Inside Higher Ed reports,

Two years ago, 54 percent of Republicans said colleges had a positive impact on the country’s direction, with 37 percent rating higher education negatively…The latest version of the survey, conducted last month among 2,504 adults, for the first time found a majority (58 percent) of Republicans saying colleges have a negative effect, compared to 36 percent saying they have a positive effect.

The story is interesting throughout. It is based on an annual Pew survey.

I tell friends that if I had an 18-year-old child today, I would be tempted to try home schooling for college. Just go with YouTube and avoid the indoctrination centers.

As a check on myself, I regularly ask college students and very recent graduates if things are as bad as they are portrayed in conservative media. The modal answer is that indeed the faculty and a minority of students are very far left and very obnoxious about it, but if you are conservative or moderate you can work around the radical leftists.

My sense is that the people in charge of those institutions are past the point of caring what Republicans or conservatives think of them. Students are still clamoring to get in, so why change?

From a commenter.

People in education tend to believe two things:

1) School is America’s great driver of social mobility. School lifts up the poor. Without our education system, we would be a terribly unequal, unjust, “rich get richer and the poor stay poor” society.

2) It is not just grudgingly acceptable but good and just that the more education you have, the better you are treated.

This is an interesting dilemma for progressives. They are inclined to see income and status hierarchies as unjust. However, they are inclined to see income and status advantages that accrue from schooling as just. Or, as Orwell put it, some pigs are more equal than others.

He or she comments,

Harmful interventions:
Ending tracking
De-emphasizing demonstrated test scores on difficult tests in favor of grades.
Increased legal protections for discipline disasters.

…Costly interventions:
Special education now gives additional money to 1 out of 8 kids and we see nothing for it. …We spend billions on “English language instruction” …ELL from the 60s on was designed on the expectation that ELL kids would be illegal immigrants from across the border.

Now that I think of it, it is easy to imagine a lot of Hansonian practices cropping up in education. There is no equivalent of the FDA process for screening out bad or ineffective protocols. New curricula and practices are introduced faster than they can be evaluated. It is classic case of what statistical process control guru W. Edwards Deming would term “tampering.”

A commenter writes,

surely students who took statistics with you know statistics better than students who didn’t take statistics at all, right? The null hypothesis taken to the extreme would suggest that having taken your- or any- statistics course, should provide no benefit in understanding statistics at all.

If we define the intervention as “took a statistics course” vs. “did not take a statistics course,” then I believe that the intervention worked for some students. However, if we define it as “took a statistics course with Dr. Kling” vs. studied the material some other way, then I would not bet against the null hypothesis.

The same commenter writes,

Arnold, are you of the belief that educational outcomes would be the same if we got rid of schools altogether? That almost seems to be what you’re implying here.

Again, this raises the question of what is the relevant experiment. (I have often not been clear on this.) For example, if you want to compare home schooling with standard schooling, I would not be willing to bet against the null hypothesis. But if you compare standard schooling with no schooling, you are talking about something else entirely.

Learning from other humans is an essential trait of human nature. To hold dogmatically to the null hypothesis, one would have to suggest that the amount and type of learning that children undertake is a function only of their individual characteristics and of the culture in which they are embedded. It does not depend on the way that the institutions of schooling are structured.

The institutional structure does affect resource allocation with respect to teaching and learning. I would speculate that our school system probably makes more efficient use of resources than would a system in which schools did not exist. I would speculate that it makes less efficient use of resources than would a system of vouchers and competition rather than government-managed schools.

Would I go far as to say that the only difference that schools make is in resource allocation, not in outcomes? I doubt that such an extreme position is warranted. But statistically, educational interventions tend to affect resource allocation much more than outcomes. For educational interventions within roughly the current institutional setting, the null hypothesis is not an iron law, but it is an empirical regularity.

According to a WSJ story, as described by Newsweek,

The Journal found that at about half of schools, large groups of seniors scored at basic or below-basic levels. According to a rubric, that means they can generally read documents and communicate to readers but can’t make a cohesive argument or interpret evidence.

The WSJ story itself says that

At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.

Sounds like another win for the null hypothesis.

But credible enough to pass peer review, apparently.

The paper states that the penis as a form of “’hegemonic masculinity and cultural construction,’ presented in the ‘essence of the hard-on’,” and even argues that man-made climate change is happening because of “patriarchal power dynamics,” brought on by the conceptual penis.

Story here.

It seems to me that this sort of story deserve comments that consist only of puns. Hard science. Scientific Con sensus. Whatever.

Bryan Caplan may be coming out with the book, but Peter Gray makes it in this video, interviewed by Nick Gillespie. By the end, he is talking about school as comparable to child labor.

Those of us who grew up many decades ago probably would not want to trade our childhood for today’s childhood. My memories are of spending all day playing “hit the bat” out in the street, or practicing handstands in the yard, or playing board games. With no adult supervision.

Gray thinks that the school system is not capable of changing. If you are worried about what schools might do to your children, then probably home schooling is the most attractive alternative.

I recommend the whole 30-minute interview.

If I were trying to home school now–and I would give the idea much more consideration than I did 25-30 years ago, when we first sent our daughters to school–then I think that the challenge would be to connect with other home schoolers who are not motivated primarily to provide a religious environment. A Google search for “secular homeschool groups” turns up some resources. I do not know if these are extensive enough to make it a workable option for parents these days. One of the links I clicked on had malware, so I am not going to try to click on any more.