School vouchers and college enrollment

There's an interesting study out from Harvard and Brookings using a randomized experiment to measure how vouchers for elementary students to private schools in the 1990s affect their enrollment in college.  Apparently, there's no significant change in overall college enrollment, but among African-American students the effect is large, statistically significant, and positive--a twenty-four percent increase.  It is also associated with significant increases for full-time college attendance, enrollment in selective four-year schools, and enrollment in private four-year colleges.

education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

Evidently, as experiments like Head Start showed several years ago, a little bit of help at an early age can make a major difference for some people later on.  How interesting that one of the better ways to help African-American students get an education--and a better life--is to get them out of the private public schools.

My mother is a retired public school teacher.  My father was a principal in St. Louis, eventually ending up in charge of the school for juveniles held in jail.  I know how hard they worked.  I know the horror stories they'd bring home.  I also know--as they did--that the present system has some fundamental problems.  It tells you something that my Dad was happiest at the prison school: he found it better for the students, and more conducive to learning, than the standard public school.  He even had students who admitted to getting arrested in order to get back into his school.  What does that tell us about the public alternatives?

Related articles

• Study: Vouchers help black students
• Study of school vouchers & college enrollment shows large effects for African Americans
• Do private school vouchers help? New study offers data.

Global Threats

Image via Wikipedia

The ink is dry on the contract for the new textbook I'm to co-author.  It's entitled Global Threats (CQ Press, 2013), and I'm a little anxious about it.  Last time I tried to write a textbook it was on Soviet politics--and the Soviet Union collapsed.  Trying to keep up with what was happening, while it happening, was impossible. Even if I could have kept up with everything up to the day I handed in my sections, the book would have been overtaken by events long before it was out the door of the publisher.  Trying to do the impossible produced a lot of unnecessary anxiety then, and thinking about it still triggers a little anxiety today.

The good news is I know better now than to attempt the impossible.  As long as I keep my perfectionist tendencies in line, this new book should not only be possible, but fun.  How often do I get (paid) to speculate on as many possibilities as I can think of for the collapse of nations and civilizations?  The book encourages brainstorming, and that's one of my favorite activities.  It's as if I get to write a bad science fiction novel without the going to the trouble of developing believable characters.

So if I get anxious it's my own fault: I'm the one who can choose to set the bar higher than any real person can achieve, or worry about how my work will be received by others.  Instead, I'll do my best to produce good work and have some fun.

How bad is it?

Porter Stansbury, already noted for his gloomy predictions about the American economy, finds "the numbers tell us America is in decline... if not outright collapse."  His analysis starts with an estimate of real per capita GDP/time, based on a market-basket of currencies and/or gold.  Even this has pitfalls.  But, anyway, he uses a commodity index (the CRB) until 1975, and after the US is off the gold standard he switches to gold, and the chart looks like this:

I don't know that this is the best way to estimate what is going on, but clearly something is.  And this misses what may be the greatest problem of all: that per capita GDP tells us nothing about the distribution of wealth.  Things got better, it seems, in the years from Reagan to George W. Bush--but how much of that was consolidated in the hands of a few?  Even ignoring that, however, after 2001 things look bad for almost everyone.

Why bring this up here?  Because economic failure promotes desperation, and crime, and a police state mentality.

Stansbury connects the decline to an ethic of entitlement, coupled with vast (and unpunished) corruption at the top.  Henry Paulson and Tim Geitner should be behind bars for lying to Congress and providing more accurate insider information to old associates.  Congress doesn't do anything about it (perhaps because the Congress as a whole has an ever-widening gap with their consitutents, based in part on their exemption from insider-trading laws).

He also wants to claim that there's a direct correspondence to the Great Society programs, either by design (to buy off troublesome groups) or error (the basic errors of large-scale government planning systems).  That's debateable, but what isn't in doubt are the numbers--and the spiral of poverty and crime and incarceration they represent.  Some data points, again from Stansbury:

According to the NAACP, Texas taxpayers spent $175 million in 2009 to imprison residents from a small part of Houston – only 10 zip codes out of 75. Thus, people from neighborhoods that are home to only about 10% of the city's population account for more than 33% of the state's entire $500 million annual prison spending. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor and African American. 

In Pennsylvania, taxpayers will spend $290 million in 2009 to imprison residents from just 11 of Philadelphia's neighborhoods, representing about 25% of the city population. On this relatively small urban area, the state will spend roughly half its $500 million prison budget. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor and African American. 

In New York, taxpayers will spend $539 million to imprison residents from only 24 of New York City's 200 different neighborhoods. Only 16% of the city's population lives in these areas, but they will account for nearly half of the state's $1.1 billion prison budget. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor and African American.

