Moscow Education (Idaho)

As reported in today's edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

The University of Idaho's graduate programs are stuck in the past, resistant to change and lag behind other schools, according to an independent report commissioned by the school and released this month.

Anyone heard if the UI has done anything to modernize graduate programs in the last year?  

Capital Research Center's Education Watch Director, Phil Brand, is visiting a total of 100 schools across the US: two in each state.

One of the two schools featured in the Jan 2008 edition of Compassion & Culture is Moscow’s own Logos School.

You can read the entire article here:

 http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1230746729.pdf 

A pearl of education in Northern Idaho.

Timeless Wisdom

Logos School, Moscow Idaho

It’s 9 pm on a Friday night in Moscow, Idaho. Gathered together in the living room of high school teacher Jim Nance are 25 juniors from his rhetoric class, watching the movie “Henry V.” Every year after the students read Shakespeare’s play, Nance has them over to watch the movie version, paying particular attention to King Henry’s motivational speech on the eve of the great clash with the French on St. Crispin’s Day. In class, Nance has his students prepare and deliver their own speeches about personal heroes. “All the great men of the past had heroes,” says Nance. “It is important not only to teach them about abstract ideas, but about concrete examples they can model their lives after.” Nance’s own hero is Leonardo Pisano, a famous mathematician. Students’ heroes ranged from Michael Jordan to J.R.R. Tolkein, Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs, pastors and family members.

Nance and his students are from Logos School, a classical Christian school serving grades K-12. The school opened its doors in 1981, with 18 kids in the rented basement of a church. Superintendent Tom Garfield, who has been with the school since the beginning, said the founders wanted a school for their children that was both classical and Christian, and distinct from government (public) schools. The school has grown to 250 students, and is a leader in the classical, Christian education movement. In 1991, Doug Wilson, a founding board member and teacher in the school, wrote a book entitled Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, introducing Logos as a real-life example of the model. It sparked the interest of parents and educators around the country, and in 1994, with Logos as a charter member, the Association of Classical & Christian Schools (ACCS), was formed. ACCS now lists over 200 member schools. Logos was inspired by Wilson’s reading of a 1947 essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, by the English novelist Dorothy Sayers. She argued that there was something seriously amiss in modern education; we have, she said, “lost the tools of learning--the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks.” Instead, students learn an assortment of “complicated jigs,” specific, isolated knowledge, which have turned out to be very poor substitutes. We are failing in the “sole true end” of education, which is simply to teach men how to learn for themselves.

What set Sayers apart was her solution. Schools, she urged, ought to adopt “the medieval scheme of education… what the men of the Middle Ages supposed to be the object and the right order of the educative process.” At the heart of classical education is the Trivium, whose three parts are Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order. Intended for the study of Latin, they actually instruct pupils in the process of learning. First, one learns the structure of language, grammar (hence, grammar school) “what it was, how it was put together, and how it worked.” Then dialectic, how to use language, make accurate statements, construct an argument and detect fallacies in argument. Finally, the pupil learns rhetoric, how to use language elegantly and persuasively. These steps—acquiring the building blocks of knowledge, analyzing how they are used, and constructing something beautiful and true from them—apply to all fields of study, not just language.

The Trivium also gives structure to a K-12 school because its three stages correlate with “singular appropriateness,” what Sayers recognized as three states of child development, which she called the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic. “The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable.” A young child memorizes and recites easily, and “rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables.” The Pert age, which follows, “is characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to ‘catch people out’ (especially one’s elders).” People often say the last stage, the Poetic age, is difficult. The student is self-centered, expressive, and “rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness.”

When I arrived at Logos school, I immediately saw the philosophy in practice. On stage in the cafeteria/auditorium, elementary (or grammar) school students were concluding a “speech meet.” Public speaking, the Rhetoric stage, is an important part of Logos at all grade levels, starting in elementary school but capped by a thesis presentation in 12th grade. Garfield attributes the success of Logos school’s mock trial team (10 state titles in the last 14 years) to the school’s classical training.

Everything at Logos (Greek for “the word”) is selfconsciously built on the bedrock of Scripture (John 1:1, “In the beginning was the word…”). At first the school unsuccessfully used a pre-packaged Christian curriculum that it tried to mold to Sayers’ model of classical education. Eventually, it built its own curriculum based on original documents and “great books.”

Often this means old books. A C.S. Lewis essay that came to be known as On the Reading of Old Books states, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” It’s a philosophy rhetoric teacher Jim Nance believes in. “We use Aristotle, we use source documents a lot in classical education.” Then the old books and documents are studied and criticized from a Christian perspective.

Sayers’ view was that problems in modern education are not about education, but are by-products of confusion about culture and civilization. She believed modern civilization was burdening its teachers with the task of shoring up the “tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand.”

Logos believes it has found a more nurturing soil. I visited a 12th grade civics class whose textbook was Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order. Tenth graders in literature class had finished James Fenimore Cooper and were reading Herman Melville—Moby Dick. The class was discussing a Melville character, Captain Bildad, in relation to the Scriptures, for Bildad’s namesake was one of Job’s three friends. The Logos school song is Shakespeare’s “Non Nobis, Domine,” whose lyrics hang on a banner in the gym. Superintendent Garfield said the basketball team sings it after every game.

Most parents of Logos students work for the University of Idaho or as farmers, the two largest sources of employment in Moscow. Annual tuition averages $3,700 for K-12. The school supplements it with donations, and a cottage industry has developed: Logos sells its curriculum and administrative materials to sister schools and homeschoolers around the country. The income now accounts for about 20% of the school’s budget.

