Expand retirement options, shrink teacher doldrums

http://www.mdjonline.com/content/tncms/live/

BENITA M. DODD: Expand retirement options, shrink teacher doldrums

Jan 31, 2017

PAGE, the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, has surveyed its members and the findings, reported in its latest 2017 newsletter (PAGE One), are depressing.

The survey found that nearly half of teachers (45 percent) say they are unlikely to remain in education for the next 10 years. Sadly, a majority — 53 percent — also said they would not recommend a career in education.

The report notes, “With the current teacher shortage and continuing teacher pipeline issues, these statistics are of great concern to PAGE.”

The survey also found that 59 percent of the respondents oppose converting the Teacher Retirement System from a defined benefit (pension) plan to a defined contribution (401(k)-type) plan. This is no surprise, given that PAGE reports 70 percent of the respondents were “veteran classroom teachers with more than 10 years in service,” according to the article.

After all, if you’ve invested that much in your pension plan already, why would you want to change the benefits?

Here’s why: To draw young, enthusiastic new teachers into the “pipeline,” it’s important to understand two things. The profession has become far more transient, with people changing districts, states and careers. According to the Fordham Institute, the average experience of a teacher who leaves the profession is 15 years; fewer than one in four stay for 25 years. Encouraging the profession means acknowledging the changing nature of education careers and adapting to that by facilitating portability of their retirement investment.

Second, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation’s Friday Facts of Jan. 28 cites a Fordham Institute study that finds teachers are getting a raw retirement deal.

Fordham examined teacher retirement systems in the nation’s largest school districts and found teachers have to wait an average of 25 years before the value of their pensions are larger than what they contribute themselves. Fordham cited Gwinnett County, Georgia’s largest public school district, where this “crossover point” for teachers is 13 years.

A Gwinnett County teacher who leaves after five years of service (or at any point before the vesting point of 10 years) is not eligible to receive pension benefits at all, because she has not vested. Her pension wealth is zero, and at five years she has contributed a total of $14,276 into the retirement systems. (In reality, should this teacher separate from the systems before she vests, she can only take a refund, which may or may not be credited with interest.)

In summary: The article in PAGE One declares there’s a teacher shortage in Georgia and reports that teachers don’t plan to stay more than 10 years and discourage others from entering the profession. It’s befuddling that teachers and teacher organizations with a commitment to educating Georgia’s children would oppose — for new hires, at least — a defined contribution plan, a 401(k)-type plan. At the very least, offer new teachers the hybrid defined benefit/defined contribution retirement plan in place since 2008 for all new Georgia state employees (with an option for existing employees to participate).

Portable retirement benefits would attract younger teachers by offering greater control over their careers so they don’t feel locked in or compelled to stay a minimum of 13 years in a profession merely to extract retirement benefits.

To oppose a 401(k)-type system seems to be cutting off your nose to spite your face. As a teacher, if you care about the children, you should care about who’s left behind to educate them when you leave. And about what kind of taxpayer debt you’re leaving behind for those children to cover those over-extended, taxpayer-funded pension plans.

According to PAGE, there are currently 261,408 active TRS members and 119,038 retirees who receive an average monthly benefit of $3,068.

Read more about Pension Reform in the Georgia Public Policy Foundation Guide to the Issues.

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http://allonpolitics.allongeorgia.com/a-georgia-attorneys-open-letter-to-sen-johnny-isakson/

A Georgia attorney’s open letter to Sen. Johnny Isakson

January 29, 2017

The following article is an open letter opinion piece submitted by Georgia attorney Jane Robbins. The views expressed below do not necessarily reflect those of AllOnGeorgia.

For years parents have fought the Common Core national standards, which have survived in Georgia under the misnomer “Georgia Standards of Excellence.” The resistance transcends the standards themselves and addresses also their underlying philosophy – that the purpose of education is to create a workforce, and schools should therefore train students in “skills” rather than academic knowledge. This workforce-development philosophy also holds that it’s never too early for the government to begin this training – preschoolers are fair game.

