I do often wonder just how much of what is written these days is ever read in its entirety, and how often even those of us working in higher education ever manage to slowly and carefully think through and resolve our most important issues.

If my experiences are representative, the answers to those questions are not encouraging. For example, in my work as an associate editor of an academic journal, I have increasingly found: 1. fewer people willing to do peer reviews; 2. fewer people completing their reviews (let alone completing them on time); 3. more people turning in brief, superficial, poorly written reviews; and 4. more authors responding to their reviews in a manner that suggests they either didn't read the reviews carefully or didn't have time to focus on them thoroughly. Although I'd like to feel dismayed and outraged by those trends, the sad truth is that I too have found it increasingly difficult to complete my own editorial and peer-review work on time, and have felt forced to do more skipping and skimming than I care to admit.

My recent experiences as an author have done much to assuage my guilt for those sins. For instance, my last grant application didn't make the cut because one of its reviewers didn't have time to read more than its title and abstract page. Moreover, none of the four successive editors assigned to me by my former publisher ever managed more than a "quick skim" of my manuscript. (I appreciated their honesty but was left wondering what exactly such "editors" do these days.) While the editor at my prospective new publisher has been somewhat more responsive, the first thing she told me was that because nobody would buy (let alone read) a 400-page book anymore, if I wanted to work with her press I'd have to cut my manuscript by at least 50 percent.

Even within academe, I'm often struck by how many of us are willing to argue over documents we haven't actually read. I wish I had a dollar for every faculty round-table discussion and journal-club meeting I've attended in which at least half of the attendees had not read the papers we assigned ourselves. And just the other day, the chair of a committee I serve on interrupted a heated debate to ask whether we had all read the relevant sections of a document after our previous discussion of the topic at hand. "Yes," we all groaned irritably, eager to get back at it. "Well, that's quite interesting," she observed dryly, "because I still haven't managed to find the time to write up and send that document!"

"Given that so many of their lives are overflowing with a combination of "real world" commitments (taking six classes a semester, working part time, competing in collegiate sports, caring for ailing grandmothers) and seemingly involuntary virtual additions (texting, Facebooking, gaming, and God knows what else)," he asks, "is it really any wonder that so many are unable or unwilling to grapple with the plain old texts we assign?"

Cabin claims, at the end of the article, to have been employing "irony" -- but he also appears to argue, more or less with a straight face, that the solution does lie in dialing back:

I still dream that someday we will collectively slow down and start demanding less. For starters, how about less e-mail and fewer meetings for faculty members, and smaller course loads and fewer curricular requirements for our students? How about, say, once every other month we turn it all off on our campuses for (gulp!) an entire day—no computers, no Internet, no personal gadgets. Instead we might engage with one another and our surrounding communities the old-fashioned way—and even read and thoroughly discuss a book in its entirety.

Thus does pragmatism meet irresponsibility: Rather than discuss such matters as priorities, self-discipline, organizational skills, professionalism, dedication, and ethics, Cabin appears to read the widespread distraction, abdication, and deflection he sees at both the faculty and student levels as inevitable--and seemingly reasonable--reactions to a situational and sensory overload for which no one is personally responsible. It's almost a foregone conclusion, given this premise, that the answer is to lower standards for students and faculty alike. Failure to fulfill commitments and to do one's work ceases to be a problem when we define away the concepts of failure, commitment, and work, and when we allow inanimate entities such as technology to be blamed for our personal failures. The result: a lost opportunity to think creatively and constructively about how to address a very real problem.

I know I'm overloaded these days -- and you probably are, too. The electronic world I work in has a lot to do with that. But I labor under the impression that the answer is to become better at managing my time, more clear and disciplined about my priorities, more focussed and purposeful in everything I do, more able to say no when that's needed, and more firm than ever that when I make a promise--to myself or others--I keep it. I don't want to dial back and do less--I want to do more and I believe that if I am clever about managing myself I can. You?

There are all kinds of good reasons for this--and Louis Menand, for one, does a grand job of explaining some of them in his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. That's another post for another time, though. Right now, I'm interested in John Ellis.

Ellis is an emeritus professor at UC Santa Cruz--and began teaching at the University of California in 1966. He's been watching the UC system for a long time--and has a special perspective on the campus unrest that is roiling the university right now as California goes broke and higher ed feels the pinch. Here he is at Minding the Campus, with a piece entitled "How the Campuses Helped Ruin California's Economy":

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year's. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of "the struggle," and of "oppression," and---of course---of racism. "We are all students of color now" said Berkeley's Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented "structural racism." (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations "the best of our tradition of effective civil action." Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the old "shut it down" cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve.

One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted "Who's got the power? We've got the power." In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.

Ellis's conclusion focuses on the tragic irony of it all:

The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California's two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.

Only one idea for solving the funding crisis was floated on March 4. It was to repeal the state's requirement that taxes can only be raised by a two thirds vote, so that taxes can be raised yet again and more money made available to the campuses. In other words, let's make the funding crisis even worse, by driving out of California even more wealth and wealth creating capacity, and raising the unemployment level even more. "California is not a tax-heavy state," said Assemblyman Joe Coto, whose office is right next door to San Jose State University, which enrolls 31,000 students. And that raises the question: how much longer will the California citizenry want to support a system of higher education that keeps its legislature stuck on stupid? It's not a question for this state alone.

