Chart of the dday

Pre-school, dummies, pre-school!!  *Thanks, DJC) Of all the low-hanging fruit of public policy we are not close to taking advantage of this, is surely it:

And, some accompanying explanation (though if you are reading this blog, this should be familiar):

The latest research, from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by James Heckman and Lakshmi Raut, concludes that a policy of free preschool for all poor children would have a raft of cost-effective benefits for society and the economy: It would increase social mobility, reduce income inequality, raise college graduation rates, improve criminal behavior (saving some of the societal expenses associated with it), and yield higher tax revenue thanks to an increase in lifetime wages.

Specifically, Heckman and Raut estimate that the percentage of children whose parents never graduated from college who go on to graduate themselves would rise from 6.71 percent to 9.45 percent. And such a preschool policy would reduce the percent of the population that falls in the long run into poor socioeconomic status, from 35.71 percent to 29.14 percent. (Heckman and Raut define poor socioeconomic status as families earning less than 70 percent of the average in the economy.)

Keep such a policy in place for years, and its benefits accrue from one generation to the next. Put a child in preschool, in other words, and that improves her chances of graduating college. But it also improves the future education and earnings prospects of her children and grandchildren. Obviously, the quality of a school that a child attends later in life matters, too. And we’d be foolish to invest in preschool without continuing to invest in poor children as they age.

Quick hits

Lots of interesting open tabs in my browser today:

1) Love, love, love this brilliant satire on MOOC’s, seemingly beloved by college administrator’s every where.

As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education.

2) Nice EJ Dionne column on Gatsby economics:

I confess: I love any economist willing to say straight out that luck plays a large part in how well we do [Steve-- me too!!]. The prosperous are especially disinclined to acknowledge that however hard they worked or ingenious they were, they were also lucky. The role of good fortune in determining success provides a powerful moral underpinning for more egalitarian policies.

As the song goes, it’s a long way to the top if you want to rock ‘n’ roll, and Krueger points out that the three decades or so after World War II — when the United States firmly established itself as the global economic leader — were a time of greater economic equality than we enjoy today.

He argues that we need to grow again “from the middle out,” not from the top down. This is the theme of a symposium in Democracy, a journal I’m involved with, and the “middle-out” idea needs to be our era’s answer to inequalities rationalized since the 1980s by supply-side economics.

“We have reached the point where inequality is hurting the economy,” Krueger insists. “Today, a reduction in inequality would be good for efficiency, economic growth and stability.”

3) Damn it sucks to be a woman academic.  Or at least one who wants a family life.  It’s really quite unfair according to the data:

A new book I co-wrote with the team at Berkeley, Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower, draws on several surveys that have tracked tens of thousands of graduate students over their careers, as well as original research.

The most important finding is that family formation negatively affects women’s, but not men’s, academic careers. For men, having children is a career advantage; for women, it is a career killer. And women who do advance through the faculty ranks do so at a high price…

Men and women retire at about the same age, but women have less income to rely upon in retirement; their salaries at retirement are on average, 29 percent lower.  This is partly the result of parenting responsibilities: For women, each child reduces her pay. This is mostly as a cumulative effect from time and money lost earlier. But children have no such effect on men’s salaries.

Bummer!

4) Really interesting piece on the racial disparities in drowning:

“Before the Civil War, more blacks than whites could swim,” Lynn Sherr, the author of Swim: Why We Love the Water, said in an interview. “There are many stories of shipwrecks in which black slaves rescued their owners.”

But as Ms. Sherr learned from Bruce Wigo of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, segregation destroyed the aquatic culture of the black community. “Once whites discovered swimming, blacks were increasingly excluded from public pools and lifeguarded beaches,” Mr. Wigo told her.

As a result, many minority parents never learned how to swim. Adults who can’t swim often fear the water and, directly or indirectly, convey that fear to their children.

I found that particularly interesting as my college roommate, a Black man, did not actually learn until he took a swimming course in college.

5) Really nice piece on privacy vs. the security state from fellow OSU Political Science PhD, Bill Ayers:

Yet the existing surveillance apparatus — as massive as it apparently is — was not enough to stop two young guys with no experience from blowing up bombs that killed three and injured more than 250. The net which the NSA and others have cast isn’t foolproof.

