Friday, October 19, 2007

Law fails to make dummies smart

As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction. For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district's teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At Abraham Lincoln High School this year, only 7 in 100 students could. At Woodrow Wilson High, only 4 in 100 could.

For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance. But more than 1,000 of California's 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading. "What are we supposed to do?" Ms. Paramo asked. "Shut down every school?"

With the education law now in its fifth year - the one in which its more severe penalties are supposed to come into wide play - California is not the only state overwhelmed by growing numbers of schools that cannot satisfy the law's escalating demands. In Florida, 441 schools could be candidates for closing. In Maryland, some 49 schools in Baltimore alone have fallen short of achievement targets for five years or more. In New York State, 77 schools were candidates for restructuring as of last year. Some districts, like those in New York City, have moved forcefully to shut large failing high schools and break them into small schools. Los Angeles, too, is trying small schools, along with other innovations, and David L. Brewer III, its schools superintendent, has just announced plans to create a "high priority district" under his direct control made up of 40 problem schools.

Yet so far, education experts say they are unaware of a single state that has taken over a failing school in response to the law. Instead, most allow school districts to seek other ways to improve. "When you have a state like California with so many schools up for restructuring," said Heinrich Mintrop, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, "that taxes the capacity of the whole school change industry."

As a result, the law is branding numerous schools as failing, but not producing radical change - leaving angry parents demanding redress. California citizens' groups have sued the state and federal government for failing to deliver on the law's promises. "They're so busy fighting No Child Left Behind," said Mary Johnson, president of Parent U-Turn, a civic group. "If they would use some of that energy to implement the law, we would go farther."

Ray Simon, the deputy federal secretary of education, said states that ignored the law's demands risked losing federal money or facing restrictions on grants. For now, Mr. Simon said, the department is more interested in helping states figure out what works than in punishment. "Even a state has to struggle if it takes over a school," he said.

A federal survey last year showed that in 87 percent of the cases of persistently failing schools, states and school districts avoided wholesale changes in staff or leadership. That is why, Mr. Simon said, the Bush administration is proposing that Congress force more action by limiting districts' options in responding to hard-core failure.

In California, Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of schools, calls the law's demands unreasonable. Under the federal law, 700 schools that California believed were getting substantially better were counted last year as failing. A state takeover of schools, Mr. O'Connell said, would be a "last option." "To have a successful program," he said, "it really has to come from the community."

Under the No Child law, a school declared low-performing for three years in a row must offer students free tutoring and the option to transfer. After five years, such schools are essentially treated as irredeemable, with the law prescribing starting over with a new structure, new leadership or new teachers. But it also gives schools the option of less sweeping changes, like reducing school size or changing who is in charge of hiring.

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"Associational Preference" And The Rationale For "Diversity"

Post below lifted from Discriminations. See the original for links

I have criticized more than once the, for lack of a better term, hypocrisy of higher education institutions whose lofty statements of principle trumpet their devotion to fundamental principles of non-discrimination, including the "without regard" principle, while other statements and a myriad of policies proudly proclaim exactly the opposite, that they are committed to using race, ethnicity, and gender to produce "diversity."

As I discussed several years ago, in a post that I invite you now to re-read (or read), Preferences, Principles, And Hypocrisy In Higher Education (Hey, I just had to re-read it; why shouldn't you?), the University of Pennsylvania is a typical example. Its Policy of Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action and Nondiscrimination states (or least it did in 2004 when I first quoted it):
Penn adheres to a policy that prohibits discrimination against individuals on the following protected-class bases: race, color, sex (except where sex is a bona fide occupational qualification), sexual orientation, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, age (except where age is a bona fide occupational qualification), disability (and those associated with persons with disabilities), or status as a special disabled, Vietnam era veteran or other eligible veteran.....

Penn is committed to ensuring that all academic programs (except where age or sex are bona fide occupational qualifications), including social and recreational programs, and services are administered without regard to an individual's protected-class status.

Penn is also committed to ensuring that its personnel and other employment decisions are made without regard to an individual's protected-class status.

