No more cupcakes for you!

New York City has decided that there shall be no more bake sales, or at least a lot fewer, because selling junk food to kids makes them fat.

But it also makes them rich. Or at least rich enough to be able to go on field trips and buy sports equipment, which is what they do with bake sale money.

I want to go on record as saying that I think this is a terrible idea. Yes, I understand the imperative to stop feeding kids lots of bad food, and I could lose a few pounds myself. But this is also a great example of why conservatives criticize liberals: because liberals believe in the nanny state, i.e. the idea that those in power know what is good for you, and have the right to dictate how you should live your life.

Liberals are forgetting a key lesson of history, and that would be the political correctness of the 1980's. I survived that era, but barely; I still have bad memories of the PC police. There is an element of puritanism in both liberal and conservative viewpoints; conservatives have their versions of enforcing morality. Someone (H.L. Mencken?) once said that puritanism is the idea that someone, somewhere, is having fun, and that they must be stopped. Telling students that they cannot have bake sales is a version of that.

How about this: if a group has a bake sale, they also have to have a fundraiser that somehow promotes healthy living, like a walkathon. Or maybe the football team (although I suspect there aren't a lot of high school football teams in NYC) asks people to pledge a certain amount of money for each point they score. Or bake sales have to incorporate some educational element, like coming up with new recipes, or working with professional chefs. What about forming some kind of organization, and encouraging the students to treat it as a real corporation? There could be a group that hosts bake sales, and the other school groups outsource it to them. Or maybe limit the amount of sugar and/or fat that can be used, which would force students to be really creative with their ingredients. It's entirely possible to make really good snacks and desserts without lots of calories, but you have to focused on doing just that. That might require more work on the part of the school administration. But it would also be much more rewarding than a straight ban. And there wouldn't be risk of a backlash. Remember, these students are all future voters.

Recession hitting colleges - time to challenge some assumptions

The recession is hitting starting to hit colleges and universities hard. The NY Times profiles Reed College, in Oregon, which had to deny admission to some students because the college couldn't offer them enough financial aid. Officials there are hoping that this is a temporary setback:

Reed has put off drastic measures like spending more of its endowment, closing some departments or selling some real estate near campus. Instead, college officials are counting on the economy to turn around quickly

I think that is wishful thinking at best. Delusion seems to be the order of the day here. The problem is not that the economy is in a downturn. The problem is that the business model for elite liberals arts colleges is broken. It simply is no longer sustainable to charge people $50K a year for an education, and expect to be able to continue charging ever more. It's time to challenge some assumptions.

Consider some other industries with broken business models: American car companies, and newspapers. For years, the UAW demanded, and got, job security in its contracts with the Big Three. The "jobs bank" was part of that - workers were paid to sit around factories, instead of being fired. Sound familiar? Guaranteed job security is also what tenure is about. GM, Ford, and Chrysler have had trouble adapting to new economic realities because they did not have the flexibiilty to make the changes that they needed to. And they were forced to put the interests of workers ahead of the interests of customers. Is it in the best interest of customers of American car companies for auto workers to be able to retire after 30 years? No, it's not. Running a corporation always involves balancing the interests of employees and customers, but these kinds of demands made it impossible for the Big Three to try to fine-tune that balance. Same thing with their dealers. Instead of managing change gradually, the Big Three were forced to change very drastically and very suddenly, with disastrous results for thousands of employees who had demanded job security.

Colleges are going to face the same problem with tenure. There are conflicts between the interests of students and professors. But giving professors tenure makes balancing those interests very difficult, if not impossible, for colleges and universities. That has not mattered for a very long time, in part because a college education was so valuable that it we, as a society, could afford to cut colleges some slack. For many students, it didn't really matter what they studied - a college degree was a ticket to at least a solid, middle class existence. This was particularly true for many decades, even centuries, in this country, because having a college degree was rare enough that just having it gave a person a huge advantage in the marketplace. So many people could learn something esoteric and obscure, graduate from college with a useless degree, and still get a good job. That is becoming less and less possible.

