A friend of mine, and occasional Lean Left commenter, Angus Johnston, has started a blog focused on US student activism: studentactivism.net. Angus is completing his PhD in History this semester; his dissertation is on the history of student activist groups from the 60s. He is also currently hooked into nationwide student activist groups as they exist today, and has acted in an advisory role for some of them. (He was, you won’t be surprised to hear, more or less the Megaphone Mark of his own campus as an undergrad.) He comes to his subject with considerable experience and academic expertise.
studentactivism.net covers current controversies involving students or colleges, as well as student organizing, activism, and rights issues. Given the high representation of the academic world in the blogosphere, and the increasing politicization of campuses and the educational experience, it’s a valuable resource for anyone interested in what’s happening with campuses today, and the generations of young citizens they are turning out. Check it out!
April 30th, 2008
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General, Politics, Bloggin, School, Culture, Education |
no comments
I’ve repeatedly had a debate with Tennesseefree’s Glen Dean about this subject (most recently here), but I figured I’d toss the question out to the peanut gallery: Can demand be created, or can one only ever hope to respond to demand?
Have at it.
February 25th, 2008
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Education |
31 comments
George W. Bush has demolished all Presidential records for stupidity, vapidity, contempt for facts, and sheer lack of intellectual engagement with the world. He has also scaled new heights in preening religious posturing, religious sectarianism, and scarily delusional religious triumphalism in an official capacity. It’s hard not to think those two phenomena are related (as they are overtly in such specific instances as Bush’s denial of global warming, embrace of creationism, opposition to stem cell research and abortion, and the like).
Mike Huckabee is giving Bush a run for the title on the religious front, claiming his religion “defines” both him himself and his approach to his official duties, touting his status as an ordained minister as part of his qualifications for the Presidency, declaring categorically that no Muslim would be appointed to his Cabinet [that was Romney; my apologies], and boasting (falsely) in a Republican candidates’ debate that he holds a degree in theology. (He does not, but it’s striking that he would bring it up as part of his qualification for office.)
This is bad enough, but it’s also becoming apparent that Huckabee is somewhat strikingly . . . um . . . fact-challenged, too.
December 16th, 2007
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General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Education, Media, News & Current Events |
20 comments
Cass Sunstein is back, this time with a new book claiming that the Internet is bad for democracy because it allows like minded people to hang out with other like minded people, and thus they all become partisan zombies and thats bad, because, umm, because people aren’t supposed to have strong positions on things? The meta-argument kinda loses me there, as you can probably tell. I haven’t read the book so I cannot speak to its in depth argument, but Mr. Sunstein is blogging at TMP Cafe this week and his first post is not a particularly impressive one.
Here is the core of his post:
As the experiment was designed, the groups consisted of predominantly liberal or conservative members—with the liberal groups coming from Boulder, and the conservative groups from Colorado Springs. (The groups were not mixed together.) It is widely known that Boulder tends to be liberal and that Colorado Springs tends to be conservative. The groups were screened to ensure that their members conformed to these stereotypes. (For example, if people in Boulder liked Vice President Cheney, they were cordially excused from the experiment.) People were asked to state their opinions anonymously both before and after a period of group discussion, and also to try to reach a public verdict before the final anonymous statement. What was the effect of discussion?
The results were simple. In almost every group, members ended up with more extreme positions after they spoke with one another. Discussion made civil unions more popular among liberals; discussion made civil unions less popular among conservatives. Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion; they strongly opposed it after discussion. Mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, liberals became strongly favorable toward affirmative action after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action before discussion, conservatives became even more negative abou affirmative action after discussion.
A couple of things here. Even assuming that the degree of the effect was as intense as Sunstein implies, this is a poorly designed experiment, or, from Sunstein’s description of it, this is a poorly designed experiment. He doesn’t link to it or give us enough details to track down where it was published, so I cannot be one hundred percent certain. but there is no mention of what happens after the groups are shuffled and the rations are more 50-50. In other words, Sunstein assumes that the effect he describes is permanent without actually offering any evidence that it so. If your contention that the Internet makes partisanship worse, shouldn’t and one of your supporting arguments is that groups in isolation become more partisan and have less internal differences, shouldn’t you design an experiment that actually attempts to answer that question? Unless you assume that the groups always remain in isolation, the first thing you have to do is to determine whether or not that affect is lasting and to what degree it persists. This experiment as described does not do that.
And groups do not remain in isolation. People go to work, they go to Church, they go to movies and ball games and professional conferences. It is literally impossible for me to not be aware of the conservative view of the world, both because of the prevalence of conservative viewpoints in the mainstream media and because of the fact that I live a normal human life that brings into contact with other people all the time. Some of those people are conservatives, and some of those people talk about conservative issues. It’s probably easier for conservatives, but even they would have a hard time going through life without exposure to liberals.
The second problem assumes that increased partisanship on the issues in questions is a bad thing. First, any argument that assumes “extremism” is a label that can be applied to civil unions is suspect in and of itself. Civil unions are the compromise position between the current level of discrimination and full equality before the law. So in Sunstein’s experiment, the liberals became more strongly in favor of the compromise position. Describing that as an increase in extremism is ridiculous on its face. (UPDATE: Ted points out that this is not entirely accurate. It implies that Sunstein is labeling civil unions explicitly as extremism, when the text doesn’t really support that; I misread the way he was using the word. He still seems to be implying that civil unions are the opposite of the current inequality, but he isn’t really stating it explicitly, so I could be mis-reading his intention.) But its part and parcel of the problem with the underlying assumption. Sometimes, the compromise solution is not a viable one. Global warming, another area where “extremism” increased according to Sunstein is a good example. Either global warming is a large problem that has to be dealt with quickly and forthrightly or its an overblown ghost story that doesn’t justify the material investment required to prevent its worst effects from occurring. Neither side is much served by a split the middle, compromise is always good attitude. Half measures may be better then nothing form the global warming perspective, for example, but they won’t solve the problem and at the end of the day you still have to work to convince people to take the real steps required to prevent the worst form occurring. At best, compromise buys a little more time for such convincing — the kind of convincing that went on in Sunstein’s experiement — to continue. Affirmative action is less an all or nothing position than global warming, but it, too, can be argued that the compromise position is useless for both sides in the argument: a little affirmative action is either an unnecessary violation of rights or a useless tool that does not achieve the very real and needed societal changes.