I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by the way. Rand has a word for people who think the way the campus protesters do. She calls them "looters."

It's high time--and when it's done, it will reverberate very interestingly indeed in higher ed, where a great many private colleges and universities don't allow ROTC on campus because of DADT. The thing is, those campuses for the most part have not allowed ROTC on campus since the Vietnam era -- when the issue wasn't gays serving in the military, but the military itself. Since the 1990s, though, faculties and admins at Columbia and Harvard, among others, have been quite explicit that they don't want campus-based ROTC units because they don't like the military's discriminatory policies. With DADT repealed, those campuses will be challenged to be as good as their words--and will be pressed to bring ROTC back.

Stanford phased out its on-campus army, navy, and air force ROTC units during the early 1970s in response to the Vietnam War and concerns about the academic quality of ROTC courses. Since then, Stanford students wishing to participate in ROTC have had to do so in Berkeley, San Jose, or Santa Clara--which amounts to tremendously long and disruptive commutes for students to take courses and train. In practice, that means that very few Stanford students participate in ROTC--and that the university is creating a barrier to participation that arguably violates the Solomon Amendment and that, more broadly, does a disservice to its own students and to the military's ability to function in close connection with civil society by recruiting educated citizen-soldiers and officers.

"The academic dimensions of this subject were negotiable 40 years ago; and there's no reason to think they won't be negotiable again today," emeritus history professor David Kennedy told the faculty. "To bring the discussion up to the present day, it's our perception--and it's shared by others--that our current policy and practice compelling the one dozen ROTC students at Stanford to go to Berkeley or Santa Clara or San Jose--depending on their service branch--for their ROTC training imposes a pretty unreasonable burden on them that we probably ought to think seriously of doing away with, by bringing that instruction back onto this campus in some form."

Watch to see if Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and others will follow suit.

An Inconvenient Tax - Official Trailer from Life Is My Movie Entertainment on Vimeo.

An Inconvenient Tax premieres, aptly enough, on April 15. This film explains how our convoluted and excessively complex tax code came to be, looks at how it has been thoroughly abused by politicians, and offers several viable ways to effect meaningful reform. It could not be more timely--and it transcends the partisan bickering that tends to define debates about taxation to focus on what we are all losing, and what we could all gain from some serious change.

Watch the trailer, and if you want to see this film, please contribute to the fund-raising campaign launched yesterday at Kickstarter.com, and urge your friends to do the same. Every little bit helps. Your gift is tax-deductible--and will help raise the $20,000 needed to ensure that this film reaches the widest possible public. Kickstarter campaigns are on clocks--the deadline for raising that amount is April 15--and if the film doesn't make it, all donations will be returned.

Full disclosure: An Inconvenient Tax is produced in association with the Moving Picture Institute (MPI), which is also running the Kickstarter campaign. As I've mentioned here before, I am closely involved with MPI's work.

The problem is that peer review has been appropriated for purposes other than the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and truth. It has become a means of establishing and enforcing not only professional status (through enforced intellectual conformity) but quasi-religious belief (as the process is used to produce moral dogma rather than to question, discover, debate, and learn). And that makes it a very problematic process indeed.

At Spiked Online, Frank Furedi lays it all out in elegant, damning detail. He is particularly good on the rise of advocacy science. Excerpt:

In numerous areas, most notably in climate science, research has become a cause and is increasingly both politicised and moralised. Consequently, in climate research, peer review is sometimes looked upon as a moral project, where decisions are influenced not simply by science but by a higher cause. The scandal surrounding 'Climategate' is as much about the abuse of the system of peer review as it is about the rights and wrongs of the various claims made by advocacy researchers in and around the IPCC and the UEA.

[...]

Increasingly, peer review is cited as kind of unquestioned and unquestionable authority for settling what are in fact political disputes. Consequently, the findings of peer review are looked upon, not simply as statements about the quality of research or of a scientific finding, but as the foundation for far-reaching policies that affect everything from the global economy to our individual lifestyles.

[...]

Climate alarmists do not simply boast of their monopoly over peer-reviewed outlets – they also do their best to call into question peer-reviewed outlets that dare to publish research that challenges any aspect of their moral crusade. When Cambridge University Press published Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, it faced bitter criticism from campaigners who hinted that something had gone wrong with the publisher’s system of review. Stephen Schneider, a professor in environmental studies, asked why 'a publisher with so excellent a reputation in natural sciences (it even published the IPCC reports) publish[ed] a polemic under its imprimatur', and demanded to know if Cambridge University Press had 'the book completely reviewed?' It seems that as far as Schneider is concerned, it is simply unthinkable that a publication that questions the prevailing consensus could have been properly reviewed.