Part of the reason is that it's now no longer rare or even unusual for Americans to go to college. It's now fairly common. That means that the advantages conferred on college graduates are not as great. Supply is now more equal to demand, so the value is not what it once was. Which means that we are going to have to think much more carefully about the value of a college education.

The other industry going through wrenching changes is the newspaper industry. The parallels between higher education and newspapers are obviously much closer than between car companies and the liberal arts. The products of both are primarily in the form of the written word. There are, of course, differences. Newspapers publish quickly and almost disposably, while college professors take a long time to write essays that are supposed to last. Colleges have small, captive audiences who pay huge amounts; newspapers have diverse, widespread audiences who pay very little or, in the case of their Websites, nothing.

But creation and dissemination of intellectual property is at core of each's value proposition. The processes by which intellectual property is created, stored, and distributed are, of course, undergoing radical change. Newspapers have not adapted well, and it shows. Colleges are different in large part because of the different timelines that defines each. Students stay in college for several years, but are then alumni for the rest of their lives. The feedback loop for newspapers is virtually instantaneous; the feedback loop for colleges lasts decades.

The challenge for newspapers is blindingly obvious; news is very easy to find and distribute, which makes it very cheap. The challenge for colleges and newspapers is much more obscure; it's not clear exactly how to replicate Harvard, which has been around for centuries. That's a fairly large barrier to entry for competitors.

The competition that colleges like Reed should be most worried about, however, is not going to come from other colleges. It is going to come from completely different sources. The NY Times used to compete with the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post; now it competes with Talking Points Memo and other blogs. Reed's value proposition derives in large part from its reputation as a place where great ideas are discussed. Such a description, however, no longer applies in any kind of a unique or interesting way strictly to colleges and universities. Great ideas are being discussed in lots of places. Reed's competitors are not other colleges. Its competitors are Google, McKinsey, the NY Times, and Time Warner. As well as a million other companies delivering intellectual content.

The first step in solving a problem is acknowledging that it exists. Liberal arts colleges are far from taking even that basic step.

But no college president wants to be first to make major changes in the college experience; Reed, for example, is not abandoning plans for a new performing arts center. “If we’re going to change our ways, we’re really going to need to be pushed,” Mr. Diver said, referring to colleges generally. “It’s not going to well up from within.”

That's for damn sure. This is, in a sense, the silver lining of this deep recession; it is going to force colleges to start facing some unpleasant realities. For example, that their students are basically customers. This attitude, from Reed's president, is indicative of how much work needs to be done, how much old attitudes are in the way:

“The catering to consumer tastes — I keep trying to say, we are in the education business,” Mr. Diver said, describing the pressure to keep up with wealthier colleges and expressing a frustration rarely voiced publicly by college presidents. “The whole principle behind higher education is, we know something that you don’t. Therefore, we shouldn’t cater to them.”

I find that absurd. Yes, you know something that students don't. But they are paying you. Moreover, many of them are going into debt to pay you, which means that they are going to be paying you for years. Question for Mr. Diver: do you want your students to make donations when they are alumni? Then you should try to make sure that they are happy when they are students. Which means that you need to cater to them.

Time to challenge some assumptions.

Investment bankers and educational reform

Some good commentary from Megan McArdle on why we shouldn't hate investment bankers. She also throws in some good advice to investment bankers: don't whine. You are not entitled to being paid millions of dollars a year. And it's not just the people on Wall Street who have to come to terms with reality.

The real problem with investment bankers goes deeper, and is the problem of the entire upper middle class: we have come to believe that complying with the rules produces excellent results as by some natural law. In school, if you do your work, teacher gives you an A. It comes to seem like a sort of a natural law: if you have a good education and work hard, the universe is supposed to reward you. After school, the upper middle class gravitates towards careers with very well defined advancement hierarchies: medicine, law, finance, consulting, where this subtle belief is constantly reinforced

.

