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30 November, 2022
Idaho murders: Law enforcement should not dismiss 'incel' angle, experts say
More than two weeks after four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in their off-campus residence, police still have not identified a suspect or located a murder weapon.
Forensic psychologist Kris Mohandie said that the brutal nature of the murders, combined with the appearance of the victims as popular students on campus, leads him to believe that law enforcement should take a close look at the suspect potentially being an "incel."
Incel, which is short for involuntary celibate, refers to a misogynistic subculture of romantically frustrated men who frequently share their anger online about not being able to find a partner.
"There's a lot of hatred and anger that is evidenced in these crimes – the level of violence, the resolve, the obvious hostility in such a personal hands-on attack," Mohandie told Fox News Digital. "That is a lot of intensity. So it is not inconsistent with somebody that may have that kind of motivation. There's something hateful and rage filled about it."
Authorities believe the attack was "targeted," but they have not identified who was targeted or why they believe that to be the case. Additionally, Goncalves made statements before the murders that she "may have had a stalker," but authorities have not been able to corroborate those claims.
"These are kids, adult kids, living their life, experiencing happiness, being spontaneous and carefree. And that's going to stimulate somebody that either felt entitled to have had a relationship with one or more of them," Mohandie said.
"For individuals that feel on the outside looking in… that's going to create envy and hate."
Sarah Daly, a criminology researcher at Saint Vincent College who has studied the subculture of involuntary celibates, noted that it would be premature to say the killer in this case comes from the incel community, but the circumstances of the murders could potentially provide clues.
"I can certainly see how people might suspect an ‘incel killer’ in this case, particularly because the four victims are young and attractive, thus fitting the ‘Chad’ and ‘Stacy’ reference that incels often use on their forums," Daly told Fox News Digital.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/idaho-murders-law-enforcement-should-not-dismiss-incel-angle-experts-say
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Santa Comes Early with CUNY Exec Raises as Enrollment Drops
Two top City University of New York administrators each received $90,000 raises this year – as enrollment dropped.
Hector Batista, the public university system’s chief operating officer, saw his salary climb 27 percent from $330,000 to $420,000, and Derek Davis, the senior vice counsel and general counsel, saw a 30 percent gain from $300,000 to $390,000, according to The New York Post.
Batista also gets a car — driven by university police officers.
Two other executives, vice chancellors Doriane Gloria and Maria Junco Galletti, collected 15 percent pay raises. All the raises were retroactive to Dec. 31, 2021, approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees, The Post reported.
The hefty pay increases come as the university system saw a 10 percent drop in enrollments, from 271,000 in 2019 to 243,000 in 2021.
A CUNY spokesman told The Post that the school’s executive compensation plan needs to insure that “senior staff’s earnings are on par with other public higher education institutions locally and nationally.”
The spokesman acknowledged the raises come as enrollment has dropped.
"We are in a challenging job market and CUNY recognizes that it must remain competitive in order to recruit and retain talented leaders particularly as we work to boost pandemic-related enrollment drops and get New Yorkers the help they need to return to college."
Not everyone is happy with the raises. Adjunct professors, who teach many of CUNY’s classes, have made no secret that they are underpaid.
Penny Lewis, secretary of the faculty union, told The Post, “If the CUNY Board of Trustees believes management deserves raises this big, then surely our underpaid full-time faculty and staff, and our adjunct faculty who often struggle to afford even basic living expenses in NYC, deserve a substantial raise in the next contract.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul increased CUNY’s budget by $1.2 billion for FY 2023, to hire more full-time faculty, improve academic programs and services, cover capital projects, pay for operating costs, expand childcare services on campuses, and includes $110 million to increase fringe benefits for staff.
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/11/29/santa_comes_early_with_cuny_exec_raises_as_enrollment_drops_866818.html
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Baltimore Schools Head Collects $444,775 While Student Test Scores Suffer
While students in Baltimore’s public schools are suffering with some of the lowest test scores in the country, the head of the school district collected $444,775 in pay and other compensation during her contract year that ended on June 30, 2022.
Dr. Sonja Santelises, the school district’s CEO, earned a base salary of $333,125, the highest in the state among 24 public school districts, Fox45’s Project Baltimore, Chris Papst reported.
But she also received added compensation, including a $9,600 car allowance and $53,300 in “deferred compensation” toward retirement.
She also gets 59 paid days off a year — 38 vacation days, 18 sick days and three personal days. The almost 12 weeks of taxpayer-funded paid time off doesn’t include the 13 paid holidays throughout the year.
If Santelises doesn’t take her 12 weeks off, her contract allows her to be paid for most of the unused time.
During her last contract year, she was paid in cash $48,750 in unused paid leave. When that’s added to the rest of her compensation, Santelises collected a total of $444,775.
“It’s milking taxpayers like dairy cows,” OpenTheBooks.com CEO and founder Adam Andrzejewski told Project Baltimore. “We put a premium on those leaders, locally, that say they're going to educate our children. And so, we need to hold, at the end of the day, we need to hold them accountable.”
While her contract says she will be held accountable — the school board will evaluate the CEO, in part, on how she “demonstrated improvement in the academic performance of students in the City Schools” — graduation rates, attendance and college enrollment are lower than when the Santelises began overseeing the schools in 2016.
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/11/28/baltimore_schools_head_collects_444775_while_student_test_scores_suffer_866817.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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28 November, 2022
Majority of top medical schools pushing critical race theory, new report finds: 'A false diagnosis'
A new report found that critical race theory instruction has infiltrated 58 of America's top 100 medical schools, with some teaching materials from inflammatory authors who have been accused of pushing open discrimination.
"It's a great concern because what's going on here is the false diagnosis of a problem. The problem is that Black patients tend to do worse than White patients in a number of medical conditions," Do No Harm Chairman and former University of Pennsylvania associate dean Dr. Stanley Goldfarb said Tuesday on "Fox & Friends First."
"The diagnosis that's been made is that there's racism in health care that's producing this disparate outcome. The difficulty is, there's no evidence to prove that's true…"
MSNBC, CNN, ABC and more repeatedly pushed critical race theory ideology on TV while denying it exists Video
Goldfarb told Carley Shimkus he believes far more than 58 of the schools and perhaps all the top 100 medical schools have implemented ideas from the theory in their curricula.
"The AAMC [American Association of Medical Colleges], which is the governing body of medical education just put out an inventory that suggested that the vast majority of schools are engaging in this kind of activity," he said.
CriticalRace.org found that many of the institutions included in the study contained mandatory instruction on materials from Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, two authors whose material has come under scrutiny for allegedly divisive rhetoric.
Goldfarb, sounding off on Kendi's material in the curriculum, pointed to his argument for "present discrimination to remedy past discrimination and future discrimination to remedy present discrimination" and slammed its inclusion as a "terrible development."
CriticalRace.org's study also uncovered that some institutions mandate faculty and staff training rooted in critical race theory.
"[This curriculum] represents virtue signaling. It represents an attempt to go along with the current trends, but it doesn't represent an effort that's going to yield better outcomes for Black patients," Goldfarb said.
Goldfarb said the true problem behind poorer outcomes for Black patients could be resolved by improving "health literacy and education" to ensure patients understand the signs and symptoms of dangerous medical conditions before their issues progress.
"Better access and better health literacy would go a long way to solving the problem," he said.
"We have an invasion of critical race theory and all that it implies… I've been told that I should be canceled now and that I shouldn't be speaking about all these issues, and I've been left off an online textbook that I was an editor-in-chief of simply because of these ideas…
"They refuse to discuss this issue," he added.
Controversy surrounding critical race theory in colleges across the U.S. has erupted in recent years as institutions continue to push values of diversity and inclusion.
Dr. Nicole Saphier reveals how ‘woke’ medical school guidelines lower the bar for admissions Video
A report Fox News Digital recently obtained from Goldfarb's organization Do No Harm singled out the University of Florida's College of Medicine for implementing an allegedly "destructive" diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiative rooted in critical race theory.
The push to ensure tomorrow's medical field is rife with "antiracists" focuses on "active recruitment" of underrepresented groups and curriculum focused on diversity, equity and recognizing implicit bias.
The medical school stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and features "Guidelines for Being a Strong White Ally."
https://www.foxnews.com/media/majority-top-medical-schools-pushing-critical-race-theory-report-finds-false-diagnosis
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Court rejects San Diego school district's COVID vaccine mandate
The California 4th District Court of Appeal ruled against the San Diego Unified School District’s COVID-19 student vaccine requirement this week.
On Tuesday, the appellate court agreed with a lower court's ruling from last year that the school district does not have the authority to establish its own mandate.
The court rejected the district's several defenses of its mandate, including that it is in line with the responsibility to keep students safe, that programs can be created to meet "local needs" and that the mandate is not actually a mandate because it allows for students to do at-home independent study should they choose not to comply.
"We doubt that students and their parents perceive a real choice. For some, independent study would likely be a step backwards," it wrote.
San Diego Unified is examining the appeals court ruling and "will consider its next steps," district spokesperson Mike Murad said in an email to the Los Angeles Times.
In May, the district decided to stay the mandate — which would have immediately required students ages 16 and up to get the shots in order to attend school in person and participate in extracurricular activities — until at least July 2023.
San Diego Unified School District signage is seen on a Navistar International Corp. school bus in San Diego, California, on July 9, 2020.
San Diego Unified School District signage is seen on a Navistar International Corp. school bus in San Diego, California, on July 9, 2020. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
There were exemptions allowed for medical reasons, but not based on personal beliefs.
The mandate faced a legal challenge from the parent group "Let Them Choose," whiled filed a lawsuit in October 2021.
Protesters demonstrate outside the San Diego Unified School District office in San Diego, California, on Sept. 28, 2021.
Protesters demonstrate outside the San Diego Unified School District office in San Diego, California, on Sept. 28, 2021. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
The group argued that the decision to mandate vaccines must be made at the state level and also needs to include a "personal belief exemption" — unless the state legislature acted to eliminate the exemption.
The district first adopted its vaccine mandate for students in September 2021.
It is one of several large school districts in California to announce such a mandate. Those with similar mandates include the Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento and West Contra Costa Unified school districts.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/judge-rules-against-san-diego-school-districts-covid-vaccine-mandate-again
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American colleges join global protests against China's anti-COVID lockdown
Anti-lockdown protests have spread to multiple American universities, part of a growing global movement in support of protesters in China demonstrating against their country's "zero-COVID" policy.
Students from Columbia, Duke, North Carolina and the University of California Berkeley gathered for demonstrations in support of Chinese protesters in recent days, according to a report from France 24, expressing solidarity with a population that has seen its frustrations boil over amid over two years of strict COVID-19 prevention measures.
Chants of "Free China!" and "Xi Jinping, step down!" were heard at California Berkeley protests, with one protester holding a sign with a drawing of Chinese President Xi Jinping that read "Death to the dictator."
The scenes at American college campus come as Chinese authorities have launched a massive law enforcement response to protests that started last week and continued to intensify throughout the weekend across China, largely at least temporarily restoring order in the major cities of Beijing and Shanghai on Tuesday.
The protests originated after an apartment complex fire in the far-west region of the country resulted in the deaths of 10 people, an event that has been blamed on a delayed response by the local fire department amid continued lockdown policies.
Protesters took to the streets across the country to demand pandemic restrictions be eased, while others even called for the resignation of the country's top leaders.
The protests cap a tumultuous couple of months for the Chinese Communist regime, which has generated increased scrutiny over its mass internment of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang and continued threats toward neighboring Taiwan.
A protest organizer from China at Columbia, who only identified himself as Shawn, said he preferred to keep the school's demonstration focused on COVID policy and not other controversies.
"We know that may alienate a lot of people," the protester told Reuters.
However, the spread of campus protests is part of a larger movement across the globe, with some demonstrators in Washington,D.C., marching on the State Department and taking direct aim at the Chinese government's treatment of the country's Uyghur population.
"We want them to issue a formal statement condemning the loss of lives, Uyghur lives, and to call for full transparency on the real number of deaths that occurred," Salih Hudayar, one of 25 members of the city's Uyghur community who took part in the demonstration, said, according to France 24.
"We're hoping that the international community supports these protesters in demanding accountability from the Chinese government," she added.
Elsewhere in Washington, roughly 100 people gathered to demand greater freedoms for the Chinese people.
"(Officials) are borrowing the pretext of COVID, but using excessively strict lockdowns to control China's population. They disregarded human lives," said a Chinese student identified only as Chen. "I came here to grieve."
https://www.foxnews.com/world/american-colleges-join-global-protests-against-chinas-anti-covid-lockdown
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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27 November, 2022
Collegiate Alumni Donations: What Are We Giving To?
Adam Novak
I read a news report about a group of woke Yale students who burst into a panel discussion on civil liberties hosted by the Federalist Society on campus back in March and tried to shout down and intimidate the speakers—who had to be escorted out by the police.
This kind of activity on campus has become so commonplace it barely makes the news anymore. But it struck me, as a former fundraiser for universities, how this behavior—the result of the leftist ideology being taught on campus—is actually being funded largely by well-meaning alumni who donate to their alma maters in the hope that young people will receive the same solid education and values that they did.
What they don’t realize is that the colleges they give to are not the places they once were.
Now, I’m proud of the gifts I raised—the new scholarships, student resources, and research dollars I helped secure. I remain forever grateful to the donors who chose to part with their hard-earned resources to improve lives. But when I see that these colleges have ballooning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staff salaries, coursework in critical race theory required for graduation, and campus activists bullying of conservatives, I worry the promise I made to those donors might not be kept by those universities.
Charitable giving is a uniquely American thing. When a problem cannot be solved by the marketplace, rather than wait for the government to create a new, inefficient, expensive bureaucracy to fix something, Americans utilize their resources to try to help. This also happens in a few other countries, but never to the same degree. It is classic American exceptionalism.
A cardinal principle in fundraising ethics is to fulfill the wishes of a donor. When you give to your college, you expect the gift to fulfill the emotional and practical inspiration for the gift. Conservatives might be surprised to see how that money is actually spent.
Critical race theory originated on college campuses and has since infected almost every other American institution. This Marxist framework makes race the prism through which its proponents view all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims. This is a distinctly anti-American idea.
The great civil rights leaders throughout American history have sought to resolve racial conflict through the framework of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. American sins like slavery and Jim Crow were expunged by exercising freedom of speech and assembly, and demonstrating that slavery and Jim Crow were antithetical to the founding principles of this country, even if some of the Framers themselves didn’t practice what they preached.
Critical race theorists, on the other hand, teach that racial injustice is part and parcel of America’s founding principles. In their eyes, America is fully a racist country, and American history and values are “toxic.” As hard as it is believe, those ideas now flourish in higher education and at colleges that once embraced academic integrity and free speech.
And it isn’t just in curriculums that include leftist scholars such as Angela Davis and the late Howard Zinn. Critical race theory is embedded into the institutional hierarchy of higher education. Racial bean counting is included in performance reviews across universities, monitored and controlled by diversity, equity, and inclusion offices.
This is what your gift to your alma mater is paying for.
DEI is now the fastest-growing “industry” in higher education. The salaries of academics—the ones teaching and conducting worthwhile research—have remained flat. Meanwhile, the DEI offices are growing exponentially. On today’s college campus, there are an average of 3.4 DEI staff members per every 100 tenured faculty. They are there to make sure these Marxist ideas are incorporated in every area and office in colleges and universities.
When that letter comes in the mail asking for another gift to your alma mater, that’s what you are paying for.
If you raise these concerns with your alma mater or child’s school, they may point to the existence of the campus conservative paper, a Christian campus outreach group, or a Jewish student group. Even if that’s the case, a portion of activity fees will still go toward operations—meaning that campus activists, encouraged by the DEI officers and deans of students, will still get their portion of your gift.
And I have a hunch the college administration does not make life very pleasant for conservative groups, especially if they have the audacity to criticize the DEI office or campus activists.
As a fundraiser for The Heritage Foundation, perhaps I’m a bit biased in suggesting conservative donors have a better shot at fulfilling their desire to build a freer, more prosperous country with us than their alma mater. But a conservative can have confidence knowing the gift at Heritage will be spent on the causes they believe in; namely, liberty, civil society, and a defense of the American way of life. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Charitable giving should fulfill the wish of a donor. Conservatives should carefully examine whether a college or university they support uses the money they send exactly the way they would wish.
If conservative speech, ideas, students, or faculty are not welcome at your alma mater—perhaps your own charitable dollars should go somewhere else.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/14/collegiate-alumni-donations-what-are-we-giving-to
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‘Living hell’ and the destruction of academic freedom
If universities don’t protect free speech and open debate, they’re no better than finishing schools, if not outright propaganda factories — serving not the nation or the search for truth, but simply the dominant ideology. But that’s increasingly what US colleges have become, routinely closing the door to dissent by shutting down professors, researchers and students who challenge the received wisdom. How many still deserve the vast public support they still receive?
The latest example: Stanford professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya, who with profs from Harvard and Oxford co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, early in the pandemic, flagging the huge cost of lockdowns, both medical and social.
Some 16,000 medical and public-health scientists (many of them highly credentialed), 47,000 medical practitioners and 871,000 “concerned citizens” signed on — making it plain that nothing resembling a scientific consensus endorsed the course much of the nation had taken.
Which infuriated the powers that be. Dr. Anthony Fauci, with huge grant-making powers as boss of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, slammed the declaration as “nonsense” — joined by other key public-health officials and prompting much of the media to ignore or even suppress the debate.
And the rulers of academia followed suit. As Bhattacharya said at a talk this month, his life soon became “a living hell” — and his university, Stanford, failed to back him. He not only got death threats and hate mail, he also faced a “deeply hostile work environment,” making clear that “academic freedom is dead.”
“If Stanford really, truly were committed to academic freedom,” it would’ve “worked to make sure that there were debates and discussions, seminars where these ideas were discussed,” he added.
Data on lockdowns and COVID deaths suggests Bhattacharya & Co. were right: Sweden, Finland and Norway, for example, rejected extended closures and saw notably less “excess mortality” than most other European nations. Here in America, largely open Florida fared as well or better than largely closed New York and California.
In short, Fauci and other public health leaders should’ve at least considered the possible dangers of their preferred course. “Shut up” isn’t supposed to be a winning argument in the scientific community.
Of course, academia’s been suppressing “heretics” for a long time now.
At Portland State, Peter Boghossian became a pariah just for calling attention to the lack of diversity of opinions on campus, a response that proved his point.
University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot had an MIT speech canceled and his name removed from academic papers and from a National Science Foundation grant proposal. His sin? Coauthoring an op-ed arguing that admissions policies should be based on merit.
American Historical Association President James Sweet felt forced to apologize for criticizing those who see history through current, fashionable politics, as The New York Times’ “1619 Project” did.
As of April, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education had logged 591 cases of retaliation toward profs with “unpopular” ideas since 2015. Medical schools have been forced to adopt woke policies and programs. Several polls have shown that even students in high school and college feel uncomfortable expressing their honest views in public.
It’s alarming: The last place cancel culture should flourish is on campus. Higher education is supposed to foster fresh thinking, not enforce any ideology except the classical liberal ideals of free and open debate. Universities can’t serve society as a whole if fear of backlash keeps brilliant thinkers from sharing their thoughts.
“Academia is supposed to encourage free thinking, not enforce one orthodoxy,” contends John Tomasi, the president of pro-free-thinking Heterodox Academy. “Great minds do not always think alike.”
No, unpopular ideas won’t always prove right — but even when wrong, they can expose faults in the previous consensus. And if they go unheard, true progress becomes impossible.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/26/living-hell-and-the-destruction-of-academic-freedom/
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Major regret? See how these Americans feel about their college degrees after graduating
A Washington Post analysis found that nearly 40% of college graduates regretted their major. Americans in New York and Philadelphia had mixed feelings.
Americans in New York City and Philadelphia had mixed feelings on whether they regretted their college major.
"I was a criminal justice major and I regret it," one woman said through laughter. "I really don’t like it. I would have probably done art."
But another graduate said: "I majored in computer science, and I would keep the same major."
Nearly 40% of college graduates regret their majors, a Washington Post analysis found earlier this year. Among arts and humanities majors, nearly half wished they’d studied something else, while STEM graduates tended to feel they made the right choice.
"I realized that my major wasn’t very specific," an international business major told Fox News. "I don’t entirely regret it, but when I started applying for jobs, I realized it wasn’t like a specific field."
"Most of the jobs were looking for a specific field like data analysis or like software or like accounting majors," he continued.
Some suggested alternative paths.
"I think going to a trade school would probably be better off," one man said in Philadelphia. "I think right now the opportunities in that field are probably outstanding."
A few in the arts told Fox News they found their passion.
"I got a bachelor of fine arts in musical theater and I don’t regret it because that’s my job," one woman said. "I live here in New York. I’m a Broadway actor."
https://www.foxnews.com/us/major-regret-see-americans-feel-college-degrees-graduating
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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25 November, 2022
Our children aren’t being taught to read and we need a national commitment to save their futures
It’s no accident that you can read and understand this sentence. A solid education empowered you with this fundamental skill. Yet today there are literally millions of kids in our nation who are behind in reading and, sadly, too many who can’t read at all. Your child may be one of them.
The latest data provide the facts — and they’re alarming. The National Assessment of Education Progress released its latest 4th and 8th grade reading scores for U.S. students and found that nearly 70 percent of these kids are testing "below proficient" in reading and are in real trouble. That’s not just appalling – it’s heartbreaking, especially because most parents think their kids are doing fine.
How did this happen? In a recent podcast series, "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong," journalist Emily Hanford shared stories of parents who discovered their children couldn’t read and the many challenges they faced in seeking help.
One parent, Corrine Adams, realized her son in kindergarten was not being taught to read when she helped him with his remote schooling during the pandemic. When she turned to Twitter to share her experience, Adams quickly found parents across the country had children who were not being taught how to read either.
This nationwide failure is real, and it has the potential to rob our children and grandchildren of a chance to reach their full potential. To cite one example, economist Eric Hanushek estimates that students impacted by pandemic-related learning loss will earn 6-9% less income throughout their life.
The path forward is effective policy. It’s why I founded the Foundation for Excellence in Education 15 years ago. Our organization recently hosted over 1,200 attendees at its annual National Summit on Education in Salt Lake City. Attendees heard from both Hanford and Hanushek and many other speakers in policy-focused discussions.
Central to our work is that every one of these solutions begins with what’s best for students. It’s why I strongly believe every child should have access to every educational option, similar to what was passed in neighboring Arizona with its Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program.
But that’s not all. In Utah, leaders have already made strides to enact commonsense policies. Senate President Stuart Adams is a champion for accountability that grades schools using letter grades – so schools are held accountable. Utah Sen. Ann Milner has championed some of the fundamentals of early literacy policy that include literacy coaches, screeners to promptly identify kids who are struggling, and early intervention, monitoring and supports for students until they’re on grade with their peers.
Jeb Bush: Nation's report card showing poor math and reading scores should be 'call to arms'Video
Yet in education, success is never final, reform is never complete. There’s still more that can be done. It starts with ensuring all early literacy curriculum is aligned with phonics and the science of reading and disallowing failed policies. States would be wise to follow the leads of Arkansas and Louisiana that have banned curriculums containing "3-cueing." As the podcast series I referenced earlier unveils, this failed method literally teaches young children to guess words rather than work on sounding out the letters and truly learning how to read.
I don’t expect parents to know this – they shouldn’t have to. But there is an industry that profits off this curriculum, despite overwhelming evidence it impairs a child’s reading skills.
It’s time to put students first and put an end to what’s not working for kids.
But there’s too much at stake – we all must play a part to help every child rise. There are things parents, guardians, grandparents and any trusted adult in a child’s life can do to help students recover lost learning.
Invest just 20 minutes of reading every day with a child. And research has found an additional 30 minutes a week of extra math work have proven to help students make educational gains.
As a national problem, it requires a national effort. It requires a national commitment to education excellence for every child. I know we have it in our capacity as Americans to help every child close these gaps and ensure every child can access their God-given potential for a meaningful life.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/our-children-arent-being-taught-read-and-we-need-national-commitment-save-their-futures
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New York Willing to Put Schools in Danger if They Don't Get Rid of Native American Mascots
Those entrenched in State-sanctioned education continue to display how they value political correctness over safety and are happy to use state aid as a means of extorting compliance.
The New York State Education Department’s Senior Deputy Commissioner, James Baldwin announced in a letter on Thursday a mandate that would affect all New York school districts.
According to the letter, the mandate would require New York schools to remove all mascots, team names and/or logos associated with Native American heritage by the end of the 2022-23 school year.
The letter stated that the use of Native American-themed imagery in schools violates the “Dignity for All Students Act” which was a law allegedly created to combat student harassment and discrimination.
Baldwin also cited an obscure psychological study that claimed Native-themed mascots in schools had negative impacts on Native American students including “reinforced stereotyping and prejudice among non-Native persons.”
Failure to comply with the mandate or to obtain permission from tribal leadership associated with the mascots or team names would mean the withdrawal of state funding.
The withdrawal of funding — according to the letter — would also include the loss of “school officers” for non-compliant schools.
New York City has one of the largest school districts in the country and since 1998, has required the presence of school safety officers on school grounds to protect students and staff from violence.
According to CBS New York, staffing levels for this position are already dangerously low.
CBS quoted Gregory Floyd, who is a Teamsters Local 237 president and representative of school safety agents.
Floyd stated that “the combination of ‘defund the police’ cuts and the vaccine mandate have spelled a dramatic drop in personnel — 1,200 agents who retired weren’t replaced and 600 more are not at work because they refused to get the COVID shot.”
“This results in violence not being prevented,” he continued.
Despite these important positions not being filled, misguided bureaucrats like Baldwin are threatening to pull the entirety of school safety officers should no schools comply with the mandate.
The piece by CBS discussed how New York parents are already concerned for the safety of their children and the increase in violent incidents on school grounds.
Parents who have children in non-compliant districts should be doubly concerned now that New York officials have declared political correctness to be a higher priority than that of their children’s safety.
“About 60 school districts in the state still have nicknames or mascot images that reference indigenous people,” according to NYSED in an article by Times Union.
Should any readers currently have children enrolled in any of those 60 school districts, it may be wise to consider alternative educational venues as woke “leaders” like Baldwin gladly risk their safety for the sake of virtue signaling.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/new-york-willing-put-schools-danger-dont-get-rid-native-american-mascots-removal-school-officers
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As California Schools Fall Even Further, A Charter School Shows How To Succeed
Only about one in four California students is proficient in math. Or in English. Or in science. California’s K–12 school system has been broken for decades, and it is getting even worse, despite a school budget that now spends on average nearly $500,000 per year, per classroom. This is failure on a grand scale, and what makes it so much worse is that our kids are the ones paying the price.
This could be turned around quickly, and it would not require more spending or new educational philosophies. All we need to do is follow the K–12 success stories that are quietly advancing the ball: schools that are spending less, that have less bureaucracy, and whose vision is focused on their students. The Kairos charter school in Vacaville, California, can teach the rest of California’s schools so much. Kairos has generated so much enthusiasm in their small community that their 650-student school, which admitted its first students only in 2015, has a waiting list for admissions that recently hit 1,000 students.
It is obvious why parents are flocking to the Kairos school. Compared to students in the district’s traditional schools, Kairos students are performing at very high levels. Since Kairos began in the 2014–15 school year, English language arts proficiency for students has averaged 64 percent at Kairos, compared to 48 percent for traditional schools in the Vacaville school district and 48 percent for all California schools. This performance advantage exists across all demographic groups: among poor households, 52 percent of students are proficient at Kairos, compared to 35 percent for the district and 36 percent for California; among Hispanic households, proficiency is at 54 percent for Kairos kids versus 38 percent for the district.
There are similar performance differences in math: on average since the 2014–15 school year, 52 percent of Kairos students have demonstrated proficiency, compared to 36 percent of students in both district traditional schools and in all California schools; among poor households, 37 percent are proficient at Kairos, compared to 23 percent in both the district and in all California schools; among Hispanic kids, proficiency is 42 percent for Kairos versus 26 percent for the district.
These performance differences are enormous. To put them in perspective, if California schools could broadly deliver Kairos-level learning outcomes, California’s school ranking within the United States would rise from well below average to among the best-performing state school systems in the country.
Kairos also operates a non-classroom-based homeschool program to support families homeschooling their children. During the pandemic, the school’s experience with this program helped Kairos manage teaching during mandatory school closures much more effectively than many other schools were able to. Kairos also chose to reopen their school much earlier during the pandemic than traditional schools, providing their students with seven additional months of in-person learning during the 2020–21 school year.
Kairos’s mission statement describes how it put students first: “Kairos Public Schools is committed to empowering generations of learners to think critically, analyze and apply knowledge strategically, and utilize relevant tools to interact thoughtfully within a global community.”
I had the opportunity to speak with Jared Austin, the cofounder and executive director of the school. He explained how the school has economized on the number of staff, which not only expands funding available for education but also creates a leadership team of a manageable size. Both the 650-student main campus and the homeschooling enrichment program together operate with an administrative staff of just six. Austin serves not only as the school’s executive director (superintendent) but also as the school’s principal, facilities director, and technology director.
Kairos is run efficiently. Kairos is building a new campus on a 27-acre site, land that was recently acquired using funds that the school had saved. The first phase of construction—a 12,000-square-foot learning center that will provide enrichment classes in areas such as math, science, and robotics for homeschooled children—will be completed early next year.
I asked Austin how they could possibly design the project, receive permits, and finish construction on a project of this size in less than a year. For California, this is the construction equivalent of light-speed space travel. “We have a great relationship within the community, including the fact that our students perform 5,000 hours of community service each year. The community really came together to help us make sure we could get this done as quickly as possible.” A 45,000-square-foot campus to address the waitlist will follow.
