A Needed Shot In The Arm

I've not been happy teaching the last couple months--and yes, this school year started a couple days shy of two months ago in my district--but today I got a couple of kudos that helped make the day a little bit brighter.

A couple of days ago a former student came to me and told me that she referenced me in her college entrance essay, and asked if I'd like to read it.  That ball can bounce in any direction, there's no telling what she wrote, but I told her sure, please email it to me.  I received and read it this morning.

She wrote about how some traumatic event in middle school caused her to have tremendous, almost debilitating, anxiety.  She wrote about how she broke down crying the first week of school during both her freshman and sophomore years, not because of any test but just because of general anxiety.  But her sophomore year pre-calculus teacher "didn't believe in anxiety", and told her that if he were to give her a test on the alphabet she wouldn't be anxious at all because she knew the alphabet cold.  Her anxiety was caused by not being confident that she knew the material being tested.  The solution, then, was to know the material so well that there could be no fear of failure--and he was available to help her do that.  That teacher, she said, was the first person to tell her that her anxiety was conquerable, that it wasn't something she had to live with, surrender to, or accommodate.

You can imagine where the story goes from there, but there's more.  She grew to recognize that she could learn from mistakes and not just fear them.  And I believe she's sincere in that belief, not just writing it to get into a university.  I've seen a tremendous change in her confidence--and happiness--over the last couple years.  She's grown a lot.

The second minor anecdote requires some background knowledge.  When conducting hypothesis tests in statistics, one calculates what's known as a p-value.  If the p-value is small, if it's unlikely you'd get the results you did given some initial hypothesis, then you reject your initial (null) hypothesis.  The null hypothesis is abbreviated H-sub-0, or H-naught.  When you see it written, it looks like "Ho".

The first year I taught statistics, a former student of mine--who has since become a math teacher!--told me a pithy rhyme that his stats professor in college used to help students remember how the p-value and null hypothesis interact.

I received a text message from another former student today:

Thank god i was in your class because my business stats professor just used a complicated way to explain "if p is low, reject the ho".

Sometimes they listen.  Sometimes they remember.  Sometimes they learn.

Racist Hatemongers

If you think it's ok to steal someone's property, and to threaten their physical safety, because that person has a different political ideology than you do--then you must be a leftist:

UC Riverside student Matthew Vitale, who had his Make America Great Again hat taken from him by a fellow student, has decided to press criminal theft charges against her, he told The College Fix in an interview Monday.

Meanwhile, peers of the young Latina woman who swiped the hat, Edith Macias, have rallied to her defense, demanding the university protect her from any charges and even pay her rent in a “solidarity” document released Oct. 1.

At issue is an incident last week in which Macias took the bright red MAGA hat right off Vitale’s head during a campus event, an incident that was recorded.

That video was posted on Facebook by Macias, who states in her post: “‘Make America Great Again’ coded ‘Continue the Genocide of POC’. You feel safe cuz you got the cops and politicians on your side. Youre not safe… just saying. We need to make racists scared.”

If you think it's OK to defend someone who does those things, and to defend such actions in the name of racial solidarity, then you must be a leftist--and a racist. 

It must take a lot of energy to harbor that much hatred against people.  Young Edith, I hope you learn a lesson in civility as well as what kind of behavior is acceptable in a diverse society--otherwise, your life will be miserable indeed. 

The Role of Education in Social Mobility

It might not be as important as we currently think:

Geography plays a big role in whether a child born to low-income parents will rise to the top of the economic ladder, concluded a 2014 study led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty.

The economists found that “a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte,” writes Cohen. “They concluded that five correlated factors — segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital — were likely to make a difference.”

In a new working paper, Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein found that school quality makes less of a difference than local labor markets (clear career pathways, union jobs, higher wages) and marriage patterns (concentrations of married or single-parent households).

“We can’t educate people out of this problem,” Rothstein concludes.

Tom Petty

Tom Petty's is the first "famous person" death since Ronald Reagan's that's truly affected me.  And yes, that includes Leonard Nimoy's death.

I was a big Tom Petty fan in high school.  In fact, his was the first concert I ever went to, in September of 1981 at Cal Expo.  They threw a tarp over the race track and called it "festival seating".  It got to around 100 degrees that day, and since no one had yet thought to sell plastic bottles of stuff that fell for free from the sky, we just stood outside the race track all day and dehydrated.  It was pretty bad.

