Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush talks education.

I heard this morning on NPR that murmers have it that Senator John McCain, in order to distract from Senator Barack Obama's European travels, will perhaps announce this week??his running mate. Looks like McCain plans to be in Louisiana on Wednesday, which is the state governed by Bobby Jindal, a sharp character who is reportedly high on McCain's vice presidential grocery list.

Jindal, though, is no longer on a??honeymoon with his state's voters.??He's not on a honeymoon with science, either.

I wouldn't link so often to pieces on NRO if a) such pieces weren't so interesting and b) weren't so well written. Even that outlet's??more langorous languorous libations manage to refresh. Here's just such an article, by John Derbyshire, which uses??about 800 words more than needed to make its point but which is nonetheless fully enjoyable.??

Derbyshire notes that most Americans, accustomed to observing inequality in most things, bristle when inequality of "smarts" crosses their paths. "The problem with this smartocracy," he writes, "is, we have this itchy feeling that it's un-American." He makes many of the arguments usually associated with Charles Murray, who is not shy about pointing out that people with low I.Q.s are, generally, not going to do well in school and that not much can be done about it. (Murray makes precisely this argument in his forthcoming book, Real Education.)

Yes and no, of course. While it doesn't hurt to acknowledge that a bell curve exists in academic achievement, as in most things, it's tough to prove that the entire curve can't be moved--i.e., that "average" can't become better.

But Derbyshire is right that scads of people don't like to acknowledge that some folks??are smart, some aren't, and that's how it is. A perfect example is the widespread opposition to separating students by their abilities and teaching to those abilities. Instead of undertaking that sensible approach, we are bombarded with misguided ideas such as, for example,??having all students enroll in AP classes, a proposition that defies logic. If AP means what it is supposed to me (the word "advanced" is, after all, in its name), then all kids cannot expect to take AP classes and succeed in them.

I read in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday that race+class school-assignment plans will succeed only if students are not??just integrated at the school-level but also at the class-level. You see what's happening here? It's diversity creep, and it threatens to??do a lot of damage (more than it's already done) by allotting pupils to classes based not on students' abilities but on their races and classes, all in the name of promoting some type of feel-good amalgam in which, we are told, poor and minority students, awash in the middle-class glow that emanates from their middle-class classmates, will see their academic achievement soar.

What nonsense. What would happen, of course, is either a)??the less savvy students--many of whom will be poor and minority students--will not be able to keep up, or b) the class will regress to the lowest common denominator of academic rigor, such that the least-advanced pupil is able to digest the material therein served.

We should be wary of this and beat it back whenever and??wherever it chooses to pop up.

Over twenty years ago, Bill Bennett popularized the term, "The Education Blob." The Blob is the seemingly infinite ocean of alphabet-soup organizations that lobby on behalf of educators and in opposition to any reforms that might upset the status quo. The teachers unions are the blobbiest of The Blob, but they have many allies in administrator associations, school board groups, professional associations, etc.

So to illustrate the intransigence of The Education Blob to adopt positive change, I hereby announce our new weekly feature, The Blobbiest Quote of the Week. And now, the inaugural winner...

Richard Flanary, the director of professional development services for the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP for short), who was quoted in Thursday's Education Daily (available to subscribers only, of which I think there are about 74) responding to John McCain's call for greater authority for school principals:

Certainly we support greater spending autonomy, but there needs to be more clarity on the criteria on which principals make these decisions. Principals already?? have very busy schedules, and I would hate to think that they would get caught in a situation where they are the purveyors of funds.

Yes, that would be terrible for the managers of large organizations (in this case, high schools) to "get caught in a situation" where they are responsible for making funding decisions! But why stop at schools? Someone should alert the private sector that it's stressing out its managers by expecting them to manage budgets. After all, managers already "have very busy schedules."

You get the point. This is the primary lobby for high school principals, and it's lobbying against giving principals more authority. Folks, most groups in Washington want more power for their members, not less. But if you think this is strange, you just haven't gotten to know The Education Blob.

Congratulations, Richard. We'll be back next week with another installment.

If you live in Seattle and you just can't seem to slake your thirst for discussions about school diversity, I'll be on the David Boze talk-radio show today, chatting about the direction that some districts (including, perhaps, Seattle) are taking their school-assignment plans. Much auditory??hand wringing and finger wagging??promises to??go down.

Jay Greene's blog led me to this, from the Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson:

To the left is a 1971 Chevrolet Impala. According to the New York Times of September 25th, 1970, it originally sold for $3,460. That's $19,011 in today's dollars. If cars were like public schools, you would be compelled to buy one of these today, and to pay $43,479 for that privilege (2.3 times the original price).

The bold portion presumably designates the bit that Coulson finds??totally whack (or is it wack, derivation wacky?), and he's right.??Coby is a big libertarian, so I bet he'll be pretty, pretty, pretty??steamed to discover that America's??public schools are actually??Impalas, especially when school systems already spend so much money on buses.

I said I'd do it, and I meant it. We begin with this portion from our latest "watch-worthy" post??(the basic point of which is that the blogger does not like gender-based college admissions preferences but??is fine with??race-based ones):

Because minority students are less likely to attend well-funded schools and less likely to get strong college prep curricula in high school, on average they enter the college admissions pool with weaker credentials than white students, and thus end up disproportionately attending less selective colleges. Affirmative action counteracts this, with the result being within-college racial/ethnic makeups that are more representative of the college student body as a whole.

Affirmative action "counteracts" the fact that minority students (black and Latino students, really) in general "enter the college admissions pool with weaker credentials than white students" only insofar as it overlooks those credentials. Affirmative action does nothing to solve the underlying problem, which is a yawning gap between the qualifications of black and Latino college applicants and those of their white and Asian counterparts. Instead, it simply ignores the??disparity and gives leniency to applicants of lesser academic qualifications as long as they??manage to be??black or Latino, which is troublesome for all sorts of reasons.

