Holding Teachers Hostage to Demogaphics

The field of education has become a political hot button topic again, notably over failing schools, charter schools, and how best to hold teachers accountable for the job they do. I'm not going to go into this topic too much right now (I have teachery things of my own to do) but I did want to point this little tid bit out.

I'm not all that familiar with Rochester, NY, but I do know it is a urban/suburban area with multiple high schools. Here are the results of two such schools, Brighton and Thomas Jefferson. (information found at www.greatschools.org)

Brighton:

New York State Regents Exams
Scale: % passing

Mathematics A
98% (2009)
97% (2008)
99% (2007)
The state average for Mathematics A was 61% in 2009.

Mathematics B
81% (2009)
75% (2008)
82% (2007)
The state average for Mathematics B was 68% in 2009.

English
96% (2009)
93% (2008)
95% (2007)
The state average for English was 82% in 2009.

Living Environment
99% (2009)
95% (2008)
96% (2007)
The state average for Living Environment was 80% in 2009.

Physics
86% (2009)
82% (2008)
78% (2007)
The state average for Physics was 77% in 2009.

Chemistry
94% (2009)
94% (2008)
96% (2007)
The state average for Chemistry was 74% in 2009.

Earth Science
91% (2009)
89% (2008)
94% (2007)
The state average for Earth Science was 72% in 2009.

Integrated Algebra
95% (2009)
Data not available for this school (2008)
The state average for Integrated Algebra was 72% in 2009.

Global History and Geography
93% (2009)
91% (2008)
The state average for Global History and Geography was 71% in 2009.

U.S. History and Government
95% (2009)
97% (2008)
The state average for U.S. History and Government was 80% in 2009.

Student Ethnicity

Source: NYSED, 2007-2008 Ethnicity This School State Average White 75% 52% Asian or Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander 14% 7% Black or African American 9% 19% Hispanic or Latino 3% 21%

Source: NYSED, 2007-2008

	This School	State Average
Students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch program	8%	44%
Limited English proficient	2%	7%

Attendance

Source: NYSED, 2006-2007

	This School	State Average
Attendance rate	96%	93%

Graduation Rate

Source: NYSED, 2007-2008

	This School	State Average
All Students	93%	76%
Female	95%	79%
Male	91%	71%
Black or African American	75%	61%
Hispanic or Latino	60%	59%
Asian or Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander	89%	81%
White	97%	86%
Economically disadvantaged	74%	65%
Not economically disadvantaged	96%	80%
Students with disabilities	80%	56%
General-Education students	95%	79%

Thomas Jefferson:


Mathematics A
35% (2009)
56% (2008)
63% (2007)
The state average for Mathematics A was 61% in 2009.

Mathematics B
16% (2009)
58% (2008)
58% (2007)
The state average for Mathematics B was 68% in 2009.

English
56% (2009)
45% (2008)
38% (2007)
The state average for English was 82% in 2009.

Living Environment
64% (2009)
54% (2008)
58% (2007)
The state average for Living Environment was 80% in 2009.

Physics
Data not available for this school (2009)
18% (2008)
22% (2007)
The state average for Physics was 77% in 2009.

Chemistry
48% (2009)
10% (2008)
Data not available for this school (2007)
The state average for Chemistry was 74% in 2009.

Earth Science
39% (2009)
32% (2008)
43% (2007)
The state average for Earth Science was 72% in 2009.

Integrated Algebra
34% (2009)
Data not available for this school (2008)
The state average for Integrated Algebra was 72% in 2009.

Global History and Geography
43% (2009)
25% (2008)
The state average for Global History and Geography was 71% in 2009.

U.S. History and Government
46% (2009)
51% (2008)
The state average for U.S. History and Government was 80% in 2009.

Student Ethnicity

Source: NYSED, 2007-2008 Ethnicity This School State Average Black or African American 63% 19% Hispanic or Latino 18% 21% White 12% 52% Asian or Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander 7% 7% Native American or Native Alaskan 1% <1%

Student Subgroups

Source: NYSED, 2007-2008

	This School	State Average
Students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch program	78%	44%
Limited English proficient	18%	7%

Attendance

Source: NYSED, 2006-2007

	This School	State Average
Attendance rate	90%	93%

Graduation Rate

Source: NYSED, 2007-2008

	This School	State Average
All Students	51%	76%
Female	49%	79%
Male	53%	71%
Black or African American	54%	61%
Hispanic or Latino	48%	59%
White	43%	86%
Economically disadvantaged	64%	65%
Not economically disadvantaged	32%	80%
Students with disabilities	24%	56%
General-Education students	56%	79%

The real kicker?
Brighton:

Total per pupil expenditures

$14,834

That's roughly $1,500 under the state average.

Thomas Jefferson:

Total per pupil expenditures

$15,732

(I said I wasn't going to go into this much, not that you wouldn't).

