An interesting story in the Washington Post about JFK’s race against Richard Nixon:

It began in the fall of 1960, when the Kennedy campaign spread word that Vice President Nixon had secretly pocketed money from billionaire Howard Hughes, whose far-flung business empire was heavily dependent on government contracts and connections. Reporters for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Time magazine corroborated the allegations, but their editors feared publishing such explosive information in the last days of the tightly fought campaign.
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So the Kennedys turned to two crusading liberal columnists, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who had been attacking Nixon for the past decade. It was “a journalistic atrocity” to conspire with “the Kennedy hawkshaws to help us get the goods on their opponent,” Anderson admitted, but scoring a scoop to destroy Nixon was simply too tempting to pass up.

I took a US History class that covered from 1946 to 1960, ending (of course) with JFK’s election. I had planned to take the next course, covering 1961-1976, but was turned off by the professor (of both courses). Even though JFK (and Nixon, somewhat) played a relatively bit role, it was obvious that the professor held Kennedy in the highest esteem. I have a number of biased professors (a couple conservative, actually), but there was something about this professor’s particular sanctimony that I found extremely off-putting. The end result of it all was that the contrarian in me prevailed and I came out of it with a distaste for JFK and Kennedyism in general.

One of the cool parts of the class, though, was that we poured over the opinion media at the time. Even in the height of the Clinton years, it punched a pretty big hole in the notion that in the wonderful days of yore people had respect for the presidency if not its occupant. Criticisms of Eisenhower at the time actually closely matched later criticisms of George W Bush: an unintelligent, unenlightened hick who never had any business being president. And, of course, the obvious Kennedy/Clinton parallels.

Half Sigma links to some numbers as to what people are majoring in.

There are some interesting comments that follow, once you get past the “majors I don’t like are useless” mentality. A couple of the comments are from Hit Coffee Commenteers, though before I get to those I thought this one to be particularly interesting:

While it may be true that there aren’t a whole lot of “critical queer studies” majors (for which we can all be grateful), such departments have campus and policy influence far disproportionate to their numbers, having been able to bully higher ed administrations into providing them with similarly outsized shares of resources as well.

I was actually talking to my father-in-law about this when I was in Beyreuth visiting them. We were talking about how some professors, such as those in engineering and business, are able to command larger salaries and often better working conditions because if they’re dissatisfied they have somewhere to go. He responded that was a factor, as was the fact that engineers and businesspeople tend to be better negotiators. He went on to talk about exactly what this commenter is talking about. What liberal arts professors lack in options, they make up for in enthusiasm. He said that nearly every academic committee is dominated by liberal arts types because academia is their world and they throw themselves into it while a lot of science and math profs tend to be anti-social and engineering and business profs tend to view academia as a job rather than a calling. I thought that was a really interesting point.

Abel actually read my mind with this comment:

This only shows the number of people who graduate with degrees–worthless or not. What would be more interesting is to see how many students are enrolled in various degree programs and whether there’s a higher dropout rate between those pursuring “worthless” degrees and those pursuing more “practical” degrees.

You would think that those majoring in subjects that interest them might have better graduation rates. And maybe it’s so. My observational experience, though, suggests the opposite. Those with vocational majors tend to be more goal-oriented while those with more academic majors are more likely to view their more immediate needs as being more important.

I’ve commented in the past that a real turning point in my friend Clint’s academic career was when he changed his major from music education (something with vocational utility) to music composition (something without it). Well, maybe it wasn’t a turning point. But it was indicative of a problem. That college was more about doing what he wanted to do and playing to his talents rather than preparing him for a future job. His academic performance did not improve. He graduated, but did no better than I think he would have if he had stuck with his original major.

In fact, nobody I can think of that changed to a more friendly major significantly improved their academic performance. The opposite was more likely to be the case. I choose people who changed their majors because you’re controlling for a lot of variables that way.

Peter commented:

It’s curious that health-related majors rank third yet get very little blogospheric attention. Not much mainstream media attention, for that matter. I would attribute this to the fact that elite universities generally don’t offer these majors, at least not to a significant extent, and no one cares about non-elite institutions. Also, while I don’t have statistics, my reasoned guess is that health-related majors tend to have a relatively high percentage of students who are past traditional college age, and once again no one cares about them. Everyone wants to hear about a 22-year-old* who just graduated from NYU with a degree in comparative literature. No one gives a hoot about a 40-year-old who just graduated from York College with a degree in occupational therapy.