School success requires passionate and dedicated teachers. Austin described how teachers are included in key decision making within the school, including the decision to reopen the campus well before other California schools reopened. It is interesting to note that the Kairos faculty has chosen not to unionize.
The Kairos charter school recipe for success can be replicated. But a recent California law has made it difficult to form new charter schools. California Assembly Bill 1505, which passed in 2019 despite strong opposition from the Senate Republican Caucus, changed the approval process for new charter schools. Under AB 1505, an application for a new charter school can be denied if the charter would have a negative fiscal impact within the district. Traditional schools do not want to face the competition created by a charter school, since students who matriculate to a charter school take much of the associated per-pupil funding with them.
Under the new law, a charter school application could be denied if it would substantially undermine existing services or academic or programmatic offerings provided by incumbent schools. A new charter school could also be denied if the existing school was performing so poorly that it was in either state receivership or if the introduction of the charter school would draw enough resources away from the existing school that it could not meet its financial obligations.
Yes, the new law is written to keep students trapped inside the worst-performing schools. The truly awful aspect of this new law is that the worst-performing schools tend to be in low-income neighborhoods, where parents cannot afford private schools or other educational alternatives. If this law were about any other good or service provided today, it would represent a blatant violation of our antitrust laws. Somehow we continue to tolerate a horribly performing monopoly, one that substantially damages our children and our future.
The Kairos charter school shows that we don’t have to accept California’s failed school system. California’s school system could improve quickly and significantly if our political leaders were willing to permit competition within our education sphere. This would incentivize traditional schools to adopt best practices. But California’s school system is not focused on educating our kids. If it were, our schools’ performance would have been turned around decades ago. Instead, the system is focused on doling out a multibillion-dollar budget to satisfy a vast array of vested interests. And if you doubt this, just ask your local elected representative where they send their own kids to school.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14342&omhide=true&trk=title
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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24 November, 2022
Parental Rights Candidate Wins Loudoun School Board Race, Signals Changes on Board
A parental rights candidate who narrowly secured a spot on the Loudoun County School Board could influence how the school system handles transgender issues and parental rights in education.
Incoming board member Tiffany Polifko won her race in the northern Virginia county as school boards across the commonwealth are expected to change policies related to transgender students. The Department of Education released new guidelines compelling school boards to keep parents informed if the student is seeking to change his or her gender identity and requires them to get parental permission before offering counseling services that affirm a student’s transgender identity.
Those guidelines conflict with Loudoun County School Board’s current policies, which do not keep parents in the loop. During her campaign, Polifko expressed her support for the new guidelines and will likely serve on the board as a voice in support of changes that match the DOE’s new guidelines. This comes as some school boards across the state have already indicated they might ignore the rules.
“Congratulations to Tiffany Polifko for her well-earned win for the Broad Run School Board seat in Loudoun County,” Ian Prior, who is the executive director of the northern Virginia parental rights group Fight For Our Schools, said in a statement.
“She was a tireless campaigner who ran for school board to become part of the solution to what ails Loudoun County Public Schools,” Prior continued. “Tiffany deserves all the credit for boldly taking on this challenge, staying true to her convictions, and winning. We have no doubt that she will be a much-needed champion for parental rights on the Loudoun County School Board.”
Last year, the school board came under fire after it had been accused of misinforming parents about a sexual assault in which a male student wearing address assaulted a girl in the girls’ bathroom. He was later transferred to a different school in the district, in which he sexually assaulted another girl. He was convicted on both counts.
Even though Superintendent Scott Ziegler informed the board of the initial assault, he later said during a public hearing that there are not any records of sexual assaults occuring in school bathrooms. No one on the board corrected him. The public discussion occurred when the board was considering changes to transgender policies, which would allow students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity even if that identity did not match their biological sex. Some parents and parental rights groups accused Ziegler and the board of covering up the assault to help advance transgender policy changes.
Attorney General Jason Miyares is currently conducting an investigation into how the board handled the sexual assault. The investigation seeks to determine whether school board members and school administrators intentionally withheld information from parents or whether they intentionally lied to them.
Polifko narrowly won her race with 35% of the vote in the three-way race for the Broad Run District. She won by fewer than 100 votes.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2022/11/parental-rights-candidate-wins-loudoun-school-board-race-signals-changes-on-board/
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Your kids know they ARE being taught critical race theory despite the denials — here’s the proof
City Journal last month released a survey that asked 18- to 20-year-olds whether they had been taught six concepts, of which four are central to critical race theory: “America is a systemically racist country,” “White people have white privilege,” “White people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people,” “America is built on stolen land,” “America is a patriarchal society,” and “Gender is an identity choice.”
Each was answered in the affirmative by a majority of participants, of whom more than 80% attended public schools. That’s curious given that public educators and their defenders in corporate media have been claiming for years that CRT is not taught in schools.
“Teaching critical race theory isn’t happening in classrooms, teachers say in survey,” reported NBC in July 2021. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson in June 2021 called the controversy over CRT “manufactured,” while his colleague Karen Attiah the same month called it “hot air.”
Since then, the narrative has evolved. A November 2021 PBS report, for example, explained, “There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students, though some ideas central to it . . . have been.”
That’s naïve if not disingenuous. Few high-schoolers know the names of the philosophical schools of utilitarianism and scientific materialism, but most of them are trained in their premises.
There’s an added dimension, given that The New York Times’ 1619 Project’s curriculum has been disseminated across the country to public schools responsible for teaching millions of students. There are other CRT-friendly public-school curricula: The Southern Poverty Law Center for years has been pushing its “Teaching Hard History” program, which many school districts have adopted, including in my home state of Virginia.
Concerned parents need guides to effectively respond to these “anti-racist” curricula, and scholar Mary Grabar has written one: “Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America.” Grabar, who crossed swords with 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones so many times that NHJ blocked her on Twitter, offers a careful rebuke to CRT’s problematic (and often erroneous) claims. Grabar explains: “We must understand The 1619 Project: its divisive aims and its dishonest methods, its sweeping historical misjudgments and its blatant errors of fact. And we must drive its lies and its poisonous race-baiting out of public institutions, beginning with the official curricula of our schools.”
The book’s early chapters deal with the historical inaccuracies and irresponsible reductionism of the original essays in The New York Times Magazine. (Tellingly, a lot of the project’s language was deleted or changed following public outcry and critiques from respected professional historians who said the authors had replaced history with ideology.) For example, put on the defensive by backlash to her claims that 1619, not 1776, is America’s true founding, NHJ claimed the 1619 Project “does not argue that 1619 is our true founding.” Yet Hannah-Jones herself had previously tweeted, “I argue that 1619 is our true founding.”
The blatant historical errors have been well covered elsewhere, so I’ll note just a few. The 1619 Project argues the colonies declared independence “to protect the institution of slavery,” though there’s virtually no historical evidence to substantiate that. It asserts American slavery was “unlike anything that had existed in the world before,” though any cursory survey of the ancient world, medieval and post-medieval Africa and the Ottoman Empire puts that idea to rest. Slave traders from the Barbary Coast alone enslaved and brutalized more than 1 million Southern Europeans between 1500 and 1800.
And NHJ fundamentally misreads the effect of the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which, far from “enshrining” the idea that blacks are a “slave race,” likely expedited the peculiar institution’s demise, with the Civil War starting only four years later.
“Debunking the 1619 Project” contains other, perhaps less-well-known information. Contra NHJ’s claims of intellectual novelty, black Americans have been discussing and memorializing the arrival of a Portuguese slave ship at Jamestown in 1619 for more than a century. There’s also the complicated fact many blacks profitably participated as slave owners in the antebellum Southern economy (Grabar doesn’t mention it, but so did many Native Americans). That by no means excuses white slaveholders’ sins, but it certainly muddles the Manichaean narratives anti-racist ideologues preach.
Yet there’s another component to this story beyond bad history: NHJ’s and fellow anti-racist pseudo-intellectuals’ self-serving exploitation of the remarkably lucrative grievance industry. She charges about $25,000 per speaking engagement (between September 2019 and February 2021, she made 33 appearances on college campuses, many of them remotely). She not long ago earned a staggering $55,000 for a single speech at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo charges $30,000 for a 60-to-90-minute speech.
Americans, many motivated by misplaced white guilt, are paying grievance-industry celebrities to inculcate a spirit of resentment, cynicism and victimhood across an entire generation of youth. The data City Journal compiled demonstrates that. So does peer-reviewed research on what students are learning in social-studies classrooms.
Consider one article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Social Studies Research. The authors observe a teacher provoke a class discussion on the failure of Galveston, Texas, to heed warnings from Cuba before a 1900 hurricane wrecked the city. “That was just racist that we didn’t listen to them,” say the students. “Good answers,” the teacher tells them.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/22/your-kids-know-they-are-being-taught-critical-race-theory-despite-the-denials-heres-the-proof/
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UK: Churchill in Disrepute as Woke Indoctrination in Schools Spreads Throughout West
Woke attitudes are becoming pervasive among young people, even outside the United States.
Recently released research by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London, shows how concepts such as critical race theory and radical gender ideology have become common concepts taught in U.K. schools.
The research was based on a YouGov survey of 1,500 U.K. residents ages 18 to 20. It reinforces the fact that radical ideas such as critical race theory are not just relegated to the United States.
And even Winston Churchill isn’t safe, that survey shows.
“A majority, 59%, of British school leavers say they have either been taught, or heard from an adult at school, about at least one of ‘white privilege’, ‘unconscious bias,’ and ‘systemic racism,’ three concepts associated with applied critical race theory,” the study found.
That number rises to 73% when the research included “critical social justice” approaches to gender, patriarchy, and the concept that there are many genders.
The study noted that CRT concepts are even more frequently picked up on social media, though Kaufmann said schools are reinforcing these concepts.
According to the research, left-wing cultural attitudes are most prevalent among Britain’s young “elite,” who are at or plan to attend universities.
In an UnHerd article explaining his findings, Kaufmann said schools aren’t just teaching critical race theory as a concept, they’re teaching it as fact: “68% of those taught these ideas said that they were either not taught competing perspectives, or that they were told that the alternative views on offer were not ‘respectable.’”
So this is more along the lines of indoctrination, not pedagogy.
Kaufmann also noted that these polls reflect other findings about young people in the United Kingdom. He noted a separate survey showed stark differences in attitudes toward free speech between the young and old, especially on the Left. The politics professor used the case of J.K. Rowling, author of the “Harry Potter” series, who has criticized the transgender movement.
“When asked whether J.K. Rowling should be dropped by her publisher, young people split evenly while the over-50s plumped 82-3 for Rowling. The biggest age gap is within the Left, between illiberal young leftists and their liberal older counterparts,” Kaufmann wrote.
It gets worse. From Kaufmann:
18-25s are evenly divided over whether Churchill’s statue should be removed from Parliament Square whereas those over 50 oppose it 83-6. Just 9% of 18- [to] 20-year-old women report a positive opinion of the wartime leader. When asked whether Britain is a racist country, the 18-25 group responded in the affirmative by a 61-39 margin compared to 35-65 against among the over-50s. Indeed, nearly 6 in 10 of these young people thought Britain was as or more racist than most countries.
Apparently, leading the fight against a genocidal Nazi Germany isn’t good enough for a huge number of penitent woke youths in the modern U.K.
What’s notable, and deeply disconcerting, about these polls is how similar woke attitudes have spread so quickly among young people in the West. This isn’t just a disease infecting American institutions.
At one time, the “West” generally meant “Western Christendom.” Despite often stark cultural differences between countries, countries within Western civilization shared a certain moral basis—even as they fought over borders and other details.
What we now have is a competing belief system that’s spread by academia and a globalized elite culture.
In just a short amount of time, fringe concepts such as critical race theory—once relegated to small corners of academia—became not only common but in some cases the dominant theories being taught and transmitted to young people.
Self-criticism, once an important Western trait that in some cases led to genuine progress and improvement, now is becoming the basis of the civilizational suicide of the West. This civilizational suicide conveniently allows the elites to retain power, of course.
The increasingly dominant ethos in the West among the young and elites in general has exacerbated the warped loathing of all things Westerners were once proud of—Winston Churchill, in the case of the U.K.—and combined it with an increasing inability to criticize anything outside the West.
Western business leaders seem to have particularly glommed onto this trait so that they may continue to contribute to progressive projects at home while making money in countries that practice brutal repression of their citizens, or simply modern slavery. Our new robber barons not only get rich thanks to Western laws and institutions, they now lecture us about our bigotry and backwardness while operating businesses in countries with concentration camps.
Zealotry for the cause, whether grounded in deep belief or not, is often tied to self-interest. To be a member of the elite in good standing, you must embrace these views or risk cancellation.
But this hypocrisy shouldn’t lead conservatives or centrists to think that the rising woke ideas aren’t deeply felt by many. For young Westerners—many of whom are detached from family, religion, community, and tradition—woke ideas provide a framework to live by.
As I wrote in my book “The War on History,” attacking and rewriting the past is how the far Left shapes the present and the future. The old pillars of the West and the United States—Christianity, liberty, self-government, and even democracy properly understood—are being uprooted, torn down, and ultimately replaced by the new faith.
That’s why the political battles over education and schools are so important.
Insiders, educrats, and union bosses won’t save us. They’ve only reinforced the mechanisms of indoctrination that have poisoned the minds of young people. But there are ways of fighting back.
Some governors are proactively preventing woke indoctrination in public schools. Parents are organizing to reshape local school boards and taking their children out of failing schools that won’t change.
Yes, many woke concepts will continue to get to young people through media and entertainment. That’s almost unavoidable at this point. But ceding our schools to fanatics exacerbates the problem and creates the perception that this is the only way to think about the world.
Preserving the free world, for ourselves and posterity, means that these battles over education are of the greatest importance.
There is no escaping the culture war or the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime. They are coming for you and your children here and throughout the Western world. If we fail, we will slip into a new dark age, as Churchill warned us a few generations ago.
The rot within goes deeper than ever before, but it will become total if we don’t draw lines in the sand now.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/22/churchill-in-disrepute-as-woke-indoctrination-in-schools-spreads-throughout-west/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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23 November, 2022
Students at NYC high school get third grade-level lessons on ‘Goldilocks’
Juniors taking American literature at highly rated Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn were tasked with a series of rudimentary assignments based on childhood fables and fairy tales — third grade-level classwork that stunned critics and parents called “educational neglect.”
After reading “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and “The Tortoise and the Hare” this semester, the 11th-grade general education students were then tasked with answering simple questions, such as “Who?” “What?” “When?” and “Why?” according to students who provided copies of the lessons to The Post.
For an answer to “What?” in “Goldilocks,” one student answered, “eat bears’ food + slept in beds.” The “Why” was “hungry + tired.”
They were then directed to write a summary sentence of the “literature.”
Students at the Midwood school were initially as taken aback as the little bear was over his missing porridge — when they saw the sheer simplicity of the assignments. But they were savvy enough to realize a good thing when they saw one.
“I was confused why we had it at first but I was like ‘F–k, it’s an easy assignment.’ I’m not complaining,” shrugged one junior outside the school this week.
Another student called American Literature “the easiest class that I have” and speculated that the worksheet on the “Tortoise and the Hare” would account for 10% of her grade.
A third student showed an instruction sheet on writing summary sentences she received a few weeks ago, with “Goldilocks” as the example.
“This was just a starter to see what you could do. Just to see if you could do it first and then we were gonna move on to something more challenging,” the student noted.
A fourth student said he received both “elementary style” assignments.
“Besides annotating a lot, we don’t really do what I would describe as 11th-grade work,” he said.
The assignment sheet with the bear’s tale came with a version of the story from the British Council’s “LearnEnglish Kids” program which says it aims to teach the language to children.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/19/students-at-nyc-high-school-get-third-grade-level-lessons-on-goldilocks/
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Report Reveals Just How Much the DEI Complex Has Infiltrated Medical Education
Forty-four percent of medical schools have tenure and promotion policies that reward scholarship on "diversity, inclusion, and equity." Seventy percent make students take a course on "diversity, inclusion, or cultural competence." And 79 percent require that all hiring committees receive "unconscious bias" training or include "equity advisors"—people whose job it is to ensure diversity among the faculty.
Those are just some of the findings from a new report by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which together with the American Medical Association accredits every medical school in the United States. The report, "The Power of Collective Action: Assessing and Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts at AAMC Medical Schools," is based on a survey of 101 medical school deans—representing nearly two thirds of American medical schools—who were given a list of diversity policies and asked to indicate which ones they had implemented.
The results paint a striking portrait of ideological capture: At many medical schools, concerns about social justice have saturated every layer of institutional decision-making, particularly the hiring and admissions process, a trend some doctors say will undermine meritocracy and endanger patients.
The report indicates that more than a third of medical schools offer extra funding to departments that hit diversity targets, half require job applicants to submit diversity statements, and over two thirds "require departments/units to assemble a diverse pool of candidates for faculty positions."
In addition, every school reported using a "holistic admissions" process—a euphemism for affirmative action—that assessed applicants’ grades and test scores in light of their race, lowering the academic bar for groups "underrepresented in medicine."
"We’re dealing with life and death here," said Jeff Singer, a general surgeon from Arizona. "I want to know that my doctor got their degree because they are smart and know what they’re doing."
Released November 10, the report comes in the wake of a yearlong campaign by the Association of American Medical Colleges to inject "diversity, equity, and inclusion" into the accreditation process. A year ago, the group put out guidelines calling meritocracy a "malignant narrative," a view critics said at the time would lower admissions standards and endanger lives. And in July, it required all medical schools to incorporate "diversity, equity, and inclusion" lessons into their curricula, stating that they should impart a "critical understanding of unjust systems of oppressions."
The survey appears to have been part of that campaign. All schools that completed it received a score grading their DEI efforts, which marked any policies not implemented as "areas for improvements." One of the best uses of the survey, the report said, is for schools to show that they are meeting the "accreditation requirements for DEI."
Feeling the heat of those requirements, medical schools have lowered standards for all students, even the top-performers, to avert a scenario in which dropout rates explode. "Once you take in a cohort of students who struggle, you have to ratchet down the entire curriculum," said Stanley Goldfarb, a professor at University of Pennsylvania Medical School, a Washington Free Beacon enthusiast, and the father of Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb. "So everyone gets through with much less rigorous courses."
Several doctors also voiced concern about mandating DEI coursework, which they said would leave less time for other, more essential subjects.
"If you’re bleeding out from a gunshot wound, you need the doctor who knows how to save your life, not the one who can tell you about implicit bias," said Laura Morgan, a nurse in Dallas, Texas, who lost her job at a teaching hospital, Baylor Scott & White Health, after she refused, in a recent diversity training, to affirm that all white people were racist.
The Association of American Medical Colleges told the Free Beacon that it supports all of the policies listed in the report, arguing that they "contribute to a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture and climate for students, faculty, staff, and administrators."
"Our member medical schools and teaching hospitals have an obligation to address the factors that drive racism and bias in health care," said David Acosta, the group’s chief diversity officer.
Not all of these policies are entirely new. "Culturally responsive care," the idea that doctors should have some fluency in their patients’ values and upbringing, has been a staple of medical education since the 1970s, Goldfarb and Singer said, and—in moderation—is an appropriate thing to teach.
But, Goldfarb added, that is a far cry from requiring entire courses on "cultural competence."
"All this can be done in two lectures," Goldfarb said. "The problem is that it inevitably expands."
The report suggests that medical schools are sinking significant time and energy into their diversity initiatives. Beyond changing the curriculum and hiring process, 75 percent of surveyed medical schools have advocated for legislation related to "diversity, equity, and inclusion," and 81 percent have modified "communications, branding, icons, or displays that may be perceived as noninclusive."
Schools are also collecting detailed demographic data on their faculty members and students—an ostensibly neutral practice that has been leveraged for ideological ends. Hiring committees often keep track of faculty promotions by race and gender, the report notes, then use that information to ensure "equity is maintained in advancement decisions."
All told, 85 percent of schools said they’d used "demographic data to promote change within the institution."
Eventually, the report implies, that number should be 100 percent. Medical schools are "creating a holistic strategy where DEI is integrated into all operations and mission areas," the report says. "The findings in this report prompt further exploration of how effective DEI practices can be embedded into the entire infrastructure of medical schools."
https://freebeacon.com/campus/report-reveals-just-how-much-the-dei-complex-has-infiltrated-medical-education/
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Australia: 'Accidental' homeschoolers are rising as some parents feel they have no choice but to withdraw their children
Gemma didn't set out to homeschool her daughter, Bonnie. Bonnie had loved kindergarten and Gemma assumed that, the following year, school would go just as smoothly.
"We entered prep very excited and full of wonder, ready to start the mainstream [school] experience," Gemma says.
But it was 2020, and Bonnie's start in school coincided with the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schoolyard conversations, and restrictions like social distancing and mask-wearing, had Bonnie concerned.
"She came home full of questions and then full of worry," Gemma says. "And that's where the anxiety started to build."
It was the beginning of Gemma's journey to becoming an "accidental homeschooler".
That's the term used by Rebecca English, a Queensland University of Technology researcher and lecturer specialising in non-mainstream education.
The term describes a cohort of home educators that Dr English says is growing. Accidental homeschoolers are those people who have tried one or several different schools that haven't worked for their child, "so they have found themselves home educating or distance educating", she says. "They just felt they had no choice."
It's a decision that carries implications beyond a child's education. Overwhelmingly, it's women who take on the homeschooling responsibility in a family, Dr English says.
"The short-term impact is the loss of possibly a woman's full-time wage," she says. In the medium-to-long term, it might equate to lower superannuation, and a drop in how much money a family can spend in their local community.
Rising figures mean these are issues that need addressing, Dr English says.
In Queensland, where she is based, there were 900 homeschooled students a decade ago. Today there are about 8,500. In the past year alone, Queensland homeschool registrations have jumped 69 per cent.
Dr English believes the figures reveal a system in need of change. "There are reasons that all of this is falling down. And we need to have a broader conversation about this as a country."
After Bonnie's anxiety about school "started to dial up to 10", and she was diagnosed with anxiety and autism, Gemma says she tried to make the school experience work. She sought external specialists as well as extra in-school support.
None of it was enough. "[Bonnie] was so worried and she was so scared that she wanted to be around us and she didn't like the separation from us. "For us, it just became a point where we had to try something different," Gemma says.
Bonnie's school was nurturing and well-intentioned, but Gemma says teachers were under-resourced and over-worked. They didn't have the specific skills needed to help her daughter feel safe and comfortable at school.
The family finally made the decision after term one this year to withdraw Bonnie and homeschool her. "It wasn't the [fault of the] school and another school wasn't going to be the answer. It was the system as a whole. And we had to make a change," Gemma says.
She argues that schools need more flexibility — and more time — to be able to focus on the individual needs of students.
Dr English agrees. She argues that schools need better support to be able to manage issues such as bullying, as this is one of the main reasons parents choose to home educate, according to her research.
Her research also highlighted the indirect factors leading some parents to choose to homeschool. Some of these include social and emotional issues a child might face, such as anxiety or depression, or because they identify as being on the autism spectrum and find classroom noise difficult or overwhelming. "And so they're much happier at home," she says.
Dr English argues that an uptick in homeschooled children is something that "can't be disconnected from the teacher crisis" — that is, the widespread shortage of Australian teachers.
"Realistically, schools are really pressed. The institution of schooling really needs to be looked at more deeply … There just isn't the time to do that support work," Dr English says.
She argues that teachers are too stretched and that too much of their working days are consumed by "data-driven" work demanded of them by education departments, leaving them insufficient time to devote to individual students.
"If teachers were better supported, more people would join the profession [and] less parents would feel disaffected and would be resorting to home education," she says.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-21/accidental-homeschooling-families-on-the-rise-rebecca-english/101589182
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My other blogs: Main ones below
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http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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22 November, 2022
Teenage alienation
<i>A tragic problem. The measures mentioned below could be generally helpful if shorn of their Leftist ideological content but what is really missing is intact families and the church. Both give a feeling of connectedness and support but are often missing from young lives today</i>
The trouble with AMERICA’S teenagers began well before the pandemic. In 2019, more than 1 in 3 reported feeling so sad or hopeless at some point over the past year that they had skipped regular activities, a 44 percent rise since 2009, and 1 in 6 had contemplated suicide. Public health measures made all that even worse, as teenagers in communities around the nation grew more isolated than ever. During the pandemic, the number of emergency-room visits for suspected suicide attempts rose by 50 percent for adolescent girls and 4 percent for boys, before settling down in recent months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The city of Tacoma, Washington, appears to be bucking these trends even though more than half of its residents live below the poverty line and its school system, with an enrollment of 30,000, has a history of low high school graduation rates. On a statewide test that measures depression and anxiety among 10th graders, scores actually improved between 2018 and 2021.
Now, communities across the nation are looking to Tacoma as a model of how to help their own teenagers, who, experts say, are experiencing alarming levels of loneliness and alienation. Policymakers and educators say that schools must do a better job of addressing the emotional and social needs of high school students. Scientific research supports this view. Brain studies suggest that the social and emotional aspects of classroom instruction are not only critical to students’ mental health but also improve their ability to learn and can shape a student’s trajectory into adulthood.
School districts are now rolling out programs that go beyond the ABCs and 123s to teach skills not typically the purview of schools: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationships and responsible decision making. However, these “social and emotional learning” (SEL) programs are largely piecemeal efforts that don’t match the scale of the problem, experts say. That could soon change, if more funding becomes available through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 earmarks $123 billion for K-12 education.
Advocates of SEL programs insist that they are a potent tool to help combat rising rates of mental health problems—if offered as part of comprehensive, community-wide responses. They point to the experience of Tacoma, which 10 years ago implemented a plan to train teachers, community leaders running after-school activities and parents in ways of helping kids identify and share their feelings, empathize, listen and develop meaningful relationships. As a result, school bus drivers now greet children by name. Teachers begin each day by asking their students to talk about how they are feeling. Kids in trouble know how to ask for help—and for those who don’t, parents and community leaders know to look out for them.
“The graduation numbers were just a symptom,” says Joshua Garcia, the superintendent of Tacoma public schools. “We needed a comprehensive approach to supporting and raising children that ensured they felt safe, engaged, challenged, healthy and supported.”
The program paid big dividends. This year, Tacoma expects to graduate more than 90 percent of its students for the first time, up from 55 percent in 2010. Alcohol use among 10th graders dropped by two thirds in 2020 compared to 2010, and marijuana use fell from 20 percent to around 10 percent. Perhaps most remarkably, last year, at a time when levels of anxiety, depression and suicide skyrocketed amongst teenagers nationwide, Tacoma’s numbers actually went down.
Still, not everybody thinks the programs are a good idea. Some conservatives warn that social and emotional learning is a “Trojan horse” from liberal policymakers, who want to introduce curriculums intended to indoctrinate students. Others have tried to associate the plans with hot-button issues like critical race theory, which holds that racism is endemic in U.S. institutions, and transgender rights. Some parents argue that mental health is not the province of schools. As a result, some red districts in red states have reduced their commitments to SEL—some districts in Florida, for instance, dropped their SEL plans after the state’s board of education banned the teaching of critical race theory. Lawmakers in at least seven states have introduced legislation to ban social and emotional learning outright.
https://www.newsweek.com/2022/11/18/teen-loneliness-rates-soar-schools-may-making-it-worse-scientists-say-1758013.html
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How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life
In September 2021, an official in Michigan State University’s athletic department sent an email to his boss with exciting news: An online betting company was willing to pay handsomely for the right to promote gambling at the university.
“Alan, if we are willing to take an aggressive position, we have a $1 M/year deal on the table with Caesar’s,” Paul Schager wrote to Alan Haller, the university’s athletic director.
The offer from Caesars Sportsbook turned out to be even bigger than that, according to emails obtained by The New York Times. In the end, the company proposed a deal worth $8.4 million over five years. It was, a member of the negotiating team said in another email, “the largest sportsbook deal in college athletics.”
Other schools, too, have struck deals to bring betting to campus. After Louisiana State University signed a similar deal in 2021 with Caesars, the university sent an email encouraging recipients — including some students who were under 21 and couldn’t legally gamble — to “place your first bet (and earn your first bonus).”
And when the University of Colorado Boulder in 2020 accepted $1.6 million to promote sports gambling on campus, a betting company sweetened the deal by offering the school an extra $30 every time someone downloaded the company’s app and used a promotional code to place a bet.
All three deals were part of a far-reaching but secretive campaign by the nascent online sports-gambling industry. Ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2018 to let states legalize such betting, gambling companies have been racing to convert traditional casino customers, fantasy sports aficionados and players of online games into a new generation of digital gamblers. Major universities, with their tens of thousands of alumni and a captive audience of easy-to-reach students, have emerged as an especially enticing target.
So far, at least eight universities have become partners with online sports-betting companies, or sportsbooks, many in the last year, with more expected.
In addition, at least a dozen athletic departments and booster clubs have signed agreements with brick-and-mortar casinos. For example, Turning Stone Resort and Casino is the official resort of Syracuse University’s ‘Cuse Athletics Fund. In 2020, Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, joined WinStar World Casino and Resort to open a new club with suites and premium seating.
The online gambling deals have helped athletic departments recoup some of the revenue they lost during the pandemic. The partnerships bring in extra funds that schools can use to sign marquee coaches and build winning sports teams. Mr. Haller, Michigan State’s athletic director, said in a news release at the time of the Caesars deal that it would provide “significant resources to support the growing needs of each of our varsity programs.”
The partnerships raise questions, however, about whether promoting gambling on campus — especially to people who are at an age when they are vulnerable to developing gambling disorders — fits the mission of higher education.
“It just feels gross and tacky for a university to be encouraging people to engage in behavior that is addictive and very harmful,” said Robert Mann, an L.S.U. journalism professor and outspoken critic of the partnerships.