The zealous policing of peer review by campaigners is directly encouraged by the IPCC itself. As Reiner Grundman argued in (the peer-reviewed journal) Environmental Politics, the IPCC 'characterises outside critics as unscientific as they do not publish in peer-reviewed literature'. With so many moral resources invested in the authority of peer review, it is not surprising that some supporters of the IPCC consensus adopt an almost casual attitude towards the violation of academic protocols. The leaked 'Climategate' emails show how one UEA scientist, Dr Keith Briffa, wrote to a colleague to ask for help in keeping a paper that he did not like out of an academic journal that he edits. US climate scientist Michael Mann has proposed that a journal should be ostracised for daring to publish a paper criticising his work. 'I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal', he argued. Phil Jones, the central figure in the Climategate scandal, promised to keep two research papers out of the IPCC report. 'I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is', he said.

[...]

While the IPCC insists that its critics should be judged by the most rigorous standards of peer review, it has a more relaxed attitude towards its own publications. In recent weeks there have been a series of damaging revelations about how conclusions drawn by the IPCC's 2007 report were based on speculation and anecdotes. So claims made about disappearing mountain ice were cobbled together from information drawn from a student's dissertation and an article published in a mountaineering magazine. Other claims were based on information from newsletters, press releases and reports produced by environmentalist advocacy groups.

There is a powerful double standard at work here: the IPCC attacks its critics for relying on 'grey literature' – that is, non-peer-reviewed literature – and yet it has relied on anecdotes and speculation in its reports. We shouldn't be too surprised about this double standard, because, fundamentally, the IPCC is not simply concerned with presenting the facts but with interpreting them, giving them meaning, giving them momentum. It continually makes conceptual leaps from facts to meaning, from findings to politics. Of course there is nothing wrong with being in the meaning business, just so long as you are honest about it and do not present yourself as the pure, impartial voice of science.

It shouldn't be surprising that those involved in the corruption of peer review should also be happy to use anecdotes and speculation as the moral equivalent of hard scientific data. However, it is important to understand that these people fervently believe in their cause and are convinced that, far from deceiving the public, they are preserving and protecting a higher truth. Like the authors of the British government's dodgy dossier on Iraq, they are convinced they are absolutely right. And it is this sense of righteousness that allows them not to let the absence of a few facts stand in the way of promoting their arguments as either hard intelligence or peer-reviewed science. It was the moral conviction of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld that allowed him to respond to a question about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by stating that 'the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. And in a similar manner, the absence of evidence does not deter climate alarmists from practising their art.

The philosophy of the Noble Lie – revealing a 'higher truth' with little regard for meaningful facts – allows people to stretch the truth in good conscience. One apologist for the sordid Climategate affair has reminded the public to 'not forget the context in which many of these emails were sent'. Apparently, 'this is a saga that goes back to a time before the current political and media concern about climate change'. He reminds us that this was before Al Gore got his Nobel Prize and when ‘well-funded climate sceptics routinely spread disinformation’. From this perspective, the 'context' lightens the burden of moral reproach. Climategate is an understandable if not 100 per cent justified response to the 'context'. Which is precisely how Noble Lies are hatched.

More generally, Furedi's comments about how conscience operates within the Noble Lie--ratifying the abandonment of a moral compass in the name of doing the right thing--reminds me of the discussions we've had on this blog about conscience, leadership, and school vouchers.

The questions I have are these: Can peer review be cleaned up? If so, how? If not, what could possibly take its place?

What makes things worse, to my mind, is that there doesn't seem to be much attempt to think about these two problems together--efforts to increase retention just don't, for the most part, take into account that educational quality must not be sacrificed in the name of simply getting students to the finish line. One could even argue that the problems we are seeing with lack of curricular focus and poor overall educational quality are owing--at least in part--to pressure to keep students enrolled.

Diane Auer Jones makes an analogous point in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

With so much focus on college retention and graduation rates—and so little focus on educational quality—I can't help but wonder if the "new" humanities focus isn't yet another attempt to dumb down an already dumb curriculum so that more students can have fun and get through.

History is hard if we actually must memorize dates and understand the social, economic, scientific, and cultural context in which various actions occured and decisions were made. Foreign language is hard if we must learn how to communicate clearly and correctly in another language (especially when we can't construct a complete sentence in our first language). Mathematics is hard if we must use higher-order algorithms to derive correct answers. Literature is hard if we must master a college-level vocabulary and read for content. Science is hard if we must design and carry out controlled experiments that build upon current theory and evidence to defend or refute our hypotheses.

So, when we can't get students to do the hard stuff, it might just be easier to have them dribble on and on about what they think or what they feel and call it a day.

The question is, though, does this sort of education constitute a higher education and does it well prepare a student—and especially a first-generation college student—to succeed in the competitive global marketplace? It is time to stop treating students like consumers and to go back to treating them like students. Students may not like it if they have to perform higher order mathematical functions and get the right answer, or if they have to become proficient in a second language, or even if they have to read classical pieces of literature upon which Eastern or Western civilizations were based, but as the adults in charge, we need to ensure that a diploma on the wall means that the recipient is capable of reading, writing, and performing arithmetic at a level worthy of the sheepskin.