This is a really good point. We tend to think of college within a certain context, often overlooking the large and growing population of non-traditional students. I would be willing to bet that this accounts for a lot of the business majors. It could undermine Abel’s thoughts and my own as non-traditional students are likely to have lower graduation rates, on the whole. They may be goal-oriented, but they are often balancing other priorities (and are often less school-oriented in general).

This actually isn’t hypothetical, because it happened to a classmate in my college phys-ed class. About a third of our grade was based on overall physical fitness (our ability to run the mile-and-a-half, life weights, and so on), a third based on participation (were you at least trying?) and a third based on classroom work. That second part was also based on physical fitness, to some extent, because you started getting docked whenever you stopped jogging or when you had to call it quits for lack of physical fitness. The classwork was dreadfully easy. Obviously, for someone not in good physical shape, the fitness tests were hard.

My friend-for-a-class Ned was in overall pretty good shape (well, much better shape than me – and I was not a smoker at the time). The thing is that he was a smoker. He could start and stop at will and so for the fitness tests (most specifically the running test which was the hardest) he would actually stop smoking for a few days before the run. So on the jogging test, he kicked my posterior and actually came in 7th (out of 30). He beat me by some margin on every physical test.

When we got our grades, though, I got a B- and he got a C. When he talked to the instructor about this (I was with him to verify that we showed the same effort in class), she said that she docked him because he was a smoker. She’d seen him smoking first thing after class or before class. He smelled of the stuff. In her mind, his smoking was indicative of a lack of commitment to physical health. Ned’s counterpoint was that it was none of her business. He ran the laps, lifted the weights, and did everything he was expected to do. On what basis could she dock him points? She said that his “participation” grade was low because he really wasn’t giving it his all (usually working at the same pace that I did). If it weren’t for the cigarettes, she said, he could have done more. And since smoking was his choice, he lost participation points. And yet I (Will) didn’t, Ned argued, despite showing the exact same effort.

The difference, she argued, was that what was a greater effort for me was less of an effort for him. It’s graded on a curve.

He argued that he was then being punished for being in shape (in terms of effort) more than I was being punished for being out of shape (in terms of fitness challenge performance).

She shrugged it off, saying that physical fitness was about appreciating your body and that there was no sign that somebody didn’t appreciate their body like smoking, and so ultimately he deserved a worse grade than he got. Did he want that? The conversation ended there.

So, the question is, should phys-ed be able to punish someone for being a smoker if it doesn’t show up in their ability to practice and perform? Even though I later became a smoker, I can actually somewhat appreciate her perspective on the matter. Smoking, as compared to excess weight (my problem at the time) is a more binary decision. And as difficult as it is to quit smoking, the quit-success is much higher for smoking than dieting is for overweight people.

On the other hand, it seemed pretty apparent to me that this declaration was pretty arbitrary. She was punishing him for a habit that he found disgusting. Nowhere was it written down that smokers are penalized (beyond the physical toll it takes). Presumably, if it had been written down, he would have at least taken more care not to show up smelling like smoke. Maybe he should have done that anyway to be considerate, but being considerate is not a factor in his grade.

Of course, all of this comes back to the difficulty when it comes to grading people in PE. In no other college course is “effort” graded directly, nor should it be. Or maybe it is, since that’s what attendance grades and a lot of homework assignments are. Ultimately, though, most of your grade is supposed to come from the degree to which you demonstrate mastery over the subject matter. That’s hard to do for PE because you can understand the subject matter of running very, very well and yet still not be able to do it. It’s difficult to make up for lack of ability (over the course of a single semester) with determination and discipline. Most classes, determination and discipline are going to be, if not sufficient to overcome all, at least sufficient to overcome some of it.

And, ultimately, being able to run the 1.5-mile over a period of time isn’t really what people go to college for. Even classes like Comparative Folk Dancing offer something in terms of learning how to communicate ideas (regardless of the frivolity of the subject-matter). I suppose the ability to take care of oneself physically does matter to future employers, but that has to be viewed as a lifetime project and not something you’re going to pick up in class. It’s easy to translate term papers into something useful in the business world, but more difficult to translate squats.

