Coyote Blog

True monopolies, which are extraordinarily rare in the private sector but all too common when the government uses it coercive power, lose any incentive to provide good customer service.  Via Adam Schaeffer at Cato, here are your government monopoly schools at work:

In Montgomery County, beloved third-grade teacher Soon-Ja Kim was
bounced on the word of one reviewer despite an outpouring of support
from parents who knew what great work she had done with their
children.  I can’t say it better than it’s reported:

But a panel of eight teachers and eight principals
charged with reviewing Kim’s performance gave little weight to the
parent letters when they considered her future in a closed-door
meeting, according to panel members.

Doug Prouty, vice president of the Montgomery County
Education Association and co-chairman of the panel, said in an
interview that the strong parental support for Kim was considered only
a “secondary data source.”

The good test scores of Kim’s students, he said, were also secondary.
The primary sources for the decisions, he said, were the judgments of
Principal Elaine Chang, a consulting teacher assigned to evaluate Kim
and the panel members themselves that Kim was ineffective in the
classroom and hurting her students’ progress.

“That’s a bunch of hooey,” said Elyse Summers, one of the multitude
of pro-Kim parents. “Our children went to Mrs. Kim’s class every day,
came home and are performing extremely well.”

“We take parent feedback, both good and bad, about teachers very
seriously,” Edwards replied. But the Montgomery schools spokesman added
that “the final decision about the effectiveness of teachers must come
down to those with the professional expertise.”

So, it does not matter if you are a great teacher who gets good results, if you don’t kiss the principal’s ass enough, you are gone.  This is not to say that private employers can’t be equally silly.  However, in the private sector, if a company is stupid enough to fire a good employee for petty political reasons, its competitors will snap that person up.  If it happens enough, company 2 will quickly begin to outcompete company 1.  When the government maintains a forced monopoly on schools, there are no such feedback mechanisms to force improvement, except maybe parental feedback, and you see how much that achieves in this case.

Rosie O’Donnell is a great example of the failure of scientific education in this country.  Of late, Rosie has joined the "truthers," using her show to flog the notion that the WTC was brought down in a government-planned controlled demolition.

I will have to yield to Popular Mechanics for most of the discussion about WTC7.  However, I can, from my own engineering training, rebut one point on WTC1&2.  (Note again, future commenters, this applies to WTC 1&2.  There was a different dynamic at work in WTC 7).

Rosie, as others have, made a point of observing that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel, and therefore the fire in the main towers could not have caused the structure to yield and collapse.  This is absurd.  It is a kindergartener’s level of science.  It is ignorant of a reality that anyone who has had even one course in structural engineering or metallurgy will understand.  The argument made that "other buildings have burned and not collapsed" is only marginally more sophisticated, sort of equivalent to saying that seeing an iceberg melts proves global warming.  (Note that this is all written by a person who has no faith in government and is at least as suspicious about government motivations at any truther).   

Here is the reality that most 19-year-old engineering students understand:  Steel loses its strength rapidly with temperature, losing nearly all of its structural strength by 1000 degrees F, well below its melting point but also well below the temperature of burning jet fuel.  For three years I designed piping and pressure vessel enclosures at a refinery.  Many of the processes in a refinery crave heat and run better at elevated temperatures.  In fact, what refineries can do, and how efficient they can be, is really limited by the strength of steel at high temperatures.  Refineries end up being limited to process temperatures no higher than 600 to 800 degrees, and even then these require expensive special metallurgies.  Anything higher requires a very expensive vessel lined with some sort of ceramic insulation material.

The strength curve of steel vs. temperature is dependent on the type of steel, but the curve below is about what I remember from my old textbooks.  Note by 930 degrees the steel strength has dropped by half and in the next 100 degrees it halves again.

But the proof of what went wrong in WTC1 and WTC2 does not take a college education.  You only have to look at building codes.  Building codes generally require that structural steel members be coated with a fireproofing material. 

As the critical temperature for steel is around 540°C (give or take, depending on whose country’s test standards one reads at the time), and design basis fires
reach this temperature within a few minutes, structural steel requires
external insulation in order to prevent the steel from absorbing enough
energy to reach this temperature. First, steel expands, when heated,
and once enough energy has been absorbed, it softens and loses its
structural integrity. This is easily prevented through the use of fireproofing.

You have probably seen it- that foamy tan stuff sprayed on girders before the rest of the building is filled out.  In fact, this stuff is not fireproofing per se but insulation.  It is there to keep the structural steel cool during a fire, so the steel will not fail.  Generally the standards are set in the code that the insulation has to be able to stand X time of fire (generally several hours) and keep the steel below its critical yielding temperatures.   Engineers know that a building fire, which burns much cooler than a jet fuel fire, can cause steel members to weaken and fail and the building to collapse.  If this were not the case, then why do builders spend billions every year to insulate structural steel building components?? 

I wrote about this issue in more depth here.  In this post, one of the commenters listed a series of building fires and asked, why did these buildings not collapse?  The answer is:  Because insulation is applied to the building structural steel members to try to prevent the collapse.  Even insulation is just a stopgap — if the fire burns long enough and
hot enough (or if the insulation is stripped off, say by an airplane
shearing through the building) then the steel will heat up and fail.   So there are three reasons that some buildings have fires and don’t fail while the WTC did fail:

• Some building fires can and do cause buildings to collapse.  Insulation on steel members help many buildings to survive, and often does save the building from collapse, but not always.  This building did collapse, at least the top 6 stores.  Oddly, this is actually used by truthers as further proof, somehow, that the WTC fires could not have brought down the building (the link is actually one of their web sites, I think).  But in fact, the Madrid building failed the same way as WTC 1 and 2, with the top six floors collapsing.  Since the building was not fully constructed on these top floors, there was not the huge weight collapsing that created the battering ram effect that brought down the WTC.  The Madrid floors took longer to collapse, but they were 1) under far less stress, since the building above them was not complete; 2) the fire burned much cooler and 3) the insulation had not been mechanically scrubbed from the beams, so it took longer for the beams to heat up.  To me, this is a clear parallel to the official version of the WTC collapse, but even this is distorted somehow by the truthers.
• Fuel burns hotter than normal building fires, so even insulated members will heat up faster.  I have many pictures in my personal collection of refinery fires where the main thing you can see in the aftermath is all the structural steel bent and collapsed.  Truthers may not be able to find many examples of building collapsing in a fire, but you would be hard-pressed NOT to find examples of collapsed structural steel at every refinery and petrochemical fire.
• The insulation that normally protects buildings was stripped off by the mechanical action of an enormous airplane shearing through the building at 300 miles an hour. 

This is in addition to the actual removal of some support columns by the crashing aircraft, which put more load on the remaining structure and thereby hastened the collapse.

postscript: By the way, can anyone tell me why the so called "reality-based"
community, that so often criticizes the Right for theocratic attacks on
science, is so quick to fall for this pseudo-scientific junk?

Update: One other thought:  The hallmark of truthers is that they take small abnormalities or uncertainties in the failure analysis and event reconstruction as justification for throwing out the whole explanation of events in favor of an alternate series of events with much, much larger gaps, contradictions, and logical problems (e.g. how did the buildings get wired for demolition without anyone noticing? or, how did the planes manage to crash into the precise floors wired for demolition without dislodging the charges and their wiring?  or, how did such a massive conspiracy get pulled off without one leak when the administration can’t even competently fire 9 US attorneys?)

Anyone who has ever done root cause analysis of a catastrophic failure knows there are always questions no one can answer when all is said and done.  And people who say things like "always happen" or "can never happen" typically don’t have any real-world engineering experience.

Update2: One other thought on WTC7, since most of the sites I have visited over the last several days really seem to focus on WTC7.  I consider our government capable of all kinds of hijinx, but why WTC7?  I would argue that about 0.00001% of the outrage that resulted from 9/11 is attributable to WTC7.  How many people not associated with the truthers have even heard of WTC7?  In fact, one could argue that the strike on the Pentagon was effectively irrelevant, since no one really even seems to remember that one.

