Thoughtful Ideas: Political Diversity Of Stanford Students: 94% Voted Democrat For Governor and U.S. Senator, only 4% voted Republican

JACKSONVILLE - I love the methodology and the use of data, but the money shot is the conclusion.

Universities talk a lot about the importance of diversity of ideas but have done little to achieve it.

 Diversity is said to help students learn from each other—so long as the dominant political views are not challenged!

from thoughtfulideas blog:
http://thoughtfulideas.blogspot.com/2018/06/political-diversity-of-stanford.html

Political Diversity Of Stanford Students: 94% Voted Democrat For Governor and U.S. Senator, only 4% voted Republican

California is a Blue State.  The San Francisco Bay Area is Dark Blue.  Stanford University, where your friendly proprietor has worked and lived for more than 40 years, is Deep Dark Blue.

By acreage, Stanford is the second largest university in the world.  From its founding in 1891, portions of its land have been used to construct housing for faculty and staff.  Over 125 years, Stanford faculty and the University have built about 650 single-family homes, 250 condominiums, and 40 duplexes.  (Several hundred more housing units are nearing completion and several hundred more are in the planning or early stage of construction.)
Stanford has 2,219 members of the professoriate faculty and several top administrators who are eligible to purchase a campus residence.  About 40% live in the "faculty ghetto."  The other 60% are scattered about neighboring towns and suburbs (Palo Alto, Menlo Park, San Jose, San Francisco, and others).  It seems reasonable to assume that the political predilections of on- and off-campus faculty and are similar.

California's 2018 primaries were held on June 5. 

Four precincts (Santa Clara County Precincts 2542, 2544, 2545, and 2546) circumscribe Stanford University.

Precincts 2542 and 2544 consist of graduate and undergraduate student housing.  Some students are registered to vote using their campus address.  Most are registered at their home address.

Precinct 2545 consists solely of faculty/staff (F/S) housing.  Precinct 2546 is a mix of student and F/S housing

Here are the results for Governor and U.S. Senator, the two most important races in California.

Governor:

Precinct 2545 (all F/S):  Democrats 234 (88.0%), Republicans 31 (11.7%), Other 1 (0.3%).

Precinct 2546 (F/S and students):  Democrats 356 (94.9%), Republicans 12 (3.2%), Other 7 (1.9%).

Precinct 2544 (all students):  Democrats 155 (93.4%), Republicans 8 (4.7%), Other 3 (1.8%).

Precinct 2542 (all students):  Democrats 129 (94.2%), Republicans 6 (4.4%), Other 2 (1.4%).

U.S. Senator:

Precinct 2545:  Democrats 232 (87.9%), Republicans 27 (11.5%), Other 5 (1.9%).
Precinct 2546:  Democrats 354 (96.2%), Republicans 11 (3.0%), Other 3 (0.8%)
Precinct 2542:  Democrats 127 (96.2%), Republicans 3 (2.3%), Other 2 (1.5%)
Precinct 2544:  Democrats 154 (93.9%), Republicans 5 (3.0%), Other 5 (3.0).

F/S voters are 7-8 percentage points more Republican than students.  One reason is that F/S voters are older and more conservative.  Some of these Republican voters are in their 70s and 80s.

Stanford has achieved undergraduate student diversity in terms of race (only about a third is non-Hispanic White), ethnicity, gender and gender preference, nationality, religion, disability, and socioeconomic status.  Political and ideological diversity is nowhere to be found. 

Universities talk a lot about the importance of diversity of ideas but have done little to achieve it.

Diversity is said to help students learn from each other—so long as the dominant political views are not challenged!

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The College Boost: Grads Still Outearn Nongrads | St. Louis Fed

This is Part I of a three-part series from the Fed. A little more cheery than Part II, which I posted yesterday. I can't wait for Part III to see their solutions.

On average, families headed by someone with a four-year college degree have 69 percent more income and 201 percent more wealth than families without a degree. The gaps between nongrads and those with a postgraduate degree are even larger.

I fear they are going to bang the drums for equal funding for all school districts nationwide. It's all these socialists and Marxists know. They fail to realize and refuse to accept that even if you do that -- and there will be unintended/unforeseen consequences to doing that -- the race will still go to the swiftest and the fight to the strongest. That's the way to bet. 

from the St. Louis Fed:

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/july/college-boost-grads-outearn-nongrads

The College Boost: Grads Still Outearn Nongrads

Monday, July 16, 2018

By William Emmons, Lead Economist; Ana Hernández Kent, Policy Analyst; and Lowell Ricketts, Lead Analyst, Center for Household Financial Stability

This is the first post in a series on the financial returns of college degrees.