All of this is of course contingent on viewing college as vocational training. I suppose if you disagree with that on a fundamental level, you can view phys-ed as a more abstract good. Of course, those that view college as a sort of a self-improvement thing apart from vocational training are also the types who hate jocks for all of the wedgies they got when they were younger.

The subject of cheating seems to be coming up here and there. A lot of it pertaining to this article, written by a professional ghostwriter for college papers. Further commentary by Otherwill and Rufus at The League.

Longtime readers of Hit Coffee may remember that once upon a time, I was a ghostwriter for my then-girlfriend Julianne at the college level. She and I took three classes together and she shrugged off all three. The end-result was that I would get upset calls at 2 in the morning from Julianne saying that she hadn’t started the paper due the next day, had no idea what to write, and little or no knowledge of the subject-matter because of all of the classes that she missed. So I would take care of it for her. I was happy to the first few times, though after enough reiterations of how these last-minute deadlines came at her suddenly without any warning (when she’d groused at me for reminding her of it as the date approaches) and her being caught flatfooted, it gets exasperating.

Anyhow, I’m sure that you’re shocked to hear this, but I can be a kind of wordy fellow and so when a paper was meant to be 3-5 pages long, I usually had to struggle to meet the five-page maximum. So there was usually an abundance of material for a half-hearted rewrite for Julie’s benefit. I would cut out several points, usually add a couple, or if it was a paper that we had flexibility on, topic-wise, pick up on something that got cut from my paper and run with it. The papers were junk. Typically mindless, unoriginal, and about as by-the-numbers as you could possibly imagine.

They also – every single one of them – got a higher grade than the papers that I turned in with my own name. And it was never that I was overtly docked for failing to stay on-point or for rambling on. Quite the opposite. I would get docked for failing to address a particular point. Her paper failed to address it, too, but it only seemed to matter on mine. I have a number of theories as to why hers graded better than mine, though none make a whole lot of sense. By the third class I though about simply reversing the names on the papers, but though a cheater I was I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was proud of my A- papers and her A+ papers were, as far as I was concerned, parrot droppings. In two of the three classes I got a higher grade than her simply because I couldn’t take the test for her as well. In the third class I actually could help her with the tests, too, and she scored the highest grade in the class and got an email from the prof saying as much.

I’m sure if there are any Game-types that read this, they are thinking how pathetically beta my behavior is. Probably thinking that she lost all respect for me as I bent over backwards doing these things for her. The problem is that it couldn’t be further from the truth. She was actually very appreciative and did not lead her to dump by ass or cheat on me with an alpha. She did kind of take it for granted, and that caused some ill-will on my part, but she never took me for granted. After the third class together where she almost never showed up at all, I resolved that I wouldn’t take any more classes with her. It didn’t matter as our relationship collapsed at the end of that semester and she had flunked out of Southern Tech University anyway.

The second, and to me more interesting story, is this one from the University of Central Florida. Basically, some students got ahold of the test bank and the professor caught wind of it. There is a video of the lecture that the professor gave to his students, offering them an out:

“I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you didn’t graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don’t identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course.”

That’s a pretty generous deal. In fact, so generous that even if I didn’t cheat* I might fess up to having done so simply out of fear of their algorithms incorrectly identifying me as a cheater. I mean, the overall cost is lost face in the eyes of a professor and a four-hour ethics course. That punishment is guaranteed. But if the algorithms are wrong and you are incorrectly identified, the consequences are absolutely ruinous. It’s the same dynamic that leads people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit because they’re allowed to confess on a lesser charge. I mean, how much faith would you have in their algorithms? Probably a lot now, but back when I was in college? I’d probably grant at least a 5-10% chance of it being wrong. And I wouldn’t like those odds.

I wonder how many of the people that confessed were innocent but making that same calculation?

I never cheated on a college exam. I came close once, having printed out all my notes on a little piece of paper. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. In addition to helping Julianne out with her college studies, I also helped out some kids in junior high and high school for various reasons (some I regret, others I don’t). I did get caught trying to copy someone’s paper during a Spanish exam. I needed glasses and did not yet have them. The teacher did not have to be particularly perceptive to catch me. My friend Clint, incidentally, was caught by the exact same teacher trying to change his grade in her gradebook. She threatened to get a handwriting expert and he broke.

Some students at Alabama universities are suing in order put a stop to mandatory meal plans:

According to the Auburn University website, students who live on campus must pay a minimum of $995 per semester for the dining plan. Those living off campus must pay at least $300 for the program.