I am very familiar with this problem. I graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in philosophy, and was expecting to be able to just get a job. I have a degree in a very intellectually sophisticated and demanding subject from one of the best schools in the country. Shouldn't I just be able to snap my fingers and presto! get a well-paying, intellectually engaging, emotionally satisfying job? Shouldn't I be able to just send my resume out to a bunch of places and then wait for the job offers to roll in?

Uh, no. I grew up spoiled. Not by my parents, who were very fair and moderate, but by my situation. I'm a heterosexual white male in contemporary America. I took for granted that I would have the nice house and great vacations and all the consumer goods I could want and all that, because that's normal.

Uh, no. It's not normal. It's the product of hard work. Part of my mistake was thinking that education is the key to success. Because that's what we're told: work hard in high school so you can go to a good college, and then you're set. That's the most important thing in being successful: going to a good college.

For many people, maybe it is. And it doesn't hurt. But I think we have confused cause and effect. Many successful people have gone to good schools, so that must be the key to being successful, right? Except that those people got into those schools for the same reason that they were successful. They were smart, competent, hard-working and creative in high school, they were smart, competent, hard-working and creative in college, and then they were smart, competent, hard-working and creative in the real world.

But going to a good school does not guarantee that you will be successful. It just makes it a little easier to get started on being successful. That's it. I have known flaky people with degrees from Harvard and Stanford.

This is something that we as a society have not yet come to terms with. For previous generations, higher education was something that was available to very few people. So people with college degrees were a scarce resource. That made them valuable.

That is no longer the case. Higher education is now much more widely available, so the value of a college degree is now less, as a function of greater availability.

I fell into the trap of thinking that my college education made me special, because I was thinking of it in the terms that had been defined by previous generations. This is not surprising, because the people running the college when I was there were the people from those previous generations. For the people on the Board of Managers when I was in college, Swarthmore was a very special place, because it gave them an education like no one else in their generation had.

So I thot the same would be true for me. I was getting an education that made me unique and special. Except that it didn't. Almost everybody in my high school graduating class went to college and got at least a Bachelor's degree. The one who didn't end up with a BA actually has the coolest job of almost anyone I know - he's a brewmaster at a brewpub, and is doing much better professionally than I am. And he has no student loan debt.

Not everyone in my high school class went on to an elite liberal arts college, but even the ones who went to state schools did really well. Three of my friends went to the University of Michigan. All three have Ph.d.'s (one from Harvard), and all three are successfully pursuing careers in academia.

Megan's friends in investment banking are discovering something that many of us in Generation X have discovered: your college education does not guarantee that you will be successful. All it does is guarantee that you will be able to go to reunions every five or ten years.

Obama on education

President Obama gave a speech on education yesterday to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. That's an interesting choice of a group to give this speech to. I'm guessing that most, if not all, of the people in attendance have a deep and personal understanding of the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." A fair number are probably immigrants or the children of immigrants. I think we can safely assume that many were the first in their family to attend college. These are people who understand the value of a good education.

But they are also people who understand the value of innovation. Those two things - the value of education and the value of innovation - have a great deal in common. Most innovations come from people who are educated.

We do have a great deal of educational innovation in this country. Teach For America is an example of an innovative idea that has spawned a great deal of experimentation.

But we also have some persistent problems that seem resistant to change. I'm not going to recite them here. I'm also going to try to restrain myself from rehashing the arguments of either side, including my own.

The problem with education is not teachers unions, as Republicans claim (although I think they make some good points), or not enough money, as Democrats claim (although I would obviously like to see more money going to education).

The problem with education is that we have a 19th century institution in the 21st century. The basic structure of education - students sitting in a classroom, taking notes, doing homework, reading books, solving problem sets, writing papers, taking tests - has not changed in a long, long time. It's a very ordered, highly structured environment, with clearly defined rules, rigid schedules, and carefully laid out expectations.

Very little of which is anything like the real world. Very few jobs have anything like the stability and structure of our current educational system. We have a Newtonian, clockwork educational system in an Einsteinian, relativistic world.

Except of course for the social life of the average high school student. I realize that the concept of "stability" has little meaning in the social life of the average high school student. Been there, done that.