A college degree has long been associated with a laundry list of positive outcomes:

• Higher income and wealth
• Better health
• A higher likelihood of being a homeowner
• A higher likelihood of being partnered (married or cohabitating)
• A lower risk of falling behind on loan payments

In response, more and more Americans are pursuing—and earning—a bachelor’s degree. In 1989, about 23 percent of families were headed by someone with a four-year college degree or higher. By 2016, the share had reached 34 percent.

More individuals are continuing their schooling beyond the traditional four-year degree as well. Families headed by someone with a postgraduate degree (such as a master’s degree or Ph.D.) rose from almost 9 percent of all families in 1989 to about 13 percent in 2016.

This remarkable surge in highly educated individuals begs the question: How have the financial returns (expected earnings and wealth) of college degrees fared over time?

The Average Financial Returns to a College Degree

Previous work by our Center for Household Financial Stability has long corroborated the traditional wisdom that a college degree is associated with higher expected earnings and wealth.1 For this analysis, we typically used the Survey of Consumer Finances, often considered the gold standard of data on household balance sheets (asset, debt and income).

When evaluating the financial payoff to a college education, it is useful to ask: How much additional income and wealth does a college-educated family have beyond that of a family that doesn’t hold a college degree?

Income Differences

Pooling all available data (47,776 families), we found that the average family with a four-year degree (grads) earned approximately 69 percent more than the average family without a degree (nongrads). The average family with a postgraduate degree (postgrads) earned twice as much as their nongrad counterpart. Importantly, these estimates controlled for the age of the family, so we were comparing outcomes at similar stages of life.

Wealth Differences

What about wealth? College graduates—both grads and postgrads—accumulated much higher amounts of wealth over their lifetime than nongrads. On average, grad families accumulated 201 percent more, while postgrad families accumulated 242 percent more than their nongrad peers.

These boosts are remarkable, and it’s clear why going to college is such an imperative for individuals and families across the U.S. However, these average returns mask a considerably wide range of outcomes. How do these outcomes vary when considering the race and ethnicity as well as birth decade of these families? That will be the focus of the next post in this series.

Notes and References

1 For example, see Emmons, William R.; and Noeth, Bryan J. “Education and Wealth.” The Demographics of Wealth, Essay No. 2, May 2015.

Additional Resources

• Center for Household Financial Stability
• The Demographics of Wealth: Education and Wealth
• On the Economy: Income and Wealth Gaps: College Grads vs. Nongrads

Seven do's and don't's of school discipline reform | The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

from edexcellence.net
https://edexcellence.net/articles/seven-dos-and-donts-of-school-discipline-reform

It seems likely that the Trump administration will soon revise or rescind an Obama-era directive intended to address racial disparities in school disciplinary actions. The "Dear Colleague" letter in question, issued by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice in 2014, has been the subject of much debate. It stated that school districts could be investigated and found guilty of violating students' civil rights when doling out punishments, even if the discipline policies were race-neutral and implemented in even-handed ways (in other words, even if there was no evidence of discriminatory treatment of students).

Yet the latest federal discipline data, released earlier this month, show that African American students continue to be disciplined at higher rates than white students. While U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos held roundtable meetings with lawmakers in April to hear debates about the guidance from both sides, there is no timeline for the administration's final decision.

But school discipline reform did not begin with President Obama, and it won't end with President Trump. Momentum for change has been gaining steam for years, which legislatures and school boards have increasingly codified into laws and practices at state and local levels.

If the Trump administration makes its move to revise or rescind, local education leaders will regain discretion over how to balance discipline with safety and order in the classroom. Regardless of what happens at the federal level, school discipline brings into play a number of important but often competing goals for school districts: eliminating discrimination, protecting the learning time of both disruptive students and their well-behaved peers, upholding high expectations for students, empathizing with traumatized students, and defending the authority of teachers.

---

With those competing values in mind, here are seven suggestions for superintendents and district-level administrators to consider for their discipline policies:

DO worry about racial discrimination and implicit bias when determining punishments for students who misbehave. Advocates for fair school discipline are right to be alarmed by the dramatic racial disparities. Schools nationwide suspended 2.7 million students in 2015–16—100,000 fewer students than 2013–14. But African American male students represented a quarter of all students who received an out-of-school suspension in 2015–16, despite making up only 8 percent of enrollment. Multiple studies have found that educator bias explains some of these disparities.