Cody Worsham, L.S.U.’s associate athletic director and chief brand officer, said in a statement that Caesars and the university “share a commitment to responsible, age-appropriate marketing.” That commitment, Mr. Worsham added, “is integral to a sustainable and responsible partnership benefiting our entire department, university, and fan base.”
Robert Mann, a journalism professor at Louisiana State University, is among critics of the university’s deal with Caesars.Credit...Stephen Speranza for The New York Times
Some aspects of the deals also appear to violate the gambling industry’s own rules against marketing to underage people. The “Responsible Marketing Code” published by the American Gaming Association, the umbrella group for the industry, says sports betting should not be advertised on college campuses.
Most online gambling partnerships are just months old, so the full impact on students has yet to play out. But the risks are considerable. Sportsbooks encourage people to bet frequently, even after they rack up losses. Campus programs to treat gambling addiction and other problems are sparse, according to university officials and mental health experts.
“We’re not seeing enough oversight, transparency and education to support the rollout of these kinds of deals,” said Michael Goldman, who teaches sports marketing at the University of San Francisco.
Because gambling is not featured on school tours or in university brochures, parents may not know their children are enrolled in colleges where gambling is encouraged through free bets, loyalty programs and bonuses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/caesars-sports-betting-universities-colleges.html
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Stanford professor who challenged Covid lockdowns says 'academic freedom is dead' and his life has become a 'living hell' due to 'hostile work environment'
A professor of medicine at Stanford University who challenged Covid-19 lockdowns said 'academic freedom is dead' and his life is now a 'living hell.'
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya spoke out in an interview about the criticism he has received since questioning the rationale behind US lockdown orders by Dr. Anthony Fauci and masking in schools.
Bhattacharya is a tenured professor at the university who previously co-authored a letter in 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration, which declared the lockdowns were damaging. The release of the letter left him with no support from his colleagues.
'The basic premise is that if you don't have protection and academic freedom in the hard cases, when a faculty member has an idea that's unpopular among some of the other faculty - powerful faculty, or even administration... if they don't protect it in that case then you don't have academic freedom at all,' Bhattacharya told Fox News.
The Stanford professor received death threats about his letter and said the results could've turned out differently if the university was open to offering a debate about Covid-19 topics.
Bhattacharya, who described the call for 'herd immunity' as harmful and inefficient, said that there was a lack of debate at the school to challenge the popular views - leaving him to be an outsider.
'The policy of the university, when push comes to shove, is to permit this kind of hostile work environment,' he said. 'What if there had been open scientific debate on campus, sponsored by the university of this? So that people could know there were legitimate alternate views?'
He later told the news outlet: 'If Stanford really truly were committed to academic freedom, they would have… worked to make sure that there were debates and discussions, seminars, where these ideas were discussed among faculty.'
If the school would've offered a debate to challenge Bhattacharya's letter, then perhaps it would've lessened the 'hostile environment,' he said.
'When you take a position that is at odds with the scientific clerisy, your life becomes a living hell,' Bhattacharya said at the Academic Freedom Conference at Stanford earlier this month.
Bhattacharya also previously appeared in a round table with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last year, praising the Republican's more relaxed approach to economic restrictions.
Free speech debates on campus' have been a contentious topic as some schools refuse to tolerate alternative viewpoints.
Cancel culture on campuses was especially up during the pandemic as some students sought to deplatform those who didn't agree with the popular opinion.
Columbia University was ranked the worst in the nation for tolerating different viewpoints on campus and received an 'abysmal' score in September.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) monitoring group also awarded low scores to the University of Pennsylvania, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgetown University, and Skidmore College.
Meanwhile, the University of Chicago came first for campus free speech, scoring 77.9 out of 100 points. Kansas State University, Purdue University, Mississippi State University and Oklahoma State University rounded out the top five.
Schools were graded on their formal free speech policies, incidents of deplatforming, the number of academics sanctioned and on the opinions expressed by students in a survey, which collected responses from 45,000 nationwide.
Columbia was awarded only 9.9 out of 100 points. Its score was dragged down for being the ‘most egregious offender’ in sanctioning seven scholars, including two terminations, one of whom was a tenured faculty member.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11453099/Stanford-University-professor-challenged-covid-lockdowns-says-academic-freedom-dead.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
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21 November, 2022
Teachers are Quitting Because of Unruly, Violent Students
Better pay is good, but no amount of compensation can lure a teacher into a combat zone
Bebe Nicholson
My niece always wanted to teach math. Since math teachers are in high demand, she didn’t have a problem landing a job. But now, after one year of teaching, she works as a church bookkeeper.
Why did she leave the school system when she had wanted to be a teacher for as long as she could remember?
Because students these days are unruly and violent, and teachers get no backing from school administrators or parents. Children are in charge of our schools, and if you don’t believe me, look at what happened in my niece’s case.
Her students were in the middle of taking a test when one of them stood up, test in hand, and headed out of the room.
My niece asked him where he was going.
“Out,” he mumbled. She told him he couldn’t take his test with him, and he protested. So she took his test, walked out, and returned with a plate of food a few minutes later. But he didn’t eat the food. He hurled it across the room at my niece, barely missing her.
Guess who got into trouble.
If you guessed the student, you’d be wrong. The teacher was the one who got into trouble. She was reprimanded for taking the student’s test away before he left the room.
She promptly quit her job.
I hear a lot of schoolteacher stories. My cousin, who taught high school, was in her classroom when gunshots rang out. She went into lockdown mode, securing the door and taping paper over the windows. It wasn’t until later that she discovered what had happened.
One of her former students had entered the school grounds with guns. He fired a shot, and luckily, his gun jammed. The principal and another school employee tackled him before he could pull the other pistol from his trench coat. No one at school was hurt, but they found out later that he had murdered his parents before heading to school.
My cousin retired the following year.
My husband, a teacher for 15 years, says classroom management was his biggest problem. Teachers weren’t allowed to suspend disruptive or violent students without filling out a mountain of paperwork justifying their decision. It took weeks for the paperwork to be approved.
Sometimes parents said their children had special conditions that caused them to be disruptive and the teachers needed to overlook it. Parents threatened lawsuits. If teachers tried to hold students accountable, there were endless parent/administrator/teacher meetings where teachers had to explain why they discriminated against the children.
One time my husband wasn’t told that one of his new students had been suspended a few weeks earlier for taking a gun to his previous school!
Now that he’s retired, my husband volunteers as a math tutor. He showed up at school yesterday only to discover that the student he was supposed to help had decided to leave school and go to the store. Why are students allowed to come and go whenever they want during school hours? This was never allowed when I was in school.
My 11th-grade granddaughter told me students fight at school all the time. She heads in the other direction when she sees a fight in progress.
You’ve probably heard the saying, “The inmates are running the asylum.” It appears these days that the students are running the schools.
Most politicians recommend increasing teacher pay as a primary solution to the problem of recruiting and retaining teachers. Better pay is good, but no amount of pay can lure a teacher into what has turned into a combat zone. Restoring a teacher’s authority to discipline students would be a good incentive to bring teachers back.
Schools have become too politicized. While well-intentioned, the No Child Left Behind Act has been a dismal failure, with its incentives to pass children at all costs acting as a detriment to real learning. Failing students is a black mark for a school, so administrators come down hard on teachers who don’t pass everyone.
In reading about solutions to the school discipline problem, I came across articles that emphasized how children needed space, they needed to be heard, they deserved to be understood, they needed authentic ways to validate their emotions, they needed to be re-centered for emotional stability, and they needed to know they belonged.
That’s all fine and good and should probably be addressed in a counselor’s office. We all want to be heard and have our emotions validated. But disruptive students don’t need coddling in the classroom.
They need accountability, to learn respect, and to be removed from the classroom when they are so disruptive that they interfere with another student’s opportunity to learn.
Why would we want to teach an entire generation of young people that they rule, that bad behavior has no consequences, and that disrespect and violence are acceptable?
I fear for the future of a country that nurtures and promotes immaturity and self-centeredness instead of accountability and accomplishment. Probably not many other countries allow student behavior in our schools.
We might be surprised that students thrive and excel with firmer boundaries and more discipline. Instead of having their fragile emotions injured from not “being heard,” they would develop a true sense of self-esteem from learning how to listen, be respectful, and master their lessons.
Instead of learning that hurling a plate of food at a teacher is okay, a student might decide he needs to stay in class and complete his test.
https://medium.com/illumination/teachers-are-quitting-because-of-unruly-violent-students-ca93b554dc19
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Education Choice Supporters Win Big in 2022 Midterm Elections
Proponents of empowering parents with education choice should feel encouraged by the outcome of the midterm elections. States that went big on choice policies in the last two years overwhelmingly re-elected the policymakers who made it happen.
Opponents of education choice have long claimed that choice policies were politically unpopular. Despite polls showing high levels of public support, opponents like the teachers unions were better organized and well-funded. When they threatened politicians with electoral consequences for supporting choice policies, that was often sufficient to push fence-sitters into voting against empowering families with education choice.
But the lesson from the midterms for lawmakers inclined to support education choice is clear: Be not afraid!
In 2021, West Virginia enacted the Hope Scholarships, which are K-12 education savings accounts that families can use for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, online courses, special needs therapy, and more. The Hope Scholarships are available to all West Virginia students who are switching out of a public school or entering kindergarten, making it the most expansive education choice policy at the time it was enacted.
>>> Parents Lead the Nation on School Choice
The bill passed without the support of a single Democrat in either legislative chamber, while Republicans were overwhelmingly in favor. If opponents of education choice were right, then Republicans should have suffered at the ballot box in West Virginia. Instead, Republicans expanded their majorities in both chambers, gaining at least six seats in the state Senate and nine seats in the state House with five races still to be decided as of this writing.
Additionally, in primary races earlier this year, three of the 10 Republican defectors with contested primaries lost their races. Support for education choice is emerging as a litmus-test issue.
New Hampshire passed the second-most expansive education choice policy in 2021, with about one-third of K-12 students eligible for Education Freedom Accounts. Gov. Chris Sununu signed them into law and was handily re-elected for a fourth two-year term by a healthy margin (57% to 42%) in a year when Democrats won re-election in the U.S. Senate race and both congressional races.
Although votes are still being counted in the legislative races, the GOP is poised to maintain its control over both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature.
Several states also significantly expanded their existing education choice policies in 2021, including Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Oklahoma. All four maintained Republican trifectas with most gaining legislative seats, while the three with gubernatorial races saw their Republican governors overwhelmingly re-elected.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made education choice a signature issue, signing legislation to expand eligibility for Florida’s choice policies to more than two-thirds of students and boasting that the Sunshine State is "leading the way in school choice." He’s right. The Heritage Foundation’s inaugural Education Freedom Report Card ranked Florida No. 1 overall and No. 3 for education choice. He won re-election by a margin of 59% to 40% and the GOP gained seats in both legislative chambers.
Support for education choice in Pennsylvania is more bipartisan than most states. In 2021, the Pennsylvania legislature adopted Senate Bill 381 to expand the Educational Improvement Tax Credit, which provides scholarships for students from low- and middle-income families. Though all six state senators in opposition were Democrats, so were about a dozen of the 41 senators voting in favor. Likewise, though all 47 votes against the bill in the state House came from Democrats, so did 43 of the 154 votes in favor. The bill was signed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat.
>>> Arizona Parents Show How To Beat the Teachers’ Unions
Wolf’s successor, Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro, made waves earlier this year when he endorsed Lifeline Scholarships, a policy similar to the K-12 education savings accounts in 10 other states albeit limited to students assigned to low-performing public schools. Shapiro will be one of two Democratic governors openly supporting education choice along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who won re-election this year after reversing his prior opposition to his state’s tax-credit scholarship policy.
In 2022, Arizona took the education choice crown back from West Virginia by expanding its education savings account policy to all children, making it the nation’s first truly universal choice policy. Now the families of all Arizona K-12 students are eligible to receive an Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) worth about $7,000 to choose the learning environments that work best for their children. Since lawmakers expanded ESA eligibility, more than 25,000 students have signed up for an account.
Unlike in Pennsylvania, the vote in Arizona was along party lines. Although Arizona is still counting votes, the GOP appears poised to maintain its trifecta. Moreover, an attempt by choice opponents to refer the ESA expansion to the ballot failed to garner enough signatures due to the heroic grassroots efforts of families who support education choice.
As education choice becomes more widely available to more families, policymakers are waking up to the reality that it needn’t be a partisan issue. Rather, education choice is, rightly, now being viewed not as a Democrat versus Republican cause, but as parent-oriented versus special-interest oriented. And as the 2022 midterms have just demonstrated, those who sided with parents were on the winning side of their contests.
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/education-choice-supporters-win-big-2022-midterm-elections
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UK: The lesson if you want to succeed in life? Act like a woman, leading headmistress says
Women have for decades been encouraged to 'lean in' to male working behaviour to get ahead – to speak louder, be more assertive and revel in competition.
But a leading headmistress believes the opposite is the key to success, saying everyone should act and work like a woman.
In a speech today, Heather Hanbury, president of the Girls' Schools Association (GSA), will hail the benefits of traditionally feminine and 'soft power' traits such as empathy, creativity and collaboration.
Mrs Hanbury, who is also head of the Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton, west London, will tell the GSA's annual conference that it is the job of schools to instil these traits in all pupils, regardless of their sex.
'It's absolutely time to finally acknowledge working like girls and women is a great way to work and live,' she will say. 'I've had enough of being told otherwise. No one should feel they have to 'be like a man' to succeed in life.'
Addressing more than 150 head teachers, Mrs Hanbury will argue that girls' schools are 'incubators of new and better ways of thinking and being'.
She will add: 'This influence isn't just about girls and young women but about the huge value that young women offer and create in the world through the way that they work and spend their time in it.'
She believes traditionally male qualities often 'end up in burnout'. Her comments come after a major study found men's greater self-esteem helps them to succeed in the workplace.
The study by Dr Nikki Shure and Dr Anna Adamecz-Volgyi of UCL followed 17,000 people born in the UK in a specific week in 1970 throughout their lives.
It showed over-confidence was a big reason why more of the men ended up in top roles than women.
Separately, a recent report by Cranfield University and EY found 91 per cent of the 413 women on FTSE 100 boards are in advisory non-executive director roles, with just nine chief executives.
It led to accusations that top firms have made an 'appalling' lack of progress in promoting women to executive roles, instead putting them in 'box-ticking' positions to boost equality figures.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11450641/Act-like-woman-want-succeed-life-leading-headmistress-says.html
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http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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20 November, 2022
Law School Accrediting Panel Votes to Make LSAT Optional
<i>Legal education tends to be demanding so letting in people who are unlikely to cope with it is to set up a lot of people for disappointment and failure. It is quite simply cruel</i>
An American Bar Association panel voted Friday to drop a requirement that law school applicants take the LSAT or another standardized admissions test, amid debate about whether the tests help or hurt diversity in admissions.
The accrediting council, made up of lawyers, professors and administrators, voted 15-1 at its meeting to eliminate the requirement of a “valid and reliable admission test” for hopeful law students. The panel sought public comment on the proposal in May, after an ABA committee recommended the elimination of the testing requirement.
Individual law schools are still free to require a test. The policy change will take effect beginning for students applying in fall 2025.
The LSAT, or Law School Admission Test, tests analytical reasoning, logic and reading comprehension, and is considered a predictor of success in law school. The ABA last year allowed law schools to consider the Graduate Record Examination, or the GRE, in addition to the LSAT.
Public comments over eliminating the testing requirement have been polarized, largely around the issue of diversity. The legal profession has long been criticized for a lack of women and people of color in its top ranks, and the panel’s debate comes as schools are bracing for a decision from the Supreme Court on whether race can be a factor in college admissions.
“In the grand scheme of things, folks of color perform less well on the LSAT than not, and for that reason, I think we are headed in the right direction,” Leo Martinez, an ABA council member and dean emeritus at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said at the meeting. “I am sympathetic that it gives people like me a chance.”
Representatives from the Law School Admission Council, which administers the LSAT, and ETS, a nonprofit education testing service, told the council making testing optional would result in the admission of some law students who are unprepared to succeed, which it said would ultimately hurt the legal profession.
“This proposal will be highly disruptive,” John White, chair of LSAC’s board of trustees, told the council. “The change won’t be worth it, and we won’t get the diversity we are looking for.”
“I find the argument that the test is necessary to save diversity in legal education is bizarre,” said council member Craig Boise, dean of Syracuse University College of Law.
The panel also questioned why law schools shouldn’t be aligned with other graduate programs that don’t require tests.
A range of law professors and prospective law students urged the ABA to eliminate the testing requirement in public comments submitted before the vote.
In one written comment, Fariha Amin, a full-time worker and mother to a 6-year-old son, said her LSAT scores remain a hurdle to getting into law school. She took tutoring courses, but her scores still weren’t high enough to be admitted, she told the ABA, urging them to eliminate the requirement.
“I would hate to give up on my dream of becoming a family lawyer, just due to not being able to successfully handle this test,” Ms. Amin wrote.
Coalitions of admissions officers and university deans warned of unintended consequences if the testing requirement were dropped.
“We believe that removal of the testing requirement could actually increase the very disparities proponents seek to reduce by increasing the influence of bias in the review process,” Kristin Theis-Alvarez, assistant dean of admissions and financial aid at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said in a submission on behalf of dozens of university officials.
They argued that eliminating the test could lead to an overreliance on grade-point average and other criteria they say could be “infused with bias.”
In a survey of 82 law schools, released this week by Kaplan Inc., 30 said they would be “very likely” to continue to require tests while 37 said they were undecided. Only two schools said they would be very unlikely to continue requiring an admission exam.
John Pierre, chancellor of Southern University Law Center, a historically black university in Baton Rouge, La., in an interview said he supported the ABA change but his university would continue to use the LSAT for prospective students, regardless.
Each school, he said, should make its own choices. “There have been concerns for a number of years that it might not be a factor in determining success,” Mr. Pierre said. “Everyone has to look at their own history.”
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/law-school-accrediting-panel-to-consider-making-lsat-optional-11668778730
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New Conservative School Board Members Fire Superintendent, Ban Critical Race Theory at First Meeting
A group of parents who ousted their school board members in South Carolina wasted no time putting their new powers to use by immediately firing their district superintendent and eliminating any vestige of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their schools, among other moves.
A group of parents who ran for a school board acted at once to fulfill their campaign promises. As soon as the new majority was sworn in to take their place on the Berkeley County School District in South Carolina, they moved.
Within the first two hours of their first meeting upon being sworn in, the board fired school superintendent Deon Jackson, dumped district in-house counsel Tiffany Richardson, banned any part of the CRT curriculum they could find, and launched a committee to evaluate whether certain books in district libraries were age-appropriate, NBC News reported.
The new majority of conservative parents who took over the school board took their seats after a campaign by a group called Moms for Liberty, a group that rose to oppose the left-wing agenda in races across the country ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, joining many outraged parents.
NBC noted that Moms for Liberty endorsed more than 500 school board members across the county, and they achieved an astounding 49 percent success rate.
In South Carolina’s Berkeley County, for instance, Moms for Liberty flipped six board seats and took control of the board’s majority. That allowed them to move quickly to implement their agenda.
Moms for Liberty celebrated the board’s quick action, saying, “six new board members clean house first night on the job.”
The liberal media, such as NBC, were shocked that the district’s “first black superintendent” Jackson was immediately fired. But the board replaced Jackson with Anthony Dixon, who is also black.
Indeed, the new chairman, Mac McQuillin, warned the audience to settle down when they announced the end of Jackson’s job.
“All right, listen up,” McQuillin said during the meeting. “We’re going to be respectful in this meeting. You may not agree with our votes, but I ask that you please be respectful and calm. What kind of example are you setting for our kids, disrupting a meeting like this?”
The previous, more liberal board members also fretted over the firing of Jackson and Richardson.
David Barrow, the ousted board chairman, called the firings a “travesty” and a “political witch hunt,” NBC added.
Another member who stayed over from the previous board, Yvonne Bradley, attacked the new majority, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are being fooled by these six. Unbelievable — what the chairman would do. It is so unbelievable how this is going.”
Bradley also blasted the audience for voting for the new majority.
Local liberals also excoriated the new majority for banning CRT, a move that the left-wingers claimed was a sham because there is no CRT curriculum in the school in the first place. They also claimed that a committee to review library books is unnecessary because there are already rules to guide the purchase of books for the schools.
Still, the board united 8-0 to set up a committee to craft guidelines to remove “inappropriate sexual/pornographic content” from the schools after it was determined that teachers, mental health professionals, and librarians would also be part of the committee.
The board in South Carolina’s Berkeley school district, while shocking for how quickly it moved to implement a parent-friendly agenda, is not the only school board to be impacted by Moms for Liberty and other parent groups looking to oust left-wings from positions affecting schools.
In another report, NBC noted that parents in Florida sent at least 25 new school board members to work, along with the support of powerhouse Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And the governor had great success in his school endorsements.
Lindsey Curnutt, a member of DeSantis’ communications department, said in a statement that the governor “led a coalition of parents to establish students-first, parents’ rights school board governance across the state. The DeSantis Education Agenda was on the ballot, and the voters made their voice clear: We want education, not indoctrination.”
Moms for Liberty also waded into Florida’s school board races by endorsing 51 candidates. Twenty-eight of those candidates won, NBC noted. In contrast, the state’s Democratic Party endorsed 30 candidates, but only nine won. And the party’s gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Crist, endorsed seven school board candidates and only three won. Crist also handily lost his race to DeSantis.
Time will tell how effective these new conservative, parent-friendly school board members will be, but whatever the case, it is about time that parents start to pay more attention to the extreme leftism being foisted on our schools in the guise of “education” by these school boards and to begin making inroads to stop it.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/new-conservative-school-board-members-fire-superintendent-ban-critical-race-theory-first-meeting
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Why Catholic schools didn’t fail at all while public ones did during COVID pandemic
In case you missed it, American education is in free-fall. The National Center for Education Statistics released the first national test scores for fourth- and eighth-graders since before the pandemic, and the news is somehow worse than we could have imagined, with catastrophic learning loss, the largest declines ever recorded and decades of progress wiped out.
But in America’s Catholic schools, the failure and free-fall simply did not happen. In fact, in both math and reading, Catholic scores stayed the same or improved in areas where public schools dramatically declined.
For instance, Catholic students in 8th grade saw a one-point average increase in their reading scores, compared to the three-point drop for public school 8th graders. Scores for 4th-grade math stayed the same for Catholic schools but dropped five points for public schoolers in the same grade.
The losses facing America’s public-school students can’t be overstated — researchers typically consider 10 points as equivalent to a year’s worth of learning, so most of our public-school students have lost months they can’t get back.
Unsurprisingly, the education establishment has been scrambling. They seemed unable to decide whether this disaster affected all states regardless of COVID closures (it didn’t), or whether it was the inevitable result of trying not to spread the virus. A quick look at European schools throughout much of the last few years casts doubt on that idea, but Catholic schools now offer a powerful rebuttal much closer to home.
As Partnership School’s Kathleen Porter-Magee pointed out, if Catholic schools were a state, they’d be the highest-performing state in the nation. They’d also be the most cost-effective state — by a long shot.
Families pay an average of $5,847 to send their children to Catholic school, compared to the roughly $16,000 public schools receive per pupil — not counting the billions the education establishment received, and then largely did not spend, during the pandemic.
In other words, it could be done. The public school system just decided not to do it.
In retrospect, the outcomes seem obvious. Across the country, most Catholic schools stayed open and kept teaching students, while most public schools closed and offered at best a paltry attempt at actual remote learning.
The decision to stay open and keep teaching students was an extraordinarily bold one. As Porter-Magee recently noted, it was made amid substantial uncertainty and constant rhetoric from teachers’ unions and their allies that reopening schools “was tantamount to murder.”
The fear-mongering rhetoric never came true, of course. And thanks to the brave decisions and hard work of Catholic school leaders across the country, neither did the massive learning loss that plagues public schools today.
Families across the country have rewarded Catholic schools for standing in the gap when it mattered. Catholic-school enrollment is soaring, while public-school enrollment plummets.
After many years of struggles for Catholic schools, with pillars of the community forced to close when they could no longer make ends meet, this is a welcome change. But more must be done.
Despite recent growth, many Catholic schools operate at a financial loss. That’s because the average cost to families doesn’t come close to capturing all the expenses involved. To make up the difference, Catholic schools rely heavily on private donors, diocesan support and endless work of administrators who are dedicated to the mission of Catholic education.
But there is another option to make Catholic education sustainable for another generation: school choice.
In leading school-choice states like Florida, Catholic school enrollment growth was especially strong, and schools have not faced the same types of existential struggles as many in other states regularly do.
When parents can redirect some of their education tax dollars to the schools of their choice, many choose Catholic schools — and many schools no longer face the same financial burdens as before.
School choice offers a solution to ensure that the growth Catholic schools are experiencing now continues into the next generation. As an added bonus, there is compelling evidence that school choice helps public schools as well.
For Catholics, education is core to our identity. As the Catechism says, “Parents have the right to choose a school for them which corresponds to their own convictions. This right is fundamental,” and “public authorities have the duty of guaranteeing this parental right and of ensuring concrete conditions for its exercise.”
During the pandemic, leaders across the country proved their dedication to this mission by keeping students learning in historically challenging conditions.
They succeeded where the system failed. As we continue to learn more about the scale of the challenge ahead of us to clean up the disaster of the last few years, lawmakers should pass the types of programs that ensure Catholic schools can remain strong for another generation who will need them.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/15/why-catholic-schools-didnt-fail-while-public-ones-did-during-covid/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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18 November, 2022
Father Banned From Kids’ School After Speaking Up at School Board Meeting
Luis Sousa was ordered not to enter his children’s school after he spoke up at a school board meeting.
Now, the father is taking the local Massachusetts school district to court.
The ban by the school system impedes Sousa’s “right to observe his government … [and] participate in government,” his attorney, Marc John Randazza, told The Daily Signal during a phone interview Tuesday.
Sousa’s children, ages 5 and 6, are enrolled in Mildred H. Aitken School, part of Seekonk Public Schools in southern Massachusetts, about 70 miles west of Cape Cod.
Here’s what happened to their dad.
Sousa sought to attend a Jan. 5 meeting of the Seekonk School Committee to address the school district’s masking policy. However, when he arrived, the time for public comment had concluded and the committee was holding a private executive session.
Upon being denied entry, Sousa stood outside the window of the room where committee members were meeting and began to protest for his right to give a public comment.
“Why are we not allowed in the meeting?” Sousa asked while standing outside, according to a video provided to The Daily Signal by Randazza. “You canceled two meetings. Why can’t we go?”
Committee Chairman Kim Sluter called the Seekonk Police Department, according to Sousa’s complaint filed in court. The complaint states that Sluter “lied to the police that Sousa was ‘banging on the windows’ and that he was some kind of physical threat.”
Sluter did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Following the incident, Schools Superintendent Rich Drolet issued a temporary “no trespass” order.
That order was lifted after a few months, Randazza said.
Nearly nine months later, on Sept. 26, Sousa’s wife Kanessa Lynn made public comments during another school board meeting. She was asking to donate conservative podcaster Matt Walsh’s book “Johnny the Walrus” to the school, Randazza said.
When the committee told her that the allotted time had expired, Sousa yelled from the back of the room: “I’ll wait till my wife’s done.” Lynn was told to sit down.
“So, you should have had a meeting two weeks ago,” her husband told the committee.
The committee called a recess and Sousa said, “This meeting is a joke” before Drolet asked him to leave. A school resource officer entered the meeting room and escorted Sousa out.
The next day, Drolet notified Sousa that he intended to issue a permanent “no trespass” order. Sousa met with the superintendent Oct. 3 to discuss the looming order.
They talked about the incident in January when Sousa stood outside asking why he couldn’t attend the school board’s closed-door meeting.
“We did the temporary no trespass order last [school] year based on, you know, an outburst outside the windows here where you were screaming and video-recording through the window,” Drolet told Sousa during their meeting, which Sousa recorded with the superintendent’s knowledge.
“Let me correct you there,” Sousa said. “There was no screaming, there was no banging on the windows, like that report said.”
The two proceeded to disagree over whether Sousa yelled.
“I’m Portuguese,” Sousa told the superintendent. “Portuguese people are loud, we use our hands, just like Italians. They are loud. We speak loud. I’m also bipolar. I’m not screaming, I’m not yelling, I’m diagnosed bipolar.”
“It’s a difference of opinion, I guess,” Drolet said.
The 13-minute meeting ended with Drolet informing Sousa that the no trespassing order was in effect immediately. Sousa said the school district would be hearing from his lawyers.
The following day, Oct. 4, Drolet issued the permanent order in writing.
“Please be advised that you are forbidden from entering upon the premises of Seekonk Public Schools, including the grounds and inside any building,” Drolet told Sousa in the letter, adding that he is “not allowed to attend any Seekonk Public Schools-related functions or events.”
The letter explains that Sousa may attend parent-teacher conferences for his children or a back-to-school night only if he gives the superintendent’s office at least 48 hours’ written notice. Similarly, Sousa may be able to attend events at his children’s school if he asks permission no less than two days in advance.
Sousa may be “subject to criminal trespass and other offenses as provided for by law” if he violates the order, Drolet said in the letter.
Because public schools in Seekonk are used as polling locations, under the order Sousa “has to ask the superintendent of schools for permission to vote,” his lawyer said.
“Seekonk’s behavior is a disgrace,” Sousa told The Daily Signal in a text Tuesday, referring to the school district. “Superintendent Drolet is holding my kids’ well-being hostage, because his unconstitutional acts tell me that he doesn’t like that I don’t agree with him.”
