Education

Selection Bias

This story says that people with college degrees whose parents also have a college degree make more money than those whose parents don’t have a college degree. It also found that for children without a college degree, it made no difference if their parents had a college degree or not.

Why? My opinion (you knew I would have one)

If a parent has a degree in a field that pays good money, say medicine, law, or STEM, also tends to have children who follow in their footsteps. Examples: I have a degree in the medical field. My son is a nurse practitioner. My uncle has a degree in computer engineering. My cousin got a degree in marine engineering and is on the design team for the Navy’s LCS.

What if a parent doesn’t have a degree? They assume that all college degrees have equal value. They convince the kids that they need to go to college and get a waste of a degree in Leisure studies, music, or Gender Studies. A degree is a degree, right? Example: My wife’s cousin has a degree in outdoor recreation. She is largely jobless and spends all of her time smoking weed and banging Colorado ski instructors. Or you can simply look at every Asian and Jewish family in America and observe that Asian and Jewish mothers consider an education to be a gift from God.

A parent who goes to college and gets a degree in Gender Studies or some other useless major winds up working at a McJob and decides that a degree is worthless. He tells the kid the same thing. Kid doesn’t go to college and winds up in the same company with the same McJob at the same pay as dad.

By Divemedic, ago

I am done

This article blames the school system because a high school student had a 0.13 grade point average and failed nearly every class he took. The student in question was absent 272 times in four years. He failed his classes for four years, and the first time the kid’s mother knew anything was during the final semester of his senior year? Yeah, mother of the year right there.

I have 133 students this year. Of those, more than half of them (68) are currently failing my course. Six of those students have a perfect zero for the current marking period, due to the fact that they have not turned in a single one of the fifteen assignments that has been assigned to them. In fact, more than half of my students have received at least 6 zeros. The mean grade for my students is a 48 percent.

Absenteeism is over the top. I have students who have been absent more than not. One of my students has only been in class six times so far this year. I have over a dozen students that I have not seen nor heard from since before Christmas.

There is nothing that I as a teacher can do. I teach, but the student has to show up and actually make an effort. I am tired of caring more about my students’ success than they or their parents.

In fact, I have had enough. I am done. I am putting in my two weeks’ notice tomorrow. Since spring break is coming up, my last day as a teacher will be next Friday. This morning, I was offered a job supervising techs at a nearby hospital. I accepted.

Back to the medical business.

By Divemedic, ago

Get woke, go broke

The University of Texas has had a long tradition of playing the school alma mater, “The Eyes of Texas,” at the end of each football game. Traditionally, the football team stands in the middle of the field and sings the song with all of the fans, alumni, and boosters.

Until this year.

This year, students and athletes decided that the song, with ties to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, was racist. Many students and athletes were organizing protests and circulating a petition to have the song banned. It all culminated in the team leaving the field and refusing to sing the song.

The backlash from the boosters and alumni was overwhelming. Hundreds of alumni and donors blasted off emails to the university president, demanding that the school stand up to “cancel culture” and firmly get behind the song — or else donors were going to walk away.

The press is roasting the benefactors, calling them the “worst” and claiming that they are racists.

The school, athletes, and students are free to change the traditions of the school. The donors and benefactors of the school are just as free to withhold donations and endowments. Remember when you lectured us and told us how Facebook and Twitter could do whatever they want? It cuts both ways.

Don’t like it? You can always go ahead and start your own school. Or continue to run the existing one without much of your funding. Isn’t that what you told the right when they complained about FB and Twitter?

By Divemedic, ago

Socialism hurts everyone

Boston schools have eliminated educational courses that are designed for advanced students because not enough black students are admitted to the program. This is the basic flaw with socialism- it seeks to achieve equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.

The students who are seeking to enter the program took a standardized test in the third grade, earned a high score, and won an open spot via lottery. Even with that, the rate of black students that entered the program was far below that of white and Asian students.

Many studies have shown that black students do poorly on standardized tests and on intelligence tests. As a result, researchers have concluded that the tests have racial, cultural, and socio-economic bias built in. There is no evidence of this claimed bias, aside from the results. The conclusions of these researchers ignore an obvious, alternative conclusion: that some races and cultures are less intelligent or place less value upon education, which results in the disparate scores.

My guess is that this is not because blacks are inherently inferior or less intelligent than whites, but that the black culture itself places little value on intelligence or on education. There is research that even supports this. When black or mixed-race children are raised in white rather than black homes, their pre-adolescent test scores rise dramatically. These adoptees’ scores seem to fall in adolescence, but this could easily be because their social and cultural environment places them into social circles with other black teenagers.

The whole point of desegregating the schools was to place black students into classrooms with white students, with the belief that black test scores have not risen. Instead, the white/black gap has shrunk, mostly through white students losing ground as they began to adopt the “hip hop” culture.

No matter what the cause, eliminating the advanced classes in order to put the advanced students in with the underperforming students will create equal results, but that only means results will be equally poor.

There you have the essence of socialism: as long as everyone has the same outcome, it doesn’t matter how poor that outcome is. Welcome to education in a socialist environment.

By Divemedic, ago

Combat pay

Taking a break from my trip report to talk about a news story that appeared in the Orlando Sentinel back in May:

Carver Middle School is an F rated school in the middle of the Pine Hills neighborhood, located west of Orlando, in Orange County. This school’s students tested in the lowest 3 percent of all students nationwide. In order to correct this, Orange county is attempting to lure the best teachers in the state to the school by offering an extra $20,000 a year to teachers willing to work there.

The problem is that the school is in a crime ridden, poverty stricken neighborhood. I have blogged about Pine Hills and its surrounding neighborhoods before. More than once. The school is 91% black, 6% Hispanic of any race, and less than 1% white. Seventy percent of the students receive free or reduced lunch.

Both the violent and non-violent crime rates in Pine Hills are double the national average. Police officers are shot and killed in the area of this school often enough that several streets in the area are named for fallen officers, and shootings happen there nearly every night. The local government repeatedly dumps millions of dollars into this blighted area in an attempt to “clean up” the crime problem, to no avail.

Currently, the teachers there are inexperienced first or second year teachers who transfer away at first opportunity. Teacher pay is tied to student performance, and combined with the crime in the neighborhood, teachers avoid the area like the plague.

Any teacher who accepts a job at this school is placing his or her life in jeopardy. A $20,000 bonus is not worth it, in my opinion. The plan likely will not work and be a waste of money, anyway. You cannot, no matter how good of a teacher you are, teach a student who does not want to learn. The crime problems need to be addressed, the gangs eliminated, the drugs under control, before you can convince the students to give up the thug lifestyle and learn.

By Divemedic, ago