One minor note:  I saw on a conspiracy site the claim that all military planes were ordered to stand down on 9/11.  I know from personal experience that can’t possibly be true.  I was in Manhattan during 9/11 and remember well people in the streets hitting the ground in fear every time a military jet rocketed over the city.

I don’t buy all this conspiracy theory not because I think well of the government, but just the opposite.  I consider the conspiracies posited at these various sites to be orders of magnitude beyond this government’s capabilities.  Remember Coyote’s Law:

When the same set of facts can be explained equally well by

1. A massive conspiracy coordinated without a single leak between hundreds or even thousands of people    -OR -
2. Sustained stupidity, confusion and/or incompetence

Assume stupidity.

Update3:  I guess I need to throw out a few more things.  This was not meant to be a comprehensive or definitive rebuttal of the 9/11 conspiracy theories.  I merely used as a starting point one stupid comment by Rosie O’Donnell on melting, a comment I have heard a lot of times, and that I knew I could refute of my own knowledge.  Those who want to get mad at me because I did not refute this or that, sorry, go deal with the book by the Popular Mechanics guys.  The only other thing I can contribute other than engineering sanity is the fact I have participated in many engineering failure analyses and the fact that I watched the towers fall live, with my own eyes, from the streets of Manhattan.

Every single engineering failure analysis I have ever participated in, from refinery explosions to airplane crashes, has always left unanswered questions and nagging inconsistencies that had, I am sure, nothing to do with conspiracies. We had many things we could never explain about a heat exchanger fire at our refinery in 1985, but I don’t think that those unknowns and uncertainties leave the door open to blame government agents for the fire. 

I’ll say again, if you want to argue that the WTC buildings were demoed by explosives, you have to explain how the explosives were laid, and, more important, how the explosives and their delicate wiring and detonators survived a plane crashing into the same floors.  And by the way, given that the buildings had not external markings showing the floors, how did the people flying the airplanes hit the exact correct parts of the building?  For every problem with the core hypothesis I could name 10 problems with the truther alternative.  I have no problem with offering an alternative hypothesis to the original thesis, but it is silly to criticize the core thesis for small problems only to replace it with a hypothesis that has problems that are orders of magnitude larger.

I had to say that this, from Janna Goodrich as quoted by Kevin Drum, is absolutely hilarious:

Education is one of the best engines for upward mobility and poor
students cannot afford to pay for higher education on their own. Their
families don’t have the physical collateral to borrow money in the
private financial markets nor the savings to pay for the tuition
outright….But if we gave poorer students mostly grant-based aid we’d
be asking for the rest of the society to subsidize those who are one
day going to be wealthier than the average citizen. Two different
concepts of fairness or equality are at play here and I’m not sure if
both of them could be achieved at the same time.

Can you just see the liberals getting twisted in knots?  Oooh, helping the poor is good, but if we send them to college and they get rich, then we are helping rich people, and that’s baaaad.  Its like that logic problem where a card says "the statement on the other side is false" and on the other side says "the statement on the other side is true."  Only a liberal could take the happy story of a poor kid going to college and getting rich and turn it into bad news.  I never thought about what a problem education was for liberal ethics, in that it converts sainted victims (e.g poor) into evil exploiters (e.g. rich).  Maybe that explains why they oppose school choice?

By the way, I have about zero sympathy for this whole grants in education discussion.  From an incentives standpoint, it is perfectly reasonable to ask people who are getting public money for self-improvement to share the risk with the public through the debt and repayment obligation they take on.  A lot of people today already don’t take good advantage of the opportunity they have while in college, and this is certainly not going to get any better if we give them a free ride rather than loans.

The second problem I have with public funding of grants for education is that colleges and their alumni groups can decide to fix this problem privately if they so desire.  My school (Princeton) makes a commitment that everyone who gets into the school, not matter how poor, will get a financial aid package that will make it possible to attend.  And, the financial aid is all in grants such that the student graduates from one of the most expensive schools in the country debt-free (and yes, the incentives problem worries me some).  All with private money.  We are able to do this because our school makes it a priority and our alumni give the money to make it happen.

I know what you are going to say — Princeton is full of rich people, so they can afford this.  Yes and no.  First, our alumni do pretty well for themselves, but they also have to help fund financial aid for the highest tuitions in the country.  Other schools with lower tuitions have a lower bar to clear.  Second, while Princeton alums may be wealthier per capita, our alumni population, because we are a small school, is probably one tenth the size of a Berkley or a Texas.  As a result, schools like Texas almost certainly have a much wealthier alumni group in total.  But few of them give back.  It’s not a priority for them to create financial aid money for incoming students (instead, T Boone Pickens gives $125 $165 million to the OU OSU football program).  So don’t come crying to me that students at your schools need government grants — you could have funded such a program at your school privately if you had made it a priority.

Postscript: My dad ran numerous fund raising initiatives at the University of Iowa for years.  After decades of effort, I think he has finally despaired of getting state school alumni to donate money for something other than the sports program.

Update:  OK, that’s what I get for making a throw-away statement without fact-checking.  Boone Pickens actually gave $165 million to the athletic programs of Oklahoma State, not OU.  I got a bunch of aggrieved emails on this.  Sorry.  Being from Texas, I get all that stuff up in the trans-Red-River region mixed up.

Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute: (via Maggies Farm)

This
is the most widely held myth about education in America–and the one
most directly at odds with the available evidence. Few people are aware
that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50
years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States
spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars.
By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345.
By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then,
it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.

Since
the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized
exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it
has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective
way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled.
So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to
see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That
didn’t happen. For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end
product of the education system, NAEP scores in math, science, and
reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years. And the high
school graduation rate hasn’t budged. Increased spending did not yield more learning.

There is a lot more good stuff in the article, from class size to teacher pay.  I would observe that he misses one component of teacher pay — that they tend to have higher than average benefit packages, which makes their jobs even more competitive with other professionals.  I covered much of the same ground 18 months ago in my Teacher Salary Myth post (which still earns me some good hate mail).

[This is an update and a reprint of a post from 2004.  Lesson learned from last time I posted on this topic:  If you are going to send me hate mail, at least read the post carefully first]

The concept of a cultural celebration by African-Americans of
themselves and their history is a good one.  The specific values
celebrated in Kwanzaa, however, suck.  They are socialist
-Marxist-collectivist-totalitarian crap.   Everyone seems to tiptoe
around Kwanzaa feeling that they have to be respectful, I guess because
they are fearful of being called a racist.  However, I find it terrible
to see such a self-destructive set of values foisted on the
African-American community.  These values are nearly perfectly
constructed to keep blacks in poverty – just look at how well these
same values have played out in Africa.

First, understand that I have no problem with people of any ethnic
group or race or whatever creating a holiday.  Life is worth
celebrating, as often as possible, even if we have to make up new
occasions. One of the great things about living in Arizona is getting to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

Second, understand that Kwanzaa is not some ancient African ethno-cultural tradition.  Kwanzaa was made up in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga.  Karenga was a radical Marxist in the 60′s black power movement.  Later, Karenga served time in jail for torturing two women:

Deborah
Jones … said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord
and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their
clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss
Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her
own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga … also put detergent
and running hoses in their mouths, she said."

Interestingly,
after this conviction as well incidents of schizophrenia in prison
where "the psychiatrist observed that Karenga talked to his blanket and
imaginary persons and believed that he had been attacked by
dive-bombers," California State University at Long Beach saw fit to
make him head of their Black Studies Department.

