I don’t know why people speak so highly of dreams all the time: e.g., the American Dream, “I have a dream,” Dreams from My Father, etc.

If my dreams are representative, then the real American Dream is that you’re in the classroom for your final exam but you haven’t attended a class or opened the book all semester, and for some reason you’re wearing your pajamas, and you really have to go to the bathroom.

One of the signature fads of the Obama Era is “Universal Preschool.” A new book, Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut, by veteran education pundit Chester E. Finn Jr., explains the political sleight of hand involved:

Most have opted to pursue the “universal” model—prekindergarten for every four-year-old is their campaign slogan— rather than seeking more intensive intervention services targeted on a far smaller group of acutely disadvantaged children. Although the moral energy of the “universalists” derives from the claim that such a program will close educational gaps between America’s haves and have-nots, their political strategy rests on the belief that enacting and funding any such program depends on mobilizing the self-interest of middle-class families who would welcome government-financed day care and an early educational advantage for their own kids. (The flaws in this approach reverberate through the following pages.) …

Although it serves enormous numbers of small children, today’s ragged armada of day care and preschool operators and programs, with their variegated eligibility requirements, uneven quality standards, and twisted funding streams, dismays advocates whose strategy hinges on propagating identical, universal programs designed to appeal to millions of parents and voters. That strategy relies on gaining the political boost that comes from offering John Q. and Sally Z. Public, both of them now working, the prospect that somebody else will pay for their child care, creating a new middle-class entitlement to government-financed services for their four- (and maybe three-) year-olds, wrapped in much hype about school readiness and social justice for the poor.

Okay, now I get it!

The Obamanauts’ have a multilayered set of reasons for pushing Universal Preschool. (more…)

On the blog of AEI’s magazine The American, Charles Murray writes a brief response to David Brooks’ “Harlem Miracle” column about the Harlem Children’s Zone charter school “eliminating” the white-black gap:

It will be wonderful if the results are as good as they sound, but hold the champagne.

I’m not being mindlessly pessimistic. The problem is that we have had 40 years of “Miracle in X”—the early Head Start results, the Milwaukee Project, Perry Preschool, the Abecedarian Project, Marva Collins’s schools, and the Infant Health Development Project, to name some of the most widely known stories—and the history is depressingly consistent: an initial research report gets ecstatic attention in the press, then a couple of years later it turns out that the miracle is, at best, a marginal success that is not close to the initial claims.I haven’t seen the study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie that was the basis for Brooks’s column, but if I’m going to be such a grinch I might as well lay out the kinds of things I will be looking for (these are generic issues, not things that I necessarily think are problems with this particular study) when I get hold of a copy:

1. Selection factors among the students. Did the program deal with a representative sample? Was random assignment used?
2. Comparison group. Who’s in it? Are they comparable to the students in the experimental group?
3. Attrition. What about the students who started the program but dropped out? How many were there? How were they doing when they dropped out?
4. Teaching to the test. After seven years of No Child Left Behind, everybody knows about this one. Worse, there are the school officials who have rigged attendance on the day the test was taken or simply faked the scores—that’s been happening too with high stakes testing.
5. Cherry-picking. Do the reported test scores include all of the tests that the students took, or just the ones that make the program look good?
6. The tests. Do they meet ordinary standards for statistical reliability, predictive validity, etc.
7. Fade-out. Large short-term test score improvements have, without exception to date, faded to modest ones within a few years.

Murray points to this pointed response on Gotham Schools, which cites data in this report:

Just How Gullible is David Brooks?
by Aaron Pallas

(more…)

The April/May edition of the American Institute of Philanthropy’s Charity Rating Guide & Watchdog Report has just snailed in.

AIP is an admirable outfit dedicated to the notion that Charities should actually spend most of the money they raise on the cause for which they raise it. Many Charities apparently do not agree.

A particular peeve of AIP is entities which accumulate and sit on excessive financial reserves. Beyond “available assets” being 5 times “current spending levels” they give the offender an automatic “F’ grade, overriding the grade awarded based on the “percent spent on services and cost to raise $100” - which is their benchmark measure.

I see our friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC to us) are down as “F”, over riding the B- they get as a result of the operational analysis.

Other notable downgrades caused by wealth are the ACLU Foundation (A to B-) Hadassah (A to C+) and the Carter Center (A to C+). No other politically orientated charity gets an F.

Discussing the effect of the economy of charities, AIP comments

AIP strongly believes that it is wrong for some charities to persist in holding such large available resources at a time when many charities…are having to turn away a growing number of people in need of assistance”

There is of course nothing (except selfishness) to prevent the $PLC giving grants to like-minded political “charities”.

Email now to a liberal near you!