Horizon now has five planes in University colors: BSU, UW, WSU, UO and OSU.

But what happened to the University of Idaho?

From today's Spokesman Review.

The Bronco blue and orange will festoon a Horizon Air Q400 jet that will fly the colors year-round as it flies passengers around the West, the airline announced today. Horizon said the decorated plane is planned to celebrate its 25 years of serving Boise. The Boise State-themed plane is not actually unique; Horizon already has “university-themed aircraft” honoring the University of Washington, Washington State, University of Oregon and Oregon State. “Our four university-themed aircraft have generated an overwhelmingly positive response, and they hold a special place in our fleet,” said Dan Russo, Horizon’s vice president of marketing and communications. “Like the others, the Boise State-themed aircraft will be painted at no cost to the university and flown full time across our route system.” BSU President Bob Kustra said he was “very proud” and called the move “another indicator of our increasing stature.”

HT: Dave G.

This Washington Times column suggests that the Obamas homeschool their two daughters.

Home-schooling will relieve the need for Secret Service agents and drivers to accompany your daughters to school each day, saving taxpayer funds. It will allow maximum security, because they will be with their parents, and there's no better security than that.

Home-schooling produces better academic results than public or private schools. According to a study just published by the Home School Legal Defense Association, when students from a sampling of Ivy League colleges took the American Civic Literacy Test, (on factual knowledge of American history and the Constitution) college seniors from Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities scored 69.50 percent, 65.85 percent and 61.90 percent, respectively.

These Ivy League seniors were bested by freshmen at Patrick Henry College, who earned a 71.6 percent. The Patrick Henry freshmen - most of whom were home-schooled - not only beat out Harvard seniors, they also scored 17 points higher than the mean score of seniors at the 50 best colleges in the country.

In the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, which tests critical thinking, reading, writing and math skills, again the home-schooled freshmen outperformed college seniors at all of the 253 participating universities and officer training academies.

Home-schooling will do more for your daughters than give them great academic instruction. It will keep your family sane and give you all a sense of stability and togetherness through a trying time in your lives. Even at the best of times, the presidency can take a terrible toll on the individual and the family.

Hell will freeze over first. But it’s a good suggestion.

HT: Dr. A

The Denver Post has an article about how students are promoted when they are proficient, not after they “do” so many hours of class.

Students will be tested this spring to determine their proficiency in reading, writing and math, and will be grouped next year with peers who are learning at the same level.

Students may move to the next level at any time they are proficient.

This seems like the very best approach to education. Instead of the Prussian system, where everyone marches in lock-step based on their age (and not necessarily what they have learned), to base education on proficiency.

There are strategic nightmares, of course, in trying to schedule this kind of curriculum.

But this has been the power of homeschool co-ops: where kids are put into classes based on their proficiency and aptitude and not based on their age.

Here’s a longer extract from the Denver Post:

A school district in Westminster struggling with declining enrollment and falling test scores will try something revolutionary next year that many say never has been accomplished in the Lower 48.

Adams 50 will eliminate grade levels and instead group students based on what they know, allowing them to advance to the next level after they have proved proficiency.

"If they can pull this off, it will be a lighthouse for America's challenged school districts," said Richard DeLorenzo, the consultant who implemented a standards-based model in Alaska and is working with Adams 50. "It will change the face of American education."

A district of 10,000 students and 21 schools, Adams 50 serves a working-class suburb north of Denver. Seventy-two percent of its students are poor enough for federal meal benefits, two-thirds are Latino, and 38 percent still are learning English.

Two years ago the district was put on academic watch because of achievement troubles; fewer than 60 percent of students graduate on time.

"What we are doing right now is not working," said Superintendent Roberta Selleck, who was hired in 2006 to reform the district. "We think this will be huge."

The new system will have 10 levels instead of the traditional kindergarten through 12th grade model.

Students will be tested this spring to determine their proficiency in reading, writing and math, and will be grouped next year with peers who are learning at the same level.

Next school year, the system starts with students now classified as kindergartners through eighth-graders and will expand into high school one year at a time.

The US government education system is modeled after the old Prussian education system:

The Prussian system instituted compulsory attendance, national training for teachers, national testing for all students (used to classify children for potential job training), national curriculum set for each grade, and mandatory kindergarten.

There are some really scary parallels between the US government education system and the Prussian model.

• Horace Mann (“Father of American Public Education”) brought the Prussian system to the USA.
• “The State is the father of children.” — Horace Mann
• Following the defeat by Napoleon, the Prussians devised a system that would teach “duty, discipline, respect for authority, and the ability to follow orders.”
• Elite Prussians, looking to get a thinking man’s education, attended private schools.
• This stratification still exists in modern Germany: Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium. 
• The purpose of the system was to instill loyalty to the crown; and train young men for the military and bureaucracy.
• The Prussian system defined for the child was to be learned; what was to be thought about; and how long to think about it.
• One had to remove critical thinking so that there was no confusion by the masses.
• The Prussian system wasn’t designed for the good of the individual but for the good of the government.
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the designer of the Prussian system:
• “The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way, that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”
• “Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”

To the right is an amazing documentary on the Prussian education system.

I’m totally rethinking the US education system. The system we have now is not the original US system; not the system that made America great; not the system that will restore us as an educated people; and not the system that has been successful for millenia in Western civilization.

Much of this applies to private schools as well, which are also structured after the Prussian system.