When Petty finally came on, he opened with American Girl.  He dedicated his song The Waiting to those of us in Sacramento since we'd waited in the burning sun all day.  Surprise (not really, but that's how they billed it) special guest Stevie Nicks came out and did two songs with Petty, Insider from his recent album and Stop Draggin My Heart Around from her recent album.  I was enthralled.  I took my mother's 110 camera (remember those tiny pictures?!) to the concert, no telephoto lens, here's the postage-stamp-sized section of one picture I got of Tom and Stevie:

I have all of Petty's albums from the 1976 debut self-titled album up through 1987's Let Me Up (I've Had Enough).  I was given a couple of his later albums but by then his style had changed enough that I didn't listen near as much as I used to.  There were some good songs, but they were more like Dylan than the Petty I remembered.  (BTW, I loved The Traveling Wilburys, which included Dylan and Petty.)  I very much enjoyed when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was the Super Bowl halftime show a few years ago.


In honor of his passing, I'm going to list those first seven albums as well as one of my favorite songs from each of them.  Since not all of these songs are available on Tom Petty's VEVO page on YouTube, I'll just list the songs here and let you find a current link on YouTube (if I provided a link, there's no guarantee that link would still work a month from now).  I hope you enjoy the music.

1976's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers self-titled album:  American Girl
1978's You're Gonna Get It!:  I Need To Know
1979's Damn The Torpedoes:  Here Comes My Girl
1981's Hard Promises:  The Waiting
1982's Long After Dark:  Change of Heart
1985's Southern Accents:  Dogs on the Run
1987's Let Me Up (I've Had Enough):  Jammin' Me

There are a few great songs on 1989's Full Moon Fever, but my favorite on that one was I Won't Back Down.

Petty's music brought me a lot of joy in life, and did so over several decades.  I'm sorry to see him go.

The Impetus Behind Common Core--One Man's View

Jim Milgram, the Stanford professor who was the primary author of California's 1997 math standards, sent the following email to a list of which I am a member, and gave me permission to quote it here with attribution:

I wish you were right, but here in California, Ze'ev Wurman's work shows that the 12 years of reasonable standards and state enforcement actually did reduce the achievement gap and in the right way. Scores for "minority" groups went up significantly, while scores for others were roughly unchanged.

As you know, I was on the Common Core Validation Committee, so I had a first row seat to what was happening. You should have seen the sudden increase among the math educators involved -- when Ze'ev's results first appeared -- in their desire to get rid of the CA standards.

I had a long argument with the most well known among them. I focused on explaining our results in eighth grade algebra which had shown a very high percentage of those minority kids passing the course and scoring pretty well on the state exam.

The more they understood what was going on, the more determined they became. I recall that when I mentioned that fully 2/3 of the CA students were taking eighth grade algebra, one of them said that's horrible, and the others agreed. That's when I realized I wasn't speaking the same language they were, I had to get out, and I finally felt I had to report to Governor Schwarzenegger's office that CA should not get involved with Common Core. Unfortunately, the Race to the Top money had already been announced, and CA was desperate for funds. So it was too late. He tried to keep eighth grade algebra, but it only took Jerry Brown and Mike Kirst one or two years to get rid of it.

Jim

He has had more direct experience in this than I have, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity.

Joanne Is On A Roll Today

Two consecutive posts today are right on:
50 is the new 0

Is 50 is the new 0?, writes Kate Stoltzfus on Education Week Teacher. Schools in Maryland and Virginia are implementing “no zero” policies to make it harder for students to fail, reports the Washington Post. Often, the minimum grade is 50...

Making 50 the minimum grade lowers the drop-out rate  and keeps struggling students from giving up, argue advocates. Students are evaluated on learning, rather than behavior.

However, some teachers hate the idea. Say “no” to no-zero grading, argued teacher Gina Caneva in Catalyst Chicago.

When her high school made 50 the minimum grade, attendance at tutoring sessions plummeted. The F students had become D students. “Since few students were truly failing, hardly anyone thought they needed to work hard to improve,” wrote Caneva. The school’s rating rose because more students were on track for graduation, but students’ test scores remained low.

Yep.