Then there's this:

Crucially, race-based affirmative action as practiced by selective colleges doesn't hurt non-selective colleges, because it simply brings the racial/ethnic mix into more of a balance.

It's unclear a) what this means ("...brings the racial/ethnic mix into more of a balance," for example.??We wonder: A balance with what?), and??b)??why this is crucial or even desirable; furthermore, it's not true. Why not true? Because we??have a finite pool of black and Latino college applicants. And if a number of those who are most qualified to attend the University of Michigan are instead accepted, because of their ethnicities, at Yale (a school at which their standardized test scores and classroom preparation and grades are well below the incoming class's average), then the University of Michigan must look further down??its list. And??Michigan then??accepts less-qualified individuals, which counts, in my book, as being "hurt" by a selective college's affirmative action policies. (Of course, the most selective schools are choosing, technically, to "hurt" themselves.)

Thus, we have this: Yale accepts a black student whose qualifications are average for the University of Michigan, Michigan accepts a black??student whose resume would be appropriate at Florida State, and Florida State fills its classes with black and Latino students whose credentials reflect those of their community college peers.

But forget all that. We should be less worried, of course, about whether affirmative action is unfair to colleges than whether it is unfair to white and Asian students (who may be qualified for, say,??Yale but whose spots are given to less-qualified applicants of a different race) or to the black and Latino students who are accepted at schools that they are, on paper, less ready to attend than are the majority of their classmates.

One wonders: What convincing argument shows that an under-qualified student at Yale will fare there so much better than he would at the University of Michigan, where his credentials match those of his classmates? And how do the advantages of accepting that student to Yale outweigh the disadvantages of a) discriminating against a better qualified white or Asian applicant because of his race and??b) judging the black student simply??because of his race? I've never encountered a convincing or logical justification for this.

"Making up for past transgressions" (i.e., slavery, Jim Crow, and all the other terrible stuff)??doesn't justify it, on any level. First, what if the black applicant's family comes from, say,??France???Second,??how, exactly, does??pushing into Yale a black kid who's qualified for the??University of Michigan make up for slavery? Third, for what, exactly, is the U.S. atoning when the Cuban kid (or the Venezuelan kid, etc.) gets an affirmative action bump into a selective college? Fourth, fifth, sixth....

Another insufficient response is this:??Affirmative action is just like, say,??legacy admissions, and nobody raises a stink about those. First, two wrongs don't make a right. And second, affirmative action is not akin to legacy admissions. Legacy admissions are made on a per-person basis, and they do not assume anything about the legacy students. Legacy students are admitted because someone in their family attended the school in question;??it's unfortunate good ol' boy stuff. Affirmative action policies, in contrast,??are not predicated on a per-person basis--they are based on generalizations and, truthfully, stereotypes about all black and Latino applicants. Legacy admissions are unfortunate, but race-based admissions are noxious and really should be illegal??but for??the perplexing??reasoning of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Finally (not really, but finally for this post's purposes), we read:

But gender preferences at a given selective college do nothing to fix the overall problem of more women in college than men. Instead, they merely push that problem down the higher education food chain, from the selective colleges to the non-selectives. If a selective college rejects a more qualified woman in favor of a less qualified man, she's still going to college somewhere.

We wonder why this exact situation doesn't pertain to black and Latino applicants, too. And then we realize it does.

Michelle Rhee gets some support from Senator Joseph Lieberman.

My take on yesterday's New York Times Magazine piece on "integration" is here . (I'm not employing around integration??so-called "contemptuous quotes "; I'm merely noting that the terms "integration" and "segregation," which once were used to denote, respectively,??the de jure??combination and separation of black and white students,??are today used in reference to de facto racial separation caused by housing patterns. But the two different meanings are too often conflated, which is why we must call attention to the way in which they're used.)

One part of the Times Magazine article that I didn't have enough space to explore??is the idea that new class+race school assignments hold much promise for significantly elevating academic achievement. This contention??is, I think, a real stretch, especially when so many other curricular and instructional and management reforms (many of which do not involve complicated schemes) would do so much more to boost student learning. I suspect that not a few diversity proponents have simply realized that fluffier justifications for busing pupils hither and yon??do not, for most parents, outweigh the flaws of complicated school assignment plans. Thus the shift toward couching??arguments for school diversity??in terms of increasing academic performance.

Update: The Wall Street Journal reports on a demographic shift that could potentially bring more diversity to inner-city schools... potentially.

Photo by Flickr user blackheritage .

I'm back after a week's vacation (yes, I believe in extra-curricular activities in my own life too) and see that Flypaper has been buzzing along. But I also notice that we failed to mention Jonathan Alter's hard-hitting Newsweek column taking the teachers unions to task for blocking meaningful school reform. Atler writes:

Teaching is arguably the only profession in the country with ironclad job security and a well-honed hostility to measuring results. Because of union resistance, NCLB measures only schools, not individual teachers. The result is that school districts fire on average only one teacher a year for poor performance. Before recent reforms (which have boosted test scores), New York City dismissed only 10 of 55,000 teachers annually. What business could survive that way?

Hear hear, though teachers are right that today's tests are hardly the best instruments for measuring their performance. But we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good; if we harnessed the resources we currently spend on our fifty-state system of tests for one common system, we could afford to measure subjects beyond reading and math, online, in a way that encouraged intellectually-challenging schoolwork rather than test prep. Then the rest of Alter's suggestions would make sense:

Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage "thin contracts" free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. He should offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure. And the next time he addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance--or face extinction.

Good ideas all--and they would make sense for a McCain Administration, too.