THE SLOW LEARNERS DRAG EVERYONE DOWN. Insta Pundit: Harrison Bergeron, call your office. It's depressing.

As many as three-quarters of [British] state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote 'elitism', an Ofsted study says today.

Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.

Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils.

A commenter correctly identifies the outcome.

I'm worried about rising caste differences, but I think schools are only a small part of the problem. A diminishing number of families teach their children to dress and groom for a good first impression; speak and write coherently; show poise in formal settings; and so on.

Those who do these things, send their children on up the social scale. Those who don't, condemn their children to lives of clueless subservience. Whether they can factor polynomials or conjugate irregular verbs is pretty much beside the point.

Until the common schools, beginning in kindergarten, stress development of the habits of the upper middle class in all their students, the social stratification will only get worse.

SUN AND SNOW.

What is Soviet engine without winter?

The Steppes of DeKalb, 12 December 2009.

(I must work on airbrushing out those executive boxes in Crisis of Capitalism acres in background.)

THE HOME OFFICE OF EDUCATIONAL MEDIOCRITY. It is, of course, the Colleges of Deaducation. James Joyner elaborates.

This is the high school-ification of college teaching, alas. Partly, it’s a sad but understandable response to an increasingly legalistic culture. But it’s also a function of the fact that the people who run universities these days are career educrats rather than classroom veterans who’ve been promoted up the department chair-dean-provost route. These people have “degrees” in Higher Ed Administration or somesuch and have the mindset of bean counters everywhere.

To call it high school-ification is to pull punches. The article he links suggests that allowing the slow learners to drag everybody else down with them is the essence of access.

YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THIS. It's the key to economics.

All scarce goods are rationed somehow. It doesn't matter how the good is allocated: If there is more of the good desired at a zero price than is available, some mechanism develops that determines who gets it.

Read and understand.

RETURNING TO DUTY. The Northern Illinois University review panel clears Chief Grady and reinstates him effective today. The university will work with local law enforcement agencies to improve working relations with university police, and the report on the 14 February shootings is expected to be released in February 2010.

WHILE I'M IN GRADING GULAG.

 We salute the efforts of our comrades the combine drivers in bringing in the harvest before the first snows dust the steppes, and we wish all faculty continued solidarity during the struggles of examination week.

5 December 2009.

I WISH IT COULD BE THAT EASY.

At Phi Beta Cons, Jane Shaw lauds Hofstra and Northeastern discontinuing their football programs.

At first, I was pleased with the news. Major sports — football, especially — are costly to universities and often threaten the educational mission. To drop football, given its strong proponents, is a courageous step, one that wouldn’t be taken without good reason.

After further review, she sees a threat to the continued existence of the private universities.

Is dropping football another sign that state universities are “crowding out” private universities? Private schools, which depend heavily on tuition, must weigh their priorities carefully, while state universities can more easily tap into taxpayer resources. Could dropping football, while eminently sensible in some cases, push more students to the public schools with their well-funded athletic programs and ample state revenues?

Let's take this proposition seriously. If she is suggesting that many potential collegians are not serious, more interested in beer 'n circus and the rabbit culture than in cultivating habits of mind, and that the private universities dwindling market share reflects that revelation of preference, by all means, let's develop that argument.

HEY, DUKE, THIS IS A HOCKEY GAME, NOT A CULTURAL STUDIES SEMINAR. You say it was a basketball game? The faithful didn't have to taunt "Duke can't skate."

THE ULTIMATE REVENGE OF THE NERDS.


Context at Chicago Boyz.

A NEW BACH CHRISTMAS CANTATA.

It is an entrant in the Chicago Tribune's New Holiday Classics contest. Voting remains open through December 6.

(Via Northern Illinois University.)

I DON'T HAVE TO MAKE THINGS UP. Suit: College Lowered Standards For Revenue.

In an effort to boost tuition revenues, a State University of New York campus lowered admissions and retention standards to admit unqualified – predominately black – applicants who had little chance of graduating, according to a lawsuit filed by a former dean.

The article identifies today's Cold Spring Shops Righteous Professor.

Thomas Cronin, a physics professor, responded to [provost Anne] Myers’s December 2008 e-mail by labeling the practices “corrupt” and even possibly “criminal."

“The list of academically and morally corrupt practices that ensue from our inability to adhere to our own standards is rather long,” he wrote. “One of our worst offenses is that we admit, and re-admit students absolutely unqualified and absolutely incapable of achieving a college degree. Many go into debt or cause their families to go into debt into [sic] order to attempt a college degree. This is an absolutely corrupt practice and it may be criminal. If we have done this to even one student, then we are guilty of a low form of corruption."

I like that formulation. Access-assessment-remediation-retention is corruption, indeed.

HERE I STAND WITH MY LAW, AND HERE YOU STAND WITH YOUR INVASIVE SPECIES. Process worshippers. Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, not content with killing business in her state, now intends to sue Mother Nature.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm wants Michigan's attorney general to take legal action to prevent Asian carp from invading the Great Lakes.

Granholm and Lt. Gov. John Cherry sent Attorney General Mike Cox a letter Wednesday urging him to "pursue every legal tool" available.

They say among possible actions are closing the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, part of a waterway linking Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River.

A Granholm spokeswoman says Michigan could file lawsuits against the state of Illinois and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It also could try to prevent Southern fish farms that use Asian carp from importing more of them.

