“G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.” - - Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies
The post secondary education system cannot last. I have read about this on Gary North's site, and he has written a book review about Charles Hugh Smith's The Nearly Free University. You can read the introduction to Smith's book here.
Why can't the current system continue? Because of cost. In the old days, the college degree was a weeding out process - employers would use it as a way to avoid low IQ workers and they'd know that the person could at least start a task, finish it, and deal with boredom. Now, with 'everyone' getting (or deserving if you subscribe to Current Progressive Thought) a college degree, that vetting process doesn't work.
In the interview below, these topics and others are brought up. If you're getting a degree in something, why are you paying huge dollars to pay the Assistant Dean of Supervision, or some other useless bureacratic sinecure $150,000 a year? For what? How does that person help you get your degree? What is he teaching you?
Many people I work with, and students of mine seem to think I am against college. This is not true. I am against going broke - hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for a degree that you can't use for anything. Americans as a whole now owe more money for student loans than they do for their credit cards. This from a population that has been conditioned in a Pavlovian manner to SPEND when things get tough, or any other reason for that matter. You should count the cost, and analyze the benefits and job market you'll get after you get your degree.
College tuition is way out of line in terms of cost, and Charles Hugh Smith has some good ideas as to avoiding it and becoming successfully educated.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Saturday, May 24, 2014
$227 Million Doesn't Buy What It Used To
Something of a rant here, but any high school student (the people for whom this site is engineered) will instantly recognize what is going on. Especially students from in the schools on the wrong side of the tracks, the bad part of town.
Our school budget passed the last week. When I started, the school budget was out of control - topping out at around $160 million. People where aghast at that figure. That was 12 years ago. Now the budget is $227 million dollars. This is for a school district with a poor academic record, crumbling infrastructure and, in my case, a repair - free zone.
I go into more detail in the podcast, but I have had no heat, no air conditioning, a broken smart-board (since early March), missing blinds and a bell that barely makes any noise. Where there once was a clock is an unsightly hole, and rickety chairs and profanity laden desks populate the room.
Naturally, criticizing public education gets you yelled at - the ad hominem attacks come quickly at rapid fire pace, but you should expect that by now. The Gov't schools are 'good', and their defenders vouch for them, facts be damned. Naturally these are the same people who have the perfect fix for the schools: more money. The irony is off the charts, but it allows them to participate in that most comfortable activity, hand wringing.
Our school budget passed the last week. When I started, the school budget was out of control - topping out at around $160 million. People where aghast at that figure. That was 12 years ago. Now the budget is $227 million dollars. This is for a school district with a poor academic record, crumbling infrastructure and, in my case, a repair - free zone.
I go into more detail in the podcast, but I have had no heat, no air conditioning, a broken smart-board (since early March), missing blinds and a bell that barely makes any noise. Where there once was a clock is an unsightly hole, and rickety chairs and profanity laden desks populate the room.
Naturally, criticizing public education gets you yelled at - the ad hominem attacks come quickly at rapid fire pace, but you should expect that by now. The Gov't schools are 'good', and their defenders vouch for them, facts be damned. Naturally these are the same people who have the perfect fix for the schools: more money. The irony is off the charts, but it allows them to participate in that most comfortable activity, hand wringing.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
High Stakes Testing Gone Crazy
The latest 'trend' (they're all trends, no one seems interested in fixing real problems) in education is "raising the standards" and measuring performance with "data driven instruction".
What that means is that my students, and most public high school students, are buried under at least 3x more exams than normally exist during a school year. Today we had the year end 'summative' exam. This test, which didn't reflect the material from the year, nor much of anything, will be measured against the exam results from the Fall exam. Here's the problem: the conditions of the exam are totally different, the weather was hot today, my students were all kinds of tired and intellectually checked out. Never one to excuse student malfeasance and laziness, I was however sympathetic to what they were feeling. Young people still have a functional BS radar - unlike many adults. They knew they were being turned into guinea pigs in a lab, and they hated it.
This exam, the iReady exam, the SLO exam and the other Common Core time wasters are now becoming the norm. Who gains? Not the students. They realize that they are not the beneficiaries of any of this kabuki dance - you should realize this too. The education corporations are making a killing off of this, mainly through consulting fees, but also in exam generation, both paper and digital forms.
Here's my take on this awful trend:
What that means is that my students, and most public high school students, are buried under at least 3x more exams than normally exist during a school year. Today we had the year end 'summative' exam. This test, which didn't reflect the material from the year, nor much of anything, will be measured against the exam results from the Fall exam. Here's the problem: the conditions of the exam are totally different, the weather was hot today, my students were all kinds of tired and intellectually checked out. Never one to excuse student malfeasance and laziness, I was however sympathetic to what they were feeling. Young people still have a functional BS radar - unlike many adults. They knew they were being turned into guinea pigs in a lab, and they hated it.
This exam, the iReady exam, the SLO exam and the other Common Core time wasters are now becoming the norm. Who gains? Not the students. They realize that they are not the beneficiaries of any of this kabuki dance - you should realize this too. The education corporations are making a killing off of this, mainly through consulting fees, but also in exam generation, both paper and digital forms.