Anyway,  I give credit to Karenga for wanting to create a
holiday for African-Americans that paid homage to themselves and their
history.  However, what Karenga created was a 7-day holiday built
around 7 principles, which are basically a seven step plan to Marxism.
Instead of rejecting slavery entirely, Kwanzaa celebrates a transition
from enslavement of blacks by whites to enslavement of blacks by
blacks.  Here are the 7 values, right from the Kwanzaa site (with my comments in red itallics):

Umoja (Unity)
To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race

On
its surface, this is either a platitude, or, if serious, straight
Marxism and thoroughly racist.  Think about who else in the 20th
century talked about unity of race, and with what horrible results.

In
practice, the notion of unity in the black movement has become sort of
a law of Omerta — no black is ever, ever supposed to publicly
criticize another black.  Don’t believe me?  Look at the flack Bill Cosby caught for calling out other blacks.

Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)
To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves

Generally
cool with me — can’t get a libertarian to argue with this.  When this
was first written in the 60′s, it probably meant something more
revolutionary, like secession into a black state, but in today’s
context I think it is fine.

Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
To
build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and
sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together

Um, do I even need to comment?  This is Marxism, pure and simple.

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)
To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.

OK, I said the last one was Marxism.  This one is really, really Marxism. 

Nia (Purpose)
To
make our collective vocation the building and developing of our
community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.

There’s that collectivism again

Kuumba (Creativity)
To
do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our
community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

I
guess I don’t have much problem with creativity and make things
better.  My sense though that if I was to listen to the teaching on
this one in depth, we would get collectivism again.

Imani (Faith)
To
believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers,
our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

What
about in ourselves as individuals?  Through all of this, where is the
individual, either individual responsibility or achievement?  It is
interesting that a holiday that
was invented specifically to be anti-religious would put "faith" in as
a value.  In fact, Karenga despised the belief in God as paying homage
to "spooks who threaten us if we don’t worship them and demand we turn
over our destiny and daily lives."

However,
this is in fact very consistent with the teachings of most statists and
totalitarians.  They tend to reject going on bended knee to some god,
and then turn right around and demand that men go on bended knee to …
them, or other men.  This is in fact what this "faith" was about for
Karenga – he is a statist laying the foundation for obedience to the
totalitarian state.  He wants blacks to turn over their destiny and
daily lives to their leaders, not to god.

So,
in conclusion, Kwanzaa was designed as a celebration of creating a
totalitarian collectivist Marxist racist state among
African-Americans.  I may well get comments and emails that say "oh,
thats not how we celebrate it" and I will say fine – but Marxism is the
core DNA of the holiday, a holiday created by a man who thought Lenin
and the Black Panthers were all wimps.

Never wishing to criticize without suggestion a solution, here are alternate values I might suggest:

Freedom
- Every individual is his own master.  We will never accept any other
master again from any race (even our own).  We will speak out against
injustices and inequalities so our children can be free as well.

Self-Reliance – Each individual will take responsibility for their life and the lives of their family

Pride - We will be proud of our race and
heritage.  We will learn about our past and about slavery in
particular, so we will never again repeat it. 

Entrepreneurship - We will work through free exchange with others to make our lives better and to improve the lives of our children

Education – We will dedicate ourselves and our time to education of our children, both in their knowledge and their ethics

Charity – We will help others in our country and our community through difficult times

Thankfulness – Every African-American
should wake up each morning and say "I give thanks that my ancestors
suffered the horrors of the slavery passage, suffered the indignity and
humiliation of slavery, and suffered the poverty and injustices of the
post-war South so that I, today, can be here, in this country,
infinitely more free, healthier, safer and better off financially than
I would have been in Africa."

By the way, if you doubt that last part, note that in the late 90′s, median per capita income of African Americans was about $25,000, while the per capita income of Africans back in the "old country" was around $700, or about 35x less.  Note further this comparison of freedom between the US and various African nations.  Finally, just read the news about the Congo or Rwanda or the Sudan.

I am not sure this even needs an introduction.  Comparisons to "1984" are invoked in political discourse almost as much as those to Nazi Germany, and most are overblown, but the George Orwell novel is all I can think of when I see this:

It may be almost 2007, but it feels more like “1984” at Michigan
State University. The university’s Student Accountability in Community
Seminar (SAC) forces students whose speech or behavior is deemed
unacceptable to undergo ideological reeducation at their own expense.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is challenging
Michigan State to dismantle this unconstitutional program, which
presents a profound threat to both freedom of speech and freedom of
conscience.

 

“Michigan State’s SAC program is simply one of the most invasive
attempts at reeducation that FIRE has ever seen, yet it has been
allowed to exist at the university for years,” FIRE President Greg
Lukianoff said. “As bad as it is to tell citizens in a free society
what they can’t say, it is even worse to tell them what they must
say. Michigan State’s program is an immoral and unconstitutional
program of compelled speech, blatant thought reform, and
pseudo-psychology.”

 

According to the program’s materials,
SAC is an “early intervention” for students who use such
“power-and-control tactics” as “male/white privilege” and
“obfuscation,” which the university cryptically defines as “any action
of obscuring, concealing, or changing people’s perceptions that result
in your advantage and/or another’s disadvantage.” Students can be
required to attend SAC if they demonstrate what a judicial
administrator arbitrarily deems aggressive behavior, past examples of
which have included slamming a door during an argument or playing a
practical joke. Students can also be required to attend SAC for
engaging in various types of constitutionally protected speech,
including “insulting instructors” or “making sexist, homophobic, or
racist remarks at a meeting.” When participation in SAC is required,
“non-compliance typically results in a hold being placed on the
student’s account,” an action that leaves the student unable to
register for classes and thus effectively expelled from the university.
Students are required to pay the cost of the SAC sessions.

 

Once in the program, students are instructed to answer a series of
written questionnaires. In their answers, students must specifically
describe how they are taking “full responsibility” for their offensive
behavior and must do so using language that the director of the session
deems acceptable. Most students will be asked to fill out this
questionnaire multiple times, slowly inching closer to what
administrators deem to be “correct” responses.

PC indoctrination at our nation’s universities is alive and well.  It just astounds me that a group of adults thought this was acceptable.

The Market Power blog noticed something that also tweaked my interest, in an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Today’s M.B.A. students are not as ethically challenged as recent
reports make them out to be, according to the findings of a study being
released today at a global conference of business educators and
leaders. In fact, 81 percent of those responding to a recent survey
believe businesses should work to improve society, and 78 percent of
them want "corporate social responsibility" integrated throughout their
core courses.

The survey results will be presented during a three-day
conference, "Business as an Agent of World Benefit," at Case Western
Reserve University, in Cleveland. The conference, which began on
Monday, has drawn 440 management educators and business leaders, as
well as about 1,000 online participants.

I know this issue has been debated in circles, but I still have real heartburn defining business ethics as "corporate social responsibility."  In my mind, and as reinforced by cases like Adelphia and Enron, the number one overriding ethical responsibility of corporate managers is their fiduciary responsibility to the company’s owners.  Second is their responsibility to comply with the law (though sometimes the law is so muddled and contradictory that may be difficult).  Third is the obligation to be honest in dealings with employees, suppliers, and customers and to honor the commitments that the company has made to all three. 

In this context, asking a manager to divert the company’s resources away from honoring these commitments or providing a return on the shareholder’s investment, instead focusing them on some other nebulous entity called "society," is wholly unethical. 

Baseball Crank reports:

In … Gulino v. New York State Education Department (2d Cir. Aug. 17, 2006),
the Second Circuit reinstated a race discrimination suit against the
New York State Education Department based on the theory that a test of
"basic college-level content" that asks applicants to get just
two-thirds of the questions right is racially discriminatory because it
has a "disparate impact" on African-American and Latino teachers. The
test, developed in response to a 1988 task force report on problems with teacher quality, is described at pages 11-13 of the opinion.

There is nothing surprising, really, about this.  This theory, that a test that shows African-Americans performing more poorly than whites is by definition racist, has been floating around by decades.  It is particularly popular with various African-American leadership groups.

