Education

Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.

Excellent post from Laura about improving schools. She makes several school-improvement suggestions, in response to an article in the NYTimes arguing that all you need for good schools is good teachers and small classes. As Laura points out, the research on class size is completely inconclusive. I’d add two points. The first is that even if class size matters we have no reason to believe that there are no threshold effects; it may be pretty much as easy to teach 30 as 25, and much easier to teach 22, for all we know. Incremental across-the-board reductions in size are expensive, and may have miniscule benefits. Second, I have a feeling (based only on anecdotal evidence) that small classes, in making it more feasible for teachers to individualize instruction, may encourage them to engage in trendy, experimental, but ultimately less effective teaching methods.

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One of the most pleasant aspects of being a Research Fellow is guest lectures. I give guest lectures in a number of different courses, ranging over several faculties and sometimes different universities. This gives me all the things I like about teaching, including (since a change is as good as a holiday) generally attentive audiences, and a chance to present material that’s not the standard textbook, but not new or rigorous enough to justify an academic seminar. On the other hand, all the unpleasant stuff – booking rooms, litigious students complaining about their grades, administrators trying to promote customer-centric shareholder value in a dynamic enterprising university, and so on – is taken care of for me.

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A prominent philosopher in the UK emails to tell me that he has had enough and that he’s looking for employment in the US. The proximate cause of his frustration is the ridiculously complicated process that the Arts and Humanities Research Board (soon to be Council) imposes on us as a condition for distributing the pitiful funding that is available for research students. Increasingly, universities have to demonstrate that they are providing all kinds of “training” in order to access this money and this is part of a wider trend where government (or its arms-length agencies like the AHRB, HEFCE etc) seeks to regulate and micromanage activity within higher education by such conditionalization of funding. My correspondent draws attention to the recent review of “Business-University Collaboration” undertaken by former FT-editor Richard Lambert at Gordon Brown’s behest. Suprisingly, given Brown’s predilection for micromanagement and control across the public sector, one section of the report offers a trenchant exposition of the mess that the government has made as it has tried to subject higher education in the UK to its will.

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Caroline Minter Hoxby has just published a paper (available, like all her papers, free at her website) in the Swedish Economic Policy Review claiming that the performance of Milwaukee’s public schools (measured in terms of test scores per dollar of spending) improved quite dramatically during the heat of the battle over vouchers (in the late 90’s), and that the gains of that time do not seem to have fallen back (though they have plateaued).

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Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day so I wanted to take a few moments to remember. Although numerous members of my family were killed during World War II, my father survived and a few years ago decided to write his story. He did this in a fairly unconventional way. Each chapter in his book begins with a snippet from a Nobel Laureate’s life (with whom he had conducted conversations). Later in the chapter he then relates this biographical story to something in his own life. Reading the book takes us on a journey through the lesser-known moments of many famous scientists’ lives and the details of one Hungarian Jew’s life affected by the events of over 60 years ago.

Here I share with you some snippets from my father’s book. I start with a section told by my uncle about his experiences when he was 11 in a concentration camp. Then I quote the section about my father’s visit in 2002 to the camp he had been in and how poor the remembrance is there.

Excerpts from “Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist” by István Hargittai, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2004

[this quote in the book is from my uncle who was 11 at the time — EH]

The first day after our arrival [in the camp] the people got their work assignments. Mother was directed to be helper to a roofing master who turned out to be a humane Viennese man. He often shared his sandwich with Mother who pretended to eat it and brought it back for us. Children younger than 10 years old stayed behind in the camp during the day. Children above the age of 15 were considered adults and went to work with the rest. Children between 10 and 15 years old formed a special labor unit. I was in this unit, which had about 20 children. We were taken to bombed-out buildings, immediately following the bombing. We had to reach places that adults could not have reached. We had to bring out cadavers and wounded people and all the valuables. If we found just limbs or other body parts we had to bring them out as well. It was a cruel and frightening job and dangerous too.

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I wonder if anyone can help me. I’m doing some research on Channel One. For those who don’t know Channel One it is a daily newscast for schoolchildren, which is watched in schools. The content is provided to the schools for nothing, and the contracting schools also get a significant amount of televisual equipment for their own use while the contract is in effect. The catch: it broadcasts a 12 minute show, 2 inutes of which are advertisments. Delightful. (Max Sawicky at MaxSpeak
has a nice cost-benefit analysis here). I am interested in it as an example of schools collaborating with corporations in a way that affects the ethos of the school, infusing it with the ethos of the commercial public culture outside the school. But a very minor point that I want to make in the paper is a conjecture that when corporations provide goodies to schools there will be a corresponding drop in the willingness of taxpayers to provide funds. I’m guessing that this happens, eg, when local taxpayers know that a local lottery will provide income to the city or state, and that a substitution effect occurs. My suspicions are increased whenever I describe Channel One to someone and ask them to guess the value of the equipment provided: they MASSIVELY overestimate the value, presumably because they think that any sane person would need to get a hell of a lot of money before they would be willing to force kids to watch commercials. (I’ll put the figure Sawicky and Molnar give below the fold, but even they are pretty certainly overestimating considerably (as they admit)). Rather than conjecture, though, it would be nice to have some empirical evidence of the effect, eg, with respect to a lottery. Does anyone know the literature (or whether there is any) on this?