Penn, of course, is permeated with policies that explicitly violate the "without regard" principle, and my post went on to mention some of them. Now take a look at this initially similar statement of principle at the University of Iowa, as quoted in this fascinating column in the Des Moines Register (HatTip to RealClearPolitics):
The University of Iowa prohibits discrimination ... on the basis of race, national origin, color, creed, religion, sex, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or associational preference.

If you note that somewhat opaque "associational preference" at the very end of the string of protected categories that are off limits to discrimination, you will see why I said the Iowa statement was only "initially similar" to others of its ilk.

What is "associational preference," you ask, and what does it actually protect? Good question. Nobody seems to know, including officials at the University of Iowa, although there is evidence at Iowa that political affiliation comes under its somewhat leaky umbrella. As a result, a controversy has been ignited by a complaint filed by Mark Molar, an unsuccessful applicant for a position in the history department noting that the department contains 27 registered Democrats and 0 registered Republicans. The Des Moines Register column describes Molar as
a[n] historian with an impressive record: bachelor's degree from Harvard, doctorate from Cambridge; two books, one with Cambridge University Press; laudatory recommendations from distinguished historians; and a growing record of public commentary in national periodicals.

The point of his complaint is not that he wasn't hired but that he was more qualified that all eight candidates who were selected for a final screening. His problem?
He is also a conservative, and his thesis about the Vietnam War - that it was a noble cause that could have triumphed had the United States supported its allies more vigorously - falls well on the right side of things.

Molar himself has an article today on National Review Online going into greater detail about his complaint, and it is well worth reading. He makes, not surprisingly, a variation of the familiar "diversity" (in this case, however, real diversity) argument, noting that
the University's own hiring manual states that search committees must "assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences, diverse backgrounds, and ideology to the university community."


Molar proposes, in effect, that universities spend as much time delving into the ideology of applicants as they do in determining skin color and, presumably, weigh it as heavily on the "diversity" scale. I have reservations about this approach - would, should, it for example, encourage the creation of "Conservative Studies" programs on the model of the Blacks Studies and Womens' Studies programs that were and remain a primary means of promoting race and gender "diversity"? One of their initial functions was to funnel black and women that traditional departments would not hire onto faculties. That seems to be what Prof. Molar (now a professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University) suggests, calling on universities "to create new faculty positions for conservatives beyond the reach of other professors' tentacles, as other schools have started doing."

But I don't want to argue remedies today; I want to discuss the nature of the problem. Or I should say, the nature of the problem if there is one, since Iowa, and other universities, maintain there is no problem, that they cannot assess the ideology of applicants and, even if they could, they should not. If there's no problem, of course, no remedy is needed.

Whether we are still in a post-modern era or have progressed (or regressed, if you prefer) into a post-post-modern era, it remains powerfully true that fields like history are much more enthralled by interpretation than fact. Graduate students spend as much (usually, quite a bit more) time mastering the various and conflicting interpretations of the past than they do on the pedestrian and mundane details of what actually happened. ("Actually!" they might exclaim aghast. "Actually? Don't tell me you still believe in the correspondence theory of truth.") If point of view takes precedence over what is viewed, if it takes a black to teach black history and a woman to teach womens' history, then ... well, you can see where this leads.

What interests me, however, is not what (if anything) should be done about the ideological imbalance in humanities and social science faculties. What interests me is how a whole generation of academics appears to have so little difficulty reconciling irreconcilable principles and behaviors: professing a commitment to treating people "without regard" to race, ethnicity, and gender while proceeding flagrantly and proudly to "take race [and ethnicity and gender] into account," favoring some and disfavoring others on the basis of characteristics they continue to promise not to regard; professing a profound commitment to the fundamental indispensability of "diversity" while remaining cavalierly unconcerned about an ideological conformity in many departments that would make forced re-education camps green with envy. At first I though the answer might lie in cognitive dissonance:
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon first identified by [Stanford psychologist] Leon Festinger. It occurs when there is a discrepancy between what a person believes, knows and values, and persuasive information that calls these into question. The discrepancy causes psychological discomfort, and the mind adjusts to reduce the discrepancy. In ethics, cognitive dissonance is important in its ability to alter values, such as when an admired celebrity embraces behavior that his or her admirers deplore. Their dissonance will often result in changing their attitudes toward the behavior. Dissonance also leads to rationalizations of unethical conduct, as when the appeal and potential benefits of a large amount of money makes unethical actions to acquire it seem less objectionable than if they were applied to smaller amounts.

