Moscow Education (Idaho)

From the L.A. Times:

“If we do nothing, in four years, the University will be spending more on retirement programs each year than we do on classroom instruction.” 

According to Camille Paglia in the Chronicle of Higher Education, preparing students for jobs “should be front and center in the thinking of educators.”

The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics.

So is there any difference between education and training any longer?

Seems like the whole purpose of “education” in America these days is for job-training/skill development.

Standard numbers for college debt usually focus on the kids and not on the family unit, so the reported numbers hide much of the debt that the parents take on. But “Shadow Debt” is the amount that parents borrow or raid from their 401k to pay for their kids’ college. Andrew Gillen over at the College Affordability Clubhouse just produced a better estimate of the unreported shadow debt.

Americans Borrow 126 Billion a Year for College

I did a radio show with Steve Scher this afternoon on student loans. (I started off a bit rocky, but eventually recovered). While preparing for it, I accidentally came up with an estimate of the yearly shadow debt of college. My back of the envelope calculations indicate that in total (standard debt plus shadow debt), Americans borrow about 126 billion dollars a year for college.

Federal Loans account for 84b.
Private and State Loans account for another 12b.
The Shadow Debt accounts for the rest, about 30b. It is composed of

• Non-official student loans ~ 7.4b
• Credit Cards (student) ~ 1.9b
• Credit Cards (parent) ~ 5.5b
• Home equity or line of credit ~ 8b
• Retirement Acct ~ 3.3b
• Other parent loans ~ 3.6b
  

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

The Washington Education Association is calling for a boycott of Walmart, asking people to refuse to buy the crayons, notebooks and protractors needed for the fall term of school at this labor battleground.

And 5 years later, Washington gets a Super Walmart in Pullman. Ah, the irony.

Jerry Ice, president of The Graduate School, writes in the Washington Post that the idea that everyone needs a four-year college degree is a “myth”. Why? Because many careers require education or specialized training, but not a four-year degree.

“Well over half of all students attending four-year undergraduate institutions are dependent on loans and graduate having incurred enormous debt”

Ice says that community college students can earn vocational certificates or associate degrees without taking on heavy debt.

Community colleges now represent over 50 percent of higher education enrollment. Their affordability and accessibility are a significant part of their appeal, as is their focus on essential skills and job-related training. While many who attend community colleges do so with the intention of transferring to a four-year school and earning a B.A., it appears that more than half are there to complete technical or vocational training, or just to upgrade their job skills.

Ice also argues that distance education is flexible and more affordable than classroom-based training.

“Explore the possibilities for short-term professional training and determine what will work best for you.”

Since most university degrees are nothing more than high-cost VoTech training, why not go to a community college?

From Capitol Quickies:

Some New Jersey high school students without evident ability to exhibit simple math skills have been recorded as passing calculus, according to a Department of Education report.

In a report being delivered at today’s state Board of Education meeting, the DOE’s deputy commissioner is recommending four new policies aimed at helping struggling high school students, more than 4,500 of whom couldn’t read, write or do math well enough to meet state graduation standards this past June.

When a larger than usual universe of students failed to pass state graduation tests last school year, one of the options the state established for providing other evidence of academic competence was asking high school counselors or teachers to forward evidence of skills from the students’ high school record and/or work products.

More than 1,000 portfolios were received, according to a memo from Deputy Commissioner Willa Spicer. They contained information about the students’ classes, their grades and examples of their work. Each was read by state officials, to make decisions on whether students were proficient. Statistics (including some district-level details) indicate that nearly 200 out of 600 language-arts appeals were rejected, as were more than 300 math appeals.

And this:

According to a Department of Education report, "there were other students, unable ultimately to evidence even simple math skills, who were unimaginably recorded by their schools as succeeding in Algebra II or even Calculus."

A report delivered at today's state Board of Education meeting will recommend four new policies to aid students who weren't proficient enough in reading, writing or math to meet state graduation standards.

Your tax dollars at work.

HT: Dave G.

The American Legislative Exchange Council released its Report Card on American Education.