When homework goes wrong

When homework goes wrong, parents should remember three rules, writes K.J. Dell’Antonia in Medium.

1. It’s not yours.

2. What kids learn from homework is rarely on the worksheet.

3. You don’t want to make tonight’s homework better. You want to make ALL the homework better.

If it seems like an unreasonable assignment, consider the possibility “that the reading assignment was given last week, not last night, or that the project was discussed in the first week of class,” writes Dell’Antonia. Or your kid got it wrong.

Double yep. 

Sociopaths

There are many types of sociopaths in the world.  Some of them we recognize right away, and others we just shake our heads at; it's only later, when we've thought about it for awhile, that we recognize that there's more than a little that's "not quite right" with some people, that they're actually sick in the head.

The first type of sociopath is the shooter in Las Vegas.  I don't care what his reason was, he was a sociopath.  The second type of sociopath is demonstrated by these people:

CBS has parted ways with one of the company’s top lawyers after she said she was “not even sympathetic” to victims of the Las Vegas shooting because “country music fans often are Republican,” when discussing the mass shooting that unfolded in Las Vegas late Sunday night.   link

I'm impressed CBS fired her.  Then again, who would want someone that unstable working for them?


How about this one--from a teacher, no less?  Giving that Felarca woman a run for the crazy title, and making all of us look bad in the process:

Lots of white trump supporters in Las Vegas at route 21 watching Jason aldean.  Pray only trumptards dies! link

One of the signs of sociopathy is a lack of empathy for other people.  The people above possess that warning sign.

This next fellow isn't a sociopath, just a dimwit:

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said Monday that he won’t participate in a moment of silence on the House floor for victims of Sunday night's deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas.

“As after #Orlando, I will NOT be joining my colleagues in a moment of silence on the House Floor that just becomes an excuse for inaction,” Moulton tweeted Monday. link

His idea of action is gun control.  Incidentally, I wonder if he approves of the "excuse for inaction" currently in vogue in the NFL.  Just sayin'.

Update:  From Sarah Hoyt:

[T]he carrion crows viewing this as a chance to advance their agenda, should get down on their knees and beg whatever God they believe in to forgive them and turn them into real humans, with real human feelings.

And that’s not counting the people saying it’s okay because those people were likely Trump Voters. Those people have willfully cut themselves from the human race and made themselves a species of hyena far more repulsive than real hyenas — who are after all only animals who can’t help their behavior.

A Little Media Bias With My Mid-morning Tea

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

I know why some conservative speakers, white supremacists and the president’s supporters flock to Berkeley, and it has nothing to do with free speech. What they want to do is normalize hate and spread it on college campuses. 

This is not an op-ed, this was written by one of the paper's columnists.  If you don't believe that's media bias, then we have no common ground on which to have a constructive conversation.

You want more?  Here's more:

But Taylor, who identifies as a communist revolutionary and has some radical views and ideas that I don’t support, such as revolution that completely disrupts government, certainly isn’t wrong about what Berkeley represents: a battleground for political messaging.

And I believe she’s here for the right reasons.

I give this columnist credit for being honest with his illiberal, intolerant bias.

You know why "white supremacists" are the new bugaboo of the left?  Because no one listens to accusations of "racist" anymore, because in true Peter and the Wolf fashion, they've cried "racist!" so many times that no one believes them anymore.  What's the next epithet they'll hurl, once they figure out that "white supremacist!" doesn't work anymore?

Water Troubles

Earlier this week, the problem was with my waterbed.  Even after draining the mattress, the fibrous "lumbar support" retains enough water such that maneuvering the mattress around (to get the heater out) was no easy task.  I was sore by the time I got that repair done.

And then yesterday my sink stopped draining.  Rather abruptly.  What could it be?  I'm the only one here, and it's not like lots of hair is going down my drain (see here for evidence).  I removed the trap--nothing in there.  I looked down the drain--nothing in there.  Dang, the stoppage is in the pipe in the wall.  That required a few hours' work today as well as two trips to Home Depot.  A snake got the stoppage--goop of some kind--cleaned out, and I replaced all the plumbing from the sink to the wall.  Sore from crawling under the sink so much.