Here's my take on this awful trend:
Thursday, May 8, 2014
The Best Creator Driven Comic Book Runs
I have mentioned to students over the years how I was a comic book reader in my youth. I've always stressed reading anything to my students - I am quick to mention that I read comic books and Sports Illustrated maniacally as a young person. What I noticed starting around the age of 13 was that I became more interested in who was writing and drawing the comics than the characters themselves. If John Byrne left Alpha Flight and went to write and draw the Hulk - I went with him, even though I didn't collect the Hulk regularly.
These runs are what I feel are the best long term tenures on various books. They are by the creators / artists I feel created the best work and stayed on to come up with a timeless body of work that will be a standard bearer for future artists and writers. I limit the list to post 1980, simply because that is the era where I am an expert. I realize there are others that should be on the list, but I was a Marvel / DC person for most of those years, so something like Dave Sim's Cerebus is not on the list, as I read one issue of it as a young person and didn't like it too much. Maybe I missed out on something but I can't comment on it with any authority.
The list:
These runs are what I feel are the best long term tenures on various books. They are by the creators / artists I feel created the best work and stayed on to come up with a timeless body of work that will be a standard bearer for future artists and writers. I limit the list to post 1980, simply because that is the era where I am an expert. I realize there are others that should be on the list, but I was a Marvel / DC person for most of those years, so something like Dave Sim's Cerebus is not on the list, as I read one issue of it as a young person and didn't like it too much. Maybe I missed out on something but I can't comment on it with any authority.
The list:
- John Byrne on Fantastic Four
- Frank Miller on Daredevil
- Alan Moore on Swamp Thing
- Marv Wolfman and George Perez on The New Teen Titans
- Walt Simonson on Thor
- Chris Claremont on The Uncanny X-Men
- Peter David on Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider Man
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
The Donald Sterling Affair
What has turned into a mainstream media freak show is best summed up by Kareem Abdul Jabbar in an editoral at Time called "Welcome to the Finger Wagging Olympics". He puts things in perspective, as the MSM is still up to its usual tricks, trying to create a 'narrative' and pit regular people against each other on racial grounds. Abdul Jabbar calls BS on this instance, noting that Sterling has been a bigot for a long time. So why begin the most favorite of American Media activities, hand wringing, now? And what about the leaked recording? Abdul Jabbar's take:
"And now the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. She was like a sexy nanny playing “pin the fried chicken on the Sambo.” She blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee.
They caught big game on a slow news day, so they put his head on a pike, dubbed him Lord of the Flies, and danced around him whooping.
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it."
Jabbar is right - here is my take on the whole affair. Of course, the most disappointing part of the whole thing is watching the MSM tell Americans who to be angry at, when, and why. Where has everybody been?
"And now the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. She was like a sexy nanny playing “pin the fried chicken on the Sambo.” She blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee.
They caught big game on a slow news day, so they put his head on a pike, dubbed him Lord of the Flies, and danced around him whooping.
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it."
Jabbar is right - here is my take on the whole affair. Of course, the most disappointing part of the whole thing is watching the MSM tell Americans who to be angry at, when, and why. Where has everybody been?
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men - Book Review
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, a professor of history and economics at Golden Gate University in San Francisco has done every American High School student a service. Hummel presents the history of the American Civil War in a readable manner, while taking on not just the major conflicts, but the economic aspects of the war as well.
The American student gets a raw deal from 'school' history on the Civil War. Hummel uses short chapters and readable prose to allow access to difficult concepts about the Civil War. Hummel covers the ideological and economic rifts over slavery. The varying camps within the abolitionist movement as well as the numbers and viability of southern slavery are both handled skillfully. Did you know that 25% of southern whites owned slaves, and half of that number owned 5 slaves or more? I don't know what you were taught, but the garden variety American history class teaches that all southern whites were slaveowners, and it was Lincoln and the Civil War that ended slavery. The political power of the south was cobbled together and held by the large plantation owners, but the majority of the population of the South did not own a single slave.
As you read through Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, you learn that much of what we are told about the Civil War is wrong - from both sides. The northern apologists worship Lincoln and his actions, while the Southern Apologists cavalierly dismiss the role of slavery leading up to the war. What Hummel craftily manages to do is find the answer to this difficult question: If there had been no Civil War, would slavery have eventually ended peacefully, as it did in every other western hemisphere country except Haiti?
The only way to answer that is to analyze the economic, political and social effects of slavery before the war. Hummel invites the reader to skip the 2 chapters he dedicates to the economics of slavery (Was slavery profitable? How did it affect trade? How did the economy of a slaveholding society compare to a free one?). I, however, found these chapters the most interesting in the book. Slavery was not an economic boon to really anyone except the large plantations, and they controlled Southern government. Working whites hated slavery as it made their quest for work and salary demands more difficult. How do you compete against free labor? There were also slaveowners who barely monitored their slaves and allowed them to work and manage enterprises. There were also the cruel and vicious slaveowners - how did these two types coexist economically? Why were there differences?