In questioning U.S. Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos at her Senate hearing recently, Sen. Johnny Isakson adopted this children-as-widgets world view. Did Georgians who voted to re-elect the Senator in November realize they endorsed an ally of the statist progressive-education establishment?

There are numerous problems with the idea that education should be designed for workforce development. First, the practical problems – how does the government predict what jobs will exist and what skills they’ll require when students graduate? How does the government determine which students will be interested in which jobs and therefore will need what type of training, especially since many students don’t decide on a career until early adulthood? (Georgia seeks to solve that problem by nudging students toward a “career pathway” as early as grade 6, an approach of self-evident madness.)

Progressive statists also argue that the 21st century changes everything, that it’s now insufficient to give students the classical education – great literature, mathematics, history, science, art – that schools used to offer. But if that education was so deficient, how did men and women who received it go on to establish empires, create breathtaking works of art, generate untold societal wealth, and land on the moon? A student trained for a particular type of job will flounder if he heads in a different direction; a student with a genuine education will be equipped to take on anything.

More profoundly, the workforce-development model ignores that students are human beings, not cogs in a machine. It is, as Professor Anthony Esolen says, “a vision which is strictly utilitarian, man with the soul amputated.” But this is what Common Core and workforce-developers have imposed. 

Nevertheless, policy-makers on both the left and the right have adopted this view — the left, perhaps, because such a scheme maximizes government power to operate a managed economy and control individual lives, and the right because Big Business promotes any “education” system that promises a pipeline of workers who have been trained on the taxpayers’ dime.

Whatever motivates Isakson’s position on this issue, here’s what he said to DeVos at the hearing (about 1:02:14 on the tape): “We have to come up with the programs necessary to train our kids to be able to do the jobs of the 21st century.”

Disturbingly, he made this statement in the context of discussing . . . preschool. He declared (at around 1:00:26) that he wants to  “work towards requiring 4-year-old pre-kindergarten for every student in the country . . . .” It wasn’t clear if he meant requiring toddlers to be sent to preschool, or requiring states to offer such “early learning” to parents who want it. 

But either interpretation is troubling. If the former, Isakson clearly isn’t familiar with the studies showing the ineffectiveness of or even harm done by taking little ones from their parents for hours every day. (Yes, some studies suggest otherwise, but experts such as pediatrician Dr. Karen Effrem have demonstrated why their conclusions are flawed. And even if the evidence is mixed, parents have the right to protect their children from any system that may not be in their best interests.) And if he merely meant the federal government should require states to offer preschool to willing participants, where is the federal authority to do that? The Constitution gives the federal government no role – none – in education policy, so Isakson’s suggestion that states should be “required” to do anything is anti-constitutional and therefore anti-conservative.

Isakson also extolled the benefits of using state money to pay for private but government-approved preschool. “If you get the private sector making an investment in public education and have seamless standards that everybody commits to,” government can turn every private provider into a government agency. Because what are those “seamless standards” the private preschools would have to adopt? Common Core – workforce-development for 4-year-olds.

Maybe Isakson simply hasn’t thought through his positions on education. That’s unfortunate, since he serves on the Senate committee that (unconstitutionally) guides education policy. Or maybe he has, in which case his claims of being a conservative are revealed as nonsense. Either way, Georgians lose.

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Jane Robbins is an attorney and a senior fellow with the American Principles Project. She has crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She has published numerous works about these issues and has testified before the legislatures of eleven states. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.

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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/k12_drain_this_swamp.html#ixzz4WxtSAItr

K-12: Drain This Swamp

January 27, 2017

By Bruce Deitrick Price

Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp in Washington.  This task is especially urgent in that large, malodorous part of the swamp known as Education.

The Education Establishment makes everything murky and unproductive by an endless spew of jargon, incoherent theories, goofy methods, phony research, and new names for failed ideas.  Finally, no two Americans can talk constructively about anything in education.  It's as if they are talking across vast linguistic and cultural barriers, not over coffee at Starbucks.  Education is now the fog-shrouded domain of dumbing down.  Pervasive murkiness is a big part of the reason why so much educational reform remains stymied.  Nothing moves fast in a swamp.