“These fees are not tuition and not related to class instruction,” attorney John F. Whitaker of Whitaker, Mudd, Simms, Luke & Wells said in a statement. “Instead, these food fees are mandated because these state schools have agreed to give certain food vendors exclusive control over these student food purchases in exchange for millions of dollars being paid back to the school. The students themselves are given no option.”

Compass Group USA and Thompson Hospitality Services, both from Delaware, are food vendors specifically named in the lawsuit.

Southern Tech University’s policies requiring meal plans was, I believe, limited only to those that lived in campus. I lived on campus all four years and there was never a semester that I did not spend the entire debit. Even so, the policy used to make me angry. It wasn’t actually the existence of the policy, which the Alabama students are objecting to, but the way that the university used to want it both ways.

It seems to me that campus food ought to fall under one of two categories. Either it is there to make a profit or it is there to serve the students. I am actually okay either way. If they simply told vendors “Hey, rent this space and sell food to our students and faculty!” that would certainly be fair. The university can get some money for renting out the space and people have eating options that they can take advantage of or not. For people like me, if we were to choose “not” then we can stock up our fridges and take it from there. Granted, the options surrounding the university in the seedy part of town were somewhat limited. So really, they likely had our money anyway. If only they would have just given us the choice.

But sometimes you can’t give people a choice and I understand that. I mean, sometimes you have to force everybody to pay something so that the businesses can be profitable. Now frankly, I question the business acumen of anybody that can set up shop at a university with a captive audience of 20,000 students walking from place to place and rarely driving off campus (seedy part of town, remember, plus parking spaces were golden) who cannot turn a profit. But that can also be attributed to the university charging too much for the space.

So it creates a situation where the university gets loads of money from the food providers in return for forcing the student population to pay the service provider in order to pay the exorbitant amount of money for the contract. In other words, we were essentially paying the university. However, because of the way that they have it set up, it seems like we’re not paying the university. We’re paying for food. Nevermind the portion of the food that is going to overhead which is going straight to the university.

While I would appreciate more transparency, even this doesn’t bother me all that much. I mean, in the end we’re making our check out to the university either way and they are needing and getting the money either way. What bugs me most about it is that it is advertised as a service to us. We have to do this in order to have food available on campus. Or something like that. However, it is only a service when they’re collecting money. When they’re deciding what they give back, it’s suddenly a business again.

It ultimately seemed (and seems) to me that if we’re all in this together and we all have to contribute, then there should be a premium put on actually serving us even when it is not entirely convenient to do so. I was not asking for a diner be open at 3 in the morning. I wa not even asking for things to be open during holidays. I was asking for breakfast. Around my junior year, they stopped serving breakfast at the dorms. Just. Stopped. Why? Oh, because they weren’t making a profit. I didn’t give a rats patoot if they weren’t making a profit. They’re not there to make a profit, we are told when they are collecting the money. They’re there so that we can eat. It seems to me the ability to get breakfast is one of the things that we are paying for when they tell us that we all have to buy food. It’s supposed to be for our convenience.

I recognize that to one extent or another that they’re getting our money either way. But the only argument for mandatory meal plans is that without them we won’t have the convenience of being able to eat conveniently on campus. But when breakfast isn’t available, or when lunch is served only from 11 to 1:00 (nevermind if you have an 11:30-1 class), or there is nothing open on entire weekends, it’s not really much of a convenience, is it? It’s a business. Except when they demand we pay. Then it’s a business. That can’t be boycotted. All of the downsides to either option.

-{via OTB}-

Does how popular you were in high school affect how much money you make later in life?

The answer is an affirmative. Causality is hard to determine for sure. The initial response of skeptics is that it has to do with extroversion, but they found no effect on the basis of gregariousness. That makes sense. Nerds and introverts make too much of the role of introversion in popularity. Some people are very extroverted and very annoying. Some people that are unpopular that people think are introverted really just won’t shut up when they’re in a position where everything they say will be used against them.

I think that it comes down to social confidence and charisma. People that are used to getting what they want from other people ask for more and in turn get more. The charisma that comes with popularity is always a career-helper. There is also the matter that some of the things that make one popular can also help one make good grades, which can have a cascading effect on future earnings. Sorta.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about ridiculous blank slate policies that drag down bright kids and steer slower kids in the wrong direction. But this is the worst I’ve heard yet. A middle school in San Diego, that sounds like it’s full of poor Hispanic kids, eliminated most of its tracking.

