Vanished Bloggers, Vanishing Valedictorians –

Vanished Bloggers, Vanishing Valedictorians – Sorry about the silence of the last few days (hope someone noticed). Jessie graced us with her presence last weekend (leaving the cobalt nanoparticles at NIST to fend for themselves). Taking her back to her summer internship we had a delightful dinner with visiting senior Volokh Conspirator Eugene Volokh and a bakers’ dozen or so of his friends in D.C on Monday, and then my wife and I headed south to help celebrate the 100th birthday of one of my uncles in Pensacola, Fla.

But I’ve been collecting stuff along the way. For one thing, I found more Vanishing Valedictorians, the subject of a very good article by Joanne Jacobs on TechCentralStation that some of you may have seen.

Stopping off with friends in Greensboro, N.C., I happened to notice that the local paper that day had an impassioned OpEd on “Education and the Injustice of Equality,” whose arguments with reference to Guilford County, N.C., echoed many of Joanne Jacobs points. (As of this writing the article is not on the Greensboro News-Record web site, www.news-record.com, but other, older articles are listed and so this one may be there shortly. It appeared on July 16.)

Shortly after Guilford County school officials decided to do away with valedictorians and salutatorians, the state Board of Education decided to ignore the dismal fourth and seventh grade writing scores from that county. The OpEd’s drift can be seen in the following excerpt:

Although these are distinct events, they are linked by a philosophical thread that has strangled public education for decades…. The common thread can be called “egalitarian”…. This theory maintains that no student is more intelligent than any other; that competence and merit are evenly distributed. Expand the theory to encompass teachers and schools, and you get jettisoned test scores. Of course, this is sheer nonsense that has nothing to do with reality.

This must be a hot topic in Greensboro and Guilford County, for in looking for an online version of the OpEd to link (not there yet, as mentioned) I discovered that four days earlier, on July 12, the News-Record had published another OpEd making the same argument.

Everybody is supposed to feel equal and, most especially, feel good about themselves. Don’t get too competitive, according to this notion, because somebody’s self-esteem will be incurably damaged for life. And what better way to avoid that horrifying prospect than not to recognize academic achievement with valedictorians and salutatorians.

I heard enough about self-esteem and sensitivity during Jessie’s trek through elementary and middle school that now they sound to me more like diseases to be avoided than qualities to be cultivated. It’s enough to make curmudgeons even out of people far more reasonable than I.

Say What?