Shocked, Shocked

July 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Several teachers and administrators in Texas were shocked to learn of the report.
“That’s astronomical,” said Joe Erhardt, a science teacher at Kingwood Park High School in the Houston suburb of Humble, Tex. “I’m at a loss.”

From the New York Times article about a study of disciplinary procedures in Texas schools. Thirty percent of students had been suspended or expelled; with “in-school” suspensions included, the rate is 60%.

The great state of Texas has an incarceration rate higher than that of all but a handful of states. Since the Supreme Court started allowing death penalty laws in 1976, Texas has executed four times as many people as has the next most execution-friendly state. It accounts for nearly 40% of all executions in the US.

So why should anybody be surprised that Texas schools deal with kids by punishing them? Punitiveness seems to be a fairly strong element of Texas culture. Even before today’s report, it was well known that nearly all school districts in Texas allow corporal punishment. In 2006-07, the most recent year I could find statistics for, 49,000 Texas kids were paddled in school.

As for the effectiveness of suspension and expulsion

“We see so many kids being removed from the classrooms for disciplinary reasons, often repeatedly, demonstrating that we're not getting the desired changes in behavior,” Thompson [one of the authors of the report] said. “When we remove kids from the classroom, we see an increased likelihood in that student repeating a grade, dropping out or not graduating. We also see an increased likelihood of juvenile justice involvement.” (From the Houston Chronicle)

Will the report affect state and school policies. Maybe. But I suspect that this will be another instance where values (ideas about what is good) shape beliefs (ideas about what is true). If cultural values hold that punishing bad behavior is right, people will cling to the belief that punishment is also effective, i.e., that it reduces bad behavior. People who cherish these ideas will dismiss the evidence from this report and others as wrong or irrelevant. If they refer to these studies, they will be careful to put the word in quotation marks. You might have to pay attention to a study, but you can ignore evidence from “studies.”

Tough Situation

July 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Coming in October: a conference on Jersey Shore Studies. It had to happen, right? But at the University of Chicago?? Where have you gone, Allan Bloom? (HT: Scott McLemee, who has more to say on the subject at Insider Higher Ed.)

Despite very pleasant vacations last summer at Barnegat Light and Ocean Grove, I haven’t managed to watch much of the TV show. But I did take notice back in May when my favorite newspaper ran a story about a video posted by the father of Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino. Apparently, Sorrentino père has little good (and much unprintable) to say about Sorrentino fils.

The rift between the father and son started when, according to the elder Sorrentino, when his son ignored his plea for help with his medical expenses.

“I’ve been a diabetic for 25 years and my insurance was running out and I called up my son and said, ‘Listen, Mikey, I'm between jobs right now, can you help me out?’ I don’t want to lose my health coverage.”

Only in America, I thought.

Not “only in America” could a talented fellow like The Situation rise from modest circumstances to an esteemed position of wealth and fame

Not “only in America” could a father and son have a serious falling-out over money.

And certainly not “only in America” would a father make disparaging remarks about his son’s companions and co-workers.

But only in America, among wealthy, industrialized nations, would a diabetic, regardless of his son’s lack of filial financial piety, not be able to obtain the necessary treatment.

That situation, of course can be remedied. But the remedy is one form or another of what the Republicans still like to call a “government takeover” of health care. Unfortunately for Mr. Sorrentino,* that won’t happen in the US for another year or more at the earliest. And if the Supreme Court runs true to form, it might not happen for decades.

*According to a story at Trendbuzz a month later, Sorrentino the elder had switched to a cheaper diabetes med, and thanks to the side effects he wound up in the emergency room.

Too Much Goverment Spending on Schools?

July 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A comment on an earlier post raised the question of whether “rich Republicans . . . pay so much for their kids' education but don't want to pay for the education of poorer children .”

Neither that comment nor the response to it had much to do with the substance of the post itself (which was about the ways in which the SAT might be biased). It was a tempest in the shot glass that is the Socioblog and not of much relevance, so I said nothing.