It seems odd to argue that an increase in partisanship is bad without examining the actual merits of the questions involved; i.e. is one side already supporting a compromise position, as in the case of civil unions, or if a compromise position could have more than a minimal effect on the problem as in the case of global warming and affirmative action and is thus a rational choice for the players involved or not. Sunstein’s experiment assumes that any two positions are equally extreme, that the group dynamic demonstrated is persistent, and that compromise is always the rational position. All three of the assumptions are dubious and the fact that they form the underpinning of his experiment leaves his grander thesis, to the degree that he is going to support it based on this example, on very shaky ground.
November 12th, 2007
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Politics, Culture, Education, Books |
5 comments
The sky is blue, the grass is green, etc., etc.:
Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenager sexual behavior, although they are eligible for tens of mil lions of dollars in federal grants, according to a study released by a nonpartisan group that seeks to reduce teen pregnancies.
“At present there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence or reduces the number of sexual partners” among teenagers, the study concluded.
…snip…
The study found that while abstinence-only efforts appear to have little positive impact, more comprehensive sex education programs were having “positive outcomes” including teenagers “delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use.”
…snip…
The study, conducted by Douglas Kirby, a senior research scientist at ETR Associates, also sought to debunk what the report called “myths propagated by abstinence-only advocates” including: that comprehensive sex education promotes promiscuity, hastens the initiative of sex or increases its frequency, and sends a confusing message to adolescents.
None of these was found to be accurate, Kirby wrote.
But no doubt, the Religious Right will continue to oppose comprehensive sex ed with all their might, facts be damned. Who cares if what they advocate produces results that are demonstrably worse? They have principle to stand on, after all…
November 7th, 2007
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Politics, Religion, Culture, Education |
no comments
School reform supposedly founders upon the shoals of union rules. If only the schools were allowed to treat teachers they way Nike and its sub-contractors treated the people who make shoes, creativity and ponies would flourish on all of the nation’s schools. Never mind that education results are lowest in states with the least powerful teacher’s unions, and never mind that the vast majority of the best performing schools have teachers who are –gasp — union members. No, just read this heartbreaking series (part one, part two, part three on Tuesday) on one troubled school and a true hero of a teacher in Chicago. What you wont find is any hint that union rules have gotten in the way of anything. What you will here are plenty of stories like this:
A baby-faced 8th-grade boy stood at a lectern analyzing a poem. In a squeaky voice, he talked about feeling alone and neglected, like the narrator. And, matter-of-factly, he ticked off events that brought him there.
He had been taken away from his crack-addicted mother. His brother had been shot in the heart and head during a gang fight. His young cousin had died of neglect.
… One boy was removed from the classroom because Apostolos suspected he was high on marijuana. A girl kept falling asleep; she had been staying up late doing laundry for the family.
… On an unseasonably warm morning the day before Halloween, Apostolos sat in the hallway just outside her closed classroom door. … Apostolos knew that reading is the avenue to all other learning. She was following research that shows small-group, focused lessons are the best way to propel the slowest readers forward. But as she tried to nudge this group toward an answer, they heard a chair screech across the floor. Inside the classroom a boy shouted, “I’m gonna steal on you.” … She tried to sort out the disagreement, but by the time she got the kids settled down, she had lost her teaching moment.
… If there was a child in danger of being left behind in Room 301, it might have been Kyesha.
With 34 children in the orchestrated frenzy, there was little one-on-one time for the quiet and studious teenager, who, academically, was far ahead of most of her classmates. Apostolos spent much of her time teaching to the middle.
…The testing period had been disrupted early on. Half the girls in Apostolos’ class had a running feud with some 7th-grade girls and it had grown violent.
During testing week, a group was hit with chemical spray outside the school. A girl opened her front door late one night to find three dozen girls threatening to beat her up. And two girls were chased home from school with threats of razor blades.
Unions didn’t cause any of those problems. In fact, the “blame the unions!” cry is just a clever bit of propaganda, a way for over-privileged assholes like Mikey Kaus to excuse their refusla to put education first in public policy. Schools — especially schools in neighborhoods like the one in this report — should be fucking palaces. They should be absolutely secure, teachers should be paid like rock stars, and each class should have a half a dozen full time tutors/assistants to assist the teachers. But all of that would cost money — a lot of money in some cases — and spending that money on education might get in the way of the shiny new sports stadium, or the fancy new war, or the next huge tax cut for people like Mikey Kaus. So money must not matter to education — education must be unlike any other human endevour in the age of capitalism — it must be the fault of all those no good unions that are the cause of the problem.
Whining about unions is perhaps the greatest piece of modern doublespeak. It allows people to ignore the real problems - -of class, of poverty, of facilities, of the effects of white flight, of resource allocation — while at the same time making themselves feel good by stridently demanding a slolution that costs them nothing. It allows people to look themselves in the mirror and say that children are our future but lack of money is not the problem in education without vomiting all over their smug little reflections.
September 3rd, 2007
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Education |
3 comments
I don’t think there is much doubt about this any more, but here is more evidence that pre-school is good for kids, even the most disadvantaged:
Minority preschoolers from low-income families who participated in a comprehensive school-based intervention fared better educationally, socially and economically as they moved into young adulthood, according to a report by University of Minnesota professors Arthur Reynolds and Judy Temple. The study is published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s (JAMA) Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Reynolds is a child development professor in the College of Education and Human Development and Judy Temple is a professor in the department of applied economics and in the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.
“This study is the first to show that large-scale established programs run by schools can have enduring effects into adulthood on general health and well-being,” Reynolds says. “Early childhood programs can promote not only educational success but health status and behavior.”