I urge higher education leaders to initiate a serious discussion about what constitutes a rigorous liberal-arts education—and what does not—and to be sure that liberal arts does not become the new euphemism for social promotion in higher education. After all, a solid, rigorous liberal-arts education provides the best hope that the next generation will be empowered to solve the problems of tomorrow, which we can't begin to anticipate today.

From the Wall Street Journal:

'The voucher movement seems to have been born, or seems to have been started as a Republican idea. That's the way Democrats look at it. That's the way black lawmakers look at it. This is a Republican idea. This is what the Republicans want to push on us. . . . We don't seem to see public schools not working in your area."

The speaker was the Rev. James Meeks, explaining black resistance to vouchers. The venue was a sold-out lunch put on by the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI). The result? Something new in Windy City politics: a powerful black Democrat reaching out to a free-market think tank to force reform on the city's most hidebound institution--the Chicago public schools.

James T. Meeks does not fit the usual stereotype of a voucher advocate. To begin with, he is founder and senior pastor of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, the largest African-American church in Illinois. He serves as executive vice-president for Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Oh, yes: He is a Democratic state senator who chairs both his chamber's education committee and the legislature's Black Caucus.

A few years back, Barack Obama named him someone he looked to for "spiritual counsel." Now the man they call "the Reverend Senator" has done the unthinkable: He's introduced a bill to provide vouchers for as many as 42,000 students now languishing in Chicago's worst public schools. He tells me he thinks he can get enough Democrats on his coalition to get it through.

"I'm banking on the difficulty Democrats will have telling these parents, 'No, you're not going to have choice. Your kids are locked into these failing schools.'"

Right now, national attention on Illinois is focused on the possibility that Republicans may take the U.S. Senate seat once held by Mr. Obama. But Collin Hitt, the IPI's director of education, notes Mr. Meeks may have the more far-reaching narrative.

"There is an irony that the highest-profile push for vouchers in America today is in Illinois, while the highest-profile opposition to vouchers is also from Illinois," says Mr. Hitt. The latter reference is to President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrats whose opposition pulled the plug on a popular, bipartisan voucher program in our nation's capital.

As his remarks make clear, Mr. Meeks appreciates the disincentives that make vouchers such a political orphan. Pro-voucher Republicans open themselves to a double whammy: opposition from suburban voters who are happy with their kids' public schools and equate vouchers with bringing blacks into those schools; and only tepid support from African-Americans who are wary of GOP intentions. Meanwhile, any Democrat who dares to back vouchers will immediately find himself at war with the most powerful and unforgiving special interest in his party: the teachers unions.

That's what Mr. Meeks meant when he spoke to IPI of the difficulty of Republicans using "our statistics"--that is, failure rates for inner-city public schools--to promote "a Republican idea" for largely black schools. He's also frank about why he's embraced that idea after years of banging the drum for more money. As he recently told one local TV interviewer, the money isn't there. With Illinois $13 billion in debt, parents do not have "ten years to wait for Democrats to fund schools."

Certainly he's not a man to hold his tongue. He speaks frankly about elected officials "owned by unions." About politicians who send their own kids to private schools--while opposing the choice for the less fortunate. In 2006, he gained notoriety for language in a fiery sermon that appeared directed at Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

"We don't have slave masters," he said. "We got mayors. But they still the same white people who are presiding over systems where black people are not able . . . to be educated."

Whether this was fair to Mayor Daley, it's hard to contest the point about the school system. Even conceding there was progress during the years Mr. Duncan served as CEO of the Chicago public schools—especially on charters--half the students who make it to ninth grade still won't see a high school diploma. Mr. Meeks invokes an even more dispiriting statistic: Only eight out of 100 Chicago public school students will graduate from a four-year college.

"If the American Dream includes sending your kids to college," he asks, "what is Chicago saying to these parents?" Good question.

In the last presidential campaign, Americans responded to a candidate who spoke of a new politics of hope and promised to reach across the aisle. It hasn't turned out that way in Washington. But back in the city the president and his education secretary left behind, Mr. Meeks believes he has found a reform that will give Chicago school parents change they can believe in.

The latest addition to this growing choir of voices is Idaho State provost Gary Olson, whose column in the current Chronicle of Higher Ed hits all the big points. He notes the need for transparency, fiscal responsibility, and for administrators and supervisors to hold faculty and staff to established professional standards. He mentions that higher education exists to serve the public good, and must clearly honor its public compact. He observes that even as legislators and federal commissions call loudly for academic accountability, they should not, ideally, be the ones implementing it--academics should be. And he argues that academics are already voluntarily doing just that.

Olson asserts that "In recent years, colleges and universities, independent of external pressure, have begun to institute sweeping measures to hold themselves and their faculty and staff members accountable in a number of areas," and his column is aimed ultimately at drawing a contrast between academia's recent, lawless past (where he personally "witnessed" how "'good old boy' ... supervisors and department heads often would ignore infractions of university rules, or privately direct the transgressor to halt the offending behavior"; where "a shocking degree of laxity in such matters" led "department heads [to] dismiss unethical, unprofessional, or occasionally illegal behavior because, 'after all, we're all colleagues,' or because, as a former chair once told me, 'rocking the boat would cause more trouble than it's worth'") and a new academic order oriented around documentation, clarity, and transparency.

