States compel attendance at school and “score” is 4th or 8th grade Reading or Math scores ten years later. Early compulsory attendance is counter-indicated.

ETS reports a smaller Black/White SAT score gap with homeschoolers than with conventionally-schooled children.

From these and other lines of evidence, I derive two generalizations:

1) As institutions take from individual parents the power to determine for their own children the choice of curriculum and the pace and method of instruction, overall system performance falls.
2) Political control of school harms most the children of the least politically-adept parents (“Well, duh!”, as my students would say).