Idaho Dropout Age

Idaho Dropout Age

An Idaho legislative committee narrowly defeated a bill to raise the dropout age to 18 today, largely because of the costs involved. It sounds like even those who voted against it did so with mixed feelings. From the February 11, 2009 Idaho Statesman:

Although several state education groups spoke in favor of the bill, the House Education Committee voted 9-8 against advancing the measure that sponsor Rep. Rich Jarvis, R-Meridian, said would keep children in school longer.
The state Department of Education had estimated the proposal could cost about $11 million, based on the estimated 1,890 students who dropped out of grades nine through 12 last year and how much it would have cost to keep them.
Rep. Pete Nielsen, R- Mountain Home, told the committee it is better to provide students with educational choices such as alternative schools than to force them to attend traditional classes.
"Are we willing to save a few kids with compulsion?" Nielsen said.
Nielsen said many Idaho schools already offer education options for students who may not be college bound, such as alternative schools, early graduation and work force training.
The bill's supporters argued that a 16-year-old doesn't have the mental capacity to make such a large decision.

I understand Rep. Nielsen's concerns on this. (He is one of my two representatives in the lower house.) But I agree with those who think that 16 is a bit young to making a decision like that.

Still, let's not get carried away with the likely consequences if this bill had passed. Idaho's dropout rate is actually better than I would have guessed. One of the commenters at the article linked above pointed to this data which shows that Idaho has the 13th highest graduation rate in the U.S. And we are doing way better than California--which has 18 as the dropout age. Idaho's 2006 high school graduation rate was 78.7%; California's was 65.8%.

I can remember being in high school, and seeing a teacher's add/drop list, and seeing the rather chilling explanation for several drops as "turned 18." These were students who decided that finishing the last few months of senior high school and getting a diploma just wasn't worth the time required.

Raise the dropout age to 18, if necessary. But let's start to work on the real issues that are why kids are dropping out. My guess is that many of them are coming from homes that are destructive or where education just isn't important. A social worker that I know who works in a mental hospital with kids says that for some patients, the most effective treatment might be a "parentectomy."

Home Feeders

Home Feeders

A while back, I wrote an amusing piece (well, I thought it was amusing) analogizing education to food--and imagining a society where public restaurants fed every resident, free of charge (as well as illegal aliens, of course, but not tourists just passing through). In the course of that piece, I made a reference to home schoolers that I thought would be immediately recognized as sarcasm--but at least one home schooler thought that I was seriously calling them whackos, by comparing them to people who insisted on having meals at home with their family, instead of going to the tax-funded public restaurant system.

Anyway, I was thinking more about home schoolers today, and I found myself wondering: what if, in 1870, elites of Western societies had made a concerted effort to create a tax-funded public restaurant system? How would we regard people that ate at home today?

If this seems like an absurd idea, I've read that part of why Britain started its family nutrition supplement program after the Boer War (1899-1902) was because so many young men that volunteered for military service were so badly nourished that they simply could not pass the physical. (This page seems to be acknowledging as much.) Imagine if the dominant idea of Edwardian England had been socialism, not welfare state capitalism? Today we would have a public restaurant system like I described previously.

I admit that this is a radical concept. Even the Soviet Union, to my knowledge, didn't try to abolish the concept of families preparing and eating meals together. Some socialists did float the idea--but even Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward only imagined a future where dinner was eaten in the community dining hall. Still, how would we today look at "home feeders"--those who insisted on preparing meals at home for themselves and their children?

Defenders of the public restaurant system would admit that some parents had sufficient knowledge of nutrition and food preparation to prepare adequate meals for their children. But how, without a degree in nutrition, could most parents expect to prepare properly balanced meals? Why, just look at how bad the situation was a century ago! People sickened and died of pellagra, beri-beri, and a host of other malnutrition diseases! Even today you hear of parents who let their kids go hungry, or inadequately nourished! Just think what it would be like if parents had the option of keeping their tax dollars, and were given the enormous responsibility of buying food at the store!