And this is very much the point. We can spend billions upon billions of dollars, and disaffected 20-somethings will still be able to blow up bombs in public places. We’re not going to get perfect security from terrorism — and in the broader context, terrorism is one of the least of dangers in our society anyway (well behind alcohol-induced car accidents, murders, suicides, industrial accidents, and many other things).

So in order to answer the question about how much privacy we’re willing to give up in exchange for security, we have to decide how much security do we expect? If the answer is “a reasonable amount, but we know it’s never going to be perfect,” then the massive data-gathering the government is engaged in is probably a significant overreach. We could obtain the same result with far less effort, and far more privacy.

The problem, of course, is that politicians don’t do rational calculations — because we don’t let them. Any politician can be vilified, anytime something goes wrong, for “not having done enough.” Michael Dukakis was raked over the coals — and ultimately lost his bid for the White House — in part because one criminal was paroled and went on to commit a crime.

Real-world reality dictates that we accept some level of vulnerability, and some number of deaths, just as we accept a certain level of car accidents, homicides, and other things. How many accidental gun deaths committed by children have occurred in the last month?

But political reality — on the singular issue of terrorism (but not road accidents, or gun violence) — says to the politician, you must leave no stone unturned, no action untaken. You must be able to say, “we did everything we possibly could.”

 

Advice for all college students

Came across this list of 7 things graduating high school seniors should know as they head off for college.  It’s a great list.  And I would not limit it at all to new college students.  Sadly, I know plenty of juniors and seniors who could use this advice.  Anyway, two in particular I really liked:

Every Class Counts

There is a lot of redundancy built into high school courses. Many classes go over what was done before, some classes are devoted to preparing for tests, and, once in a while, you don’t really do much at all.

In college, it’s different. Professors have only 30 or 40 lectures in which to cover the subject, so they try to make each class count. If you miss more than two or three lectures, you are likely to miss out on some content that will be difficult to fill in on your own.

Yep.  Actually, I had forgotten that fact about high school in comparison to college.  Presumably helps explain why some students don’t take attendance as seriously as they should.

But this final point I think is really important:

The Professor Would Like to Help You Succeed

Professors need not be distant figures whose only job is to give lectures in large auditoriums and spend the rest of their time doing research. In addition to those tasks, professors are also teachers, whose self-conception is often invested in whether students are doing well. They are often delighted to help students construct a paper or prepare for an exam. They also have office hours throughout the week so they may devote time to helping students.

Yes!  We want to help our students and we want them to do well.  I hate giving C’s and lower, especially to students I’ve come to know and like.  When students get poor grades, I sometimes feel that I have, at least in part, failed them.  I really want all my students (who actually care and try) to succeed.  It’s a shame that many students do not realize that my colleagues and I are actually on their side, not antagonists.  Of course, I think part of that lies on faculty, who really need to make sure that students appreciate this fact.

Anyway, the whole list of 7 is actually quite good (and short) so check it out.

One good teacher reform

So, as a general rule, the Republicans in the NC General Assembly have been disastrous for public education.  This letter in today’s N&O goes through the litany and is pretty much right:

A more thorough undermining of public education could scarcely be imagined than what is proposed: lifting the cap on class sizes, eliminating teacher assistants, denying teachers who pursue master’s degrees a raise, subjecting public but not private schools to punitive grading systems, giving away millions of taxpayer dollars in vouchers to be used at private schools and more.

Make no mistake” The goal of these initiatives is not to improve public education. It is to destroy it by starving it, demoralizing and demonizing it and to push as many paying customers as possible over to private schools. Is this what we want? After decades of investing in public education, will we stand idly by while our misguided leaders dismantle our public schools?

AMY WOMBLE, CARY

I agree.  On all but one thing.  We should not actually be paying teachers more for earning master’s degrees.  The reason that teachers earn master’s degrees is to get a raise.  Sadly, there’s zero evidence that a Masters actually contributes to one being a better teacher.  Thus, it really does not make any sense for a state to incentivize it.  It would presumably make more sense to simply raise all teachers’ salaries a modest amount by taking away the pay raises for a masters.  Of course, what really makes sense is to figure out what qualifications (aside from testing our students to death) truly indicate better teacher quality and reward those.  Alas, that’s proven really hard.

