Lee Edwards writes,

Confucius Institutes avoid discussing China’s widespread human-rights abuses and present Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed Chinese territories. As a result, writes Peterson, the institutes “develop a generation of American students with selective knowledge of a major country”—and a major adversary. Confucius Institutes are a textbook example of soft power that causes universities in receipt of Chinese largesse to stay silent about controversial subjects like China’s use of forced labor to pick cotton

This is something to keep your eye on.

Eric Wearne writes,

Large schools—public or private—cannot replicate the flexibility offered by ESAs [educational savings accounts, which can be used to pay a variety of providers to meet the needs of a given student], pods, or hybrid homeschools. They cannot personally tailor their programs to the same degree while at the same time maintaining the small community coherence that many families desire. In the U.S., hybrid homeschools have generally been open and operating (relatively) normally this school year. Most parents are ready for schools to re-open. But they are not looking for the return of business as usual. They are likely to pull their kids out much more quickly than they were in the past if things are not working well. They are seeking, somewhat paradoxically, more individualization and more community, and are often finding both by attending—or starting—hybrid homeschools.

He is talking his book, Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons.

Many major American institutions have degraded over the past 70 years, but I think that there is a case to be made that public schools have degraded the most.

Between 1950 and 1980 the number of school districts fell from 83,642 to 15,987. Today, it stands at 16,800.

That means that in 1950, there were about 1,820 Americans per school district. Today, there are roughly 19,700 Americans per school district. School boards are remote from their constituents. The influence of parents on public schools has waned. The influence of teachers’ unions has waxed.

If the larger districts have produced economies of scale, this is not evident. Spending on schools has soared, without any evident improvement in performance.

One argument for public schools is that they will take any child. But it seems that students with special needs are served better by smaller institutions. The affluent parents I know who have children with special needs send them to private schools. The parents are progressives who support public schools but “not for my child,” who they think could not possibly thrive in public school. Less-affluent parents deserve the same opportunity.

Another argument for public schools is that they provide common socialization. But the woke religion that today’s teachers are being taught and are passing along to children is not my idea of helpful socialization.

If we are going to continue to keep the public school concept, we need significant reforms.

1. Smaller school districts.
2. Much diminished power for teachers’ unions.
3. A totally different approach for training teachers, based on evidence rather than ideology.

The prospects for this being what they are, I have more hope for a voucher system.

Alex Tabarrok discusses a paper showing that prosecutors may do harm by going after misdemeanors.

Parents Defending Education is another resistance organization that a reader emailed me about. They are dedicated to using voice (would A.O. Hirschman approve?). I think that exit is the better answer.

James Hankins writes,

The unmet demand for a traditional humanities education in elite universities is increasingly being supplied by offshore institutions that set up shop near universities but are not officially part of them. Indeed, the last decade has seen an extraordinary blossoming of private humanities institutes that offer what progressive academe no longer offers: a space to escape the suffocating taboos of contemporary university life, a place to explore the deep questions of human existence and form friendships in the pursuit of meaningful lives and (dare one say it) truth.

I have spoken at a lunch at the Elm Institute, one of the places mentioned in the article.

Hankins advocates expanding these “offshore institutions” to assist graduate students. He worries that otherwise traditional knowledge and methods will be lost, as the older generation of scholars dies off and is replaced by ideologically-trained younger cohorts.

I am pessimistic that any solution can be found. I still think that economics is on what I call the Road to Sociology, in which race, gender, and inequality become the dominant issues, and they are approached from a left-wing perspective.

Michael McShane explains,

The Regina Caeli network of Catholic hybrid home schools offers another successful example of this model. Students attend school in a classroom setting for two days per week and then are homeschooled for the rest of the week. For the 2020-2021 school year, the cost of full enrollment at Regina Caeli for two days per week, along with a program of instruction for the home-school days, is $3,500 for students in kindergarten through sixth grade, $4,000 for those in grades seven through eight, and $4,500 for those in grades nine through 12. Tuition is capped at four children per family; any additional children attend for free.

This sounds good to me. I could see many parents adopting such a model, but it would be easier if government money followed students rather than teachers’ unions. And, yes, you should have more government money follow students with severe disabilities.

Meditating on how the value of free speech eroded on college campuses, She writes,

For the most part, professors are people who have done well in school and never left it, staying to take on more power and prestige within that setting. Therefore I don’t think they are selected for courage, or for even necessarily for thinking for themselves (with exceptions, of course). For the most part, they have been very good at taking in information and then giving it back again, perhaps with a small advancement on current knowledge in a very circumscribed field. So there may be more people in academia who are selected for conformity, and they are less likely to buck the prevailing winds.

If you read my series on academic corruption, I cited three factors: government money; emasculated culture; and affirmative action.

Government money provided support for mediocrity and conformity.

Emasculated culture worked this way. Once upon a time, elite colleges were mostly male, with a culture of open competition. But open competition by definition should not have excluded women, so that colleges became more open to women, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But women are not naturally inclined to favor open competition, and as they became a larger and larger force on campus, open competition is no longer supported.

Affirmative action was supposed to improve outcomes for blacks while maintaining standards. It did neither.

I should add the element that Shelby Steele calls “white guilt.” No college administrator wants to be the one who presides over a revolt by a “marginalized” group. If you have to cave in on values that are fundamental to an institution of higher learning, then so be it.

Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins wrote,

we measure the consequence of extending compulsory schooling in England to ages 14, 15 and 16 in the years 1919-22, 1947 and 1972. From administrative data these increases in compulsory schooling added 0.43, 0.60 and 0.43 years of education to the affected cohorts. We estimate the effects of these increases in schooling for each cohort on measures of adult longevity, on dwelling values in 1999 (an index of lifetime incomes), and on the the social characteristics of the places where the affected cohorts died. Since we have access to all the vital registration records, and a nearly complete sample of the 1999 electoral register, we find with high precision that all the schooling extensions failed to increase adult longevity (as had been found previously for the 1947 and 1972 extensions), dwelling values, or the social status of the communities people die in. Compulsory schooling ages 14-16 had no effect, at the cohort level, on social outcomes in England.

Pointer from Jeffrey Miron.