Reynolds’ research group discovered that by age 24, children who were involved in preschool programs were more likely to finish high school, attend four-year colleges and have health insurance coverage, and less likely to be arrested for a felony, be incarcerated or develop depressive symptoms. For example, the preschool group had higher rates of high school completion with 71.4 percent finishing high school compared with a 63.7 percent finish rate among those in the non preschool group. Those who attended preschool also were more likely to have health insurance with 70.2 percent having insurance compared with 61.5 percent of those not in preschool. Those children in the program also had lower rates of felony arrests with 16.5 percent compared with 21.1 percent and lower depressive symptoms with 12.8 percent compared with 17.4 percent.
Universal pre-school would not be the first thing I introduced if I was made Supreme Ruler of the Universe, but it would be in the top five. For a relatively modest investment, it returns enormous amounts to society.
August 9th, 2007
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Politics, Economics, Culture, Education |
5 comments
Ramesh Ponnuru never ceases to amaze. He’s so dumb that you can tell he doesn’t know what he’s talking about even when you don’t know what he’s talking about. His writing is like some sort of auto-installing ZIP file that unpacks idiocy on your monitor as soon as you click on the link.
Today he’s responding to someone else’s response to the Supreme Court’s recent anti-desegregation decision. Not having read that article, and being familiar with the decision only from news reports, I would refrain from commenting on any intelligent person’s discussion of the matter. But that in no way constrains me from commenting on Ponnuru’s. It takes no knowledge of the subject (i.e., a level of knowledge no greater than Ponnuru’s own) to spot this nonsense:
Risa Goluboff writes [in Slate]:
Stevens and Breyer are right. . . . The plurality and concurring opinions undermine and misinterpret decades of efforts to undo the long American history of racial segregation, discrimination, and inequality.
Except that pretty much the rest of Goluboff’s article is devoted to showing that the interpretation of Brown given by Roberts and Thomas is entirely reasonable, Brown itself having been insufficiently egalitarian for the author’s taste. You can make either argument—Roberts and Thomas as betrayers of Brown, Brown as insufficient—but to make both at the same time would require skills that Goluboff evidently does not have, and that Slate’s editors are unwilling to demand before publishing an attack on the conservative justices.
Why would this possibly be true? Of course Goluboff could have contradicted herself, though I would wait for a reader of greater perspicacity than Ponnuru to tell me so before believing it. But Ponnuro comes close to saying that to simultaneously criticize the de facto overturning of Brown, and also to claim that the Brown decision “did not go far enough”, is impossible - or at least so tricky as to be reachable only by writers of some exalted level of skill.
Why? Isn’t it perfectly obvious that anyone who supports the continued application of Brown would also think that (a) Brown is still necessary and (b) it is wrong to overturn it at this time? The positions that Ponnuru declares no one could hold simultaneously are the obvious and necessary ones for anyone who takes the basic stance he attributes to Goluboff.
And is there perhaps something just a bit fishy about his claim that “Goluboff’s article is devoted to showing that the interpretation of Brown given by Roberts and Thomas is entirely reasonable” - especially in the face of his direct quote of her saying that they “undermine and misinterpret decades of” jurisprudence on racial equality? Taking it for granted that Goluboff is against racial segregation, would anyone of normal intelligence read that last-quoted sentence and then imagine that its author was likely to write an article “devoted to showing . . .” that those opinions were “entirely reasonable”?
[OK - I cheated here: I read the Goluboff article.] Of course Goluboff says nothing of the kind. Her claim is that Brown was argued on too-narrow grounds, as an attack on explicit de jure segregation and not on the effects of racial stigma and substantive inequality resulting from private and de facto segregation.* The result is that it is possible for conservatives to cynically “abstract” the Brown decision away from the actual facts of its own underlying cases - that is, to characterize it as being entirely about explicit and formal segregation alone and not about racial equality in any substantive sense. She does say that “the way [the Brown decision] was structured, and the way it has often been read since, lends credence to the conservatives’ modern interpretation”. But she also says:
The fact that the conservative justices can so easily transfer this abstract concept of harm to whites shows that their jurisprudence has nothing to do with actually remedying inequality. The equal protection clause is their supposed text, but inequality is not their real concern. . . .
[C]ertainly, readings of Brown as portending actual integration and not simply an end to state-mandated segregation are still possible. . . .
Justice Stevens is right to point out that none of his brethren in 1975 would have understood Brown and its progeny in the cramped way the court does today. . . .
The fact that Brown itself offers up a formalistic vision of racial harm does not preclude it from offering up other visions.
She says that “the conservatives’ modern distortion of Brown is embedded in the case itself” - from this Ponnuru concludes that she thinks it is the case, and not the distortion, that is wrong!
Can anyone read the above and conclude that she supports the Roberts decision? Could anyone conclude that she believes, or that anyone could believe, that decrying the obvious wrongness of the Roberts decision is somehow not compatible with hoping for more robust applications of Brown in the future? On logical grounds alone, when she says that decision is a “distortion” that “does not preclude [the Brown decision] from offering up other visions”, could anyone conclude that that compatibility was anything other than her central point?
Ramesh Ponnuru could, but he’s a jackass.
* I think she’s straining her argument a bit, here. One of the motivating themes of the Brown decision was that “separate but equal is not equal” - i.e., that what was wrong with de jure discrimination was precisely its effects, and not merely that it was government-mandated segregation. And the court case in Brown involved extensive sociological testimony of the effects of segregation on black children (most famously the “doll experiments” of Kenneth Clark).
July 2nd, 2007
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Culture, Education, News & Current Events, Race |
12 comments
[NB: This began as a comment on Kevin’s post, below. But my point is somewhat different, and the comment got too long, so I moved it up here. - KTK]
Attacks on Romney for being Mormon are out of line and should be condemned.
Why, exactly, is this, anyway?