Here, then, is a simple formula for quickly draining the educational swamp: eliminate all the counterproductive ideas introduced over the last 85 years.  That's it.  These bad ideas, like the viruses in your computer, did not appear by accident.  They were systematically and deliberately placed in the schools by John Dewey's socialist "change agents."  The good news is that these bad ideas can be removed in that same deliberate way – just as a technician removes viruses from your computer.  Presto: schools will be better and cheaper.

Start by eliminating any reading instruction that is not phonics.  (That would include such folderol as Whole Word, Whole Language, Sight-Words, Balanced Literacy, High-Frequency Words, Dolch Words, Fry Words, and others.)  Systematic phonics teaches a simple sequence: kids learn the alphabet; they learn that each letter stands for a sound; they learn to blend those sounds.  This process moves much faster than many people might realize, given the current low level of performance.  Phonics experts say most children learn to read in the first grade, and usually by the midpoint of first grade.  If children aren't learning to read in the first grade, you know you are in a swamp.

(To accelerate reading and other academic activities, children should learn cursive handwriting.  They may or may not use this skill later in life; this doesn't matter.  Cursive serves a vital purpose in the early years of school: it makes children more precise, careful, and observant.  Learning cursive speeds up both physical and cognitive abilities.)

Discard the last vestiges of New Math, Reform Math, and Common Core Math.  Despite superficial differences, these pedagogies agree that basic skills need not be mastered, instruction should spiral wildly from one topic to another, non-standard methods should be emphasized, and if every student ends up dependent on a calculator, that's fine.  The frustration level is very high; these dysfunctional methods typically make children cry and adults scream.

The biggest boondoggle in public schools is called Constructivism.  (Like any good criminal, it's known by a bunch of aliases, such as Project-Based Learning, Experiential Method, Discovery Method, and others.)  The idea behind all these names is brilliantly perverse.  Here it is: teachers must not teach.  They can hang around in the back of the room.  They can murmur approval, but they must not teach directly to the students.  Students are expected to teach themselves.  Almost everything labeled Constructivist should be thrown out.  Teachers must themselves be well educated; they can then be let loose to do their job.

Another idea that should be eliminated, for the most part, is called Cooperative Learning.  Children work in small groups.  They think as one, create as one, and succeed or fail as one.  Here we have socialist world-building inside each classroom.  Socialists love this idea.  However, as you can imagine, students lose the ability to think independently and to solve problems by themselves.  Furthermore, teachers don't have a good read on which kids are advancing at a proper pace and which need help.

Another prejudice to discard as soon as possible is the one against memorization.  Wouldn't it be better if children actually acquire knowledge, an outcome collectivist ideologues disdain?  Apparently, their goal is that all children end up equally empty-headed and mediocre.  Ideally, children would again be able to memorize multiplication tables, poetry, dates, famous people, place names, spelling, grammar, anything they would be better off knowing.  Let education begin!

Still another content-killer is the sophistry called self-esteem.  If Mike can spell Mississippi and Ted cannot, Ted will feel bad.  This can't be allowed.  So what does the school do?  It makes sure Mike doesn't learn to spell any more long words.  The acquisition of knowledge is slowed down so slower kids will feel okay about themselves, but in return, they are locked in place forever.  Meanwhile, the smarter kids are taught to accept low goals and standards.  This one pathetic little "virus" can crush a school system all by itself.

Another in-your-face sophistry is called Multiculturalism, which is often partnered with Relevance.  Multiculturalism says kids can study only foreign cultures.  This leads to the absurdity that American children know the names of Chinese rivers but don't know the name of the Mississippi.  Relevance cuts from the other direction, insisting that children should study only the world they live in.  If interpreted narrowly, this approach keeps children from learning foreign countries, ancient history, and anything the child does not encounter every day.  In practice, anything you want to add to a K-12 curriculum can be dismissed because it's not Multicultural or it's not Relevant.  In consequence, very little is taught in our public schools.