Authors Dr. Matthew Ladner, Andrew LeFevre, and Dan Lips analyze student scores, looking at both performance as well as how scores have improved over recent years. The authors also assign each state a grade based on its current education policies.

You can read the state-by-state rundown.

Here's the quick read on the data:

• Idaho was ranked 22 in the nation. Not bad since the liberals say we spend 50th in the nation. But that just goes to reinforce that there's zero correlation between spending and results.
• Idaho received a B–  in education reform, ranking 10th in the nation.

According to Fortune magazine, Bill Gates is a big fan of Khan Academy. Khan features online, mini-lectures that are perfect for homeschoolers and anyone who needs tutoring in just about any academic subject.

This past spring a colleague at his small think tank, bgC3, e-mailed (Gates) about the nonprofit khanacademy.org, a vast digital trove of free mini-lectures all narrated by (Salman) Khan, an ebullient, articulate Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager. Gates replied within minutes. “This guy is amazing,” he wrote. “It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.” Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began soaking up videos, from algebra to biology.

Then, several weeks ago, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave the 33-year-old Khan a shout-out that any entrepreneur would kill for. Ruminating on what he called the “mind-blowing misallocation” of resources away from education, Gates touted the “unbelievable” 10- to 15-minute Khan Academy tutorials “I’ve been using with my kids.” With admiration and surprise, the world’s second-richest person noted that Khan “was a hedge fund guy making lots of money.” Now, Gates said, “I’d say we’ve moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category. It was a good day his wife let him quit his job.”

Khan provides these video tutorials for free. I commend them to you. Check them out if you've never seen them. Quite amazing.

We've discussed here many times the political clout of the unions and how they funnel millions of dollars into Democratic elections.

But here's a blatant union power play:

A government studies teacher at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan is making his first run for elective office by taking on an incumbent who angered the teachers’ union. Twenty-year veteran teacher Gregg Lundahl says he entered the Democratic primary because East Side Assemblyman Jonathan Bing introduced a bill this year to get rid of the “last hired, first fired” policy in the event of teacher layoffs.

What do we have here? “A union-backed, union-approved, union member is running for office in an effort to roll back reforms and maintain the status quo for teachers unions.”

But this is for the kids, remember.

Reason's Editor-in-Chief, Nick Gillespie, wonders how much money high-school sports actually cost, and why no one seems willing to even consider cutting them in these times of financial distress.

NPR has a story about how value-added data is used in North Carolina’s Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School District. The district began using the data three years ago. Superintendent Donald Martin explains that the information is not made public:

Dr. MARTIN: . . . if you’re red, your students are performing two standard errors below your — sort of comparable counterparts. If you’re yellow, you’re right in the average performance. And if you’re green, you’re two standard errors above.

And if a teacher has one red, you know, their first year, then we literally just have a – it’s like a growth conference with them. They have a personal, you know, individual plan. We talk to them about what are they going to do differently next year.

Then in the second year, if there’s two reds in a row, the teacher has consecutive reds, then we have a trigger for what we call a plan of assistance. And that plan of assistance may involve going to training. It may involve sending in some central office folks to work with that person and to really work on, you know, a very formal plan that’s now, you know – could trigger dismissal at the end of the year if it is unsuccessful.

In my experience, kids and administrators are not surprised at which teachers are “green”, “yellow”, or “red”. The problem is that the administration can't do anything about the “red” teachers. The union protects the worst performing teachers.

But remember: it's all for the kids.

Everyone wants a waiver from Obamacare. I wonder why?

From the Wall Street Journal:

In the movie "Animal House," the hilariously loathsome Dean Wormer announces a pointless campus crackdown with the classic line, "The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me." Democrats seem to have had a similar inspiration and targeted student health insurance in ObamaCare.

Along comes word that the bill "could make it impossible for colleges and universities to continue to offer student health plans." That's how the American Council on Education and a dozen other higher-ed lobbies put it in a recent letter to the Obama Administration, warning that the insurance coverage they offer may get junked by ObamaCare's decrees.