If attacking someone for “being an X” (where “X” is “member of some certain religion”) is understood simply to mean saying that they hold certain beliefs (characteristic of X) and those beliefs should be condemned, why would it possibly not be legitimate to attack them in that way? What else could we judge a person on - especially in the political arena - but their beliefs and how they act on them? We certainly have no hesitation in making such attacks for all beliefs other than religious ones - but are somehow pulled up short as soon as those beliefs are called “religious”.
The strangest thing is that we have allowed the least-defensible beliefs to be elevated to the level of the most-off-limits to criticism - while simultaneously allowing holders of those beliefs to cite them, without being called on to defend them, as reasons for their adopting policies that are themselves indefensible.
Homophobia is a character flaw. Religious homophobia is not only a point of pride for many, but instantly becomes acceptable and off-limits to criticism as soon as the adjective is added to the insanity. That the embryo or early fetus has precisely the same moral interests as a full-grown, mentally competent adult is an absurd proposition on its face. Assert it as religious belief, and it sudenly becomes not merely worthy of respect, but irrefutable!
In any other context, we would demand reasons and explanations for what people do, and would subject the beliefs that guide their actions to the test of rationality and conformity to civilized values. Yet we have allowed ourselves to be prohibited from doing so any time the subject merely asserts that those beliefs are religious (or, “matters of faith”, as if that were somehow more exalted than sectarian dogma).
For no conceivable reason, we have condemned huge swaths of public policy, political discourse, and private life to the exclusive hegemony of (aggressive, politically-motivated) non-rational sectarian activism, grounded on nothing more than self-justifying fervency - and we reinforce this suicide pact by the constant reminder to those who might be inclined to display any degree of logical rigor in that direction, that “we must not criticize people’s religion”. I suggest, instead, we should grant religion the respect of being taken seriously enough that we expect it to make sense, demand that it not offend against the rights and values of other members of the community, and reject it when it fails these tests.
There are reasons to be cautious about attacks on religious beliefs, of course. The history of religious persecution, and the religious wars still ongoing, point up the dangers of religious prejudice or religious animosity, as opposed to criticism of religion. But those dangers are precisely those of prejudice, persecution, and war of conquest - things we know are unacceptable for reasons having nothing to do with religion. We have rightly repudiated our history of religious prejudice, but in embracing tolerance have given religious believers carte blanche for their own prejudice and irrationality - to the point that, today, the religious right declares that it is victimized by not being allowed to persecute gays (among many, many other ordinary facts of civilized life)!
One might reasonably argue that religion, properly understood, belongs on the “private” side of the public/private distinction and is thus immune to criticism. This argument is an important one, and I would like to see it better appreciated. I would be glad to accept such a consensus. But that would also mean that religion could not be cited as justification for public policy, or even for support of policies congenial to one’s religion that were not supportable on other grounds. (The fact that you like Mozart does not justify you in demanding special privileges for Mozartians. The fact that you like Jesus does not justify you in demanding special privileges for Jesusians, still less reduced privileges for others.) If religious believers were willing to see their own religion as JFK did, as a personal matter which he would not allow to interfere with his political duties, they would have a claim to be entitled to practice their beliefs without criticism - but there would also be no reason for that criticism. It is because religious believers refuse to treat their own beliefs about religion - or anyone else’s - as private that they are subject to criticism for the content of those beliefs which they bring into the public sphere.
There is, finally, the “don’t rouse the bastids” argument - that holding people accountable for the content of their religious beliefs simply provokes them, often into violence, and that it’s better just to let things ride. I think recent history has taught us the emptiness of that forlorn hope.
So, I think I’m tired of constantly being told we can’t say anything about the reasons other people cite for distorting public policy and blunting the lives and freedoms of others. I want to hear rational reasons, grounded in fact, for laws and policies, and I want to see a firm consensus that any laws or policies not so grounded are invalid on their face. I want it said, and universally acknowledged, that most of the policies promoted by the religious right - from “abstinence only” to lack of birth control to mandated false information about abortion to phonics-only language instruction (how did that become a religious issue, anyway?) to embryo fetishism to creationism - are grounded on no rational analysis and no provable facts, and have been abject failures in practice; I want the obvious implication of that fact acted on and these idiotic policies vacated unless and until they can be defended on rational grounds in comparison with what we already know is true and does work. I want every Republican candidate to be required to cite explicit reasons, grounded in fact and logic, for their support (if it is such) of creationism, lack of choice on abortion, anti-environmentalism, airwaves censorship, and whatever other absurdities they’ve been pushing, and I want every one of them blackballed from the primaries if they can’t do so, plausibly, without notes, on the first try. I want Romney to explain exactly how his Mormonism influenced his (various) votes on abortion, stem cell research, and access to birth control, and, if his answer is anything other than “it’s totally irrelevant”, why exactly we should take seriously as a presidential candidate someone whose policy decisions are grounded in such absolute, sidesplittingly ludicrous inanity as the Book of Mormon. I want all the other Republican candidates (and Hillary, and maybe Obama and Edwards) to answer the same question about their policy decisions, on the same grounds. Then I want them all to answer the question “How will your religion influence your policy decisions in the future?”, and, if their answers are anything but “it’s totally irrelevant”, I want a big trapdoor to open under them and dump them in a pit for the duration of the campaign. Mostly, I want the things religious people say and expect others to believe to be subject to test, in the same way any other statement by any rational person is so.
Until now, that has clearly been too much to ask, because we have allowed ourselves to be bamboozled into accepting absurdity as wisdom, falsehood as truth, and faith as reason. But is it too much to expect from now on?
June 25th, 2007
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General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Privacy, Education, News & Current Events |
one comment
Metaphorical, a tech-savvy blogger, comments on the Julie Amero case - the woman who was sentenced to 10 years in jail for “endagering a minor” because a porn-spam pop-up appeared on a computer in a classroom where she was substitute teaching.