Those fish must have natural predators in their native habitat. I suspect, however, that land sharks with Lexuses and Rolexes are not among them.

AS YOU DID IT TO ONE OF THE LEAST, YOU DID IT TO ME. The All Saints Episcopal Church, in a tony neighborhood of Chicago, operates a food bank with health services.

The single file outside is as tidy an economic barometer as any Labor Department news release. Federal stimulus aside, the line only gets bigger and inspires grousing by a few neighbors that the church is “attracting” misbegotten souls from afar.

A recent news story suggests some neighbors have gone beyond grousing.

Chicago Police Officer Robert Perez said a church official told police the damage may have been related to a story published Thursday by the New York Times that noted the economic disparities between those who frequent the All Saints soup kitchen and the residents of the surrounding neighborhood. The story referred to the church as a place that keeps "fellow citizens from drowning."

Perry said seven months ago church officials met with the alderman and neighbors over safety concerns regarding the soup kitchen. After those conversations, the church agreed to pay $12,000 out of the kitchen's budget for another off-duty police officer, in addition to the one they already had providing security. That seemed to quell the complaints, she said.

Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas.

SOMETIMES IT IS SIMPLE. The dean at Anonymous Community takes a road trip. By default.

(My one-step process for making train travel more appealing: speed it up. Okay, Stephen, have at it.)

That link, and a companion link at Inside Higher Ed, has sent numerous wise and worldly readers this way.

I've been having at it and at it and at it, and with a few more minutes searching the archives could probably demonstrate a body of work on that point that would put some professors to shame.

To make that simple improvement possible, however, requires those wise and worldly readers to get involved. A legislator who receives occasional observations from a known train nut about archaic speed regulations doesn't have to give it much respect. Throw in a few English professors and philosophers and environmental scientists and parents and antique-shop owners and the dynamic changes. Inform yourself, then get involved!

OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. King Banaian follows up on Recant, or Be Excommunicated with an alert to observers of higher education.

If what Climategate teaches is the inherent flaws of the peer-review process, that would be worth as much as sticking another fork in the hockey stick. It relies on people motivated by professional ethics, people who choose to be academics for a variety of reasons that would make you skeptical of trusting them with your car, let alone with the search for truth.

Too true.

A CATECHISM FOR THE HOLY INQUISITION.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has challenged the University of Minnesota for treating race-class-gender-culture models of social structure as the received theory for schoolteacher preparation.

The college intends to mandate particular beliefs and values "dispositions and commitments"-for future teachers. These are not just things like the disposition to deal with classroom discipline, but demands that future teachers demonstrate "cultural competence" as defined by the college's Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group.

The college even intends to redesign its admissions process so that it screens out people with the "wrong" beliefs and values as well as those who either do not have sufficient "cultural competence" or who the college judges will not be able to be converted to the "correct" beliefs and values-even after remedial re-education.

That these models have yet to produce measurable improvements in the literacy, numeracy, or sociability of K-12 graduates has not yet come up for discussion.

AN OPPORTUNITY TO DEFLATE THE BUBBLE? Notre Dame fires football coach Charlie Weis. The article details the team's continued underachievement, and a televised sports report noted previous coaches who did not live up to Knute Rockne standards. Accompanying articles suggest disinterest on the part of head coaches at other prominent football programs in the job.

Notre Dame has the opportunity to emulate the University of Chicago, and perhaps to induce California-Berkeley and UCLA to get out from some of the financial stresses their football programs are placing on the academic mission.

OUR THOUGHTS ARE WITH THE RUSSIANS. The Moscow to St. Petersburg Nevsky Express has been bombed, with serious loss of life.

Moscow Station in St. Petersburg.

The bombing occurred on a remote stretch of track, not easily reached by ambulances or med-evac helicopters, and a second bomb that exploded nearby later might have been timed to cause injury to rescuers.

TEACHING IS TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO NOVICES. The Wall Street Journal files a report on the finalists for Baylor University's Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching.

As much as [Williams mathematician Edward Burger] finds math fascinating, he realizes that most people will not use calculus after college. The utilitarian promise "is an empty one," he notes. "You don't need to know how to build a bridge to go over one." He says that the hardest thing professors can ask themselves is "the 10-year question." "What will my students retain from my class 10 years out?" And so his lecture is devoted to showing the audience how to "think mathematically."

Prof. Burger, who acknowledges being one of the tougher graders on campus—"I don't give grades; I just report the news"—says that he is only convinced a student understands a concept when he can "explain it to an 8-year-old." I wouldn't put it past him to bring a fourth-grader to class for that purpose, but he says he just forces students to explain concepts without using jargon.

The columnist notes that higher education loses something by leaving the introductory classes in the hands of relatively inexperienced people.

In an ideal world, senior professors, who have the most experience teaching, would be forced to teach freshman survey courses. Instead, professors at many universities are told by their mentors not to focus on teaching at all. And the joke on many campuses is that the winner of a school's teaching award is guaranteed to be denied tenure.

It takes a long time to develop the ability to distinguish a profound, but ill-formed question, from a clueless question, and to be able to answer both tactfully.

Go, read and understand all of it.

EARN YOUR PEACE PRIZE. The Friday night vigils continue, with participants taking the Obama administration to task for continuing the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. (The post title comes from one of the newer banners on display.)