In the text, Sousa also criticized Sluter, the school board chairwoman, for what he said she did:
School Committee Chairwoman Sluter provably gave a false report to the police about my protest because, I can only surmise, she wanted the police to think there was a real emergency. And I’m the one in trouble? I’m the one who can’t go to pick my kids up at school, can’t go to government meetings, can’t even VOTE without begging Drolet for the privilege?
For the rest of my life? This is outrageous, and I hope that we have a judge with integrity. If we do, I win. If she is merely part of the establishment, I guess I will have to spend the rest of my life effectively banished from any kind of public life.
“You don’t get to be judge, jury, and executioner … and decide without any kind of a hearing, without any kind of due process, that you’re going to banish somebody for life from public participation,” Randazza said of the superintendent’s order regarding Sousa.
Sousa and his lawyer filed a motion Friday in U.S. District Court for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to allow Sousa to enter school buildings again.
“The Seekonk School Committee supports the right of free speech of all Seekonk residents,” John Davis, a lawyer representing the school system, told The Daily Signal in an email Tuesday. Davis added:
The School Committee also recognizes, however, that at times public expression at open meetings may unreasonably disrupt or interfere with the ability of the Committee to conduct important school business in an efficient and orderly manner.
Such disruptions and interference are rare, But when and if they occur, the School Committee is committed to taking all appropriate measures to restore order so that the great work of Seekonk Public School administrators, students, and staff may continue unimpeded.
Randazza argues that the superintendent’s order banning Sousa violates his First Amendment right to free speech, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“These people who claim to be in it for the kids, I think they’re in it for the political power,” Randazza told The Daily Signal, “because it’s just … so petty and small.”
The school district has until Nov. 28 to respond to the court complaint, Randazza said, and the judge will set a hearing on the motion for an injunction.
“But every single day that goes by,” he said, “Seekonk schools are holding this guy’s kids’ well-being hostage.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/16/exclusive-father-banned-from-kids-school-after-speaking-up-at-school-board-meeting
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Woke Ivy League Princeton University will now offer students paying $79k-a-year courses in BDSM, fetishism and body positivity in 2023
Notoriously woke Princeton University will start offering courses in BDSM, fetishism and body positivity in 2023.
The $79,000-a-year Ivy League's course catalogue for the Spring 2023 semester includes classes on 'Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture,' 'FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body' and 'Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization: Fetishism and Decolonization.'
Those courses would be taught by arts professors, dance professors and scholars, and would require students to read books like The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM and Pornography, Queering Fat Embodiment and On the Worship of the Fetish Gods.
Students at the school are now speaking out against the BDSM course offering, likening it to the university 'forcing undergrads to smoke a cigarette to study its effects.'
Classes at the New Jersey school cost $57,410, while students must also pay $10,960 in room fees, a $7,670 board rate and $3,500 in miscellaneous expenses — bringing the total cost up to $79,540.
But in September, university officials announced it will offer a 'free ride' for most undergraduate students from families making under $100,000, including tuition, accommodation and food.
Among the courses offered at the Ivy League next semester is 'Black and Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture,' taught by Lewis Center for the Arts lecturer Tiona Nekkia McClodden.
The course description says students 'will explore the material culture of this community from three perspectives: Architecture + Location, Visual Artists and Exhibitions, and Black Queer BDSM communities.'
As part of the course, students will also conduct 'significant research focus on finding and presenting new materials.'
They will also 'survey... existing BDSM archives in research libraries, community groups and individuals and their personal ephemera.'
It is unclear what kind of research the students will be expected to conduct, but Merriam-Webster defines BDSM, which stands for 'bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism' as 'sexual activity involving such practices as the use of physical restraints, the granting and relinquishing of control, and the infliction of pain.'
The sample reading list for the course includes books like Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism by Amber Jamilla Musser, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography by Ariane Cruz and The Black Body In Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography by Jennifer C. Nash.
Also on the list is A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography by Dr. Mirelle Miller, an associate professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara who describes herself on Twitter as a 'smut collector.'
Miller had previously been arrested for getting into a physical altercation with a pro-life teenage student in 2014, and was sentenced to community service, anger management classes and was required to pay $493 in restitution to the teen.
The BDSM course has already sparked backlash amongst students who see it as inappropriate to teach college-age students.
'The primary issue I take with this course is its employment of pornography,' junior Paul Fletcher told College Fix. 'In the course description, pornographic content is required reading.
'Pornographic content of this sort is highly addictive, particularly to men and women of college age, often correlating with severe anxiety and depression,' he claimed. 'Students cannot just watch it, "study it," without consuming it.'
He added: 'This is the equivalent of a Princeton course requiring every student to smoke a cigarette each week and "study" its effects. This course has no place in a university that prioritizes the well-being of its students.
'The concern here... is the university-funded imposition of something potentially harmful and addictive by faculty onto students,' said Fletcher, who serves as the president of the Princeton chapter of Anscombe Society — an undergraduate organization that promotes traditional views of sex, love and marriage.
Sophomore Julianna Lee, who serves as the club's vice president, also said she is 'shocked that such a course is being taught at Princeton.
'Cultural discourse and understanding are good things, but there is no need to do it in such a way that students are exposed to content that has been scientifically proven to be harmful,' she said.
Lee added that 'plenty of people would be opposed to the idea of glorifying domestic abuse or gun violence, so why is it OK to have a class dedicated to concepts that promote unsafe sexual practices.'
She then went on to say that she has never seen a course at the school dedicated to traditional understandings of sexuality.
'I have not yet seen a single course here dedicated to exploring what it means to love in such a way that minimizes damage, including a clear dating timeline and how to truly will the good of another.'
Meanwhile, other courses would have students studying body positivity and the history of fetishes
FAT: The F-word and the Public Body, is a returning course at the school, taught by Judith Hamera, a dance professor.
Students in that course, would discuss what it means to be fat and 'will examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness using dance, performance, memoirs, and media texts as case studies.'
The suggested reading for that class includes Queering Fat Embodiment by Cat Pause et al and The Neoliberal Diet by Gerardo Otero.
And a third course offered at the school next semester, entitled Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization would be taught by research scholar Milad Odabaei.
It vows to introduce students 'to the anthropology of religion, and a key debate of the field on the fetish.
'Students will learn about the colonial history of the study of religion and the role of fetishism therein,' the course description says.
'They will gain the tools to critically intervene in ongoing conversations about race, sexuality, cultural difference and decolonization by becoming familiar with debates on fetishism in anthropology, critical theory and black and queer studies.'
Readings for that course include On the Worship of the Fetish Gods' by Charles De Brosses, The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof by Karl Marx and Fetishism by Sigmund Freud.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11439881/Ivy-League-Princeton-offer-courses-BDSM-gender-sexuality-race-2023.html
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Cut the fat in the Australian curriculum. There’s a lot in the curriculum kids can live without.
The recent release of the 2022 NAPLAN results were met with a collective sigh of relief from governments and the education sector after the doomsday prediction of students suffering significant learning setbacks due to the Covid pandemic did not occur.
While it is undoubtedly a good thing that the damage to our students was limited from the catastrophic public policy failure that was Australia’s pandemic response, the latest NAPLAN results should surprise and concern us all.
For example, the national Grade 3 reading results placed 95.5 per cent of students at or above the National Minimum Standard in 2022, compared to 95.9 per cent in the previous two tests in 2021 and 2019. Likewise, Grade 3 numeracy shows similarly consistent results with 95 per cent, compared with 95.4 per cent and 95.5 per cent in 2021 and 2019, respectively, and writing, equally consistent, with 96.2, 96.7 and 96.3 per cent of students at or above the National Minimum Standard.
Based on these figures it would appear that almost two years of lockdown made no difference to the Grade 3 cohort. The results also suggest that those parents of Grade 3 students – who during Covid were likely working from home, juggling family responsibilities, are unqualified, and lacked access to usual teaching resources – did just as well as their child’s school could have.
But how can that be?
Given the knee-jerk lockdowns in Victoria, often announced with less than two-hour’s notice, teachers were asked to perform miracles and provide a curriculum for parents to teach their children with no notice and achieved this by focusing only on the core items.
A Melbourne Prep teacher told the Institute of Public Affairs’ Class Action program about her experience immediately after hearing her school would be forced to close due to a snap lockdown;
‘I ran off heaps of worksheets for parents focusing on numbers and I gathered a selection of appropriate readers for each child and sent it all home in folders. It was pretty basic, but I knew it would do the trick. There’s a lot in the curriculum kids can live without.’
The Grade 3 NAPLAN results are testament to the great job teachers and parents did and, yet again, reinforces that foundational skills are pivotal to setting students up for success.
Yet, the very same NAPLAN results also highlighted what happens when the basics are not taught to students. Of all Year 9 students, 23.5 per cent are at or below the minimum national standard and shockingly, almost 15 per cent of Year 9 boys did not meet the National Minimum Standard for reading.
Federal Minister for Education, Jason Clare, sought to dismiss these worrying figures by saying, ‘It’s not clear whether that’s Covid, but I would suspect that’s a big part of it.’ Sorry Minister, the standard ‘Covid caused it’ excuse doesn’t pass the test here.
While the current crop of Year 9 students has shown stable results in numeracy every year since they were first tested, their reading and spelling results tell a different story. The percentage of this cohort at least achieving the National Minimum Standards in reading when in Grade 3 was 95.1 per cent, in Grade 5 was 94.9 per cent which has now fallen in Year 9 to 89.6 per cent. Spelling shows a similar decline from 94.4 per cent when they were in Grade 3 and 5, which has now fallen to 91.8 per cent.
If the pandemic is to blame for these worrying reading and spelling results, as Jason Clare suggests, then why did these students’ numeracy results stay consistent?
Could it be more fundamental? Could it be the teaching methods these students have been exposed to since the time they started their schooling?
This cohort of students have been exposed to the widely used teaching method of ‘whole word’ and ‘inquiry’ approach to learning to read and spell. These methods have rightly been criticised by many as the culprit of falling standards for failing to provide students with the necessary foundation and analytical skills required to understand more sophisticated language.
NAPLAN is sometimes criticised as a myopic view of a child’s development because it only tells part of their story, and there is some merit to this argument. However, what it does provide parents is an independent and objective radar for whether their child is grasping the basics, and the truth of the matter is that many students are simply not.
Just throwing more money into education as some teachers’ unions would like to see is clearly not the answer. Institute of Public Affairs research shows in Victoria, since 2014, spending on education has increased by 30 per cent, yet critical reading and numeracy results have not increased in a commensurate manner.
And Covid is definitely not the culprit the Federal Minister of Education would have us believe.
If we learn anything from the pandemic, it is that students need to be taught the basics if they are to have a solid foundation for future study. Under pressure to produce lesson plans before being locked down, many teachers recognised the amount of unnecessary fat in the curriculum and when given the freedom to dismiss it, achieved great results.
We need to get serious about fixing the curriculum taught to our children, and it’s time we got back to basics.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/cut-the-fat-in-the-curriculum/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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17 November, 2022
The systemic racism of the teachers' unions
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”
One of the glaring outrages of the case is that the two national teachers unions – the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers – filed amicus briefs in which they pound the racial bean counting drum. The unions insist that “diversity” must remain a factor in choosing who gets to be admitted into a given college.
The NEA brief claims that “elementary and secondary schools remain heavily segregated. In the 2019–2020 school year, the average White student attended a majority White school. By contrast, students of color are far more likely to attend schools where the majority of students are also students of color.”
The irony of the teachers unions’ deploring racism in education is glaring, because it is the very same unions that essentially imprison children – notably poor children of color – in substandard public schools. Specifically, the union-mandated collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), in place throughout most of the country, bring to light why government-run schools fail so many kids.
Collective bargaining, a term first introduced into the lexicon by socialist Beatrice Webb in 1891, is a process of negotiations between employers and employees aimed at reaching agreements that set wage scales, work rules, etc.
In reality, CBAs dictate that teachers unions don’t treat teachers as professionals, but rather as interchangeable widgets, all of whom are of equal value and competence. To differentiate between effective and ineffective educators as a result of what their students actually learn would necessitate doing away with their industrial-style work rules. Those include one-size-fits-all salary scales, tenure (contractually known as “permanence”) and seniority or “last in, first out (LIFO), whereby if a teacher must be laid off due to budgetary belt-tightening, it is not the least talented teacher who is on the chopping block, but rather the newest hire.
Regarding salaries, teacher quality doesn’t matter a whit to teacher union honchos, only the number of years he or she has on the job. The other way teachers can increase their salary is by taking “professional development classes” which typically have no impact on student learning.
Permanence clauses make it just about impossible to fire an incompetent teacher. In California, it was revealed during a court case in 2012 that on average just 2.2 of California’s 300,000 teachers (0.0008%) are dismissed yearly for unprofessional conduct or unsatisfactory performance.
The arbitrariness of seniority based decisions is epitomized by Bhavini Bhakta, a teacher-of-the-year who lost teaching positions in four southern California schools over eight years because she lacked seniority. One of her ongoing encounters with LIFO involved a situation where either she or another teacher-of-the-year – who was hired on the same day – was to be laid off. The district had the teachers pull numbered popsicle sticks out of a hat to see which one kept her job. Ms. Bhakta got a lower number and thus lost her position, yet again. Also, The New Teacher Project found that only 13% to 16% of the teachers laid off in a seniority-based system would also be cut under a system based on teacher effectiveness.
Many studies have borne out the harm of CBAs to America’s children. In 2013, an analysis by the University of Chicago showed that strong unions have a greater impact on student proficiency rates in math and reading than weak unions. The researchers found that a $233 rise in union dues per teacher causes student math and reading scores to drop almost 4 percentage points. Also, a $14 increase in union spending per student results in a 3 percentage point decrease in math and reading scores. The reason for the correlation between spending and test scores is that powerful teachers unions are able to get laws passed that protect their interests, and make it more difficult to implement child-friendly reforms that boost student achievement.
Released in 2019, “The Long-run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining,” a study by researchers Michael Lovenheim and Alexander Willen, found that, among men, exposure to a collective bargaining law in the first 10 years after passage depresses students’ future annual earnings by $2,134 (3.93%). The negative effect of CBAs is particularly pronounced among Black and Hispanic males. In these two subgroups, annual earnings decline by $3,246 (9.43 percent), and at the same time, employment and labor force participation are reduced.
Another way the unions have done great damage to children, especially minorities, was their insistence on shutting down schools during the Covid pandemic. Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and D.C., researchers found that “shifts to remote or hybrid instruction during 2020-21 had profound consequences on student achievement. In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in-person, “there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools in math (and less widening in reading).”
Additionally, a study by Amplify, a curriculum and assessment provider, examined test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states. It found that the shutdowns led to a spike in students unable to read at grade level, with literacy losses “disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades. The study revealed that during the 2021-2022 school year, 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second graders fell behind on literacy and needed “intensive intervention,” compared to 26% of their white peers.
Of course, if any students try to break out of their public school prisons, the teachers unions are standing at the schoolhouse door fighting tooth-and nail against any kind of parental choice.
Clearly, the NEA, an organization that frequently rails about “systemic racism,” is guilty of that sin. Yiddish maven Leo Rosten wrote that the word “chutzpah” can best be exemplified by a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. The union’s chutzpah on beating the systemic racism drum, while acting in a way that ruins the lives of many minority kids, is another suitable example.
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/the-systemic-racism-of-the-teachers-unions
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Gettysburg College postpones event for people tired of ‘White cis men’
Gettysburg College has postponed a painting and writing event hosted by its Gender Sexuality and Resource Center for people who are “Tired of White cis men.”
The private Pennsylvania college offered the event as part of a peace and justice, or “P&J,” senior project but has since postponed it after it was shared online.
The event, originally scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 12, told people to “come paint and write about” how they are tired of straight, White men.
The pieces from the event would then be displayed in the school’s dining hall for the campus to view.
One anonymous Gettysburg alumnus told Fox News Digital that he was “pretty upset” by the event and that “as a White, cis male, the fact that basically people are being allowed to discriminate based on sexuality and race is not something that was ever in the Gettysburg that was taught to me.”
“Even as a conservative, the one thing Gettysburg used to always strive for was diversity, equity and inclusion but in an actual good way that you could have conservatives, you could have liberals, you could have actual conversations,” he said. “You could have that academic back and forth as a liberal arts college.”
The alumnus told Fox News Digital that he believes the event was postponed because “they thought they were going to get away with it” until “it got shared on to an Instagram thing with 2 million people.”
“And a bunch of people saw it, and they went, ‘What the heck?’” he said, adding that he believes the event sends a “negative” message to Gettysburg alumni and potential donors.
“I hope that they take this as a learning experience and push back on some of this wokeness that you’ve seen, because the primary focus of school should be to educate the next generation and make sure that we have a society that continues to function and think critically,” he said.
A current senior at Gettysburg College who spoke on anonymity over fear of punishment told Fox News Digital that they were “not surprised at all that a poster like this is spread through the college, considering there was a public drag show in the middle of campus three or four weeks prior to this.”
“Normally, rhetoric on posters of this nature tends to be more inclusive and welcoming to the target student groups. But this rhetoric is simply divisive,” the student said. “The faculty on campus always preaches unity among students on campus but never actually do anything to enact this unity.”
“The school should not allow this type of rhetoric as it openly and boldly defies what the college says they want to achieve from their student body,” the senior continued.
The student said this “incident, like many other incidences that have occurred at Gettysburg College, makes me feel as if the school is incompetent” and that the “school no longer allows students to speak freely, they only allow ideas and concerns of students to be heard that fit their ideas that the school would like to promote.”
“The school does not have an accurate grasp of how students truly feel about the college,” the student said. “Most are angered and discouraged that the school is improving not just from this event but many other events that have occurred before this.”
This is not the first incident of its kind to occur at a college campus in America. In 2019, Yale student Isis Davis-Marks wrote an op-ed that pledged to monitor and collect dirt on White men on campus in order to undermine them in potential future confirmation hearings later in life.
“I’m watching you, white boy,” the student wrote.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/14/gettysburg-college-postpones-event-for-people-tired-of-white-cis-men/
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Red State Coalition Halts Biden’s Cancellation of Student Loan Debt
Efforts to challenge presidential priorities in court are akin to military campaigns with opening salvos, intermittent skirmishes, daring attacks, and bold defenses. In many respects, the legal battles over President Joe Biden’s executive action canceling federal student loan debts fit this pattern.
The latest news from the front is a victory, albeit a preliminary one, for the challengers. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals entered an order Monday temporarily preventing the Biden administration from canceling any student debt.
The 8th Circuit currently is considering a lower court’s ruling that a coalition of six states led by Missouri lack standing to challenge student loan cancellation.
Under long-established legal rules, nobody can bring a lawsuit unless he first can show that he has standing (i.e., a concrete injury caused by debt cancellation and fixable by the courts).
Missouri argues that it has standing because it has a state agency, the Higher Education Loan Authority of the State of Missouri, that services student loans and stands to lose millions of dollars if the Biden administration cancels those loans.
The state also argues that it has standing because money that the Higher Education Loan Authority earns is invested in the state’s public colleges, and thus a reduction in its income will reduce the schools’ funding.
The 8th Circuit appears to agree that Missouri has standing. Based on the court’s order, the state’s interrelation with the Higher Education Loan Authority—whether statutory, financial, or both—is likely sufficient for Missouri to sue over the Biden administration’s plans for student loans.
The appeals court didn’t squarely address whether Biden has the authority he claims to cancel the debts of millions of student borrowers. But it acknowledged that “[w]hatever the eventual outcome of this case, it will affect the finances of millions of Americans with student loan debt as well as those Americans who pay taxes to finance the government and indeed everyone who is affected by such far-reaching fiscal decisions.”
This prompted the court to pause the impending debt cancellation and preserve the status quo while the plan’s ultimate legality is assessed. Although the case before the 8th Circuit involves only six states, the court’s order prevents the administration from forgiving loans nationwide.
So, where does this ruling fit in the broader fight over student debt cancellation? Before this decision, standing had been favorable ground for the Biden administration to defend. In a matter of weeks, it convinced the Supreme Court to turn aside two would-be challengers to the plan, both of whom lacked the concrete, particular injury needed to establish standing.
The states’ win on standing is procedural—it doesn’t resolve the legality of Biden’s plan, and the general pause on loan forgiveness will remain in place only until the 8th Circuit rules on the case before it.
Still, the win has significant implications beyond the temporary pause. Now that at least one state, Missouri, appears to have standing, the courts must answer the fundamental question: Does Biden have the power to cancel $400 billion in student debt without specific congressional authorization?
In fact, one lower court already has reached this question and answered it in the negative. A federal judge in Texas ruled Thursday that the HEROES Act, the 2003 statute on which Biden bases his action, doesn’t provide any authority to cancel student debt. The court, therefore, found the administration’s debt cancellation plan unlawful and vacated in its entirely.
If Biden’s actions have already been vacated by the federal court in Texas, what does the 8th Circuit’s decision add? In a word, security. The Texas decision charged headlong into the merits of the dispute, largely bypassing important skirmish lines like the standing question.
This left the ruling vulnerable on its flank, and the Biden administration, which immediately appealed the decision, is poised to turn that flank and have the decision overruled.
Missouri, by contrast, occupies stronger ground and is better positioned than any other current litigant to sustain its attack.
When standing is disposed of, the Biden administration will have less room for maneuver. Missouri and its compatriot states can then concentrate their fire where the administration’s defenses are weakest: the argument that a 20-year-old statute with no mention of debt cancellation authorizes Biden to erase the debt of 40 million borrowers.
A pitched battle on student loans looms. If Missouri prevails before the 8th Circuit, the campaign will likely shift eastward and be fought to a conclusion before the Supreme Court, with congressional antagonists looking idly on from across Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, some 26 million borrowers have already applied for debt cancellation. With Congress locked in its habitual torpor, both borrowers and taxpayers must await the outcome of another round of “lawfare” in the federal courts.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/15/red-state-coalition-halts-bidens-cancellation-of-student-loan-debt
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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16 November, 2022
Kayla Patrick’s Not-So-Soft Bigotry
Being a Democrat means never having to say you’re sorry — even for being a racist. And nowhere is that more clearly the case than with Kayla Patrick, who works for Joe Biden in the Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development.
Patrick, who has a master’s in education policy from Columbia University and a bachelor’s in political science from Wellesley College, and has been with Team Biden since February, said this last year during her keynote address at an event called Policy Pathways’ 3rd Annual Fall Celebration: “School discipline is a symptom of a racist and punitive system that often fails to see children as children. … So black girls are more likely to be disciplined, frankly, because black girls experience race- and sex-based discrimination in classrooms. They are disciplined often for simply being black.”
There’s more where that came from. “In other settings, we would consider self-advocacy or assertiveness a leadership skill,” she said. “But when black girls do it in schools, they are often suspended for being loud, defiant, or talking back.”
“These aren’t just consequences,” Patrick said of the belief that good order and discipline are necessary components of an orderly classroom. “These are actions that leave too many black girls stuck in the school-to-poverty pipeline. And this doesn’t just happen because black students inherently behave different than white students. They absolutely don’t. This happens because racism is baked into school discipline and dress code policies.”
What’s sad here is that eight years ago, the Obama administration was making the same rotten raced-based arguments. As the great Thomas Sowell wrote then:
Attorney General [Eric] Holder’s threats of legal action against schools where minority students are disciplined more often than he wants are a much more sweeping and damaging blow to the education of poor and minority students across the country.
Among the biggest obstacles to educating children in many ghetto schools are disruptive students whose antics, threats and violence can make education virtually impossible. If only 10 percent of the students are this way, that sacrifices the education of the other 90 percent.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Kayla Patrick, though, is not only an opponent of discipline; she’s also a fan of racial quotas — at least where education is concerned. “So in this country,” she complains, “nearly 80% of the teachers are white. And sometimes their mindsets are based solely in whiteness. So that means when they come into school, they have predisposed mindsets about who black children are, what they need to wear, and how they need to behave. And so instead of celebrating their identities and cultures, schools often erase them.”
Thus, Patrick seems to be making a segregationist argument — one that harkens back to the Jim Crow Democrats of the pre-Civil Rights era: Blacks are better off being taught be blacks, not those whose “mindsets are based solely in whiteness.”
We’re not sure what counts as “white” with Patrick, but given that blacks represent around 14% of the U.S. population, that would make for a quota of around 86% non-black teachers. Interestingly, Patrick didn’t complain about the fact that blacks represent 70% of the NFL’s players and 75% of the NBA’s players. Where’s the quota-driven outrage?
If we’re going to start calling for racial quotas, we should be consistent, right?
As for maintaining color-blind order in the classroom, this isn’t so much racism as it is commonsensism. And any call by excuse-making educational bureaucrats like Kayla Patrick to administer discipline with respect to the color of a student’s skin reminds us of what George W. Bush referred to more than two decades ago as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/92816-kayla-patricks-not-so-soft-bigotry-2022-11-14
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Parental Rebellion Pays Off: Conservatives Win School Board Seats
The midterm elections didn’t quite sweep Democrats out of power. However, some positive developments occurred, especially in noteworthy state and local elections.
The parental rebellion against wokeness, radical gender ideology, and misguided COVID-19 policies continued, producing some solid results in school board elections across America. Again, it wasn’t a red tidal wave, but commonsense candidates found success in an arena long dominated by the Left and public sector unions.
Unions still dominate at the local level—in both organization and money—but the landscape is changing.
Though they are often “nonpartisan,” school board elections have become a serious battleground in debates over K-12 education. Nonpartisan does not mean that there isn’t a serious debate about ideas. As local schools—even in “red” districts—increasingly promoted critical race theory and radical gender ideology alongside stringent COVID-19 lockdowns, parents began organizing in earnest.
What we’ve seen in the past few years is organized parental groups insisting on having their voices heard in school board meetings—much to the consternation of Attorney General Merrick Garland. They’ve put forth candidates to transform school boards from the inside too.
A few national organizations, such as the 1776 Project PAC and Moms for Liberty, added much-needed support and financial backing for citizens to step into the arena to save their local schools.
For instance, Bridget Ziegler, a Florida mom who not only won her Sarasota County School Board election back in August, now helps educate other potential candidates as the Leadership Institute’s director of school board programs.
This kind of organization and institutional support has proved invaluable and means that campaigns once dominated by left-leaning insiders are now open and competitive.
Over the past year, the 1776 Project says it has flipped more than 100 races nationwide.
And some big wins came during the midterm elections. These groups helped flip school board elections in Florida, Maryland, Indiana, and Michigan, according to The Daily Caller.
“Of the 67 candidates Moms for Liberty supported in Florida school board elections, 41 won,” the Caller reported.
An impressive record, especially given that many of the group’s candidates are political neophytes, running for office for the first time in their lives.
The Left has taken notice. Big, left-wing media outlets are starting to write lengthy hit job pieces on Moms for Liberty. The message: The notion that critical race theory has embedded itself into K-12 education is a right-wing fantasy, but trying to stop it is racist.
The New Yorker, for instance, said that such efforts were a “manufactured culture war over critical race theory.” If the culture war is manufactured, why is the Left so concerned about it? Maybe left-wing activists are just nervous that someone is fighting back and not simply ceding schools to them without a fight.
Here’s how the New Yorker described victories for education freedom—a phrase it put in scare quotes—in the midterms:
A clown-car school board race in Charleston, South Carolina, ended with five out of nine seats going to Moms for Liberty-backed candidates. Governor Ron DeSantis—the maestro of Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ legislation and a home-state hero to Moms for Liberty—endorsed six school board candidates, all of whom won their races; Moms for Liberty endorsed a total of 12 in Florida, winning nine. In Texas, 10 out of 15 spots on the state school board appeared to be going to Republicans, including three seats in which GOP incumbents either lost or dropped out of their primary when facing opponents who took a harder line against CRT.
Bad news for The New Yorker is good news for America.
Saving education in this country is a multifront battle. Of course, school choice opportunities for parents and students are essential. Florida, for instance, has by many measures, one of the best set of school choice programs in the country.
But plenty of students continue to attend public schools. Despite what the Left says, parents have every right to shape education in those schools too.
Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had a great response Monday to the National Education Association, the largest public sector union in the United States, after the NEA’s Twitter account suggested that teachers know what’s best for children.
That parents are participating in school board elections is a great thing for self-government in America. Those who are so insistent that “democracy” is under threat apparently are upset by this development.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/14/parents-opposition-to-wokeness-produces-notable-victories-in-school-board-elections/
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The disturbing Australian school environment today
<i>As described by a 13 year old girl -- below</i>
School is a great place to be with friends and learn new skills. I am a student in Year 7 and I want to tell you about the stressors I have been finding at school and in every day for those who would like to listen.
Firstly, living through Covid, lockdowns and new vaccines has been a scary time. There was a lot of talk about Covid, with adults often scaring us kids with the things they told us. A teacher in primary school told us that we could die from getting Covid. After that, I was worried about my family and I thought I would die if I got sick which made me scared to go to school.
The vaccines came out for people who were working. My mum got vaccinated for her job, but she got really sick after and it has changed her and now it feels different. I don’t think people understand how much stress we have been through in the past year. I didn’t get vaccinated in case I got sick too.
One of my friends was so worried about me not being vaccinated that she begged me to wear a mask even when I was eating, which is a pretty tricky thing to do. She has since had Covid and said sorry for being so worried about catching it from me.
At school, masks were required to be worn no matter how hot it was. We would have problems breathing and felt like we would pass out. I felt like I would gasp for air when I was allowed to take it off and so did my friends. How is getting Covid any different from getting the flu before? We used to get really sick before, but no one was forced to wear masks at school. We just practiced good hygiene and stayed at home when we were sick to stop the spread.