When a clueless Internet user meets a computer hopelessly infected with porn-oriented spyware the result won’t be pretty, but it will be a private few hours of pop-up ridden frustration, annoyance, and disgust. Unless the setting is a middle school classroom. Then it will be a hour of public embarrassment. Unless it’s brought to court by an equally clueless, but aggressive prosecutor. With an equally clueless judge, who disallows the defense expert to present all his evidence. Then, anything can happen, including jailtime. Many hours and days of jailtime. Up to 10 years of it, in fact.
Such was the fate of Julie Amero, a Connecticut substitute teacher, who was convicted in January on four counts of “risk of injury to a minor.” This week the wheels of injustice may have started to grind to a halt. Amero was granted a new trial by an appeals court because the lower court case relied on expert testimony that “may” have included “erroneous” facts.
He notes that the trial included testimony from a so-called “expert witness” - a police officer who handles the department’s computer cases - that the existence of a Web history file showing porn site visits proved that she had been surfing dirty Web pages on the school computer; an actual expert was prohibited from testifying that the district had allowed its antivirus protection to lapse, and that viruses and adware on the machine were the source of the porn. She was sentenced to a decade in the slammer, but finally the judge wised up and ordered a new trial on the basis of evidence that the prosecutor’s “expert” was full of shit.
[T]he school’s firewall was out of date and so was the computer’s anti-virus software. “In short, the Windows 98 computer was completely exposed to the Internet without any kind of protection.” The defense had found “two adware programs and at least one Trojan horse program,” which logs showed took up residence on the computer weeks before the classroom pop-up incident.
But the lesson Meta takes from this is about the dangers of technology:
It’s time for software vendors to protect clueless computer users, it’s time for prosecutors and the police to understand how computers work, and it’s time for a wiser court system than we have to slap them silly when they don’t.
It’s also time for teachers and other adults to learn how computers work. If we’re going to put them in the classroom, a teaching strategy of mixed utility and, so far, mixed—at best—benefits, then we need for schools to stop just tossing them onto teachers’ desks, expecting them to operate themselves and teach our students. Not even Macs do that.
I don’t really think this is the point.
The problem is not putting technology into the hands of the clueless. (The value of computers in the classroom is an open question, true, but that’s a side issue.) Computers are actually pretty usable these days, and there are some levels of haplessness you simply can’t overcome with software design. (Remember “Microsoft Bob”? Please let’s not go there again.)
The problem is stupid, backwards, and clueless authorities who are beside themselves at the thought that some kids saw a pop-up ad on a computer, and think that’s worth 10 years of someone’s life. (I’m glad they didn’t find the father of my friend from 5th grade, whose stack of Playboys we found in his garage one day. Christ, the guy would still be in jail.) Technology problems will always be with us. Confusing systems and obnoxious malware are a pain, and will likely be so for some time, but they are nothing but an annoyance. Letting panicky prudes throw people in jail because some kids saw the words “Triple XXX Action!” on a computer monitor - forget that it was by accident, that’s the least part of the issue - is a vastly greater danger. We don’t need computers that are better at protecting us from sex. We need people in charge who aren’t so completely unhinged about sex.
We also need accountability for the prudes, the freaks, the creeps, and the crazies who go overboard with this nonsense. You can be sure there will be no consequences for this dipshit cop, who undoubtedly took one weekend seminar using a yellow textbook with the words “For Dummies” on the cover and then became his department’s “computer expert”. Nor will there be any for the prosecutor who brought this idiotic case to trial, and who did not initiate efforts to overturn it after finally realizing their own case was fraudulent. Nor will there be any for the identical cops and prosecutors across the country who do the same thing with less publicity, the administrators and school boards who lead the rush to sex-panic in the schools, or the politicians who have made pandering to sex-panic the substance of statecraft. Until we grow up as a country, people will be going to jail for admitting to kids that sex exists, and kids will grow up thinking their own bodies, and a large part of their own lives, are dirty, mysterious, dangerous, and harmful. What’s worst about this case is that a couple of pop-up ads for porn sites is probably the most information these kids have ever received about sex from their school, and likely from the parents who called the school to complain, as well. That is the sex crime we should be punishing.
June 8th, 2007
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, School, Culture, Education, Media, News & Current Events |
8 comments
Jill, at Feministe, has a great post up about some dweeb at Arizona State University who started a “Caucasian American Men” club to combat the fact that “males are quickly becoming a minority on college campuses”. Last year’s graduating class at ASU had a white/black ratio of 25:1. What’s truly priceless is that the club was started by a woman - who isn’t even an ASU student.
The post goes on to profile Emily Mitchell, the professional conservative whiner behind the whole thing. She’s an agent of a right-wing non-profit group who travels around the country, all expenses paid, and gets $500 a shot for every reactionary group she starts on college campuses. She gets conservative students on campus to front the groups officially, but she is the one who pushes them into it and provides the ideas and impetus. She has founded abstinence clubs, anti-feminism clubs, etc., most apparently designed to be deliberately provocative rather than contribute anything substantive. (Why would you possibly need a club to not have sex? How is a group comprising 95% of the student body a “minority”? Luckily, you don’t have to make sense or speak truth if you’re a conservative.)
So, she’s a twit and he’s a jerk. Was it likely to be otherwise? They deserve each other. But what really got me in the story was this:
It was a political science class that brought [Mitchell] to the Leadership Institute. Mitchell recalls a world politics class with a professor who told her there was no way she could get a passing grade on a paper she was writing defending capitalism over communism.
“She told me there was no suitable argument,” says Mitchell.
The professor, Katherine Kaup, recalls the exchange differently.
“I remember the paper wasn’t strongly researched and I told her to rewrite it. She wasn’t happy,” she says. “I encourage them to take any view as long as they defend their argument. I’m not a socialist, either. I’m a card-carrying Republican.”
Now that brings back memories. Short-term memories, in fact, because I’m right in the middle of grading my own students’ crap-awful term papers on political philosophy and listening to the same distorted gibberish.