"Stability," "highly structured," and "clockwork" are also words that can be used to describe educational bureaucracies, particularly in large city school systems. Any teacher in a city school from Boston to San Diego has horror stories about dealing with the bureaucracy. That's where lack of innovation starts to become a problem.

Teachers unions are also bureaucratic, and I've heard horror stories about how resistant they can be to innovation, as well. I don't blame teachers unions for becoming bureaucratic - I think they got that way in response to the bureaucracy of of the school districts. The problem is that the school districts and the teachers unions and the supporters of both are frozen in their positions. Neither bureaucracy is going to give up power willingly.

This is where Obama comes in:

“For decades, Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline,” Mr. Obama said, in a speech here to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom. Too many in the Republican Party have opposed new investments in early childhood education, despite compelling evidence of its importance.”

What I said. One of these days I think I am going to have to write about an issue where I strenuously disagree with Obama, just to prove that I can. But not now.

This is classic Obama: challenging the preconceived, stereotypical ideas of both sides, daring each to acknowledge their common ground. The vast majority of Americans understand the value of education. We agree that it is a good thing. We agree that more of it is better. We agree that there are large problems to solve.

This is the second great problem afflicting our educational debate (with the first being the outmoded structures): we do not trust each other. Democrats think Republicans want to sabotage public education, while Republicans think Democrats are beholden to teacher unions. Neither side wants to acknowledge the other side's good intentions.

Again, this is where Obama comes in. He trusts both sides (although he obviously trusts Democrats a bit more). He understands the perspectives of each side.

President Obama is going to force people on both sides of the educational debate to listen to each other and work together. Which is, in itself, is the great innovation that we really need.

Vouchers in DC schools

The debate about vouchers in schools is taking an interesting turn in Washington, DC. The District currently has a voucher program, which was started at the behest of a Republican, back when they were in power in Congress. Now that Democrats are back in power, they would like to end it. Except one Democrat, but one very important Democrat in this debate: Arne Duncan, Obama's Secretary of Education. He's in favor of letting kids stay in schools that they are already attending. As someone who attended elementary schools in three states, I'm strongly in favor of continuity.


I'm also one of the only Democrats in favor of vouchers. I'm a big fan of public education. My mother taught elementary school, my brother teaches high school English, and my public high school education in suburban Detroit was one of the best things that ever happened to me.


But I'm also a fan of innovation. One reason my high school education was so good was that I was in a program called "Flex" (short for Flexible Scheduling) that allowed teachers a great deal of freedom to teach unusual topics in interesting ways. We watched movies like "Ran" and "The Seventh Seal." I actually graduated from high school with a better knowledge of foreign film than American movies.


I am also of the opinion that we already have an incredibly successful voucher program in this country. It's just that we have it at the college level. Think about it: the Federal government subsidizes private higher education in a number of ways: Pell grants, student loans, grants from the NEH, NIH, etc. For me, there is very little difference between Pell grants and vouchers. Both of them are payments from the government that allow students to study at private schools. Pell grants are basically vouchers for college students. The only difference between Pell grants and vouchers is the age of the student.


One argument against vouchers is that they subsidize religious education. But a fair number of colleges and universities in this country are religious in nature, and we have no issues subsidizing those. Georgetown, Notre Dame, and Boston College are all Jesuit. There are dozens more, associated with a wide variety of religions.

So I say we keep vouchers. Americans are constantly complaining about the state of our educational system. But our higher educational system is the envy of the world. We have a great model for how vouchers can work to encourage innovation and promote excellence in education. We just haven't realized it yet.

Justifying the Humanities

The New York Times has an article about how the current economic crisis is causing problems in higher education, particularly for the humanities. I've been wondering about this. I have a degree in philosophy from an elite liberal arts college, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about the economic value of a degree in the humanities.

A traditional justification of the humanities is that it enlightens students, provides them with greater insight into the human condition, and thereby inspires them to be better people. I agree with this somewhat, but I also think it's usually overstated and overblown as a justification for the higher expense of a liberal arts degree. I've known great people who had technical degrees (like my Dad) and flaky idiots from elite liberal colleges.