There are some differences between teacher quality and classroom size in these schools but not enough to cause the results to be this drastically different. I think the biggest influence on kids concerning their education is always going to be at home. Brighton can spend less per student and achieve far greater results because the home environment is that much better off for those Thomas Jefferson students (as noted by the students eligible for reduced or free lunch). The short of it is, the teacher in the classroom can do almost nothing about this. Holding teachers accountable for the final grades of their students is wrong in epistemological terms and further reduces a teacher's willingness to work in poorer school districts.

I don't have time to come up with a better system right now (topic for another day, perhaps). Teachers certainly need to be held accountable, as any public employee does, but the method of using students' scores as a true measure of the teacher's quality is inaccurate because different teachers will begin the year with students with different abilities. The answer will almost certainly have to come from within the community as only they will know the students well enough to know if they show improvement, which may be a better goal than an arbitrary passing number.

Responsibility

I believe this entire mess we find ourselves in, politically, economically, and socially, is mainly caused by a misplaced sense of responsibility. People find it much more convenient to assign blame to some disliked individual or entity rather than those who actually took the actions which lead us to this disaster.

Think of the banks in our nation right now. I am willing to bet that did not cause a warm, fuzzy, sympathetic note to sound within your soul. Ask around about the banks; the responses will not be positive. You will probably hear something about how those greedy bankers gave out bad loans to make money and put us all in this miserable situation. What you won't hear is that those banks often didn't have a choice, thanks to government intervention like the Community Reinvestment Act. You won't hear about how the government effectively backed up sub prime mortgages through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, seriously distorting the market, making those sorts of loans profitable and hence encouraging the banks to act in a way they otherwise would not have. And yet it happened.

You'll almost never hear about how the people who signed those loans were responsible for this predicament. From the way people speak of this crisis, you would believe homeowners were forced at gunpoint to take the houses and mortgages. A loan is a contract, a promise; millions of people broke their promise and then promptly blamed the banks they screwed over for the economic recession.

We live in a confused time where many believe society and the state have the responsibility to improve our lives rather than the individual. This makes it all too easy to avoid responsibility for one's own actions and to pin bad times on unpopular scapegoats who themselves had little to do with the mess at hand.

A great wave of irresponsibility is killing this country. No one wants to admit they shouldn't have signed the mortgage or lease, or gone to college; no one wants to admit social programs are failing, that we can't afford them, that jobs in that sector should be cut; always find someone else to blame who didn't make the decision; always affix blame to those who did well, as if one could not do well unless they had done wrong. Until we fix this problem, there will be no solutions to the crisis we face. Let each be responsible for himself and we will soon see improvement. Give a man an excuse and he will take it.

"But it was the greedy profit motive that brought us into this mess!" some will undoubtedly say. Let's think about that for a second. Imagine an economic system (we'll call it "free market") where people make decisions based on their own greed and where all transactions are voluntary (nobody can be forced to do something). A person with no job and no assets tries to get a loan from the bank. The bank examines this person, realizes giving a loan will almost certainly lead to losing money, and promptly decides not to issue the loan. Guess what? Almost no sub prime mortgages are going to be issued by greedy banks, meaning there is no sub prime mortgage crisis.

"But they got around that by selling those mortgages, breaking them up into securities!" Ok, let us assume the bank tries that. They go to a potential investor and say "I'm considering offering this loan, but I want to hedge my bet against the risk of the buyer defaulting. If you buy a part of this mortgage, you will receive a chunk of the profit." The investor (also greedy) examines the buyer just like the bank did to determine if the buyer will actually pay the loan back, sees the buyer couldn't, and decides to turn down the chance to buy the security. Guess what? No sub prime mortgages, no sub prime mortgage mess.

"But this crisis is proof of market failure, that the market system doesn't work!" Nope. With the profit motive, it would be almost impossible for this sort of crisis to occur. But occur it did. Was the housing market really "free?" As we saw above, it was not. The government regulated this market and interfered with government sponsored enterprises that acted not on the profit motive but on the supposed "common good."

Let us start again. The man with no income and no assets looks for a mortgage. This time, the government seeks to increase home ownership among the poor, because it helps create a more equal America and it is the right thing to do socially. The government requires the banks to make a certain amount of mortgages out to low income people. Voilà, sub prime mortgage.

And the government also creates giant, government run corporations (backed by the Treasury) to issue securities for these loans. Banks can now offer loans with little risk to themselves. And the government will set interest prices low, which encourages people to build and buy houses. Now everyone can get a house, creating skyrocketing demand and increasing the attractiveness of investing in housing which is not backed by the government. That is, right until the number of buyers starts drying up.

Once demand starts falling (with a durable good like housing, this is inevitable; people do not need to buy a new house every day), the value of those houses starts sinking. Since artificial demand had propped up prices very high, those prices start sinking very far and very quickly. Investors begin losing money at a rapid rate, and businesses and individuals who invested in housing find their net worth plummeting. Banks and those government sponsored enterprises begin taking huge losses on these houses. With their cash on hand falling, the credit market seizes up, as banks cannot or will not lend right at the same time businesses and people who lost money investing need it the most. Panic begins to set in; stock prices drop like a rock, people are laid off due to falling consumption, creating less consumers and more pressure on local governments. And we end up about where we were in 2008.