I have no problem with various ethnic and racial groups bringing expertise to bear to weed out poorly worded questions on exams.  But making this their only reaction to the test – ie the test shows we as a group may have a problem so lets throw the test out – is insane.  By way of explanation, here is a little play to consider:

Doctor:  I am sorry to tell you that you have cancer.  If untreated, it can be fatal.  The good news is that it is treatable, but the treatment will take time and can be quite difficult and painful.

Patient:  Your test is bad.  If other people don’t have cancer, then I don’t either.  I am going to ignore the result and ask the government to make sure that no one else is allowed to take the test either.

Doctor:  But that’s crazy!  The cancer is treatable, but only if we get to work on it right now.

Patient:  You will be hearing from my lawyer for the pain and suffering your bad test has caused me.

I fully believe that the average African American wants her kids to be well educated, and has deep concerns about the quality of the education her kids are getting.  So I will limit my comments to African American "leadership".  Is what these leadership groups are doing in trying to legally strike down tests that show that the education they are getting as a group is failing really any different than a patient ignoring a positive cancer test?

Postscript:  In the article I linked, I do not share the author’s concern about political T-shirts at school.

Both based on outside pressure (mostly from torts) and internal desire, universities are rapidly modeling themselves into mini-governments, really mini-super-nanny-states.  FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, observes of a recent gathering of University attorneys:

At one panel I attended, San Francisco lawyer Zachary Hutton explained
Williams v. Board of Regents, a recent case in which a University of
Georgia student alleged having been raped by two student-athletes while a third
student watched. The police charged the athletes with rape, and the university
decided not to conduct its own investigation until the criminal case was
resolved.

That turned out to be a mistake. The plaintiff then sued the university for
sexual harassment, and the 11th Circuit held this year that the university could
be liable because, by waiting to conduct an independent investigation until the
criminal case was resolved, it had exhibited deliberate indifference to the
alleged rape. “The court emphasized,” Mr. Hutton told the college lawyers, “that
the pending criminal trial . . . did not affect the university’s ability to
institute its own proceedings, and the criminal charges would not have prevented
future attacks while the charges were pending.”

There are excellent reasons for the university not to conduct its own
investigation. For one thing, instead of police detectives and professional
prosecutors conducting the investigation, you are likely to get Campus Public
Safety and the Associate Dean for Student Affairs. How having inexperienced
college administrators and college safety officers conduct a rape investigation
is likely to benefit either the victim or the accused is beyond me. The
potential for violating the Fifth Amendment, damaging evidence, and coming to
wildly inaccurate conclusions is immense, and if any of these things were to
happen, the university would risk botching an important criminal case. Rape is a
serious crime; victims and the accused deserve better than college justice.

In some ways, this was even more illuminating of the drive to mini-nanny-statehood:

The most entertaining discussion I heard at the lawyers’ convention
centered on what to do about facebook.com and myspace.com–how to prevent
slander, harassment and rumor-mongering on these online communities popular with
undergrads.

What these attorneys were talking about is wholesale regulation of online
speech. Slander is, of course, a tort, and engaging in slander or libel can get
a person sued. It’s hard to see how or why a college should be involved in this,
though. If I libel someone online, it’s the business of those affected, not the
college. As for harassment, one of its main characteristics is that the person
being harassed finds the harassing behavior hard to avoid. Unless the “harasser”
is hacking into the victim’s MySpace page, it’s hard to see how going to a
“harassing” website isn’t completely avoidable. As for “rumor-mongering,” horror
of horrors! Regulating that on a college campus will mean tripling the number of
administrators (and probably tuition), but I suppose no expense is too large to
make sure that everyone stays comfortable.

College campuses were probably among the first and most vociferous critics of GWB’s various domestic surveillance programs.  Its interesting to see that while opposing such programs at the national level, they are crafting far more far-reaching speech monitoring and restriction programs on their own campuses:

The room was evenly divided: Some lawyers recommended ignoring the students’ Web
sites unless something offensive was brought to administrators’ attention, while
others suggested taking aggressive action….

By my calculations, if half the lawyers thought that “offensive” speech that is
reported should be punished, and half the lawyers thought that administrators
should spend their time cruising the websites and proactively stamping out
“offensive” speech, that leaves ZERO lawyers who believed that perhaps merely
“offensive” speech should be protected, as the First Amendment (at public
schools), or respect for fundamental freedoms (at all schools), requires.

Via Liz Lightfoot in the Telegraph:

Nearly 60 per cent of girls aged 12 to 15 described themselves as
overweight when only 15 per cent met the medical criteria for excess
body fat.

The findings prompted the Schools Health Education Unit, which carries
out the annual survey, to issue an appeal for an end to the "obsession"
with skeletal body shapes in the media and fashion industry.

Yeah, I know this is the UK, but I bet you would get similar results in the states.  While the article points the finger at the media and fashion industry, how about government and academic know-it-alls who with their recent obsession on teenage obesity are reinforcing this message?  For example, remember this previous post about the Arkansas governor’s new program:

I get email and comments from time to time that my language deriding
government’s intervention into every aspect of our lives is overblown
and exaggerated.  My answer:  Oh yeah, well how about this:

Mike Huckabee, the Governor of Arkansas, now
requires annual fat reports. These are sent to the parents of every
single child aged between 5 and 17; a response, he says, to “an
absolutely epidemic issue that we could not ignore” in the 1,139
schools for which he is responsible.

I
just cannot craft any reasonable theory of government where this is the
state’s job.   The "obesity" crisis in this country just amazes me.
"Experts" every few years broaden the definition of who is overweight
or obese, and suddenly (surprise!) there are more people defined as
overweight.  Even presuming it is the state’s job to optimize our body
weights, is it really the right approach to tell everyone they are too
fat?  Having known several people who were anorexic, including at least
one young woman who died of its complications, is it really a net
benefit to get young people more obsessed with looks and body style?
And what about the kids that are genetically programmed to be
overweight?  Does this mean that years of taunting and bullying by
their peers is not enough, that the state’s governor wants to pile on
now?

It is interesting to note that governor Huckabee apparently started
this initiative after his own personal battle with weight loss:

[Huckabee] lost 110lb after being warned that his
weight, more than 280lb after a life of southern fried food, was a
death sentence. A chair even collapsed under him as he was about to
preside over a meeting of state officials in Little Rock.

We
all have friends who have lost weight or gotten into homeopathy or
became a vegan and simply cannot stop trying to convert their friends
now that they see the light.  Now we have the spectacle of elected
officials doing the same thing, but on a broader scale and with the
force of law, rather than  just mere irritation, on their side.  One
can only imagine what report cards kids would be carrying home if
Huckabee had instead had a successful experience with penis
enlargement.  What’s next, negative reports for kids with bad acne?
For women whose breasts are too small?  For kids who are unattractive?

The Supreme Court refused to review the Padilla case:

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the appeal of Jose
Padilla, a U.S. citizen held in a military jail for more than three
years as an "enemy combatant." The Court, however, declined to dismiss
the case as moot, as the Bush Administration had urged. Only three
Justices voted to hear the case, according to the order and
accompanying opinions. The case was Padilla v. Hanft (05-533).

The decision was a victory for the Bush Administration in one
significant sense: by not finding the case to be moot, the Court leaves
intact a sweeping Fourth Circuit Court decision upholding the
president’s wartime power to seize an American inside the U.S. and
detain him or her as a terrorist enemy, without charges and — for an
extended period — without a lawyer. The Court, of course, took no
position on whether that was the right result, since it denied review.
The Second Circuit Court, at an earlier stage of Padilla’s own case,
had ruled just the opposite of the Fourth Circuit, denying the
president’s power to seize him in the U.S. and hold him. That ruling,
though, no longer stands as a precedent, since the Supreme Court
earlier shifted Padilla’s case from the Second to the Fourth Circuit.