My problems with the humanities have little to do with the humanities themselves, and just about everything to do with how they are taught. I loved reading Keats and Joyce. But when I graduated, I was emotionally burned out, and basically incapable of looking for a job.

I'm going to concentrate on humanities as they are taught at dedicated liberals arts colleges, because I went to one (Swarthmore). I also attended film school as a grad student at the University of Southern California, although I don't have a degree.

For me, the difference between a liberal arts college and a more technically-focused school like film school is simple:

Swarthmore taught me how to think. But USC taught me how to be competent.

Each of those is important. But without the other, each also has severe limitations. For me, Swarthmore was ridiculously unbalanced - there was no effort to teach me how to be competent. I was one of the most politically active people on a very politically active campus: I ran Amnesty International while I was there, and had two internships in Washington. But I had a grand total of one conversation about my activism with a professor while I was there, and that was about a parking ticket.

USC, on the other hand, had both elements of a technical school and a liberal arts college; we were required to take classes in screenwriting and critical studies as well as editing and cinematography. In film school, even the technical skills have a humanist purpose; the best lighting in the world is useless unless it helps tell the story.

Part of the problem with the liberal arts is that professors have absolutely no incentive to help students learn anything other than the subject matters that they teach, and they have very little incentive to change that. And they have tenure, so they have very little reason to change.

Part of my problem is that I got lost asking the "big questions." I kept looking for the "meaning of life," completely ignoring the fact that I had to actually figure out how to live my life before I could ask questions about meaning. In retrospect, I took a class in Plato that was not the best use of my time; I probably would have benefited from taking a class in accounting instead. Or Photoshop, although I'm not sure Photoshop had been invented then.

There are many ways that liberal arts colleges can adapt to the 21st century that would enhance their ability to educate their students without corrupting their mission. There are now a fair number of technologies that require the manipulation of information, which means thinking. Learning how to set up formulas in Excel also teaches math. Working with Photoshop or Illustrator or even PowerPoint is a way of learning about how the visual presentation of information works.

Most of my education consisted of reading books, which means, in the most basic sense, starting at black lines on a white page. Text is an extremely precise method for transferring information. I'm using it right now. But it can also be extremely inefficient. There's a reason a picture is worth a thousand words. Consider a copy of Hamlet in book form. If it were converted to a text format on a computer, like Microsoft Word, it might be a few megabytes in size. Now consider Hamlet as a movie. It's probably on a DVD, and several gigabytes in size. The movie is literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times larger than the text file. Measured digitally, there is literally hundreds of times more information in the movie.

Now consider the process of physically engaging the material. When a student reads Hamlet in book form, there are two minds at work: the student's, and Shakespeare's. But when a student watches a movie (or a play, as Shakespeare intended), there are many, possibly hundreds, of minds at work: all the actors, the director, all the craftspeople.

One great adaptation that would be most helpful would be for liberal arts colleges to end their love affair with books. End the tyranny of text. I love books. I have many books. I read books constantly. I read newspapers and magazines constantly; at one point in my life I had 26 periodical subscriptions. At one point I had something like 4,000 books. I had to sell them, and, honestly, I don't miss having that many.

In the most basic sense, liberal arts colleges are in the business of processing, storing, and transferring information. For many years, those were difficult to do. That's one reason colleges and universities all have large libraries.

But processing, storing, and transferring information are all being radically transformed, and organizations that do not adapt to the new realities are in danger.

Just ask anyone in the newspaper business.

An idiotic civics test

Kathleen Parker, a conservative columnist, writes in the WaPo about one of those civics test that occasionally demonstrate just how stupid the American public is.

O ut of 2,500 American quiz-takers, including college students, elected officials and other randomly selected citizens, nearly 1,800 flunked a 33-question test on basic civics. In fact, elected officials scored slightly lower than the general public with an average score of 44 percent compared to 49 percent.

Only 0.8 percent of all test-takers scored an "A."

I took this test a few days ago, and got 31 out of 33 right, so I guess I am part of the 0.8%. Parker doesn't provide a link, but I googled it, and retook it - this time I got 100% (I remembered the correct answers the two that I got wrong the first time).

