The New York Times Advises: Plan B: Skip College.
They Missed Plans A, C and D.
Revised 1.22.2013 Most Townhall links are broken.
The bankrupt New York Times—aka the Walter Duranty Papers--
has many heroic and phenomenal accomplishments, mostly bestowed upon themselves
with much pomp and circumstance and with a necessary due diligence to carefully
avoid their earlier mistakes in journalism and thinking. Their noisiest fans
are Marxists. Barrowing their hackneyed theme on the comments about the
shrunken remains of Marxism the “…idea
was correct, and still is, but people didn’t carry out the dream successfully
and we really need to try again.” This is an ongoing essay in tautology. The word education is more properly
translated as propaganda by those dedicated leftists who believe they have some
solutions to the world’s problems almost utterly caused by the crass evils
capitalism. Today, they embark on a new and wonderful change in education.
Education,
as an institution, or more properly called a scamish job mill for the semi
competent worker, occupies the central star in the galaxy of social programs
for the left. Who could be against education or ejukashon
as it might be more colloquially pronounced in places like California.
This notion is the topic of an interesting op-ed by Jacques Steinberg in the
Times. The central theme is that education is required for some jobs but not
necessarily all and that we need some alternatives to our current system, as
always. This is Plan B. This is also a very stale essay.
Jacques Steinberg begins
with our lesson for today:
“The idea that four years of higher education will
translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life — a
refrain sure to be repeated this month at graduation ceremonies across the
country — has been pounded into the heads of schoolchildren, parents and
educators. But there’s an underside to that conventional wisdom. Perhaps no more
than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall
of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest
projections from the Department of Education. (The figures don’t
include transfer students, who aren’t tracked.)”--Plan
B: Skip College By Jacques Steinberg Published: May 14, 2010 [Emphasis is mine in
all quotes.]
As
an echo here, we also note that about half those who attempt to graduate from
high school also share this very disappointing metric in many schools around
the nation and almost always in the major cities. I wonder if there is some connection.
This prompts us to wonder if some of these are the same people. But, that
question is not so politically correct so we need to follow the theme here and
behave. This observation is not exactly new or even unpredictable so there must
be some agenda that will advance the causes of unionized teachers or
administrators.
Then, a key metric
shines brightly and illuminates this article:
“For college students who ranked among the bottom quarter
of their high school classes, the numbers are even more stark: 80 percent will
probably never get a bachelor’s degree or even a two-year
associate’s degree.”--Plan B: Skip
College By Jacques
Steinberg
Bingo!
But, how can this be? And, now for the central but unaddressed question here:
why did we ever think that those on the bottom tail of the Bell Curve [below IQ
= 100] would ever be able to handle college? Does IQ have anything to do with
this? This is currently the thinking in Plan A and it works in advanced
education only for those with IQs greater than about 110. I think we already knew that and it is called
the education gap. This gap is the difference
between average test scores of white and blacks or 100- 85 for a 15 point
difference [one standard deviation]. These 15 IQ points have even been
acknowledged by the New York Times.
This gap was first noticed about 1905.
There is nothing new here so this article is at best a pot boiler.
“Among those calling for such alternatives
are the economists Richard K. Vedder of Ohio University
and Robert I. Lerman of American
University, the political
scientist Charles Murray, and James E. Rosenbaum, an education professor at
Northwestern. They would steer some students toward intensive, short-term vocational and
career training, through expanded high school programs and corporate
apprenticeships.”--Plan B: Skip
College By Jacques
Steinberg
The Bell Curve, one of whose authors is mentioned in the paragraph above,
debunks this phony theory of equality with numerous—nay millions—of examples. The notion of a bell curve, and particularly if such a curve or
curves are compiled from race-sorted data, is outlawed by the left in all
conversations and thinking. Whites and Asians mostly rank in a median value of
100-102 but blacks and some Hispanics rank lower with a median at about IQ=85. The existence of such a social monster
as cognitively weighted standardized testing violates the ultimate basis of the
political concept of equality. Never mind that half of any population has to be in the bottom
half--this is still unfair. Socialism depends upon such nostrums as equality
and many far leftist governments have solved this problem by a simple
extermination of the cognitive elite an example demonstrated to the world by Pol Pot and the Khmer
Rouge political party in Cambodia.
To kill off the top tail of the Bell Curve in a given society actually does
yield equality in a warped sense. But, this does make political sense in
leftist terms.