And without the professional training and state certification in food preparation, how could the average parent expect to consistently prepare meals without giving their children food poisoning? Look at how often people get food poisoning even in licensed restaurants that are subject to health inspections! It is just asking for trouble for most parents to try this themselves. It might work for a few weeks, but you just know that a parent is going to fail to wash his hands in between cutting up the chicken and putting the plates on the table!

A few defenders of the public restaurant system would insist that "home feeders" were just kooks who wanted to teach their children "fringe ideas" about eating which shouldn't even be allowed until the children were 21--or that "home feeders" are going to give their kids nothing but soft drinks and Twinkies for every meal--because that's what the kids want, and parents are too lazy to say no.

Because the tax structure forces you to pay for the public restaurant system, almost everyone will use it. Since most people won't know any "home feeders," all sorts of outrageous lies will be told about them, and many people won't know any better.

Imagine if Restaurants Worked Like Public Schools

I just finished filling in the Idaho Education Association's candidate questionnaire (a very good one, by the way, if a bit unintentionally self-revealing), and I found myself wondering: What is we had a public restaurant system similar to our public school system, that provided lunch and dinner to every Idaho resident who lived in that restaurant district, funded entirely from taxes?

1. No one would go hungry--especially the poor.

2. We could guarantee that everyone was served a nutritious and well-balanced meal. Now, a lot of people wouldn't eat their salad or vegetables, and some people might not eat enough of the broiled chicken, but at least they would have the opportunity.

3. I'm sure that the public restaurant system would provide at least one vegetarian entree. It might even (after lawsuits were filed by the ACLU) offer at least one kosher meal and one halal meal. But in many parts of Idaho, a lot of those specialty meals would be stored in freezers waiting for an Orthodox Jew or Muslim to show up. I suspect that they wouldn't be terribly appetizing by the time someone came to eat them.

4. Vegan meals? I rather doubt it. There's no Constitutional basis for demanding the government provide what a strong majority would regard as bizarre or unnecessary accommodations.

5. There would be a few kooks (or so some would call them) who would insist that their religion requires them to eat meals with their family in a private setting. Well, they would be free to do so. But there would be no reduction in your taxes that paid for the public restaurant system. You chose not to use the perfectly fine public system that is already in place.

6. Of course, being a public system, the restaurants would have very, very limited options on refusing service. I suppose that "no shoes, no shirt, no service" might survive court challenge, but someone who hadn't bathed in a month (and there are homeless people in that situation) would have just as much right to eat at the table next to you as anyone else. Much of the inappropriate behavior that would get you bounced out of a private restaurant would have to be tolerated--and the public restaurant workers wouldn't be happy about this, either.

7. Because only pretty gross incompetence or misconduct would get a public restaurant worker fired, some of the waiters would be surly, and completely unconcerned about whether they did their jobs right. Most of them would make a serious attempt at doing their jobs, of course--but seeing that you didn't get rewarded any better for doing more the minimum necessary would, over time, take away your incentive to work hard.

8. Private restaurants work hard at keeping costs under control as well as looking for new and interesting dishes to attract in customers--because they have competitors. The public restaurants would have effectively no competition--since you couldn't on a regular basis eat outside of your district.

9. If you weren't happy about the food or service provided in the public restaurant system, you would be, of course, free to go to private restaurants. You would still be paying taxes to support a public restaurant system that you didn't like or use. After all, this way we can be sure that no one goes hungry, no matter how poor they were.

10. If you suggested that this wasn't fair--that you shouldn't be required to pay for a system that you didn't want to use--indeed, might regard as violating your right of conscience--the Idaho Restaurant Workers Association would insist that the public shouldn't be forced to fund your weird restaurant choices. They would hunt around until they found a biker bar somewhere in the U.S. with swastikas on the walls and tell the public that this is where money would be spent in a voucher system.