So, in general, I trust the NC legislators on education about as far as I can throw them, but I am glad to see the state will no longer be incentivizing degrees for teachers that don’t actually do anything to help them in the classroom.  Of course, I don’t actually trust them to spend the savings wisely.

Another unintended consequence of all the testing

I meant to include this in my previous post, but forgot.  Anyway, back in my day the last couple weeks of school were not exactly the most productive, but we did learn things.  From what I’ve seen in 8 years as a parent of a public education post NCLB, pretty much no learning happens once the kids take the EOG (end of grade) tests.  Obviously, this is an N of one kid, but from what I’ve heard from other parents, this sound pretty typical.  My son’s school day today consisted of a movie in each class.

Now, you know I’m not one to bash teachers.  In general, I have the greatest respect for what they do and lament the degree to which they are under-valued, but one thing I will say is… please do not say that the tests stifle all your efforts to teach creatively and do things outside the box and then when you get 2-3 weeks of teaching after the tests to do little more than show movies.  Now is your chance to do all this great, creative, not test-driven teaching.  But, I’ve seen pretty much no evidence of it.

On the other hand, I know at least some of David’s teachers are really good and passionate about teaching.  I do wonder the degree  to which a school develops a culture where post EOG  testing is just a break for everybody and nobody wants to be the one teacher who is actually teaching.  If so, that’s a shame.  And if its just universal, even more of a shame.

Too many tests

So, for the second time in two days, I agree with our governor (seemingly bizarrely to me, he came out quite strongly in support of solar power yesterday).  In today’s news, he argues that NC school students are taking too many tests, and as a parent, sure seems to me that he’s right:

RALEIGH — Public school students take too many tests, Gov. Pat McCrory told education leaders Wednesday, and the state needs to figure out how to lighten the load.

During a meeting with the State Board of Education, McCrory said he has instructed his new senior education advisor, Eric Guckian, to identify which tests are unnecessary and report back by the end of the summer…

On Wednesday, just a few hours before McCrory made the argument for fewer tests, administrators with the state Department of Public Instruction answered questions from skeptical board members about North Carolina’s testing regimen.

Board Vice Chairman A.L. “Buddy” Collins said two high school assistant principals told him that their schools spend 20 days a year on tests. Those 20 days represent lost instructional time, he said.

“The testing program of this state has reduced our school year to 165 days,” Collins said. “We are operating at a time when many educators would say we need a 200-day year of education to keep up with international counterparts.”

Rebecca Garland, DPI’s chief academic officer, said schools should not need to reserve 20 days for testing.

“If we’re talking 20 days out of the instructional calendar, we don’t want that to happen,” she said. “I want to know what it is, too.”

McCrory later told the State Board of Education that he met with more than a half dozen school superintendents last week, and they uniformly complained about the testing load and the drain on instructional time.

Personally, I’ve astounded and disturbed by the amount of instructional time my son David (7th grade) has lost to taking (and preparing to take) tests.  Heck, at some point they actually need to spend some time learning all this stuff that they are being tested upon.  I’m not going to blanketly oppose all testing, but it certainly seems to me that they need to be more judicious with the matter.  Case in point, making my son take an End of Grade test for 7th grade math and an End of Course test for Algebra (which is his 7th grade math).

More reason to hate the Tea Party

Well, now that they’ve largely failed in 1) preventing more Americans from having affordable health care; and 2) preventing Obama from being re-elected.  The Tea Party needs something to freak out about.  Turns out that its national educational standards.  God forbid we try and bring up the piss-poor education in Mississippi or Louisiana to national standards or even worse, share data across states to try and improve education.  We’ll simply ignore the fact that pretty much every country that outperforms us relies on national standards.

Local control of educational standards not only has a long history, its importance to learning is quite clear.  Factoring an equation, subject-verb agreement, and the years of the Revolutionary War quite obviously are different in North Carolina than North Dakota.  And standards should reflect that.  Or something.

From the Post:

Tea party groups over the past few weeks have suddenly and successfully pressured Republican governors to reassess their support for a rare bipartisan initiative backed by President Obama to overhaul the nation’s public schools.

