Slow destruction of the human condition

Roger Cohen is quite eloquent today:
"Urban livers wallow in emotion — about death among other things — because of a dearth of necessity. Cut off from natural patterns of life and death, they become sentimental. Reality shows take the place of the realities of life. You do not find heroes among the dales. The word would be considered indulgent. You do what has to be done.

Once most of humanity is estranged from nature, rootless, unfamiliar with the rhythms of the seasons and the cycle of passing and renewal, bound by material considerations alone, uncomfortable with solitude and silence and darkness, jostled by the crowd and the hum and the neon, the danger is that some essential ethical ballast and reference is lost."

WSJ on doctors (and teachers)

In response to a commentary, I sent the WSJ a letter:

To the Editors:

In his concern about the potential for doctors to strike, ("The doctor's office as union shop,") Wednesday, January 30, 2013), David Leffell explicates the inevitable danger of prioritizing corporate profits over health care.  

Doctors should be concerned that the economics of health care sift money out of the patients' well-being.   Teachers, to whom he offers in comparison, already worry that privatizing education pulls money away from learning to enhance shareholder value and quarterly returns.  When the focus of medicine is no longer patient welfare, as the purpose of education is no longer student learning, but corporate profit, Americans should, to rephrase Dr. Leffell, "expect the quality of their care and access to it decline." Collective action, though rarely and often poorly used, remains a bulwark against that threat.

The moral animal

A letter, to the NYTimes:


To the Editor;

Thanks are in order for Jonathan Sacks.  His insight ("The moral animal" December 24, 2012) can help us to celebrate the humanity in this season.

And yet, his comment, "Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age"  demonstrates the irony of modern personal salvation. Spiritual evangelicals of all faiths, including that of reason, engage in an other-directed and community-minded action for the sake of the enlightened self-interest.  In this new age of accumulative theology, we consume belief in order to better our selves.

Sacrificing Head Start?

A federal study demonstrates that by the end of 3rd, students who had been enrolled in Head Start, have little to no advantage over students never enrolled: "Yasmina Vinci, the executive director of the National Head Start Association, called the vanishing impacts of Head Start in the early grades "troubling," but noted that Head Start does its core job well by preparing disadvantaged children for kindergarten. "Our work with students ends when children graduate from Head Start, but it is clear that for many, their circumstances continue to hinder their success; circumstances including, but not limited to, the quality of their primary and secondary education," she said in a prepared statement."

There are those will use this report to call for Head Start to be defunded, at the federal level.  A thought experiment.  Suppose they win this call, based on this study.  As a result, Head Start is completely defunded, on the argument that the $8b spent on these kids has no residual effect.

That would mean that Congress accepts the idea that the long-term effects of education may not and perhaps can not be known until several years afterward.  In other words, would using this evidence to impeach the impacts of the Head Start program be the same thing as claiming that standardized tests should not be used to evaluate a teacher and the school because the effects of that teacher can not be determined for several years?

Yes, Head Start would need be sacrificed, at least in the short term.  The statistics given in the new report express success in the students while they were enrolled (as Ms. Vinci notes).  Proponents of the program would not doubt point to those real effects in an effort not to shuttle the program.  However, the longitudinal advantage of having (mostly) Conservative education reforms accepting the irrelevance of real-time testing is humongous.

If progressive-minded educators and politicos have already hatched this plan, forgive me for spoiling the secret.

The Fed's Contradiction or the WSJ's?

Today, I send the WSJ another letter.


To the Editors;

You attempt to ridicule the thinking of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke "The economy needs more monetary stimulus because it is still too weak despite four years of previous and historic amounts of monetary stimulus." (The Fed's Contradiction, December 12, 2012).

And yet, you harbor similar reasoning for continuing the tax rates of the Bush era.  The economy needs lower tax rates because it is still too weak despite twelve years of previous and historic amounts of tax reduction.

You end the piece with this warning: "The bill for unbridled government spending stimulus is already coming due. Sooner or later the bill for open-ended monetary stimulus will arrive too."

You could have equally written that the bill for unbridled government tax cutting is already coming due.  Sooner or later the bill for open-ended tax cuts will arrive too.

Fiscal cliff and education

Rick Hess hides several pertinent points in his appeal to how to handle the 'fiscal cliff': "Look, let's keep this simple. As a nation, we're spending vast sums we don't have. In every year of President Obama's first term, we borrowed more than $1 trillion. Today, the federal debt stands at $16.4 trillion (we spend $220 billion a year just paying interest on the debt.) If we extend the Bush tax cuts, once again prolong unfunded "patches" to avoid pain associated with the alternative minimum tax and Medicare physician payments, and fail to make the cuts dictated by sequestration, the debt is expected to rise to more than $22 trillion by 2020. (I'm okay with going over the dreaded "fiscal cliff," even though the tax increases and spending cuts are expected to trim next year's GDP growth by a half-point, largely because doing so would cut that projected debt down to only $14 trillion in 2020.) Who's to blame? All of us. We're enjoying services that we don't want to pay for--which means we borrow the money, then leave the bill for our kids (that's right, to the same children we claim to love so much). Our profligacy is not just an economic concern; it's a vast, disheartening moral failing on our part."