11. Because most people couldn't afford to fund the public restaurant system and either buy their own groceries or eat out very often in private restaurants, the private restaurant market would be highly distorted. It would have a few places that catered to the very wealthy, or it would have a lot of places that provided meals for those who felt that the public restaurant system was failing them. Consequently, the private market would be overwhelmingly dominated by kosher, halal, vegetarian, and vegan restaurants. Not surprisingly, many of those who were not happy with the public system would not be particularly enthused about these other choices.

12. The shortage of funding, because most people were already paying for the public system, would mean that private restaurants that weren't for the wealthy would have continual struggles to stay afloat financially. The pay for workers in the private restaurants would probably be lower than it was for the public system employees, and often, private restaurant workers would be doing so because they saw what they were doing as a mission: to provide members of their faith/eating belief system with an alternative to the public system.

13. Because the public restaurant system was effectively a monopoly (with 95% of all meals served being ultimately paid for by the state government), wages for workers would be lower than in a free market system--but the Idaho Restaurant Workers Association would simply refuse to believe that working for a monopoly system was bad for their wages--and they would then point to the lower wages in the private restaurant industry as proof this, with no awareness that there was a significant market distorting effect caused by the monopoly.

Okay, I've had enough fun with this analogy. Like most analogies, it isn't perfect. I'm not proposing that we scrap public education--only provide a voucher system to provide more choices. There are definitely parents out there who, if they had to pay for education for their kids, either couldn't afford it, or would put a higher priority on beers, cigarettes, and meth.

But let's not exaggerate this problem. It costs somewhere between $600 and $2400 a year to put basic foodstuffs on the table on the table for a child. A private school tuition right now costs about $3600 to $5000 a year (depending on the school). There are parents who would simply neglect their children's education, if the government didn't provide for it free of charge. There are parents who do neglect their children's need for food--and the government doesn't run a public restaurant system. That's why we have laws about child neglect--and they are needed. Over the years, I have met very, very few parents who didn't care at all about whether their children received an education. Nearly all parents care some, and many care a lot.

There are parents who, without question, would make poor decisions about what sort of education their children should receive--just like there are parents who keep the house stuffed with potato chips, cookies, and soft drinks, producing the current epidemic of obese kids. Still, I've met a lot of fat parents with fat kids who still cared about getting their kids a decent education. I can't recall ever running into a family where the parents had healthy, properly nourished kids but who didn't care if their kids were getting a good education.

How Affirmative Action Hurts Blacks

It is not surprising that affirmative action works to the detriment of whites and Asians (who are no longer racial minorities, when it comes to affirmative action). But this recent report from the April 21, 2008 Inside Higher Education reveals that what Thomas Sowell has repeatedly written about--how affirmative action hurts blacks--is still the case:

A report being released today by Education Sector suggests that, at many campuses, the gap in the graduation rates of black and white students is embarrassingly large, raising questions about the experience of black students once enrolled. The report finds that some institutions — including those outside the elite ranks of private higher education — have strategies that result in black students graduating at relatively similar rates to white students, while other institutions appear to accept gaps of 25 percentage points or more in the rates.

The new report, “Graduation Rate Watch: Making Minority Student Success a Priority,” is largely based on data that colleges are required to report on graduation rates, broken down by race, under the Student Right-to-Know Act, which was enacted in 1990 with a major of drawing attention to the historically low graduation rates of athletes. While that was the goal, the law required colleges to report graduation rates on all students, for comparison purposes, making possible the kind of analysis Education Sector has done.

Nationally, about 57 percent of students at four-year institutions graduate within six years — with some private colleges reporting rates well above 90 percent year after year while others have rates that are quite low. Black students disproportionately attend colleges with low graduation rates for black students. Only about 30 percent attend colleges with six-year graduation rates of 50 percent or higher. About 50 percent of black students attend colleges with six-year graduation rates for black students that are less than 40 percent.

