Immigrations and schools

Recent list work: 9 (done with stats. Whoo!), 38 (yay), 37 (arguably)

This piece from the NY Times caught my eye today. It concerns the educational challenges of illegal immigrants. As the article points out, since a 1982 Supreme Court case, public schools have had to accept and educate illegal immigrants through high school, but that requirement stops at college.

Let me start off by saying that I call a spade a spade. I don't like the term "undocumented", because it glosses over the face that people who do not have visas or citizenship are in this country illegally. If you immigrate to a country without following that country's laws on becoming a citizen or leaving by the end of your visa, you have immigrated illegally. Hence, you are an illegal immigrant. That does not make you evil, it does not necessarily make you a bad person, but it is a description of your legal status which isn't euphemistic.

That being said, I have a lot of sympathy for individuals who immigrated as children, regardless of whether that immigration was legal or not. At the age of 6, no one should be expected to understand international law. If we agree that you're not old enough to be legally responsible for crimes like murder and theft, which are generally pretty obviously wrong, it is not reasonable to expect you to responsible for moving somewhere with your parents or aunt or whatever. This seems like common sense to me.

I dislike that the federal Congress has passed a law barring states from offering in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants. This does not seem to me to be the job of the federal government. I don't believe states should be required to offer such tuition discounts, but I don't think they should be barred from it either. I applaud the states which have found ways around this, most notably by basing in-state tuition on having graduated from a school in that state rather than a legal residence.. The only problem I foresee with that is for people who take time off between one graduation and the next enrollment, and potentially move across a state line in the interim. I imagine there must be a way around this.

Fundamentally, I think something needs to be done about giving children who were brought to this country illegally a path to citizenship. I'm not sure what the best plan is, though. Making a bright-age-line is the immediate idea, whereby you could gain citizenship if you immigrated illegally before age X, but not if you were older. The problem with that is that the most logical age, legally, is 18, and I find that troublesome. It seems like that would encourage a lot of 17 year olds to sneak across the border, as they'd be old enough to realize the tremendous advantages that come with US citizenship. But what age would be fair? 14? 12? 16? I don't know.

Then there are issues related to the effects this would have on legal immigration. As it is, for instance, it's easier to gain legal immigration rights if you have close relatives who are citizens--most notably, spouse, parent, or child. If we grant citizenship to children brought here illegally, we would be increasing the probability that their parents would then be granted citizenship, so we would in effect be giving an advantage to someone who broke the rules for others as well as themselves. You'd be more likely to be allowed to stay permanently if you smuggled additional people across the border. That's not right. But, at the same time, I like the idea of equality before the law for all citizens. It would strike me as very much against the notions of equality to say, for instance, that legal citizens who earned their citizenship after being brought here illegally as children are *not* allowed to use their citizenship to help bring their parents in, which other legal citizens are.

I don't know what's to be done. Moreso than most political hot-buttons, I feel this issue is inherently complex. On the one hand, fully open borders are not a viable solution, as feel-good as that solution might seem; the prosperity of our country would simply attract more people than we can truly afford to let in, and our quality of life would drop by too much for that to be feasible. On the other hand, our quality of life would also drop if we sealed all of our borders entirely. Our country attracts many highly educated and skilled workers from India, China, South Korea, and the industrialized world. We bring in a lot of hard workers from Latin America, many of whom are unfairly branded with stereotypes about lazy Mexicans. Our agriculture depends in large part on unskilled migrant farm labor, and many of our unpleasant service jobs in food service, sanitation, meat packing, etc are filled by immigrants because few citizens are willing to take those jobs for what they pay. For the most part, immigrants come here to stay, and people who are willing to travel long distances in search of a better life are the sort of people you want to have on your side. It's clear to anyone thinking about this issue rationally that a balance needs to be struck. What I'm unclear on is where that balance should be.

Another take on test scores

Recent list work: #9, #94

I've spent much of today catching up on recent issues of Nature and Science, as I've not been reading them as much this summer as I should. So, this is old news, but I just came across it today.

For those with access to Science, a few letters appear in the June 22nd issue regarding a study from February advancing a claim that higher standardized test scores are a predictor in graduate student success, as measured by things such as publications, etc. The first of these is the one I think is the more insightful.

As the letter's authors (Manuel Lerdau and Christopher Avery) point out, the initial finding hypothesized the twin causal links: 1) greater aptitude --> higher test scores, and 2) greater aptitude --> increased probability of success. That's a potentially valid causal chain. On the other hand, they suggest that the causal chain might be more along the lines of higher test scores --> greater support (both financial and mentoring) --> greater probability of success. This also strikes me as potentially valid.