It’s astounding how badly students can mis-hear what you say, or misinterpret what they are told or read. I get the most unbelievable things coming back to me on papers, and every professor I know has the same experience. But in addition to that, it is an article of faith among conservatives that the academy is institutionally biased against them - that professors penalize conservative points of view and constantly try to indoctrinate their students with liberal orthodoxy. (Hint to conservative students: get over yourselves. You’re not worth indoctrinating - no one really cares what you think.) Like any faith, it has its scriptures and its dogma - stories, always vague and unverifiable, abound of professors who had a vendetta against right-wing 18-year-olds and had devoted themselves to ferreting out dissent and brainwashing them with “political correctness”.
I never understood that. None of the many campuses I’ve studied or taught at exhibited that tendency. (See the hint above for the reason why.) Most professors have more than enough of their own work to do to bother with what, if anything, goes through their students’ heads outside the classroom. But of course the stories repeat and repeat, with no grounding and no accountability (professional whiner David Horowitz has filled a book with them). In this case, however, someone actually sought out the professor and got the other side of the story - one that makes vastly more sense and dovetails perfectly with experiences I’ve had dozens of times with similar students: the student wrote a crap paper on a legitimate topic, didn’t like the criticism she got on it (even after being given a chance to improve her grade), and decided she was a victim; she then inflated a perfectly ordinary comment on a term paper into some bizarre parody of hidebound ideology - something no one would say even if they were a communist - and passed it off as her conservative victim credentials. Her professor not only didn’t say what Mitchell claims, she apparently doesn’t even hold such beliefs and is a member of a conservative, pro-market political party. We see now what it means to be “indoctrinated” by “politically correct bias” in the “liberal academy”.
Emily Mitchell has thus usefully clarified two distinct genres of whining for us: the reactionary idiot campus club and the bad-professor victim story. Both are artificial constructions whipped up for public consumption by professional conservative whiners, dressed in the truth-seeking veneer of the academy they despise, distorted with lies and falsehoods into self-indulgent martyr fantasies that are themselves the very bias and brainwashing they pretend to combat. No more evidence is required, I think. Thanks, Emily - keep up the good work!
May 30th, 2007
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General, Politics, School, Religion, Culture, Education, Media, News & Current Events, Race |
40 comments
Some buzz developing over the story of the Dean of Admissions at MIT, forced to resign today when someone secretly informed the Institute that she did not have the academic credentials she had listed on her resume when she was hired 28 years previously. She was widely recognized as a leader in the movement to make college admissions less stressful and hyper-competitive (ironically, she had made major efforts to downplay the emphasis on formal credentials; more ironically, her new book stresses that attitude as a means to maintaining integrity in your life), and was popular with the students, but the Institute felt it had no choice.
April 27th, 2007
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General, School, Economics, Culture, Education, News & Current Events |
4 comments
The New York Times Business section (so, OK, expectations aren’t high, but still . . .) has an article today on a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the artificial sweetener “Splenda”. The issue hinges to some extent on how the sweetener is synthesized, and the reporter tries to explain this horrifically complex process to the reader. It’s not a pretty sight.
April 6th, 2007
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General, Politics, School, Economics, Environment, Writing, Culture, Science, Health, Education, Media, Food & Cooking, Technology, News & Current Events, Math |
5 comments
The New York Times plays its infuriating game again today, trumpeting a major study on child-raising with a headline that presents the data almost exactly backwards and gives “family values” conservatives every convenient falsehood they could have asked for.
What’s the scoop? Better read the headline and the alarming first paragraph of this major story:
Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care
A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.
Wow! That message is pretty clear, and pretty ominous: farming your kids out to daycare for even one year causes long-term bad behavior! (Subtext: The children of women who dared to have a life of their own are doomed to delinquency, and it’s all their mothers’ fault.)
The data must be pretty bad. Let’s see just how bad:
The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.
Oh. Anything else?
they also found that time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school.
Oh. Well, at least we know, now. Good to get some hard data:
Others [sic] experts were quick to question the results. The researchers could not randomly assign children to one kind of care or another; parents chose the kind of care that suited them. That meant there was no control group, so determining cause and effect was not possible. And some said that measures of day care quality left out important things.
Oh.
So what they really meant was:
Poor Behavior Is Linked to Poor Parenting and Genetics
A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more produces healthy children whose behavior is well within the normal range. Some kids do marginally better for about 6 or 7 years if their mommies sacrifice their entire careers and autonomy to follow their children around all day every day, but that’s obviously ridiculous and there’s no apparent need to do so. Daycare’s influence on child behavior ranks at least third in level of significance, trailing by far the influence of the parents themselves whether or not their children were in daycare. There is no evidence the effect of daycare persists beyond the sixth grade, though, as a random passerby who isn’t a drooling moron noted, “Bad parents and bad genes last forever”.
By the way, they didn’t use a control group and don’t know which types of daycare are relevant.
We already knew all this, but that didn’t stop us from boldfacing the one aspect of this study that had the least influence, over the shortest period, as if it was news.
We also didn’t bother to highlight the part about improved language skills.
It’s not like they simply stumbled into this by mistake. They had to go to extra effort to get from “The effect was slight, and well within the normal range . . . parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence” to “keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive”. They deliberately dug their way down to the third-most-significant effect mentioned, which produces results “well within the normal range”, and then make that their headline. Of the three, that just happens to be the one that makes women look bad and will be used to criticize them and restrict their independence.
Indeed, the backlash is already beginning. Ann Althouse links the article as part of a post on bad schools; her entire content is to quote the first paragraph verbatim, without quoting or acknowledging any of the following take-backs. Insane alien-haired misogynist “Vox Day” quotes both the opening and the part about “normal range”, spares not the slightest moment to contemplate the contradiction, and then concludes that people who put their children in daycare would support Satan worship (I’m not kidding; it’s not clear if he is). Did the Times expect anything different?