The article puts the entire discussion in terms of the failure of colleges to make sure that black students receive enough assistance to graduate. But why do black students need all this extra assistance? Even at historically black colleges (many of them public institutions that were originally set up by Southern states that didn't want black students at the white colleges), there is a big problem with the more competitive institutions:

The study briefly explores trends in graduation rates at historically black colleges, where average rates for all institutions are low, but where there is a split between institutions with competitive admissions (which tend to have high rates) and other institutions, which tend to have low rates.

Why? And what does this have to do with affirmative action? A lot of the elite universities desperately want black students to attend. At the same time, blacks are disproportionately concentrated in some of the worst public school systems: Los Angeles, D.C., New York City, Chicago. Many of the graduates of these often hellhole high schools who are college bound have been inadequately prepared for the demands of Harvard, or Yale, or UC Berkeley.

So what happens to students who might have able to survive the demands of UC Berkeley, but get lured into Harvard by extraordinary scholarships? Or what about the student whose grades and test scores would have put him in the middle of the class at San Jose State, but instead goes to UC Berkeley? He is competing with students (white, Asian, and black) who were admitted without any special treatment, and whose SAT scores may average 200-300 points higher, because their K-12 education was markedly superior. High dropout rates are inevitable.

Is it better for a black kid from an inferior inner city school system to drop out of Harvard or Stanford, or to graduate from UCLA or San Jose State? College administrators can feel good about themselves for admitting students under affirmative action who aren't ready for the rigors of their institution. But I rather doubt that it is making the students who drop out feel good about themselves.

Idaho Public Teacher Pay

The January 9, 2008 Idaho Statesman has an article about how Idaho public school teachers are paid that is quite startling, especially to those of us who are constantly hearing how poorly teachers are paid:

A national study shows the state’s teachers come within a few cents of the median pay compared to what Idahoans earn in 16 other comparable professions including counselors, clergy, accountants and registered nurses.
The study, released by Education Week Wednesday morning, shows that Idaho teachers’ median income is 96.6 cents on the dollar compared to what Idahoans earn in those other professions.
Nationally teachers earn only 88 cents on the dollar compared to those other professions. The lowest state is North Carolina at 78.8 cents.
Idaho ranks 15th highest out of the states and District of Columbia in the pay parity compared to the other professions.
In 10 states, teachers salaries meet or exceed the pay for the other categories in the same state. The report, done by EPE Research Center, shows the average median income for Idaho teachers in 2005 and 2006 was $40,060. The average of the other 16 professions in Idaho was $42,060.

What, exactly, does this mean? It means that they compared the salaries of teachers to other professions that require at least a college degree, and that involve working with people. You might argue about whether that list of other professions is the appropriate comparison, but the point of the study is that Idaho public school teachers are paid, relative to those other professions, not so differently from other states.

This is to say that Idaho public school teachers aren't being treated significantly worse, relative to those other professions, than the average of public school teachers in other states. Salaries are low in Idaho for a lot of professions (not just school teachers) because the cost of living is low as well. If you live in the Boise area, you may find this hard to believe, especially with the increase in housing costs the last few years, but once you get out into the sticks, where a lot of Idahoans live, things are still really, really cheap. For example, I searched for 3 bedroom, 2 bath houses for sale in Twin Falls, and there were 84 houses for sale with asking prices of $150,000 or less.

I generally think that teachers really aren't paid all that well for what they do, but at least part of this is because teachers in most school districts work nine months of the year. Yes, I know that they are generally doing preparation and continuing education classes during the summer, and they are often working more than 40 hours a week during the school year, but I know enough teachers to know that they aren't busy all summer long. Add 20% to a teacher's salary to make up for three months off and working perhaps 50 hours a week during the school year, and suddenly, teachers aren't paid all that poorly. This indicates that the Superintendent of Public Instruction's current proposal would make $31,000 a year the new minimum salary for teachers.

And We Wonder Why Public Schools Have Financing Problems

Here's an interesting article about my alma mater, Sonoma State University. Some years back, someone I used to work for who is obscenely rich--and like nearly all obscenely rich people, is very, very liberal and contributes to the Democratic Party--gave SSU $10 million to build a choral hall there. That was a nice little action on his part--I mean, what's $10 million when you are Don Green? It's small potatoes.