As the letter writers state, these two different causal chains lead to very different policy views. I think it would be interesting to try to disentangle the two effects. One way of doing so off the top of my head would be to look at departments where students are given essentially the same financial support and teaching duties regardless of whether they have fellowships or not. (For instance, Stanford's Department of Biological Sciences). Another would be to look at students who have the very high test scores but don't have fellowships for other reasons--perhaps by being non-citizens and therefore disqualified from national fellowships such as those through the NSF. It would also be interesting to look at students who have fellowships and thus don't need to teach, yet have lower standardized test scores than peers in their departments. There could be some difficult things to control for in these examples--for instance, students with low test scores who have fellowships most likely have significant undergraduate research experience, which might let them hit the ground running--but I think the general idea of studying these things is worth exploring.

Random annoyance

I am still alive, just massively slackerly on the blog. For much of the past month, I can claim as an excuse the stats class that did its best to eat my life, in which I somehow managed a 4.0 despite not really caring about my grade nor feeling like I had mastered the subject matter. I guess old habits die hard. Every time I've taken a course pass/fail, I've ended up with one of the (if not always the overall) highest grades in the class. This class I wasn't taking pass/fail officially, but in my mental state for the term, a 3.0 was all I cared about. However, I do have an explanation: I only take classes pass/fail when I think they are complex and confusing. And I don't do well at not understanding things, so I tend to freak out and actually put in effort when I don't get what's going on. Therefore, it's not that the pass/fail grading scheme is causal to my doing well, but rather that there's a strong correlation between classes which intimidate me enough to take pass/fail, and courses in which I'll be scared into putting in substantial effort.

As for the random annoyance, I had two negative controls from yesterday's work. Same growth media in the two different types of containers I used. One of them was contaminated today; the other was not. And the one that was contaminated having to be restarted throws off my schedule for about a week, while the other one (had it been contaminated) would have had virtually no impact on my schedule. Grr.

A frustrating article

This is an interesting article that would have been far better if they either left off the the gender angle or fully explored it.

As a synopsis, the article is really about the pressures of being an overall overachiever teenager in an affluent suburb. I could insert my own experience here as an overachiever from an affluent suburb, but...this article is made out to be about overachieving teenage girls.

This could be an interesting angle. Anecdotally, it was certainly the case that most of the all-around overachievers in my high school were girls. The male overachievers tended to be very field specific, whereas the female overachievers tended to be broader spectrum. Many of the top male students showed skewed academic strengths, performing much better in, say, math and science than history or foreign language, whereas many of the top female students were more even across the board. More of the top girls were both on sports teams and in musical groups than were the top boys. And a much higher percentage of the honors students were girls than boys. There were exceptions of course--I was actually one of them--but as a general trend this was the way of things in my high school when I was there. Anecdotes are not very reliable, but I'd like to know if this is a generally true trend. An analysis of the different patterns displayed by overachievers of the two sexes would be potentially quite interesting.

As it is, though, this piece is of the sort I find really annoying. It comes very close to an interesting topic, but doesn't actually address it. And that's just frustrating.

Fun with school laws in Utah

Recent list work: #9, #12 (completed! Most recent 2 mile run was 15:54), #59, #94.

The weather this past week has been interesting. Last Tuesday it was 73 degrees, and it was uncomfortable wearing long pants. Later in the week we were in the 30s again. Yesterday was warm, bright, and sunny. I woke up this morning with snow on the ground--though it was up in the 50s later on in the day. If this turns into The Day After Tomorrow, I claim dibs on the main character whose father is a climate change researcher.

To prevent this from being a completely meaningless post, I link now to an article I read recently in the NYTimes (warning: link will probably eventually expire). Utah has decided to enact really strict rules about what school clubs are allowed to do, which seem quite clearly to be targeting gay groups. However, these guidelines are a bit crazed. For example:

Under the new Utah law, every club will have to complete an activity disclosure statement that itemizes what it will do, and discusses how many members it will have, and whether tryouts are required. It mandates that any student joining any club needs a parent’s signature — though most public schools in Utah require that already — and specifically bans any discussion by any club of “human sexuality.”

The law defines that term to mean “advocating or engaging in sexual activity outside of legal recognized marriage or forbidden by state law,” and “presenting or discussing information relating to the use of contraceptive devices.”

Let's leave aside, for the moment, the fact that unless there are tryouts, it's extremely unlikely that any club can say how many members they'll have ahead of time. I know I couldn't have done so with regards to the math team, for example, despite being the president of that. This legislation would mean, for instance, that high school chapters of Amnesty International would not be able to protest compulsory intrauterine devices as a form of population control. I'm thinking the religious right who are backing this legislation won't really like that outcome. This ends up being an example of the dangers of trying to censor speech you don't like--that which you do gets thrown out as well.

Another blow to individualism

Things like this really annoy me, and not entirely for the reasons you might think.

Basically, Hamilton college (a fairly good small school in upstate NY--I actually know people who went there) has decided to end all merit-based aid and divert this money toward need-based aid. It's not surprising that I would object to this, but the reasons are a bit more complicated than they might appear.