The College Puzzle presents some disturbing statistics about Boston government school grads.

• According to the Boston Globe, 70% of Boston’s public high school graduates go to a four- or two-year college, but few earn a degree or certificate
• At one community college, 80% of Boston public graduates required remedial math, reports the Boston Globe.
• Only 12% of Boston students who started at a community college earned a degree or certificate of any kind
• One-third of four-year state college students and 56% of four-year, private college students earned a degree within six years.

Clearly, Boston and Massachusetts are spending a ton of money for K12 babysitting services.

This article reminds me of the quote from Pirates of the Caribbean, where Elizabeth confronts Barbossa about the Pirate’s Code:

Elizabeth: Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren...
Barbossa: First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate's code to apply and you're not. And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner .

High school graduation requirements are more like “guidelines” rather than rules. Everyone can graduate once there are no rules.

The Washington Post bemoans the fact that in order to prevent students from failing, the state has made graduation easier and easier. This has led to zero standards.

The waiver is the latest but most troubling example of the watering down of the high school assessments since they were initiated in 2003. The original requirement that a student earn a minimum score on each test was modified to allow a minimum score on all four tests. Then came the change that allowed students who flunked the tests more than once to do a project to show their mastery of a subject. Now comes the waiver and, bingo, Maryland is right where it started, when diplomas were awarded but not necessarily earned.

When there is no bar, the diploma means nothing.

You may have never heard of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, but there’s a movement to push for single-sex education in the government schools.

EdWeek has an article that discusses gender-specific education in Memphis schools.

The article includes updates on the number of single-sex experiments in public schools.

The biggest driver that educators cite for single-sex schools: boy troubles.

Gender-specific classes have been part of the U.S. private school environment since before the Constitution. But until a few years ago, public school parents who couldn’t afford $15,000 to $20,000 in private tuition were out of luck, said Dr. Leonard Sax, co-founder of the single-sex group.

“If you don’t have that kind of money, you don’t have any choices,” he said. “Why not make these choices available in the public schools?”

In 2002, 11 U.S. public schools offered the option. Today, 514 do, including Washington, Corry Middle, Vance Middle, Kingsbury Middle and Georgia Avenue Elementary in Memphis. Pockets of experimentation are taking off in other Memphis City Schools.

At 48, Sax has given up his medical practice to preach full time the gospel of gender-specific classrooms, hoping in five years that 7 percent of the nation’s public schools will be gender-specific. Just about 1 percent are today.

He lists the benefits with the fervor of a convert, including that girls “tend to find their voice” in classrooms where they don’t have to worry about being wrong and being ridiculed, he said, ticking off a list of women who graduated from all-girl schools, including Reese Witherspoon, Madeleine Albright, Nancy Pelosi, Rosa Parks, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sally Ride.

“In colleges, you can tell which women went to girls schools,” he said. “The girls who didn’t will raise their hands and wait for you to call on them.

“The girls who did still raise their hands, but if they don’t get called on, they interrupt.

I posted here ages ago about gender-specific education (such as what Moscow’s Atlas School provided).

There is much research that suggests both boys and girls learn better when separated.

The following letter to the editor appeared in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. This was written by an MHS senior:

New requirements have been made by our State Board of Education stating that public schooling in Idaho will require more math and science courses.

Our state also is requiring all seniors present a senior project in order to graduate; pass the ISAT with a score of proficient or advanced in reading, math, language usage and science; and students will have to take either the ACT, SAT or Compass exam by the end of their junior year. This will all go into effect for the class of 2013 and beyond.

Since additional courses are being added, the Moscow School Board is looking into a schedule that would balance these requirements. Right now, Moscow High School uses a floating fifth period schedule. Students have six classes total. You attend five classes each day, and you go to each class four times in a week's period.

The board is thinking about going to a scheduling system where students would have seven classes total and go to six classes each day. I feel this is not a very good decision. Having six classes every day is a lot for any high school student. The more important factor is that having six classes per day is a lot of homework.

I hate to break it to her, but having seven different classes per day, 5 days per week, 7^th – 12^th grade is a typical schedule for private schools. It’s the government schools that get away with only having 5 classes per day.

Via Christianity Today: 

"Activist Republicans are sticking their hands into higher education," said Duane Litfin, Wheaton's president. "Democrats hear the same complaints, but Republicans feel like the foxes are in charge of the henhouse of higher education, and the result is a tremendous amount of intrusiveness coming at us."

Christian colleges will also watch how the Obama administration handles government funding, which could lead to hiring restrictions outlawing faith-based discrimination. While campaigning in July, Obama laid out his plans to continue support for faith-based social services, saying, "If you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion." Since then, there has been extensive debate on the precise nature of the regulations Obama might impose.

But money always has potential strings attached, said Gene Veith, provost of Patrick Henry College, a Christian school in Virginia that does not accept government funding. The government, he noted, is generous in its higher education grants now, but there are already some conditions, such as privacy laws that restrict access to student grade reports.

"There's concern at some point that the federal government might mandate, through antidiscrimination laws, laws about homosexuality and other things like that," Veith said. "That's possible. I don't really see that on the horizon yet, but it could happen."

…

Some Christian colleges are also concerned that a national accreditation process could force schools to be more similar in their missions, creating problems for colleges that want to focus on research or the liberal arts because of requirements that must be met. The federal government is not involved in the process now, but the Bush administration headed in that direction.

"The diversity of institutions in the U.S. is one of the great strengths of our educational system — the assessment conversation tends to sound like there's one type of institution," says Chip Pollard, president of John Brown University, an evangelical college in Arkansas.

