Student loans are EVIL!

There have been many who have called into question the financial return that a college education gives the American wage earner.

I'm going on record as stating that WHATEVER the returns might be, they will be grossly offset by any student loans the graduate has to pay back.

First, let's establish that colleges don't loan money.  Colleges often have nice grant money that one does NOT have to pay back, but they don't usually loan money longer than the term the student is enrolled, meaning the money is paid back by the end of the term or the student cannot enroll for the next term.  Student loans are not the fault of any college.

But our US government has guaranteed money for banks to loan to students.  That means that the bank doesn't have to pay back the money they got from the government to loan to the student if the student defaults on the loan.  (Does this sound like the foundation for the current housing loan crisis?)

Most banks won't loan to a student without a co-signer, which means that a parent is usually responsible if the student can't meet the payments, but the good news is that most students feel obligated enough to establish their good credit and they do pay back their student loans.  Most of them.  A student who defaults, becomes ill, or dies can bankrupt the entire family with those loans.

Student loans have a long payback period, often 30 years.  Students who have achieved a Master's degree or Doctoral degree are going to have a student loan payment equivalent to a mortgage on a decent house.

Yes, you really need to think through the implications of a student loan, and if your college education is worth the payments you'll be making for that education after college.

Here's why student loans are evil:

1.  College graduates need to be able to go to where their new job opportunities are going to take them, to be able to apply those newly learned skills.  If they have a loan equivalent to a mortgage, they aren't going to be able to buy a house when they get there.  Many of these expensive college graduates end up living at home with mom and/or dad until that college loan is significantly reduced.  Then they have the freedom to move about, but that can be years after graduation.

2.  Student loans may well be one of the reasons for the rise in college costs.  Banks love to loan money, the more the better.  If college costs go up, so what?  That means the return the banks earn will be greater.  There's no reason for colleges to curtail costs if students can get the loans to pay for them.  This is probably the reason that college costs in recent years have risen far faster than inflation.

3.  Who would want to marry $40,000 - $100,000 or more in student loans?  Love isn't the same as money, and a warm feeling won't pay the rent or a mortgage.  Debt obligation can limit a choice of spouse, or your own debt obligation can limit who will choose you.

4.  Women with significant college loans may well have to choose between staying home with a family and work.  If her loans are equivalent to a mortgage, then circumstances are going to require her to work.  If she wants a family, then the burden of the loan payback becomes the wage-earner's burden in that family.  If the wage earner also has student loans, the wage earner may well be paying both husband and wife student loans as well as the mortgage.  If your mortgage is 1/3rd of your income, and husband and wife student loans are both equivalent to that mortgage, then you don't eat.  If you want one parent to stay home with your kids, then don't take out those loans.

5.  Student loans (as well as mortgage loans) make you a slave to someone.  You will be obligated to the job that pays those loans back.  If there's a cause somewhere in the world to which you would like to lend your assistance and expertise, then you're stuck paying those loans back instead.  If God would like to use you somewhere else, you will be unable to go.

6.  Your student loan will make someone rich.  Over a 30 year period at 5%, you could well be paying that loan back almost twice.  You'll pay back the full amount of the loan, and the interest you will have paid will amount to about 93% MORE than your loan.  If your interest is 7%, your payback will be about 139% MORE than your loan.  Couldn't YOU use that money?

In general, an educated population is a tax-paying population.  It's in a government's interests to encourage education and research that not only makes life better for its citizens but also protects those citizens (military).  Tax payers in countries such as ours, where the government is by the people and for the people, need to decide how much education is worth, and need to discern if we're getting the return we expected, or are just getting a population burdened with unnecessary debt.  Debt will immobilize a nation, as we're seeing with the current loan crisis.  Debt can even obligate one nation to another.  The US may well be the biggest lender to other nations, but that CAN change.  Keeping American citizens out of debt is in our national best interests.

If your college education will guarantee you 50% more income then it may be worth it to do that.  ('Guarantee' is a funny word in this context!)  But you will have more flexibility and more choices after college if you have no loans.  You can take some time and see the world.  You can use your education to help folks in out-of-the-way places.  The money you earn will be yours to do as you please.  But if you take those loans, you may well be stuck with a job that earns your loan payment and leaves you with little else.

Don't do student loans!

Pre-school. PRE-SCHOOL?