QED: Our Education Establishment is diabolically clever.

Let's also throw out the idea, long ago popularized by "progressive" educators, that if a classroom is confused, disrupted, and not very different from a playground or lunatic asylum, the children will learn faster because it will be oh, so creative.  This might be true occasionally; more typically, this is just a sophistry in defense of chaos.  Send children outside for physical activity. In the classroom, let children run and play intellectually.  Create a mood that will encourage serious learning.  Disorderly, dangerous classrooms reveal that the Education Establishment is not serious about learning.

Our high-level educators are obsessed with social engineering, not so much with academic progress.  I believe that all these bad ideas were injected into the schools as a way of putting the brakes on intellectual success.  The biggest brake is obviously prolonged illiteracy.  If kids can't read, they can't learn.  The other gimmicks enumerated so far, when piled on top of semi-literacy, create the ineffective, horribly wasteful K-12 we have now.

You can't ask parents to be more involved when the system is incomprehensible by design.  The Education Establishment seems to love strategies that don't work, and then murkiness to cover up this tragic truth.  If we want a rebirth of education, we need far more transparency and clarity.  Only then can parents and community leaders understand what's happening to the children.  Only then can the country have the schools we need.

Bruce Deitrick Price explains theories and methods on his education site Improve-Education.org.  For info on his four new novels, see his literary site Lit4u.com.

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http://www.georgiapolicy.org/2017/01/new-study-finds-georgia-underreports-public-school-spending/

New Study Finds Georgia Underreports Public School Spending

GEORGIA PUBLIC POLICY FOUNDATION NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
January 26, 2017

Contact: Benita Dodd
benitadodd@georgiapolicy.org | (404) 256-4050 

New Study Finds Georgia Underreports Public School Spending

Atlanta – For decades, Georgia’s Department of Education has underreported by billions of dollars what the state spends on public schools, according to an Issue Analysis released today at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation’s annual National School Choice Week event.

The report, “Balancing the Books in Education,” by Foundation Senior Fellow and Kennesaw State University economist Dr. Benjamin Scafidi, notes that official state websites give the impression that taxpayers spend billions of dollars less on K-12 public education than is actually spent.

For example, while the Georgia Department of Education website reports spending figures of $15.665 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2016, Georgia reported a total amount of $19.158 billion in public education spending to other government agencies, Scafidi found.

With an estimated $3.5 billion in FY 2016 public school spending omitted from the state website, it seems spending per public school student was $9,020 when, in fact, the state spent $11,031 – more than 22 percent more – per student.

“Clearly, this ‘missing money’ clouds Georgians’ understanding about how much and where public education dollars are being spent,” Scafidi said.

He found that between 1988 and 2014, Georgia students saw their funds increase by 56 percent on a per-student, inflation-adjusted basis. That increase did not lead to an increase in teacher salaries (which actually declined slightly) but to a “staffing surge,” according to the Issue Analysis.

The staff increase in teachers and other school personnel surged ahead of what was needed to accommodate the student enrollment growth, and this had a large opportunity cost, according to the Issue Analysis.

“Had Georgia public schools increased the number of non-teachers at the same rate as the increase in students, Georgia public schools would have seen $1.08 billion in annual, recurring savings,” Scafidi writes.

“These funds could have been used, among other things, to give teachers a permanent raise of almost $10,000 per year or to give $8,000 education savings accounts (ESAs) to the families of more than 135,000 students.”

Scafidi points out that the underreporting has occurred for “at least the past 20 years.” He urges the Georgia Department of Education to immediately begin reporting total revenue and expenditure data for current and past years, and to provide the data “in an easily accessible, prominent and user-friendly way.”

“Government agencies already have the data, given that the information is reported in full to the federal government,” Scafidi said of his findings. “It makes no sense to withhold information or keep two sets of books. That’s inefficient and results in incomplete numbers cited in the media, in litigation and by policymakers.”