Between 4.5 million to 5.5 million students annually are insured by short-term plans sponsored by their schools, which are tailored to upperclassman who have aged out of their parents' coverage or to international and graduate students. These plans are very low cost because the benefits are designed for generally healthy young people and often organized around campus health services and academic medical centers.

All of which means these plans aren't likely to qualify under ObamaCare's "minimal essential coverage" rules that mandate rich benefit packages, even if colleges have the flexibility to make exceptions for special needs. And given that insurance must now be sold anytime to everyone, colleges may be required to continue to cover students after they've graduated—leaving this type of coverage unaffordable.

It doesn't help that the regulations governing student health plans are as carelessly written as the rest of the bill, and the uncertainty is holding up insurance contracts and plan design for the coming academic year. Not surprisingly, the colleges are asking federal regulators for a blanket ObamaCare waiver. (Can everyone else apply too?)

All of this is no accident. The liberals who wrote the bill despise these campus health plans because they think every plan in the country should be designed in Washington and have been calling for a regulatory crackdown for years. Other Democrats probably had no clue about these rules, even as they voted for a bill that was so large and convoluted that no one could truly understand it. Either way, count this as another of ObamaCare's really futile and stupid gestures, with many more to come.

HT: Bill J

This should preface any use of the USNWR rankings. From the ISI College Guide:

The U.S. News Beauty Contest

U.S. News & World Report has just come out with its annual ranking of colleges, which makes me think of Miss Teen South Carolina 2007. If you rely as I do on a GPS, you may even be one of those “U.S. Americans” who “don’t have maps.” The fact is that the U.S. News rankings are mostly a beauty contest—when what we really need is a map.

For U.S. News, the leading factor in ranking schools is “peer assessment.” Some 25 percent of each school’s ranking is based on . . . surveys emailed to administrators at other schools, inquiring about “intangibles such as faculty dedication to teaching.” So to determine how dedicated the teachers are at Princeton, they ask the provost of Harvard—and vice versa. No wonder some college administrators boycott the U.S. News surveys. This year, Princeton and Harvard staffers must be on exceptionally good terms: the schools tied for first in the rankings. This is the biggest and dumbest part of the ranking; call it the swimsuit competition.

The next category, accounting for 20 percent of each school’s score, is freshman retention and graduation rate. For U.S. News, “The higher the proportion of freshmen who return to campus the following year and eventually graduate, the better a school is apt to be at offering the classes and services students need to succeed.” Or it might mean that a school is unadventurous about the students it admits, and that easy grading makes it very hard to flunk out. As colleges play to win a place in U.S. News, they are less willing to take a chance on talented underachievers (with high SATs but low grades, for instance). Once they let someone in, the pressure to keep a high retention rate encourages schools to inflate students’ grades and move them down the assembly line. Grade inflation is considered a major problem by faculty both at Harvard (tied with Princeton for number one) and at Yale (number three)—while Princeton has made serious efforts to enforce more honest grading.

The next category is “faculty resources” (20 percent), which mashes up numbers like the percentages of large and tiny classes, faculty pay and qualifications, and the use of adjunct and part-time teachers. While average class size is critical, it puzzles me why faculty salaries are important but the ratio of class meetings taught by graduate students isn’t. (Most schools won’t cough up this last number; you actually have to call up faculty members and ask them.) Most of the leading National Universities in the U.S. News ranking rely heavily on graduate students to interact with students both in grading and discussion sections. Professors are mainly lecturers.

Next comes “student selectivity” (15 percent). Fair enough. If Princeton can cherry-pick students, its classroom discussions will probably be more enlightening than those at Podunk Tech. Of course, a high ranking from U.S. News leads thousands more students to apply to a given school, which affords its admission department the luxury of being…more selective. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy here.

Ten percent of each school’s ranking is simply bought and paid for—as colleges move up in the rankings through “generous per-student spending.” If you’re wondering why small schools, historically black schools, and religious schools rarely make the U.S. News ranking, and why the top schools this year (as every year) are mostly the richest colleges in America—this would be why. Of course, it’s at just such schools that faculty tenure and pay are based not on teaching quality (or even quantity), but on how many books or articles professors crank out—typically on obscure subjects unrelated to their teaching. The average such scholarly book in the humanities sells just 300 copies, which mostly sit unread in libraries.

