"Anyone who is satisfied with the American educational system has to be delirious with joy over public high schools with a forty percent dropout rate, the high cost of a college education, a convoluted federal tax code, the process of confirming federal judges, the government's handling of immigration, etc. etc. etc."

Here are two links to a web site that is devoted to promoting free, high quality Internet educational programs leading to a high school, college, or technical school degree/certificate.

http://afreecollegedegree.com

http://afreecollegedegree.com/SiteMap

Just as newspapers are seeing their circulation drop as readers discover that it is possible to get unbiased news conveniently for free on the Internet, so too students are beginning to realize that technology is making it possible to get an excellent unbiased education online without spending tens of thousands of dollars in the process.  The great problem in education today is that educators and government bureaucrats are in a massive state of denial about this.  


As government employees, educators and bureaucrats wield large amounts of authority and power.  They tell students and their families where students can go to school, for how long, under what conditions, etc.  They grade students, and set academic standards, etc.  They certify who is qualified to teach, etc.  They are in a privileged position of authority for lobbying for their special interests in Congress and in the state legislatures.  In short, educators and bureaucrats use their positions of power and authority for their own benefit and convenience and job security.  It is impossible to deny that this conflicts seriously with respect to their obligations to students.


Remarkably, while this conflict of interest is in plain view, educators and bureaucrats typically bristle at the suggestion that they are so low minded as to put their own interests ahead of those of students.  Nevertheless, they do.  If a student and his family go out to eat, and if they are not satisfied with a restaurant’s menu and its prices, then they are free to walk across the street to another restaurant.  In today’s high schools and colleges, students and parents may not like the menu.  They may not like the service.  They may think that the cost of the meal is exorbitant.  None of this matters.  In a government run restaurant system, restaurants exist to provide lifetime jobs for government employees who use the power of government to protect their jobs.


The recent college student loan scandals are the result of denying that a conflict of interest exists between students and educational institutions.  These scandals actually represent two separate conflicts of interest.  The current focus of investigation is on the relatively minor conflict of interest that exists between students and corporate interests.  As the student loan scandals reveal, conflicts of interest with corporations create problems for students when college financial aid offices are influenced into favoring banks and student loan lenders at the expense of students.  Colleges and universities face other similar conflicts of interests in their relationships with food service and beverage companies, cellular phone providers (***see footnote), education associations, auditing and accounting firms, etc.


KEY POINT:  While conflicts of interest with corporations and associations are serious, they are not the major conflict of interest problem for students.  The truly important ---- and widely ignored ---- conflict of interest in the current student loan scandals involves the fact that it is in the financial interest of college financial aid offices to maximize the amounts of student loans themselves.  To do this, colleges and universities raise the cost of an education to the maximum.  Then they soak students with student loan debt to pay for inflated college expenses.  Then in the following year they repeat the cycle all over again.  Consequently, the student loan scandal problem is not really so much about a difference of half of a percentage point on interest rates for a $20,000 or a $30,000 student loan.  It is primarily about the $20,000 or the $30,000 student loan itself, which directly benefits colleges and universities and which is where all problems with student loans begin.


This is the elephant in the middle of the room that everyone ignores.  The reason is clear.  Many educators and bureaucrats pretend to be concerned about conflicts of interest in education, but their efforts to correct conflicts of interest are shallow and deliberately misguided.  A genuine concern for the best interests of students would lead to a much better, more economical, less expensive, financially disciplined approach to educating students.  It would also mean that educational programs would be forced to compete for students.  


Competition is what leads to excellence, including excellence in education.  Openness to competition indicates that an enterprise is free from any conflict of interest, and that it is confidently pursuing the best interests of consumers.  This is why free markets are so efficient at providing what consumers want.  Now, for the first time ever, new technologies make it possible for free, privately funded, Internet educational programs to compete effectively with public schools and colleges and universities on the basis of quality, convenience and cost.  With Internet educational programs free Internet access to the finest teachers and professors is widely available in an attractive, convenient, transparent, economical, and readily accessed format.  


FOOTNOTE


Cellular phone services for high school and college students illustrate the remarkable blindness that exists to conflicts of interest in today’s educational systems.  A portion of the revenues from a cell phone service can easily be used to fund an excellent, free Internet high school and college degree program.  A cellular phone service like this would be enormously popular with millions of high school and college students and their families.  Individuals who are working in today's educational systems do not even begin to consider possibilities like this because it conflicts with their own self interest.