Worse, he notes, when traditional public school spending is underreported, the funds to school choice programs such as charter schools are further reduced because their allocations are tied to (and less than) that of traditional public schools.

“Without an accurate accounting of how much is already spent, too many Georgians believe the answer to the state’s education challenges lies in more funding,” said Foundation President Kelly McCutchen. “Yet several states are spending less per pupil with better results. Dr. Scafidi’s eye-opening study reinforces that transparency, wiser spending and competition through choice will improve education for Georgia’s children.”

Access the study here; to arrange an interview with Dr. Scafidi, email info@georgiapolicy.org or call Benita Dodd at 404-256-4050.

About the Georgia Public Policy Foundation: Established in 1991, the Foundation is an independent, state-focused think tank that proposes market-oriented approaches to public policy to improve the lives of Georgians.

About the researcher: Dr. Benjamin Scafidi is a professor of economics and director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University. He is also a Senior Fellow with the Georgia Public Policy Foundation and a Friedman Fellow with EdChoice. Previously, he served as the Education Policy Advisor to Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue; on the staff of both of Governor Roy Barnes’ Education Reform Study Commissions; as an expert witness for the state of Georgia in school funding litigation; as the first chair of Georgia’s Charter School Commission, and as a member of Georgia’s Charter Advisory Committee. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Virginia and his bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Notre Dame.

About National School Choice Week: National School Choice Week is celebrated annually in January. Georgia Governor Nathan Deal has joined more than 600 elected officials – governors, mayors and county leaders – in issuing a proclamation to declare January 22-28 School Choice Week. A record-breaking 21,392 events are taking place across all 50 states this week to champion choice in education. 

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http://getschooled.blog.myajc.com/2017/01/24/defeated-by-too-many-students-and-scripted-instruction-a-good-teacher-becomes-an-ex-teacher/?ecmp=ajc_social_twitter_2014_getschooled_sfp

Defeated by too many students and scripted instruction, a good teacher becomes an ex-teacher

Maureen Downey•January 24, 2017

By 

Why do teachers leave the classroom?

University of Georgia professor Peter Smagorinsky is back with another interesting column today. He delves into why a dedicated and effective teacher left the profession, focusing on the number of students she was required to teach and the scripted format she was told to follow.

At the recent Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education forum, teacher turnover was deemed a critical issue facing the state in 2017.

“As with the rest of the nation, teacher attrition is a significant issue in Georgia. Approximately 70 percent of teacher hiring statewide is done to replace teachers who have left the workforce. Since 2010, 13 percent of Georgia’s newly hired teachers left after their first year. After five years, 44 percent of those newly hired in 2010 were no longer teaching,” according to GPEE.

And there are fewer new teachers in the pipeline. Between 2010 and 2015, enrollments in Georgia’s teacher education programs declined by 36 percent.

WIth that background, here is the essay:

By Peter Smagorinsky

Fiscal conservatives have often criticized government spending as “throwing money at the problem.” Public education—“government schools” in this nomenclature—is often among those considered over-resourced, as stated by Hoover Institute Senior Fellow Eric Hanushek: “available evidence suggests that there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.”

Hanushek and others consider “available evidence” largely to consist of standardized test scores. Bill Gates, for instance, after investing a small fortune in small schools, decided that because test scores didn’t change significantly in the small schools he underwrote, class size is irrelevant. He in turn has invested additional small fortunes (now totaling over $3 billion) in initiatives predicated on the idea that large classes don’t inhibit learning, because test scores remain flat regardless of the number of kids a teacher must manage and instruct each period of the day.

These researchers and financiers rely on “big data” to inform their opinions. These studies rely on statistical evidence, and the bigger the data set, the better.

But the bigger the data set, the less the nuance.

My own research is much smaller in scope. I mostly study single cases in detail. Although some find studying small samples to have questionable potential for generalization, I find it instructive to look closely at the real people who are reduced to numbers in the sort of research that reigns over educational policy.