The next category is kind of puzzling: “graduation rate performance” (5 percent). Basically it amounts to totaling up a bet. U.S. News looks at how well it thought, years back, a school was going to do on improving its graduation rate—then compares its prognostication to what actually happened. Schools that beat the point spread get a leg up. Call this category the talent competition—do the judges really care how well those girls can juggle?

Finally, U.S. News asks schools what percentage of alumni give money every year. Since it doesn’t ask “how much” but rather “how many,” this metric actually makes sense. Who better than those putting a school’s education to use to judge how much the school was worth to them? This category is very telling—which leaves me wondering why U.S. News weights it at only 5 percent.

Entirely absent from U.S. News’s evaluations are two questions that educators like me consider essential:

• How solid is a school’s curriculum? Must students take fundamental courses in U.S. history, Western Civilization, classical philosophy, and great works of literature? For instance, at Harvard, which recently overhauled its curricular requirements, students can easily graduate without having read Shakespeare or the Constitution. As one student complains, “The new General Education program requires no real exposure to a body of knowledge or intellectual skill. . . . This is by far the worst thing about Harvard.”
• Does a college encourage intellectual diversity? Are undergrads free to speak their minds on issues Americans differ about? Or do speech codes and punitive grading enforce a grim uniformity? Are teachers fair and reasonably objective? At the University of Pennsylvania (tied for fourth this year), for example, one student complains of “professors who are ideologically driven. They care less about teaching history and more about teaching their political views.”

These subjects provoke controversy, which is why a nice, apolitical magazine like U.S. News prefers to evade them. But parents and students ignore them at their peril."

HT: Dr. A

When I went to high school, we had a class called “civics”. It was later replaced by “social studies” and then finally “government”.

Maggies Farm makes a good observation about the lack of “civics” education in today's youth.

By some fluke, in the past month I have consulted with three teens who have run afoul of the law, including one 16 year-old who could be facing many years in jail.

Not one of these kids realized or had ever considered that what they had done was criminal. It got me to thinking.

In my parents' generation, the kids took a course called "Civics." It was about our government, laws, civil behavior, civic responsibility, how to be a citizen of a free republic, etc. It was replaced, in time, by some strange Dewey-ish thing called "Social Studies" in public schools (but private schools, like mine, never did "Social Studies). My guess is that nowadays it's about recycling, respecting "others," and appreciating Serbian cuisine and folk dress.

When I met with the parents, I discovered that the parents had never discussed the laws with their kids. They figured they had "basically good kids."

Whatever that means.

I'd like to launch a movement to re-institute Civics. I'd like to see kids get classes from cops and criminal and non-criminal lawyers about the laws and the legal process. I'd like to see kids taught about being a citizen in a free repubic, and their duties and reponsibilities. I am certain that not all parents convey those things today, but if kids aren't taught these things they will find out the hard way. It takes lots of people to teach a kid how to be an acceptable member of society.

A good parental example is a good start, but not enough. They need feedback and simple information.

HT: Dave G.

From the Evergreen:

WSU is among the top 15 percent of colleges, universities and trade schools in the nation on G.I. Jobs’ 2011 List of Military Friendly Schools.

According to the G.I. Jobs website, schools are selected for the list based on criteria such as academic achievement and efforts to recruit and retain military and veteran students. “We are pleased that our university is again ranked as a military-friendly institution," said WSU President Elson S. Floyd in a press release from the WSU News Service. "Providing educational opportunities and support for these returning heroes is an important part of our mission as a public university.” He said WSU is proud to help veterans reach their goals and shape the nation's future.

According to the WSU Office of Veterans Affairs website, many veterans are able to attend college because of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which provides financial and housing support to servicemen and women who served after Sept. 11, 2001. The billions of tuition dollars provided by this bill have bolstered the desire of universities to enroll veterans, according to the 2011 Military Friendly Schools website. The bill allows veterans to choose a school that suits their goals and needs.