'We' do not have the funds because we have disastrously reduced tax revenue aggressively since the 1980s.

'We' enjoy services that 'we' don't want to pay for only when those who use the services are distinct from those who pay for them.  With the increasing economic inequality society has experienced for the past generation, the haves (who do not need nor use these services) have more political power than the have nots (who, through wage stagnation; failure to reap benefits of productivity gains - going to profit rather than compensation; benefit loss through the de-unionization of workers).  As long as this continues, those on top will rebel against spending for those on the bottom. The more they feel they deserve their success, the more they will assume the rest of society deserves their failures.

'Our' profligacy is a 'moral failure' precisely because economic and political considerations pay attention only to the current economic status of the wealthy.  If a more conservative disposition were adopted, 'we' would recognize that our institutions are crumbling not because of economic and moral profligacy, but from a single-minded greed that forgets the role of society in individual thriving.

Hess adds later: " The solution is pretty straightforward. We need to get less and to pay more. When it comes down to it, there are only three real choices: raise taxes on folks besides the top two percent of households; reduce growth in the giant entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid); or cut other domestic programs. That's it. And given that most mandatory government spending now involves assistance for seniors, tackling Social Security and Medicare has to be a big piece of this."

Choice 1: raise taxes on everyone.  Exactly, though this need not be income taxes. Carbon (among other Pigouvian taxes) and trade transaction fees (among other forms of a Tobin tax) would also raise substantial revenue.  VAT and consumption taxes do fall regressively on the poor, though relief could come from lower their income or payroll tax deductions.

Choice 2 and 3 make sense only from the prospective of one not interested in admitting that a generation has seen wealth flow to the top <2 b="b">. As a smaller segment of the population has reaped enormous gains from the restructuring of the political and economy systems (see this book and this one and this one), that segment has willfully blinded itself to the effects on the overall society. Time to return to reinvest in the institutions, by reversing the gains.  This is not Marxism, Socialism, nor a resentment politics.  It is fairness and the conservative recognition that the economic changes of the past generation have not helped us but burdened us.

College accountability?

Kevin Carey, in the NYTimes, makes another case for standardizing college academic standards: "The lack of meaningful academic standards in higher education drags down the entire system. Grade inflation, even (or especially) at the most elite institutions, is rampant. A landmark book published last year, “Academically Adrift,” found that many students at traditional colleges showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing, and spent their time socializing, working or wasting time instead of studying. (And that’s not even considering the problem of low graduation rates.)"

The use of the book Academically adrift is problematic for two reasons, both speculative (on my part, based on their data).  First, the number of students not having learned much of value in the author's most recent research equals the number of students more that attended college than the comparison year (2010 v. 1970).  In other words, the same number of students are learning now as their were students before (the total number of students v. a percentage of students).  Alone, that statistic could mean that for over a generation, we have been sending students to college that lack the basic qualifications to be there.  It would make sense that schools lowered the expectations in order to accommodate this influx.

Second, there are no meaningful measures of what percentage of students were learning things of value (or their level of effort) back in the earlier years.  Do the groups being compared merit comparison?  We do not know.  Without knowing a similar set of statistics, the socio-economic context from which these students attended college, the comparison between 2010 and 1970 is moot.

Carey offers a remedy to what he perceives as a problem: "But the most promising solution would be to replace the anachronistic credit hour with common standards for what college students actually need to know and to be able to do. There are many routes to doing this. In the arts and sciences, scholarly associations could define and update what it means to be proficient in a field. So could professional organizations and employers in vocational and technical fields."

Proficiency is the solution to avoid making college degrees "ultimately worthless."  His idea shares the foundational theory of the Bologna Process in Europe.  If all universities aligned in their outcome expectations of skills, knowledge and performance, then comparisons between graduates (for graduate schools and employment, among others) would be much easier.  A standard of what a college degree means, regardless of the college, would provide a clear, objective understanding to the students' degrees.

Learning is not a commodity, a consumable capable of being measured by quantity. No matter how well we formulate what a degree (or major) means, what the student learned and can later apply is a different question, one without a method of standardization, much less objective, empirical and quantitative meaning.  The purpose of higher education should be questioned, and its expense justified. But aiming for a single set of responses is folly, for the set of hoped for proficiencies are never-ending; who gets to decide what a graduate should know?  Better, from the democratic perspective, who is better able to determine what their graduates should know and do but colleges themselves, their faculty, board of trustees and alumni?

Standards of proficiency come from cost-benefit analyses of investing in education. Fair enough, just not sensible enough for an education that has meaning.