Activists have donned matching T-shirts and packed buses bound for state legislative hearing rooms in Harrisburg, Pa., grilled Georgia education officials at a local Republican Party breakfast and deluged Michigan lawmakers with phone calls urging opposition to theCommon Core State Standards.

So, just what is this evil Common Core you ask?

The White House has promoted Common Core, written by governors and state education officials in both parties and largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to create consistent math and reading standards from kindergarten through 12th grade. Academic standards vary widely among states, and that patchwork nature has been partly blamed for mediocre rankings of U.S. students in international comparisons.

The standards do not dictate curriculum. Rather, states decide what to teach and how to prepare children for standardized tests based on Common Core.  [emphases mine]

F*&n Communists!  I mean really, the hubris of thinking their should be national standards on math and reading.  Reality?  I suspect that despite the fact that this has been truly bipartisan and embraced (until now) by plenty of Republicans (note that last emboldened paragraph above), the Tea Party whackjobs have realized that Obama is for it, so it can’t be good.  Not to mention, the Gates Foundation spends most of its money trying to cure the world’s poorest people of disease, so you know their values are suspect.

Now, I’m no expert on the Common Core (though, seems to be being implemented just fine with my 7th grader this year), but to argue against national standards for math and reading is ludicrous on its face.  If the Tea Party gears up, unfortunately, not many Republican politicians will have the guts to face them down.

On the bright side, big business is actually interested in having well-educated workforce, so there’s this:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable also are planning a public relations blitz to defend the standards.

Those are the real heavy-hitters of the Republican Party.  As a political scientist, it will be fascinating to see the Chamber of Commerce vs. the Tea Party.  And boy am I pulling for the Chamber for once.

Subjects → citizens → customers

One of the great revolutions of the American experiment was the idea that Americans were not subjects of a monarch, but rather citizens of a shared social contract– government by consent of the governed.  Alas, for many Republicans, it would seem the next step is for us to evolve from citizens to consumers.  In taking a look at the education voucher proposal here in North Carolina, NC PolicyWatch’s Rob Schofield has a great take on the insidious negative effects of viewing citizens not as such, but primarily as consumers:

Sadly, Jones’ position roughly summarizes a core belief of the state’s modern, Tea Partying right-wing: that citizens have a divine right to relate to their government as they relate to a big box store.

This is not an exaggeration or a parody. Governor McCrory has made this idea one of the centerpieces of his new administration with his repeated references to treating North Carolinians as “customers.”

In the modern conservative worldview, all human relationships are driven by the interactions of the marketplace. Many of these ideologues have genuinely come to believe that humans have been commanded by the Almighty to pursue their own self-interest in virtually all matters of economic and social interaction and that when they do, the “invisible hand” will somehow lead us all to the best possible (or, at least, the most just) societal result.

Hence the notion that North Carolina’s education ills can be cured by giving parents the kinds of “choices” afforded to “customers” and forcing schools to compete for their “business.” It’s really a quite remarkable and coldly Darwinian argument – especially coming as it does from a group that so frequently espouses a full-throated conservative Christianity…

And when citizens are treated like “customers” rather than owner/stakeholders, a subtle but important attitude shift is abetted. Rather than caring for their entire community as a whole, inhabitants are encouraged to worry about themselves, treat their neighbors as competitors and threats and confine their communal instincts to private charity.

Does this explain all of Milwaukee’s [they have a famous school voucher program of questionable efficacy] racial divides or economic blight? No, of course not; but it does shine an important window on the struggles of this once-thriving city. And, sadly, unless a change in course is effected soon, this attitude shift could soon come to afflict North Carolina on a mass scale as well.

This is why so many caring and thoughtful people are so desperately worried about the introduction of school vouchers in North Carolina. It’s not the immediate demise of public education they worry about; they know that public schools will cobble together a way to survive in the near term (just as they have muddled along through the budget cuts of recent years).

What worries these advocates and observers most is that vouchers will expedite the ongoing demise of citizenship and the social contract that once bound North Carolinians together in a united society. And sadly, judging by the attitudes and rhetoric of voucher supporters, this is a well-founded concern.

That’s ultimately a sharper point than I’d put on it (I don’t think civic virtue can be quite so easily eliminated), but I think Schofield is indeed right that viewing citizens primarily as consumers ultimately erodes a sense of community and social contract that is ultimately essential to a healthy democracy.