But as long as federal assessment mimics regional assessment and takes the mission of research, liberal arts, and religious schools into account, Pollard said more assessment will only help Christian colleges.

"I don't think [assessment] will be a problem for us," Pollard said. "But I don't want to have one cookie-cutter way of doing assessment that assumes a state or research institution as the institution we're assessing."

From the International Reading Association:

Brozo noted the following facts about boys’ reading and writing, gathered from a variety of sources:

• By fourth grade, the average boy is two years behind the average girl in reading and writing.
• Boys score significantly lower than girls on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and writing assessments.
• Boys make up 70% of special education classes and are four times more likely to have ADHD than girls.
• Boys are 50% more likely to be retained a grade than girls and are three times more likely to be placed in reading/learning disabilities settings.
• Boys around the world score less well than girls in reading and writing and have lower motivation to read and write than their female counterparts.

What can be done? In Bright Beginnings for Boys, Zambo and Brozo say that boys will have great potential as active readers when they

• Are viewed as a resource with unique imaginations, abundant curiosity, and the capacity for self-regulation and sustained attention.
• Become engaged readers because of responsive instruction that is sensitive to the achievement and motivational challenges they face.
• Have print encounters upon entering school that capture their unique and burgeoning male imaginations and build strong literate identities.
• Are exposed to books with positive male characters that serve as both entry points to reading and templates of honorable masculinity.

As opposed to someone who should be drugged to make them behave as a girl?

California’s school board decided all eighth graders should be tested in algebra by 2012 in accordance with state standards.

But according to the Sacramento Bee, a Superior Court judge has blocked mandatory algebra.

Why? The state superintendent, local school boards, administrators, and most of all the teachers’ unions, say California doesn’t have enough qualified math teachers to get everyone ready for algebra in eighth grade.

And just why cannot any college graduate teach 8^th grade Algebra?

We’ve discussed this problem here on this website before.  Those who teach have the lowest academic scores — ie., are the least qualified to be educators.

As Walter Williams notes: we have to address that sensitive problem if we’re to fix education in the US.

American education will never be improved until we address one of the problems seen as too delicate to discuss. That problem is the overall quality of people teaching our children. Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have graduated with an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admissions tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. As such, they are home to the least able students and professors with the lowest academic respect. Were we serious about efforts to improve public education, one of the first things we would do is eliminate schools of education.

—George Mason economist, Prof. Walter Williams, in his most recent nationally syndicated column

Fred Strine, who just retired from teaching after 36 years, laments the ignorance of his fellow teachers:

Of my 28 colleagues in the English dept. only one other geezer and I know what a direct object is. My grammar diagnostic test routinely given to 7th graders in the 70s proved way too tough for my current high school TEACHER colleagues. Our Language Arts department has no Standard English textbooks. The facilitators wouldn’t use them anyway. “Besides, nobody cares about stuff like subject-verb agreement anymore,” I’ve been told. Meanwhile glaring errors such as, “Her and me feel the same,” pass muster with both students AND their facilitators.

…

Wise up, America. By default public education has declared the earth flat again and fallen off the edge. Somebody please re-discover Pythagoras, and let’s get back to a truly well-rounded, grounded education for all.

This is a breathtaking view of government education.

And I’ve heard it repeated over and over again.

I’m not sure how the government schools can break out of the culture of mediocrity that they’ve created. Government school graduates go back with the mediocre mindset to teach more mediocrity.

It’s going to take something completely new to fix this downward death spiral.

From the Philly Inquirer:

Veronica Goss is the first person to admit that her son, Walter Ransome, made a big mistake in the stairwell of Francis Pastorius Elementary School the week before Thanksgiving.

Walter, a tall, lean boy with a shelf full of trophies from a Christian Youth Basketball Association, agrees that he was foolish that afternoon.

Before going to the after-school program at his Germantown school, Walter, 13, and an eighth-grade female classmate stopped in the stairwell.

It was there that that they briefly had sexual intercourse. Walter got kicked out of school for the incident. The girl stayed in school. Now, Goss is demanding to know why.

"I'm not going against the school board whatsoever. Punish these children the way they are supposed to be punished, but don't just punish one and not the other when they both were involved. That's not fair," she said.

Perhaps it was “pajama day” at school.

After all, what do the schools expect happen when hormones go to school in pajamas?

Sorry, math humor.

From the Associated Press:

Six Boise State University students are suing the school, saying BSU is discriminating against them by refusing to provide student activity fee money to religious clubs.

Attorneys with the Virginia-based Center for Law and Religious Freedom filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court on Thursday on behalf of students Tanya Cordova, Justin Ranger, Paul Beskow, Samantha Thorson, Jesse Barnum and Alex Canfield. Three BSU officials — Michael Laliberte, vice president for student affairs; Kelly Stevens, student activities director; and Teri Rapp, the financial technician for the Associated Students of Boise State University — are named as defendants.

The students contend that BSU is engaging in viewpoint discrimination by barring only religious clubs from getting student activity fee money.

BSU collects student activity fees from every student attending the school, according to the lawsuit. That money is allocated to approved student clubs by the Associated Students of Boise State University, the student government body.

…

University officials say the policy was intended to comply with the Idaho State Constitution, which expressly forbids state money going to religious organizations.

But other schools in the state — including the University of Idaho — do allow religious groups to receive money from student fees, according to the lawsuit.

If these institutions were weaned off of state funding, they would be responsible to the demands of the market and their customers — parents and the kids.