Then I started work on the toilet.  Sometimes you have to jiggle the handle before the flapper settles; should be an easy fix, right?  Wrong.  I have some unique system in there, one that doesn't even use a "universal" flapper valve.  I figured out quickly why the thing sticks and needs to be jiggled, but fixing that dislodged what appears to be a jerry-rigged fix to keep the toilet from running.  Ugh!  To fix this, it looks like I'd have to--wait for it--remove the tank.  I'm gonna try to restore the jerry-rigged fix.  If that doesn't work, I might have to remove the tank to replace all the guts inside.

I'm tired of all these repairs!  I guess that's part of the cost of living in a house that's older than I am.

A Problem From the 70's Rears Its Ugly Head

What was the biggest problem of the 70's?

Angel's Flight pants?  The American Embassy in Tehran?  Fondue?  Polyester plaid?  The AMC Pacer?  The Tenerife crash?  Terrorism in Europe and Central America?  Three Mile Island? 

None of these.  I'm living the problem.  My waterbed heater has gone out.

I've had a waterbed since 8th grade.  Obviously I didn't get to sleep in it at West Point, and for about 11 years I had a standard mattress in the frame.  But just over a year and a half ago I went back to the waterbed, and life was good.  I couldn't believe how after the first morning, I woke up and didn't feel any aches?

But I was penny wise and pound foolish.  I bought a new mattress but not a new heater.  How could a waterbed heater go out, I thought?  It had lasted for so long, how could it not last forever?  But it didn't.

So last night I had to drain the bed--not the easiest task, especially when you're doing this solo. And I had to sleep in the guest room!  After work today I was able to remove the old heater pad from under the almost empty mattress and replace it with the new heater.  Then I maneuvered the kinda-empty-but-still-very-heavy mattress into place and started refilling it.  That's not as easy as you might think, especially when I had to go outside to shut off the water, come back inside, make some adjustments, go outside to start the water again, etc. 

After a significant amount of time, and a significant amount of sweat (it's quite warm out today), I got the bed filled.  It should be adequately heated by tomorrow night.

And then I'll be able to enjoy a good night's rest again.

Another Black Mark Against My Alma Mater

On my first day at West Point, over 1400 of us New Cadets were brought into the Eisenhower Hall auditorium.  The only thing I remember from that speech was, “Look to your left.  Look to your right.  One of the three of you won’t be here 4 years from now.”  An attrition rate of 1/3 was expected.  Almost 4 years later, just over 1000 of us graduated.  Graduating over 70%, we beat the estimate.  Our 47 months at West Point was considered to be a winnowing process.  Sure, a couple bad eggs made it through, but overall, it was a good idea.

Some time between then and now, though, what some of us call “Harvard Syndrome” took over at West Point.  Rather than weeding out those who shouldn’t be officers, the view became “if they’re good enough to get into West Point, they’re good enough to graduate.”  Standards dropped.  Honor violations no longer necessarily merited expulsion, they merited “discretion” and another chance.  In so many cases, cadets got another chance.  And another.  Cadets weren’t kicked out, they were “helped” or “rehabilitated”.  The justification for such changes ranged from money (it costs so much to train cadets, only to boot them after a year or more) to moral (everyone deserves a second chance) to racial (you can imagine).

In such an environment, this is the kind of person who’s allowed to graduate.
http://amp.dailycaller.com/2017/09/27/communist-west-point-graduate-called-mattis-an-evil-vile-f/

What a disgrace.

"Showing Vulnerability" After A Disaster

About an hour ago I got home from a meeting with other mentor teachers of student teachers from UC Davis.  I'm teaming up with another teacher at my school to mentor a UC Davis student; the other's teacher's two classes are the "primary placement", while my one class is the "secondary placement".  "Secondary placement" means that my student teacher will not take over actually teaching my one class until next semester, but will observe and assist until then.

The class in question is the class I've been writing about on this blog, most recently here.  We gave a test in there on Monday.  The results were disastrous.  Of the students present to take the test, a full 25% of them failed.  More than a couple had scores in the 30s and 40s--yes, percent.  Yes, there were several high grades as well, but that doesn't make those F's disappear.