As reported in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

It may be at least a month or two before the Moscow School District and its teachers reach an agreement on this year's educator contracts.

The Moscow Education Association, which represents about 150 teachers in the district, announced this week it is requesting an independent fact-finder to assess the district's finances.

MEA President Stacy Albrecht said the results of that investigation, including a recommended settlement from the fact-finder, likely won't be available until October or November.
…
Albrecht said she thinks the district is trying to be safe by having such a large reserve, but she added that no one has a crystal ball that can predict how the economy will fare in the next two years.

"It's looking right now like the economy is working toward an upturn," she said. "The Moscow School District is one of the biggest employers in this area. If we had a little bit of help this year and money in our paychecks to be able to spend in the community, that might be a help toward the upturn."

Let me get this right. The union wants to take $100 out of my pocket and put it into the teachers' pockets, and that's going to make me and Moscow better off?

She said a teacher strike isn't on the MEA's agenda right now because "we'd rather have this not affect (students) in any way, if possible."

Yea. After all, it's all about the kids. Right?

The school district likes the results.

To try to improve student achievement at her low-performing school, Arthur F. Smith Middle Magnet School Principal Norvella Williams was willing to try "anything and everything" for the new school year.

That included separating boys and girls into separate classrooms.

Some parents and even some of her staff viewed having sex-segregated classrooms as a "crazy" idea, but Williams implemented the plan for the new school year, and so far it's showing positive results.

"I thought it was crazy, I really did. I went in thinking, 'She has lost her mind,'" seventh-grade English teacher Camille Shelfo said. A short time into the new academic year, he acknowledges he is quickly switching his views.

"The first day, I saw my boys like I never seen them before. They were focused, they seem to be more challenged, they take more pride in their work -- it just blew me away. I've never seen anything like this," said Shelfo, who has been an educator for 23 years.

Overall, Shelfo said, girls and boys seem to be doing better in the gender-separated classrooms in behavior and assignment performance when compared to a year ago.

Research has shown that single-sex classrooms, particularly with at-risk students, work better in improving achievement scores, Williams said. She cited various studies from the National Association for Single Sex Education.

Of course, the educrats don't like this because it assumes (demonstrates?) that there actually is a difference between boys and girls that's more than skin deep.

The following commentary by Michael Costello ran in today's Lewiston Tribune. Costello is always well worth reading.

You can find a copy on his website: The Pajamahadin.

We've discussed these research findings here in the past as well.

What do you call the elimination of three vice presidential positions? Answer: A modest start. Washington State University president Elson Floyd certainly deserves congratulations for taking on the irresistible force of higher education administrative bloat. The good news is that WSU will have three fewer vice presidents shortly resulting in a total savings of $700,000 - $900,000. The frustrating news is that such streamlining comes after so many years of administrative bloating that there is probably layer after layer of bloat that still could be liposuctioned away without harming the university’s function.

While much political hay is made using statistics showing that medical expenses rise faster than inflation (an economic distortion for another time), far less is made of the fact that education expenses also outpace inflation, as any parent writing tuition checks could tell you.

One of the forces driving this inflation is the fact that, as with most medical expenses, the consumer has a layer of insulation between himself and the true costs. With medical expenses, most of the bills are paid indirectly through insurance companies. The consumer has essentially prepaid and has little incentive to reduce costs. The same was once true for publicly supported universities. Taxes provide direct support and subsidized financial aid provides much of the rest. Until recently, the share that parents had to come up with themselves could be managed relatively painlessly. This layer of insulation has permitted colleges and universities to grow quite recklessly.

No more. Today, writing a tuition check hurts. And so it’s worth examining what those checks are paying for.

Economic studies have shown that, unlike the real world, universities do not realize economies of scale as they grow. In fact, quite the opposite occurs as the growth in the number of administrators outpaces the growth in student populations and instructors. Per student expenses actually rise as more students are admitted. And the primary cause of this is administrative bloat.