I recently conducted an interview with a case study participant I’ve been following for seven years, as part of a longitudinal study — a multi-year project that takes into account how one’s thinking develops over time —of how teachers develop understandings of how to teach effectively. This was the final interview for this young woman, because following a very frustrating experience in one of Georgia’s elite school districts, she has left the profession for a career in the hospitality industry.

I have reported on her here in the past, before her return to Georgia, when she taught English in a school in rural South Carolina. She taught there for three years, experiencing both joy and frustration. As she told me recently, in that district, her typical class size was 20 students. She learned all of her students’ names by the second day of school, something she worked hard to accomplish. Her motivation for teaching, she had often said, was to teach kids, more than it was to teach English.

Getting to know her students promptly helped her teach them effectively, because she cared about them as people. Not only did she know her own students quickly, she knew many other kids from hall duty and other interactions. Engaging with kids, even on the days when they had other things on their minds than school, was what had made this profession so appealing to her.

She and her husband had deliberately planned to move back to Georgia to return home to their families. Getting a job in the same district she’d attended as a student was a dream come true. She began the school year with great anticipation. By the end of one semester, she told her principal that she’d finish the year because she had committed to a contract, but wouldn’t be back after that.

In one semester, she’d gotten burned out by the work conditions of what many would regard as a desirable district for a teaching career.

Many of her reasons for leaving her job, and the profession, could be traced to a single source: an oppressive student load. In contrast to classes of 20 in which she quickly learned her students’ names and personalities, she was assigned classes that averaged 35 students, totaling about 175 for a subject, English, in which teachers should optimally assign and grade a lot of writing.

Let’s say that she took one minute each day to devote to each student assigned to her classes. That’s three additional hours a day. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day or week to teach such large numbers in caring, personal ways.

But the time per student was only part of the problem. With so many students, she had trouble learning their names quickly, taking weeks instead of days. Meanwhile, with students getting schedule changes for several weeks into each term, the idea of learning so many names of so many students who might be gone tomorrow rendered that essential value of hers obsolete.

The great waves of students produced additional problems for her as well. Out of 175 students, you’ll have some hardheads, some kids with unseen problems, some kids working long hours after school, and kids with all manner of other reasons for finding schoolwork to be an afterthought. With small class numbers, those kids can become known relatively quickly, and individual attention can be catered to provide them with an encouraging academic plan.

But with enormous classes in which students get lost in the crowd, a teacher might have far less energy for chasing down kids who are disengaged and helping them find a pathway forward in the classroom. If you don’t know them, you can’t possibly know what makes them tick. And the more kids crammed into classrooms, the more likely those kids are to be left behind.

Class size was one of two points of frustration she named. The other was the scripted curriculum that required all teachers of a grade level across the whole district to teach the same thing in the same way on the same day, every day. This teacher, in contrast, had gone through a teacher education program that had taught her how to think about teaching her discipline. Taking instructional planning out of teaching might please teachers who are less invested in the intellectual aspects of teaching.

But to a teacher who finds planning to be highly stimulating, exciting, enjoyable, and fulfilling, teaching a centrally designed instructional script is immensely frustrating. Like the reduction of real kids to test scores, the implementation of a scripted curriculum takes the engaging, interpersonal, relational career of teaching and reduces it to mechanical operation.

A teacher entrusted to exercise her judgment is always playing with ideas, tinkering with lessons, and using her intellect to teach more effectively. Teaching scripted lessons requires no judgment, only fidelity to someone else’s idea of what to do.

The teacher I’m featuring is one you would want working with your own children. She’d wanted to be a teacher since starting first grade, and had dedicated college to teacher education. She’d found her first job both stimulating and frustrating; but when she moved to a district with overwhelming numbers of students and a centralized curriculum that removed her own judgment from instructional decisions, she couldn’t do it any more.

Does class size matter? The answer depends on where you look for evidence.

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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/01/hillsdale-college-president-larry-arnn-getting-federal-government-education/

Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn Discusses Getting the Federal Government Out of Education

Hillsdale College

by Dr. Susan Berry1 Dec 2016281

Dr. Larry Arnn explains that because Hillsdale rejects federal funding, it enjoys the freedom to teach its students what they need to know without interference and mandates from the centralized bureaucracy that is the U.S. Department of Education.