I don’t even pretend to understand all the procedural stuff, but I find it amazing that the effective suspension of habeas corpus, particularly when the "war" and "enemy" that is used as its justification is so amorphous and open-ended, isn’t something the Supreme Court would like to sink its teeth into.

Apparently, the Justices were reluctant to address the case since it has now been made "hypothetical" by the transfer of status of Padilla from enemy combatant held incommunicado indefinitely to a more mainstream justice track.  However, this transfer occurred, as the appeals court pointed out angrily, in a transparent effort by the Bush administration to avoid judicial review of indefinite detentions.  Which raises the possibility that the administration could hold hundreds of people in such detention, systematically changing the status of any individual whose case comes for review, thereby avoiding review of the program in total.  As Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, "Nothing prevents the Executive from returning to the road it earlier constructed and defended."

One wonders by this logic if the segregationist south could have indefinitely postponed Supreme Court review via Brown vs. Board of Education just by letting individuals like Linda Brown individually into white schools whenever their cases got to the Supreme Court.

And still I ask, as I did here, where the hell is Congress?  I am sorry the Supreme Court failed to review this but the Constitution created this group called the legislative branch that is supposed to have the power to change the law.  If law is unclear here, they could make it clear.

I generally stay far away from the back-bench spitball fights that seem to go with Supreme Court confirmations (except for Harriet Meier’s, but she was so spectacularly bad a choice I felt the need to chime in).  So I am late to the party in noting that apparently Alito came under some fire for being a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton.  Apparently, he has been tagged as a racist, sexist, blah, blah, blah for being a member of this organization.

First, it is worth observing the the Republicans asked for this guilt-by-organizational association stuff.  Long before the Federalist Society membership attack by Democrats was the attack on Dukakis as "a card carrying member of the ACLU".  This is just as dumb as can be.  I, for example, support the ACLU in a number of their endeavors at the same time I have grave problems with certain aspects of their work, particularly their refusal to acknowledge property rights as on equal footing with speech and privacy (which I guess is not surprising since they were founded by a Stalanist).  I am sure it is possible that Alito supports some of the goals of CAP without wanting to make Princeton all-male again.

My second reaction is just to laugh.  While at Princeton, it was always fun to take a shot at CAP for being racist or sexist, since their most public positions always seemed to be about opposing women on campus or affirmative action or similar stuff.  Then and since, though, I have gotten to know a bunch of folks in CAP and have found its really just a bunch of very conservative (little c) folks concerned that Princeton isn’t the same as when they were there.  I sometimes agree with them, for example when they oppose political-correctness driven speech limitations, and sometimes disagree with them, particularly when they oppose any sort of dynamism in the school.  In general, I classify them as humans were classified in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:  Mostly harmless.

My problem with CAP is that Princeton, like most of the Ivy League, needs to be more dynamic, not less.  Princeton has done a good job adjusting themselves to many challenges over the last 30 years:  Princeton has gone from no women to being majority women.  It has good representation from most ethnic groups, and it has all the money it could possibly need to make sure any student it wants in the University can afford to go.  Its got every building and piece of equipment a student could ever need, plus a few more.

But here is the real problem, as I see it:  Over the last 30 years, the undergraduate population at Princeton, as with all of the Ivy League, has hardly grown.  The University has become hugely wealthy over this time, has built tons of facilities, but it has all gone to increasing the educational and capital intensity for the same 5000 students.  The challenge as I see it is how do you make this same education available to say 15,000 people at a time instead of 5,000 without changing the heart of the institution. 

Because they aren’t creating any new Ivy League schools, while an ever larger portion of the population has the wealth and basic education background and the drive and expectations to want an Ivy-League-quality college experience.  The result is that the admissions process has gotten to be crazy.  Ask any Ivy Leaguer who went to college 20 years or more ago, and ask them "Could you get admitted today" and they will probably answer "no" or at least "I’m not sure".  Education consultants – I have met these folks – are making fortunes coaching kids from the age of 9 or so on how to get a resume built that is Ivy-League-admittable, complete with an oddball hobby selection aimed at catching the admissions board’s eye.  Everyone plays piano, so kids started trying the harp and banjo to be different, but even that is overdone so now its probably the bagpipes or something.  Football is out, and lacrosse is probably overdone now, so how about falconry?  Out west, private universities like USC are thriving by being able to offer top educations to much larger numbers of people.  The Ivy League needs to figure out how to do this as well.

Of course, every time I raise this idea at any Princeton forum, I get only negative reactions, being accused of trying to change the very fiber of the university.  You don’t have to be born in 1930 to be conservative about the the university and change.  But I keep at it, noticing that the responses I get are identical to those heard when the University went coed.

update:  Well, Joe, I’m not really a big Joe Biden fan.

I think that that FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, does a really nice job defending speech across the political spectrum on campuses.  I was struck in particular by this post on their blog, about Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a private university in Massachusetts.   Speech rights at private institutions (such as on the job) are often an area where "civil rights" groups trip over themselves.

I thought FIRE did a nice job with its WPI analysis:

as a private institution, WPI is not bound by the U.S. Constitution, and WPI
takes full advantage of that by stripping its students of their First Amendment
rights. WPI doesn’t try to hide this fact, either. Unlike many private
universities, its website makes no promises that students will have the
constitutional rights that they enjoy in society at large. Moreover, it prominently
advertises that “[s]tudents enter WPI voluntarily…If they do not like some
of the rules, regulations, traditions, and policies of WPI, they do not have to
enter,” and
that “membership in this particular academic community is freely sought and
freely granted by and to its members, and…within this membership group certain
specific behaviors that may be accepted by society in general cannot be accepted
within an academic community without hindering the explicit goals of that
academic community.” 

 

As a private institution, Worcester is acting within its rights: it
advertises its repression and censorship right up front.  WPI doesn’t promise
you free speech, and you won’t get it. That’s why FIRE doesn’t rate WPI a “red
light”— when a private university states clearly and consistently that it holds
a certain set of values above a commitment to freedom of speech, FIRE does not
rate that university. But we still think you should know what to expect when you
get there.

Good for FIRE.  It achnowleges that WPI as a private institution has the right to set its own rules and terms and conditions, as long as those are clear up front.  FIRE doesn’t like these rules (I don’t particularly either) but it limits itself to speaking out against them, rather than filing legal actions as it might in the case of public universities which, by law and by court precedent, can’t place artifical limits on first ammendment rights.

This article has become an annual tradition at Coyote Blog, I guess to make sure I start the new year with plenty of hate mail.

The concept of a cultural celebration by African-Americans of
themselves and their history is a good one.  Whenever I write about blacks in America, much of the email I get tries to educate me in how much the "lost heritage" issue matters to African-Americans, a concept I have never fully grasped since I am happy, after the 20th century, to leave behind my German heritage.  Even if I’m not into it, I have no problem with people of any ethnic
group or race or whatever creating a holiday.  Life is worth
celebrating, as often as possible, even if we have to make up new
occasions.

The specific values
celebrated in Kwanzaa, however, suck.  They are socialist-Marxist-collectivist-totalitarian crap.   Everyone seems to tiptoe
around Kwanzaa feeling that they have to be respectful, I guess because
they are fearful of being called a racist.  However, I find it terrible
to see such a self-destructive set of values foisted on the
African-American community.  These values are nearly perfectly
constructed to keep blacks in poverty – just look at how well these
same values have played out in Africa.

To begin, its important to understand that Kwanzaa is not some ancient African ethno-cultural tradition.  Kwanzaa was made up in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga.  Karenga was a radical Marxist in the 60′s black power movement.  Later, Karenga served time in jail for torturing two women:

Deborah
Jones … said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord
and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their
clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss
Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her
own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga … also put detergent
and running hoses in their mouths, she said."

Interestingly,
after this conviction as well incidents of schizophrenia in prison
where "the psychiatrist observed that Karenga talked to his blanket and
imaginary persons and believed that he had been attacked by
dive-bombers," California State University at Long Beach saw fit to
make him head of their Black Studies Department.