Honestly, I don’t have the specific numbers for Washington State University, although I do know that administrative positions have proliferated during my time here. However the Goldwater Institute has collected the data nationwide and their results will surprise no one who has worked in higher education or who has been putting children through college. Between 1993 and 2007, enrollment at America’s publicly funded colleges and universities rose by 15%. During that same time, the number of full time administrators rose by 60%. This translates into an additional 39% more administrators per 100 students in 2007 than were employed fifteen years earlier.

The good news is that Washington State University is nowhere near the worst offender. According to the Goldwater Institute, nearly half of all full time employees at Arizona State University are administrators and the number of administrators per 100 students has risen 94%. Simultaneously, the number of teacher and researchers these administrators supervise has actually declined by 2%.

But, “We’re not as bad as ASU” is hardly the sort of slogan that anyone’s likely to rally around. “We’re making real progress,” is more like it. And even though Dr. Floyd’s initiative might look like baby steps to an outsider, from the perspective of someone who has seen the seemingly inexorable growth of administrators, it has the appearance of lowering a shoulder into a glacier and driving it backwards a couple of inches. Arresting plate tectonics looks easy in comparison.

Hopefully this represents an embryonic change in higher education culture. For far too long education at all levels has served first as a full employment program for adults rather than as an incubator to nurture and educate our youth. Trimming away this tiny bit of excess has probably rattled quite a few nerves in the university’s administrative offices as previously there was no safer job.

Of course, the real answer to arresting and reversing administrative bloat is to examine closely the tasks needed to run a university and ask if jobs are really necessary or are duplicated. I once saw an analysis of the federal government’s bureaucracy that found that the feds employed more than thirty layers of administrative bureaucracy where private enterprise would require only five. I suspect that similar bloat exists everywhere in higher education.

This was no doubt a painful experience for Dr. Floyd and he might not receive quite as many Christmas cards this year as a result. But he deserves congratulations for showing the courage to do what desperately needed to be done.

Via Reuters:

Study finds quarter of UK lap dancers have degrees: One in four women who works as a lap dancer in Britain has a university degree and the majority of those involved in the industry enjoy their work, earning up to 48,000 pounds ($74,500) a year, academic research has found.

Furthermore:

The preliminary findings of the year-long study, which will include interviews with 300 dancers, reveal that all the women interviewed had finished school and gained some qualifications. Most (87 per cent) had at least completed a further education course, while one in four had undergraduate degrees. Just over one in three dancers were in some form of education, with 13.9 per cent using dancing to help fund an undergraduate degree, 6.3 per cent to help fund a postgraduate degree, and 3.8 per cent using it to fund further education courses.

The university graduates, who typically have arts degrees, say they couldn’t find other jobs.

This cracks me up. I just got done teaching on how egalitarians hate standardized tests because they are biased against students of lower socio-economic class, biased against African-Americans, biased against Hispanics, and biased against non-native English speakers.

Basically, the educrats find them biased against everyone except for white males.

So the The Onion comes up with this satire of the educational-industrial complex's hate of tests: Are Standardized Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

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

Moscow School District officials are hopeful an H1N1 flu outbreak won't close schools this fall, but they're preparing for the worst. Under the district's outbreak plan, officials will notify the North Central Health District Health Department if a school or the district as a whole reaches an absentee rate of at least 10 percent.

How did that government epidemic work out?

Recent polls of interest from the Gallup Organization:

U.S. Parents Want Teachers Paid on Quality, Student Outcomes: The large majority of parents with children in the public school system believe teachers' salaries should be based on the quality of their work rather than a more standard compensation system. They also would like to see pay tied to student achievement.

Imagine that, expecting an outcome and rewarding based upon that outcome.

The teachers unions will never let that fly. The government union monopoly is based on the highest cost, lowest performing standards.

I posted previously (Moscow School Board & Teachers Wrestle over Federal Money) about the $415,128 that MSD has received of federal taxpayer money.

The “initial guidance” memo from the Department of Education has bad news — there’s no discretion on the spending.

