The Internet should be a transformative technology for political debates; in a matter of seconds you can verify or reject nearly any conjecture, relieving bloggers from the embarrassment of posting complete nonsense. Unfortunately, few ideological adherents avail themselves of this tool, preferring to stick with unsupportable conjecture, something I always enjoy pointing out.

For a rich trove of examples, I read a few articles from Model Minority. It didn’t take long to find this article about the costs of being poor, which includes these verifiable statements:

Look at it like this, if you are working at Target, making $7 an hour, Target is making arguably $100 to $200 dollars an hour off of you. You are taking the short, and the corporation is keeping the rest. What if you were able to keep more of the money you earned for them? Life would be different. On top of that, most of the items that we get from stores are from factories in China, Mexico, Haiti and the Phillipines where women work earning $2 per day. Again, those women are taking the short.

It took me only 30 seconds to find basic financial information about Target and compute relevant stats. In 2010, Target had about $69B in revenue and $3B in earnings. With 355K employees, Target’s revenues are about $94 per hour per employee if the employees work full time, and about $200/hour if they work on average half time. So, the author is right, but only if “making” means “revenues.” However, when she says “keeping the rest” she clearly means earnings. In that case, Target’s earnings per employee are from $4/hour to $8/hour. In that case, the writer is off by a factor of 25x, not a small error. So, she either doesn’t know the difference between revenue and earnings, or she’s really bad at math, or she doesn’t care if she spouts nonsense, as long as the nonsense fits her biases.

The second verifiable fact is that workers in China, Mexico and other places are making $2/day. Bloomberg reports that manufacturing workers in China and Mexico make about $2 per hour. I’d guess that a 10 hour day is more typical there, so for this statistic, the author is off by a factor of 10x, an improvement but still not even in the ballpark.

I certainly would not dispute the author’s theme that prices are higher in poor neighborhoods, or more generally, that life in poverty is abysmal. However, these points can be argued without fabricating statistics, and a decent respect for facts and figures, across the political spectrum, would help moderate the rancor of our debates and bring us closer to agreement.

While reading a bit about KIPP schools, a compensatory education program for minority students, I found a report that has some interesting, adjacent paragraphs:

[The KIPP Performance gains do] not appear to be attributable to a selective admissions process. KIPP serves minority and high-need students, many of whom performed poorly before they entered the schools. Some unobservable biases may be present in student motivation and support, but except for a tendency to attract more girls than boys, there is as yet no strong observable evidence of a systematic selection bias.

Where it has been monitored, student attrition is high and seemingly selective. Those who leave KIPP tend to have been performing less well than those who stay, and at least one study suggests that those who leave were lowerperforming when they entered. Such attrition, if it were taken into consideration, would reduce the size of gains in reports that simply compare KIPP eighth graders with those in their host districts. However, the evidence does not go so far as to suggest that attrition fully accounts for the observed KIPP advantage.

So, there is no bias on which students enter the program, but there is a bias on which students leave. Which of course means that there is a bias in the students that were evaluated to assess the gains in performance. It hardly matters if the poorer performing students didn’t get in, or if they dropped out; it is only important they the were not part of the assessment.

Here is an excellent comment to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The commenter, mark_r_harris,  is a teacher in South Korea who explains what happens when, as the Obama administration would like, every student in a country graduates from college.

On 60 Minutes a few weekends ago, it was mentioned that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would like 80% of American youth to attend and graduate from college. It is a nice thought in many ways. As a teacher and professor, intellectually I am all for it (if the university experience is a serious one, which these days, I don’t know).

But students’ expectations in attending college are not just intellectual; they are careerist (probably far more so). As it happens, I am now living and teaching in a country, South Korea, that meets the Gates’ standards. Right now, about 75-80% of Korean high school students enter a university. The 20% of Korean youth who do not attend university are mainly poor rural youth. Given the Koreans’ diligence, it is not surprising that the vast majority of university attendees also graduate, many with majors in scientific and engineering disciplines (“soft” degrees like marketing are not as popular here). This is a dedicated country.

But you know what? They can’t find jobs. It was reported in the Korean media a few weeks ago that according to the latest government figures, only half of recent Korean university graduates have found full-time work. Even the country’s best university, Seoul National, only has a 70% placement rate.

Now, Korea is experiencing an economic downturn, but not as bad as America’s. This employment issue has more to do with levels of training and subsequent levels of expectation. When a Korean student emerges from 20 years of intense study with a university degree, he or she reasonably expects a “good” job — which is to say, a well-paying professional or managerial job with good forward prospects. But here’s the problem. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, a society in which 80% of the available jobs are professional, managerial, comfortable, and well-paid. No way. Korea has a number of other jobs, but some are low-paid service work, and many others — in factories, farming, fishing — are scorned as 3-D jobs (difficult, dirty, and dangerous). Educated Koreans don’t want them. So the country is importing labor in droves — from China, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, even Uzbekistan. In the countryside, rural Korean men are having such a difficult time finding prospective wives to share their agricultural lifestyle that fully 40% of rural marriages are to poor women from those other Asian countries, who are brought in by match-makers and marriage brokers.

Since young Koreans almost invariably live at home until marriage, whether they are working or not, it is routine for the young unemployed to do so. Their parents, who have a lot invested in their children’s successful outcomes, discourage them from taking low-level, part-time, or contract work, even just to get a start in life. As is usually the case, the only way they can see of improving their lot is not by lowering their expectations, but by improving their qualifications: by scoring well on English tests, getting additional certificates, and so on. But everyone else is doing this, too, so the competitive field remains the same. What will happen to these youths? The more years they don’t work, the less chance there is that they ever will. They become tainted, and possibly a permanently disenfranchised minority.