Olson doesn't provide much evidence for the shift he celebrates--mostly he's arguing by assertion, and the reader is as free to discount his claim that academia is cleaning up its act as s/he is free to discount the prior assertion--backed only, ultimately, by anecdote--that there were serious problems to begin with. There's something for everyone in a non-analysis of this sort--but nothing very much, in the end, for anyone.

Be that as it may, Olson does get one thing very right indeed, and that is what a serious commitment to accountability can do for academia's internal operations and for its tarnished reputation. Noting that an "increased commitment to accountability" leads to "more deliberate, defensible, and professional decision-making" and that it underscores "the necessity of making data-driven rather than seat-of-the-pants decisions, much less ideologically driven ones," Olson explains an obvious point that tends to get lost in the polarizing, distorted culture-war crucible that is the usual destination for debates about academic accountability:

Becoming genuinely accountable means being able to demonstrate that decisions derive from specific facts, not from anecdote, impression, gut feeling, personal agenda, or ideology. It entails fostering a culture of evidence within the institution, which has led, in turn, to the increased importance of involving information-technology and institutional-research departments in key decisions.

Recently I was invited to participate on a panel of experts in information technology and institutional research about the importance of data-driven decision making in strategic planning. The consensus was that having sufficient access to the right data enables universities to make more sophisticated, fine-grained decisions and to demonstrate the rationales behind them.

Clearly, "accountability" in academe can refer to a vast array of attempts to become transparent and open in decision-making processes. Whether it is an attempt by curricular programs to illustrate that they are truly delivering what they promised, or an effort by academic departments (or entire institutions) to demonstrate that their students really are acquiring the skills and knowledge demanded by their disciplines, or measures taken by institutions to tighten their fiscal controls, the answer to "Why accountability?" is this: Because we have a responsibility as public stewards to answer for the trust we have been given.

When it comes to K-12 education, vouchers are often talked about as expenditures--and opponents of vouchers often want to know how we are supposed to pay for voucher programs. It seems logical on first blush. But in fact it's inside-out.

Here's John Stossel on just how inside-out it is.

... I said that Washington DC gives voucher schools $7,500 per student, but DC's public schools cost twice that much: $15,000.

The $15,000 number has been cited by congressmen and newspapers like the WSJ and the Denver Post. It comes from the the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Census.

Unfortunately, it's also wrong. Or at least very misleading, since it ignores major sources of spending. As CATO Education scholar Andrew Coulson explains:

DC also has a 'state' level bureaucracy that spends nearly $200 million annually on k-12 programs, and the city spends another $275 million or so on school construction, school facilities modernization, and other so-called 'capital' projects.

But those aren't included in the regular spending figures.

The $15,000 statistic is also misleading because it includes money for kids in charter schools, even though those schools are not guaranteed a student base and so are forced to be much more efficient than regular public schools.

The real figure? $26,000 for each student signed up at a DC public school. $28,000 for each student who actually attended. Some might say that's an unfair number because it includes special education students that the private schools supposedly won't take. But even if you drop the costs of special education students, DC still spends $23,000 per kid.

You know public education is a mess when hardly anyone can keep track of what schools really spend. As Coulson tells me:

School district budgets are so convoluted it's almost as if they're made to be confusing ... DC has split up its education spending into seven different budgets, all of which go to k-12 public education, but only one of which is called 'the DC Public School budget.'

Oh, and the $7,500 for voucher schools? Turns out that the average voucher school only charges $6,620 (many are catholic schools.) So they cost a quarter of what public schools do, but still they do better!

Food for thought: top private day schools in the DC area don't charge all that much more than DC is spending on the nation's worst-performing public schools. Georgetown Day charges between $28K and $32K, depending on your grade level. Sidwell Friends charges about $30K. These are expensive private day schools, it should be noted; tuition there approaches what boarding schools elsewhere cost. I haven't looked at the numbers in a couple of years, but when I was actively looking for independent school jobs, good private day schools across the country were running about $20K a year, while boarding schools were running about $30-35K per year.

Also worth considering: kids in the DC voucher program may be able to cover their entire tuition at a private Catholic school with their voucher. But a number have also put their vouchers toward tuition at places like Georgetown Day, which makes up the difference in scholarship. Having choice makes so much possible.

Here's what DC is producing with its more-than-$20K per student:

--Tests show that in reading and math, the District's public school students score at the bottom among 11 major city school systems, even when poor children are compared only with other poor children. Thirty-three percent of poor fourth-graders across the nation lacked basic skills in math, but in the District, the figure was 62 percent. It was 74 percent for D.C. eighth-graders, compared with 49 percent nationally.

--The District spends $12,979 [or more--see above] per pupil each year, ranking it third-highest among the 100 largest districts in the nation. But most of that money does not get to the classroom. D.C. schools rank first in the share of the budget spent on administration, last in spending on teachers and instruction.

--Principals reporting dangerous conditions or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379 days -- a year and two weeks -- for the problems to be fixed. Of 146 school buildings, 113 have a repair request pending for a leaking roof, a Washington Post analysis of school records shows.