Quick hits

1) As mentioned before, American doctors are seriously overpaid.  Yglesias has a nice discussion of the supply and demand aspects.  Short version– open up more medical school slots (of course, doctors oppose it because it keeps their pay high) and allow more competition from Nurse Practitioners (who generally do just as good a job.

2) Intelligent people are better at blocking out visual background information (does that count for blocking out stuff my wife tells me that I should remember?)

3) Cockroaches have evolved to taste glucose as bitter as sweet since it is so commonly used to attract them to poison bait.  Bastards.  Research done at NC State!

4) When states actually work to implement Obamacare correctly, the competitive nature of the insurance exchanges can work quite well for driving down prices.  Or so the case of California suggests.  Now, will other states be smart enough to copy?  (Presumably not ones led by overly-ideological Republicans– is that a tautology?)

5) Nice essay in the WSJ about how our increasing understanding of how the brain works raises interesting and complicated questions in our criminal justice system.

6) 97% of scientific studies agree on human-caused global warming.  I’m sure it’s all just liberal bias.  Maybe the’re wrong. It’s possible (the aether!), but given current knowlege I’d much rather put my trust into the best of what scientists have to offer than what James Infofe or Exxon-Mobil think.

7) Loves this cool buzzfeed inforgraphic on how American life has changed from the 1960′s till today.  E.g.,

8) Are boys more competitive than girls because they play in groups  Maybe.  Found this really interesting:

“In observed lab studies of six- to eight-year-old boys, they spent 70 to 80 percent of their time playing in groups,” while girls spend less than 20 percent of their time in groups. Boys are so desperate to arrange themselves in groups that “when [researchers] put a pair of boys in a room and forced them to talk to each other, they ended up talking about what it would be like to have a group of boys there.” By contrast, “Girls in a group will look at each other and try to find a single friend.” This behavior extends all the way up to the boardroom.

9) Cato types hate the idea of a national ID card.  Funny, in this essay where they describe how horrible it is, it sounds like a good idea to me.  Perhaps because it strikes me that privacy is already pretty much an illusion (and I think many people are way too hung up on it).  If you pay taxes the government already knows who you are.  So there’s an ID card to go with it– big deal.

10) Even most conservative economists agree the Bush tax cuts didn’t really give us much economic benefit.  I’m sure this will have a major impact on how Republican politicians view tax policy.  :-).

Quick hits

A lot of interesting stuff I’ve been reading lately that I don’t have all that much to say about:

1) Grade inflation is just nuts.  Currently at my alma mater, Duke, fully a quarter of the students have a 3.7 or above GPA.  In my day– class of 1994– that figure was about 3.4 for the top 25%.

2) In theory, I love the idea of attending a Premier League game in England some day.  In practice, sounds kids of crazy.

3) Catholic school in Columbus, OH fires beloved PE teacher after finding out via her mother’s obituary that she has a same sex partner.  Damn this stuff drives me crazy.  Love this quote:

Perhaps six colleagues met Julie over the years, though they probably weren’t the only ones aware of Carla’s sexual orientation. “I’m sure it was surmised: gym teacher, divorced, short hair, didn’t have a bow in it,” Carla said. “Come on.”

4) All of our babies slept in bed with us at some point.  It’s just so much easier and I’m pretty sure we were as safe as could be about it.  I really enjoyed this discussion of the issue, especially the sad fact that pediatricians will not even discuss how to make co-sleeping safer because they are so dead-set against it.

5) Enjoyed this George Packer post on how technology has made our lives better, but there’s not much it can do about inequality.

6) Apparently parents read more to their daughters.  One theory is that its harder to read to boys because they’re more likely to be squirmy.  That one sounds good to me.  This author’s anecdotal N of 1 family (her own) shed no light on the topic at all, but was an interesting review of the issues.  In my family David loved to be read to and so does Sarah, who actually demands it on a regular basis.   I’d like to see more research to help figure out how much of this is about the parents vs. how much is innate differences in young  boys vs young girls.

Does your major matter?