After reading Hummel's book you'll have a much better picture of the United States before and after the Civil War. You will learn that it was ironically the first strike against widespread freedom, as the explosion of federal power began and has never been checked since. The federal government was 2% of the US economy before the war, and 25% of it afterward. Realizing that government makes no money and creates nothing, you begin to see the beginning of the huge drag it has been on the American people. This began before the war, with the Fugitive Slave Act. The Federal Government passed the costs of capturing runaway slaves to the Northern states. There were many abolitionists who were happy to see the South secede and be done with - this was unknown to me beforehand.
You will also see the horror show that was the Lincoln administration. The forced jailing of dissenters, the stifling of free speech, the suspension of habeus corpus - I will never see the Lincoln administration the same way again. Hummel shows just how arrogant and fascist Lincoln was - not the usual take on an area of history that has been captured by the Cult of Lincoln.
I highly recommend the book. The bibliographical essays at the end of each chapter show the depth of research the book contains. They are somewhat complex, so if you are a high school student and you want an honest look at a complex area of history, skip the essays. The short, easily readable chapters will clear up the inconsistencies you've been presented when it comes to this era.
The American student gets a raw deal from 'school' history on the Civil War. Hummel uses short chapters and readable prose to allow access to difficult concepts about the Civil War. Hummel covers the ideological and economic rifts over slavery. The varying camps within the abolitionist movement as well as the numbers and viability of southern slavery are both handled skillfully. Did you know that 25% of southern whites owned slaves, and half of that number owned 5 slaves or more? I don't know what you were taught, but the garden variety American history class teaches that all southern whites were slaveowners, and it was Lincoln and the Civil War that ended slavery. The political power of the south was cobbled together and held by the large plantation owners, but the majority of the population of the South did not own a single slave.
As you read through Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, you learn that much of what we are told about the Civil War is wrong - from both sides. The northern apologists worship Lincoln and his actions, while the Southern Apologists cavalierly dismiss the role of slavery leading up to the war. What Hummel craftily manages to do is find the answer to this difficult question: If there had been no Civil War, would slavery have eventually ended peacefully, as it did in every other western hemisphere country except Haiti?
The only way to answer that is to analyze the economic, political and social effects of slavery before the war. Hummel invites the reader to skip the 2 chapters he dedicates to the economics of slavery (Was slavery profitable? How did it affect trade? How did the economy of a slaveholding society compare to a free one?). I, however, found these chapters the most interesting in the book. Slavery was not an economic boon to really anyone except the large plantations, and they controlled Southern government. Working whites hated slavery as it made their quest for work and salary demands more difficult. How do you compete against free labor? There were also slaveowners who barely monitored their slaves and allowed them to work and manage enterprises. There were also the cruel and vicious slaveowners - how did these two types coexist economically? Why were there differences?
After reading Hummel's book you'll have a much better picture of the United States before and after the Civil War. You will learn that it was ironically the first strike against widespread freedom, as the explosion of federal power began and has never been checked since. The federal government was 2% of the US economy before the war, and 25% of it afterward. Realizing that government makes no money and creates nothing, you begin to see the beginning of the huge drag it has been on the American people. This began before the war, with the Fugitive Slave Act. The Federal Government passed the costs of capturing runaway slaves to the Northern states. There were many abolitionists who were happy to see the South secede and be done with - this was unknown to me beforehand.
You will also see the horror show that was the Lincoln administration. The forced jailing of dissenters, the stifling of free speech, the suspension of habeus corpus - I will never see the Lincoln administration the same way again. Hummel shows just how arrogant and fascist Lincoln was - not the usual take on an area of history that has been captured by the Cult of Lincoln.
I highly recommend the book. The bibliographical essays at the end of each chapter show the depth of research the book contains. They are somewhat complex, so if you are a high school student and you want an honest look at a complex area of history, skip the essays. The short, easily readable chapters will clear up the inconsistencies you've been presented when it comes to this era.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
On NCAA Unionization
NCAA athletes have been granted, by the National Labor Relations Board, the ability to be considered 'employees' and therefore unionize.
In High School you get taught that unionization is a good thing, no questions asked. Not only is that not true, but this decision will have serious repercussions and tons of unexpected consequences. Before you get into the podcast, think about this: How will the colleges pay the football players AND the women's gymnastics team? Title 9 demands gender equality, and you can't discriminate the dollar amount either.
What school can afford this? This causes serious issues for the future of NCAA athletics. This is, in my opinion, a bad thing. I like college sports. It could also signal the end of the NCAA, an organization that already has a HUGE legal problem on its hands. This is, in my opinion, a good thing.
In High School you get taught that unionization is a good thing, no questions asked. Not only is that not true, but this decision will have serious repercussions and tons of unexpected consequences. Before you get into the podcast, think about this: How will the colleges pay the football players AND the women's gymnastics team? Title 9 demands gender equality, and you can't discriminate the dollar amount either.
What school can afford this? This causes serious issues for the future of NCAA athletics. This is, in my opinion, a bad thing. I like college sports. It could also signal the end of the NCAA, an organization that already has a HUGE legal problem on its hands. This is, in my opinion, a good thing.
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