 

A GRADE POINT AVERAGE = 3.14797364528243500325637
IS RIDICULOUS.  WHY?

 

Many people are apparently unaware of just how ridiculous the practice of grade point averaging is.  This includes (unfortunately) many educators and educational bureaucrats, who should know better.  These people assume that a simple number, for example 2.7, can actually represent a grade point average that absolutely reflects a student's skill and effort and learning.   It does not matter whether the student went to Harvard University or to a community college.  It doesn't matter whether the student majored in biology with a minor in genetic splicing or in basket weaving.  It doesn't even matter if one student was in college and the other student was in middle school.  A grade point average is widely thought to be the kind of measurement that is as precisely fixed as the places of the stars in the firmament.

 

This is nonsense.  It is important that this is recognized as such because it leads to a major injustice when students are denied state funded scholarships because of phony grade point average requirements.  In South Carolina there are thousands (and probably tens of thousands) of students who have lost Life Scholarships on the basis of grade point average requirements that are arbitrary, irrational, and inconsistent. 

 

In South Carolina students are required to maintain a 3.00 grade point average to maintain a Life Scholarship, for example.  In fact the state violates the constitutional rights of college students to due process and equal protection when it takes a Life Scholarship away from a student with a 2.8 or a 2.9 grade point average.  Forget about the 3.00 grade point average requirement.    If a 3.0 grade point average mean "good" work, then what does a 2.9 grade point average mean?  Less than good work??  And then what does a 2.8 grade point average mean?  Less than less good work??  And then what does a 2.7 grade point average mean?  Less than less than less good work, but better than average work??  Trying to pin down what these numbers mean quickly becomes absurd.  In other words the state of South Carolina (along with other states) is taking scholarships away from students on the basis of meaningless, unreasonable, absurd criteria.

 

In this country grade point averaging assumes that millions of different educators --- who are teaching hundreds of different subjects at thousands of different schools to different age groups --- can be mathematically precise in assigning “good” grades for good “work” where there is no uniform understanding for what is “good” and what is “work”.  This is like assuming that millions of people can assign and average grades to rationally compare things as varied as books, kitchen sinks, cars, vacation resorts, cigars, hotels, schools, investments, magazines, physical beauty, musical compositions, sports teams, restaurant meals, etc.  Averaging grades like this completely ignores the content-value-context-price-skill level of what is being evaluated. 

 

This is not even wrong.  It is an irrational misuse of numbers.  It is like saying that a 3.03 grade point average apple from an American orchard is better than a 2.98 grade point average automobile made in Japan by exactly 0.05 degrees of    “goodness”.  This is nonsense.  Millions of educators can repeatedly and uniformly agree that an object weighs 2.3 or 3.82 or 1.596 etc. pounds with a suitable scale.  However, there is no objective unit (like the inch or the pound) or instrument (like a ruler or a scale) for measuring academic “goodness” or for measuring academic “work”. 

 

Irrational mathematical comparisons of grade point averages represent the claim that already vague and subjective measures of “goodness” (like a college grade of B without reference to subject, school, educational level, etc.) can be subdivided and refined yet further into ten (3.0), or a hundred (3.00), or even a thousand (3.000) sub degrees of “goodness”.  Grading crimes and criminal punishments according to this kind of “mathematical logic" would not be tolerated for a moment because it would violate the due process and equal protection clauses in the Constitution.  Imagine trying to imprison someone for what is described as precisely 2.78 degree “bad” behavior, or “bad” behavior in the 2.78th degree.  Imagine trying to explain how being "bad" in the 2.78th degree differs from being "bad" in the 2.79th or in the 2.77th degree.  

 

In fact numbers like this are meaningless, and attempting to use numbers in this way is disingenuous.  In taking away state funded scholarships from college students that are worth $20,000 or more, states like South Carolina use subjective, unscientific, misleading grade point average comparisons in ways that violate the constitutional rights of students to due process and equal protection.  These states are guilty of using deceptive, flimflam arithmetic in deciding who gets to keep state funded scholarships. 

 

This needs to stop.  That is, this needs to stop if this country is going to have an excellent educational system.  It is impossible to achieve educational excellence when the markers for academic achievement and for spending huge sums of money on education are meaningless and intellectually dishonest.

 

POSTSCRIPT

 

None of these comments are meant to imply that all grading systems for measuring academic achievement should be rejected.  How grading systems should be organized is a subject for another time and place. 