Parker goes on to bemoan the lack of intellectual curiosity of the average American (Parker is one of the few conservatives who have criticized Sarah Palin, which has gotten her in trouble with fellow conservatives), and proposes some solutions, including forcing high school and college students to read newspapers. Good luck with that.

I have a better solution: let's all completely ignore idiotic tests that do nothing except make us feel bad about ourselves. This test is not a worthwhile examination of a person's understanding of American democracy. Some of the questions have nothing whatsoever to do with America, and some are so obscure that only people with a well-above-average interest in history or politics even have a chance of getting them right. Try this one:

13) Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas would concur that:
A. all moral and political truth is relative to one’s time and place
B. moral ideas are best explained as material accidents or byproducts of evolution
C. values originating in one’s conscience cannot be judged by others
D. Christianity is the only true religion and should rule the state
E. certain permanent moral and political truths are accessible to human reason

"D" is a trick answer: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, all lived in ancient Athens, a good 300 years before the birth of Christ; they could not have been Christians. "Evolution," as in what we learned from Darwin, was also an idea formulated in an era somewhat past their time. I have a degree in philosophy and I had to think hard about the answer, and took an educated guess. The correct answer is "E." I don't associate "E" particularly strongly with any of those four philosophers, and I've read several Platonic dialogues. In other words, very well-educated, politically aware and sophisticated people could easily get that wrong. It's absurd to claim that average Americans are not politically aware because they got that question wrong.

There's a very subtle hidden agenda at work here. "A" and "C" are clearly statements of moral relativity. "E" does not say anything about moral absolutes, but it forces you to define these four philosophers in a way that specifically DOES NOT associate them with moral relativism. At the end of the test, there are several questions about how to define capitalism, which strongly suggests that the writers of this test designed it to put conservative, "traditional" values in a positive light. There's nothing wrong with that, except that they're not upfront about it.

Or consider this question, which is about American history, but is very obscure:

11) What impact did the Anti-Federalists have on the United States Constitution?
A. their arguments helped lead to the adoption of the Bill of Rights
B. their arguments helped lead to the abolition of the slave trade
C. their influence ensured that the federal government would maintain a standing army
D. their influence ensured that the federal government would have the power to tax

I've lived in Washington, DC, and have been an avid student of politics and American history for decades, and I had to take an educated guess on this one. I guessed "A," because the term "Anti-Federalists" suggest people skeptical about the power of the federal government, and part of the purpose of the Bill of Rights is to constrain the power of the government (the First Amendment being a prime example). But I couldn't name a specific "Anti-Federalist" off the top of my head if you paid me. The question implies that they had an impact on the Constitution when it was being written, which also leads me to the Bill of Rights. But, again, it's a tricky question, and not being able to answer it correctly says essentially nothing about a person's knowledge of American politics or history. You would have to have specifically studied this one group in one era of American history to know this well. I haven't done that, and I have an excellent education.

And then, some of the questions are open to interpretation:

29) A flood-control levee (or National Defense) is considered a public good because:
A. citizens value it as much as bread and medicine
B. a resident can benefit from it without directly paying for it
C. government construction contracts increase employment
D. insurance companies cannot afford to replace all houses after a flood
E. government pays for its construction, not citizens

The correct answer is "B." I got this wrong the first time (I think I chose "D"), but just about any of those answers could be considered valid. A member of a construction workers' union would probably choose "C," and who could blame her? And isn't "D" technically correct? If I were the CEO of an insurance company, that would probably be my answer.