What film was it years ago, in which the couple moves to NY city and the neighbors start asking about which pre-school they'll be sending their kids to?  Then we see the mad rush to get the kids into the 'best' pre-school, which is the guarantee to get them into the best grammar school, which will get them into the best high school... You see where this is going.

Schools are institutions, and somehow we've come to believe that what happens inside those four walls will be much more important than what happens in the world.  Please don't institutionalize your child too soon!

My kids were born in the mid-80's, which today makes them 20-somethings.  We participated in a play group, organized by the local tech college as a class, open to the general community.  It wasn't for credit and no grades were awarded.  Moms with toddlers showed up, watched the interaction with the kids on different kinds of play equipment each week, then a couple of us would watch all the kids while the rest of the moms had some discussion time on a parenting topic with an early childhood expert for about 30 minutes.  It was a nice time to compare notes with each other and talk about fussy eaters, fussy dressers, sibling rivalry and potty training.  We learned our kids were normal, that we were doing fine, and we taught each other the finer points of frugal living and shopping with stay-at-home moms and limited incomes.  The kids played hard with each other for 90 minutes, had a snack and went home and took a nap.  It was really a time for parents as much as the kids.

But what is pre-school?

It really doesn't make sense to start kids to school much before they are cognitively ready to read.  If you do, all you really accomplish is to get them to line up and follow each other to the rest room, drinking fountain, and bus to go home.  Or as my daughter answered after she finished kindergarten "We learned to sit in a circle with our feet crossed and our hands folded in our laps."  And I thought, at the time, that she had a pretty good kindergarten teacher whom she enjoyed.  That answer was unsolicited and caught me by surprise.  It was one of the things that led to my rebellion about public education.

What if we just started school later, like eight years old when almost all kids are able to learn to read easily?  Would we really be losing valuable time?

At the community college where I teach we have classes for adults that begin with 1-2-3 and A-B-C.  It takes us about two years to get the completely illiterate adult through an 8th grade education, and about two more years to get them through a high school education.  Then we plop them into college level classes, and they perform.

So why would we want to spend more of our public funds on pre-school, when we could just wait and do it later in a short amount of time?  Very, very few 3-year olds will learn to read.  I haven't seen any data that suggests that kids who learn to read at 3 and kids who learn to read at 7 are very different from each other by age 12.

And if a parent can't handle the pre-school curriculum, then perhaps we should be educating the parents and not the children!

Pre-school has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with education.  The pre-school movement is about placating the consciences of parents who choose their careers over their children.  Even assuming for ONE moment that the parents MUST work to put food on the table and a roof over the heads of their kids, our education dollars would be better spent teaching these parents to get a better job rather than teaching their kids to sit in a circle with their feet crossed and their hands folded in their laps.

Kids need their parents to be their parents during their early years.  Rather than sitting in a circle, take your kids for a walk.  Read a book together.  Visit the grandparents and get their stories.  Bake some cookies or a pie and take them to your neighbor as an excuse to get to know them.  Make mudpies in the dirt.  Rub leaves through newsprint with a crayon and look at all the different patterns.  Google "what to do with a pre-schooler" and see what comes up.

Slow Down High School

We seem to think that humans are on an upward evolutionary path.  We keep raising high school graduation requirements, thinking we are raising the bar for basic achievement (after all, everyone needs a high school diploma, right?), when all that accomplishes is more students dropped out of high school.

I don't have a problem with offering more education to high schoolers.  I have a problem with requiring them all to achieve at the same level at the same time.

There are lots of high schoolers out there who need more time to do well in high school.  In my work at the local community college I hear from them every term.  These are kids who were perhaps not quite ready, cognitively, or they may be kids who just never had a chance to do very well.  By that, I mean that their home lives were so disrupted that they didn't get a chance to do their homework.  Parents may have been divorced or their families disrupted in other ways, and it may just have not been possible for these kids to get homework done.  

Some kids just need more time to absorb their learning and do homework, and six classes (or eight in some of the block scheduling patterns) may just be too many for these kids.  Our industrial manufacturing, conveyor belt model of doing education emphasizes getting to the end of the conveyor belt over developing a quality product along the way.

For lots of high school kids, we should just slow down their education.  This is true even for homeschooled kids who have the best families in the world. 

Doing well is more important than getting high school done on time.