Feed the nutjobs even the most obviously false nonsense, flattering to their prejudices, and they will inflate it into another right-wing myth without the slightest critical reflection. Tell them it’s false right in the second ‘graf, and it makes no difference. Give them an inflammatory headline and an ass-backwards lede, and then present the actual data, and which parts do you think they’ll start repeating and quoting?
This isn’t the first time the Times has taken on the Fox News role, but somehow I still find it in me to be disappointed.
[UPDATE: It isn’t only the Times. Echidne of the Snakes notes that almost-identical headlines are found, among other places, on Forbes.com, the Daily Telegraph, and, most disappointing, the Discovery Channel Website. It’s almost like there’s a . . . systematic bias against independent women . . . in society and the press, that defies scientific research undermining its conceptual foundations. Huh. Someone should look into that.]
March 26th, 2007
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General, School, Culture, Education, News & Current Events |
7 comments
As some here may know, I teach part-time in one of the great public university systems in the US. Lately I’ve been teaching in their adult night-school program - a BA-granting program aimed at the needs of full-time working adults who didn’t have a chance to go to college when they were younger. The enrollment is majority female and, this being a working-class New York City population, non-white by a huge majority. Being older, the students bring a lot more life experience and practical wisdom to the class with them, so I expect more savvy from them than from clueless 18-year-olds. But that’s not to say they can’t surprise you.
March 23rd, 2007
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, School, Culture, Libertarian Problem Solving, Privacy, Education, Race |
33 comments
Asshole town repeatedly hassles free-speech supporters, repeatedly loses. Round 3 coming up.
March 13th, 2007
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, School, Culture, Education, News & Current Events |
27 comments
NYTimes article today about yet another sociobiological argument for religious faith as an evolved trait. Ho-hum (there is a lot to sociobiology that clearly must be true, but I’m tired of them coming up with stories about how some behavioral traits could be evolutionarily advantageous if they had evolved, without any evidence that they actually could have evolved, or, more importantly, did so). But this caught my eye:
[W]hatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. “Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?” asked Atran . . . . His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.
You’re shitting me.
First, who crosses their fingers during turbulence? There are atheists who do that? How does he know?
More importantly, his students are really unwilling to put their hands in an “African relic” because he says it has a curse on it? Where the hell did he find these students - at a Raiders of the Lost Ark fan convention? Admittedly, teenagers (as about half of college students still are, despite being legal adults) tend to be hyper-suggestive and somewhat superstitious, until they’ve had a chance to settle down and test their beliefs in the world a bit, but this is ridiculous. I suppose they also believe that if you say “Bloody Mary” in a mirror three times, you’ll be killed in your sleep. Oy.
That being said, I was on an East Coast campus in the early 90s when a scare went through the students of a bunch of schools in the region, to the effect that some supposed prediction of Nostradamus had declared that “all the beautiful children” would be murdered on a certain date and this clearly pointed to one or the other of the elite colleges. (Obviously, their egos had nothing to do with this.) Most of the students pretended to take it only mock-seriously, but many of them vacated the campus on the night in question.
I suppose it’s a question of just not having had to really live by their beliefs yet. It can be hard to hold out for rationality when almost everyone around you openly endorses superstition and you have only your own convictions to fall back on. But that wooden box thing is still pathetic.
March 5th, 2007
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General, Religion, Culture, Science, Education |
7 comments
This Slate piece on donorschoose.org is disturbing, not so much for the praise of donorschoose.org, an organization I fully support, but for the implication that all charity should be done in the same manner as donorschoose.org. The “magic” of the marketplace, which donorschoose.org apparently harnesses, will apparently lead all of charity to the non-profit nirvana:
Why? Because nonprofits need to capture the magic of the marketplace if they want to make a serious dent in big social problems. Douglas K. Smith has written for Slate about one way to do this that’s brilliant but still theoretical. The organization that Charles Best founded, DonorsChoose, is already using market principles to change American education and the nonprofit world. Some day, the idea behind it will flatten, democratize, and take the intermediary out of all giving.
This is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. If donorschoose.org is the future of philanthropy, than the future is very bleak.
Again, let me stress here that I support donorschoose.org whole-heartedly. It fills an important niche, but that is all it does. Suggesting that its model is the one true path towards a perfect system of charity is free market fundamentalism at its least intelligent. Donorschoose.org works roughly like this:
Best’s brainchild was to create a market in teacher proposals, which are posted on donorschoose.org in informal, non-grants-proposal language by the teachers themselves. So for example, this week a teacher in Richton, Mo., posted a request for a $392 camcorder for her kids to act out stories they’re reading; a teacher in New York City asked for a rug on which to read stories to kindergarteners ($474); and a teacher in a 100 percent low-income school in Los Angeles wants a $414 telescope to teach astronomy to her students. Donors scroll through the hundreds of proposals (searchable by region, subject, level of school poverty, etc.) and fund them in whole or in part with a couple of clicks. If there’s no market for the proposal, it doesn’t get funded, though most eventually do. DonorsChoose handles all of the discounted purchasing from vendors, so no money goes directly to the teacher.
Sounds harmless enough, and, hey, who wouldn’t want to know that their money went directly to buy a rug for kindergarteners to listen to stories upon (ignore, for a moment, what it says about our society that school teachers have to beg for such basic material)? But this model simply does not scale. The magic is apparently supposed to come from getting rid of all the mean, nasty bureaucracy:
The key is preventing anyone from controlling the market, so no administrators, unions, school boards, or other nonprofits are allowed to get between teachers and potential donors. Beyond weeding out some obviously inappropriate proposals (”Send teacher and class to Paris to study cooking!!!”), DonorsChoose doesn’t get in the way, either.