The
article trundles forward even reviewing the German testing system [Plan A]
that divides
and steers most of the students into college versus a vocational educational
system. But, from the lower tail
of the Bell Curve we get this response:
“Peggy Williams, a
counselor at a high school in suburban New York City with a student body
that is mostly black or Hispanic,
understands the argument for erring on the side of pushing more students toward
college.
“If
we’re telling kids, ‘You can’t cut the mustard, you shouldn’t go to college or university,’
then we’re
shortchanging them from
experiencing an environment in which they might grow,” she said.”--Plan B: Skip College
By Jacques Steinberg
No,
we are not. This is the standard political whine we hear from those who cannot
compete in our society for many assorted reasons. The German testing tuition system
of Arbitur
[ the "Begabtenprüfung" or "test of
aptitude"] actually is a Plan A and it works very well in Finland too. If there was some charge
to finish high school by the left then this comment might make sense, but it
only calls for more spending on ‘education’ and wasting that money. This essay runs off into the social swamps
here with comments like this:
““It’s not just about the economic return,” he
said. “Some college, whether you complete it or not, contributes to aesthetic
appreciation, better health and better voting behavior.””—[comment quote by Morton Schapiro] in Plan
B: Skip College By Jacques Steinberg
At
this point, I am tempted to suggest that much of our latent ‘education’ is mere
propaganda. The assembly of propaganda piecesand other blends of disinformation are
designed to sway the reader with some guarantee of money, justice or, more
appropriately: the notion that justice will claw-back some of the ill-gotten
money or hides of evil doers and capitalists.
Victims must be identified, praised and the wrongdoers punished, at
best, with higher taxes or more legislation. This article by Steinberg skirts
around the raw edges of this but really misses the defined opportunity espoused
by President Obama:
Here, Obama theorizes of
ways to avoid the Bell
Curve:
“Standardized testing is stuck in the crossfire in the debate over accountability, and Obama has
stepped up to take aim. He says that too often standardized tests fail to provide valuable
or timely feedback. Meanwhile, “creativity has been drained from
classrooms, as too many teachers are forced to teach to fill-in-the-bubble
tests,” Obama says. He doesn’t go so far as to say he’ll drop testing
completely; it should be one of the “tools that we use to make sure
our children are learning. It just can’t dominate the curriculum to an extent
where we are pushing aside those things that will actually allow children to
improve and accurately assess the quality of the teaching that is taking place
in the classroom.” How does he plan to revamp testing? “I will provide funds
for states to implement a broader range of assessments that can evaluate
higher-order skills, including students’ abilities to use
technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve
problems, present and defend their ideas,” says Obama.
Education must sometimes
be only propaganda.
We all know that affirmative action
is a tacit admission of the failure of ‘education’ to equip each of our
citizens with an equivalent set of mental and entrepreneurial skills and
opportunities so they can compete. Cognitive equality is an oxymoron. There is no way you can give
standardized tests and ensure that everybody gets the average test grade with
nobody getting a higher or a lower test result. Or, even the more absurd notion
that everybody can score above the median. The much maligned book The
Bell Curve, sometimes
accused of actually causing the ‘problem’ of cognitive distribution in the US, actually
states the blunt facts about our societies and the distribution of mental
skills. This salient fact that half the people who take the standardized test
will score below the median is the rallying point for ‘change’ in
‘education.’
That is not fair. Society must be equalized. Thus
propaganda must replace education.
The Bell Curve correctly
predicts what groups [NOT individuals] will probably pass high school, college
and who will excel in the work place—and who will not—but strictly on a group
basis. It doesn’t work for individuals. This fact commits millions to menial
jobs for lack of certain skills but is casus belli for the political left.
Politically, then, about half the populations of various minorities and the
white majority are candidates for political exploitation based only on their
intrinsic skills. This works well politically and that is where about 50% of
the votes are derived.
So,
in nearly all of the 14,000 school districts across the land there are no
school systems where blacks routinely score higher than whites on standardized
tests with roughly 50:50 population ratios. These tests have been stringently
rewritten to expunge the ‘white bias’ and ‘be fair’ and when re-administered
have produced the same results; A15 point deficiency is nearly always observed.
If the 15 point gap was a myth then we would expect to see about half the
school districts showing blacks proportionately populating the upper half of
the academic population and we observe essentially none of this. Money is not the solution as the Washington, D.C, school system spends the
most money on their students and have probably the worst
academic record in America.
Money is clearly not the answer.