Anyway,  I give credit to Karenga for wanting to create a
holiday for African-Americans that paid homage to themselves and their
history.  However, what Karenga created was a 7-day holiday built
around 7 principles, which are basically a seven step plan to Marxism.
Instead of rejecting slavery entirely, Kwanzaa celebrates a transition
from enslavement of blacks by whites to enslavement of blacks by
blacks.  Here are the 7 values, right from the Kwanzaa site (with my comments in red italics):

Umoja (Unity)
To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race

On
its surface, this is either a platitude, or, if serious, straight
Marxism and thoroughly racist.  Think about who else in the 20th
century talked about unity of race, and with what horrible results.

In
practice, the notion of unity in the black movement has become sort of
a law of Omerta — no black is ever, ever supposed to publicly
criticize another black.  Don’t believe me?  Look at the flack Bill Cosby caught for calling out other blacks.

Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)
To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves

Generally
cool with me — can’t get a libertarian to argue with this.  When this
was first written in the 60′s, it probably meant something more
revolutionary, like secession into a black state, but in today’s
context I think it is fine.

Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
To
build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and
sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together

Um, do I even need to comment?  This is Marxism, pure and simple.

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)
To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.

OK, I said the last one was Marxism.  This one is really, really Marxism. 

Nia (Purpose)
To
make our collective vocation the building and developing of our
community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.

There’s that collectivism again

Kuumba (Creativity)
To
do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our
community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

I
guess I don’t have much problem with creativity and make things
better.  My sense though that if I was to listen to the teaching on
this one in depth, we would get collectivism again.

Imani (Faith)
To
believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers,
our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

What
about in ourselves as individuals?  Through all of this, where is the
individual, either individual responsibility or achievement?  It is
interesting that a holiday that
was invented specifically to be anti-religious would put "faith" in as
a value.  In fact, Karenga despised the belief in God as paying homage
to "spooks who threaten us if we don’t worship them and demand we turn
over our destiny and daily lives."

However,
this is in fact very consistent with the teachings of most statists and
totalitarians.  They tend to reject going on bended knee to some god,
and then turn right around and demand that men go on bended knee to …
them, or other men.  This is in fact what this "faith" was about for
Karenga – he is a statist laying the foundation for obedience to the
totalitarian state.  He wants blacks to turn over their destiny and
daily lives to their leaders, not to god.

So,
in conclusion, Kwanzaa was designed as a celebration of creating a
totalitarian collectivist Marxist racist state among
African-Americans.  I may well get comments and emails that say "oh,
that’s not how we celebrate it" and I will say fine – but Marxism is the
core DNA of the holiday, a holiday created by a man who thought Lenin
and the Black Panthers were all wimps.

Never wishing to criticize without suggestion a solution, here are alternate values I might suggest:

Freedom
- Every individual is his own master.  We will never accept any other
master again from any race (even our own).  We will speak out against
injustices and inequalities so our children can be free as well.

Self-Reliance – Each individual will take responsibility for their life and the lives of their family

Pride - We will be proud of our race and
heritage.  We will learn about our past and about slavery in
particular, so we will never again repeat it. 

Entrepreneurship - We will work through free exchange with others to make our lives better and to improve the lives of our children

Education – We will dedicate ourselves and our time to education of our children, both in their knowledge and their ethics

Charity – We will help others in our country and our community through difficult times

Thankfulness – Every African-American
should wake up each morning and say "I give thanks that my ancestors
suffered the horrors of the middle passage, suffered the unforgivable indignity and
humiliation of slavery, and suffered the poverty and injustices of the
post-war South so that I, today, can be here, in this country,
infinitely more free, healthier, safer and better off financially than
I would have been in Africa."

By the way, if you doubt that last part, note that in the late 90′s, median per capita income of African Americans was about $25,000, while the per capita income of Africans back in the "old country" was around $700, or about 35x less.  Note further this comparison of freedom between the US and various African nations.  Finally, just read the news about the Congo or Rwanda or the Sudan.

I am a big supporter of the work FIRE does to support openness and individual rights in universities.  Today, FIRE turns its attention on Phoenix’s own Arizona State University:

State-sponsored racial segregation has found a home at Arizona State University
(ASU).  ASU’s ironically named ‘Rainbow Sections’ of English 101 and 102 have
been advertised on flyers and on the university’s website as being open to
‘Native Americans only.’

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has written to the
university to demand that the classes be opened to all students. Shockingly,
this marks the second time in less than four years that FIRE has been forced to
protest a racially segregated course at ASU.

It is appalling that ASU would resurrect segregated classes five decades
after Brown v. Board of Education,” stated David French, president of
FIRE.  “The idea that a class can be ‘separate but equal’ was discredited long
ago.

The ‘Rainbow Sections’ of English 101 and 102, ASU’s freshman composition
courses, were advertised as “restricted to Native Americans only” on the faculty
webpage of Professor G. Lynn Nelson, the course instructor.  A flyer
addressed to ‘Native American Students’ states that they ‘are invited to enroll
in special Native American sections of ENG 101 and 102.’  It also discusses some
of the differences between the special sections and the ‘standard First Year
Composition classes,’ making it clear that the special sections offer a
different educational experience.

Anyone heard of Brown vs. Board of Education here?  I wouldn’t have a particular problem with private groups offering such education with these restrictions, after all I have said many times that the right of free association implies a right not to associate with whoever you want.  But public institutions have different obligations in this regard.  Its actually not that hard to deal with, and even ASU knows what the solution is:

FIRE last wrote
to ASU in April 2002 to protest a segregated Navajo history class that
limited enrollment to Native American students. At that time, ASU simply dropped
the racial restriction in response to FIRE’s letter.

Its OK to have different versions of the same coursework, and probably OK to advertise one version as specially targeted at a particular group, as long as you let individual students make the final decision on which of the University-sanctioned versions are right for them.

“You took a teaching position, ’cause you thought it’d be fun, right?
Thought you could have summer vacations off…and then you found out it
was actually work…and that really bummed you out”

– Carl to Vernon, in the Breakfast Club

If you go to the NEA web site, you will see that they argue that most of the problems in education boil down to either low teacher pay or overly high teacher productivity expectations (i.e. classroom size).  I fisked many of these claims here and here, but most media outlets still quote these assertions credulously when they write about education.

I have found (from some past emails I have received) that one of the ways to really irritate a teachers union rep is, when they lament their low salaries, to point out that they only work 9 months a year, and they should multiply their salaries by 1.33 to make them comparable to the rest of ours.  For example, per the NEA web site, teachers made a bit over $56,000 on average in California in 2004. Lisa Snell, in this month’s Reason, estimates that benefits add nearly $16,000 to this compensation package, for a total of about $72,000 per year for California teachers.  Normalize this for the fact they work 9 months (or less) a year, and you get them making an equivalent of $100,000 a year.  Woe is me.

Of course, California is high vs. other states on salary, and the “9 months” estimate is only approximate, and doesn’t count the fact that teachers typically work a shorter work week than many other professionals.  Fortunately, Snell pointed me to this article in Education Next, which has a fantastic rebuttal to the “teachers are underpaid” myth.

A substantial body of evidence implies that teachers are not underpaid
relative to other professionals. Using data on household median
earnings from the U.S. Department of Labor, I compared teachers with
seven other professional occupations: accountants, biological and life
scientists, registered nurses, social workers, lawyers and judges,
artists, and editors and reporters. Weekly pay for teachers in 2001 was
about the same (within 10 percent) as for accountants, biological and
life scientists, registered nurses, and editors and reporters, while
teachers earned significantly more than social workers and artists.
Only lawyers and judges earned significantly more than teachers—as one
would expect, given that the educational training to become a lawyer is
longer and more demanding.