As reported in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

State funding for public colleges and universities is declining across the nation, and some schools have taken their futures into their own hands by starting to wean themselves from public money.

University of Idaho officials would like to follow a similar path, but don't know if it's possible. Washington State University officials are a bit more skeptical.

Both universities receive about one-third of their funding from the state.

UI Vice President for University Advancement Chris Murray said public universities can no longer survive without private support.

"It's a national trend, and we're not alone," he said. "You look at public universities over the last 30 years, the trend for state support has gone down in every state."

UI Budget and Finance Committee member Jim Murphy said public colleges and universities across the country have been looking at a greater need for external dollars.

"There have been a number of state institutions, particularly in the Midwest, who have engaged in some pretty interesting discussions about not being state institutions," Murphy said. "They're to the point where they could say, 'If we didn't have money from the state ... we could still survive.' "

Murray said the UI's external supporters play an important role for students, and that the university would not be able to maintain its role without private support.

"Those private dollars are essential because as state funding continues to go down as part of our budget, private dollars are going to become more important," Murray said. "I just think it's incredibly important to increase private dollars."

…

But UI faculty and officials remain more hopeful. Murphy said the state is not capable of supporting an institution the size of the UI, which is in the midst of its own capital campaign.

"The truth is, if we are going to be as big and far-ranging as our appetite suggests, then we're going to have a greater supply of our operating budget come from other sources," Murphy said. "We need donors to come to our rescue."

Or go on a diet and stop eating Twinkies and Ding-Dongs….

According to this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the problems boys experience in school are completely genetic.

Young men are less likely to attend college if they carry a common form of a gene associated with poor impulse control, a new study has found. But the study also found that a strong environment-a high-quality high school and heavily involved parents-can counteract that genetic risk. For boys with this gene who grow up in supportive environments, there was no drop in college attendance.

The study, which was written by three sociologists and a behavioral geneticist, examined genes and survey data from more than 2,500 people who have participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The paper appears in the November issue of the American Journal of Sociology, which was published last week.

The lead author, Michael J. Shanahan, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, insists that the study should not be used to support fatalism or genetic determinism. On the contrary, he says, the study offers a new kind of evidence about the roles that social institutions play in reproducing or ameliorating inequality.

“Whether this gene is related to college-going is extremely contingent on a person’s social capital,” Mr. Shanahan says.

The gene, known as DRD2, controls the body’s ability to respond to a brain chemical called dopamine, which plays a role in many cognitive and emotional processes. Certain variants of the DRD2 gene have been associated in previous studies with poor impulse control, difficulty in planning, and alcoholism. But the mechanisms behind those relationships are not fully understood, and some scientists are skeptical about single-gene explanations of human behavior.

In the new study, young men with DRD2 risk-that is, those who carry the “problem” variants of the DRD2 gene-were significantly less likely to continue their educations beyond high school. (Roughly 43 percent of the study’s participants were found to have problem DRD2 variants.)

Among white men, 59.3 percent of those without DRD2 risk continued their educations beyond high school, whereas only 44.4 percent of those with DRD2 risk did so. Among African-American men, 51.5 percent of those without DRD2 risk continued their educations, but only 34.7 percent of those with DRD2 risk did so.

As the expression goes: there’s gall, then there’s breathtaking gall. 

This surpasses even that.

Universities have been spending money like drunken sailors, well outpacing even health care inflation. In fact, I don’t know of another sector of the economy that has as high inflation rate as the education sector.

But since they’ve spent themselves into a money hole, they want buy-out money too.

Priceless.

From the Wall Street Journal:

With the Big Three seeking a bailout from Washington, the Big Ten are following suit. Earlier this week the Carnegie Corporation of New York took out a two-page ad in the New York Times, signed by executives of 36 public universities, state university systems and higher-education associations, urging Congress and President-elect Obama to rescue them.

Mr. Obama has already promised to expand federal subsidies to higher education by increasing Pell grants and making student-loan terms more permissive. The university chiefs seek an additional "federal infusion of capital" -- as much as $45 billion -- to build new facilities, especially "green" ones. "To ensure a rapid response, only projects that are shovel-ready or on which construction can begin within 120-180 days should be funded," says the ad.

Put the word “green” or “global warming” on the grant request and expect it to be rubber-stamped.

The Higher Education Investment Act, as the university chiefs call their proposed bailout, would allow them to make an end run around parsimonious state lawmakers: "The dollars should not be subject to appropriation by state legislatures. Federal funds should be conditional on states' agreement not to use these federal funds as an excuse to reduce budgetary commitments to state universities."

Yet American higher education might benefit from more parsimony. Economist Richard Vedder has shown that large government subsidies already contribute to making universities "relatively inefficient institutions partly sheltered from the discipline of the market -- a discipline that provides incentives for cost reductions, product improvement, and innovation." The more subsidies rise, the higher tuitions seem to go. If taxpayers are going to shovel out more money to these schools, the academic executives should at least allow outsiders to perform a cost "restructuring."

HT: Club for Growth

According to FIRE, 77% of public universities and 67% of private colleges and universities restrict free speech by use of speech codes.

• The University of the Pacific defines harassment as “conduct (intentional or unintentional) that has the effect of demeaning, ridiculing, defaming, stigmatizing, intimidating, slandering or impeding the work or movement of a person or persons or conduct that supports or parodies the oppression of others.”
• Penn State University requires its students to agree that “I will not engage in any behaviors that compromise or demean the dignity of individuals or groups,” including any “taunting,” “ridiculing,” or “insulting.”