The lefties tacitly admit (without saying it directly) that affirmative action
is absolutely necessary for many minorities to compete in our society. They
either don’t have the cognitive skills or refuse to use them, or a combination
of both. The use of race-norming was used to
disguise this gap.
This worked by sorting test scores by race, forming two averages, taking the
difference and adding that difference to the black test scores.
This is now illegal. Such a practice, while being wholly alien to decency is a
grand example of the left’s ability to sanction intellectual dishonesty. This
is a characteristic of the liberal progressive where decency, truth, mendacity
and other desirable human attributes are cast aside for political gain. You can
be a liar, thief, a pervert or anything else like Bill and Hillary Clinton and
welcome warm applause from the far left.
Push Plan B and get
“something.”
“Nonetheless, Professor Rosenbaum said, high
school counselors and teachers are not doing enough to alert students unlikely
to earn a college degree to the perilous road ahead.
“I’m not saying don’t
get the B.A,” he said. “I’m saying, let’s
get them some intervening credentials, some intervening milestones. Then,
if they want to go further in their education, they can.””--Plan B: Skip College
By Jacques Steinberg
The Politics:
“Still, by urging that some students be directed away from
four-year colleges, academics like Professor Lerman are touching a
third rail of the education system. At the very least, they could be
accused of lowering expectations for some students. Some critics go
further, suggesting that the approach amounts to educational redlining, since
many of the students who drop out of college are black or non-white Hispanics.””--Plan
B: Skip College By Jacques Steinberg
Again, the minorities
cannot compete on equal terms and this truncates their meager chances.
This pathetic pathway is apparently Plan B. Plan A, from testing, excludes more than 3/4
of our society from benefiting from a legitimate B.A. or B. S. or higher. College is only for a few. Path B,
mumbled to death in this article is nothing but affirmative action reboiled and
offered with some new excuses for failure preemptively supplied. Liberalism
insists on equal outcomes in any arena but mostly for jobs.
This is a tangled form of Incrementalism (Muddling Through, Disjointed
Incrementalism, Incremental Planning).
Plan C, in my view, and an advance over Plan B would be some system whereby businesses would
set up education systems of their own and teach, perhaps in a year or less, the
skills needed for jobs in that business for that level. This could be
accomplished by corporations cooperatively sponsoring various schools nationwide.
They could decide what [if anything] could be done with partial college
training or partial high school work in an individual case before entry. The
school could monitor the diligence of the students and filter out those who do
not have the determination to succeed. Note that it is the cognitive skill base
that is the most important determinant for academic learning and that can
easily be detected by extensive testing of candidate students. But, that is also
an ethnic filter in several cases. Therein lays a massive political barrier. Plan
C would tailor employees with a focused education to fit various job
descriptions and hence abusing the notion of equality or equal outcomes.
Plan D, my plan, is to focus the spending on
education only on effective path ways. If students cannot pass standardized
exams in their first year in high school then they would be offered some
vocational training such as works in Germany. We have a society with a job
spectrum of cognitive and other essential skills and agreeing with some of the
comments above in this article college is not required for all cases. We should
be careful to not give ‘education’ more praise than it deserves from the
government point of view. The voting comment above [better
voting behavior] refers to the use of
political propaganda flatly defined as ‘education’ when it is not. There is no
reason to bluntly limit the educational level of any person if they are
qualified in cognitive terms to continue on. But, there is also no need to
overeducate persons for which no job exists at that level. It is even worse to
manufacture jobs. We have a form of bell curve in our job categories in our
country and the most efficient way to fill them is to provide enough education
for the individual to succeed at that level. If better jobs appear and there is
a need for greater skills then some extra education would obviously be required
for some and that level should be made competitive and determined by
standardized testing along with the wishes of the student and the job giver in
concert. Everyone should attain the highest level they can for their job. This
fails as standardized testing magnifies the bell curves intrinsic to our
society.
But, any plan other than B, and particularly one
in which there is minimal student testing and certainly no teacher credential
testing, will be blocked by the left based on their warped equal outcomes
mantra. Nobody knows better than the left what a failure our system is in
places like California, and particularly exemplified by cities like Detroit,
Baltimore, Oakland, Los Angeles, Philly, Atlanta and New Orleans—all liberal
bastions of government and ‘education.’