But something has happened to the original relatively modest plan:

The Green Music Center at Sonoma State was first proposed as a small choral hall to serve students. But after campus President Ruben Armiñana visited the famed Tanglewood concert hall in Massachusetts in 1996, he was inspired to think big for his small campus in Rohnert Park.

Now, a decade later, the initial $22 million price tag has ballooned to an estimated $100 million and the 105,436-square-foot building is barely a quarter built. With fundraising for the project falling behind the growing need, the university is short of money to even pay for things like the 1,400 concert hall seats and bathroom fixtures. But Armiñana has decided to go ahead with constructing the center while he searches for money to finish the buildings.

The long-range plans for the project include three components -- the concert hall, a hospitality center with meeting rooms and a restaurant, and a music education building that will house the arts programs and accommodate community groups.

So far about $43 million has been raised through private donations. Another $18.1 million has come from state construction bonds and $25 million from the state capital program for the music faculty offices and instructional equipment in the academic building. The campus will use taxpayer funds to cover the approximately $934,054 it will cost each year to operate the center.

The project has stirred up opposition and resentment among many of the campus's 450 professors and lecturers, who think Armiñana's priorities are not in line with the university's academic mission. They recently overwhelmingly passed a resolution of no confidence in Armiñana.

"Things have gotten worse in the classroom. The demand by students for access to professors and classes has increased, and we don't get much money to do things to build our careers," said associate political science Professor David McCuan, who was a student at Sonoma State and has been teaching at the campus for four years.

Art history Professor Susan Moulton said classroom equipment has deteriorated so badly that she had to use duct tape to repair desks. And sociology Professor Noel Byrne said he had to buy his own copy machine to make handouts for students.

This isn't just the money; it's the time and energy that university officials are spending on it:

University managers have worked the equivalent of $2 million in hours on the Green Music Center, according to Susan Kashack, a campus spokeswoman.

...

The hall went from a $10 million idea presented to Green to a $22 million proposal for the larger concert hall in 1998 and just kept growing from there, reaching $100 million by 2006 when construction began.

The costs rose as the project was expanded and the construction industry faced higher prices, campus officials said.

...

Byrne and Moulton, who helped spearhead the no-confidence vote, point to Armiñana's frequent trips to Tanglewood with other university officials as examples of too much energy and too many resources being spent on the music center. Over the years, there have been nine trips.

In 2006, for example, Armiñana went with donors and 10 campus executives. The university paid $20,000 for catering, supplies and concert tickets and $27,000 for hotel and travel expenses for university employees. The donors paid their own travel expenses, and Kashack said that the trips have resulted in about $10 million in donations for the Green Music Center.

The comments from readers about Arminana are also pretty disturbing:

All this while he wants a "Taj Mahal" style monument erected as some sort of legacy. I would definitely give a vote of no confidence as well in support of the professors and students. The $100 million could be better spent on student services, support for the faculty/staff, and funds for items like desks and chairs, which were lacking even when I attended in the early 90's. I would like to know where they plan to find the $1 million to operate the center every year - I hope he's planting a grove of money trees next to the center.

...

I recently attended a seminar relating to the changing demographics of the North Bay. I had to sit and listen to this windbag wag his finger at the business community for not "promoting and empowering Latinos" in the white collar world. WTF? This from a top academic official who cannot even speak English!

...

My partner and I were prepared to fund a scholarship for art students at SSU with a potential capitalization of $50K. We donated $11,000 in start up money and then waited over six months to hear from the University. When we emailed them, we received three phone calls and a letter assuring us that they would immediately set up the paper work with policies and procedures. When, a year later we'd heard nothing, we decided to fun the scholarship here in Portland OR where we now live. ALL the energy of the Development office was directed to the new music center and if we weren't interested in funding it, they weren't especially interested in our funds. Our scholarship currently gives out $500 a year to needing students.