At this meeting of mentor teachers this evening, the supervising teachers from UC Davis stated that a recent study of "what makes a good mentor teacher" showed that while good and bad teachers shared many commonalities, one difference stuck out:  good teachers showed "vulnerability" to their student teachers.  They, for lack of a better way to put it, let student teachers see the mentor teacher struggle and even fail, and didn't try to cover this up.  This shows the student teacher that things don't always go swimmingly, and that a "growth mindset" applies to teachers as well as to students.  A failed lesson isn't the end of the world.

I think those test results above qualify as "struggling" and "failing" to teach my students as well as I should have.

Because of a quirk in scheduling peculiar to my school, I have a 2-hr prep period tomorrow.  From 8 to 9 am, my student teacher and I are going to meet.  Since she's been observing my teaching, I'm going to solicit her thoughts on my instruction.  I'm going to listen to her observations of the class, and see if she has any suggestions for things we might work together on to improve student performance.  She'll be teaching the class herself in a few months, I'm sure she'll want them appropriately prepared, so it's in both our best interests to have a frank discussion about what we can do to provide better instruction.

I'm thinking that this constitutes "showing vulnerability".

Update, 9/27/17:  We had a good, productive discussion today.  We'll try a couple different things, most notably avoiding the textbook (awful) and me lecturing.  When practicing problems, we'll utilize the old stand-by of "I do, we do, you do"--which I always try to do, but time constraints in this course are bad, so I don't always get to.  Now I have to be more explicit in my personal expectations.

There are a couple other things we'll try as well.

Also, this class is full of students who haven't really had to work at math before.  It was easy, so they didn't develop study habits for math class.  Been there, done that!  I recognized that in the faces of some of my students today, and was able to address it with them.  Those things they've never had to do before--coming in before and after school, actually studying for tests and quizzes--they have to do them now, and they're not used to it.

If It's Raining On Tuesday...

...the "nn" combination makes the "fz" sound:

I'm starting to practice a little Icelandic so I can be a better visitor in February, one that doesn't automatically assume that everyone speaks English (even though everyone there does).  Like some more difficult languages (*cough* English! *cough*), Icelandic has many seemingly strange pronunciation rules--such as the one above.

By February I should be fine.  For right now, though, I sometimes exclaim in exasperation, "How can anyone remember all this crap?!  What kind of crazy language is this?!"  I'm sure no one ever says such things when learning English.

Makes You Wonder What She Was Thinking

From Fox News:

A veteran Vermont teacher was axed after she was caught instructing a class of third graders on how to give the Nazi salute.

The substitute teacher had the children perform the stiff-arm gesture as they were walking to the cafeteria Thursday at Georgia Elementary School, accoriding (sic) to a report.

"The children were standing with their arm out in front of them and the teacher was modeling the position," District Superintendent Ned Kirsch told parents, according to the Vermont publication Seven Days. "She then raised her arm slightly and said, 'And now we say, Heil Hitler.'"

I Give Them Credit For Being Honest

Now if they'll just ask people to stop throwing around that bogus 77-cents-on-a-dollar statistic:

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) has finally admitted that the “gender pay gap” is caused by women’s choices.

In a recent article on the gender pay gap, AAUW Senior Researcher Kevin Miller concedes that the pay disparity between women and men isn’t caused primarily by discrimination, but rather by the personal and professional choices that women make.

These choices include the tendency of women to work fewer hours to focus on “domestic work” and accept “reduced job tenure resulting from breaks in labor-force participation to raise children.”

Miller even notes that women tend to choose lower-paying jobs than do men, pointing out that dangerous jobs such as “construction, manufacturing, and transport” are predominantly done by men, while “most workers in health care and education occupations are women"...

Citing data from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, though, he also confirms that not only are women more likely to work part-time, but also that “among full-time workers, men work longer hours on average than do women"...

The AAUW, which celebrates seven different equal pay days, has campaigned relentlessly over the past few years to argue that the gender pay gap is due to discrimination, but this appears to be the first article in which the organization takes a more nuanced approach to the issue...

“The gender pay gap is an estimate of the actual gap in pay between men and women, not an estimate of the effect of discrimination,” he explains....    link

Why I Support School Choice

This author likes school choice because it helps black kids, I like it because it helps all kids:

Here’s what I need to say to them, to the people of this nation, to people of color — I am involved in the school choice movement because the future of my life and your life depends upon it. Starting the state’s first charter school was one of the most significant accomplishments of my life. Because of our willingness to look beyond traditional divisions and leave beyond our tendency to only work with those with whom we are comfortable, our children of color are closing the achievement gap. African-American students in charter schools are scoring 4% higher on reading tests than those in traditional public schools and Florida charter school students are more likely to attend college. Hispanic students do 12% better than their peers at traditional public schools. These are but two of the many indicators that point to increased success for students of color because their families were empowered to find schools that better met the needs of their children.