The headline was The End of ‘The Stupid Class.’

Correia put almost all students into the same classes this year, ending the controversial practice of splitting children into classes based on ability, also known as tracking.

“We wanted to debunk the whole thing and try something new,” said Principal Patricia Ladd. Her hope was that doing so could raise the bar for all kids at Correia. “So we detracked.”

That’s all the explanation we get. We are comforted with one gifted Hispanic student’s statement that she’s become more tolerant since they lumped her in with the average and slow kids.

“I was upset because I felt slowed down,” said Elizabeth Modesto, an eighth grader. “But now I like it. I’ve gotten better at working with others.”

She was surprised to see that some of her new classmates were great writers, that the boy she knew as a class clown could wow her with a cogent point. And Modesto said she kept learning, too.

This isn’t a fact-laden article. It seems the writer is bending over backward to be optimistic, and/or taking the school official’s word for how things are going:

“But so far the Correia experiment has shown promising results. School district tests show more students scoring well. Fights have dwindled and misbehavior is less common in class. And because gifted classes tend to have fewer children of color and poor kids, the move also helped to integrate the school by color and class.”

More students scoring well. We aren’t given any specifics. Later in the story, we find out scores for the gifted students have dropped in math. Anyhow, I wouldn’t expect a single year of any bad strategy to have a huge measurable effect.

Of course, there’s not one word about how splitting up the bright kids and making them minorities in every class might socially affect them. That would mean admitting slow kids tend to hassle bright kids and act worse in general. And we don’t hear from any kids without Hispanic surnames, even though we’re told that there were a lot more white kids in the top track. Based upon my experience as a white kid in a mostly Hispanic and Filipino school, I would predict the problem Hispanic kids will bother the gifted white kids before the gifted Hispanic kids. So as long as there are some white nerdy kids around, Elizabeth Modesto will probably slip under the radar.

I wonder how the reporter chose the student sources. Some schools allow reporters full access, but others restrict their contact. For example, sometimes they will allow you to interview only hand-picked student sources on school property. Small media outlets have to pick their battles carefully, so it’s often easier just to give in on small stories like this. Or, the reporter might even have given the principal control over who got interviewed by asking her to provide the sources.

To teach all kids at once, teachers let students show their knowledge through more flexible and open-ended assignments that allow children to make them as tough as they want, instead of asking all kids to do the same fixed task. For example, one history class asked students to pose and answer their own questions in writing about “big ideas” — one hallmark of gifted classes now used across Correia.

One student posed the question, “Was the war with Mexico good or bad?” and answered simply that it was good because the United States got more land but bad because people died. Another asked what factors caused the Texan rebellion and answered, “The Americans started disrespecting the Mexicans’ ways of life. On the other hand, the Mexican government enforced certain laws too harshly.”

Wow, so a kid can choose to make his assignment harder for himself as he works alongside his slower peers. How generous. What exactly would be the incentive for a student to do that?

The reporter interviewed a couple teachers, who not so surprisingly declined to speak negatively of either their bosses or of having to teach the slow students. Also not surprisingly, teachers who had all slow students before consider the mixed classes an improvement.

“I’ve never had a class like this,” said Lisa Young, who was used to teaching struggling students in a separate class. “The kids see someone else having success and they think, ‘I want that.'”

Bianca Penuelas is one of them. Slackers won’t make it in her classes this year, she says, so she’s trying harder, thinking bigger, proud to be working and chatting with the “smart kids” she once saw from afar.

“I feel smarter,” she said, her braces glinting in a smile. “I felt like I made it up to their level.”

——————————————

Here’s an on-point article from John Derbyshire at The National Review Online (via Half Sigma). And we discussed a study about tracking here, and L.A. Unified’s new approach to gifted education.

I could of discussions have got me thinking about teachers. Conservatives have been making the case that one of the main problems with our education system is that we can’t fire bad teachers. Almost no matter how bad. Liberals argue that it’s not true that we can’t fire bad teachers or that bad teachers may be expensive but they get taken out of the classroom in any event or that job security is one of the ways that we convince good teachers to teach and that outweighs what bad teachers do. Liberals generally argue that we should pay teachers more. Or we should bribe them into teaching with job security. The idea between both of these arguments, being able to fire bad teachers or tempting better teachers with more money or job security, is that it’s important that our teachers are really good at their jobs.