The benefits of slowing down high school for some kids is tremendous.  Their grade point average increases.  Their ability to take tougher classes increases.  These two items are the most important part of college entrance decisions.  A good score on the SAT or the ACT tests only confirms what the track record shows.  Scores don't have to be superlative, just good.

A student who has a good track record and has demonstrated ability to do well in tough classes has more doors open, both in colleges that student might attend and in scholarship possibilities.

It's a paradigm shift for high school guidance counselors, but if you have a child who would benefit from taking 3 to 5 classes instead of the usual 6, then ask the counselor if s/he would be willing to allow your child to do this.  You'll have to acknowledge that graduation won't happen 'on time', but again, the track record is more important than the finish date.

You may well find that a year or two of cognitive maturing can make a huge difference later on.  That student who was behind in their second year of high school, because s/he only took four classes, may well be able to pour on the heat and make up the difference as a senior with a supplemental class from a local community college evenings or summers.  The brain matures, and magic happens.   It's not necessary to finish on time in this way, but it can happen.  (I would rather just allow the student to finish in his/her merry time rather than push for the finish line to graduate with age peers.)

Kids who slowed down and stayed at that slower level may be finishing high school outside of the K-12 public school system, but there isn't anything wrong with that.  It may cost money, but this is why we should implement my "Twelve years, take it when you're ready" reform.  These students could get partial credit for one year and be able to have the state pay for it elsewhere during another year.

For the student who may well be cognitively ready but lives with a disrupted home life, slowing school down to two-thirds pace or half pace allows that kid to get a job outside of high school.  This isn't a bad idea for any kid.  But for that kid struggling with drama at home, a job can give that kid a little more power with his or her own money to spend.  The need to be at work on Saturday can have a huge influence on choices for Friday night activities.  There may be a boss or another adult coworker who becomes an advocate for the child both at home and in school.

I would not worry about the child who becomes deeply involved in work to the point where it postpones school.  We have many mechanisms in this country for making up lost school time.  There is NOTHING wrong becoming so good at something that people pay you for it, even at age 16 or 17.  Personal achievement comes in lots of ways.  The level of education is only one of them.

I see these postponed students at the local community college, which is usually a great place to remedy a track record or build a new one.  I love our community college system for this.  These folks show up in my 'remedial' (high school level) math classes, sometimes frightened to death.  They did poorly in the subject the first time, or couldn't do the homework, or perhaps blew off school in high school.  They could have had poor instruction the first time around.  But they begin to soar, and they're amazed at their ability.  It's not that I'm magical, although sometimes they tell me that, but now their brains are better.  They conquer high school algebra, which usually takes a full year in the ninth grade, in two quarters (six months).

It's really fun when these folks tag me a couple of years later, and tell me that they've just finished the calculus sequence.  They are adults of all ages, and now doors everywhere are open to them.

If your child is struggling in high school, consider slowing down high school for your child.  Doors will open later on.  You're the parent.  Come on, you can take control.

No! Not a Master's in Education!

If you're thinking about acquiring a Master's degree in education, please allow me to discourage that thought.  Outside of K-12 public education, it will be completely worthless.  Inside K-12 public education, it will only get you a modest pay raise, and it will be unlikely to make you a better teacher.

I acquired mine back in 1992.  The focus for my degree was on how technology could assist in education.  Back then, I owned a Macintosh LC.  It had a 15 MHz CPU, 2 whole MB (that's MB, not GB) RAM, and a 40 MB (not GB) hard drive.

How relevant do you think that degree would be for today's educational needs?  Yeah.  The only thing that piece of paper shows is that I was able to read a lot of papers about other people's thinking on education, and generate my own thinking in another paper.  I don't know how many people ever read my field project write up, outside my advisor and perhaps the other two educators who were on my field project committee.  I don't think any of them would remember it.

It did have the effect of turning my head around 180 degrees about the uses of technology in education.  I went in thinking I would be studying how to write some outstanding software in education, and I wanted to do that.  I came out the other end certain that couldn't be done, no matter how wonderful the technology.  I have yet to be proven wrong.  Computers and software do not teach.  Distance learning is for a very few people.  Computers and technology are tools in the hands of good educators, they are no substitute for a good educator.

That was a fair bit of funds down the tube to show it couldn't be done.  I don't mind spending money to eliminate possibilities, but this degree did not give me a marketable skill.