 C-11.  May a State use Ed Jobs funds to make payments into a “rainy day fund” or for debt reduction?

 No.  A State may not use program funds, directly or indirectly, to establish, restore, or supplement a rainy day fund, or to supplant State funds in a manner that has this effect.  Furthermore, a State may not use program funds, directly or indirectly, to reduce or retire debt obligations incurred by the State or to supplant State funds in a manner that has this effect.

And it gets worse:

 D-1.  For what purposes may an LEA use its Ed Jobs funds?

An LEA must use its funds only for compensation and benefits and other expenses, such as support services, necessary to retain existing employees, to recall or rehire former employees, and to hire new employees, in order to provide early childhood, elementary, or secondary educational and related services.

Recall that the cost of K-12 education has quadrupled since 1970, after adjusting for inflation. Now it gets even worse. You really can understand why parents are fed up with the government-backed union monopoly we call “public” education. It's like having the Department of Motor Vehicles in charge of learning. What could go wrong with that model?!?

From Bob Ewing over at Big Government:

On June 5, Andrew Coulson posted a disturbing graph at Big Government:

He showed that public education costs are skyrocketing while student achievement remains flat.  In another graph in the same post, he showed that the public school bureaucracy is growing TEN times as fast as the student body.

The bottom line:  The growth and cost of the education establishment is out of control, while the quality of public education is in desperate need of improvement.

Regarding the latter, just how bad can things be?  Check out this brief video clip:

“She went to the public school.  They taught her nothing but the ABCs the entire year,” says the frustrated father to a news reporter.  Then, looking down at his daughter: “Would you like to tell [the reporter] what letter you ended up with at the end of the year?”

The little girl responds:  “W”

W.

Brian Caulfield asks the question: Should Apple Kill The University As We Know It?

Bottom line: if Apple doesn't, someone else will. Apple might as well profit by it.

From Forbes:

In a few years, it’s going to be tough to convince the youngsters that music stores, real-world places that once distributed pricey content such as music and movies on physical media, actually existed before the Internet, digital media players, and, finally, Apple came along.

Music stores are gone, but universities — which distribute even pricier content via even more expensive stores, or ‘campuses’ — are still around. In fact, they’re more expensive than ever. Is Apple going to help do them in, too? Almost certainly not.

Still, if you’re still writing checks to pay off a decade-old student loan, you’ve got to wonder whether someone should. On Tuesday, Apple said it has distributed 300 million downloads through its iTunes U service, up from just 100 million in December. Apple says it is now giving would-be learners access to more than 350,000 audio and video files. More than 800 universities have iTunes U sites. Nearly half of those distribute their content to, well, just about anyone through Apple’s iTunes store. Much of it is free.

Meanwhile the institutions creating that content are growing less efficient. Between 1993 and 2007, inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61% and the number of administrators per 100 students grew by 39%, according to a study published earlier this month by the Goldwater Institute. “In U.S. higher education there have actually been diseconomies of scale,” the report’s authors write. “Universities employ more people and spend more money to educate each student even as those universities increase their enrollment.”

Only 18 percent of students who started in Math 050 had completed the math requirement seven semesters later.

How much did tax payers spend per child on those kids' education in K-12?

Recent polls of interest from the Gallup Organization:

Americans' Views of Public Schools Still Far Worse Than Parents': Americans continue to believe their local schools are performing well, but that the nation's schools are performing poorly. More than three-quarters of public school parents (77%) give their child's school an "A" or "B," while 18% of all Americans grade the nation's public schools that well.

This is a very long article. Some interspersed comments below.

Oh, and as you read this, don't forget: this is not “free” money. This is our tax dollars. We will have to pay this back. And the interest and cost of handling is severe.

As reported in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

Moscow teachers and other school district employees packed Tuesday night's Moscow School Board meeting to seek answers about the way the district's money is being spent.

The news that Idaho will receive about $51.6 million from the federal Education Jobs Fund for salaries and benefits for teachers and other student support personnel has sparked educators' interest about how that money will be spent at the district level.

