No, there is no correlation between spending and the quality of education.
Category Archives: Education
The New State Of Jefferson
I’ve got three of the six states up @Ricochet, but they’re behind the paywall, so I’m going to republish here. First up is Jefferson.
North California
I’ve posted the next in my survey of Draper’s six californias, over @Ricochet.
Ruining Sex In California
Fortunately, it’s just on campus. For now.
Privilege, Education And The Miracle Of The Socks
Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt on the privilege of the naive left.
Academic Writing
The most popular answer outside the academy is the cynical one: Bad writing is a deliberate choice. Scholars in the softer fields spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook.
Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some academics some of the time, in my experience it does not ring true. I know many scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to impress. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing stinks.
The most popular answer inside the academy is the self-serving one: Difficult writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness and complexity of our subject matter. Every human pastime—music, cooking, sports, art—develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to use a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in one another’s company. It would be tedious for a biologist to spell out the meaning of the term transcription factor every time she used it, and so we should not expect the tête-à-tête among professionals to be easily understood by amateurs.
But the insider-shorthand theory, too, doesn’t fit my experience. I suffer the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field, my subfield, even my sub-sub-subfield. The methods section of an experimental paper explains, “Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.” After some detective work, I determined that it meant, “Participants read sentences, each followed by the word true or false.” The original academese was not as concise, accurate, or scientific as the plain English translation. So why did my colleague feel compelled to pile up the polysyllables?
RTWT
The War On Poverty
…has been a tremendous flop.
Not really news, but always worth reminding people. The left always wants to wage war on domestic problems, while ignoring actual enemies.
Free Speech At Berkeley
Eugene Volokh rewrites Chancellor Dirks’s email for him.
[Via Ken White, who notes that Dirks has clarified his position, no doubt in response to the justifiable criticism]
Cooking In College
When I read things like this, I weep for a generation. Where were their parents?
Once, when a niece was a fresh(wo)man at USC, we had her over for dinner. She was a little shocked when I told her that the chicken I’d just roasted cost about three bucks, and would easily last her a week. She’s since become quite the homemaker, though.
Public School As Child Abuse
Example #43,675,219:
Stuarts Draft fifth-grader Grace Karaffa appeared before the school board Thursday night, saying she had requested the substance while on the playground after suffering chapped lips.
“I was told I couldn’t use it. Then later that day they (lips) started to bleed so I asked for Chapstick again and I was told that it was against the school policy for elementary kids to have Chapstick,” Grace said.
Grace asked the school board to change its policy. “Chapstick allows the human body to heal the lips themselves and protects them in any weather from drying out,” she said. She concluded her speech by saying, “Please school board, allow us to have Chapstick.”
I don’t know if you have to be a moron to be a school-board member, but it certainly seems to help.