Three’s been a fair amount of talk about a new report that concludes that only 27% of college graduates have jobs that are related to their major.  I think Yglesias‘ pushback is spot-on:

According to the paper, they’re measuring relatedness by using the National Center for Education Statistics’ Classification of Instructional Programs “occupational crosswalk” function. So I thought I would look up my own major, philosophy, and see what the federal government has to say about my career choices. They think that the only job I’m suited for is as a post-secondary teacher, teaching philosophy or religion classes at a college. In other words, I am one of the 73 percent.

But I would dispute the claim that my job has nothing to do with my college degree. My view is that undergraduate philosophy majors get a crash course in persuasive writing and logical argumentation. Any kind of liberal arts degree where you need to read a lot of texts and then learn to write persuasively based on said texts is a decent preparation for working in journalism. But philosophy is a particularly good one to study, because for better or for worse, journalists are typically asked to be generalists. As a philosophy major you read and discuss people who are not only great thinkers but people who managed to make meaningful intellectual contributions to the world without obtaining tons of new empirical information…

My larger point here is that it’s really important to pay attention to data quality. If existing labor markets do a poor job of matching college graduates to things the NCES CIP “occupational crosswalk” function says are major-appropriate jobs, is that a fact about the labor market or a fact about the statistical series?

Great point.  Be skeptical; check the data and the original study if the conclusions sounds suspect.  This comes up a lot in advising political science majors on what to do after graduation.  There’s a ton of jobs far away from politics that value strong writing ability and solid critical thinking ability.  Now, not all our students leave with that, but we certainly strive for it and I would argue are a generally very good training ground for those skills.  My former student that I had lunch with yesterday works at a bank on mortgage refinancing, but I guarantee the skills she learned as a PS major help her in that job, but she would clearly be in the 73%.  In the broader scope, I’ve been thinking for a long while now that your major is far more about the skills you learn than the specific body of knowledge that you master.   Any data/study that ignores that fact is inherently flawed.

Over-parenting

I would love to see a long term study about the relationships between college students and their parents and how that has been affected by changing technology.  I doubt it exists, though.  Based on my own observations, I’ve got a strong hypotheses that modern technology literally makes it too easy for young adults to be in constant contact with their parents and thereby hinders their personal maturity and independence.  It’s good to be close to your parents, but it really does seem crazy to me that 20-year olds are talking to their parents multiple times per day or texting with them all day long (then again, maybe I’ll feel differently when David is 20).

When I was at Duke 20+ years ago, times were such that most all of us still worried about the costs of long distance.  My mom and I were really close and had a great relationship, but I still only talked to her once a week unless something really big came up.  And my sense was that was pretty typical. And sure, N of 1 and anecdotal, but it certainly seemed to me that it did me some real and lasting good to not be so dependent upon my mom.  I can’t help but wonder if modern technologically-enabled relationships aren’t stunting the maturity of many a current college student.

Thus, I really enjoyed this NYT opinion piece on helicopter parenting:

AMERICAN parents are more involved in our children’s lives than ever: we schedule play dates, assist with homework and even choose college courses.

We know that all of this assistance has costs — depleted bank balances, constricted social lives — but we endure them happily, believing we are doing what is best for our children.

What if, however, the costs included harming our children?

That unsettling possibility is suggested by a paper published in February in the American Sociological Review. The study, led by the sociologist Laura T. Hamilton of the University of California, Merced, finds that the more money parents spend on their child’s college education, the worse grades the child earns.

A separate study, published the same month in the Journal of Child and Family Studies and led by the psychologist Holly H. Shiffrin at the University of Mary Washington, finds that the more parents are involved in schoolwork and selection of college majors — that is, the more helicopter parenting they do — the less satisfied college students feel with their lives.

Why would parents help produce these negative outcomes? It seems that certain forms of help can dilute recipients’ sense of accountability for their own success. The college student might think: If Mom and Dad are always around to solve my problems, why spend three straight nights in the library during finals rather than hanging out with my friends? …

So yes, by all means, parents, help your children. But don’t let your action replace their action. Support, don’t substitute. Your children will be more likely to achieve their goals — and, who knows, you might even find some time to get your own social life back on track.

I’ll be really curious to see just how much I can let David stand on his own when he goes to college.  And to be honest, both of us are already really scared he’s going to fall flat on his face.  So, I’m planning on much support, but I do plan on doing my damnedest to see that he (and then his siblings) really establishes his own sense of self and personal accountability when heading off to college (if not before!).