No parodies? No satire? No ridiculing?

Check out FIRE’s report on the hot new trend on college campuses: “bias incident reporting.” That’s where one student reports the biases of fellow students to the campus authorities.

Unbelievable.

HT: Joanne Jacobs

The Friedman Foundation has released a six-set of “myth busters.”

These are research guides on the six most common school choice myths.

There’s some great information here, backed up with hard data.

• Myth: Vouchers hurt public schools and take the best and brightest. Short version, detailed version.
• Myth: Private schools aren’t really better than public schools. Short version, detailed version.
• Myth: Vouchers will lead to increased segregation. Short version, detailed version.
• Myth: Private schools are hostile to tolerance and democratic values. Short version, detailed version.
• Myth: Vouchers are costly and drain money from public schools. Short version, detailed version.
• Myth: Private schools exclude difficult students. Short version, detailed version.

This goes back to the union’s requirement that everyone receive the same wage rate: from a Spanish teacher to a brain surgeon. They allow for no distinction in supply and demand or the amount of education required to become a brain surgeon vs. an underwater basketweaving teacher.

As reported in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

Jack Sullivan thinks everything should be on the table for budget cuts and changes at the University of Idaho, including athletics.

The biological sciences professor said Tuesday it was "absolutely fair" to suggest the athletic department pay more in administrative fees to help make up for the UI's budget shortfall. UI Federation of Teachers President Robert Dickow and Idaho Federation of Teachers President Nick Gier brought up the idea in a statement sent to hundreds of UI faculty and union members earlier this week.

…

The athletic department currently pays 3 percent of its programmatic revenue in administrative fees. Other university departments pay 8 percent.

Gier and Dickow's statement says the athletic department should be bumped to 8 percent also, which they estimate would generate more than $650,000.

UI Athletic Director Rob Spear did not return phone calls seeking comment. However, athletic department spokeswoman Becky Paull issued a statement today claiming that an increase to 8 percent would generate only $300,000.

Paull's e-mail states the athletic department pays less because it provides "a direct infusion of monies back to the university" by paying $2.5 million in tuition, fees, room and board for its scholarship athletes and drawing in other athletes who also pay those expenses.

Paull stated that the athletic department disagrees with Gier and Dickow's suggestions.

"The department is impacted by budget reductions and already has reduced its budget by $500,000," she wrote.

Dickow said the goal of the statement was to urge the university to look into money-saving measures he and Gier feel haven't been fully addressed.

The statement suggests administration could be cut as well. It also opposes student fee increases, though Dickow said increases should be considered.

Which goes back to the welfare mentality of Federation of Teachers — everyone else should pay for their wants.

Dickow said the university should consider "rectifying imbalances" with the athletic department before cutting academics, including faculty.

Another typical union mantra.

"The university's main function is to teach academic subjects," he said. "Athletics has always been an extra, a luxury. Some schools have gotten rid of it. They don't even have it in Europe. Basically we need to have our priorities in place."

Gier said the union has supported bringing "equity" to the administrative fee for a long time.

"We just hope that the administration will finally get the message and make it equitable," he said. "It's an outrageous inequity that's been going on far too long. It would be nice to recover all of those lost fees, but of course that's totally unrealistic."

Gier briefly brought up the issue at Tuesday's UI Faculty Council meeting.

Provost Doug Baker asked Gier to consider that increasing administrative fees would decrease the athletic department's budget and force it to make additional cuts.

The question "is more than one of equity," he said. "It's one of budgeting for an athletic department that is trying to be successful."

Gier countered that a "large number" of faculty think athletics should be a target for cuts.

"If we had academic units that failed as consistently as our football team, we'd look at closing them," he said.

Really? Does Gier really want to go there? It would be pretty easy to do a cost-benefit analysis of various programs at UI and demonstrate that they are money holes.

As I’ve said before: if you are going to cut a budget, you have to look at where the biggest percentage of the budget exists. At the universities, that’s in faculty salaries.

As reported in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

Potential personnel cuts were a hot topic at the University of Idaho Faculty Council meeting Tuesday, as deans of several colleges updated faculty on the university's looming budget cuts and program prioritization process.

UI President Steven Daley-Laursen has said "nothing is off the table" during the massive program shake-up, which was announced in September. The process is independent of the cuts required by recent state budget holdbacks.

Faculty and staff, including tenured faculty, could be cut if their departments or programs are eliminated in the prioritization process.

College of Natural Resources Dean Bill McLaughlin acknowledged that faculty cuts could be part of the process in his college.

He said he has met with faculty and staff at two "mini retreats" in the past week and laid out some of the options for the college, "which include not filling positions and in some cases removing positions."

McLaughlin said one of his college's "guiding principals" is to protect recently hired faculty and staff, who make up about 25 percent of the department.

Good luck with that. Tenure and seniority rules makes that impossible.

On the other hand, College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences Dean Katherine Aiken said cutting tenured faculty "is the last possible resort" in her mind.

"Maybe I'm being Pollyanna, but I don't think I'm going there in my college," Aiken said.

College of Art and Architecture Dean Mark Hoversten said the university must avoid a "death spiral" of cutting staff, producing less because the college offers less, and then being forced to cut more staff.

The deans also said they would consider moving tenured faculty whose positions were cut to other programs within their college or other colleges, or offering beefed-up retirement packages to tenured faculty who are nearing the end of their careers.