Far too many people and organizations, like the NAACP, refuse to acknowledge this. Their recent recommendations to curb charter schools, reduce their numbers and their independence, are wrong, and they expect falsely that all people of color should follow their lead because the color of your skin should dictate who you believe. I have worked a lifetime to change this misperception, to help people see that good policies for our kids do not have a color. 

The author is the president of the Urban League of Greater Miami.

Sticking With It

All that weight I lost in 2010--I've gained it all back, with interest.

I'm going to lose it again.  Just has to be done.

I'm grossly out of shape.  I had no cardiovascular fitness at all last month.  So I set a goal for myself--each morning before work I'm going to get on my elliptical trainer and run.  That first week of school I did 12 min each morning.  I increased it 1 minute each week, so that this week I'm up to 18 min each morning.  I notice that already I'm not only "running" farther than I did when I started, but faster as well.  My goal is to get up to 20 min each morning, and from then on just work on speed and stamina.

I haven't missed a work morning yet!

And Here In The 21st Century People's Paradise...

...our governor pushes a 19th Century mode of transportation.  Not all of us support this:

California's high speed rail line was sold to voters on the bold promise that it will someday whisk passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in under three hours. Nine years later, the project has turned into such a disaster that its biggest political champion is now suing to stop it.

An icon of California politics known as the "Great Dissenter," Quentin L. Kopp introduced the legislation that established the rail line, and became chairman of the High-Speed Rail Authority. He helped convince voters in 2008 to hand over $9 billion in bonds to the Rail Authority to get the project going. Since he left, Kopp says the agency mangled his plans.

"It is foolish, and it is almost a crime to sell bonds and encumber the taxpayers of California at a time when this is no longer high-speed rail," says Kopp. "And the litigation, which is pending, will result, I am confident, in the termination of the High-Speed Rail Authority's deceiving plan."

As Instapundit often opines, there are too many opportunities for graft here for this train to go away.

Starting School Later

Don't get me wrong--when I'm elected World Dictator, high school will go from 10am-5pm.  If, and it's a big if, there's still school sports, practices will be held before school.  Competitions will be held on the weekends. 

But that's just me.

I don't understand this push to start schools later.  I'm told that studies show that a later start time is better for teenagers, but I have questions that remain unanswered:

1)  Kids on farms get up early.
2)  Kids throughout history have gotten up early. 
3)  Do kids in other countries have this "late start time" issue, or is this strictly a US phenomenon?
4)  Has the problem gotten significantly worse in the age of handheld electronics?  In other words, is this partly a self-inflicted problem?

Is the problem such a major issue that it requires the intervention of the state legislature?

California lawmakers have rejected a bill to delay school start times, but the measure will likely resurface in January.

Here's an argument for local control:

The California School Boards Association, the leading opponent of the bill, argues that local school boards should be in control of start times and that a one-size-fits-all approach will not work for all 3,000 secondary schools in the state. The association says the bill will increase the need for supervision before school, create hardships for working families and wreak havoc on schools that purposely stagger start times to meet student demand for bus transportation. Rural districts could apply for a waiver to postpone implementation. 

Sacramento knows best.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article173547526.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article173547526.html#storylink=cpy

Who's Number One?

Is it Berkeley?

Sacramento-area residents looking for a top public university to attend don’t have to go far, according to a national report.

University of California, Davis, ranks 12th on U.S. News & World Report’s recent survey of top public schools. It’s tied with University of Wisconsin-Madison on a list of 132 schools.

The top 10 public schools list includes five other UC campuses, including Berkeley at No. 1. 

Or is it West Point?

United States Military Academy is ranked #12 in National Liberal Arts Colleges. Schools are ranked according to their performance across a set of widely accepted indicators of excellence.

#12 (tie) in National Liberal Arts Colleges

#2 (tie) in High School Counselor Rankings

#1 in Top Public Schools

Inquiring minds want to know.