Teachers, moreover, enjoy longer vacations and work far fewer days per
year than most professional workers. Consider data from the National
Compensation Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which computes hourly earnings
per worker. The average hourly wage for all workers in the category
“professional specialty” was $27.49 in 2000. Meanwhile,
elementary-school teachers earned $28.79 per hour; secondary-school
teachers earned $29.14 per hour; and special-education teachers earned
$29.97 per hour. The average earnings for all three categories of
teachers exceeded the average for all professional workers. Indeed, the
average hourly wage for teachers even topped that of the highest-paid
major category of workers, those whose jobs are described as
“executive, administrative, and managerial.” Teachers earned more per
hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers,
statisticians, biological and life scientists, atmospheric and space
scientists, registered nurses, physical therapists, university-level
foreign-language teachers, librarians, technical writers, musicians,
artists, and editors and reporters. Note that a majority of these
occupations requires as much or even more educational training as does
K–12 teaching.

Curious about the data she uses, I went straight to her source, which is here, and now has data through 2003 online that can be queried.  Sure enough, her conclusions are right there in the Labor Department data:

Note that when corrected for hours worked onto a $ per hour basis, teacher salaries are higher than the average white collar or professional worker, and quite competitive with other professionals such as engineers and managers.  In fact, if you were to take out private school teachers (which mix the number lower, see below) the average for public school teachers is even higher.  Occupations making more than teachers such as doctors and lawyers require much more education and long-term commitment than the average elementary school teaching role.

By the way, the Education Next article linked above gives us another clue that is useful in understanding teachers salaries:  For the vast majority of professions, a government job in that profession pays less than an equivalent private job.  People accept the lower government salary for a variety of reasons –  sometimes for unique work (e.g. interning with the DA as a young lawyer), sometimes for the higher benefits and more job security, and sometimes just because the jobs require fewer hours and frankly have lower performance expectations than their private equivalent.  The one glaring exception to this public-private salary relationship is with teachers salaries, where the salaries of public school teachers are often as much as 50% higher than their private school equivalents.

Wow!  Its no wonder that the NEA hates the idea of school choice and competition from private schools.  They have built a public employment gravy train, with premium salaries, no real penalty for under-performance, and double digit raises for a 180 day a year job — all while selling the media on their woe-is-me-we-are-underpaid myth.

Correction:  Messed up the Breakfast Club quote – it was spoken from Carl the Janitor to Vernon, not by “Carl Vernon”.

Update: A lot of people ask “What do you have against teachers?” and I answer, “nothing.”  I can’t remember complaining about what any employee of a private firm makes.   In fact, for employees of private firms, I am happy to root for you to get all you can.  Go for it.  But teachers are not private employees — they are government workers, just like every other government bureaucrat who gets paid by my taxes that are taken from me against my will.  If I pay your salary, and in particular if I pay your salary against my will, you can be sure I am going to demand accountability.

By the way, I send my son to a private junior high.  The school is widely acknowledged to do a much better job than any public school in the city.  And you know what – my tuition at this school is $2000 per year LESS than the average per pupil spending in Scottsdale public junior high schools.  And this school is 100% tuition supported (it is a for profit secular institution so it can’t take contributions) and it turns a profit for the family that owns it.  You know how many principals, assistant principals, administrators, and clerks it has for a 300 person junior high school?   Two.  The number at a similarly sized public school would be ten times as high. At least.

I could easily have chosen nearly any university in the country as the example for this post, but I will choose my alma mater Princeton. 

Like many universities, Princeton has a speech code.  Like many universities, Princeton’s speech code is an affront to the First Amendment and an open license to selectively apply administrative punishments based on political beliefs.

The Princeton speech code says, in part:

Abusive or harassing behavior, verbal or physical, which demeans, intimidates, threatens, or injures another because of his or her personal characteristics or beliefs, is subject to University disciplinary sanctions…

And further defines sexual harassment as:

verbal or physical conduct [that] has the effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work, academic performance, or living conditions by creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.

This is the worst kind of arbitrary legislation.  In no part of the guidelines are any of these terms defined.  In fact, both as written and as practiced, the definition of these terms is left entirely up to the victim, with outrageous consequences.  Basically we have gotten to the point where hurting someones feelings, or even disagreeing with them, is a crime. 

This would be bad enough if enforced even-handedly, but in practice, speech codes become a tool of the University faculty and administration to squelch speech they don’t agree with.  One of my pet peeves is the term "hate speech", which is used frequently in political diatribes by both the left and the right.  While this term may have at one point had some utility in narrowly describing the most extreme racism, today in its common usage it has come to mean "speech I don’t agree with".  In a similar manner, campus speech codes are effectively enforced as banning speech that the ruling orthodoxy of the university does not agree with.  If a gay rights activist and a conservative Christian get into an
argument on campus and use similar invective against each other, you
can bet only one is probably going to get sanctioned.  And, given the typical politics of universities today, you can guess what speech is protected and what is sanctioned. 

Here is my rule of thumb:  unless speech meets the (narrow) definition of libel, no legally or
administratively actionable harm can be claimed as a result of it.  Or, as we were taught as kids, sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.  In the adult world, this should translate to:  Physical assaults are actionable, verbal assaults are not. 

The Princeton Tory has a nice article on these policies, as well as the really bad idea to extend this to a "social honor code".  And, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is the leading defender of free speech on campus and has a great web site.

Postscript:  Speech limitations are a very slippery slope.  So much so that I have never encountered speech or expression by adults aimed at other adults that I would limit.  Nazis, communists, birchers, pornographers, racists, revolutionaries, militia, muslims, atheists:  Have at it.  Even Congressmen.  And even this.

Update:  One other thought.  I have never understood why so many people think that the right approach to people who have stupid, awful ideas is to keep them from being heard.  This applies not only to speech codes but the increasingly frequent attempts to ban speakers from campus or, if that is unsuccessful, drown their speech out with chants and interruptions.  Why?  I have always thought that Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant not just for government proceedings but for bad ideas as well.  Let them be heard and ridiculed.  After all, Hitler "called his shots" more than a decade before he began his horrible reign.  The world would have been better off if he had been listened to carefully in those early years.

As a libertarian that voted rather unenthusiastically Republican in the last election, I am right here with Ryan Sager:

While
some libertarian types may have been upset with President Reagan’s
deficits, he was at least singing from their hymn book: Government is
the problem, not the solution. George W. Bush on the other hand has
never even gone to the trouble of aping a small-government posture.
Instead, Bush has adopted one of Reagan’s other famous lines, sans
irony: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help. 

This
represents a fundamental shift in the direction of the Republican Party
and a threat to its traditional alliances. The shift is self-evident.
Instead of being the party that tries to rein in entitlement spending,
the Republican Party is now the party of the $1.2 trillion Medicare
prescription-drug benefit. Instead of being the party that is opposed
to even having a federal Department of Education, the Republican Party
is now the party of extensive intrusion into local schoolhouses by Washington.
And instead of being the party of the rule of law and state’s rights,
the Republican Party is now the party of Congressional intervention
into the thoroughly adjudicated medical decisions of an individual
family.

A few weeks ago I wrote here that about the high-stakes battle over judicial nominations.  When Republicans were out of power, they could be trusted to support non-activist judges against liberal activist alternatives.  Now, however, my fear is that Republicans may have shifted their stand, seeking to nominate activist conservative judges.  Leaving no one at all in Washington to support a constitutional separation of powers.

I have posted criticisms of the NEA, or teachers union, here and here.  I discussed the lack of accountability of the NEA to students and their parents, but the Education Wonks has a nice post here about the teacher’s unions lack of accountability to… the teachers.

Mises Institute presents a study whose results are fairly unsurprising for any who is not a socialist or member of a teachers union.  The study

showed that private schools are more efficient -their students perform better at lower costs- than public schools and moreover that the presence of private schools in one locality improves the efficiency of government schools too, presumably because of the pressure from competition.