Furthermore, it is clearly against the law—and has been for half a century—for districts to treat students differently based on their race. Any differential treatment will remain illegal, even if the Trump administration does rescind federal guidance.

DON'T assume that racial bias alone explains disparities in discipline rates. The same studies that find evidence of racial bias in disciplinary actions also find that such bias only explains some of the disparities. Differences in student behavior are also a major factor. That's not because of the race of the students, but because, tragically, different racial groups face different kinds and degrees of trauma, abuse, and deprivation, many of them associated with poverty.

Students themselves even report such differences. On federal surveys, twice as many African American students report getting into fights at school as white students. It would be miraculous if children's vastly different life experiences didn't result in behavioral differences in school.

DO show empathy for kids whose misbehavior is due to difficult life circumstances. Educators need to understand the truly tough circumstances that some children face outside of school and do their best to help them cope. Identifying appropriate mental-health supports is particularly important. Addressing the underlying causes of student misbehavior can go a long way toward nipping it in the bud.

DON'T engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations. It's just as important for empathy not to turn into excuses for behavior that is out of line or compromises students' academic potential. All students need to learn how to control their impulses and behave in acceptable ways, as well as cultivate an attitude that reflects motivation and engagement.

DO find ways to address misbehavior that lead to positive changes and protect opportunities to learn. Long suspensions reduce learning time for those being punished and may not improve their behavior. It's worth trying in-school suspension for nonviolent offenses, with supports for students so they can behave better and continue learning the valuable skills and knowledge that schools exist to teach them.

DON'T just send disruptive kids back to their classrooms. Those who break rules can't be our exclusive concern; their classmates also have the right to learn. We must protect their learning environment to stay on track and close achievement gaps. Research also shows what common sense indicates: One or two disruptive students can erode the learning of an entire classroom. It should alarm us that in 2015–16, 43 percent of educators reported classroom misbehavior that affects their ability to teach students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

DO address "suspension factories." A 2013 report by researchers at The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that thousands of public schools suspend more than a quarter of their students every year. And that is still the case for too many schools today—a sign that they are careening out of control on disciplinary measures. While it's bad to ignore schools with such high rates of suspensions, it's arguably worse to respond by simply commanding that they get their numbers down without providing massive amounts of support.

School discipline presents enormous challenges for education leaders. Getting it right takes balance, judgment, and wisdom. There's not much of that in Washington these days, but thankfully it still exists in abundance across our nation's schools. Let's make our decisions wisely.

As first appeared in Education Week as "7 Suggestions for Better School Discipline"on May 29, 2018. 

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The College Boost: Is the Return on a Degree Fading? | St. Louis Fed

I'm sure it's not the Feds fault, right?

On average, black college graduates born in the 1980s have little or no additional wealth above their counterparts without a degree. This is true for postgraduate degrees as well.

Get the Fed out of education and watch results go back to where they were before they put their hands on it.

But no!!  We'll continue to ask the arsonists to put out the fire. It appears we've definitely devalued or diminished, but not quite destroyed the value of an education in this country. God Bless America!!


from StLouisFed.org
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/july/college-boost-return-degree-fading

The College Boost: Is the Return on a Degree Fading?

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

This is the second post in a series on the financial returns of college degrees.By William Emmons, Lead Economist; Ana Hernández Kent, Policy Analyst; and Lowell Ricketts, Lead Analyst, Center for Household Financial Stability

Our May research symposium, “Is College Still Worth It: Looking Back and Looking Ahead,” identified how the returns to a college degree have changed over time and how those returns can be boosted going forward.

For our Center’s research contribution, we focused on how the financial returns to college have changed across generations. We concentrated on income and wealth outcomes for college graduates born in six decades:1

• 1930s
• 1940s
• 1950s
• 1960s
• 1970s
• 1980s

Among racial and ethnic groups, we had a large enough sample to break out our results for non-Hispanic white families and African-American or black families. Similar to the first post in this series, we looked at the boost to income and wealth associated with both four-year (grads) and postgraduate (postgrads) college degrees.

Expected Boost to Income Remains Strong

The figure below shows that expected incomes among grad families of either race have largely held steady across birth cohorts, with the exception of white grads born in the 1980s.

Certainly, the returns were highest among older generations. By our measure, the 1930s generation benefited marvelously from earning a four-year degree. Incomes of grads born in the ‘30s were 72 percent and 109 percent higher than their nongrad peers for white and black families, respectively.