Finally, some of the questions touch on important topics, but do so in a trivial way:

15) The phrase that in America there should be a “wall of separation” between church and state appears in:
A. George Washington’s Farewell Address
B. the Mayflower Compact
C. the Constitution
D. the Declaration of Independence
E. Thomas Jefferson’s letters

Separation of church and state is a fundamental American democratic value, but the fact that the specific phrase "wall of separation" is found in Thomas Jefferson's letters ("D") is a piece of trivia. Again, I had to take an educated guess, and used the process of elimination: I doubt George Washington talked much about the separation of church and state. It probably wouldn't have been an issue in the Mayflower Compact, because that was a small group of people from the same religion; the issue comes up once in the Constitution, in the First Amendment, which doesn't use that phrase; and I've never read it in the Declaration of Independence, which was about justifying the separation of the colonies from England. And I know that Jefferson was particularly proud of his efforts to advance the cause of religious freedom. But knowing the origin of that specific phrase signifies nothing about whether or not a person understands the significance of the idea of separation of church and state in American history and politics.

I could go on. There are a number of questions that are, in fact, perfectly legitimate, simple questions that, I agree, Americans should know.

3) What are the three branches of government?
A. executive, legislative, judicial
B. executive, legislative, military
C. bureaucratic, military, industry
D. federal, state, local

That one everybody should get. But without seeing any results, we don't know how many people did, in fact, get that one right. It's possible that 99% of the people who took this test got that question right. I have no idea. So I am not going to worry about it.

This test is garbage. If it were a test designed to test students of a particular course, it might be worthwhile. But it asks questions that highly educated people could easily get wrong for perfectly valid reasons. The fact that there are journalists out there who use this test to complain about the political and historical literacy of the American public says more about those journalists' lack of critical faculties than it does about the American educational system.

Innovation in education

Education is a perennial obsession of American politics; we always seem to be failing at something, and in desperate need of improvement. Personally, I think it comes down to this: we have a great educational system for the late 19th century. We have seen an extraordinary amount of change in many areas of our society. But our educational systems have not changed as quickly as other parts of our society, like, say, the workplace.

Yesterday's LA Times had the best piece on educational reform that I have read in many years, if not ever. The premise is simple: the federal government needs to encourage and foster educational innovation in much the same way that the National Institutes of Health do for health care.

The federal government should encourage innovation - what a concept!

There are multiple ironies in this idea and the tangle of politics surrounding it. The defining federal educational legislation of the Bush era is, of course, No Child Left Behind. But the purpose is not to encourage innovation; the purpose is to set standards and demand that states meet them.

I'm ambivalent on the question of forcing more kids to take standardized tests. I don't like the idea of teaching to the test, but I'm in favor of high standards and accountability.

But on one issue I am clear. One of the bedrock principles of conservativism is that government regulations interfere with the workings of the free market. Governments should regulate as lightly as possible, because too much regulation impedes innovation and imposes unnecessary costs. The argument makes some basic sense, although it is often used by conservatives and businesspeople to fight environmental, labor, and other laws just because they don't want to pay for them. But the basic idea is this: imposing excessive regulations from the federal government impedes innovation.

But that's exactly what NCLB does! The worst possible way to encourage Americans to innovate is for the federal government to impose excessive regulations, according to conservatives. And yet, a conservative Republican president did precisely that in the realm of education. What boggles my mind is that no one seemed to notice.

So this article will hopefully start some very fruitful thinking. One meme that has started percolating around LA is that the problem with education is not lack of money (although more wouldn't hurt), but the bloated bureaucracy at LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District). This is one reason I am in favor of charter schools; they are outside of that bureaucracy, and are better at coming up with creative, entrepreneurial solutions to educational reform.

There are many, many, many passionate, dedicated teachers out there who know how to teach kids (like my brother). If you took of survey of them and asked how many of them think we need more rules, regulations, and bureaucracy in education, my guess is that the number answering "yes" would be not many.

At the heart of the conservative argument is that we should trust businesspeople over the government. I know many trustworthy businesspeople (including my Dad). But, personally, I trust teachers more than I trust businesspeople.

One interesting aspect of this article is who wrote it. Cory Booker is the Mayor of Newark, who has made quite a name for himself by taking down the political machine of the former mayor. I know nothing about Ted Mitchell. The third person is easily the most influential. John Doerr is a venture capitalist, probably the most successful one ever. Some of the companies he has help start include Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Netscape, Amazon, and Google. The man knows something about encouraging innovation. We should listen to him.