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I wish I could have normal recurring dreams like everyone else seems to; falling off buildings, discovering you’re naked in a crowd of people, or even flying. But no. Two or three times a year, unprompted by anything particular in my waking life, I have to re-sit the Leaving Cert. And not just re-sit it. I am sent to a new school half way through the school year, and have to figure out how, this time, I will manage to pass Honours Maths.

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Via Kevin 'the Animal' Drum we learn that John Gray, author of _Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus_ is pretty touchy. He’s threatening to sue a blogger who pointed out last November that Gray’s Ph.D was of dubious provenance. I thought this was pretty well known — I mean, _I_ knew it, and it’s not like I keep up with the news. He got it from Columbia Pacific University, an unaccredited diploma mill somewhere in California. There was a TV story about it a while ago. But though CPU may be defunct (by the by, what computer scientist would not want a degree from CPU?) there are plenty of others. Enroll at Strassford University, for example (discussed further in this CBS news report), or Glencullen University, notionally located in the heart of Dublin, or just cut to the chase and design your own degree — literally — at Ineedadiploma.com. This last site helpfully reminds you that, although “All our diplomas are printed on high quality parchment paper [and] all transcripts are printed on tamper proof, security paper,” and that  ”You also have the option of adding a security hologram to any transcript”, nevertheless “none of our items are intended to be used for unlawful misrepresentation or fraudulent purposes.” 

fn1. Glencullen also operates as the University of Wexford, which I suppose isn’t _that_ far from Dublin, but also as the University of San Moritz, which makes you hope the students don’t have to walk across campus to get from one lecture to the next.

In a disproportionate and heavy-handed response to a specific problem, the University of Birmingham (UK) has banned staff from hosting personal web pages (including blogs) on their systems. The Guardian has the story . And staff at Birmingham have a campaign to defend their right to host personal material.

Ed Felten has posted a call for science/tech books we’d like all students to read. Ed is disturbed by the low number of science- and technology-related books that appear on the “must read” lists of an international group of college presidents. (Note that the response rate to the survey was quite low at around 25%.) Another interesting result is that very few contemporary books are on these people’s lists.

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Professor Edward Feser continues his self-immolation on TechCentralStation (see previous episodes here and here and Brian Leiter’s takes here and here ) and, in the course of doing so issues a challenge to his critics:

bq. The real question is whether on balance, in general, students tend to become more liberal as a result of their university experience; and this question can, for clarity’s sake, be broken up into a number of sub-questions [details below].

The answer to the questions is, according to Professor Feser, “yes”, indeed he

bq. … simply den[ies] the intellectual honesty of anyone who claims to believe otherwise — or at least doubt that he’s spent much time among university students. Yet to acknowledge that these questions must be answered in the affirmative is to acknowledge that the modern university does indeed serve the de facto function of undermining the commitment of the young to the traditional institutions of Western civilization.

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This story about the inflation of high school diplomas simply states what anyone working in a US high school knows — graduation simply requires attendance plus a modicum of obedience. Failing that, it helps to have parents who are willing to make life sufficiently difficult for administrators and teachers that they will give you a passing grade anyway. There are multiple culprits. One is the ludicrous system of having classroom teachers be the sole assigners of grades. I spent Sunday watching two teachers spend 90 minutes preparing for a meeting one of them was having on Monday with a parent of a student. The sole purpose of the meeting was to negotiate over the grade. The teacher had assigned a B and the parent was not satisfied. In the end, the parent refused to be satisfied (having recalculated the grade herself) and is insisting on a meeting with the Principal. My prediction — the parent will win, because the Principal will think — ‘this is a complete waste of my time, caving on this won’t make things any worse between me and the teacher, and it’ll get this p-i-t-a off my back’. Total waste — about 5 hours of school teachers and principal’s time. (I don’t care about the student’s or parent’s time — lets assume that harassing teachers is their hobby).

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I love America. Across its vast, extraordinarily diverse area, weird or stupid stuff happens all the time. And the media are usually there to make it into a national story:

A second-grade girl from Pittsburgh was suspended this week from her public elementary school for saying the word “hell” to a boy in her class. But 7-year-old Brandy McKenith says she was only warning the boy about the eternal comeuppance he could face for saying: “I swear to God.”

“I said, ‘You’re going to go to hell for swearing to God,'” Brandy was quoted as saying in an article that appeared on the Web site of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review on Wednesday. School officials were unavailable for comment. A Pittsburgh Public Schools spokeswoman told the newspaper that the student code prohibits profanity but does not provide a clear definition of what profanity is.

Lovely. Possible followups to this story: (1) Little boy also suspended for taking the Lord’s name in vain. (2) School issues statement saying, “It’s all been cleared up: We’ve explained to Brandy and the little boy that we were wrong to suspend them because, of course, Hell doesn’t exist and neither does God.” (3) President Bush issues statement that his No Child Left Behind Act will remedy “the unimaginative nature of profanity found in our public schools today.” (4) Brandy handed additional suspension for violating her school’s strict no-alcohol policy.

Normally I leave stories like this to the Volokhs, who have a sweet tooth for them. But they are busy at the moment trying to convince their readers that, whatever Paul Craig Roberts thinks, U.S. taxpayers are not less free than slaves. Eugene Volokh has devoted about 10,000 words of his fine legal mind to this question, so far. He even wrote up a helpful table outlining the relevant differences between 19th century U.S. slaves and 21st century U.S. taxpayers. I find myself wondering just what you’d have to say to get Eugene to write “Oh piss off, you ignorant little troll.”