Collegiate Trends

National Review has an excellent guest article* today by Ryan T. Anderson (assistant editor at First Things). It's worth a read for those who are familiar with collegiate settings these days, and raises some interesting questions as well. Though I really recommend the entire article, I will introduce it with this quote:

"One wishes that this were an isolated incident, but it’s not. The Princeton administration practices a double standard so pervasive it doesn’t even notice it. It is extraordinarily sensitive to every minority under the sun — except for traditionalists."*
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Source: [*] National Review Online [Ryan T. Anderson].

Educational "Tolerance"

National Review Online (which, by the way, is an excellent and highly respectable website) has an article* today on the concept of tolerance and its boundaries as a peacemaker. I can't possible summarize the article and then keep this post short, so I simply submit that it really deserves a look. I do offer this quote from the article:

"Tolerance is a cardinal virtue when it entails parties disagreeing over questions of beliefs, values, and culture, but respecting the rights of their opponents to live and politic within the confines of the American constitutional order. However, in today’s colleges and universities, tolerance has too often evolved into a watery, uncritical acceptance of illiberal behavior." (emphasis supplied).
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Source: National Review Online [Frederick M. Hess].

School for Money

Here is a poster story of incentives (courtesy of KVOA News)*:

"More than 20,000 Arizona teens dropped out of the class of 2006. To fight the problem, 75 students from low income families at Amphi High and 100 from Rincon high were picked for the new program. The students will get $25 a week as an incentive to stay in school. A local nonprofit will pay for the project."

Is monetizing a reward for attending mandatory school the best--or even good--answer? While it may be rewarding to the number of students in the program, it does not serve as any sort of long-term educational system fix. One can't really blame local officials, given their limited arsenal of tools. Even so, throwing money at a problem will--at best--keep something temporarily static.

Stepping back, we can see a bigger picture. Take a look at these statistics:

[1] Spending - when one converts international education expenditures into equivalent units, U.S. "education expenditures as a percentage of GDP" for primary schooling in 2000 was 3.9%. Germany: 3.4%. Japan: 3%. France 4.3%.**

[2] Results - "U.S. 9 and 13-year-olds performed at a level higher than most of their peers in other countries in reading, roughly the same in science, and lower in mathematics."***

Even if this point on spending and results is at all misguided because spending in this country tends to support administrative ends and not necessarily teachers and materials, then perhaps the over-arching lesson to be learned is that we must necessarily adapt the school system instead of simply attempting to increase funding. More studies need to be done to determine if current changes such as charter schools or other programs have merit.
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Sources: [*] WorldNow & KVOA [Ed Tribble]. [**] & [***] United States Department of Education - Institute of Education Sciences.