--The schools spent $25 million on a computer system to manage personnel that had to be discarded because there was no accurate list of employees to use as a starting point. The school system relies on paper records stacked in 200 cardboard boxes to keep track of its employees, and in some cases is five years behind in processing staff paperwork. It also lacks an accurate list of its 55,000-plus students, although it pays $900,000 to a consultant each year to keep count.

--Many students and teachers spend their days in an environment hostile to learning. Just over half of teenage students attend schools that meet the District's definition of "persistently dangerous" because of the number of violent crimes, according to an analysis of school reports. Across the city, nine violent incidents are reported on a typical day, including fights and attacks with weapons. Fire officials receive about one complaint a week of locked fire doors, and health inspections show that more than a third of schools have been infested by mice.

College campuses, especially at public universities, are places where all ideas should be expressed and debated. No speech ever should be stopped or punished because of the viewpoint expressed. Of course, there must be rules to regulate the time, place and manner of such expression to preserve order and even to make sure that speech can occur.

These general principles are unassailable, but their application to recent events at the University of California, Irvine, has attracted international attention. Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren was invited by several sponsors, including the law school (of which I am dean) and the political science department (of which I am a member) to speak at the university on Feb. 8.

Prior to this event, campus officials heard rumors that some members of the Muslim Student Union planned to disrupt the ambassador's speech by having a series of students yell so that he could not be heard. One after another they would rise and shout, so that as each was escorted away, another would be there to make sure that the ambassador did not get to speak. When asked, the officials of the Muslim Student Union denied any plans to do this.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what occurred. After the first disruptions, the audience was admonished that such behavior was not acceptable within the university and that those who engaged in such conduct would be arrested and face student disciplinary proceedings. Despite these warnings, 11 individuals rose and shouted so that the ambassador could not be heard. At one point he left the stage, but thankfully was persuaded to return and deliver his address.

Eleven individuals were arrested, and those who are UCI students are facing disciplinary action. In the last week, I have been deluged with messages from those saying the disruptive students did nothing wrong and deserve no punishment, and also from those saying that the students should be expelled and that others in the audience who cheered them on should be disciplined.

Both of these views are wrong. As to the former, there are now posters around campus referring to the unjust treatment of the "Irvine 11" and saying they were just engaging in speech themselves. However, freedom of speech never has been regarded as an absolute right to speak out at any time and in any manner. Long ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes explained that there was no right to falsely shout "fire" in a crowded theater.

The government, including public universities, always can impose time, place and manner restrictions on speech. A person who comes into my classroom and shouts so that I cannot teach surely can be punished without offending the 1st Amendment. Likewise, those who yelled to keep the ambassador from being heard were not engaged in constitutionally protected behavior.

Freedom of speech, on campuses and elsewhere, is rendered meaningless if speakers can be shouted down by those who disagree. The law is well established that the government can act to prevent a heckler's veto -- to prevent the reaction of the audience from silencing the speaker. There is simply no 1st Amendment right to go into an auditorium and prevent a speaker from being heard, no matter who the speaker is or how strongly one disagrees with his or her message.

The remedy for those who disagreed with the ambassador was to engage in speech of their own, but in a way that was not disruptive. They could have handed out leaflets, stood with picket signs, spoken during the question-and-answer session, held a demonstration elsewhere on campus or invited their own speakers.

At the same time, I also disagree with those who call for draconian sanctions against these students or of punishment for a larger group. Only the students who were actually disruptive should be punished. Whether there will be criminal prosecutions is up to the Orange County district attorney. Within the university, the punishment should be great enough to convey that the conduct was wrong and unacceptable, but it should not be so severe as to ruin these students' educational careers.

As a matter of 1st Amendment law, this is an easy case. It would be so no matter the identity or views of the speaker or of the demonstrators. Perhaps some good can come from this ugly incident if the university uses it as an occasion to help teach its students about the meaning of free speech and civil discourse.

John Stossel's column in the Examiner:

The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.

But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: "Parents are voting with their feet. ... As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent."

How revealing is that?

Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.

Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student--more than $200,000 per classroom. It's not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else?

The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country's educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?

Parents care about their kids and want them to learn and succeed--even poor parents. Thousands line up hoping to get their kids into one of the few hundred lottery-assigned slots at Harlem Success Academy, a highly ranked charter school in New York City. Kids and parents cry when they lose.

Yet the establishment is against choice. The union demonstrated outside Harlem Success the first day of school. And President Obama killed Washington, D.C.'s voucher program.

This is typical of elitists, who believe that parents, especially poor ones, can't make good choices about their kids' education.

Is that so? Ask James Tooley about that (http://tinyurl.com/ydgln9z). Tooley is a professor of education policy who spends most of every year in some of the poorest parts of Africa, India and China. For 10 years, he's studied how poor kids do in "free" government schools and — hold on — private schools. That's right. In the worst slums, private for-profit schools educate kids better than the government's schools do.

Tooley finds as many as six private schools in small villages. "The majority of (poor) schoolchildren are in private school, and these schools outperform government schools at a fraction of the teacher cost," he says.