When I was a junior in high school, I had a chemistry teacher that was absolutely great. I don’t like science, but he made science… tolerable. That’s about the highest comment that I can pay to a science teacher. I learned what I needed to learn to make a good grade, scored in the 80-something percentile on the standardized test, and forgot it all by the time I got into college. The following year I had a physics teacher that I absolutely loathed. She was condescending and dull. I learned what I needed to learn to make a good grade, scored in the 80-something percentile on the standardized test, and forgot it all by the time I got into college. In the seventh grade I had a terrible reading teacher that I hated and not because she challenged me. I failed the standardized test that year for reading and had to take remedial reading in the 8th grade. That year I had a teacher that was great. My parents met her and had very much the same impression. I failed the standardized test again.

Looking back, there are precisely two teachers that I can point to as having had a seriously positive or negative influence on my life. Neither case is really conclusive and one of the two had nothing to do with his lesson plan and the other may have been an outlier that I will get to in a minute. I mean, I think periodically about what teachers I had and whether I consider them good teachers or bad teachers, but I can’t look back at any but those two and say that they had any long-term effect on my education. It’s possible that Mrs. Nelson had that effect on others, but I think the good behavior was more-or-less limited to her class.

Of course, you have the Jaime Escalantes of the world that prove that good teaching can make quite the difference if only to allow smart kids in bad situations to realize that they’re actually smart. But they’re outliers. They’re unusual. A system that counts on them for success is doomed to failure. Likewise, I think that really bad teachers – the kind where kids get out learning far less than they ever would have otherwise – are also pretty rare. Maybe the teacher themselves matters far less in the aggregate than does the curriculum they teach. If a good teacher and a bad teacher are teaching the same material from the same book… does it matter?

Here’s why this might be wrong. I could really be the outlier. I am also smarter than average. Maybe it’s the middling kids that it makes a bigger difference with. I also had/have attention difficulties that made it difficult to follow the teacher in any event. Because of these things, I don’t know how much I depended on the teachers to begin with. If I was learning mostly from the book, it wouldn’t matter so much what the teacher was saying or doing. So maybe it makes a difference on the middling kids. Maybe for some kids the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher is the difference between learning or not.

But seriously, looking back at my classmates, the largest variable was not teacher quality or teacher motivation (for those that want to encourage teachers to teach better through merit pay) but student motivation. And I don’t remember student motivation as being particularly variable within an education environment. Kids who didn’t care in one class were pretty unlikely to care in any of the others.

So if I’m right, why is there such a consensus on this issue? People who agree on nothing else seem to agree that teachers are important and that teacher quality matters. They go different ways when it comes to the implications of this belief, but it’s nigh-universally held. I think that for some ideologues right and left like it because it validates their views (whatever they are). As for everybody else? I think that we need to believe in the people we leave our kids with. We know that education is important, so the people that carry it out must therefore also be important. And if they’re important, it is important that they are good.

The subject of gifted and talented programs has been coming up, which reminds me of the story of Lamar Heston and the Superstars program. The Superstars program was a Southfield-Mayne Regional School District invention that took the brightest kids from each of the district’s elementary schools and, once a week, bussed them out to take an afternoon of classes together. West Oak Elementary School had four slots, two for boys and two for girls.

My older brothers are both in the same grade. There was no way that two brothers were going to be chosen for the two slots, so Mom didn’t expect both to get in. She wouldn’t have been surprised if neither got in. She was a bit surprised that of the two Truman boys it was the lower-achieving Oliver that got in rather than Mitch. Ollie was an achiever, but not in any standout sort of way. Indeed, the reason that he was in the same grade as his younger brother was that he was held back a year (for maturity rather than academic reasons, but still). That, however, wasn’t nearly as much of a surprise as the inclusion of Lamar Heston.

The main thing that you need to know about Lamar Heston is that the last time I saw him, two years ago, he worked at Wendy’s. And not because he was a Rick Rosner, not in a position of authority, and not because of any temporary setback. He wasn’t a terrible student, but he had some pretty serious behavioral and attitudinal problems. To say the least. Not only was he working at Wendy’s in his mid-30’s but nobody I know that knows him is surprised that he is working at Wendy’s in his mid-30’s.

