Moe Lane

(Via Instapundit) So, educators are worried about the higher education bubble.  OK, that’s not true.  What they’re worried about is that that the higher education bubble has reached the point where it’s beginning to affect the schools themselves: the available money supply is starting to dry up.  Still, that situation is making some schools so worried, in fact, that they’re talking about it amongst themselves and looking for answers.

Well.  Some answers.  Read the whole thing and what strikes you is what is not being discussed as possible solutions:

• There was no discussion – possibly not even an acknowledgement – that our current student loan system is currently designed to reward bad loans for both the universities and the lending agencies.  Or that said system is a major contributor to both higher education prices and onerous, immediate debt burdens on the young.
• There was also no analysis of what the universities are teaching; specifically, what they want to teach – and how that compares to what our society needs them to teach.  Put bluntly: right now we’re overstocked on liberal arts majors, could use more engineers – and really, really, really need more welders, electricians, and mechanics.  It is, however, considered at best impolite (and at worst, prejudiced/racist) to suggest that we place more people into “working class” career tracks.  But, heck, there’s nothing actually stopping a university letting a student major in English lit and minor in, say, auto repair – which is to say, having them get the equivalent of an AA or a certificate degree in the latter.
• Needless to say, there was even more of a lack of an analysis on how the universities are teaching. Specifically, whether they’re teaching the latest fashionable liberal shibboleth instead of, say, how to write a coherent sentence in English.  Which leads nicely to the last point…
• There was a lot of complaining about how state legislatures are turning off the fiscal spigots.  What was carefully not brought up was the hint of a whisper of a suggestion of a intimation that at least some of this may have been due to largely conservative/Republican legislatures deciding that it was impractical to continue to subsidize largely liberal/Democratic local universities.

So what are they thinking of doing?  Well, some possible solutions offered were to: try to yank more money out of alumni and other donors; automate everything that they can (translation: fire as many people who aren’t tenured professors as possible); raise tuition; and create a two-tier system where the more money your dad has, the more you pay in tuition.

Interestingly, that last sentence could actually be summed up in one word, but unfortunately said word is too coarse for public use.

Teachers’ unions, racists, Dick Durbin hardest hit:

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program — which provides low-income District students with federal money to attend private schools — is a top priority of Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The program was closed to new entrants by Democrats in 2009, but Boehner has sought to revive and expand the program. The House passed a Boehner-authored bill last month — the SOAR Act — to reauthorize the program for five more years, and that bill will be included in the final spending deal and signed into law by Obama.

More background here.  The administration was surprisingly unequivocal in its opposition to “the creation or expansion of private school voucher programs that are authorized by this bill,” probably because poor minority kids don’t contribute to Democratic slush funds to the extent that the NEA does.  Killing the DC voucher program has been a priority for Democrats since they took full control of the government in 2009; watching the President sign it back into law is going to be one of the more satisfying things that I* will personally see next week.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Not to mention the Heritage Foundation, which has been fighting this one tooth and nail, and in the streets, all along.

The one worrying about her eighteen-month-old’s private school interviews.

1. The author would have a heart palpitation at the thought that her kid should go to a NYC public school.
2. She would probably be able to rattle off statistics about the NYC public school system that would fully justify said heart palpitation.
3. Despite her admittedly above-average self-awareness at the essential shallowness and absurd materialism that her social class is displaying with regard to their kids’ education, the author will do nothing to alleviate the conditions that lead to #1 & #2.

I don’t know.  It’s a trivial article and a bit of a passive-aggressive whine, but it annoyed me sufficiently to be rude about it.  Maybe because I suspect that the author thinks that she’s being enlightened by telling us that rich people worry about their kids’ education, too.  Which is… nice, I guess: but given that even the merely well-to-do are saddled with the consequences of the choices made by the rich on educational and other policies, put me down as being unimpressed by her problems…

After commenting on this depressing article about how hard it is to fire an incompetent teacher in the LA school system (short answer: very, very, very hard. No, harder than that. No, harder than that, too), Mickey sighs:

I know this item reads like it was written in 1984 (when Gary Hart made an issue of firing incompetent teachers in his campaign against Walter Mondale). That’s because the situation in the unionized public schools has not improved markedly in 25 years. Believe me, I wish the neoliberalism of the late ’70s weren’t so relevant.

I have no desire to get into a fight with Mickey Kaus – those never end well – but I would like to suggest that perhaps he should start remembering that last sentence on future Election Days.

(Via a number of people out there) I’m not upset because Education Secretary Arne Duncan said this about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans education policy:

Martin was quoted as saying: “What’s amazing is New Orleans was devastated because of Hurricane Katrina, but because everything was wiped out, in essence, you are building from ground zero to change the dynamics of education in that city.”

Duncan was quoted as replying: “It’s a fascinating one. I spent a lot of time in New Orleans, and this is a tough thing to say, but let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better.’ And the progress that they’ve made in four years since the hurricane is unbelievable. They have a chance to create a phenomenal school district. Long way to go, but that — that city was not serious about its education. Those children were being desperately underserved prior, and the amount of progress and the amount of reform we’ve seen in a short amount of time has been absolutely amazing.”

…I’m angry because it’s true: it took a catastrophe to focus enough attention on New Orleans to make the local Democratic party’s tradition of malignant neglect too politically risky. The Republicans weren’t the ones who wrecked New Orleans’ schools in the first place; and if you expect us to be cheerful about the fact we’re doing well at cleaning up the mess that the Democrats made, well, don’t.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, I to have noticed that a lot of people like to suddenly decide that partisanship in this sort of thing is unfair – once they realize that they’re on the wrong side of it.  Odd, no?

PPS: I see that my colleague Erick Erickson has raised a similar point.  But he’s slightly nicer about it.

Complete with harsh language and badly-drawn heads. (Via The Smallest Minority)

I’d laugh more, except that I’m going to be staring this problem straight in the face in a few more years. And, bluntly? The only thing more annoying than the fact that the public school system is being run into the ground – using my tax money – is that the people running it into the ground have powerful partisan political patrons.

Crossposted to RedState.

No sense pretending that it’s anything else but that.

Senator Durbin, why do you want to throw these kids out of their schools?

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