However, given statistical uncertainty or “noise,” we can’t definitively say that the incomes of grads born in the ‘30s were meaningfully higher than grads born in the ‘40s through ‘70s. This tells us that the expected boost to earnings associated with a four-year degree remains largely unchanged over time.

We can say that for white grads born in the ‘80s, their incomes were meaningfully lower than those of previous generations. However, it’s important to note that even the ‘80s grads received a sizable boost to their income. Thus, it appears that grad families of either race, born in any decade, reaped sizable rewards in the labor market.

What about postgraduate degrees? The next figure offers a similar look at the income boost among these highly educated families.

Expected earnings associated with a postgraduate degree have declined somewhat over time among white families. Returns peaked at 108 percent higher income for postgrad families born in the '30s and gradually shifted down to 54 percent for the postgrads born in the '80s.

Among black postgrads, the earnings boost is considerably more volatile across generations. After looking at the statistical noise related to these estimates, we can’t say that the boost to black postgrad income has meaningfully changed over time.

Again, the '80s are a peculiar decade: Similar to their four-year degree counterparts, white postgrads born in the '80s have a lowest income boost than those born in the previous five decades.

The Wealth Advantage Is Falling

The majority of conversations involving the return to a college degree talk about what graduates earn in the job market following school. This is certainly important, and the evidence suggests that graduates continue to have superior incomes over their lifetime.

What is often obscured is how those graduates accumulate wealth over their lifetime. This is an important difference: Research has shown that assets—financial (such as stocks) and nonfinancial (such as a home)—are profoundly important for both financial security and upward mobility.

If wealth is so important, why is it left out of the conversation? Reliable and nationally representative household balance sheet data are notoriously hard to come by. It is precisely this reason that the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is such a valuable resource. Using SCF data, we found that the boost to wealth accumulation associated with college has fallen across generations.

The wealth advantages afforded grad families, white and black, are shown in the figure below.

A similar trend emerges: Grad families born in previous generations received a much greater boost to wealth accumulation than their nongrad peers. White and black grads born in the ‘30s accumulated 247 percent and 509 percent more wealth, respectively. This compares with 42 percent and 6 percent more wealth for white and black grads born in the ‘80s.

Black graduates born in the ‘70s also accumulated on average a historically low amount of wealth (18 percent) above their nongrad peers. Disturbingly, given the statistical uncertainty around our estimate for the wealth boost among black grads born in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we can’t say for certain that there even is a wealth advantage to a college degree for the average black family.

The fortunes of families holding postgraduate degrees are even dimmer by our estimates, as seen in our next figure.

The enormous expected boost to wealth deteriorates rapidly between the ‘50s and ‘80s generations. Among white postgrads, the wealth boost ranged between 403 percent and 276 percent for postgrads born in the ‘30s through ‘60s.

Compare that with those born in the ‘70s and ‘80s, which had 116 percent and 28 percent higher expected wealth than nongrads. The boost estimated for white grads born in the ‘80s is almost negligible after accounting for statistical noise.

The picture is similar for black postgrads, although the decline in the wealth boost starts among postgrads born in the ‘60s. Black postgrads born in the ‘50s accumulated 332 percent more than their nongrad peers. Postgrads born in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s accumulated only 18 percent, 16 percent and 8 percent, respectively, more than their nongrad peers.

All of those estimates were sufficiently noisy that we can’t rule out that they could be zero or even negative. The implication is shocking: Black postgrads born in the 1960s, ‘70 or ‘80s do not have statistically higher wealth than blacks who didn’t graduate from college.

Why have the wealth returns to both a four-year and postgraduate degree fallen so precipitously across birth cohorts while earnings have fared far better? The third and final post in this series will offer some potential explanations.

Notes and References

1 Our sample was too thin among families born before the 1930s and after the 1980s to provide reliable estimates.

Reporters should stop caricaturing conservatives on race | The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

This is probably good advice, however it's not likely to be taken. Liberals gain too much from their lap-dogs in the media by cultivating division. Those in academia have made their names and reputations on developing future pseudo-Social Justice Warriors and oxy-moronic "community organizers".

Thanks for the advice though, it's just a case of (way) too little, (way) too late.

from edexcellence.net
https://edexcellence.net/articles/reporters-should-stop-caricaturing-conservatives-on-race

Reporters should stop caricaturing conservatives on race | The Thomas B. Fordham Institute 

Editor's note: Last week, at the University of Southern California, the annual Education Writers Association conference kicked off with a speech by USC professor Shaun Harper on "Big Ideas on Equity, Race, and Inclusion in Education." That was followed by a panel on the same topic featuring Dr. Harper, Estela Bensimon, Pedro Noguera, and the Fordham Institute's Michael J. Petrilli, moderated by Inside Higher Ed's Greg Toppo. These were Petrilli's comments as prepared. 

