Links for 1/27/11

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

For education… more federal dollars and more federal control.

There are two opposing schools of thought on this. I will call the first “principled”, not necessarily in praise of its tenets but in recognition that it emerges from a coherent conceptual position. It has two facets: classic federalism,… and a market-based approach to the provision of services…

the second school of thought “opportunistic.” It is motivated to improve education outcomes for children… It identifies reforms and programs that are thought to be desirable and uses the federal government as a means to advance them…

Whether the nation will follow the opportunistic or the principled approach will be the education battle line in the 112th Congress…

This will not be a fight between good guys and bad guys – both sides care about education. It will be a fight between dramatically different visions of how the nation’s education future will be determined.

DAVID LEONHARDT

protecting higher education from across-the-board budget cuts, as Mr. Obama is urging, makes sense.

But the status quo is not worth protecting. Both the federal government and the states spend money on higher education in terribly wasteful ways. They don’t offer incentives for success, and they demand little accountability from colleges. Colleges that do a masterful job of graduating students receive no reward, and those that do a subpar job — of which there are many — go unpunished, giving them little reason to improve.

In the federal budget, the obvious candidates for cutbacks come from a grab bag of programs that cost about $12 billion a year and make up about one-fourth of federal spending on colleges…

Most of the $12 billion subsidizes student loans so that interest doesn’t accrue while students are still in college. That may be a nice little benefit, but it does not help students stay in school…

The remainder of the $12 billion is no better. Many of these dollars are matching funds for financial aid awarded by colleges, which means much of the money ends up going to wealthy private colleges…

Parul Sehgal via Scott McLemee

I studied political science. I wanted to understand "who gets what and why," but I was instead waylaid by theory, theories about theories, and texts so mazy that they seemed to have been explicitly designed to baffle… As a student, you're forced to build up your stamina as a reader -- I'm sure many students in the humanities experience this. You learn to sit with the text past any point of desire or even comprehension. And it makes you humble. It makes you the supplicant…

Axel Leijonhufvud on the greatest scam of our times. Btw, he also wrote perhaps the best economics paper ever.