That’s the legal requirement. If you cut a tenured faculty member, you have to place them (based on seniority) in another teaching position, even if it’s not within their area of expertise. I recall one university where they had a sociologist teaching economics because they couldn’t get rid of him…

McLaughlin said any proposal to cut a program that comes before the Faculty Council would include the potential personnel implications.

The deans agreed the prioritization process in general will be a challenge for all departments. Aiken said eliminating programs "is like cutting off an arm or getting rid of a child." She encouraged faculty and staff members to share their ideas for restructuring.

College of Law Dean Don Burnett said the UI's cuts have to result in substantial and discernible change or "the message to the Legislature and the governor is there's always plenty of fat to cut at the University of Idaho, and we'll be going through this again."

Baker said earlier this month that he expects to have a preliminary sketch of which programs might be cut after a provost's council meeting in mid-January. The faculty council will discuss the initial report at its Jan. 20 meeting.

The program shake-up comes at the same time the UI is facing budget cuts from the state.

Provost Doug Baker said Tuesday that Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter's budget holdbacks mean the university will have to cut its general education and special programs budgets by 4 percent, or about $5 million, this year. A 6 percent holdback for fiscal year 2010 will require another $7.6 million in cuts.

Those reductions come on top of a previous cut of nearly $1 million, and UI already has held back about $1.5 million in reserves.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for the UI to focus on core competencies and get rid of the dead wood.

But does it have the guts to do the hard thing?

Today was holiday pajamas day at Moscow High.

Isn’t that sweet.

Imagine how much work they got done in their PJ’s…

There’s one Moscow student on this list: Matthew Menadier of Logos School.

Well done, and congrats, Matt!

From the office of Idaho Senator Mike Crapo:

Washington, DC - Idaho Senator Mike Crapo announced his nominations of 33 Idaho students to military service academies, for the freshman class entering in 2009.  The students' applications are now being considered by four of the U.S. service academies, where final selections will be made.

"These are our future leaders from Idaho," Crapo said.  "I am pleased to assist them continue their education and am proud to see they will also be protecting our country.  With our nation engaged in defending freedom and fighting terrorism, it is extremely important that our young Idahoans are choosing to serve and defend our security."

Each year U.S. Senators and Representatives make nominations to four of the service academies.  The academies then select from the students nominated.  Crapo made nominations to the following:  the U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado; the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, New York; the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York; and the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland.  Congressional nominations are not required for students attending the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. 

To be eligible for nominations, each student submitted an application and references, and met certain scholastic requirements under a deadline.  A nomination does not guarantee acceptance.  Those wishing to apply for future nominations should contact Karen Roetter in Crapo's North Idaho Office in Coeur d'Alene at (208) 664-5490. 

Crapo 2009 Academy Nominations

U.S. Air Force Academy:

• Josh Bartlow, Nampa
• Ryan Caven, Boise
• James Dose, Pinehurst
• Joe Groberg, Idaho Falls
• Everett Karpauskas, Caldwell
• Dak Kibler, Boise
• Garrett Lyons, Boise
• Matt Menadier, Moscow
• Tucker Nelson, Boise
• Montana Patton, Coeur d'Alene
• Austin Porter, Rexburg
• Joshua Reams, Nampa
• Cooper Sampson, Boise
• Anthony Starbard, Boise
• Dayne Swisher, Naples
• Luke Torretta, Coeur d'Alene
• Nathan Tousley, St. Anthony
• Carolyn Travis, Hayden
• Kat Vardell, Sagle
• Tanner Washburn, Nampa

U.S. Military Academy at West Point (Army):

• Josh Austin, New Plymouth
• Chas Cramer, Caldwell
• Danyelle Harbauer, Boise
• Dak Kibler, Boise
• Andy Livermore, Pocatello
• Mick Marion, Smelterville
• Kyle McCrite, Athol
• Courtney Sparks, Boise
• Taylor Spencer, Nampa
• Leslie Winkleman, Caldwell 

U.S. Naval Academy:

• Natalie Colla, Coeur d'Alene
• DJ Darrow, Rathdrum
• Claire Fletcher, Boise
• Aaron Klinesmith, Idaho Falls
• Ben Kopke, Coeur d'Alene
• Meg Licht, McCall
• Chase Nelson, Lewiston
• Beau Polk, Coeur d'Alene
• Fletcher Rydalch, Rexburg
• Terry Taylor, Sandpoint 

U.S. Merchant Marine Academy:

• Natalie Colla, Coeur d'Alene
• Kristi Critser, Nampa
• DJ Darrow, Rathdrum
• Pat Greer, Nampa
• Andy Jozwik, Boise
• Meg Licht, McCall
• Garrett Lyons, Boise
• Austin Porter, Rexburg
• Anthony Starbard, Boise
• Tanner Washburn, Nampa

HT: Roger F.

Update: turns out the website has not been hacked. Here’s the info from one of my readers:

There are many webservers at UI. The one that serves the main domain started acting up Sunday afternoon.

The "hello world" is what you get if the ASP.NET application pool doesn't execute and serves up a default static page instead.

It's just a test page to make sure the server is reachable.

We got it fixed a few hours later.

Someone has hacked the UI website.

Earlier this evening is said “Hello World” — a classic hack.

Now it shows that it’s under construction.