Why do parents with meager resources pass up "free" government schools and sacrifice to send their children to private schools? Because, as one parent told the BBC, the private owner will do something that's virtually impossible in America's government schools: replace teachers who do not teach.

As in America, the elitist establishment in those countries scoffs at the private schools and the parents who choose them. A woman who runs government schools in Nigeria calls such parents "ignoramuses."
But that can't be true. Tooley tested kids in both kinds of schools, and the private-school students score better.

To give the establishment its best shot, consider Head Start, which politicians view as sacred. The $166 billion program is 45 years old, so it's had time to prove itself. But guess what: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently found no difference in first-grade test results between kids who went through Head Start and similar kids who didn't (http://tinyurl.com/ylcmb92). President Obama has repeatedly promised to "eliminate programs that don't work," but he wants to give Head Start a billion more dollars. The White House wouldn't explain this contradiction to me.

Andrew Coulson, head of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Reform, said, "If Head Start (worked), we would expect now, after 45 years of this program, for graduation rates to have gone up; we would expect the gap between the kids of high school dropouts and the kids of college graduates to have shrunk; we would expect students to be learning more. None of that is true."

Choice works, and government monopolies don't. How much more evidence do we need?

That's ACTA president Anne Neal, commenting on the latest Public Agenda report, Squeeze Play 2010: Continued Public Anxiety On Cost, Harsher Judgments On How Colleges Are Run. The accompanying article in Inside Higher Ed offers a good summary of the impasse between public perceptions of higher ed (essential but far too costly and, by implication, wasteful and inefficient) and higher ed's perception of higher ed (essential, but hampered by budget cuts and shortfalls).

Other intriguing comments:

Economist Rich Vedder observes that "Once colleges were revered as selfless institutions trying to educate our youth and serve the public good. Now, apparently, universities are viewed as being somewhat akin to used car dealers, trying to shake down their customers for as much money as possible. In the long run, that is going to hurt a sector dependent on third parties for support .... The bubble’s got to burst on this thing."

The American Council on Education's Terry Hartle says the survey shows that colleges and universities have a communication problem, rather than a spending problem: The results show that higher ed is not "doing enough to explain what we cost and what we're doing to maintain affordability."

And a commenter writes that higher ed "reminds me of the health care debate. Costs for health care are out of site, partially because insurance is paying for it, not the consumer. People tend to not pay attention to the cost of health care for that reason. If people were paying out of pocket prices would no doubt be lower. Financial aid works like insurance. If people were paying out of pocket for education instead of borrowing money to pay for it, prices would be lower. I think it is called a market system, you know, supply and demand. When a 3rd party is paying part of the cost, and not the consumer, people tend to not pay attention to the price. More aid means higher costs. When loan limits were increased, borrowing skyrocketed. Schools got all of that extra money, leaving the students to figure out how to pay it back down the road. Eventually, the bubble will burst. When no one can afford to buy your product, you have a big problem."

I tend to think the answer is in the middle. Colleges and universities, like all big bureaucracies, are wasteful and inefficient. Throwing more money at them--as many would like--is not going to make them more effective, but will instead make them even less motivated to spend a dollar wisely. They need to restructure, re-prioritize, focus on their missions, and cut the fat. The public in turn needs to recognize that a quality education is not something to be gotten on the cheap. It should and could be less expensive than it is--but doing it right does incur costs.

Just to take one example: One way colleges and universities have been cutting costs in recent years is by relying on temporary, part-time teachers to handle undergrad courses. According to some studies, upwards of 70 percent of college teachers in this country are non-tenure track, part-timers. Many are working for below minimum wage, when you factor in all the prep time and grading time involved in teaching; they have no benefits, no say in governance, and no academic freedom. They also have to take on a far heavier course load than tenure-track faculty do, just to make ends meet. This is cheaper for the school, but bad for students, who are being taught on the fly by people who have neither the time nor the security to focus on actually educating. It also doesn't translate into cost cutting for the students--your tuition rises regardless of who is teaching you. When confronted with this, schools often argue that they don't have the money to move away from cheap teaching piecework and toward more expensive but also more responsible full-time teaching positions.

Is the money really not there? Or is it there--but just somewhere else? One thinks of inflated administrative and executive salaries, of bureaucratic bloat, of millions going to subsidize athletics at the expense of academics, and so on.

A HISTORICAL OBSERVATION ON CLIMATEGATE: As this scandal runs on, it's beginning to remind me of the Michael Bellesiles scandal. (Here's a thorough dissection by Jim Lindgren in the Yale Law Journal — it’s a PDF; here's a shorter summary from Wikipedia, and a thorough summary by Joyce Malcolm.)

Bellesiles, for those who don’t remember, was a historian at Emory who wrote a book making some, er, counterintuitive claims about guns in early America — in short, that they were much rarer than generally thought, and frequently owned and controlled by the government. Constitutional law scholars who expressed doubts about this were told to shut up by historians, who cited the importance of “peer review” as a guarantor of accuracy, and who wrapped themselves in claims of professional expertise.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Bellesiles had made it up. His work was based on probate records, and when people tried to find them, it turned out that many didn’t exist (one data set he claimed to have used turned out, on review, to have been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake). It also turned out that Bellesiles hadn’t even visited some of the archives he claimed to have researched. When challenged to produce his data, he was unable to do so, and offered unpersuasive stories regarding why.

