Links for 9/27/10

Richard D. Kahlenberg

10 Myths About Legacy Preferences in College Admissions

1. Legacy preferences are just a "tie breaker" in close calls…
2. Legacy preferences have an honorable history of fostering loyalty at America's great institutions of higher learning…
3. Legacy preferences are a necessary evil to support the financial vitality of colleges and universities—including the ability to provide scholarships for low-income and working-class students…
4. After a generation of affirmative action, legacy preferences are finally beginning to help families of color. Pulling the rug out now would hurt minority students.
5. An attack on legacy preferences could indirectly hurt affirmative-action policies by suggesting that "merit" is the only permissible basis for admissions…
6. Legacy preferences may be unfair, but they are not illegal. Unlike discrimination based on race, which is forbidden under the 14th Amendment, it is perfectly legal to discriminate based on legacy status, as the courts have held…
7. Legacy preferences—like affirmative action, geographic preferences, and athletics preferences—are protected by academic freedom, especially at private universities and colleges…
8. Legacy preferences have been around a long time and are unlikely to ever go away, because powerful political forces support them…
9. Legacy preferences don't keep nonlegacy applicants out of college entirely. They just reduce the chances of going to a particular selective college, so the stakes are low…
10. Everyone does it. Legacies are just an inherent reality in higher education throughout the world…

Tom Kane on the Merit Pay study

It's a well-done study of a not-very-interesting question. Merit pay for teachers could impact student achievement via three distinct routes: by encouraging teachers to work harder, by encouraging talented and skilled teachers to remain in teaching, by enticing talented and skilled people to enter teaching. The study was designed to answer a narrow question: can you make the average teacher work harder with monetary incentives?...

I've never believed that lack of teacher effort--as opposed to talent and skills--was the primary issue underlying poor student achievement gains. Rather, the primary hope for merit pay is that it will encourage talented teachers to remain in the classroom or to enter teaching. Although the jury is admittedly still out on it, this study provides no reason to question that hope…

Michael J. Petrilli and Chester E. Finn, Jr.

it’s fairly obvious that the GOP doesn’t know what it stands for on education anymore…

Where you can detect at least a pulse on education, you can spot Republican instincts on reform colliding with deeply held principles of federalism… it looks like “local control” and “states’ rights” arguments may rule the day should the GOP take over one or both houses of Congress…

state legislatures are where the traditional public-school establishment wields the most power and is best able—often working behind the scenes—to keep anything much from changing…

In urban America and many suburbs, local control means union dominance…

Neal McCluskey responds

They implored them not to ”reflexively revert to weary old themes that emphasize states’ rights, local control, and parental choice—and tell Uncle Sam to basically butt out.” In other words, they strongly advise ignoring (1) the Constitution, (2) decades of failed federal education efforts, and (3) the inherent hopelessness of government monopolies…

it seems the problem isn’t district or state government, but government itself! That’s right: A government schooling monopoly tends to be controlled by the people employed by it – the people who have the greatest incentive to be involved in education politics and the easiest ability to organize — and what they naturally want is more money and little or no accountability…