Lockdowns were really hard on all us kids. We worried about our families and friends and also missed them a lot. One thing that affected me the most was working from home. I know the teachers were trying their best, but they were unprepared and we didn’t get to learn as much due to the technical issues. I felt stressed because I wanted to catch up with my learning before Year 7, but I am still finding gaps in what I should know.
Secondly, cultural discrimination. Learning about Aboriginals and their culture is so cool! But the information is now a weapon of discrimination. When I was younger, teachers guilted me because of my skin colour, making me think it was my fault that half-blood Aboriginals were taken from their families. I cried and felt ashamed to be who I am. This year, when I entered Year 7, I met this girl whose grandmother is half-Aboriginal and looked similar to me. She called me European and excluded me by saying hurtful comments about ‘European people’ followed by ‘no offence’. I felt hurt.
Another lesson the teacher taught us ‘white people’ was that only Aboriginals could do Aboriginal art. They also said that only Aboriginal people could have a deep connection with their land. I felt hurt. Growing up in the bush and loving the flora and fauna of my area had become so much part of my life. I felt like a local connected with the land. I appreciated the Aboriginal culture, but felt that we were being pushed away like we were not good enough to appreciate where we live or the culture of the Aboriginal people.
I have always loved Australia, where I feel I belong. I had an assignment about Aboriginals and my thoughts. In my response I wrote, ‘I feel a connection with this land, I was born here and raised here and lived here.’
If I don’t belong here, then where do I belong? I know this place I call home is a home to all no matter what race. If someone shames me for the people of my ancestry, I feel I should stand up for who I am and what I experience.
My father was not a good person. He did bad things to me. Thankfully he is not in my life anymore and I am loved and cared for. That makes me ask though, am I to blame for his actions? I am not my father and I am not my ancestors. I should not be blamed for anyone else’s actions. I can only be the best person I know how to be.
In a class at the beginning of the year, my teacher was very political and made me feel uncomfortable to be around her. She would voice her opinions in class. She stated ‘women are much smarter than men, and that’s why more women were at university and women are the key to our future’. She also said men are abusive to women and said women should have more rights than men. It didn’t make sense to any of the students. We were all extremely uncomfortable. I found it rude and unjust to state her views with such anger. I felt sad for the boys in my class and also felt angry because I have a brother who I love and don’t like people pulling him down because he is male.
I believe that equality for men and women would mean no one pulls down the other sex, and that we appreciate the differences and similarities between each other. I hope that we can all find a place to appreciate both men and women and not criticise each other because of skin colour, ancestry, sex, or sexual preferences – where we can learn to be kind to one another instead of judging and lumping everyone into a category.
Sexualized themes are being pushed into very young people. I am in Year 7 and over 50 per cent of girls believe they are bi, pan etc. 100 per cent of the boys in my class believe they are gay. I have no problems with what they want to do, but I am in Year 7… Why are so many people worried about their sexual preferences? I have felt pressure to identify my sexual identity at school and I am just a kid. I was bullied because I was not interested. I thought school was about Maths, English, History, Art, Science etc. I feel that there is so much talk about this stuff that kids are being pushed into something they don’t understand. Shouldn’t that be for when they are older and ready to date? I’m only 13-years-old.
My cousin has two friends who are very particular about their pronouns and get angry when my cousin accidentally gets them mixed up. One prefers she/them and the other they/them. I thought pronouns are referring to another person and not to the person directly, so why are they offended, unless the person is saying mean things about them. I feel really confused. Going from primary school to high school has been difficult with all these changes and I feel I have needed to grow up before I am ready. I think the kids are too worried about things that don’t matter. People get my name wrong all the time and I don’t mind. I just don’t understand why it wasn’t an issue in primary and now it is?
Since starting high school, I’ve been really stressed with all of the things that I have been talking about affecting me daily. I have developed high anxiety. I struggle every day. I feel unsafe and uncomfortable and I don’t want to go to school anymore. I am a good student. I work hard and want to learn, but now I feel under attack. I feel excluded and constantly worried that I will say the wrong thing or be judged because of my ancestry, and not wanting to be involved in gender or sex talk. I just want to learn and feel safe and included. My Mum has decided that I need to change to distance education due to my anxiety.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/my-thoughts-about-school-politics-and-the-vaccine/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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15 November, 2022
Yale Penalizes Students for Being Suicidal
For months, she struggled silently with a sense of worthlessness. She had panic attacks that left her trembling. Nightmares that made her cry.
She’d told only a handful of friends about the sexual assault she endured while she was home the summer after her freshman year. Now, as she finished her sophomore year at Yale University, the trauma finally became unbearable.
On a June day after the 2021 spring semester, the 20-year-old college student swallowed a bottle of pills at her off-campus apartment.
As she slowly woke up at the emergency room in New Haven, Conn., one thought overwhelmed her: “What if Yale finds out?”
She’d heard about other students being forced to leave because of depression and suicidal thoughts, and about the lengthy, nerve-racking reapplication process. It was one reason that the student — whom The Post agreed to identify by her first initial, S., to protect her privacy — told only a few people about her problems.
Three months earlier, a Yale freshman named Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum had killed herself on campus after contemplating the consequences of withdrawing from the school, her family said. Her death had renewed fierce debate about campus mental health, the way Yale treated suicidal students and the university’s reinstatement policies. Similar controversies have engulfed other universities as student mental health problems soar across the country.
Confined to a room at Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital, S. asked her nurses and doctors with growing fear, “Do you have to tell them?”
Yes, they replied. Because she was a student, hospital staffers said, they needed to let college officials know, she recalled. They gave her consent papers to sign for the release of her medical information. She remembers how vulnerable she felt in her thin hospital clothes as she signed the release.
The hospital declined to comment on her account, citing patient confidentiality.
Yale officials quickly set up a Zoom call with S. on a hospital laptop in a small, bare room. On the screen, she said, was Paul Hoffman, the psychologist in charge of student mental health at Yale.
She told him about the rape she’d experienced — but had never reported because she didn’t want her parents to know — and how it had sent her spiraling into suicidal thoughts.
He nodded and took notes. A few days later, he arranged a second Zoom call, with her and her parents.
“We’re going to recommend you take a medical withdrawal,” he told her, she said. “Do I have to?” S. remembers asking him. “We’re going to strongly recommend it,” Hoffman replied.
In an interview, Hoffman and other Yale officials declined to discuss Yale’s withdrawal policies or specific student cases. After Shaw-Rosenbaum’s suicide, the university told the Yale Daily News that involuntary withdrawals from Yale are rare and that the majority of students who apply for reinstatement are allowed to return.
For S., leaving Yale meant losing her friends and mentors — people who had kept her afloat during her depression. It meant losing her routine, her lab research, her four-year plan to get into medical school. Losing all the things that gave her purpose, identity and support when she needed them most.
S. had followed the campus debate in the wake of Shaw-Rosenbaum’s suicide. She knew Yale could force her to withdraw if she didn’t leave on her own.
As soon as the Zoom call with Hoffman ended, hospital staffers handed her the cellphone they’d taken when she arrived. She began typing out the email Hoffman had asked her to send. “Good afternoon,” it read. “I am requesting a medical withdrawal.”
In coming months, S. would look back to that moment with anger and regret. It wasn’t what she imagined when she was admitted to Yale, one of the country’s most prestigious universities. She recalled how her family screamed for joy. How special she felt when Yale found out Brown and Northwestern had also accepted her and raised her financial aid to match what they would provide.
“They make you feel like you’re the best of the best, like this bright and shiny thing,” she said. “But as soon as something’s wrong, they want nothing to do with you.”
It had been difficult to get into Yale. She would soon learn how daunting it was for those exiled from the university to return.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/11/yale-suicides-mental-health-withdrawals/
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U.S. colleges talk green. But they have a dirty secret
Harvard. Dartmouth. NYU. UNC. These and other American colleges stress their green credentials. They also use some of the dirtiest fuels to power their campuses – and crank out carbon dioxide or smog-forming gases at higher rates than the typical commercial power plant, a Reuters data analysis has found.
Harvard University has trimmed fossil fuel investments from its endowment to show its commitment to fighting climate change. Yet the school’s power plant still burns dirty fuel oil in 1960s-era boilers to generate heat and electricity for the campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
U.S.universities tout their energy-efficient buildings, their environmental course offerings and their research on climate change. Some have culled oil stocks from their investment portfolios.
Yet dozens of America’s leading schools still use some of the dirtiest fossil fuels to light, heat and cool their campuses, a Reuters examination of the nation’s largest university power plants has found. Most of these facilities use equipment that cranks out smog pollution at rates that exceed the average generated by the boilers and turbines powering the nation’s commercial electric utilities, oil refineries and paper mills, the news agency’s analysis of emissions data shows.
The list of big emitters includes elite Ivy League schools, large public universities and small private colleges. Dartmouth College burns sludgy oil. The University of North Carolina clings to coal. So does the University of Kentucky, where a campus boiler used to generate steam heat emits poisonous mercury at a rate that puts it among the worst coal-fired power plants nationwide. Harvard University, home to a $51 billion endowment, uses fuel oil to stoke two highly polluting steam-heat boilers installed when John F. Kennedy was America’s president.
The four universities said their power plants operate within regulatory pollution limits. They add that they are using some renewable energy on campus to reduce their carbon footprint.
Energy production is one of the biggest contributors to global warming. Universities are part of the problem. That’s because many operate their own plants to ensure themselves a supply of cheap and reliable power, and to avoid dependence on surrounding electric grids that often are decaying from age and underinvestment.
Most of the operations reviewed by Reuters are so-called cogeneration plants. In addition to electricity, they produce steam for heating buildings. Some burn multiple fuels.
Combined, these 103 campus power plants at 93 universities emitted 5.8 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2020, the equivalent of 1.1 million cars, according to EIA data.
To understand how these facilities stack up against large-scale energy producers that supply electricity to homes and businesses, Reuters obtained pollution data calculated by the federal government for 103 campus power plants at 93 universities. These were the only college plants large enough to warrant tracking by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA emissions figures are estimates based on a variety of factors, including the type of equipment and fuel used by any given power plant. This information was available for 2013 to 2020.
Combined, these 103 university plants emitted an estimated 5.8 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2020, the equivalent of 1.1 million cars, according to EIA data.
Separately, Reuters obtained NOx data from 89 U.S. universities, some of it publicly available from state regulators, the rest secured through state public records requests. NOx is the shorthand for nitrogen oxides, which help form powerful greenhouse gases, smog and acid rain.
Most of the NOx data comes from emissions tests performed since 2017, plus a handful of results from 2015 and 2016. In contrast to the EIA data, which provides plant-wide estimates of CO2 emissions, the NOx results are narrower. They represent real-time emissions readings taken from specific pieces of combustion equipment operating inside a facility.
While these tests don’t measure a school power plant’s total output of NOx pollution, they do reveal how clean or dirty individual boilers and turbines are, and the environmental consequences of operating them. Regulators consider this data a useful way of pinpointing problems: Aging combustion equipment, even units used only occasionally for backup power, can produce an outsized share of a power plant’s NOx emissions.
The Reuters analysis of the two data sets revealed:
Two-thirds of the 89 plants for which Reuters obtained NOx data lacked sophisticated pollution controls commonly used in the commercial power market to cut emissions.
Nearly half of the 103 university plants for which Reuters obtained CO2 data burn fuel oil, coal or wood chips at least part of the time. Those energy sources rank among the world’s most carbon-intensive fuels.
Nearly half of those 103 campus plants produced more CO2 per megawatt hour of power generated in 2020 than did commercial utilities and other generators supplying the electric grid in their areas.
The absolute volume of carbon dioxide emitted collectively by those 103 campus plants has declined 13.5% since 2013. Still, that drop is less than half the reduction that electric grid power plants achieved over the same time period.
Nearly a quarter of the campus plants emitted more carbon dioxide in 2020 than they did in 2013.
Anti-coal activist Neil Waggoner said U.S. universities that trumpet leadership and research on climate issues need to make a priority of cleaning up their own generating plants.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently upgraded its power plant with two modern turbines. Still, MIT clings to back-up boilers – some more than 50 years old – that emit smog-causing emissions at rates up to 20 times higher than those of its newer equipment.
“There is a huge amount of hypocrisy here,” said Waggoner, a senior advocate in the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign in Ohio.
The campus plants fared particularly poorly with their commercial counterparts when it comes to production of NOx. These gases include nitrous oxide, which has a global warming potential 273 times greater than carbon dioxide, according to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA).
Turbines generating power for ExxonMobil’s refinery in Beaumont, Texas, posted NOx rates in 2021 that were lower than about 95% of the rates recorded in nearly 260 campus pollution tests reviewed by Reuters, according to EPA data and results from individual combustion units at 89 schools. The comparison was based on a standard EPA metric: pounds of NOx created per million British Thermal Units (Btus) of heat created from fuel combustion.
The college with the highest rate of nitrogen oxide emissions was the University of Wyoming, according to the data. Last year, one of its three 40-year-old coal-fired boilers produced NOx at a rate higher than all other school combustion units analyzed by Reuters: 0.62 pounds per million Btu. That rate was 9 times higher than the 2021 national average of nearly 2,500 combustion units at work in about 800 grid-connected power plants across the country, according to EPA data and the school’s 2021 emissions test.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-pollution-universities/
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Australia: Home education popularity soars in past year as state school attendance sunk by floods, Covid
The Queensland Education Department has been slammed for failing to engage and retain students with the number of home school enrolments more than doubling in the past four years.
State school attendance rates plummeted this year, while home education registrations soared, according to Department figures.
The data revealed a gradual increase in home education registrations from 2018, with 3232 home school enrolments to 2021, with 5008, before a leap of almost 3500 to bring the 2022 level to 8461.
Shadow Education Minister Dr Christian Rowan said the state government had failed in student engagement and retention.
“Between 2017 and 2021, (Semester One state) school attendance rates have declined in every single educational region and it’s even greater among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander state school students,” he said.
He said Queensland families had experienced “profound difficulties” in enrolling their children in distance and home education.
“The time it takes for processing applications is leaving students at home and not learning. The lack of consultation and ongoing delays has caused parents immense distress,” he said.
The Department of Education said it does not fund home education programs and registrations still only accounted for one per cent of all enrolments.
However, it has commissioned research “to better understand the likely future demand for home education registration services”, due to be completed at the end of the year.
Home Education Association state leader Samantha Bryan said she was surprised by the jump in registrations, describing the 69 per cent increase as “staggering”.
“The pandemic did a few things,” she said.
“People have chosen to home educate because a family member is vulnerable and they wanted to minimise the risk, some did not want their kids to be subjected to the directions around vaccinations and masks, while others found they liked homeschooling during the pandemic and decided to keep going with it.”
Meanwhile, department data also showed a slow decline in Semester One state school attendance rates from 2018-2021, before a nosedive in 2021-2022.
Education Minister Grace Grace described the past few years as “disrupted”. “For large parts of 2021, Queensland’s schools were the only ones on the eastern seaboard that had face-to-face learning,” she said.
“Like everyone, students were asked to stay home if they were sick, and that’s exactly what they did. Widespread flooding and an influenza outbreak also impacted attendance figures this year.”
Elizabeth Galbraith pulled her children out of private education in October 2019. The family lives on acreage in Redland City, 20 kilometres southeast of Brisbane.
Ms Galbraith said 13-year-old Rebekah was getting lost in the crowd, 10-year-old James wanted to be around older children, and seven-year-old Patrick preferred to work on vehicle engines. “I felt the system was failing them,” Ms Galbraith said.
“For their individual needs, I felt the best way to meet them was independent learning, allowing them to work at their own pace on their own interests.”
“And once the children are done for the day, they can ride their bikes, or the two older ones go horse riding as part of a job-ready program.
“I used to do three pick-ups and drop offs, so this has also relieved so much stress, particularly because my husband works remotely.”
Ms Galbraith sends her children’s tests into Australian Christian Homeschooling every month for marking and they then receive an end-of-semester report card.
“The children say the only thing they miss about going to school is not playing sports, but they can still play sports at private clubs,” she said.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/queensland-education/schools-hub/home-education-popularity-soars-in-past-year-as-state-school-attendance-sunk-by-floods-covid/news-story/8cea5f27ecf55ae0e3caaa04dc0fb22d
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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14 November, 2022
Biden’s illegal student-loan bailout bought off Gen Z — and staved off a red wave
The much-anticipated “red wave” in Tuesday’s midterms ended up barely a red trickle, with the GOP set to win a narrow House majority and control of the Senate likely coming down to a runoff in Georgia. The White House is reportedly “giddy” and “gleeful” to have avoided electoral disaster despite high inflation, widespread concern about crime and the natural tendency for midterm elections to favor the party out of power.
Republicans are not so giddy, to say the least. When analyzing what went wrong, the GOP shouldn’t overlook how President Joe Biden blatantly bribed some young voters to save him from the red wave — and they don’t even need the cash.
That’s right: The kids actually did show up to vote this time around. Per the Edison Research National Election Pool’s exit polling, 27% of eligible voters aged 18 to 29 cast ballots. That makes this the second-highest youth turnout in a midterm in nearly 30 years. And Edison estimates that in key competitive states, the youth turnout was even higher, around 31%.
Predictably, Democrats swept this voting block by a huge margin. But the gap was even bigger than most expected. Per the same exit polls, 63% of young voters voted for Democrats, a clear majority, whereas all other age groups were closely divided. And in the closest races that ultimately may make the difference, young voters swung even more heavily in favor of the Democrats.
In Pennsylvania, for example, John Fetterman won 70% of the youth vote compared with Dr. Mehmet Oz’s 28%. In Arizona, Mark Kelly claimed 76% of this demographic while his Trump-backed challenger, Blake Masters, got just 20%.
In such a close election, the youth vote may well have made all the difference. “If not for voters under 30,” as Harvard pollster John Della Volpe remarked on election night, “tonight would have been a Red Wave.”
So why did young voters show up in droves and skew so far to the left this time around?
Abortion ballot measures and Roe v. Wade’s overturn may prove to be the biggest single factor. But we can’t ignore the fact Biden, through his unilateral student-debt forgiveness initiative, attempted to funnel billions of dollars directly into the pockets of young people just a few months before the election.
That timing was not coincidental — and certainly seems to have bought his party some of their votes.
The president admitted as much in his reaction to Tuesday’s results: “I especially want to thank the young people of this nation, who I’m told — I haven’t seen the numbers — voted in historic numbers again” to “continue addressing the climate crisis, gun violence, their personal rights and freedoms and the student-debt relief.”
The president isn’t just speculating. A late October Harvard survey of youth voters found 9% viewed student-debt relief their first or second priority, a small percentage but enough to make a real difference.
A massive 45% listed inflation as their priority. This ties into student-debt relief because, according to Intelligent.com’s recent polling, many beneficiaries of the Biden bailout plan to use the extra money in their monthly budget to pay their other bills.
More than half plan to buy new clothes with the Biden bucks, while a whopping 46% of prospective beneficiaries say they’ll use the extra cash to dine out or go on vacation. With surprising candor, 28% even admitted they’ll use it to buy drugs or alcohol!
Clearly, these struggling young Americans were sorely and desperately in need of taxpayer-funded relief.
Just kidding. In fact, only 28% of respondents said their student loans were very negatively impacting their lives. On the other hand, 40% said they weren’t struggling with their student loans at all — but they’ll still take the “free” money, of course.
So why wouldn’t they reward ol’ Uncle Joe with a vote after he helped them cover their next batch of edibles and their spring break trip?
Biden’s student-debt “cancellation” surely had a significant effect on boosting the youth turnout. This might be smart politics, but it has jaw-dropping ramifications. After all, even Democrats like Nancy Pelosi had admitted that the president didn’t have the constitutional authority to enact his bailout unilaterally without Congress. This means that when Biden did it anyway, he did so knowing it’s almost certainly unconstitutional but that the courts wouldn’t have worked through it by Election Day.
What do you think? Post a comment.
Yup: Biden knowingly ignored his constitutional limitations to give young voters a bailout they didn’t even need (and likely won’t get) to grease the wheels a few months before an election that looked bleak for his party.
This may have just saved Democrats from a red wave — but it should go down in history as a deeply cynical political ploy and a national disgrace.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/10/bidens-illegal-student-loan-bailout-bought-off-gen-z-and-staved-off-red-wave/
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Mom Homeschools Son After Public School Brands Him ‘Handicapped’; Now She Runs Her Own School
A mother whose son was deemed “mentally handicapped” for not thriving under a rigid public school curriculum took matters into her own hands. She decided to homeschool him, and after finding a method that helped her son become his best self, she opened her own school to help others.
Ohio-born Barbara Rivera, 58, has lived in Miami for the past 40 years. She has three sons and one daughter, whom she raised alone: Damon, now 37, Morgan, 35, Adam, 32, and Michael, 31. She unofficially adopted a fifth child, Thor, when a friend received a devastating medical diagnosis and requested Barbara to take her son in.
In 1991, Barbara’s eldest, Damon, who was fluent in English and Spanish, was excited to start first grade.
“However, just two weeks into the school year, his teacher told me, ‘Damon is mentally handicapped, cannot read, and will require medication to learn,'” Barbara told The Epoch Times. “I was told that he confused the letters ‘b, d, p, and q’ and the numbers ‘6 and 9.’
“I was told this confusion of letters and numbers was a sign of a learning/mental disability. I disagreed. I argued that the said numbers and letters look similar and my son was only on his second week of school. The ‘diagnosis’ seemed unfair and illogical,” she added.
But Barbara had faith in her son’s ability, believing that with practice, he would eventually get it, and thus was not concerned. However, his teacher pressed for a medical evaluation.
“I let her know that if anyone so much as spoke to my son without my consent, I’d sue,” said Barbara. “I was not having Damon evaluated, ever! I was not putting Damon on mind-altering medication, ever!”
Damon, according to his mother, was honest, well-behaved, and one of the calmest children she had ever known. He wanted to grow up to be a policeman and play basketball for the NBA, which Barbara supported wholeheartedly.
Barbara felt the claim that her son was handicapped was “a slap in the face to parents of children who actually are disabled,” as he was gifted with speech, sight, and hearing abilities.
Barbara began looking closely at Damon’s public school learning materials. She was shocked to discover that his “phonics” reading pack was not based on actual phonics at all.
“My son was expected to read stories and write answers to questions before he mastered the alphabet and the individual sounds each letter or letter combination represented,” she explained.
She noticed that in his first month of school, Damon’s first-grade homework was a three-hour nightly chore. Instead of playing with his siblings, Damon “sat blank-faced at the table,” staring at work he couldn’t do. Barbara began returning Damon’s assignments to his teacher, unfinished. She’d write: “Damon cannot read this so I had him work on alphabet sounds, or we did a round of flash cards.”
“I was shocked that the only solution offered to me for Damon was an evaluation and medication,” she said. “Tutoring, flash cards, or making letters in Playdoh were not even mentioned. The teacher, principal, and school system firmly believed that my bilingual, well-behaved son was unreachable and unteachable.”
This had a huge impact on Damon.
“[He] learned one thing in first grade: he ‘learned’ he was stupid,” she lamented. “His love for coloring disappeared, as, if he colored out of line, even slightly, he would give up. His love of wearing a cape and zipping around the house disappeared.
“Once, I asked him to bring me the diaper bag for his baby brother, and he responded, ‘I hope I don’t mess this up.’ School changed him.”
Barbara believes she inherited a drive to survive from her Pilgrim ancestor John Howland, “the man who fell off the Mayflower and, by the grace of God, caught a rope and climbed back on.” One of five siblings, her father was an artist, another trait that she inherited.
Always a straight-A student in school, Barbara never struggled with her own studies. As a fourth-grader, she learned about the deaf-blind author and advocate Helen Keller, and was forever impacted.
“I could not, for the life of me, believe that after all of her challenges, Helen Keller went on to graduate college with honors,” she recalled. “I firmly believed that if Helen Keller could overcome her very real, very horrific challenges, my son could learn, too.”
Barbara always knew she wanted a large family whom she would help raise, along with wanting to paint. But when Damon began struggling at school, her priorities became clear; “art took a backseat to saving my son,” she said.
She hesitated to homeschool at first. With two toddlers, and due to deliver her fourth baby, she didn’t see how she could give Damon the attention he deserved, so she decided to keep Damon in public school for the remainder of first grade.
“Looking back, this is one of the worst decisions I have ever made,” she reflected. “He was not happy. He was not learning. He was being told on a daily basis he could not learn. I feel like I left my son in a burning building. Shortly after my youngest was born, I was looking around my tiny apartment, and on the verge of tears … I realized I could raise my responsibility, take my creativity beyond a paintbrush, and could ‘create’ a structured, organized school in my home.”
“And that is just what I did,” she added.
At the end of first grade, Barbara decided that Damon would not be returning to school in the fall. She wanted to homeschool him, her 4-year-old daughter, and even extended her services beyond the home to make it available to friends, only accepting children for kindergarten and second grade.
Journey of Homeschooling
Homeschooling, she said, gives a parent complete control over the information their child receives, and allows the child to pursue their individual interests. Structuring lessons around set waking and bedtimes, chores, bathing, and reading, Barbara crafted the perfect schedule.
Her idea of “classes” is dynamic.
“For example, when learning about fractions, after students can define the word ‘fraction,’ I’d have them bake a cake, measuring ingredients on their own, or cut small paper pizzas in halves, quarters, and so on,” she said.
While Barbara’s other children thrived in homeschooling, Damon took longer to convince; broken by the school system, it took him two years to cultivate belief in himself and his abilities.
Barbara began investing in Legos. Damon, she said, would sit for hours trying to put them together. He enjoyed this as he could also see the progress he was making in building a castle or putting together a car.
“His organizational skills increased as he sought ways to separate the pieces into groups,” Barbara said. “His attention span increased as did his communication. He was having wins building things. From there, he began having wins with academics.”
Soon Barbara was teaching 15 children besides her own, and there were dozens more also wanting her to take them on.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mom-homeschools-son-after-public-school-brands-him-handicapped-now-she-runs-her-own-school_4568314.html
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Australia's education trainwreck
Our economy is jittery, so new workers must be exceptionally prepared just to get a job covering inflation. That green jobs transformation arising miraculously from the ruins of fossil ruins will greedily demand students with advanced techno-scientific competencies. Globally, we need Australians so skilled they can compete with brainboxes from Taiwan and Germany, not just the kid in the next suburb.
So, in challenging times, it is deeply concerning we have either wrecked or are wrecking every component of our educational system. TAFE is a smouldering ruin, schools overrun with outdated education practices, and prestigious universities more interested in self-aggrandisement than the national good.
Of course, TAFE is the starkest example. Governments have trumpeted for years the importance of skills-based TAFE, so naturally it has been left to rot.
The problem politicians have with TAFE is that good TAFE is expensive. You cannot train sophisticated workers for the tech industry, let alone boilermakers, from pocket money. The paradoxical result is that governments have funded the vital TAFE sector like an importunate beggar.
As costs for things such as technology went up, politicians forced funding down. Foolishly, they opened the market to shonky private competitors who undercut public TAFEs by providing two-dollar shop training. Many of these were simply fronts for dodgy immigration schemes, and dragged the entire sector down in scandal and confusion. High-quality public TAFEs with decades of reputation wept.
Now, every government promises to support TAFE, including the new Albanese government. But each year it sinks further beneath the water.
Saving TAFE will involve more than the occasional budget handout and a few kind words. There needs to be a comprehensive strategy. That strategy must guarantee long-term funding, protection against educational leeches and strong incentives for universities to partner with TAFE for valuable, mutually advantageous dual credentials. This involves hard work, not flowery commitment.
Schools’ education is less in flames than an intense slow burn. The heat is not so much from a dumbing down as a hollowing out of curriculum. The packaging is fine but the contents problematic.
A central issue is that actual education in deep capacities such as language and mathematics has been neglected for much vaguer, almost conversational techniques. Note that the terms literacy and numeracy are not used here. These are mere thresholds to attainment. We do not want a population that can just add up and read. We need one that grasps mathematics and is grounded in English, history and geography.
For this, students must be challenged. Personally, every form of mathematics is an existential challenge. But in language, why do we feed students second-rate novels, fifth-rate plays and no poetry? Why do we assume no kid from Kellyville could respond to Yeats?
Tests of literacy and numeracy such as NAPLAN are interesting, not as assessments of final capacity but as glimpses of future attainment. These portents are not good. Results struggle to go up, and easily fall.
There is wider cultural failure in curriculum. In civics, we have a school population that is determinedly ignorant. Few adolescents could tell you who Lachlan Macquarie or Bennelong was, or whether Australia has a constitution (it does).
Other failures concern the teaching work-model. Teachers spend inordinate time preparing multiple lesson plans to satisfy vague curriculum envelopes. If the teacher is talented, this produces marvellous classes. If not, something is pulled from the internet and released on listless students.
These problems are not easy, but are soluble. Why not populate curriculums with standard expert-crafted lesson plans? This would enhance lesson quality and relieve teachers (especially new teachers) of the crippling drudge of constant lesson preparation. That time could be transferred to developing new, quality teaching skills.
Why not a serious approach to civics? The argument is the curriculum is already crowded. But it is a question of priorities. Knowledge and critiques of one’s own country is vital. Do it.
Then there is the perennial rancour over teacher education. This spans both schools who employ teachers and universities producing them. It is suffused with ignorance and prejudice.
For over a decade we have been obsessed not with actual teacher quality, but with the means of selecting them. It is like arguing over the cultivation of a pineapple rather than its taste.
The prime point of contention has been the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, a rather rough measure of ranking student performance in year 12. The argument goes that only a person with an ATAR of 146 out of 100 is clever enough to be a teacher.
Put aside hysterics over hypothetical education students with an ATAR below 50. These are rare, overwhelmingly involving special disadvantage schemes. Typically, university education students with an ATAR fall between the mid-60s and 70s.