In our current political atmosphere there is no
hope for Plans A, C or D. Plan B is just
a mumbler’s paradise where more money can be wasted for political reasons. That
will maintain ‘equality’ for all. There is the place where new jobs for the
left will appear to ‘solve’ a problem that insolulable. This means job security
for many at our expense. And, they
wonder why many jobs disappear here and reappear overseas. This will
continue. Companies in the US routinely
import people to fill job slots that cannot be filled. The equal outcomes
nostrum just dumbs down America
and that is one of the left’s best accomplishments.
rycK
Comments:
ryckki@gmail.com
The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles
about Israel
and Hamas
The Road to Social
Success, Peace and Justice: California
has NO Vision!
As Predicted: California Heads for the
Financial Latrines.
Copulating
with Coprolites: The Unveiled Mechanism of Governance by Progressive Liberalism
in California
Plan B: Skip College
By Jacques Steinberg
“The Education gap is a
common term for describing differences in educational attainment measured by
grades, test scores or other measures between different social groups. The
groups compared often are categorized by race or ethnicity but may also include
gender or other features.”
The New York Times
Mumbles [again] about Education and No Child Left Behind.
The Futile Attempt of
Forcing Equality Among the Masses.
Krugman Applies
Protosimian Logic to Health Care. Big Government and Higher Taxes! Of Course!
Propaganda Gem: Krugman Distorts History as He Grubs for More Taxes.
Propaganda Alert: The
New York Times Axes the Right Questions and then Answers Them with the Left
Answers.
Political Lessons from the Fairy Tales by the New York Times: Propaganda
at Work.
Friday, February 08,
2008
10:16 AM
The Bell
Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (ISBN: 0029146739)
by
Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray,
Charles Free Press of Glencoe , Inc, Old
Tappan, New
Jersey, U.S.A.,
1994.
Monday, November 26,
2007
3:44 PM
Political Lies, Ghouls,
Dictators and the Eternal Quest for your Wealth.
“The
quest for ‘equality’
and ‘social
justice’ might be attained in other ways we are told and that
‘education’ of the masses is the way to do this. If we teach our offspring to
be classless and steep them in fairness and humanity then social justice will
spring forth like flowers in the meadows.
The disease that prevented this splendor was capitalism. Any intrinsic
truths in the educational theory entrenched in this message failed to
materialize in the society as a whole because of two factors: propaganda and the maldistribution of cognitive attributes or IQs. “
“To
fix this problem, propaganda must replace education. The trickle down theory of distribution of
wealth was unacceptable according to the new educated view. Now leaders of corporations became greedy
tyrants and exploited their employees instead of being benefactors and
employing millions from their risk-taking and ingenuity. Only a few of these
entrepreneurs would rise to power and they were not the ones who by an accident
of birth became royal rulers, but they were the ones who were adept in business.
In England
those who were originally privileged to become educated by their royal parents
or peers of the realm were supplanted by those with higher intelligence, more
assertive personalities and advancing business skills. Education had now, in
the views of the left, produced the same monsters as the royal bed chambers and
must be severely modified to teach the masses how to recognize the proper
leaders that would create a more liberal society. Education, then, must be
modified and transformed into a major propaganda
mechanism [a lie machine] that would create a mold where the elite could
push out conditioned citizens who would conform to the liberal model. The
citizens must be ‘educated’ to the
phony notion that socialism or one of its variants is the best form of
government for all. This, of course, is a lie and a difficult one to
implement without some heavy propaganda and some
other drastic measures. The left used both.
Educators must now be social tyrants and act as stooges of some leftist
social agenda to hold jobs in the leftist-dominated educational system. Testing
must be minimized and students passed along to higher grade levels without
regard for academic credentials or any recognizable form of performance.
Politics has now replaced facts.”
The Futile Attempt of
Forcing Equality Among the Masses.
The Apollo Alliance, Marxism and
Another Chance to Challenge Capitalism Explained. [next paragraph]
Education gap can be
closed with fresh ideas MY VIEW • Black and Hispanic students are being left
behind. By Abigail Thernstrom The Portland
Tribune, Mar 2, 2004.
“How much would it cost and what would the
benefits be if blacks and Hispanics graduated from high school, went to
college, and graduated from college at the same rate as non-Hispanic whites?
The answer to this important question for the future of the nation is explored
in this report. The costs of education would be high, increasing by about 20 percent in California
and 10 percent in the rest of the nation.
But the benefits, in the form of savings in public health and welfare
expenditures and increased tax revenues from
higher incomes, would be even higher.”
Obama: College for
Everybody with No SATs?!
The New York Times
Essays us on Poverty, Poison and Tax Policies: The Orshansky Glubberance
Explained Posted by rycK on Monday, February 18, 2008 2:58:41 PM