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“Federal monies became available to colleges for general purposes around 1960,” Arnn says. “And we started not taking the money back then. By a series of steps they began to offer money directly to colleges and they began to attempt to regulate them more comprehensively.”

Rumored to have been among potential nominees for education secretary in the new Trump administration, Arnn explains that Hillsdale – which was founded in Michigan in 1844 – would not accept federal funds, a situation that came to a head during the Jimmy Carter administration, when some of the school’s students were given some form of federal aid. Eventually, Hillsdale – along with some other schools – received a demand letter from the federal government for compliance with regulations in return for the aid given to their students.

“The threat was a department of education official said, ‘We’re going to close these colleges down,’” Arnn continues, noting that, in response, Hillsdale sued the department and won the lawsuit in an administrative court. Then-Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare Joseph Califano, however, overturned the administrative judge’s ruling.

After a decade of legislation, Hillsdale ultimately lost its argument in the Supreme Court in 1984. The college had already decided, however, that rather than comply with federal demands and unconstitutional regulation, it would replace student federal taxpayer aid with private donations.

Arnn explained Hillsdale officials at the time said they “believe in the free market, and we don’t want to be a creature of the federal government, and we never have been.”

“Over the years, look what’s happened,” Arnn says, “the regulation of colleges and the regulation of everything else is very comprehensive now.”

Asked by Breitbart News about the danger of taxpayer-funded school vouchers bringing in more regulation to private and religious schools, Arnn replied, “That’s right. My position on that is what I understand to be a constitutional position.”

Arnn explained a provision in Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance “gives the biggest subsidy to education that’s ever been given.” In addition to providing the greater part of the land described in the Ordinance for private use, it also provided for a section of land to be used for public purposes for education in each township to be controlled by the states.

“So, that means the founders believed in education and subsidized it,” he states. “But, the question is how did they do that. The way the schools used to work in America is that they were run in the towns. Giving control of education to people who are a long way off from the process is a bad idea. And that’s what we do now.”

“There isn’t anything wrong with public education,” Arnn continues, “but it shouldn’t be centralized and bureaucratized in the way the whole government has been.”

Arnn says he is supportive of charter schools and, in fact, Hillsdale College currently operates 16 nonprofit charter schools around the country that provide a classical education. In 2014, Breitbart News reported on the Hillsdale Barney Charter School Initiative.

“We don’t take any money from those charter schools,” Arnn says, adding:

Whatever we do for them we raise or have. But we believe in those schools, we provide the curriculum, and we help their headmasters, we train their teachers, etc. But we only put those charter schools in states where the charter law enables the independence of the school under a local board to run the school as they please.

“The federal charter law, under the new Secretary of Education, should say the contract should allow the schools to have wide latitude to run themselves the way they want,” Arnn says, acknowledging that Betsy DeVos, President-elect Trump’s nominee for education secretary, is someone he “knows and admires.”

“If you get a charter law like that – and there are states today where the charter law is very good – then you can run a charter school under roughly the same terms schools were originally founded under in America,” he explains. “So, I don’t object to charter schools if they’re not centralized and bureaucratized.”

Breitbart News asked Arnn about states that have experienced difficulties with over-regulation of private and religious schools when vouchers are used and the state demands “accountability” of taxpayer funds, often through outcome measures such as standardized test results – the same ones required of public schools.

“Just remember, of course we have to have a government, and of course we have to have a strong government,” Arnn says. “But there’s more than one kind of such government. And what we have today is nosy government.”

“The government has the force of law, and the way it should regulate is to leave as much discretion as is possible in the hands of the people actually doing the work,” he asserts, “and that is the parents and the teachers who have much greater reason to care about the education of the kids than anybody in the federal bureaucracy.”

Asked about Trump’s campaign rhetoric regarding the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education, Arnn said Congress could pass a measure to end the department and Trump could sign it.