You then face two confronting realities. First, most students will not enter teaching simply with an ATAR. Yes, there may be an ATAR, but only as one part of an entry package including interviews, aptitude testing and community service. Prestige courses such as dentistry, medicine and law do this. Where is the hysteria? A stupid, underqualified dentist is a nightmare.
Second, there is no research-based evidence that high ATARS make better teachers.
Teaching is a vocation demanding absolute commitment. Provided a student has a decent school performance and a serious university education, it is this human bond to students that makes the difference, not a raw score in year 12. Think of your finest teacher. Do you know their results in the final year of school? Do you care?
This ATAR compulsive disorder has caused the current crisis in teacher supply. Embarrassed politicians and bureaucrats do not admit it, but their fanaticism over ATAR has produced the personnel crisis meaning bigger class sizes and less educated kids.
The correlation is simple. If, like former NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli, you run a propaganda campaign that all new teachers are stupid ATAR refugees, it will have entirely predictable results. It will not increase the quality of new teachers. Instead, clever students will disdain teaching as a career because they do not want to be vilified as dumb. They will be led by the cleverest students, who are prouder and have more options.
This is the reality. In NSW, the number of students entering teaching degrees has collapsed. So have their ATARs. So has the proportion of high ATAR students.
The same pattern applies across Australia.
The worst thing is that this crash, followed by massive teacher shortages, was completely predictable. Indeed, it was predicted, repeatedly, by university education faculties. Smug ministers and bureaucrats retorted there was no possibility of a teacher shortage.
Now they are propounding exactly the hopeless alleviating measures foretold by their critics. Irish teachers are imported with no ATAR, who will skedaddle after their all-expenses-paid holiday. Mid-career engineers are teaching maths. In Germany, this has worked well with genuine would-be teachers; less well with failed professionals sporting a meth habit.
Remarkably, new Education Minister Jason Clare has appointed one of the haughtiest architects of the teacher shortage to review teacher education. As Director-General of Education in NSW, Sydney University vice-chancellor Mark Scott was a doctrinaire enthusiast for ATAR eugenics and confidently predicted there would be no teacher shortage.
Then we have university education. It is the sort of rolling crisis that beset the late Roman Empire.
The university sector effectively has two components. The first is the rich, prestigious, endowed sandstone universities. They traditionally have blocked economically disadvantaged students (who typically have lower ATARs) in favour of harvesting huge numbers of wealthy overseas students, particularly from China. Think Melbourne and Sydney.
Their most recent achievement was to put the whole sector into crisis when Covid collapsed their lucrative international market. With Covid (sort of) over, they are again revving up their proportion of overseas students to dangerous proportions.
The other type of Australian university is a “working” or “service university”. They make their money by educating students, often from parlous backgrounds. In both teaching and research, they serve a community, regional or categorical. Think Newcastle and Western Sydney.
These were the universities that dramatically widened participation over the past decade, enabled the children of workers and welcomed refugees. They are definitionally more interested in mission than money.
Nevertheless, governments and policymakers typically begin their account of Australian universities with the sandstones, the Group of Eight. Everyone is flattered by cloisters, cash and condescension. Ministers go gooey when they smell ivy.
They miss the reality that it is universities of service that will educate most Australians, pluck them from social disadvantage, and focus research on their problems. Why not start with these engines of opportunity and social justice, rather than the university equivalent of a yacht club?
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/vital-lessons-for-education-policy-makers/news-story/e30f4d0498b9b219314b60c173f229e9
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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13 November, 2022
More Colleges Offering Admission to Students Who Never Applied
It sounds too good to be true: Get into college, with a guaranteed scholarship, without ever applying. This fall, tens of thousands of students will receive such offers from schools around the country.
Direct admissions, as the approach is often called, allow colleges to send offers to students based just on their GPAs or a few other criteria, such as intended major or geographic location, without the hassle of essays, recommendation letters and months of uncertainty.
More than 85% of four-year schools admit at least half their applicants, federal data show. They just make those candidates jump through hoops first. The aim with direct admissions, participants say, is to make the process less cumbersome, show low-income and first-generation students that college is within reach, and funnel more prospects toward institutions desperate to meet enrollment goals.
“There has to be a bit of a redistribution of the power dynamic from the college to the families right now,” said Luke Skurman, chief executive and founder of Niche.com Inc., which offers profiles and ratings of hundreds of thousands of schools and towns. Niche piloted a direct-admission program with two colleges last spring and is now working with 14.
Within the past year, the Common Application, private-college scholarship program SAGE Scholars, the state of Minnesota and Concourse—purchased in September by enrollment-management consulting firm EAB—have also launched or expanded direct-admit programs in conjunction with colleges or universities.
The process for most is fairly straightforward: Students looking to learn more about colleges, or who are interested specifically in joining the direct-admit pool, register on a website with their biographical information and basics such as GPA and areas of academic interest. Most students don’t know which schools are even participating. The platform then screens students based on schools’ requested criteria and, after coordinating with the schools, sends out admission offers.
Upon running its screens, Niche first notifies eligible students who expressed interest in a school, for instance by opting into receiving mailings—they are most likely to be receptive to an offer. The next set of students they reach out to may have shown interest in similar schools.
Claire Gaber was only considering large public schools close to her home in Portland, Ore., until an email in February, bearing the logos of Niche and Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, threw her off that path. “Congratulations, Claire!” it read in part. “Based on your Niche profile you’re being offered admission for the fall 2022 semester. No application is necessary.”
“My first question was, ‘Is this real?’” said Ms. Gaber, now 19 years old. “Then I read it.”
Swayed by a campus visit, talks with the rugby coach and a $25,000 annual scholarship that brought the total cost below state universities in Oregon, she is now a freshman at Mount St. Mary’s.
Under this model, a student’s file goes into the official applicant pool only if they accept the school’s overture and agree to be contacted further. Then it is up to the school to woo the student.
“The dating metaphor, you can’t escape it,” said Joe Morrison, founder of EAB’s Concourse platform, likening the process to having both parties swipe right on an app.
Concourse’s Greenlight Match started last year as a pilot with 10 colleges focused on low-income and first-generation students in Chicago, mainly through community-based organizations. It now has more than 70 partners on the domestic front, including Auburn University and Southern Methodist University.
The colleges participating in direct-admission pilots so far include big and small institutions, public and private. Some more selective schools say they have begun discussions about signing up, at least for students interested in particular academic disciplines or for international students.
“Any project, opportunity, initiative that helps remove friction from students looking to go to college is something that lands on my radar,” said Jordanna Maziarz, director of undergraduate admissions at Montclair State University in New Jersey, which is working with the Common Application and EAB. “Why do we have to make it so hard for them?”
Last year the Common Application offered spots to about 3,000 candidates based on Montclair State’s GPA criteria. Thirty one put down deposits, and 27 actually enrolled.
Miguel Popoca Flores, a senior at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, said he didn’t realize he had so many options until learning about Minnesota’s direct-admission program. Based on his GPA, he is guaranteed admission to schools including the University of Minnesota Duluth, Dunwoody College of Technology and Minnesota State University, Mankato.
He is still applying to others, but if they don’t pan out, “You always have this college as a backup,” he said. “You’re not stuck in limbo.”
Augsburg University in Minnesota is participating in direct-admission pilots with the Common Application and with the state of Minnesota, and cut its own application to be completed in an average of seven minutes.
Nearly all applicants with an unweighted GPA of at least 2.75 are admitted. Online offer letters come in a few days, including details about guaranteed scholarships.
Augsburg already connected with 184 students through the Minnesota pilot, nearly half of whom weren’t on the school’s radar, according to Robert Gould, vice president for strategic enrollment management. And as of Nov. 7, it received 1,581 applications via the Common Application and its website, up 44% from that time the prior year. It admitted 1,094 of them.
The path to direct admission may actually be long for some students, as a number of schools are requiring that those flagged for acceptance still complete applications. Critics warn that could scare off prospects and undermine the goal of simplifying the process.
SAGE Scholars, a tuition-rewards program for private colleges, now offers something founder James Johnston likens to a mortgage preapproval—subject to verification, and potentially more paperwork, if schools so choose.
More than 30 schools have signed up for its “FastTrak” program this fall.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-colleges-offering-admission-to-students-who-never-applied-11668089120?mod=hp_lead_pos11
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Biden and Activist Allies Push Taxpayer-Funded Voter Registration on College Campuses
In the run up to the 2022 midterm elections, professional activists were desperate to drive up voter registration rates everywhere they could, particularly on college campuses. And they wanted taxpayers to fund it, too.
One-Two Punch
Earlier this year, President Joe Biden’s Department of Education instructed universities that they must engage in voter registration campaigns in order to receive further federal student aid grants, a major source of revenue for higher education institutions. That includes using Federal Work-Study funds—monies meant to encourage part-time campus jobs to help cover tuition—to pay students who register their classmates, both on and off campus.
Add to that the activists at ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, which rewards faculty and students for launching registration and “voter education” efforts at their schools in order to boost “participation in American democracy.” To date, ALL IN has targeted hundreds of universities for mass registration drives.
ALL IN—like all nonprofit groups—is legally nonpartisan, meaning it isn’t aligned with either political party. But it boasts about its “theory of change,” which aims to achieve a “more representative American democracy” through “civic learning,” “political engagement,” and “voter participation”—fuzzy buzzwords that translate to greater Democratic Party turnout and political power.
Overtly Partisan
One member, Florida’s Miami Dade College, posted a “2022 Democratic Engagement Action Plan” on ALL IN’s website detailing how it plans to pay students to register their peers. Partial funding came from the New Jersey–based Andrew Goodman Foundation, which funds “social justice initiatives” and boasts about its “plan to mobilize the youth vote in the 2022 midterm elections.”
The Goodman Foundation even offered to directly employ six paid Miami Dade College interns working weekly to register new college voters, using $1,000 stipends and $500 “in funding for voter engagement activities.”
The college plans include sending faculty-wide emails “with [a] clear message re: voter registration and voter education” and voting locally, as opposed to voting in students’ home states. The college even invited activists from the far-left group Engage Miami to make “nonpartisan voter engagement presentations” in classrooms.
“Nonpartisan” is pushing it for a self-described coalition of “Gen Z, millennials, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, immigrants, women, men, queer, trans, and nonbinary” activists that offers a partisan voting guide that endorses Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections.
Civic Nation
ALL IN is itself a front for Civic Nation, a “progressive” activist hub that runs similar initiatives such as the feminist United State of Women and Michelle Obama’s voter registration group When We All Vote. Civic Nation is listed as one of the groups working to boost turnout among women, ex-felons, and “lawfully present noncitizen New Yorkers” to create a “more just and equitable democracy” in New York.
We’ve traced grants to Civic Nation from Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the Carnegie Corporation (a foundation despite its name), Environmental Defense Fund, and the Joyce Foundation, which once included then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on its board.
Civic Nation’s board is dominated by ex-Obama administration officials, including senior advisor Valerie Jarrett; Tina Tchen, who tried to discredit accusations of sexual harassment against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021; and Cecilia Muñoz, who now advises the liberal think tank New America.
https://capitalresearch.org/article/biden-and-activist-allies-push-taxpayer-funded-voter-registration-on-college-campuses
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Australia: Bosses demand better literacy, uni degree reforms
Employers have scolded schools for churning out semiliterate students, and demanded a new “degree apprenticeship” model to better train professional workers.
Traditional three-year university degrees are losing popularity, with early applications to start a degree in 2023 slumping as mature-age students learn on the job and more school leavers head straight to work.
The decline in domestic student enrolments has triggered a tertiary turf war, as regional universities accuse big-city sandstone institutions of “poaching’’.
The Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), representing 60,000 employers of 1 million workers, has warned that poor literacy and numeracy skills among workers is affecting three quarters of businesses.
It has told the Productivity Commission workers need to upskill through short courses known as “micro-credentials’’, which will qualify for student loans under federal government reforms.
Ai Group education and training director Megan Lilly said many school leavers – and even university graduates – have “inadequate skills’’ to work.
“There are definitely people who come from vocational and university education who lack the foundational skills they need to function properly in the workforce,’’ she said.
“We have a lot of very well-educated young people these days but we still have a considerable number who have literacy and numeracy deficits that impact … getting a job and maintaining a job. Apprentices often need to get literacy and numeracy support to enable them to complete their apprenticeship.’’
Ms Lilly said more businesses want a return to on-the-job training, combining work with short industry courses or part-time tertiary study.
She said “degree apprenticeships’’ were popular in Europe and would work well in Australia, for school leavers keen to “earn while they learn’’.
“There are such acute skills shortages that young people can pick up jobs and earn good money, so some companies are employing people directly and building a training program for employees,’’ she said.
“There should be more high-level apprenticeships and cadetships across the economy, like they do in Europe.
“We need a model of learning that is more relevant to the modern economy.’’
The Australian Information Industry Association, representing tech companies, also criticised the quality of some traditional university degrees.
“Graduates from IT (information technology) degrees are not job-ready,’’ AIIA chief executive Simon Bush said on Friday.
“It takes six to 12 months to train a graduate on the job to get productive and on the tools.’’
Mr Bush said IT employers were hiring Certificate III and Certificate IV vocational training graduates, who study for a year or two. “They’re not necessarily taking graduates with three- and four-year undergraduate degrees from university,’’ he said.
BAE Systems, a global engineering firm that specialises in defence, cyber security and virtual-reality technologies, will launch the first “degree apprenticeship’’ in systems engineering in 2024.
The Melbourne-based degree will involve Apprenticeships Victoria and Engineers Australia, although the partner university has yet to be revealed. Participating employers will include Dassault Systemes, Advanced Fibre Cluster, Air Radiators, Navantia Australia, Memo and Systra.
BAE Systems Australia has also partnered with the University of South Australia to kick off a degree apprenticeship in software engineering.
“It’s important that we look for new ways to work across industry and academia to collectively develop solutions that benefit the nation and provide alternatives for students who might not otherwise consider tertiary studies,’’ the company’s chief people officer, Danielle Mesa, said on Friday.
The push for work-based tertiary education comes as universities suffer a slump in enrolments for 2023. Applications to universities in NSW are the lowest in four years, with those lodged through the Tertiary Admissions Centre down 4.6 per cent from the same time last year. Victoria’s applications have dipped less than 1 per cent, but in Queensland mature-age applications have fallen 11.3 per cent and school-leaver applications are down 3.7 per cent.
Former Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven claimed prestigious universities are “plundering’’ disadvantaged students from regional and suburban universities to meet equity quotas for students.
“They are poaching socially marginal students from the regions and underprivileged suburbs, with scholarships and other sweeteners only rich institutions can afford,’’ Emeritus Professor Craven writes in Inquirer.
“They do not actually want these students, given their historic rationale for existence has been to invite only the elite. These newly privileged students will be academic cannon fodder. Sandstones have neither the interest nor the learning structures to cater for students beyond the north shore or the eastern suburbs.’’
Regional Universities Network executive director Alec Webb warned of a “hollowing out’’ of regional communities if city universities lure local students.
“While we respect student choice, regional universities are concerned about metro-centric solutions, and short-term incentives that could see a further hollowing out of regional communities,’’ he said.
“Taking the best and brightest from regional areas hollows out our regional workforces and obviously will have an impact on Australia’s economic prosperity.’’
The Group of Eight, representing the elite “sandstone” universities, said its academic success rate for disadvantaged students was “well above the national average’’.
“Allowing students to choose the university course that best suits their aspirations and skills is a core tenet of Australia’s approach to university study,’’ Go8 CEO Vicki Thomson said.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare will require all universities to do more to help disadvantaged students as part of the University Accord, to be launched next week.
“I want more people from poor families, from regional and remote parts of Australia, more Indigenous Australians and more Australians with a disability going to all our universities,’’ he told The Weekend Australian.
The federal government allocated all 20,000 of its bonus university places in last month’s budget to disadvantaged students.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/bosses-demand-better-literacy-uni-degree-reforms/news-story/3f6b0a6b966c7003af00e134d60e0647
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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11 November, 2022
New Endorsements for College Athletes Resurface an Old Concern: Sex Sells
Female college athletes are making millions thanks to their large social media followings. But some who have fought for equity in women’s sports worry that their brand building is regressive.
Olivia Dunne, a gymnast at Louisiana State, earns over $1 million annually in endorsements. “That is something I’m proud of,” she said, adding that most female athletes will not advance to a pro league after college.Credit...Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
She was an all-American in her freshman year and made the Southeastern Conference’s honor roll as a sophomore majoring in interdisciplinary studies.
Ahead of the start of her junior season, Dunne is also at the leading edge of a movement shaking the old foundations of college sports: a female student athlete raking in cash thanks to the passage in 2021 of new rules allowing college athletes to sign name, image and likeness, or N.I.L., deals.
Dunne, 20, won’t give specifics on her earnings, which at least one industry analyst projects will top $2 million over the next year.
“Seven figures,” she said. “That is something I’m proud of. Especially since I’m a woman in college sports.” She added: “There are no professional leagues for most women’s sports after college.”
Dunne, a petite blonde with a bright smile and a gymnast’s toned physique, earns a staggering amount by posting to her eight-million strong internet following on Instagram and TikTok, platforms on which she intersperses sponsored content modeling American Eagle Outfitters jeans and Vuori activewear alongside videos of her lip syncing popular songs or performing trending dances.
To Dunne, and many other athletes of her generation, being candid and flirty and showing off their bodies in ways that emphasize traditional notions of female beauty on social media are all empowering.
“It’s just about showing as much or as little as you want,” Dunne said of her online persona.
The athlete compensation and endorsement rules have been a game-changer for collegiate women, particularly those who compete in what are known as nonrevenue sports, such as gymnastics.
Sure, male football players have garnered about half of the overall compensation estimated to be worth at least $500 million, fueled by collectives formed by wealthy supporters who pay male athletes for everything from jersey sales to public appearances.
Women are more than holding their own as earners thanks largely to leveraging their social media popularity. Along with Dunne, other female student athletes have been minted millionaires by the N.I.L. rules, including Haley and Hanna Cavinder, twins who play college basketball at Miami; Sunisa Lee, the Auburn gymnast and Olympic gold medalist at the Tokyo Games; and Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd, basketball stars at Connecticut.
But the new flood of money — and the way many female athletes are attaining it — troubles some who have fought for equitable treatment in women’s sports and say that it rewards traditional feminine desirability over athletic excellence.
And while the female athletes I spoke to said they were consciously deciding whether to play up or down their sexuality, some observers say that the market is dictating that choice.
Andrea Geurin, a researcher of sports business at Loughborough University in England, studied female athletes trying to make the Rio Olympics in 2016, many of them American collegians. “One of the big themes that came out is the pressure that they felt to post suggestive or sexy photos of themselves” on social media, Geurin said.
She noted that some of the athletes had decided that making public such imagery wasn’t worth it while others had found it was one of the primary ways to increase their online popularity and earning power.
Scroll through the social media posts from female college athletes across the United States and you will find that a significant through line on many of the women’s accounts is the well-trod and well-proven notion that sexiness sells. Posts catering to traditional ideals about what makes women appealing to men do well, and the market backs that up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/sports/ncaabasketball/olivia-dunne-haley-jones-endorsements.html
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The Root Cause of America's Moral Decay Lies in the Public Schools
Rashad Gibson
I recently came across a study by the Barna Group called “How Concerned Are Christian Parents About Their Children’s Faith Formation?” I must say, the data grieved me.
One of the questions posed was, “As a parent, how concerned are you about your child’s/children’s spiritual development?” Of practicing Christians, 51 percent were very concerned, 33 percent somewhat concerned, 9 percent not very, and 7 percent not at all.
Ponder this: Only half of practicing Christian parents are very concerned about their children’s spiritual growth. This finding alone speaks volumes.
If a good portion of practicing Christian parents is only somewhat interested or apathetic toward their children’s spiritual development, they probably have the same cavalier attitude regarding their own spiritual health.
Do these Christian parents truly understand the importance of regeneration, our fallen nature, the Word of God, intimacy with Christ through prayer, repentance, or how our relationship with Christ plays out in society? Does this finding reflect a lack of value the church places on the spiritual development of adults and children?
The article reveals the dire need for our youth to be discipled to grow in spiritual maturity in Christ. Likewise, although not directly mentioned, it underscores the imperative need for adults to cultivate their relationship with Christ, so the next generation will take their faith in Christ seriously.
Currently, I am planning to start a Christian school in New England with the hopes of planting schools throughout the region. Scripture teaches that parents are primarily responsible for their children’s moral and spiritual development (Deuteronomy 6:4-8, Psalm 78:1-8). The church and Christian schools are supplements that facilitate our children’s spiritual maturity.
Unfortunately, our children face many hurdles and, dare I say, fiery darts aimed at them very early by Satan (Ephesians 6:16). One of which is the public school system.
Let me be very clear: The public school system is designed to undermine Christianity in exchange for the religion of humanism.
In 1930, C.E. Potter, a signer of the “Humanist Manifesto” and an associate of John Dewey (considered the father of progressive education), wrote in “Humanism: A New Religion,” the following:
“Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching. … So very humanistic is modern education that no religion has a future unless it be Humanism. The religion of tomorrow in America and of the day after tomorrow in all the world may not be in all respects identical with the religious Humanism we are advocating in this book, but it will be mightily like it and of the same spirit.”
Potter’s prophetic vision has led to much bad fruit (the sexual revolution, feminism, the LGBT movement, etc.). Many Christians have acquiesced and underestimated the ongoing push of humanism and how it is forced on our children today.
As a result, the Christian faith has been pushed to the margins, and every godless contention has been placed in the mainstream and educational system over the last century.
If Christian parents are not engaged in discipling their children, and Christian leaders do not stand up and stem the tide of humanism by declaring the glorious gospel and the Word of God, Christian influence will remain on the margins. Furthermore, humanism will continue to thrive, and our nation will continue its downward spiral into a tyrannical state.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/op-ed-root-cause-americas-moral-decay-lies-public-schools
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Mother-of-three claims four-year-old daughter's pre-school is teaching her that 'girls marry girls and boys marry boys
A mother has claimed her four-year-old daughter is being taught 'girls marry girls and boys marry boys' at her kindergarten.
Sarah Game, who is a member of the South Australian upper house, claimed her daughter's pre-school was teaching children same-sex marriage as 'the norm'.
Ms Game, from One Nation, made the claim on Instagram after controversy erupted in the federal Senate over drag queen Courtney Act appearing on the ABC's Play School.
After the debate, Ms Game posted a comment on Instagram saying her four-year-old had returned from pre-school to say ''girls marry girls and boys marry boys'. Her post was then shared by prominent NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham.
'When I challenged her, she pointed to a poster she made in class with pictures and it was clear to me that she wasn't aware of the more mainstream side of the story,' she said in the post.
Ms Game, who is a mother of three, wouldn't share the poster with Daily Mail Australia and said she hadn't contacted the school about her concerns.
However, she said it wasn't appropriate for the school to be teaching young children about marriage mores.
'Kids this young shouldn't be taught such concepts at school. Leave it up to parents - who know best - to decide,' she said.
'I believe parents should be front and centre of teaching children moral and ethical issues, not teachers,' she said.
'Primary school children need to be taught love and acceptance of others, which is enough detail for their age.'
Education department guidelines issued to all South Australian schools and pre-schools state that 'diversity is valued' and they must provide 'an inclusive learning environment where intersex and gender diverse children and young people know they belong'.
The department says schools must support children and young people who 'might want to affirm a gender identity that is different from their assigned gender at birth'.
Ms Game told South Australian parliament on Tuesday that she had met with multiple parents 'who have a child on this journey' of gender reassignment and had been left 'distressed'.
'They feel excluded from investigating anything other than an affirmation pathway,' she said.
In the 'Gender diverse and intersex children and young people support procedure' guidelines it states decisions around supporting a child's 'gender affirmation' are to be made by 'site leaders'
A 'site leader' is a principal, preschool director, care setting manager or co-ordinator, or their delegate.
The document states there will be situations where a parent and child disagree about their 'gender affirmation' and when this occurs, the site leader must determine what is in the 'young person's best interest'.
If the site leader decides a different gender affirmation is in the child's interests, even against the wishes of the parent, they are told to 'make support arrangements for them'.
Site leaders also determine whether parents should be told of what their children are doing based on the child or young person's capacity to 'make an informed decision and their gender affirmation and the consequences of their actions'.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11409919/SA-One-Nation-MP-Sarah-Game-says-daughter-taught-sex-marriage-school.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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10 November, 2022
UK: Music school in trans row after telling students to 'report' women who oppose the ideology
An elite music college has been forced to issue an apology after telling students to ‘report’ women who oppose transgender ideology.
The Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP) put up a sign claiming female students who wanted single-sex spaces were ‘transphobic’.
It said there was a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to ‘Terfs’ – a derogatory term which stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’. And it included a QR code so that students could use their smartphones to report such women to an official university complaints website.
The ICMP offers degrees in the music business and alumni have gone on to work with artists including Stormzy, One Direction and Radiohead. The sign appeared on a television screen at the college’s north London campus this term and was shared yesterday on social media, prompting a backlash.
Maya Forstater, of campaign group Sex Matters, said: ‘Staff or students at ICMP who face harassment because of your gender-critical views: Put this on page one of your tribunal bundle.’ Simon Fanshawe, a Stonewall co-founder who is now critical of some in the trans lobby, called it ‘an affront to academic freedom and the exchange of ideas’.
The ICMP has now removed the sign and yesterday issued an apology from chief executive Paul Kirkham on its website, admitting ‘we got it wrong’.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11414559/Music-school-trans-row-telling-students-report-women-oppose-ideology.html
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DeSantis-Endorsed School Board Candidates Win in Florida
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, won reelection by almost 20 points, and all six of the school board candidates he endorsed have prevailed Tuesday. DeSantis had previously endorsed 24 candidates in school board races, all of whom won.
While school board races are historically nonpartisan, parents’ outrage over critical race theory, transgender activism, and COVID-19 lockdowns in schools have galvanized a parental rights movement that Republicans largely support and Democrats largely oppose. The parents rights group Moms for Liberty also endorsed many of the candidates DeSantis backed.
“Governor Ron DeSantis shattered election records and produced a win for the ages,” a DeSantis spokeswoman told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “He also led a coalition of parents to establish students-first, parents’ rights school board governance across the state. The DeSantis Education Agenda was on the ballot and the voters made their voice clear: we want education, not indoctrination.”
“The results tonight prove that 2022 is the year of the parent,” Moms for Liberty founder Tina Descovich told The Daily Signal. “We are thrilled to have so many new school board members that will finally put students first and respect the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”
Descovich said Moms for Liberty endorsed 12 candidates in total, two of whom lost.
DeSantis endorsed six school board candidates in the runoff elections Tuesday and all of them won. Moms for Liberty endorsed 12 candidates. Florida Democrats endorsed 20 candidates ahead of the general election, racking up six wins and 10 losses, with two races not fully counted.
DeSantis appears to be the first Florida governor to endorse school board members.
Jacqueline Rosario, who enjoyed endorsements from DeSantis, Moms for Liberty, and the 1776 Project, won her reelection bid in Indian River County. She won with 55.27% of the vote, according to unofficial election results, defeating Cindy Gibbs (44.73%), whom Democratic governor candidate Charlie Crist endorsed.
Cindy Spray, endorsed by DeSantis and Moms for Liberty, won with 53.13%, according to unofficial results in Manatee County, defeating Democrat-endorsed Harold Byrd (46.87%).
Al Hernandez, who enjoyed endorsements from DeSantis and Moms for Liberty, won with 65.1% in Pasco County, according to the Tampa Bay Times. He defeated Democrat-supported James Washington.
Jamie Haynes, endorsed by DeSantis and Moms for Liberty, won with 58.5% of the vote in Volusia County, defeating Democrat-endorsed Albert L. Bouie.
Stephanie Busin, who also enjoyed endorsements from DeSantis and Moms for Liberty, won by a mere 13 votes in Hendry County.
Sam Fisher, whom DeSantis and Moms for Liberty endorsed, also won her race in Lee County, with 51.75% of the vote, according to unofficial results. She defeated Democrat-endorsed Kathy Fanny.
In three other races, candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty defeated their Democrat-endorsed opponents.
In Pinellas County, Stephanie Meyer defeated Brian Martin and Dawn Peters defeated Keesha Benson. Gene Trent defeated Erin Dunne in Brevard County.
“We saw huge victories in Florida, with now all 30 school board candidates endorsed by Governor DeSantis being elected,” Bridget Ziegler, director of school board programs at the Leadership Institute and a school board member herself, told The Daily Signal. “We also saw huge victories across the country with conservatives winning hundreds of seats, many flipping school boards to a conservative majority.”
DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education law in March, which opponents infamously branded the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. After Disney attacked the law, DeSantis signed a bill revoking Disney World’s special status as an independent special district in what many conservatives saw as a key win against “woke capitalism.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/09/desantis-endorsed-school-board-candidates-win-in-florida
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Big reversal by Sydney University over exam
The University of Sydney has torn up a law exam after a student complained that she had been depicted as an HIV-positive, fanatical conservative who ran over a “socialist” in a car in a bizarre legal scenario.
Law student Freya Leach, 19, said she was horrified when she discovered her criminal law final assessment featured a “right-wing” woman named Freya and received dozens of messages from classmates who recognised the character to be her.
Students completing criminal law take-home exam will be required to complete a new assignment after the original was withdrawn out of a desire to preserve the sandstone university’s “academic integrity”.
In the colourful legal scenario, Freya runs over a man in a Mercedes to give “that chardonnay socialist a fright” and has unprotected sex while HIV-positive.
Ms Leach – who is active in the Young Liberal Club and the University of Sydney Conservative Club – said she believed she was being targeted by the paper and has written to the Dean of the law school asking for an apology.