What Alter, a donorschoose.org board member, is celebrating is the lack of context or institutional knowledge. He doesn’t mean to, I am sure. I am sure that he thinks he is describing a dynamic system free of the ravages of “special interests”, but what he is describing is a charity dystopia where the full picture is not accounted for and advertising reigns supreme. There is no context on donorschoose.org. Aside from some very general information about the school, the organization provides no way to judge the relative merits of the proposals or their anticipated effect in relationship to other programs. Would you still buy that lovingly described reading mat if you knew that same four hundred dollars would stock an entire first grade library across town? Maybe, maybe not. But unless you stumble across the project form across town on your own, you have no way of knowing that it even exists; donorschoose.org stays completely out of the way once a project has met its minimum requirements. Would you like to know which of two projects is using material and or methodologies that have been shown to be effective? Well, you better be prepared to do all the research yourself — donorschoose.org won’t help you. Do you want to be sure that the last mat bought for that teacher didn’t end up neglected and unused? Sorry, donorschoose.org cannot help you there, either.
As for the market itself, Alter seems to be under a misapprehension about what his market actually rewards. Alter seems to think that his market rewards worthy projects. It does not. As mentioned, there is not enough information on the site to determine the relative worth of the various projects. As a result of that lack of information, people make their choices based either on personal pleas from teachers they know or the actual proposals on the site. What gets rewarded, then, are not ideas with merit but ideas with the best pitches or the best network. Salesmanship, in other words, reigns supreme. Markets in general tend to reward salesmanship. The problem is even worse in markets where the “buyer” has no real stake or feedback from his/her decision — which is a good description of a market for donations. Without a stake or feedback that effects them, donors have even less incentive than usual to ignore the salesmanship.
Again, I am not attacking donorschoose.org. I think it s a lovely program, and I am glad that it exists. For the kinds of small, localized projects that it deals with, the questions I raise aren’t a large concern. Someone will almost certainly find that library request (probably by being directed their by the teacher writing the proposal. You can bet that if my sons’ teachers ever direct me to one of their donorschoose.org proposals I am going to at least look); the kinds of proposals that teachers submit tend to be obviously good ideas and on such a small scale that methodology and material don’t really enter into the equation; and any teacher dedicated enough to go the extra mile to use donorschoose.org is almost certainly going to be dedicated enough to follow through appropriately. The market question is more troublesome, but, again, the projects are small enough and the donor base large enough that I imagine most get some kind of funding. And since they are so small and not generally tied to the absolute necessities a school requires, an unfilled grant is not a devastating blow.
But none of that applies to larger scale projects. And Alter wishes his market place to work its magic almost everywhere:
There’s no reason the DonorsChoose model can’t apply across philanthropic sectors. It could work for the developing world (where relief workers on the ground could post requests for filtration equipment, mosquito netting, and other projects, with the compelling human stories behind them); for hospitals (where doctors could post their cancer-research projects in layman’s terms), and certainly for cultural institutions. (”Our museum wants to buy this Vermeer. Will you help?”)
That’s an insane idea. Alter wants lay people, with nothing resembling enough information to make reasonable choices, to decide the fate of third world development projects and cancer research. In Alter’s world, the doctor that writes the best or the village with the top notch PR firm will get funding, whatever the relative merits or even the potential for harm (one villages irrigation project could, for example, become six down river villages dead fields) The bureaucracies that Alter is so contemptuous of do not “control the market”. They provide the expertise, breadth of knowledge, and institutional memory necessary to make donations effective. Alter’s market rewards, above all else, what every other market rewards: salesmanship.
Alter wants to do away with those people in most cases and rely upon the “market” to decide what projects get funded. But no market can provide all of its participants with perfect information, and there is no evidence that markets like the one donorschoose.org runs can provide sufficient information to allow donors to make good decisions. There is a reason that environmental groups put pictures of butterflies on their marketing material, even though saving the slugs may be more important to the environment. As long as there are people directing the money to save the slugs and not just the butterflies, the environment benefits. But if the slugs and butterflies get saved base don their marketability — which, as anyone who has spent more than five minutes around real human beings knows, is precisely the result Alter’s kind of market would encourage — the environment goes down with the slugs. Its one thing if a shoe maker goes down because its advertising sucks; its quite another if a third world nation’s primary school system suffer the same fate for the same reason.
February 19th, 2007
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Education |
3 comments
Oh, my fucking God.
(Australian reporter takes to the streets in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, CA, and somewhere in Texas to show that the stereotype of Americans as stupid and ignorant is a “bum rap”. Uh-oh . . . .)
January 21st, 2007
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General, Politics, Culture, Education, News & Current Events |
11 comments
I’m worried. I partly agree with Charles Murray about something, which makes me fear I’m becoming secretly stupid or racist. But, sadly, I have to admit he not only has a point, today, but it’s one I’ve long held myself. Murray, however, can’t help being Murray, even when he’s right.
Murray (author of the infamous and widely debunked The Bell Curve - the 1980s apologium for IQ-essentialist racism and classism) is in the midst of a three-day binge of yet more elitist claptrap about IQ and education. He has been given a platform for this by the Wall Street Journal, in their self-assigned role as completely shameless toady to the far right. Yesterday, he argued that primary education reform is misguided because IQ forms an unbreachable ceiling for the performance of large parts of the population - in doing so, casually dismissing the notion of different types of skill or competence, baldly re-asserting the wildly contoversial notion of IQ as a single measurable entity (”g“), and completely ignoring the question whether, even if there is a limit to performance, the expected standards for primary education are above or below that limit, and thus revealing himself to have remained the noisome tool he long has been.
Today, he gets going on college-level education, arguing both that many people are not suited for college educations (and thus that colleges distort and water-down their offerings to cater to unsuited students), and that those people, and society generally, would be better off placing less emphasis on college and re-valorizing vocational and technical training. Ignoring his tendency to attribute everything to “IQ”, it’s easy enough to observe that many high school graduates are not suited, by ability or temperament, to college (want to observe it? - try teaching a college class - you’ll observe it), though that does not have to be the result of a single, illusory, mental quality. And in light of that fairly obvious, and at any rate perfectly expected, fact, I’m inclined to agree with his other main points as well. From my experiences in higher education - on both sides of the chalk - I have long had similar beliefs.
January 17th, 2007
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General, School, Economics, Culture, Libertarian Problem Solving, Education |
3 comments
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