 

What this article is saying is that current systems of grading students are accepted by people who do not understand that arbitrarily assigning a precise number to a subjective quality (for example, a student’s understanding of English literature) and then comparing this to another arbitrarily precise number (for example, another student’s understanding of art history) is not the same as precisely and objectively making comparisons which involve physical measurements of some kind. 

 

Furthermore, it is a fact that in today’s educational systems programs for grading and testing students are corrupted by political considerations and money.  In today’s educational systems anyone who trusts in the government’s promises to leave “no child behind” in another ten years is simply gullible.  An educational system that is governed by money and political correctness is incapable of evaluating itself objectively or of making reliable promises for future educational programs.  In this writer’s opinion any of the statistics or information about testing students that comes from a government educational bureaucracy is worthless.

 

Fortunately, free, privately funded, easily accessed, convenient, high quality Internet high school and college programs will enable millions of students and their families to ignore expensive government (and quasi government, or so-called “private”) programs of education.  With free, high quality online educational systems students and parents (and anyone else) will be able to choose free educational programming that conveniently meets their needs whenever they are ready to study and learn.  This will be the ultimate in “school choice”.

 

         

In 2004 I filed a pro se lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Greenville, SC with about 30 complaints.  See civil action number 7:04-2503-13AK.  This lawsuit was dismissed because of a technicality (a missed filing date).  The substance of the complaints remains valid.  These complaints are based on simple legal principles.  Here are two illustrations of these complaints.


Illustration One:   College students are adults.  An adult is legally defined as someone who is 18 years old, or older.   Adults are not legally responsible for each other's behavior.  It is illegal for the government to punish Mr. Smith for something that Mr. Jones did.  If a 20 year old college student decides to go to a particular college, an adult parent is not legally responsible that decision.  An adult parent is not required to submit information to a college financial aid office (specifically, a government form known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA) so that another adult can get student loans, etc.  This means that:


(1)   the government cannot punish the 20 year old college student by withholding aid because of the parent's behavior.  The 20 year old student is not responsible for the parent's behavior.

 
(2)  the government cannot punish the parent (by withholding aid from his adult child) because parents are not legally responsible for the decisions that their adult children make.


The government is vulnerable to lawsuits in this area in other ways.  (1) Requiring parents to submit financial aid information also interferes with a parent's fundamental (substantive due process) right to direct his children's upbringing and education as he sees fit.  This includes the fundamental right to decide when and when not to participate in an adult child's educational program.  This is none of the government's business.  (2) Furthermore, when the government challenges parental complaints about financial aid practices, the government becomes liable to lawsuits with respect to wrongful acts (or torts) such as "false light".  The elements of a complaint about "false light" are publicity (a government charge of unacceptable behavior) which places the parent in a false light (not cooperating with reasonable government expectations) that is highly offensive to a reasonable person (parents who fail to cooperate with college financial aid offices are "bad" parents who are failing to fulfill an essential parental function).   


Illustration Two:   Government laws and regulations have to be "rational". Billions of dollars in government financial aid have been awarded according to irrational regulations.  For example, it is irrational to award state funded, college scholarship on the basis of grade point average calculations which are (to use an extreme illustration) carried out to 10 places after the decimal point. For example, 3.2689494711.  Clearly, many of the numbers in this grade point "average" are meaningless. In fact, it can easily be shown that they all are. This means that tax-funded, state scholarships are being awarded on the basis of irrational criteria, which is illegal. The government can do many things, but it cannot legislate that one plus one equals three. It cannot give a speeding ticket to someone who is going 30.1 mph in a 30 mph speed limit zone. It cannot restrict scholarships to students with social security numbers ending in numbers from 30 to 40.  Requirements like this are silly and ridiculous.  They are unenforceable.  


Conclusion:   Why should anyone bother with lawsuits like these?  Many government educational regulations violate simple principles like the ones above because they are designed primarily for the benefit of government employees.  Government educators and educational bureaucrats benefit from the flood of money that is raised through government regulations that violate simple legal principles.  These regulations are used to distribute over $100 billion every year to colleges and universities.  Colleges and universities soak up this money, and then raise their tuitions and room and board, which just leads to another round in a vicious cycle of increasing expenses for college.  Next, students and families are expected to borrow still more money to pay for the higher cost of a college's tuition, room and board.  The government is also expected to raises taxes to pay for larger state funded scholarships.  Then this money gets soaked up by new increases in tuition etc., and so the cycle repeats itself.