This is not about race, or at least not only about race.  In Detroit, where twenty-seven percent of African-American males graduate from high school, only nineteen percent of white males do so.  In practical terms, in an economy that's increasingly technical and global, these people have little or no chance.

My dad used to be a principal in the schools of St. Louis.  Eventually, he ended up in charge of the school for incarcerated minors.  I'm not sure what's worse: that he found that to be one of his safer assignments, or the fact that some of his students would commit crimes to get off the streets and return to the relative safely of his school.

Today, this country has more than seven million people in prison or on parole, more that any other industrialized state.  The prison population has grown from less than half a million people to more than 2.5 million today--and the building and running of prisons has become a profitable growth industry.  What does that say about us?

Stansbury identifies villians: democrats, republicans, government employee unions, big business.  I don't agree with all of his analysis.  But it's worth a look at the start of what is likely to be a very, very difficult year.

It's a wonder anyone ever trusts eyewitness testimony

Just follow the instructions.  How did you do?

For the undergraduate IR student

Freshmen with an interest in international relations ask me where they should start. What should they read? Fortunately, Steven Walt has put together a very good list.

My "top ten" books every student of International Relations should read | Stephen M. Walt:

They're not necessarily "the best," nor are they a complete list, but they are classics, relatively easy to read, and give you a feed for how people who analyze this stuff for a living think.

The failure of the establishment

Walter Russell Mead does it again (from his blog on The American Interest):

I don’t want to make this a habit, and I suspect he doesn’t either, but Paul Krugman and I are once again in (very) partial agreement. We both think the American elite has intellectually and morally lost its way, and we agree that the problems our country faces today have more to do with elite breakdown than popular stupidity.

***

That is not what the elite thinks, by and large. To listen to many bien pensant American intellectuals and above-the-salt journalists, America faces a shocking problem today: the cluelessness, greed, arrogance and bigotry of the American public. American elites are genuinely and sincerely convinced that the American masses don’t understand the world, don’t realize that American exceptionalism is a mental disease, want infinite government benefits while paying zero tax, and cling to their Bibles and their guns despite all the peer reviewed social science literature that demonstrates the danger and the worthlessness of both.

***

[In reality] The American people are less prejudiced, more globally aware and more willing to meet other cultures and societies halfway than ever before. Minorities today are better protected in law and more fairly treated by the public than ever in our history. No previous generation has been as determined to give women a fair chance in life, or to attack the foul legacy of racism. The American people have never been as religiously tolerant as they are today, as concerned about the environment, or more willing to make sacrifices around the world to promote the peace and well being of humanity as a whole.

By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead. It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors. It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations. Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed.

It's worth a full read.

Rethinking liberal arts

(Reposted at Duck of Minerva)

What does a citizen need to know? What skills and knowledge should we assume in our interactions with others? What makes a person a well-rounded person? The issues go back for centuries, and every so often some suggests modifications to the list of "liberal arts." I teach at a university with a "liberal arts" requirement, and I know from experience the battles to have a class listed as required (or optional) mix issues of academic politics and teaching philosophy. They can make or break particular classes, or entire programs.

A recent reconsideration of "liberal arts" (note: not the liberal arts) is available at the link below. What began as a series of conversations on a blog has been refined to a short book. The contributors go out out of their way to declare their list is not canonical, but here's their table of contents:

Introduction Timothy Carmody, Robin Sloan vii

Attention Economics Andrew Fitzgerald . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Brevity . . . . . . . . . . Gavin Craig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Coding and Decoding Diana Kimball 8

Creativity Aaron McLeran 12

Finding Dan Levine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16

Food Gavin Craig, Theresa Mlinarcik 18

Genderfuck . . . . . . . . Laura Portwood-Stacer . . . . . . . 22

Home Economics . . . . . . Jennifer Rensenbrink . . . . . 24

Inaccuracy . . . . . . . . Alex Litel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Iteration . . . . . . . . . Robin Sloan . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Journalism . . . . . Timothy Carmody, Matt Thompson 34

Mapping . . . . . . . . . . Jimmy Stamp 36

Marketing Matt Thompson 40

Micropolitics Matt Thompson 42

Myth and Magic . . . . . . Tiara Shafiq 44

Negotiation . . . . . . . . Matthew Penniman . . . . . . . . . . 48

Photography Timothy Carmody 52

Play Matt Thompson 56

Reality Engineering . . . . Rex Sorgatz . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Translation Rachel Leow 62

Video Literacy Kasia Cieplak Mayr-von Baldegg . . . 66

About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

So, what do you think? What needs to be added to the list of liberal arts? What needs to be dropped? Is there a place for what we teach?

new-liberal-arts-2009.pdf (application/pdf Object)