Sydney University has confirmed to The Australian that students were told via their online portal that the paper had been withdrawn and apologised to those who had “dedicated a substantial amount of time” to working on the existing assessment.
Sydney University Law student Freya Leach has expressed outrage after an assignment question included a…
READ MORE:‘Shocked’: Student depicted in exam as HIV positive
“We understand that many students have already dedicated a substantial amount of time to the short release assignment, and sympathise with and understand your frustration,” the message to students said.
“However, the university and the law school set a high value on the integrity of assessments, which are crucial to preserving the good standing of our qualifications for graduates, the legal profession and society.
“Regrettably, we feel that there are no alternatives to withdrawing and replacing the short release assessment that would ensure academic integrity.”
Ms Leach said she believed she was being singled out by the left on campus after she spoke out against “zoom bombing”, a form of industrial action in which students intentionally disrupt online lessons as part of a push by the National Tertiary Education Union for better pay and conditions.
“So it is almost inconceivable to think it’s an accident, given my name is not common and everyone has been able to piece it together and identify it as me,” Ms Leach said.
“I think it’s really concerning that faculties think they can abuse their power to single out students for political beliefs.”
Sydney University has denied the character portrayed in the exam was based on real students and said the similarities were “entirely a coincidence” as the name had been in usage before.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/sydney-university-backflip-over-exam-identity-furore/news-story/34f90ba0907d791597424b19d744fb6d
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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9 November, 2022
Military recruits receive full-tuition scholarships to ROTC schools at New York Jets game: ‘Truly grateful’
Four students are surprised with U.S. Army Minuteman scholarships at New York Jets game
Army Reserve CSM Andrew Lombardo shares Minuteman scholarship details with Fox News Digital as recipients Sad'e Webb and Faustina Afrim react to the big surprise.
Some of the newest members of America’s military are receiving a great shot at success.
Young warriors ready to get to work for our nation include four soldiers-in-training — and the four had no idea they'd be receiving a big thanks for their commitment.
At the New York Jets' annual Salute to Service football game at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on Nov. 6, 2022, the recruits were presented with major college scholarships to schools of their choice.
The U.S. Army Minuteman Scholarship covers full tuition and fees between two and four years, or $10,000 per year toward room and board, at any college or university served by an Army ROTC program.
Scholarship recipients will also be granted an annual book allowance of $1,200 and a monthly stipend of $420 during their college attendance.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, U.S. Army Reserve Command Sgt. Major Andrew Lombardo explained that the Minuteman scholarships for the Reserve Officers Training Corp are given to citizen service members.
These soldiers work both in their community and part time, in either the Army National Guard or Army Reserve.
Scholarship recipients are guaranteed placement in the Army Reserve after graduating.
"It’s an awesome opportunity to recognize the talents of the people of America," he said.
"To be able to pay for their university experience and, at the end of it, they commission as an officer — so they get to pursue dual pursuits — I think that’s pretty cool."
"You never think something like this would happen to you."
"Overall, the experience was very overwhelming — and I am truly grateful for this," she said.
"You never think something like this would happen to you, especially at [age] 17," she said.
Along with running track, Webb is a member of the National Honor Society and Student Council at her high school.
Webb received a total of $225,000 to attend St. John’s University in Queens, New York. There, she hopes to build a future for herself in the military and make an impact.
The recruit shared her relief at not having to worry about paying off student loans or bearing an enormous financial burden. Instead, she can focus on academics.
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/military-recruits-receive-full-tuition-scholarships-rotc-schools-new-york-jets-game
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Most British schools facing ‘unavoidable’ redundancies due to funding crisis, poll finds
Most schools will be forced to make redundancies next year due to a funding crisis, according to a huge poll of leaders.
Headteachers have been raising the alarm over what they say is a widening gap between school budgets and spiralling costs due to rising energy bills, soaring inflation and unfunded pay rises.
In its largest poll of 11,000 school leaders in England, the education union NAHT survey revealed that most schools said they would have to make cut jobs next year.
Two-thirds said teaching assistant numbers or hours would have to be cut, while half said the same for teachers.
Vic Goddard, a secondary school headteacher in Essex, told The Independent: “Redundancies are definitely unavoidable with no change in funding. Already done it twice. Not sure what I’ve got left to restructure.”
Pepe Di’Iasio, who runs a secondary school in Rotherham, said schools were “between a rock and a hard place” at the moment with funding pressures.
“Headteachers are having to look at every possibility given the current funding situation,” he told The Independent. The headteacher said redundancies had to be considered but stressed they were a “last resort”.
Paul Whiteman, the NAHT general secretary, said schools were being hit by a “perfect storm of costs” with energy bills, the price of resources going up and an unfunded pay rise for staff.
“With no fat left to cut following a decade of austerity, many thousands of schools are now looking at falling into deficit unless they make swingeing cuts. Education is truly in a perilous state,” he said.
His union’s poll also found 43 per cent of schools – with responses mainly from primary schools – were predicting having to cut back on admin or non-classroom staff numbers or hours next year.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/school-funding-crisis-redundancies-naht-b2219473.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=IND_Morning_Headlines%2008-11-2022&utm_term=IND_Headlines_Masterlist_CDP
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Australia: Cultural training for teachers branded a ‘form of racism’
Aboriginal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has branded “cultural training” for teachers a form of racism.
In Senate estimates hearings on Thursday, the Coalition senator criticised an “Indigenous cultural competency report’’ produced by the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership, warning that it assumed Aboriginal students could not learn like other children.
“I’m surprised by the extensive work that’s been done around cultural competency and cultural safety,’’ she said. “I can’t see it as being of great educational benefit to students, and it seems to make life kind of difficult for teachers at the same time.
“I’d like to see AITSL use its resources to give teachers pedagogical competency rather than fixate on this separatist idea of cultural competency, which seems to imply that Indigenous students don’t learn the same as non-Indigenous peers.
“To me that sounds a bit like, well, racism.”
Senator Price, a former deputy mayor of Alice Springs, said she was struck by the report’s statement that the “legacy of colonisation’’ undermined the rights of Indigenous students to a fair and just education, and that “Australian education systems were never designed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’’. “Can you please elaborate specifically on how colonisation is undermining Indigenous students’ education?’’ she asked AITSL executives.
The AITSL representatives took the question on notice.
Senator Price was referring to an AITSL report on Indigenous cultural competency, released in June as part of its Building a Culturally Responsive Australian Teaching Workforce project.
The report recommends teachers connect with Aboriginal families in their communities, rather than expecting them to meet at school, and includes a suggestion that Indigenous children be tested in their home languages, rather than English.
“For many, education is the means through which dreams and aspirations are realised,’’ the report states. “For others, though, education is something to be endured for little or no gain.
“The legacy of colonisation has undermined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ access to their cultures, identities, histories and languages.
“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students have not had access to a complete, relevant, and responsive education.’’
The report recommends that teachers and principals be made more “self-aware’’ of their attitudes and assumptions towards Indigenous students, and be given “self-reflection tools to support them to increase their awareness of the assumptions underlying their personal identity in culture’’.
“The cultural responsiveness of the teacher is ultimately a function of their world view and implicit biases,’’ it states.
The report cites an anonymous submission calling for Indigenous students to be tested in their first language. And it calls on teachers to work with families “beyond the school gate’’ instead of expecting them to meet “on school grounds’’.
“Building relationships is a necessary part of being an active member in any community and, crucially, a lack of relationships and trust will often lead to students not attending school and becoming disengaged from education,’’ it states.
“Teachers need to engage with students and their families beyond the school gate to understand their world and what they bring with them to school instead of the expectation to meet on school grounds.’’
Indigenous teenagers are four times more likely to drop out of high school before finishing Year 10, census data shows.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/cultural-training-for-teachers-branded-a-form-of-racism/news-story/4b7a17380f46b1298f5a4bf04cc57ffa
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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8 November, 2022
UK: The Oxbridge war on private schools doesn’t help the poor - it punishes families who put education before houses and holidays
You can be privileged in Britain but only if you have the brass neck to pretend that you aren’t. Increasingly, parents who strain their budgets to the limit to pay private school fees are being punished for their thrift and responsibility.
Their children are rejected for Oxbridge university places and jobs for which they are well qualified. Applicants from state schools are preferred for political reasons, as if this was a People’s Republic. What began a few years ago as an elusive trend has now become very hard to ignore.
A recent Freedom of Information survey of 50 leading private schools found that their pupils’ overall chance of getting an Oxford or Cambridge offer has fallen by one third in five years. The change followed soon after the two ancient universities – which deny that they are discriminating against private school pupils – began to use ‘contextual’ selection methods.
Yet Professor Stephen Toope, who has just stepped down as head of Cambridge University, has said: ‘We have to keep making it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people who are coming from independent school backgrounds into places like Oxford or Cambridge.’
Whatever is actually going on, egalitarian zealots applaud and encourage this behaviour. The Labour MP and Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy once said: ‘The upper classes have a vice-like grip on Oxford admissions that they will not willingly give up.’
This sort of talk treats the suburban middle class as if they were privileged billionaire aristocrats rather than men and women who work and save, and put schooling before big houses, holidays and expensive cars and clothes.
It is in line with the modern idea of ‘social mobility’ which has much more to do with punishing the conservative middle class than with helping the poor. And it means that universities and employers are urged to shun applicants with obvious middle-class backgrounds, even if they are better qualified.
The new regime snubs and rejects well-educated young men and women who have in many cases come from homes where the parents made major sacrifices for the sake of their education.
Despite this, the country remains as privileged as it ever was, with the new noisily Left-wing elite well versed in the methods needed to come out on top. The actual poor are still terribly treated, as they have been since state grammar schools, which selected on merit rather than money, were almost all destroyed in the 1960s.
Try this story, as an example. You would have thought it was bad enough that Anthony Blair sent two of his sons to a totally exceptional state school, the London Oratory, miles from where he lived. By doing so, he tacitly accepted that the local comprehensive schools were not good enough for him. As so often, some are more equal than others. But, in 2002, he did something even more shocking. He hired teachers from the hugely expensive private school, Westminster, to give his boys extra tuition for their A-levels.
After five years in office, chanting ‘Education! Education! Education!’, he was accepting the truth that all informed people know. Comprehensive state education is a disaster, especially for the poor. Even at its top end it cannot do the job properly. As a result many (though not all) of the private schools hugely outperform most state comprehensives, and so do the few remaining state grammar schools.
But the future Sir Tony was not admitting it openly, just in his actions. Shouldn’t he have used the schools he said he wanted all others to attend, if they were so good? But, of course, he knew they were not good. So instead he used the Oratory, officially a comprehensive. Is it really one? When I once suggested it wasn’t, the Blairs came after me, until I agreed to say that it was a comprehensive in the same way that 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terrace house.
This is always the way socialist utopians behave. When their utopia does not work, they find ways to escape it for themselves, leaving the rest of us to cope with the mess. The English state school system is, in fact, crammed with secret privilege, for those in the know, who have the money to pay for it and the sharp elbows to exploit it.
The Sutton Trust and Teach First, neither of them organisations of the Right, have produced research showing that the best ‘comprehensives’ are in fact highly socially selective. There is also no way of knowing how many of the exam results of the better ‘comprehensives’ in well-off areas are achieved by private tuition, Blair-style. Nobody is obliged to record it.
In 2017 the Sutton Trust reported that more than 85 per cent of the highest-performing state schools took in fewer disadvantaged pupils than they should have for their catchment area. They also found there was a ‘house price premium’ of about 20 per cent attached to living in the right area for a successful, highly rated comprehensive school. A typical house in such a catchment area at that time cost about £45,700 more than the average property in the same local authority.
Teach First reported in the same year that 43 per cent of pupils at England’s outstanding state secondary schools were from the wealthiest 20 per cent of families. Poorer pupils were half as likely as the richest to be heading to outstanding secondary schools.
Blair, in the days when he hired private tutors for his boys, was head of the Labour Party, the same party which had imposed supposedly equal comprehensive education on England, Wales and Scotland. His government made it illegal to open new state grammar schools, so ensuring that there was almost no escape – for most people – from the comprehensive disaster.
Most do not have the skills or the money to navigate the ‘comprehensive’ system as elite Leftists so often manage to do. No wonder so many parents, who could not really afford it, went private. But now their children suffer for their parents’ sacrifices.
To make things worse still, Blair’s Chancellor and future successor, Gordon Brown, picked a foolish quarrel with Oxford’s Magdalen College in 2000, for rejecting a state-school-educated candidate, Laura Spence. He alleged, without real evidence, that this showed prejudice against state school applicants. But despite the poverty of his arguments, his action may well have succeeded in scaring Oxbridge academics into a real prejudice against private schools.
A-level marks have been so telescoped by falling school standards that they are not much of an objective guide, failing to distinguish between the excellent and the merely good. This makes it far easier to select on ‘contextual’ grounds rather than hard grades.
You may be sure that the children of the liberal elite, while they rail against supposed private school privilege, are doing all that they can, by professing strong religious faith or moving into costly catchment areas, or by hiring tutors, to put their own children on the magic carpet to Oxbridge, via state schools which are comprehensive only in theory.
Privilege, in decline in the great days of the state grammar schools in the 1960s, is back with a bang.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11394109/The-Oxbridge-war-private-schools-doesnt-help-poor-writes-PETER-HITCHENS.html
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Professor settles lawsuit with college called 'epicenter of censorship in Texas'
On Thursday, Collin College, a public institution in the Dallas area, agreed to settle a case initiated by education professor Suzanne Jones, fired by the institution last year for protected speech. Jones will be reinstated to her post.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Jones' representatives in the lawsuit, the college cited three incidents that led to Jones' firing.
In 2017, she signed her name and college affiliation in an open letter in the Dallas Morning News supporting the removal of Confederate monuments. In 2020, Jones used the name of Collin College on a website associated with the Texas Faculty Association, a statewide faculty union Jones helped organize at Collin College. Finally, Jones, who sat on the Collin College Faculty Council, publicly supported the council’s proposed plan regarding campus reopening amidst the pandemic.
Despite calling Jones an "excellent faculty member" with positive reviews and extensive service to the college, Collin College administrator Toni Jenkins joined President Neil Matkin to authorize the non-renewal of Jones’ teaching contract — against the recommendations of three senior faculty members.
The settlement follows the Aug. 25 decision of federal Judge Amos Mazzant, denying the college's motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity, which protects government officials from suit "unless their conduct violates a clearly established constitutional right." The motion was denied, and the court ruled that the two named administrators, Jenkins and Matkin, could be held personally and financially responsible.
Instead of going to trial, the college agreed to a two-year, $230,000 teaching contract with Jones and to pay $145,000 in attorneys’ fees.
"I am happy to be back at Collin College and I am thankful to FIRE for helping me," said Jones in a press release. "This is a huge victory — not only for Suzanne, but for every single professor around the country who hesitates to speak up because an administrator wants to silence them," said FIRE attorney Greg H. Greubel. "Censorship is un-American."
Jones is only one of three professors recently terminated by the college who have sought legal recourse. Last January, history professor Lora Burnett prevailed in her First Amendment case against Collin College, being awarded more than $70,000 in damages plus attorney's fees. Burnett was fired for tweets critical of former Vice President Mike Pence and the college's administration.
The third, history professor Michael Phillips, has a case which is still working its way through the courts. Phillips explained to Fox News Digital that he was fired for various protected speech acts that Collin College took issue with.
For example, like Jones, Phillips signed his name and affiliation on the open letter calling for the removal of Confederate monuments in Dallas. "The administration was unhappy that the letter mentioned my place of work even though that is easily discoverable through Google and identifying your workplace is an almost universal practice when scholars speak on matters of public concern," explained Phillips to Fox News Digital.
Phillips also criticized the college for terminating his colleagues' employment.
Responding to a Fox News Digital request for comment on all 3 cases, Collin College administrator Steve Matthews affirmed the institution's commitment to freedom of expression and academic freedom.
Phillips, however, disagreed with the state of affairs at the institution. "I've worked as a professor and scholar at [University of Texas at] Austin and at [Southern Methodist University] in Dallas. No college illegally restricts free speech and so frequently as Collin College," he said.
According to Phillips, the two prior cases litigated by FIRE represent a victory but also a real tragedy.
"Students lost the opportunity to be taught by two of the best educators and scholars in the country and Collin County taxpayers had to cough up a total of $130,000 in the Burnett case and $375,000 in the Jones case because President Matkin and the elected board of trustees refuse to respect the First Amendment," Phillips said.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/professor-settles-lawsuit-college-epicenter-censorship-texas
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UK: Academics hit out at plans to 'decolonise' maths at universities and say degrees are being 'politicised'
Maths degrees are being 'politicised' because of demands to decolonise the curriculum, top academics have warned.
They accuse the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), an independent charity that checks on standards in the university sector, of engaging in 'tokenistic anti-racism efforts'.
The watchdog has published proposed guidance which states that 'the curriculum should present a multicultural and decolonised view' of mathematics.
The subject benchmark statement, which has been put out for consultation, adds that students 'should be made aware of problematic issues' in the history of mathematics.
It means mathematicians at risk of being 'decolonised' include British statistics pioneer Karl Pearson, who founded the first statistics department at UCL in 1911, but also believed in the existence of 'inferior races'. Sir Isaac Newton was a shareholder in South Sea Company that traded in slaves.
In their letter of protest, shared with Times Higher Education, 12 leading mathematicians said: 'We struggle to imagine what it would mean to decolonise, for example, a course on the geometry of surfaces.
'For the most part, the concept of decolonisation is irrelevant to university mathematics, and our students know this.
'If we engage in obviously tokenistic anti-racism efforts, we will simply be sending a signal that we do not take racism seriously.'
Signatory John Armstrong, a lecturer at King's College London, said that although many of the subject requirements 'might be very reasonable', it was facile to insist 'absolutely every single maths course to cover these same things'.
Dr Armstrong said he felt the guidance should be concerned only with what the basics of a mathematical curriculum might be, adding that a centralised description of content 'reduces the academic freedom of mathematicians to deliver the courses they wish to deliver'.
Eight Royal Society Fellows have signed the letter, including Sir John Ball, professor of mathematics at Heriot-Watt University, Philip Dawid, emeritus professor of statistics of the University of Cambridge, and Mary Rees, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Liverpool.
The Daily Mail has previously highlighted how universities have been 'decolonising' their business, chemistry and even thermodynamics courses to mollify woke activists.
A QAA spokesman said: 'Subject benchmark statements don't prescribe or mandate set approaches to teaching, learning or assessment. 'They are created by the subject community for the subject community, to be used as a tool for reflection when designing new courses or updating existing courses.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11401017/University-academics-criticise-plans-decolonise-maths-say-degrees-politicised.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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7 November, 2022
UK: Must not criticize transgender movement
<i>Invited speaker says there are only 2 sexes. Academics disagree and try to stop speaker being heard. Donors disagree with the academics and support the realist speaker</i>
Cambridge donors have warned they are considering pulling their funding after a college master boycotted a panel discussion with a 'gender-critical feminist', whose views she described as 'offensive, insulting and hateful'.
Some Cambridge alumni are threatening to stop donating to Gonville and Caius and have said they will urge their children not to attend the university after the college became embroiled in a free speech row, the Telegraph has reported.
It came after the head of the college Professor Pippa Rogerson and senior tutor Dr Andrew Spencer wrote to students telling them they would be avoiding a debate on gender ideology that was being attended by Helen Joyce.
Helen Joyce, an author and former Economist journalist, believes biological sex is binary and immutable and wrote a book entitled Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality which criticises the transgender rights movement.
The debate, hosted by professor of philosophy Arif Ahmed, sparked outrage among students, some of whom accused Dr Joyce of being a Terf (trans exclusionary radical feminist). Around a hundred protested outside the talk chanting 'trans rights are human rights'.
It was also condemned by the student union, who argued that the event would do nothing but 'contribute to the further alienation of trans students, to whom the university has a duty of care'.
But it was the intervention of Prof Rogerson and Dr Spencer, who described Ms Joyce's views as 'offensive, insulting and hateful to members of our community who live and work here', that has left some Cambridge donors feeling 'embarrassed, appalled and absolutely disgusted'.
One alumnus, Nick Sallnow-Smith, 72, who graduated from Gonville and Caius in 1973, told the Telegraph: 'With people like that in charge I will never donate again.'
The event, which was held last Tuesday, was also criticised by Cambridge's sociology faculty, who apologised for distressing students by circulating the advert.
A Cambridge University spokesperson said: 'The Department circulated a notice notifying students about the talk. The head of the Department later received complaints from some students opposed to the views of the speaker.
'An email was subsequently sent out to make it clear that the Department was neither actively endorsing or promoting the contents of the talk. There was never any attempt to either persuade or dissuade people from attending.'
In her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Dr Joyce argues that the trans lobby is trying to 'supplant biology', equating the movement to a 'new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws'.
However, Prof Ahmed defended the planned talk, saying Dr Joyce would be 'discussing important questions to do with sex and gender'.
He said: 'These are matters of great public interest on which it is very important that there is free and open debate. Anyone who would like to learn about Helen Joyce's views and her reasoning, and to discuss them with her, should feel free to come along. Everyone is welcome.'
He claimed that he had to smuggle students into the lecture hall where Ms Joyce was talking because they were 'afraid of ostracism by their student peers'.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11396425/Cambridge-donors-PULL-funding-amid-free-speech-row-college-head-boycotted-gender-ideology-talk.html
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This Election Day, make every Democrat who harmed our kids’ education pay
As the pandemic moves further into our rearview mirror, there are some voices that want everyone to simply move on.
We will. But not quite yet.
Election Day Tuesday is the first real opportunity to hold accountable all the people who caused so much damage to everyone, all across society — but to children in particular.
Writing in The Atlantic, Emily Oster called for “pandemic amnesty,” arguing, “Reasonable people — people who cared about children and teachers — advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.”
This is simply not true. Those opposed to reopening schools were neither reasonable, as no amount of actual evidence could persuade them that schools were largely safe, nor caring about children.
At the top of the list of people deserving blame for the academic destruction we’re now uncovering is president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten. She treated our public schools as her personal fiefdom, and Democrats let her get away with it.
That last part is so important. Anti-child special-interest groups couldn’t have hurt kids the way the teachers unions did without the support of Democratic elected officials. They kept schools closed, and we will be feeling the repercussions of that for years. These politicians chose Weingarten over the children, and there’s no guarantee whatsoever they won’t do it again.
There were real villains of the pandemic, and none of those villains has apologized or repented in any way. So Oster’s “amnesty” for those who were so wrong for years is just not possible.
What is possible is electoral punishment. Every Democrat who listened to Weingarten as if she were some kind of authority and not just a thug using a calamity to collect riches for her members should be held responsible Tuesday. Every politician who urged lockdowns past spring 2020, when we knew their pointlessness and damage, has to be voted out.
Every elected official who forced masks on children while pooh-poohing the scarring it would invariably cause has to go. As late as last month, New York City children who hadn’t gotten the COVID vaccine could not participate in sports. Anyone who supported this barbaric targeting of kids must be held liable.
Oster’s piece served as a very timely reminder of what happened to our children. It brought up all the feelings of rage over the damage done to our kids. Forgive without anyone taking responsibility or apologizing? No.
On Election Day, parents should carry into the voting booth the anger they’ve felt for the last two years and take it out on the people responsible. Every Democratic governor who either kept schools closed or pretended it was out of their sphere of influence (a lie) has to go.
But it doesn’t end Tuesday. As every parent knows, punishment doesn’t work without accountability. If Republicans do manage to win the House and the Senate, they must hold hearings. The National Assessment of Educational Progress showed reading and math scores plummeted. We can’t just move on to other topics while our kids stay struggling like this.
Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said in February 2021 that schools couldn’t open unless President Joe Biden’s spending plan passed. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky — on the White House’s orders — allowed Weingarten to craft school-opening policies. All this has to be investigated and put on the record so that we never listen to any of these people ever again and take steps to keep them from power.
It starts with voting out every Democrat from top to bottom. Do it for the kids.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/06/this-election-day-make-every-democrat-who-harmed-our-kids-education-pay/
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'Stanford Hates Fun': Student group wants to sue school over restriction of free speech after displaying banners during a football game protesting the ban on collegiate fun like Greek life
A group of students at Stanford University say they plan to take legal action over the school's alleged suppression of free speech.
The potential lawsuit comes from a group that goes by 'Stanford Hates Fun,' which claims they were refused entry and had signage confiscated at Saturday's game over signs they were bringing into the stadium.
The group claims that the school implemented a 'significantly higher' number of security guards for the game and confiscated signs made by the student and even making some take off clothing with their battle-cry.
The security guards were also specifically placed at the student entrance of the stadium, they said in a press release shared by OutKick.
'On Saturday, November 5, Stanford Students were restricted from entering the football game with signs and banners saying Stanford Hates Fun, regardless of size and format,' the group said.
'Security also made the bizarre request of asking students to partially remove their shirts to confirm that they weren't carrying any signage under their shirts, most of whom had no signage or awareness,' the group claimed.
The students say that they specifically consulted the approved and permitted items list and signage was not against the rules.
When they were turned away or had their signs taken, they say they received 'different answers from different staff' over why they were being restricted.
'We therefore have reason to believe that these signs were prohibited specifically because of their content,' the group wrote.
'If it is the case that signs were prohibited based on content, we believe that to be a violation of Stanford's free speech responsibilities under California's Leonard Law.'
An article from the Stanford Daily, posted in May 2020, called the law a 'controversial' statute that 'extends some First Amendment protections to students at private colleges in the state.'
The group, who have previously brought signs to games, say that it was the university's desire to censor them.
Video of students holding up a sign that managed to slip through security's cracks show security guards descending upon the group.
The guards allegedly tried to tear the banner down but were unable to get through the students who were in support of the message.
At a game earlier in the season, Stanford's iconic Tree mascot was seen holding up the now-infamous sign alongside bandmembers who covered their instrument's with similar messaging during a halftime performance.
Earlier this week, officials announced that the student who dons the costume was suspended from the role until January.
Jordan Zietz was suspended by the Band Executive Committee 'because of his use of the platform for personal benefit without going through or inquiring about appropriate processes,' according to officials.
That handling of the Tree's message prompted many students to don 'Free the Tree' shirts to Saturday's game versus Washington State.
Additionally, some bandmembers reportedly decided to sit out of Saturday's halftime show after the decision made by the governing committee.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11396369/Stanford-student-group-legal-action-against-university-suppressing-free-speech.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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6 November, 2022
Fifth of bar staff went to university fuelling fears modern-style degrees are worthless in the world of work
One in five bar staff are now graduates and experts say it is because university leavers find it increasingly hard to find professional work.
Nineteen per cent of bar workers went to university, compared with 3 per cent 30 years ago, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found.
The research, based on data from 6,000 workers, also found that 17 per cent of waiters are graduates, compared with 2 per cent three decades ago.
The same is true of 14 per cent of retail staff, 15 per cent of care workers and 24 per cent of security guards.
It comes amid growing fears that many youngsters are taking ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees, which do not properly prepare them for professional work. Around half of young people now study for a degree.
Lizzie Crowley, of the CIPD, said: ‘Successive governments’ focus on boosting the supply of higher-level qualifications to the labour market has failed to create nearly enough of the high-skill, high-wage jobs that the country needs.’
She said: ‘While graduate-level qualifications are undoubtedly essential in many roles and industries, the significant growth of graduates in non-graduate jobs is damaging for individuals, employers and the economy.
‘A growing number of graduates are stuck in low-skilled jobs, while employers find it harder to motivate and retain overqualified graduates, undermining workplace productivity.
‘Successive governments’ focus on boosting the supply of higher-level qualifications to the labour market has failed to create nearly enough of the high-skill, high-wage jobs that the country needs.’
The research found overqualified graduates have lower job and life satisfaction.
Just over half - 54 per cent - of overqualified graduates report being either very satisfied or satisfied with their current jobs, compared to nearly three-quarters - 72 per cent - of well-matched graduates.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11388619/Fifth-bar-staff-went-university-fuelling-fears-modern-style-degrees-worthless-study-shows.html
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College students say Connecticut university removed their US flags with Thin Blue Line and Gadsden symbol from housing for being 'offensive' - while BLM and LGBTQ flags were allowed to stay up
Two Trinity College students say the school removed their US flags with the Gadsden symbol and the Blue, Green, Red Line flag - representing police, military and first responders - for being 'offensive.'
The Connecticut college, however, allowed other student's pride and Black Lives Matter flags to stay up.
Finn McCole and Lucas Turco hung up two versions of the American flag outside their dorm windows on the Hartford campus after noticing others had hung flags up too.
'They had LGBTQ flags, they had transgender flags, BLM flags, which we have no problem with any of those flags hanging,' Turco told Fox News' Jesse Watters, who went to the school.
'We believe everyone has the right to their opinion and their own beliefs, and that everyone should be able to put their flags up and so me and Finn thought: "Why don't we put up some flags we personally believe in?"'
Turco said they had the Don't Tread On Me flag up to symbolize their 'love of equality for all people' and the line flag 'to show our reverence for first responders, our family members, our firemen, and police officers.'
'They said that the reason they were taken down was that some people viewed the flags as offensive and I think it's an absolute shame that those flags can be offensive,' Turco said on the show.
Turco said: 'We believe everyone has the right to their opinion and their own beliefs, and that everyone should be able to put their flags up and so me and Finn thought: "Why don't we put up some flags we personally believe in?"'
'It's a sad state of affairs,' McCole agreed. 'From our conversations with the dean, they seemed very open to apologizing [to] us, but it doesn't change the fact what you saw in the video.'
University president Joanne Berger-Sweeney sent an email to students about the situation, writing: 'The removal of two flags outside a Trinity College student residence hall window last week has sparked a conversation across social media about freedom of speech at Trinity.