But just now I read this WaPo story saying that the Minnesota government shutdown is going to be resolved. It looks like the Mark Dayton, the Democratic governor, caved. Here’s the relevance:

• Rich Republicans: “Dayton reluctantly acceded to Republican demands not to raise any taxes . . Dayton {had] wanted to include a tax increase on the state’s top 2 percent of wage earners.”
• Paying for public education: “The plan would balance the state’s budget by cutting programs, delaying state aid to local school districts . . .”

So the Republicans would rather delay aid to schools than allow a small tax increase on the very rich.

It’s only one case, but I also did a quick-and-dirty rummage through the GSS, specifically the question of government aid to education. Here’s the breakdown by party and income.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

In the highest income groups, the percentage of Democrats and Independents saying “too much” is zero. Among Republicans, 8.8% and 12.7%.

The good news (good if you think that cutting education spending isn’t going to do much for educational results) is that not many Americans think we are spending too much. Most think we’re not spending enough. Who are those folks who think that the government is overspending on public education? Republicans, especially rich Republicans.

Like a Virgin – Whatever That Was

July 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Virginity has mattered as far back as we can tell. It is introduced in Genesis . . . and is mentioned repeatedly throughout the Hebrew Bible.

So says Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in his recent book How Pleasure Works. But Bloom’s “as far back as we can tell” ignores most of the evolution of the human species.

Bloom is certainly no creationist who believes that our species dates back only a few thousand years and is no older than the people in the Bible. He believes in evolution, and one of his arguments about how pleasure works is that evolution accounts, in part, for what we find pleasurable.

Pleasure draws upon deep intuitions . . . it is smart, and . . . it is evolved and universal and largely inborn. [my emphasis]

Culture and society, in Bloom’s view, matter only in that they vary the foods that feed these largely inborn hungers.

Belgian chocolates and barbecued ribs are modern inventions, but they appeal to our prior love of sugar and fat.

Since the importance of virginity goes back “as far back as we can tell,” it must be like the love of sugar – largely inborn. In that same chapter on sex (you couldn’t very well write a book called How Pleasure Works and not have a chapter on sex), he writes,

The obsession with virginity is one of the ugliest aspects of our sexual psyche.

I could be wrong; Bloom is, after all, a Yale professor – smart and well-educated – and the book jacket has accolades from heavy hitters like Steven Pinker. But if the obsession with virginity, like the taste for fat and sugar, is hard-wired  by evolution, it must have been with us since our earliest days on the savanna. But unfortunately, Bloom’s truncated history (“as far back as we can tell”) ignores most of our time on this planet.

For a few hundred thousand years, we humans lived as hunter-gatherers – small, egalitarian bands, nomadic and with fluid membership . And not much concern for virginity. The societies that prize virginity are agricultural and pastoral. They have been around for only the past 15,000 years or so. Agrarian societies may seem like the “real” humans, but that’s only because they account for all of our recorded history. Pre-literate hunter-gatherers left no accounts detailing their canons of morality.*

So maybe the concern with virginity is not inborn or universal but just a patriarchal blip in a much longer history, a fad that captured our imaginations for a few thousand years and fit well with other ideas but is now fading. As societies move from agricultural to industrial or post-industrial modes, people come to regard virginity as something like the horse-drawn plow – a curious, antiquated instrument that might have been important to people once upon a time but is not really of much use today at the office. Even in an advanced country like the US, you can still see the link between agrarian life and the value on virginity.  It is in the regions closest to their agrarian past (and present) where people are likely to see virginity as a necessary sign of virtue.

Also, even in the agrarian era, just whose obsession with virginity was this anyway? My guess is that women were and are far less obsessed than men. If you want to argue that the obsession is part of the sexual psyche that evolved over millennia, you would have to show how the male and female brain evolved differently with regard to this very specific idea that virginity is of paramount importance.

So when I read that sentence about the obsession with virginity being part of “our sexual psyche,” I am tempted to ask, “What you mean ‘we,’ patriarchal agrarian?”

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*Update. True, we have no information about the morals of humans who lived long before the dawn of recorded history. But we do have accounts of hunter-gatherers in the past few centuries, and these do not provide much support for the idea that virginity has always been a universal and eternal obsession.