But this, on reflection, doesn't work, since our esteemed faculties don't seem to experience any dissonance at all, cognitive or otherwise. If they did, they'd at least revise all their statements of civil rights principles to reflect what they actually do in their affirmative action policies. But they don't.

In any event, for whatever reason I'm simply not very interested in hearing about (much less proposing) cures to this conformity. But I do confess one keen interest: I would dearly love to hear a learned exposition of exactly why the fate of the university and indeed of the western world as we know it rests on our success in achieving pigmentary "diversity" - what, for example, does it contribute to the life of the mind? - while ideological diversity appears to be of no concern whatever.






Low expectations won't help anybody

Full disclosure: My wife got good grades in law school. She graduated third in her class. She practices law with a firm downtown that only hires lawyers with good grades, just like every attorney there. Full disclosure: I got good grades in graduate school (though I was nowhere near third in my class). That helped me get on the faculty at one of the most selective institutions in American higher education. There, I give out grades. Good ones to those who master the material, bad ones to those who do not. That is my job. It is, I think, an important one.

So when it comes to today's topic, I might be biased. I actually believe in things like academic excellence and intellectual merit. I believe that right answers are better than wrong answers, that people can differ in their ability to distinguish between the two, and that identifying those who can do that well, is an important social good.

Grades, professional careers, and academic excellence are in the news thanks to the President of the National Urban League. In an interview that made national news, Marc Morial talked about law firms and diversity. It turns out that lawyers at the best firms want to hire only applicants who got good grades in law school. This, apparently, is bad.

Grades in post-secondary education exist to solve an important social problem: discovering who is good at what. It is highly beneficial to society to identify individuals with intellectual ability and professional skill, so that people can find them when they need them. That's how things like "reputation" and "prestige" work. It's also important for smart people to find and work with other smart people. Professional ability is best when leveraged. No one is suggesting that grades are the only thing professional firms should consider. There are plenty of straight-A law school and medical students who have no business being around people. That's why law firms and residency programs conduct interviews. Where you went to school is important too. Some places are tougher than others. Grades aren't perfect, but they're a pretty good indicator of whether or not you can do what you trained for and how you compare with your peers.

Morial's comments were particularly insulting to the minorities he claims to defend. The comments imply that minority law students can't achieve the same grades as white students. Since he doesn't claim discrimination by a conspiracy of racist law professors (good thing too, since there's no evidence for it), I can only assume that he's given up the fight. He seems to imply that the only way non-whites will ever be proportionally represented in American law firms is if lawyers with good grades stop asking for the same in the associates they hire.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose you were accused of a crime, or your kid got into trouble, or someone decided to sue you. Whatever it is, you need a lawyer. You've heard good things about Smith & Jones, so you stop by their office. On their front door you find a newly painted sign: "The law firm of Smith and Jones now supports the hiring policies of the National Urban League. We are proud to announce that, in support of the visual diversity of our professional staff, we have reduced the emphasis we place on the academic performance of applicants for positions with the firm." Would you want them to represent you?

The National Urban League is right when they declare that urban black America is in crisis. They are right in that the standard "solutions" of modern politics have not worked. At the risk of stating the obvious, they are also right in that racism in America has not gone away. But they are wrong if they believe that lower academic standards for law firms, or medical practices, or any professional organization, are the answer. That would be unfair to those who use professional services, unfair to everyone who meets high standards, and unfair in the long run to those it supposed to help. If you ever have wondered what the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations" means, look no further.

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