Education is like that.  From the undergraduate to the doctorate level, we study the latest fads in education, educational theory, current problems in education, current trends in education.  We can tell you about Bloom's Taxonomy, multiple intelligences, group learning and grading, cycles of learning, direct instruction, the Platonic model, internalizing education, authentic assessment, standardized assessment, diversity, minority education, ESL, theory about teaching reading via phonics, whole word, and whole language, John Dewey,  Montessori, Piaget, Vigotsky, etc. etc.  

My degree was in 1992.  If you've worked on one since then, and recognize almost none of these topics, then I have made my case.  Education as a field of study has no body of knowledge that is its foundation.

You won't have a marketable skill in any field outside of education.  Your Master's degree in education may not even be any good at the local community college, because they are more and more requiring that degree to be in the field that you are teaching.  I'm grandfathered in.  For now.  That may change.

So if you need a Master's degree, get something in a real field, like a foreign language, or literature, or engineering or biology or math.  You'll have more to teach when you return to the classroom, rather than some squishy theories about how we learn and some techniques to control crowds of students.  

Teaching in a moral vacuum

Whoever thought that the education that our kids need can be given in a moral vacuum?  Is it possible to actually teach any subject matter at all without bumping up against a moral issue?

I teach math at the local community college, and perhaps this field comes the closest to being value-neutral.  That still doesn't eliminate the instructors who have a pretty big ax to grind with their students.  I work with bleeding heart liberals who use their time in front of a class to pontificate.  It could also happen with us conservatives.  

But look at the book!  We see endless word problems in math texts in which the females are faster, richer, smarter than the males.  Pick up a used college text at any local used book store and you'll see what I mean.

So even in math, women are better than men.  All racial groups must be present in the book, or some student will feel left out, and that will be bad.

I rest my case.  Education cannot take place in a moral vacuum, because there is no vacuum.  Something has seeped inside that sterile seal, or else there never was one.

So whose moral outlook do YOU want represented to YOUR children?  If you send them to public schools, then you will see that in the textbooks, all women are smarter than men, and that all racial, ethnic, and now also any group of any sexual orientation must now also be properly represented to your children, just in case that any of THEM fall into those categories, and we don't want anyone to feel left out.

Frankly, I do NOT want my tax dollars telling my kids what to believe.  

And if you don't, either, then let's follow this out to the logical conclusion:  We need to end public education, because morality is always in education, and we don't want the government picking what you should believe.

Some other time, I'll offer suggestions on what we ought to do instead.

You don't need a diploma to go to college

Say, what?  Come again?

A few years ago I got a call from our local high school in September.  It was the attendance office.  "Where's your daughter?"

Since she was attending college in another state, I asked, "Why are you expecting her there?"

"We don't show her as having graduated from high school," said the tired voice.  She clearly had been making truancy calls all morning, already, on the first day of school.

"She didn't," I said, "but she's in college right now, so I guess she won't be in high school any more."

Silence.  Then "How can she be at college if she doesn't have a high school diploma?"

"Well," I answered, "I guess you don't need one to go to college."

Which, my friends, is true.  My daughter, the high school drop out, graduated from college after three years.  Now, to be fair, she racked up some credits at the local community college, concurrent with her junior and senior year in high school, while still taking some classes of choice at the local high school.  But she opted out of high school graduation in the 9th grade when we pulled her out of a required 'transitions' class for 9th graders, designed to ease their path into high school, with such topics as library research and some school and community awareness topics that included knowing where the restrooms and exit doors are, and who did what and ran which club in the school.  Oh, and there was a lesson on where the index of a book was and what it was for. 

Do we really need 3 - 4.5 hours per week to teach this stuff to 9th graders?  Never mind that she was a straight-A student in middle school in the gifted program there as well.

I told them that I wanted her in an academic class.  The principal told me that he was NOT opting ANY freshmen out of the transitions class for any reason.  So I made her a homeschooler for that hour, with the understanding that since this course was required for graduation that she would then not be graduating from high school.  She was fine with that.  We cobbled together her high school education using some classes at the high school, some from the local community college in a program our state makes available to high school juniors and seniors with free tuition, and some homeschooling.

As long as that 'transitions' class was a requirement for graduation, and had to be taken in the 9th grade, I guess she would still be eligible for classes at the local high school forever.  I wonder if that's a theory worth testing.

