Private Schools or Private Students

April 8, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Washington DC voucher program gave kids from poor families up to $7500 to cover the costs of attending private schools. The program, OSP (for Opportunity Scholarship Program) was started in the recent Bush administration, and it’s based on an idea much cherished by conservatives: private is good, public is bad. Programs run by the government (like public schools) are not as good as similar programs run by private entities (like private schools).

The results three years out have now been published (here). In reading, the voucher kids were 3.7 months ahead of their public school counterparts. In math, there was no difference.

Click on the table to see a larger version.

The Washington Post story ran with the headline

Study Supports School Vouchers
In District, Pupils Outperform Peers On Reading Tests

But does this mean that private schools do a better job of educating poor kids? If so, they should do a better job at teaching math as well. But they don’t.

I don’t really know what’s going on, but I have a guess. Reading is not just about decoding strings of letters. It is part of a general verbal ability. Kids learn verbal skills in school from teachers, but they also learn them from everyone they hear. For most of our time on this planet, we humans did not read or write or go to school, yet we learned to speak the language of our respective cultures. We learned from those around us. We still do.

If you send a kid to a school with children whose parents are willing and able to spend $6600 a year or more (sometimes much more*), that kid will be talking with kids whose verbal skills – vocabulary, grammar, syntax – are more sophisticated than what kids might hear in the public schools of Washington DC. That affects reading scores because among schoolchildren, at least when the teacher isn’t insisting they be quiet, verbal interaction is constant. Mathematical interaction, not so much.

So, at least when it comes to verbal skills, it’s not the kind of school that you go to that makes a difference. It’s the kind of kids who attend that school.

* The tuition at Sasha and Malia’s school, Sidwell Friends, is $28,000. Most of the OSP students went to much less costly schools. Over half the OSP kids (59%) went to Catholic schools, another fifth (22%) went to other faith-based schools (a category that may include Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school). The average income was about $22,7000, slightly above the poverty line; virtually all the kids were black or Hispanic.

Famous but Anonymous

April 7, 2009

Posted by Jay Livingston
Bud Shank, whose obit is in today’s New York Times, was a working musician for sixty years. His principle instrument was the alto sax, and he was best known for his work in the 1950s in the West Coast jazz scene, particularly as a member of the combo in the 1958 film I Want to Live. This clip, from the opening scene, shows Shank briefly. The solos you hear are by Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, and Shelly Manne.



As a comment on the Amazon page for the album put it, “Any Jazz lover who is over about 45 yrs of age probably ‘cut his/her teeth’ on listening to the soundtracks of I Want to Live and to The Hustler.” I’m over 45.

But Shank’s most widely known musical moment was not in jazz, and it didn’t have his name attached to it. It was his flute solo on California Dreamin’, the hit by the Mamas and the Papas. They got the royalties, of course. Bud Shank picked up his studio fee and went home.

Phil Woods has a similar story. Woods, also an alto player, is still going strong at age 77 and has been helping to keep bebop alive for about sixty years. He’s been the leader on dozens of albums, and he’s won several Downbeat polls over the years. Yet his best known work is, to most people, anonymous – the alto solo on Billy Joel’s huge hit and Grammy winner Just the Way You Are.

AKD 2009

April 5, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Thursday evening, we (the Montclair Sociology Department) had our annual Alpha Kappa Delta induction ceremony. Sixteen students joined the sociology honor society.

• Daniel Ahearn
• Matt Barraro
• Mari Chela Bien-Aime
• Ashley Blount
• Kristin Bobenko
• Marissa Caruso
• Shaylene Connors
• Tehresa Fallon
• Matt Grogaard
• Megan Hatem
• Helen Kane
• Burcu Korkut
• Joed Lopez
• Claire McEwan
• Lou Pacifico
• Jessica Pescatore
• Katherine Spargo
• Lee Tedeschi

A few were no-shows – such good students that they wouldn’t cut an evening class in favor of AKD. And unfortunately, many of them left immediately after our speaker, David Grazian, finished, so I managed to get photos of only four of the honorees.

Lee, Joed, Shaylene, Matt B.