The only real surprise was the study’s source:  the department of education in Socialist Sweden.  As you can imagine, the powers that be were not amused by the results:

The teacher’s union became enraged at the results as was prime minister Persson and education minister Ibrahim Baylan .

The end result, though, was ENTIRELY predictable.  Did anyone in power change behavior or their opinion?  Nope, they just hid the report and moved on:

After [education minister] Baylan publicly blasted the report (needless to say without using any real factual arguments) the Agency for Education officially disavowed it and simply withdrew it from their web site and stopped giving out the printed version of it.

This is a real low both for journalistic and governmental integrity (via Captains Quarters):

The blogosphere buzzed yesterday with the revelation that pundit Armstrong Williams received $241,000 from the Department of Education to promote the No Child Left Behind Act and push other commentators to do the same. Williams did not disclose the payment while pushing NCLB in several columns and on his television appearances; instead, he represented his opinions as his own independent views.

This is simultaneously wrong and stupid.

As a capitalist and believer in individual rights, one of the things I notice a lot today is just how many people do not trust individual decision-making.  Now, I do not mean that they criticize other people’s decisions or disagree with them — in a free society, you can disagree with anybody about anything.  I mean that they distrust other people’s free, private decision-making so much that they want the government to intervene.

Interestingly, most people don’t think of themselves as advocating government interference with people’s private decisions.  However, if you ask them the right questions, you will find that they tend to fall into one of several categories that all want the government to intervene in individual decision-making in some way:  nannies, moralists, technocrats, and progressive/socialists.  Though the categories tend to overlap, they are useful in thinking about some of the reasons people want to call in the government to take over parts of people’s lives.

By the way, before I get started, just to avoid straw-man arguments like "well, you just want 12-year-olds to have sex with dogs", there are three philosophical limitations that apply to decisions made by individuals or between individuals:

• The decisions or agreements are made without fraud or physical coersion
• The decisions are made by adults (the very definition of adulthood is the legal ability to make decisions for oneself)
• Decisions and areements don’t violate the constitutional rights of others

That being said, here are examples of the government interventionism of  nannies, moralists, technocrats, and progressive/socialists.

Continue reading ‘Respecting Individual Decision-Making’ »

It has always been ironic to me that those who started the "free speech" movement of the 60′s have been in the forefront of clamping down on campus speech via speech codes.  The answer to this paradox was that the free speech movement was never about free speech, but about advancing a mostly Marxist point of view to the exclusion of all others.

FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has a nice roundup of work they have done to defend free speech on campuses in 2004.  Hat tip to Virginia Postrel.

The concept of a cultural celebration by African-Americans of themselves and their history is a good one.  The specific values celebrated in Kwanzaa, however, suck.  They are socialist -Marxist-collectivist-totalitarian crap.   Everyone seems to tiptoe around Kwanzaa feeling that they have to be respectful, I guess because they are fearful of being called a racist.  However, I find it terrible to see such a self-destructive set of values foisted on the African-American community.  These values are nearly perfectly constructed to keep blacks in poverty – just look at how well these same values have played out in Africa.

First, understand that I have no problem with people of any ethnic group or race or whatever creating a holiday.  Life is worth celebrating, as often as possible, even if we have to make up new occasions. 

Second, understand that Kwanzaa is not some ancient African ethno-cultural tradition.  Kwanzaa was made up in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga.  Karenga was a radical Marxist in the 60′s black power movement.  Later, Karenga served time in jail for torturing two women:

Deborah Jones … said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga … also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."

Interestingly, after this conviction as well incidents of schizophrenia in prison where "the psychiatrist observed that Karenga talked to his blanket and imaginary persons and believed that he had been attacked by dive-bombers," California State University at Long Beach saw fit to make him head of their Black Studies Department.

Anyway,  I give credit to Karenga for wanting to create a holiday for African-Americans that paid homage to themselves and their history.  However, what Karenga created was a 7-day holiday built around 7 principles, which are basically a seven step plan to Marxism.   Instead of rejecting slavery entirely, Kwanzaa celebrates a transition from enslavement of blacks by whites to enslavement of blacks by blacks.  Here are the 7 values, right from the Kwanzaa site (with my comments in red itallics):

Umoja (Unity)
To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race

On its surface, this is either a platitude, or, if serious, straight Marxism and thoroughly racist.  Think about who else in the 20th century talked about unity of race, and with what horrible results.

In practice, the notion of unity in the black movement has become sort of a law of Omerta — no black is ever, ever supposed to publicly criticize another black.  Don’t believe me?  Look at the flack Bill Cosby caught for calling out other blacks.

Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)
To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves

Generally cool with me — can’t get a libertarian to argue with this.  When this was first written in the 60′s, it probably meant something more revolutionary, like secession into a black state, but in today’s context I think it is fine.

Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
To build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together

Um, do I even need to comment?  This is Marxism, pure and simple.

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)
To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.

OK, I said the last one was Marxism.  This one is really, really Marxism. 

Nia (Purpose)
To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.

There’s that collectivism again

Kuumba (Creativity)
To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

I guess I don’t have much problem with creativity and make things better.  My sense though that if I was to listen to the teaching on this one in depth, we would get collectivism again.

Imani (Faith)
To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

What about in ourselves as individuals?  Through all of this, where is the individual, either individual responsibility or achievement?  It is interesting that a holiday that was invented specifically to be anti-religious would put "faith" in as a value.  In fact, Karenga despised the belief in God as paying homage to "spooks who threaten us if we don’t worship them and demand we turn over our destiny and daily lives."

However, this is in fact very consistent with the teachings of most statists and totalitarians.  They tend to reject going on bended knee to some god, and then turn right around and demand that men go on bended knee to … them, or other men.  This is in fact what this "faith" was about for Karenga – he is a statist laying the foundation for obedience to the totalitarian state.  He wants blacks to turn over their destiny and daily lives to their leaders, not to god.

So, in conclusion, Kwanzaa was designed as a celebration of creating a totalitarian collectivist Marxist racist state among African-Americans.  I may well get comments and emails that say "oh, thats not how we celebrate it" and I will say fine – but Marxism is the core DNA of the holiday, a holiday created by a man who thought Lenin and the Black Panthers were all wimps.

Never wishing to criticize without suggestion a solution, here are alternate values I might suggest:

Freedom – Every individual is his own master.  We will never accept any other master again from any race (even our own).  We will speak out against injustices and inequalities so our children can be free as well.

Self-Reliance – Each individual will take responsibility for their life and the lives of their family

Pride - We will be proud of our race and heritage.  We will learn about our past and about slavery in particular, so we will never again repeat it. 

Entrepreneurship - We will work through free exchange with others to make our lives better and to improve the lives of our children

Education – We will dedicate ourselves and our time to education of our children, both in their knowledge and their ethics

Charity – We will help others in our country and our community through difficult times

Thankfulness – Every African-American should wake up each morning and say "I give thanks that my ancestors suffered the horrors of the slavery passage, suffered the indignity and humiliation of slavery, and suffered the poverty and injustices of the post-war South so that I, today, can be here, in this country, infinitely more free, healthier, safer and better off financially than I would have been in Africa."

By the way, if you doubt that last part, note that in the late 90′s, median per capita income of African Americans was about $25,000, while the per capita income of Africans back in the "old country" was around $700, or about 35x less.  Note further this comparison of freedom between the US and various African nations.  Finally, just read the news about the Congo or Rwanda or the Sudan.

In my previous post, I took a look at the absurdity of the metrics in the NEA’s recent schools report.  In that post, I ran out of room to Fisk the NEA’s suggested areas of improvement for better school performance (keep scrolling).

Here are their improvement areas with my comments.  I always try to differentiate the NEA as a group from teachers individually.  The rants in this post are aimed at the NEA as a group.  Many teachers as individuals have my fondest regards.  Note I have helpfully put a big green dollar sign by every recommendation that boils down to "spend more money":

Continue reading ‘Fisking the NEA’s Improvement Ideas’ »