Moscow is projected to receive about $415,128 from the fund, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama on Aug. 10. Idaho school districts learned about their potential allocations from the State Department of Education on Friday afternoon.

Superintendent Dale Kleinert told meeting attendees the district is still learning exactly how that money can and can't be used, so it's too early to guarantee where it will go.

What's clear is the money must be spent by the end of September 2012, and Kleinert said the state department is encouraging districts to split the allocation over two years so it can be used in case of future budget holdbacks.

Bottom line: Kleinert needs to burn $415,128 dollars in two years or lose it.

He said possible uses for the money include funding additional Title I instruction, reinstating a stipend for national board certified teachers, restoring funding for the district's Safe and Drug Free Schools program and increasing the number of highly qualified teachers in Moscow schools.

But I thought it was supposed to protect all those union jobs from layoffs?

Highly qualified teachers must demonstrate academic competence in their specific subject areas, in addition to holding a general teaching certificate. This may mean teachers need to complete additional professional development to achieve highly qualified status.

Now here comes the unions. Some great union quotes below:

Moscow Education Association President Stacy Albrecht said after the meeting that teachers would appreciate if the district considered helping them with the costs of taking those extra college credits.

Let's see: if a teacher attends graduate classes their pay increases. So not only do the unions want us to pay for their increased wages, but they want us to pay for their college time as well.

But no one has demonstrated that undewater basketweaving education classes makes someone a better teacher. I really thought this was all about the kids.

She said teachers also attended the meeting to try to convince the school board to consider helping them cover a 10-20 percent increase in their health insurance costs.

"Each time that increases, it takes more out of our salaries," she said. She added teachers are hopeful the extra federal money can be used to offset those salary reductions.

And how much have the health insurance costs increased this year for everyone else? Most people saw a 20–40% health insurance premium increase. Why should the teachers unions be exempt from this?

Several people at the meeting raised questions about the district's nearly $4.7 million reserve fund and why that money can't be used to help pay for teacher salaries and benefits.

i.e., shift the money around. Spend it quickly.

School board Chairwoman Dawn Fazio said the district writes about $1.7 million worth of checks each month, and the district auditor recommends a reserve fund balance of at least $550,000, so the large reserve serves as a financial cushion.

Albrecht said after the meeting that the Moscow Education Association and the school board are at odds over how the fund balance should be allocated, and the MEA has plans to hire an independent fact-finder to evaluate the fund. She said more details about that plan would become available today.

Moscow lawyer Louise Regelin told the school board she doesn't want to see the extra federal money pay for items the board has already committed to pay, and she said the board shouldn't "pinch pennies when it comes to our teachers."

"If this means raising property taxes, raise taxes," she said. "Our kids are an investment - and I don't have kids in the district."

That assumes that the money that goes into the pockets of the union workers is actually going for the kids. That's just not the case.

However, community member Cynthia Adams said she can't afford to pay any more taxes. She said she works at the University of Idaho and has already been hit by furloughs and an absence of recent pay raises.

Fazio said the district is on track to not ask voters for an increase in its indefinite-term supplemental maintenance and operations levy until spring 2012.

Teacher and parent Rebecca Price said she would be hesitant as a community member to vote for a levy increase because she hasn't seen improvements like smaller class sizes and restoration of some eliminated sports teams that she thought would have came with the current levy amount, which currently is about $7.6 million per year.

Idaho State Rep. Shirley Ringo, D-Moscow, also attended the meeting and told teachers to not give up in light of repeated legislative cuts to education budgets.

"There will be times when it's discouraging, but you've made a tremendous difference," she said.

Kleinert said funding from the state to the district is down about $1.2 million this year.

The Washington Monthly has a long article on “Dropout Factories” — universities that have rock-bottom graduation rates.

Idaho State University is included in that list because it has a graduation rate of 16%.

Believe it or not, there are 38 colleges with worse graduation rates.

What are parents/kids thinking when they send their kids to schools with such abysmal graduation rates? They must have plenty of money to burn.  

US News & World Report has a handy graph on what college costs. And the The National Center for Education Statistics has the details.