“I don’t think they’ll do that,” he admits. “But I think what they should do is something else that will lead to that.”

He explains:

The way the system works, and remember it is a very significant fact that you can read the Constitution all day long and not find the word “education” in there. And yet, in the same summer they were writing the Constitution, Congress passed a law that we know the leading founders all supported reserving land to benefit education. So, we know education was very important to them. And we also know they did not include it in the Constitution. And that’s the reason the federal government doesn’t have direct power to just pass a law and tell everybody the things they have to study.

Arnn continued that if DeVos, who is a known proponent of charter schools, is confirmed as the education secretary, she should ensure that states allow charter schools to be run independently under local boards.

“We have to instead pass laws that give general guidance, introduce variety, and let the competition happen,” he suggests, adding that media should then report on the competition.

“It’s going to take time to fix education, and I think the way you fix it is by introducing the option of doing good schools,” he says.

Arnn agrees with the assertion that the new “bipartisan” Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced No Child Left Behind, still provides the education secretary with substantial power over the states’ education policy and standards.

“This will be an opportunity for her [DeVos] to put a system in place for options and establish that for a long time, and then I would make the obvious comment, ‘What are we even doing here anymore? Let’s get rid of this department,’” he recommends, adding that if the plan goes well, he could foresee the education department being dismantled in five years.

“If Betsy DeVos has a lot of power, then her successor would have that, too,” he observes. “So, it would be better to get rid of her successor.”

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http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/high-school-apprenticeships-new-path-prosperity

High School Apprenticeships: A New Path to Prosperity

It’s no secret that the college degree has long been considered a path to success. It’s also no secret that those who take that pathway are more often than not ending up in the mire of student debt – and struggling to get out.

This dilemma has caused many to look elsewhere for alternatives to college, particularly apprenticeship or career and technical education. Unfortunately, these ideas are still so cutting edge, that many students must blaze the trail alone with relatively little direction and information.

But individuals like Robert Luddy are seeking to change that. As a recent profile in a Philanthropy Roundtable report explains, Luddy has established a number of engineering career and technical education programs at various private high schools in North Carolina:

“Known as the Luddy Institute of Technology, this track uses a special four-year curriculum throughout high school, and many enrolled students devote the summer between their junior and senior years to an industrial internship. From the outset, students are immersed in the fundamentals of engineering: traditional drafting techniques, then computer-aided design through SolidWorks. The basics of mechanisms, energy, statics, materials, and kinematics. The history of engineering and manufacturing. Automation, computer modeling, robotics, and flexible manufacturing systems.”

According to Luddy, the training this program enables sophomore students to earn certification “which alone would enable them to command between $40,000 and $60,000 as employees.”

But the training doesn’t stop there. By the time students graduate from high school, they have the option to either go on to a traditional college program – presumably with the credentials to hold a job and earn their own way through – or continue on to one of North Carolina’s paid apprenticeship programs, which often incorporate free college into the training.

As the report explains, apprenticeship programs like these could be particularly helpful to young men, who seem to be falling behind in today’s career world:

“Since the 1960s, educational trends have been zipping upward for females—who now significantly outnumber men on college campuses. But males have been suffering and declining on any number of educational measures. Equally, adult men have been getting battered in the labor force, with both rates of employment and levels of pay tumbling for many males.

Expanded tech-oriented training could help boys and men become more successful in K-12 education, in college, in job-winning, and in earnings trajectories—all the areas where males, especially blue-collar males, have been in eclipse.”

These revelations lead me to ask the following questions:

If Luddy is able to successfully train and certify high school students to hold a decent paying job by age 15 or 16, then why in the world are we keeping so many students in their desks for several years beyond that age? Is the drive and interest of many high school students lost (particularly in young men) when we fail to give them opportunities in high school for hands-on training? Would we see a more engaged high school environment if students were trained for real-world jobs in addition to the normal courses in the 3Rs?

Image Credit: Bureau of Land Management bit.ly/1mhaR6e

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