Yes, I will admit, I did get merit-based aid as an undergraduate, to the tune of my entire tuition. And I've been on merit-based fellowships at graduate schools since then. I'm sure that's had some impact on my views on this matter. But there are other concerns which I think are more relevant--though it's possible I'm kidding myself:

1) I was raised with the belief that college is the expense of the person attending, not his or her family. (S)He is the one attending the school, gaining the advantages of the successes, dealing with the consequences of the failures, picking the courses to study and the school to attend, and responsible for the bill. Turning everything into need-based aid screws over the kids of well-off parents who don't approve of their child's decision to go to college at all, who don't like the choice of school, who don't like the choice of study program, etc. It ends up causing massive differences in the level of control over a student's life that the parents or guardians have, based solely on the economics of the family. The children of wealth only have wealth themselves if their parents choose to bestow it on them. On their own, there's very little difference in the economic power of most 18-year-olds.

2) This eliminates one of the great routes of self-reliance for college students. One of the things I love about a meritocracy is that it allows people through their own effort to alter the outcomes of their lives. Getting rid of merit-based aid, and funneling all that money into need-based aid means that students will be rewarded or punished for who their parents are, not what they themselves have accomplished.

3) I don't really like the idea of charging different prices for the same thing to different people based upon their financial situation. If I want the good pizza deal at the local pizzeria, it's $7.94 for 2 small 2-topping pizzas and a 2-liter of pop of my choice. It would be the same if I won the lottery last week, and it would be the same next week if I lost my job. There are some differential price points which make rational sense to me--frequent customer discounts to lure people into being habitual shoppers, senior and student discounts to target groups which often have limited personal budgets but nevertheless account for a large amount of the revenue of certain industries like movie theaters, lower costs for advanced purchases locking in usage rising as the event gets closer followed by a massive price reduction immediately before the event to fill the leftover seats and eke out what profit you can, and even different interest rates based upon risk of lending to a given individual--but I don't like this sort of one. It's economically valid, as it helps more accurately match supply to demand, but this ends up functioning as a tax levied by entities which are not elected to determine tax structures.

Now, I recognize that part of that last argument could be applied to merit scholarships as well--different students are paying different amounts to attend the same institution. Here, though, I argue that it's a bit different. For one, simply put, the merit scholarship students are contributing more to the university in arenas other than present dollars than the other students are. By raising the academic profile of the school, they are increasing its prestige, its ability to attract grants and donations, and to hire faculty members of its choice. More often than not--if the scholarships are distributed properly--they end up being the ones who excel in classes, and as a result either raise the level of discussion or end up effectively tutoring their friends who are struggling in those classes. And when those overachievers graduate, they're more likely to go on to careers in which their accomplishments reflect favorably on the school, and are likely to be alumni donors themselves.

I was lucky. My family decided to cover the educational costs of both my brother and me beyond what our scholarships provided, despite having told us for basically our entire lives that college was our cost. And they didn't try to control what we studied or where we did so. But they very easily could have chosen not to do this. And if that had happened, I probably would be in more debt than several of my former roommates, despite the fact that I had a full-tuition merit scholarship and none of them were on any merit aid. If you then remove the merit aid entirely, well, I certainly would not have gone to the college I did, and probably wouldn't have gone to as good of one in general. Two recent alumni from the same school shouldn't be facing debt differences of tens of thousands of dollars (or, in some cases, more than $100,000) when the difference in reason is how much money their parents make.

Can we get an apology here?

Today's NY TImes contains an update on Matthew LaClair. For those who don't know who he is, he's (at the time of this writing) a high school student who earlier this year caused a surprising amount of controversy by, well, conclusively demonstrating that his world history teacher was behaving entirely inappropriately for a public high school teacher. Matthew's tape recordings involve such things as the teacher -- remember, he's a history teacher -- telling students during class that if they don't believe that Jesus died for their sins that they deserve to go to Hell, that there were dinosaurs on Noah's ark, evolution has no scientific basis, etc. There's been a strong backlash against him in his community; several have said that he was provoking these points, that he's just seeking attention, that it was wrong to tape these lectures without approval, even that these statements were no big deal.

So far, the school's response which has been publicly known has been...to ban taping classes without instructor approval. We must take their word for it that there was some sort of discussion with the teacher to prevent him from doing this again, as it falls under the umbrella of "personnel matter".

Well, today's update is that his family has filed a torts claim notice, which is the first step to filing a lawsuit in New Jersey. The family says they're seeking a public apology and a correction of some of the statements made in class.

This strikes me as a strange thing to sue over. I do feel the school's actions are inappropriate. And though without knowing the situation in detail, I have a hard time coming up with any context in which these statements could be reasonably made in a public school history class. If this behavior was still going on, and he was suing to stop it, I'd find that laudable. But suing for an apology still strikes me as a bit wrong. Our courts are overbooked as it is dealing with matters of people breaking the law. Dealing with people's feelings being hurt in ways that aren't slander or libel strikes me as too much to add.