New Haven Schools (again), The Death Penalty, and Gratuitous Promotion of Family Members

Two quick notes:

Nathaniel has another piece criticizing the New Haven Promise program. This piece says much of what he has already said but includes a few more direct proposals about what else should be done. Unfortunately, this piece is on National Review Online. While that's an impressive accomplishment, that does make me feel conflicted about linking to it. In general, while NRO does have some worthwhile material, a disturbingly large fraction of it has over the last few years come to resemble a nutshell of what is wrong with the modern conservative movement in the US. For example, considering that NRO is the same place where writer Mike Potemra complained that Star Trek promoted "peace, tolerance, due process, progress" which are much too liberal values. Aside from this issue, as I've discussed before, I think that the problems in the public schools, including New Haven, are more complicated than Nathaniel portrays them.

There is a piece by another member of my family that I can link to with fewer reservations. My father has a deeply personal piece up at the Oxford University Press blog discussing why he has grown to oppose the death penalty. I suspect that his changing views are similar to the general decline in support for the death penalty over the last 20 years. The general support for the death penalty has dropped over time although about two thirds of the US still supports the death penalty (I've seen claims that the US did not have strong support for the death penalty in the 1960s and that the level of support grew for some time before beginning its current downwards trend, but I've never seen data backing this claim up.) There's also evidence that more religious people tend to be more likely to support the death penalty. If that is a causal rather than correlative link, the current drop in support for the death penalty may be due to the general drop in popularity of organized religion over the last few years.

Public Schools, Unions, New Haven Promise, and GPFM

Last week, my alma mater Yale University announced that the university would work together with New Haven to fund "New Haven Promise," a program which would provide funding to New Haven public school students who attend colleges in Connecticut. The program promises scholarships for New Haven public school students with only a few weak restrictions. For example, students with less than 90% attendance rates in highschool are not eligible.

There are a number of possible criticisms of this program. The most serious criticism to me seems to be the simple one that this program is not Yale's job. Alumni donate money to Yale with certain expectations. They might also donate money to other causes. But there is a basic expectation that money that goes to Yale will be used for Yale purposes such as going to scholarships for poor students at Yale, not to students at random other schools in Connecticut.

There are additional problems with this program. My little brother wrote an op-ed in the Yale Daily News arguing that this program would in fact cover up the real issues in the New Haven public school systems which need to be addressed. He argues that the teacher unions and the lazy and incompetent teaching which they allow are much more of a root cause of the problems. I'm not convinced of his claims. I'm especially unconvinced by his line that "Instead of staying after school to tutor or help run an extracurricular, unionized teachers typically leave as soon as the final bell rings" which seems to underestimate the great difficulty that even hard-working teachers need to put up with daily.

However, I do think that more broadly speaking there's a clear problem with unions in our public schools which prevent the removal of all but the most egregiously bad teachers. For example, consider the case of eighth grade science teacher John Freshwater in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Freshwater taught science so badly that other teachers in later years had to specifically reteach Freshwater's students. Freshwater told students that Catholics were not real Christians. Freshwater burned crosses into students' arms using a tesla coil. Despite all these issues, it has taken more than 2 years to have Freshwater removed. Thus, while I don't have enough detailed experience to personally evaluate whether the unions are a problem in New Haven (although my limited anecdotal evidence suggests that they are a problem), it does fit the general pattern of what is going wrong with American public schools.

Nathaniel's piece generated a variety of responses such this one by a New Haven public school teacher, this one by a New Haven alderman, and this one by another Yale student. Nathaniel has responded to the last piece here. All of these pieces are worth reading.

Thoughts about the late Robert Dunne

Professor Robert Dunne died on Saturday.

This is the first time one of my professors has died. It is disturbing. My assigned adviser Walter Feit died right after he retired and Serge Lang died three days after I talked to him. But there is something different when the professor actually taught a class I was in.

Dunne was also much younger than either Feit or Lang. He was only 59.

That's not the only thing that makes this disturbing: I've had professors where I barely remember their names and faces. Bob Dunne was not that sort of professor. He was engaging, charismatic and thoughtful. He was always willing to stay after class and talk about material even tangentially related to the subject.

I only took one class with Professor Dunne. That was Computers and the Law. The class was a gut. I think that Dunne didn't realize the normal level of material in a Yale class. Between preexisting general knowledge and the ease of the class, I could have not shown up to the lectures and gotten a similar grade. But I didn't skip class. Dunne was too good a lecturer. He was
thoughtful and funny. I learned things from him that would never be formally articulated in a textbook. He taught me the true rule of parody: Parody is accepted as a fair-use defense only if the court finds that parody funny. I cannot think of a better example of Dunne's humor and ability to cut through legalism. It is unfortunate that future students will not benefit from his teaching. He will be missed.