Over at Critical Mass, Erin O’Connor has some thoughts on a recent case study from The Chronicle of Higher Education ($$$) on the ever skyrocketing costs of higher education, which are well outpacing the cost of living expenses.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is cutting through a lot of the confusion surrounding skyrocketing college costs with a case study of the University of Kansas. CHE points out that in the past twenty years, Kansas has tripled its operating budget, while maintaining a steady enrollment of 26,000 students. During that time, state support has doubled--but while state funding in 1988 covered 40 percent of the operating budget, it now covers only 22 percent. Grants and contracts cover some of the difference, but not all of it. Meanwhile, tuition for in-state students has quintupled. Kansas is still very affordable, at around $7,000/year -- and is much less expensive than rival flagships. Still, the tuition rate has increased at three times the rate of inflation over the past two decades.

Where is all the money going? To various things aimed broadly at enhancing student experience and so improving retention: new facilities (two science buildings, a fitness center replete with climbing wall, renovated dorms, a multicultural resource center, a performing arts center, a writing center, revamped high-tech classrooms, increased library services, IT), more professors, and more bureaucracy to administer all the new student services, to publicize them, and to study them. Energy and health care premiums also add to the total.

Clearly parents are not ignorant that a big chunk of their tuition money is going to non-academic luxuries — after all, the literature we receive in the mail is always touting these luxuries as a reason to attend that university.

I’m attaching a letter that my daughter received from the University of Idaho.

See how much here actually has to do with academics vs. “perks”.

Oh. And don’t forget the “friendly squirrels.”

Unions are for those who pay the dues (teachers) and not about the kids. 

"When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children."
—Albert Shanker, the AFT's longtime president, famously remarked in 1985

From the Wall Street Journal:

Like all unions, teachers unions have a vested interest in restricting the labor supply to reduce job competition. Traditional state certification rules help to limit the supply of "certified" teachers. But a new study suggests that such requirements also hinder student learning.

Harvard researchers Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler compared states that have genuine alternative certification with those that have it in name only. And they found that between 2003 and 2007 students in states with a real alternative pathway to teaching gained more on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal standardized test) than did students in other states.

"In states that had genuine alternative certification, test-score gains on the NAEP exceeded those in the other states by 4.8 points and 7.6 points in 4th- and 8th-grade math, respectively," report the authors in the current issue of Education Next. "In reading, the additional gains in the states with genuine alternative certification were 10.6 points and 3.9 points for the two grade levels respectively."

The study undermines the arguments from colleges of education and teachers unions, which say that traditional certification, which they control, is the only process that can produce quality teachers. The findings hold up even after controlling for race, ethnicity, free-lunch eligibility, class size and per-pupil state spending.

The study also found that loosening certification rules can help alleviate teacher shortages. Unions blame these shortages on low pay, though in Washington, D.C. now they are also refusing an offer of higher pay in return for giving up teacher tenure. Messrs. Peterson and Nadler show that broader recruitment paths can also address shortages, particularly among minority teachers who are in especially short supply.

This is important because there is broad agreement that minority students tend to benefit from having a minority instructor, who can also serve as a role model. And it turns out that black and Hispanic college graduates are much more likely to take advantage of alternative paths to certification.

"Minorities are represented in the teaching force to a greater extent in states with genuine alternative certification than in other states," write the authors, who conclude, "there is every reason to believe that alternative certification is key to recruiting more minorities into the teaching profession." In Mississippi, 60% of the more than 800 teachers who were alternatively certified in 2004-05 were minorities, even though the overall teaching force in the state is only 26% minority.

President-elect Barack Obama has expressed guarded support for education reforms like merit pay and charter schools. Yet he chose Linda Darling-Hammond to head the education policy team for his transition. Ms. Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford, is a union favorite and vocal supporter of traditional certification. She's also been a fierce critic of Teach for America and other successful alternative certification programs.

Unions claim that traditional certification serves the interests of students. But it's clear that students would be better served if the teaching profession were open to more college graduates. Teachers learn by teaching, not by mastering the required "education" courses associated with state certification.

Far from regulating teacher quality, forcing prospective teachers to take a specific set of education-related courses merely deters college graduates who might otherwise consider teaching. That outcome may serve the goals of labor unions, but it's hard to see how it helps the kids. If we want better teachers and more of them, relaxing certification standards would be a good place to start.

There are some interesting quotes here.

From the University of Idaho’s Argonaut

The request to take tenured faculty out of the mix when concerning budget cuts was rehashed as the University of Idaho Faculty Council acknowledged the risks of accomplishing the task.

Faculty Council Chair Karen Guilfoyle addressed the decision during Tuesday’s council meeting, saying the decision would put non-tenured faculty in a tough position.

“It’s a pretty scary place to be,” Guilfoyle said.

It is possible faculty are being too “naïve” about the situation, said Faculty Council Member Sharon Fritz.

If faculty are let go, she suggested the university invest in preparing adequate severance packages and aid toward finding cut employees another job.

Faculty Council Member Steve Chandler said he felt “bothered” by members’ desire to take tenured faculty off the table.

“It bothers me because that’s not the purpose of tenure,” he said. “It’s supposed to protect academic freedom, not job security.”

That may be the original purpose of tenure, but that’s not the purpose today. How many professors do you know are doing research that is so politically incorrect that it could get them fired? How many others have used tenure to retire while teaching?

Faculty Council Member Don Crowley said he stressed the need for all programs to be looked at, including the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, which costs the university more money than it brings in, and athletics.

“I’ve been to four relatively bad football games,” Crowley said. “And I’ll probably go to four more, but it’s expensive (to run). Those kinds of things have got to be on the table.”

Hell will freeze over before the University of Idaho considers canceling the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival or its football program. It would rather go bankrupt than have those money holes closed.