So, come her senior year of high school, she researched and picked five colleges, and got accepted to three of them.  In August, off she went, to the one that offered her about a 3/5ths scholarship.

I learned later that I was supposed to name a graduation date, so I picked the day she registered to vote.

For a long time, a high school diploma hasn't meant that the student could read or write.  For that reason, most colleges DO NOT CARE if the student has been issued a high school diploma from a state-approved school.  Their criterion is the student's transcript, SAT or ACT scores, and some application materials that they require.  Homeschooled students can write their own transcript.  More on that, perhaps, in another blog.  Homeschooled students DO need to have a graduation date.  So pick one, and be sure to have a party.  When you fill out the FAFSA, answer 'yes' for diploma.  Your homeschool diploma is completely legitimate.  If asked, enter the graduation date you picked.

Know, that when your student gets to college, that there will be placement exams in several subjects.  No matter what courses your student has taken in high school or elsewhere, these exams will determine where your students starts in a sequence of courses such as math or English.  If remedial work must be done, these exams will identify that.

Once again, let me reiterate, that your job as parent is to get your student the BEST education you can.  Local public high schools often have some very strange hoops for kids to jump through, such as silly classes, standardized tests associated with the No Child Left Behind Act, senior projects, etc.  These can be worthwhile, or they can be worthless.  If  your child didn't get a high school diploma because s/he failed to jump through one of these hoops, apply to college anyway. 

You don't need a high school diploma to go to college.  You DO need a graduation date.  Be sure to have a party and take some photos.

If I had one educational reform...

The corollary to moving to a customer-service model of doing education is matching the pace of education to the child.

If I had only one educational reform, it would be to remove the expectation that a child should be graduated from high school by age 18 or even 19.  Let's go ahead and provide twelve years of education, but let's folks take it when they're ready.  Mostly this would mean letting a child start school at age 8 or 9, but this could also mean that we give them some time off when their cognitive development doesn't seem to be matching pace with their classmates, or when disruptions that life brings, like illness or a death in the family, can stall their studies for a year.

Notice I'm not saying we change one other thing about the way we do school.

  

This means we could say to the middle schooler who's just too cool for school to come back some year when s/he's ready to do the work.  I proposed this to a middle school administrator once, who asked me what would happen to all the kids on the street.  I told him that his job was to run his school, and that the parents should be looking after their kids.  I think this shows how far the state has become the parent, and how well we've prepared teachers to think they must be the ones to raise the child.

I see huge variation in the abilities of high schoolers.  We could slow down the pace of school for some high schoolers to half the course load for a year or two.  They would finish in 5 to 8 years, but we wouldn't have to dumb down the curriculum for them.

It might mean that a well-prepared child educated completely at home, or perhaps at the parents' expense at a private school, who shows up for college, passing entrance exams and placement tests, gets his or her college paid for all the way through their doctoral degree.

Here's what this might affect:

1.  Many kids fail in school not because their teachers or the schools aren't doing their jobs, but because their families are so disrupted that they can't do any homework at home.  When these kids come home they might have to take care of younger siblings while mom works, dad is absent, or perhaps one or both parents are involved in substance abuse.  If there's yelling and screaming going on at home, you really can't expect kids to get much homework done.  These kids need some educational space, perhaps the opportunity to get a job which would give them a little power over their lives and some other adults who would be happy to advocate for them.  Let them take half the course load as well, and you give them a chance to succeed.

2.  It could mean that schools could set entrance requirements, something that makes a whole lot more sense to me than exit requirements, like the state 'standardized' tests that were the result of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act.  Parents might actually have to help get their child ready to learn and participate in the child's education, rather than handing them off to the state to babysit while they go earn an income.  It would mean that we wouldn't be doing potty training in kindergarten. 

3.  If we start education later, it can also mean that we can get the job done in less time, as well as less expense for the state.  The child who is cognitively ready for school can do it quickly.  As proof, I offer the fact that we offer the most very basic remedial classes at our local community college, including levels of math that begin with adding and subtracting with whole numbers.  Two quarters later, the student is ready for high school algebra.  Hmm.  K-8 education finished in less than one year.  Why DO we want kids in school at age 5?

This reform wouldn't cost a single penny, but it would allow many more students to get a quality high school education, and would allow the best to achieve the highest levels.