David Grazian talked about his research on Philadelphia night life.* He takes a dramaturgical approach, looking at the restaurants and clubs as stages where the staff and the customers are performing. Which is the way they look at it too. Restaurants put much thought, time, and money into creating their look – the decor, the lighting, the music – using the same strategies and often the same superficial materials used in movie sets. Cuba Libre, for example, is basically a movie set for a film set in pre-Castro Havana. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Managers also instruct the staff how to perform, and just before opening for the evening they have something like the cast meeting for a play, where the managers give the waitstaff “notes” on the previous evening’s performances.
The customers too are performers. They spend hours on their costume – men as well as women trying on several different pairs of jeans before deciding – and planning their roles with fellow cast members (wingmen, girlfriends, et. al.)

But what is it all for? The restaurants and bars are in it for the money. They count the receipts at the end of the night. But what about all those men and women? According to Grazian, guys want to get laid, of course, but rarely do. So they turn instead to a sort of contest to see who can get the most phone numbers.** The women mostly just want to be with their friends, look good, and get men to buy them drinks. The ostensible goal is fun, to have a good time, but it all sounds a bit grim. Everyone is on the same set, but they’re in two different movies. The guys are in a Judd Apatow film while the women are in Sex and the City.


* During the Q&A, someone asked why not New York or Los Angeles. To his credit David did not say, “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

** The masculine competition can turn ugly. Grazian says that the rule of thumb for bars is that when the male-female ratio reaches 2-1, it’s almost certain that a fight will break out.

Guns, Killing, and Nonsense . . . Again

April 4, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The response of the pro-gun people to the massacre in Binghamton was predictable. The problem isn’t that the killer had guns. The problem is that other people did not. Fox’s commentator on the issue, John Lott (a researcher whose integrity has been much questioned) claims that more guns would deter these shooters.

Every multiple-victim public shooting that I have studied, where more than three people have been killed, has taken place where guns are banned.

Is McDonald’s a gun-free zone? Or Luby’s cafeteria in Kileen, Texas ? A private home in Seattle? It’s possible that the lab in Sunnyvale and the office building in San Francisco and the mall in Omaha had gun-free rules, but I doubt it. There are several other civilian workplace and home massacres I have not bothered to check.*

The other favorite NRA fantasy is that if only people had been carrying guns, someone would have taken out the shooter as soon as he opened fire. (I suspect that the gun-lovers picture themselves in the key savior role.)

On the other side, we have Charles Blow at the New York Times. In his column today, Blow warns that the far right is arming itself. The gun-lovers have put out the word that Obama is going to repeal the Second Amendment and take their guns away. Revolution has become a favorite word on the right. When the left talks about revolution, they usually mean an economic transformation. But the right wingers are talking about guns.

Guns are, for lack of a better word, good. Guns are right.
Guns work. Guns clarify, cut through, and capture the essence of the revolutionary spirit.
Guns in all their forms have marked the upward surge of mankind.
And guns -- you mark my words -- will save the USA.**

And they’re not just talking, they’re buying. Blow cites FBI data showing that since Obama was elected, there has been a large increase in requests for background checks for gun ownership.

Talk of revolution followed by more people wanting guns.

Coincidence? Maybe. Just posturing? Hopefully. But it all gives me a really bad feeling.

Blow wrote these words just before the killings in Pittsburgh occurred. But these shootings help to answer his questions.

The Associated Press: Gunman 'lying in wait' kills 3 Pittsburgh officers via kwout

I wonder where he got such ideas. Of course, ideas don’t kill. But AK-47s and the .357 Magnums and other handguns and the ammunition in Poplawski’s arsenal do, and they are nearly as easy to come by.

And according to the John Lotts of the world, that’s a good thing.

The Pittsburgh slayings also illustrate the weakness of the “gun-free zones are killing zones” idea. The killer’s house was anything but a gun-free zone, and he selected as his victims people who he knew would be carrying guns – police officers.

*Lott seems to be fairly obsessive about finding references to himself no matter how insiginificant and unnoticed the venue, so if I’m wrong about any of these, he will probably post a comment.

** O.K., nobody really said this, not in these exact words. But close. In case you didn’t recognize it, it’s a riff on Gordon Gecko’s “greed is good” speech in Wall Street.