The profit motive is hardly evil and we cannot pin responsibility on those who wish to do well in life. This mess is largely the responsibility of well intentioned (but dead wrong) social "reformers" who believed they could fix perceived problems in society with the force of the government. What they failed to realize is that the profit motive keeps toxic assets out of the system. Those who cannot buy a home on their own probably do not deserve one; either they have not produced enough wealth to own one or they have frittered it away on other things. That they do not own houses is not a societal sin; it is not the responsibility of the wealthy, of banks, or of society to increase home ownership, but that of the individual who wishes to own a home.

Condoms, Interstate Commerce, and Why You Should Care

Think about condoms for a minute. Yes, condoms. We know what they do and (most of us) know how to use them. But how often do we think about where they came from? What went into making the condom, from the material being pulled out of the ground someplace to being on the business end of some randy fellow? I'm not in the condom making business, so I can't say exactly what goes into the production of condoms, but there are a few things I can reasonably guess at. For starters, there is latex and lubrication, made up of various materials, themselves made up of various ingredients from many different sources. The plastic wrapper is similar; the plant making condoms is located somewhere but not everywhere, so they have to be shipped by trucks running on diesel, both of which are made from materials manufactured all over the place.

Why am I asking you to think about this? Because if ObamaCare is a legal manifestation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, Congress can regulate or even ban condoms, because at some point in time any material used to make condoms may have crossed a state line.

Actually, now that I think of it, sex itself could technically be sold over a state line. That (sex) is interstate commerce. Ergo, Congress can regulate sex.

And the Republicans are about to win a massive election. Care yet?

It terrifies me that so many people would demand Congress pass a universal health care law without ever asking whether the Constitution allows such a policy. They asked no questions about this philosophy of government, just as Pandora asked no questions about what would happen if she opened the famous box.

ObamaCare goes far beyond a norm that is already far beyond what prudence and our Founding Fathers would allow. ObamaCare goes so far as to say that not participating in an economic activity is a form of interstate trade, because in an ever minute way it could possibly impact some form of interstate trade somewhere. Theoretically, any action or inaction could do that! If we allow this philosophy of government to stand, it follows that the government can regulate any activity or inactivity any person anywhere in this nation does. If this is allowed to stand, the government can effectively pass laws requiring us to do anything it bids because, in theory, we could possibly be involved in interstate trade were we left alone.

It creates an all powerful government. There are no checks if the government can regulate inactivity because people could have been involved in interstate trade instead. This clause was put into the Constitution mainly to prohibit states from imposing duties and banning trade among states; it was certainly never intended to allow the federal government to regulate the citizens of this nation down to the smallest detail of their lives.

Even if you believe a national health care system forcing everyone to purchase health care insurance is a good thing (an opinion we do not share), you should still be concerned by the new version of Pandora's Box you are opening. Very soon, people you do not support politically will have the government and these new powers you have unconstitutionally apportioned to the current administration. You may disagree with how they will use their new found ability to regulate your life, but you will have no moral right to say they do not have the authority to do so. You yourself gave it to them.

Details

Yesterday, the New York Times published an editorial lamenting the likely fall of Russ Feingold from his Senate seat representing Wisconsin. Forget for a moment whether they are right or wrong supporting this particular candidate and note the sense of bewilderment the article exudes. Historians will note that the last two years witnessed more government intervention in our lives than any other era of our nation; statists managed to push a universal health care bill upon the American people. The Times, and many statists, seem absolutely puzzled as to why they face annihilation at the polls in a few weeks.

Without realizing it, their attitude reveals the answer. The editorial (and Feingold) state as fact that the Stimulus worked to save millions of jobs and that ObamaCare is a great achievement. Opponents just do not realize the details! "Simplistic untruths" bought by the ignorant masses are what doom the intelligent statist candidate.

Let me put it this way: if our lives are so much better off, we would know it. That is the only detail that matters. People understand their own lives far better than Washington leaders do. All of the made up statistics in the world will not convince a family being evicted from their home and without a bread winner due to the lack of jobs that all is well. Considering the promises made in 2008, it should be no wonder there is anger against the government.

The Wall Street Journal published an editorial that compliments this topic well. It follows the thought of the book The American Voter: large segments of the voting population do not vote based on political philosophy or party identification but rather on how things appear or "feel" at the time of election. The short answer to the statist confusion is that people did not see their lives improve at all under the last two years, but they did notice the enormous bill charged to their account in the form of federal debt. They tried big government, it failed miserably, and they will not try it again.

A Proposed Voting Test

I brought up the topic of creating a voting test in earlier blog posts. I've created such a quiz, which you can take here. While I would love to give a longer test, any "realistic" test would have to be short enough to not hold up voting at the polls. Another problem is that the longer the test is, the more likely a controversial question would pop up. I do not think anyone could realistically challenge any of the questions there as politically biased toward any particular ideology.