Mom was baffled. She was actually somewhat indifferent to her kids getting into the Superstars program because she was concerned about our being too sheltered. But why Ollie over Mitch? And why the hell Lamar? The answer was pretty simple and you have probably already figured it out. Mitch was perfectly behaved and Ollie was a chatterbox with an attention problem. Oh, and Lamar was a disciplinary nightmare. Why the hell should the teacher put up with Ollie and (to a much, much greater extent) Lamar if she doesn’t have to? Lamar was black and possibly the only black kid there and there was nobody in the Superstars program that was going to single him out as undeserving of being there.

The next year Mitch and a similarly bright student were invited into the Superstars program. Mom declined.

When I was going through, they actually had three boys and three girls. The main reason being is that they couldn’t just accept the Weatherby Brothers and they couldn’t pick between the identical twins.

It’s hard to believe that L.A. Unified wasn’t already testing all students for giftedness, but it wasn’t. And it looks as if that resulted in certain poor and heavily minority schools having virtually no students identified as “gifted.”

The L.A. Times reports that the district’s new superintendent is requiring every second grade student be tested, starting this year. This is huge. It sounds as if he actually believes in the concept of intellectual giftedness, and cares about programs that support it.

Across the district, white students — 8.4% of L.A. Unified’s enrollment — make up about 23% of those designated as gifted. And Asians — 3.6% of the district — make up 16.4% of the district’s gifted students.

Most students come to be tested through one of two routes: A parent requests it or the school takes the initiative. And one or both haven’t been happening at many schools like 99th Street, which is 75% Latino and 25% black.

Part of the reason, said L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, is “insidious racism.” But another crucial factor in Los Angeles, he said, is that programs for gifted students have long been associated with integration efforts. Getting the “gifted” label made middle-class whites and Asians eligible for special programs designed as incentives for them to remain in public school.

Cortines, who came to the district in 2008, wants to identify as gifted at least 6% of students at every school. Administrators began targeting some schools, an effort that quickly saw results. The number of black students identified as gifted increased more than 9% over a six-month period.

Maybe “insidious racism” is a factor, but I suspect the administration at the schools in question is not mostly white or Asian. I suspect the main reason gifted minorities get overlooked is that they are in poor, low-achieving schools, and most educators in those schools don’t want to bother identifying gifted students and giving them special attention. There’s no incentive for them to do so. On the other hand, if they don’t get enough low-achieving students up to the minimum testing standards, they run the risk of having the feds take over the school.

School districts get no extra dollars for identifying higher numbers of gifted students. Instead, the state allots funding for the gifted based on district enrollment. For L.A. Unified, that allotment has been shrinking, to about $4.6 million this year. Most of that has gone to IQ testing, administrative costs and training for teachers. About $25 per gifted student has gone to schools, officials said.

The ongoing budget crisis actually created a disincentive for finding gifted students. As partial compensation for cutting school funding, the state allowed districts to use the gifted-student money for any purpose.

Another reason is that many educators think there’s something unsavory about identifying the intellectually gifted. They think it’s elitist, maybe even racist. That’s because as we in this blogosphere know, kids from poor families and kids from certain minority groups get lower scores on intelligence tests and aptitude tests, as a group. So to be fair and sensitive, we’re supposed to say those tests don’t matter — at least we say that when we’re dealing with those groups. Clearly the educational establishment acts differently toward the middle-class schools full of white and Asian kids.

Meanwhile, society continues to make important decisions based upon those tests, such as whom to admit to college. And some of the intelligent individuals from those groups will get shafted, because they were always lumped in with everyone else from the group.

Plus let’s face it: Some people just find the gifted annoying. They don’t want more of them around. It’s a lot more acceptable to say, “Intelligence tests are racist and elitist,” than to say, “I just can’t stand eggheads.”

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Here’s a post by “Audacious Epigone on the estimated IQ of teachers. It’s not high — about 107 for K-8. So at least according to this, the average teacher would not be considered intellectually “gifted.”

I read a study recently, to which I can’t find a link now, that the lower-scoring members of the teaching professions are the ones most likely to teach at the poor schools. So if the teachers themselves aren’t gifted, how eager are they going to be to identify a subset of their students as being smarter than they themselves are?