Bellesiles eventually lost his job at Emory (and his Bancroft Prize) over the fraud, but not until his critics had been called political hacks, McCarthyites, and worse. But what’s amazing, especially in retrospect, is how slow his defenders — and the media — were to engage the critics, or to look at the flaws in the data. Instead, they wrapped themselves in claims of authority, and attacked the critics as anti-intellectual hacks interested only in politics. Are we seeing something similar with regard to ClimateGate? It sure looks that way to me.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post begins the hitherto-neglected American MSM work of connecting the dots between the UEA scandal, the IPCC scandal, and US policies on climate. Finally.

The academic at the centre of the 'Climategate' affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble 'keeping track' of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'.

The data is crucial to the famous 'hockey stick graph' used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no 'statistically significant' warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of 'scientific fraud' for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.

Discussing the interview, the BBC's environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.

Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC's website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.

That material has been used to produce the 'hockey stick graph' which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said 'his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them'.

Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.

But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: 'There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it's probably not as good as it should be.

'There's a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.'

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no 'statistically significant' warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: 'There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

'For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

'Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.'

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled 'until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend.'

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4's Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s 'excuses' for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and 'mates'.
He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor's concessions over medieval warming were 'significant' because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

I am reminded of former Emory historian Michael Bellesiles, who claimed not to be able to produce the research behind Arming America--an award-winning work that delighted gun control activists by seeming to offer a historical rationale for restrictive interpretations of the Second Amendment--because his notes had gotten wet. Bellesiles is a "former" Emory historian because of the scandal that arose about the integrity of his research. Bellesiles' research was spectacularly successful within the academic peer review system--but proved to be deeply flawed when examined by nonacademic historians. The concerns of these historians were brushed off by academics until the media got hold of the story. Only then did Emory hold Bellesiles accountable, conducting both an internal investigation and appointing an external review committee of outside scholars. Bellesiles was found guilty of research misconduct and resigned amid hollow-sounding claims that he had done nothing wrong.

A similar story seems to be unfolding with certain climate scientists--at least in the UK.

Penn State, are you watching?

"It is in the interests of all concerned that there should be an additional assessment considering the science itself," said UEA's pro-vice chancellor for research Trevor Davies.

"It is important that people have the utmost confidence in the science of climate change," said the Royal Society's president Martin Rees.

Today, PSU students are holding a rally to demand that the university procure external oversight for its investigation of Mann.

Here's the press release announcing the event:

Students, residents and community leaders will join together on Friday, February 12, to demand a fair and independent investigation of Michael Mann and Climategate. The University has a conflict of interest, and should not conduct an internal investigation without external oversight. The Rally for Academic Integrity will take place in front of the Hetzel Union Building (HUB) on Penn State's University Park Campus (Pollock Road entrance) at 12:00. This Rally for Academic Integrity is jointly sponsored by PSU Young Americans for Freedom and The 9-12 Project of Central PA.

Background:

Penn State's internal inquiry into Michael Mann's alleged scientific misconduct concluded with the virtual exoneration of his behavior, and ignored key evidence in the Climategate scandal. As feared, this inquiry was little more than a whitewash--an assault on academic integrity.

First, the university's internal review consisted of three Penn State employees who have strong incentives to protect the school's reputation and the millions of dollars it receives from global warming research grants. There was no external oversight.

Second, the review consisted of looking at a mere 47 emails (out of thousands in question), interviewing Mann, analyzing materials he submitted, and asking only two biased sources about his credibility. Penn State hardly conducted a "thorough investigation" of alleged wrongdoing by Mann.

Consider the following extract:
--"He [Mann] explained that he had never falsified any data, nor had he had ever manipulated data to serve a given predetermined outcome;
--"He explained that he never used inappropriate influence in reviewing papers by other scientists who disagreed with the conclusions of his science;
--"He explained that he never deleted emails at the behest of any other scientist, specifically including Dr. Phil Jones, and that he never withheld data with the intention of obstructing science; and
--"He explained that he never engaged in activities or behaviors that were inconsistent with accepted academic practices."

In short, Mann's own claim of innocence is taken as proof of his innocence. Moreover, parts of the report are almost fawning in their description of Mann (e.g. "All were impressed by Dr. Mann's composure and his forthright responses"). "This type of language would be more appropriate in a letter of recommendation than in a serious investigation," commented Penn State sophomore, and YAF chair, Samuel Settle.

Third, Penn State's internal review ignored key passages in the emails under scrutiny. While the committee examined the use of the word "trick" in correspondence between Mann and colleague Phil Jones, it failed to explore the purpose of Mann's "trick" to "hide the decline [in global temperatures]," which clearly suggests a manipulation of the data.

Penn State's internal review of a few emails by vested interests inspires no confidence that Mann did not engage in scientific misconduct--which is precisely why an independent and external investigation of Michael Mann and Climategate is essential in order to reach a credible conclusion.