Shaun's comments were well said, though you won't be surprised to know that I disagree with many of his arguments. I'm happy to get into that, as Greg sees fit. 

But first I want to focus my comments on you, the reporters.
We all know that this is a difficult time to talk about issues of race and class in this country, thanks to the extreme polarization and division, including on this issue. Of course, President Trump doesn't make it any easier, as he shows no interest in bringing us together or bridging divides. In fact, he seems intent on making the divides even larger, with his awful race-mongering at his rallies and in social media, and with many of the actions his administration is taking. This is why I was a Never Trumper, and why I left the Republican Party after Charlottesville. 

But the rest of us shouldn't play his game. And especially when discussing these highly fraught issues around race, we should work extra hard to find common ground, and find solutions.
It's my belief that the overwhelming majority of Americans, and the overwhelming majority of educators, are sympathetic to the concerns Shaun discussed. It disturbs us that so many kids of color continue to face unfair barriers in their educations and in their lives, and we want to do something about it.
But we can't have productive conversations if those conversations are quickly shut down. And that's what I see too often: conversations on race shut down if those of us on the right express disagreement with the views of folks on the left. If we say, for example, that we agree that racism and racial bias are real, and are factors in the gaps and disparities we see, but we don't think they are the only factor, that other factors matter, too, including families, and personal responsibility, and student behavior—if we say these things that are perfectly reasonable, too many times we are called racists. We are thrown in with the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.  

And reporters are sometimes complicit. I see this in the debate around discipline disparities. We are all alarmed by the fact that African American students are three times as likely to be suspended as their white peers. We are open to finding solutions to that problem. 

But in the press we are caricatured. Civil rights groups and other progressives think the disparities are being driven by racism and racial bias. The conservative view is not that racism or racial bias aren't factors, or don't exist. Anyone who has studied American history, slavery, Jim Crow, understands the racist history of this country. And anyone who understands human nature and cognition knows that implicit bias is a real thing, and something we all have to be on guard against in our own lives. Of course racism and racial bias are part of the story. 

The conservative position, though, is that it's not the entire story. When you go and look at the best evidence—the most rigorous studies and surveys of students themselves—it is undeniable that the other big part of the story is student behavior. Some groups of students misbehave in school more frequently than others: African Americans more than white students, white students more than Asian American students, and so forth. This is not because of their race, but almost surely because of various risk factors that are connected to student misbehavior, all of them related to poverty. 

African American kids are three times as likely as white students to grow up in poverty, even more likely to grow up in deep poverty, three times more likely to grow up without a dad in the home, much more likely to be exposed to lead poisoning, more likely to be in the child welfare system, and on and on and on. This is a tragic state of affairs, and much of it is the legacy of racism. But we can't wish it away. 

And it matters for discipline policy because, if you expect to reach perfect parity in suspensions, but student behavior varies, you are telling educators to stop holding certain kids to high expectations. And that's not good for the kids, and it's certainly not good for their peers, or for a positive school climate. And it also paints educators as the problem, when the truth is much more complicated. 

And yet when I've argued that student behavior is part of the issue, that it varies by race, not because of race, but because of these other factors, people in this room have called me a racist. 

Can we stop doing that? 

So again, to the reporters, my plea is this: On issues of race, but really all issues, please check your own biases, including ideological and political biases. When your editors tell you to include the conservative point of view, please work hard to really understand it. Don't caricature it. Don't make it sound like conservatives are denying racism and racial bias in the same way some deny climate change. These issues are complicated and complex—and your readers deserve to see them portrayed that way.

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Sports Matter | Dick's Sporting Goods

I guess we are tossing aside the old Greek notion of the linkage between a sound mind and a sound body. Given the toxic combination of declining international test scores, increased dropout rates and increased obesity, it seems like we are ignoring a lot of evidence that proves the point. The trend below therefore, is very disturbing if it comes to pass. Maybe we need a safe to fall on our heads to see the obvious, but I guess some failed buracracy or another has an agenda they would rather see served than to have our kids served properly.

By 2020, 27 percent of public high schools in the United States could be without sports due to a lack of proper funding.

Depriving young athletes from engaging in organized sports does more damage than just taking away fun from their lives. It eliminates an outlet that teaches invaluable lessons of teamwork, sportsmanship, respect, time management, and fair play.

Dick's Sporting Goods