'As I understand the matter, an apology was issued on the same day of the removal to the students who own the flags for the manner in which the policy was enforced. We will work harder to ensure greater awareness and consistent compliance moving forward.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11391249/Trinity-College-students-slam-CT-university-removing-Blue-Green-Red-Line-Gadsden-flags.html
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Australia: Queensland schools data reveals private school enrolments growing
As private schools go from strength to strength, Queensland state school enrolment numbers are crashing due to the low birth rate in 2017, homeschool popularity and interstate migration.
Samford Valley Steiner School, an independent school offering Prep-Year 12, has experienced significant growth, so much so they have this year opened six new classrooms.
“We are growing the school from the bottom up,” enrolments manager Joan Weir said.
“I’ve seen the migration trends (with the school’s enrolments), particularly out of Victoria.”
From 2018-2020, state school enrolments increased on average 10,000 ayear. But this growth slowed in 2021 and decreased by almost 4000 in 2022.
From 2018-2022, secondary enrolments have continued to increase, but primary enrolments have shrunk since 2019, with the decline becoming sharper every year.
Education Minister Grace Grace said Covid-related international and state border closures in place until the end of 2021 created a lag in new enrolments.
“We have also seen a rise in home schooling as some families chose to keep vulnerable children at home during a health pandemic,” she said.
“There were also one-off factors like the fact that back in 2017 Queensland had a lower birthrate than usual, which has flowed through now in lower numbers starting prep in 2022.”
Independent school enrolments climbed by 4.8 per cent in 2020-21, which was a 10-year high, and followed this up with a 4.1 per cent jump in 2021-22.
Independent Schools Queensland chief executive Chris Mountford said enrolments were at all-time high across the sector.
“A key factor in this growth over recent years is the increase in in-migration to the sector throughout the pandemic. This could be students coming from interstate, overseas, or the state or catholic sectors,” he said.
“From 2019–2022, net in-migration enrolments at Queensland independent schools jumped, on average, about 50 per cent to 4350 students.”
The Catholic sector enjoyed consistent growth in the past five years, boosting enrolment numbers by more than 10,000 in total, at a yearly average of 1.2 per cent.
“Nine new Catholic schools have opened in Queensland since 2018 to meet the demand in high-growth areas,” Queensland Catholic Education Commission executive director Dr Lee-Anne Perry said.
“These schools have been in high demand with initial enrolments exceeding expectations and, in some cases, requiring additional classes to be offered.”
From 2018-2022, the number of state schools in Queensland grew from 1240 to 1258.
The state government plans to build 11 new state schools in 2023-24 – including five in Ipswich, three in Logan, one on the Sunshine Coast and one in Redland City.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/queensland-education/schools-hub/queensland-schools-data-reveals-enrolment-trends-in-state-catholic-and-private-sectors/news-story/0e451fdfac48b5cf39086418785b295b
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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4 November, 2022
NYC teachers union holds ‘astonishing’ vote of no confidence against schools official
The city’s powerful teachers union is holding an “astonishing” vote of no confidence against a Department of Education cabinet member who recently came under fire over the apparent ousting of hundreds of early childhood staffers, The Post has learned.
Deputy Chancellor of Early Childhood Education Kara Ahmed has been at the center of the outrage aimed at the division she leads, including over the nearly 400 social workers and instructional coordinators whose jobs are in limbo.
The United Federation of Teachers sent a petition earlier this week to the staffers, who received notices in September that most of their positions would be eliminated, but who have remained on payroll while allowed to look for other gigs within the agency.
“Our school system’s early childhood education program, until recently considered the pre-eminent program of its kind in the country, is being dismantled before our eyes,” UFT chapter leaders Naomi Rodriguez and Raul Garcia wrote to early childhood staffers.
“The staff who built this program are being cast aside, preschool sites are shutting down, and the city’s youngest students are paying the price,” it read.
Memos were also emailed to elementary schools and others who interact with the division on Wednesday.
Ahmed — who reports directly to Schools Chancellor David Banks — is also facing criticism over delayed reimbursements for city-contracted early childhood education programs and an exodus of central staff at the division.
“We cannot let the staff who built this program be cast aside or allow preschool sites to be shut down. Our city’s youngest students deserve better,” said Leroy Barr, secretary of the UFT.
The UFT has held votes of no confidence on individual principals, a spokesperson for the union confirmed — but usually not higher positions. The union has also filed formal complaints about local superintendents, though not votes.
“I have never heard of the UFT having a vote of no-confidence in a deputy chancellor — or anyone at the central office for that matter,” said Eric Nadelstern, a former deputy chancellor of school support and instruction under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who worked at the DOE for 40 years.
Nadelstern frowned on the move against Ahmed, which came ahead of announcements expected later this week from the Department of Education on child care and preschool programs.
“Circulating a petition for a vote of no-confidence on the eve of the department’s release of its early childhood plans seems premature and ill-advised,” he said. “It doesn’t feel as though it’s in the best interests of UFT members to respond in this manner, rather than use a more thoughtful approach to influence policy.”
The DOE has signaled it’s willing to make improvements to the division, though the policy to reassign most instructional coordinators and social workers was introduced under this administration.
“I’ll be on the record saying the system that we inherited was a mess of epic proportions,” Banks told Brooklyn parents at a town hall last week. “It’s all tied together, when I say there’s major challenges,” he added. “It just suffices to say, it’s not something I’m happy with at all… We’re going to make sure results are delivered.”
https://nypost.com/2022/11/02/nyc-teachers-union-holds-astonishing-vote-of-no-confidence-against-schools-official/
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The one question from Justice Thomas that exposed the affirmative action myth
Justice Clarence Thomas voiced what we're all thinking. What IS diversity, anyway?
Some of America's elite universities claim to know, as they defend the use of affirmative action in college admissions. But the dishonesty at the heart of their view is painfully obvious.
Their pitifully narrow understanding of diversity has damaged America.
'I've heard the word diversity quite a few times and I don't have a clue what it means,' Thomas said during oral arguments in the Supreme Court on Monday.
'Give us a specific definition of diversity…' he asked Ryan Park, the solicitor representing the University of North Carolina, alongside Harvard University, in their defense of race-conscious admissions programs.
It was a pointed question. Apparently, Park didn't see it coming.
'Racially diverse groups of people . . . perform at a higher level,' Park responded. 'The mechanism there,' he continued, 'is that it reduces groupthink and that people have longer and more sustained disagreement, and that leads to a more efficient outcome.'
Thomas' next cut went deep. 'I guess I don't put too much stock in that,' he replied, 'I've heard similar arguments in favor of segregation, too.'
Thomas is right to be skeptical. He knows firsthand the evils of discrimination based on race, and now he's being asked to endorse them?
Just as America has thrown the discredited 'separate but equal' lie underpinning segregation in the garbage, so should we trash this diversity myth.
The patronizing justification for race-based university admissions is that racial diversity generates diversity of view points, ideologies and ideas on campus.
Apparently, that contributes to the lively exchange of ideas.
Have any of these lawyers been to a college campus lately? They are among the most intolerant places in the country. The truth is that diversity of thought is grotesquely short supply at colleges throughout America, including Harvard.
And an overwhelming number of students are terrified of voicing their opinions, especially if they hold conservative views.
Every year since 2013, the Harvard Crimson has published survey results profiling the incoming freshman class. These reports show that an overwhelming majority of Harvard's incoming students identify as politically and socially progressive.
Of the graduating class of 2025, only 1.4 percent identify as very conservative; only 7.2 percent as somewhat conservative; and only 18.6 percent as moderate. By contrast, 72.4 percent of freshmen identify as predominantly liberal.
Yet this class is the 'the most diverse class in the history of Harvard,'according to the university.
It's a sick joke. The class is diverse in one very narrow and frankly, superficial way – skin color.
Other survey responses drive the point home. Members of the Class of 2025 who supported a candidate in the 2020 presidential election overwhelmingly backed Joe Biden, at 87 percent.
This doesn't sound like viewpoint diversity to me. And without viewpoint diversity as a justification, affirmative action may be a goner.
The Supreme Court's thinking on race-conscious admissions has centered not just on the legality of the policy but on its implications for higher education.
Is Harvard aware of this? Could that be why the Harvard Crimson didn't publish this year's feature on the incoming freshman class nor reply to my inquiry about whether they would do so?
It's a fair question to ask.
Defenders of affirmative action have also long argued that racial diversity would lead to more productive debates.
Pathetically, the opposite has happened.
In 2003, America's first female justice, Sandra Day O'Connor argued that racial and ethnic diversity increased tolerance of differing opinions.
It hasn't.
A 2021 survey of 37,104 students found that more than 80 percent of students reported some self-censorship. It's almost as if students are living in China as opposed to a vibrant campus in America.
Another study showed that 65 percent of college students felt today's 'campus climate prevents people from saying what they believe for fear of offending someone'. Less than half of all college students 'said they were comfortable offering dissenting opinions to ideas shared by other students or the instructor'.
This isn't diversity, it's a bland uniformity.
71 percent of students who identified as Republican 'felt that the campus climate chilled speech'.
How depressing.
American colleges have some nerve to claim that through racial discrimination they're making campus a better place.
The Supreme Court seems likely to strike down the use of race-conscious admissions in higher education next summer. The decision will rely most heavily on legal protections that prohibit racial discrimination.
But it may also have something to say about the faulty premise underlying the practice for all these years.
To answer Justice Thomas' question: true diversity is not skin deep.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/us/renu-mukherjee-the-one-question-from-justice-thomas-that-exposed-the-affirmative-action-myth/ar-AA13HrVy
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A tertiary tragedy in Australia
Of the assorted areas of life that have deteriorated over the neoliberal era – energy costs, health, and trust in institutions – has there been a greater erosion in esteem than that of higher education? The state of the Australian academy evokes Oscar Wilde’s refrain that’s all that’s now known is ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’.
This wasn’t always the case. Australia – given our history – has never been an apogee of the intellect. Our Anglo-European inheritance did once furnish us with an estimable academy, but we were one of the first places in the modern world to establish secular universities in the spirit of the Athenian model, and one of the first to offer tertiary education to women.
The establishment of an Australian academy was, as Governor-General Sir Charles Fitzroy remarked upon the founding of The University of Sydney in 1850, a development undertaken for the ‘advancement of…morality, and the promotion of useful knowledge’; an institute erected ‘for the promotion of literature and science’, with entrance not contingent on religion nor social-status, but on ‘the basis of academic merit’, as MP William Wentworth would confirm.
It was a noble intention that would come to fruition as our academy spawned a range of world-renowned figures. Inter alia, the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer and entertainer – and Dame Edna herself – Barry Humphries emerged out of The University of Melbourne. While at The University of Sydney, the Kid from Kogarah, Clive James, and acclaimed art critic Robert Hughes were fellow alumni back in the 1950s. Other notable names, like opera singer Dame Nellie Melba and Nobel-prize-winning author Patrick White, were an integral part of our academic and artistic milieu.
The Australian academy – including the CSIRO – was also the site of inventions of major historical importance. It’s no exaggeration to say that without Australian inventions – like Wi-Fi, the bionic ear, or the airplane ‘black box’ – many of the advances and comforts of modern life wouldn’t be with us.
Yet such developments are a far cry from our current academic state. Alongside a decline in public literacy and numeracy – even among teachers – and a deterioration in school performance, as evident in our PISA results, hardly a day goes by without a major malfeasance at one of our tertiary institutions.
As a recent article in The Australian starkly observed, the Australian ‘education experience is just a sham’ with plagiarism and cheating rife. Alongside sector-wide contract cheating, there are now common examples of students who’ve faked their way through their entire degree.
There is a favoured method involving students bypassing university plagiarism software by employing ghostwriters in poor yet English-proficient places like East Africa. As one ghostwriter remarked: ‘I have some students who I have worked for since their first year and I’ve done all the assignments until they graduate.’ Adding that what really worried him was the ‘the medical students who have never done even one assignment since their first day’.
Like our ‘Most Liveable Cities’ crown, our position in the recently-published Times University Rankings is a partial reflection of our institutes and not a more acute gauge of the whole. Indeed, 60 per cent of these rankings are based on the narrow notions of research and citation, while only 30 per cent is given over to the more fundamental practice of teaching.
On top of this are increases in class sizes and a decline in academic standards, with the latter evident in the fall in the use of final exams and the consequent increase in group assignments. That is, assessments designed to help weaker, overwhelmingly foreign, students slide through on the coattails of their more competent classmates.
Universities are now engaged in a sleight-of-hand in which the content remains the same, yet the onus is taken off the individual. For as commentator – and ex-student – Meshel Laurie noted of her university experience: ‘It’s a neat trick: group assessment (with groups allocated by instructors) in courses overloaded with full-fee-paying, non-English speaking students means the English speakers bear the burden of catching the others up, translating the course content for them, and helping them pass.’
Thus – like our cities’ ostensible liveability – our university results are useful fodder for the marketers; but in reality, our universities are the educational equivalents of fast-food outlets whereby an outwardly attractive appearance belies the utter lack of sustenance found within.
Given such sophistry, what has caused this fall from grace? And why it allowed to persist? The sad fact is that in opposition to the crucial role that is still performed by parts of our universities in training our doctors, lawyers, and engineers – vast swathes of the sector are now nothing more than a warehousing program for young and a ‘degree factory’ run along economic lines for favoured interests.
Of these interests, the biggest beneficiary has been the foreign students themselves – particularly those from the developing world. Our top ten source countries are dominated by nations from what was once known as ‘third-world’ with the top three – China, India, and Nepal – comprising well over 50 per cent of our overall annual intake. It is a fact made more acute by the rapid increase in total numbers, with the amount of international students in Australia almost doubling between 2010-20.
Australia has by far the largest per capita presence of foreign students of any place in the world, at over a quarter of our tertiary cohort. Our universities have come to function not as a place of education, but as a means to a first-world wage and living conditions, and an indirect route to permanent residency: with a sizeable minority of ‘students’ (around 16 per cent) obtaining residency after their studies.
This trend is further reinforced by the vast numbers who don’t obtain residency, but who nevertheless stay on in one form or another: with ‘more international students than ever…remaining in Australia for up to four years on graduate work visas following their studies’. The figure is made worse by the non-negligible number who – both here and in the UK – simply overstay their visas and remain here illegally.
A cynical interpretation could be that these things don’t really matter, as long as such incidents remain isolated and the integrity of the academy remains. Yet unsurprisingly, the entrance of a raft of non-native students into a nation’s tertiary-education sector, often with little knowledge of its history, culture or customs – or even its language of instruction – has not proven salutary.
English language requirements are often forged and pre-university preparatory courses are little substitute for years of immersion in the ideas and idiom of instruction. Some students even regress in their English the longer they are here, rarely leaving their first language enclaves of their home and place of work.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/a-tertiary-tragedy
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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3 November, 2022
Award for pro-mask, pro-lockdown?! NYC teacher
Bashing the parents of the students you teach, especially those who fought to get kids back into your classroom and freed from irrational and harmful totems like face masks, is apparently a good career move for some New York City schoolteachers — and profitable, too.
Bobson Wong, a 17-year veteran math teacher, was just awarded $20,000 and the MfA Muller Award for Professional Influence in Education for “influencing the teaching profession in exceptional ways” and his “ability to have a positive impact within [his] school community and drive change outside of [his] own classroom.”
On Twitter, meanwhile, Wong regularly and publicly shares his disdain for the parents of his students who advocated opening schools — in Marxist, classist language.
“When I see the ‘keep schools open’ screaming about ending mask mandates from the comfort of their home offices in their posh neighborhoods unaffected by COVID, I shake my head. Centering your convenience at the expense of everyone is the embodiment of privilege.”
Wong might want to seek out an English teacher for a refresher class in irony. No single profession had their “convenience centered” more than unionized public-school teachers who fought to keep them “working” from home and made sure they were first in line for vaccines (and did not have to return to work after being vaccinated!).
The teachers union also successfully fought off the reasonable request to livestream class lessons when up to two-thirds of students were at home because of New York City’s insane union-driven cohorting system, which did nothing to lower transmission of COVID and did so much to deny so many public-school children stranded at home days, weeks and months of in-person school.
Teachers, ER doctors, EMTs, firefighters, cops, corrections officers and MTA bus drivers and subway conductors who worked through the pandemic could help explain to Wong what “centering your convenience” and “privilege” actually look like.
So could the parents, mostly moms, who left the workforce and had careers end or stall so they could do the jobs that teachers were still being paid to do — you know, teach kids. Wong has an impressive pedigree: He’s a Bronx Science graduate with a BA from Princeton and two master’s degrees. He may well be a great math teacher.
But one wonders: Wouldn’t all those degrees and nearly two decades of teaching math imbue some basic numeracy? New York’s extended school closures and lockdowns did nothing to slow or stop the COVID transmission that ravaged our city in spring 2020. In the end, New York state fared worse than Florida, our polar opposite when it comes to pandemic policy, in terms of mortality rates.
New York’s self-inflicted economic damage, youth mental-health crisis and devastating learning loss are what we open-school parents were trying to prevent. And we were right to do so, Mr. Wong. We were also brave, stubborn, resilient and, eventually, immune to the lame and ridiculous accusation of privilege tossed around by you and so many others.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/01/award-for-pro-mask-pro-lockdown-nyc-teacher-has-a-lot-to-learn/
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South Dakota epitomizes the rapid growth of homeschooling in America
Guided by the principle that parents, not the government, have the right to determine what and how their kids are taught, homeschooling families have overturned existing rules and batted down attempts over the last decade to impose new ones in many states, including South Dakota.
What’s left in much of the United States today is essentially an honor system in which parents are expected to do a good job without much input or oversight. The rollback of regulations, coupled with the ill effects of remote learning during the pandemic, have boosted the number of families opting out of public schools in favor of educating their kids at home.
Reflecting a national trend, the number of children homeschooled in South Dakota rose more than 20% in both of the last two school years.
Homeschoolers in the Mount Rushmore state advocated for a new law that strips away key pieces of the state’s oversight and eases the way for parents leave public schools. Last year Senate Bill 177 ended the requirement that parents provide annual notice to a district of their intent to homeschool their child. More significantly, homeschool students no longer must take standardized tests, as public schoolers do, or face possible intervention by the school board if they fail.
“It was a big win for parental rights,” says Dan Beasley, then a staff attorney at the influential Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which helped craft and pass the legislation. “It cut out unnecessary regulation and streamlined the process so parents can invest their time in providing the best education they can for their children.”
This freedom stands in contrast to outraged parents who feel powerless over how their kids are taught in public schools. In high-pitched battles at school board meetings, some take aim at the easing of admissions standards, others at what they see as the promotion of critical race theory and transgender rights, and still others at segregated classrooms and the presence of police officers on campus. And almost everyone is concerned with the sharp decline in already low reading and math scores of students in nearly every state during the pandemic, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress released in late October.
For a growing number of parents, homeschooling is the answer to the institutional barriers to the education they believe in. Beyond requirements that homeschooling parents teach a few core subjects like math and English, they are free to pick the content.
American history, for example, can be all about the glory of the Founding Fathers and the prosperity of free markets, or the oppression of Native Americans and people of color and the struggle for equality. For many homeschoolers, history is taught through a Christian lens, while others follow a standard public school curriculum.
The push to deregulate homeschooling raises difficult questions about how to balance the rights of parents to educate children as they see fit with the responsibility of the state to provide educational opportunity – and protect kids when things go wrong. While U.S. courts have stood behind parental rights, with the caveat that states have the authority to impose reasonable regulations to ensure students are educated, European countries lean the other way. To safeguard children, they have imposed much more stringent oversight of home schools.
Cases of child abuse and academic neglect in home schools are a real concern, especially as the guardrails are removed. Most cases of mistreatment are discovered and reported by teachers in public schools, a protection that doesn’t help homeschooled children. Homeschool alumni at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) and academic researchers have documented hundreds of examples of harm to children, many leading to criminal charges, ranging from fatalities and sexual abuse to poor instruction from parents who can’t or don’t teach.
But calls by CRHE and others for more protections don’t get much traction in the United States. In March, after Maryland lawmaker Sheila Ruth introduced a bill to create a homeschool advisory council to collect information from homeschooling parents and advise state officials, she was inundated with calls and emails. A few were so nasty and threatening that her office called the police. In a Facebook post, Ruth promised the homeschool advocates that she would let the bill die and pleaded with them to stand down.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/11/02/as_states_let_home_schools_be_growing_numbers_are_just_fine_with_that_862241.html?mc_cid=466807a75f&mc_eid=012a6b3e32
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DC Council ‘Beginning to Recognize Irrationality’ of Kicking Kids Out of School Over Vaccine Mandate
The District of Columbia Council voted Tuesday to push the city’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students ages 12 and older to next year. The district currently mandates that eligible students must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Jan. 3, or else be barred from attending school.
D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson, an independent, joined by Chairman Phil Mendelson, a Democrat, introduced emergency legislation to delay the mandate and the council passed it.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who sponsored a bill in September to combat D.C.’s “racist COVID-19 vaccine mandate in schools,” told The Daily Signal on Tuesday:
Even as the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] continues to unscientifically push the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for students, the D.C. Council is beginning to recognize the impossibility and irrationality of throwing thousands of children out of school if they choose not to take the COVID vaccine. We’ve known for a long time now that children face much less risk from COVID-19. It’s time for the D.C. Council to give parents assurance, stop threatening their children’s education, and repeal this racist vaccine mandate once and for all.
“We need more time and understanding,” Henderson told The Washington Post. “So that is why, when [Mendelson] and I discussed it, that is why we thought first doing a delay until school year 23-24 was appropriate, and then for us in the new council period to have a fuller conversation around what happens next.”
“The district is one of three jurisdictions in the country that requires COVID vaccine for public school students,” Mendelson, the D.C. Council chair, said at a Monday legislative briefing. He explained that he and Henderson crafted a COVID-19 emergency policy, which would push off the deadline for students to receive the vaccine in order to attend school.
The Office of State Superintendent of Education reported in September that 45% of D.C. students are not in compliance with the district’s COVID-19 vaccination policy, as of Sept. 27. This policy defines full COVID-19 immunization as both an initial vaccine as well as any additional boosters incorporated into public health standards.
Yet, a mere 6.5% of D.C. residents have received the new COVID-19 booster.
In August, Mayor Muriel Bowser told The Daily Signal there would be no virtual learning options for unvaccinated students. The Daily Signal reported that and the fact that over 40% of black students in the District aged 12 and older were not vaccinated at the time. After The Daily Signal’s report, the city abruptly changed the enforcement deadline for the COVID-19 vaccination, moving it to 2023.
Doug Badger, health and welfare policy scholar at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal, Heritage’s news outlet:
The D.C. government is finally responding to reality: Turning children away from school because they haven’t received the COVID vaccine is infeasible. Most parents understand that the risk of COVID to their children is low and that the vaccines don’t prevent their kids from getting or transmitting the disease. Having closed the schools for too long, it would be unconscionable to turn away students now that they have reopened.
Moreover, over a quarter of D.C. public school students are not up to par with the district’s routine pediatric immunization schedule, which applies to grades as young as pre-kindergarten.
D.C. public schools extended the deadline for pre-K through fifth grade students to Oct. 11 at the beginning of this school year. The deadline for middle and high school students to receive their routine immunizations is scheduled for Nov. 4.
Mendelson noted there has been confusion surrounding the district’s vaccination policies, “in part because the law that we adopted last year requires the vaccine when the student is eligible” for full Food and Drug Administration approval. “Much approval has been emergency authorization, which is not what the law contemplates.”
Though D.C. Council members extended the COVID-19 vaccine deadline for students, Mendelson noted that the routine immunization requirements still apply to pre-K through 12th grade students.
Lindsey Burke, director of education policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal:
Over the course of the pandemic, D.C. fourth graders lost 12 points in math and 8 points in reading on the recently released National Assessment of Education Progress. Those dramatic declines are the equivalent of over a year’s worth of learning loss in math.
Those problems compound over time. Just 16% of eighth graders in D.C. are proficient in math and just 23% are proficient in reading.
The last thing these children need is to be denied entry to school because of politicized, teachers union-supported policies. As D.C. is under its jurisdiction, Congress should immediately allow every single child denied entry into school because of this policy to receive a voucher to attend a private school in Virginia or Maryland.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/01/d-c-council-beginning-recognize-irrationality-kicking-kids-school-vaccine-mandate-ted-cruz-says
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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2 November, 2022
Alarmed parents go to desperate lengths to combat ‘woke’ school ‘ideologies’
For the past decade, Paul Rossi has worked in education, but in the past year, the 53-year-old Queens resident has been getting some niche requests. Well-off private school parents are coming to him for advice on how to navigate the city’s increasingly woke schools.
Families pay him $150/hour for help finding private schools with what he calls “traditional, individualistic values.”
A dad moving to Illinois sought out Rossi’s services earlier this year when searching for a school for his two kids where the emphasis would be on critical thinking, not blindly adhering to supposedly liberal ideas about diversity and identity. Rossi analyzed mission statements for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, examined health and sex ed courses, looked up teachers’ backgrounds and examined school websites.
“Are they talking about implicit bias — about how students have implicit bias — and are they expected to examine the bias?” Rossi said of his methods. “That’s a red flag.”
As private schools become increasingly focused on identity politics, some skeptical parents are paying thousands of dollars to hire private consultants to find institutions that are more in line with their values, or to help them communicate effectively with administrators about thorny issues and divisive topics.
“Kids are feeling like they can’t speak openly about their views and parents are noticing the toll it’s taking,” another education consultant and admissions coach, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post. “They don’t agree with the ideologies being forced down their children’s throat,” said the consultant, who works with families in Manhattan and the tri-state area and charges up to $3,000 for a project fee.
“They’re teaching their kids certain values at home and they’re taught a different set of rules at school,” the consultant said, adding that clients have found them on a word-of-mouth basis.
It’s not just conservative white families who are seeking out these professionals. A parent of a black child enrolled in an elite private Manhattan school recently hired Rossi. The parent needed help navigating a conversation with administrators about not using their child for what Rossi said the parent called “woke tokenism.”
“The parent was concerned that their child’s blackness or black identity was going to be formed by the school in such a way that their child was going to develop an oppressed identity that was going to be part of their character,” Rossi said, noting the client was able to address these concerns with the school, and the child remains there.
One Manhattan mom of three said she hasn’t sought out consulting services, but can understand the need. She’s been unhappy with her third grader’s private school curriculum, which, she said, is riddled with books that promote ideas about “systematic oppressions.” While visiting high schools for her older son, she was uncomfortable about how introductions were handled.
“Every kid has to say their name and their pronouns. They talk incessantly about DEI and they don’t even talk that much about critical thinking,” said the mom, who asked for anonymity. “It’s frustrating.”
Rossi comes to his work with a personal tie to it. For nine years, he taught at the independent Grace Church School in the East Village. Last year, he was suspended and his contract was not renewed after, he said, he spoke out about about the school “indoctrinating” students. (Grace Church School did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.)
While Rossi sees his consulting work as needed, he readily admits that “these are upmarket problems.”
And, he said, parents don’t always want to hear what he has to say. “I’ll be frank with them,” he said. “I’ll say I know their child is going to be better off and healthier at a smaller religious school where they’re not going to have to deal with this, than some prestigious brand where they’re going to get these luxury beliefs.”
“Kids are feeling like they can’t speak openly about their views and parents are noticing the toll it’s taking,” another education consultant and admissions coach, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/01/alarmed-parents-hire-consultants-to-combat-woke-school-agendas/
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Supreme Court cases expose ugly truth of elite colleges’ inhumane racial admissions
Lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are exposing the crude and dehumanizing racial sorting that goes on in elite universities’ admissions offices.
UNC’s application form asks young people to check a box identifying themselves as (1) Asian, (2) Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, (3) Hispanic, (4) White, (5) African American or (6) Native American. White Hispanics with ancestors from Spain are lumped in with Central American immigrants. The black child of a Harvard-trained doctor or diplomat checks the same box as a black applicant living in a homeless shelter. The Asian category absurdly covers 60% of the world’s population, from China to Japan to India.
Applicants who mark Hispanic or African American win acceptance with test scores and grades far below what whites and Asians, on average, need to get in, per data presented to the Supreme Court.
Such so-broad-as-to-be-meaningless categories are no way to recognize the humanity and individual merit of college applicants.
On Monday, the Supreme Court justices grilled Harvard and UNC attorneys. The questions indicate the court is likely to outlaw using race to determine who is accepted.
Universities could still consider the achievements of applicants who convey in their personal essays or interviews that they have overcome hardships related to their race. Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions, which brought the lawsuits, explained, “What we object to is a consideration of race and race by itself.”
Harvard lawyer Seth Waxman objected that while race is sometimes the determining factor in who gets into Harvard, other times being “an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra needs an oboe player” will tip a student in. Chief Justice John Roberts instantly shot back, “We did not fight a civil war about oboe players.”
The left protests that outlawing racial preferences will be yet another departure from precedent. Not true. The precedent is Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 ruling that upheld the use of race at the University of Michigan Law School. But Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the Grutter opinion, anticipated that racial preferences would be temporary and unneeded in 25 years.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked the Harvard and UNC lawyers repeatedly, “When is your sunset?” They had no answer. The schools have no intention of ending racial preferences voluntarily.
US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, cautioned that overturning racial preferences would send “shock waves” through every sector of society. That’s actually good news, especially for employees in the corporate world who are frequently being told, “We already have too many white guys.”
Some 80 major companies, including Apple and Google, signed onto a brief supporting Harvard and UNC. A trade group representing human-resource departments in 600 firms also filed a brief backing racial preferences, quoting a McKinsey & Company report that said, “The business case for diversity, equity, and inclusion is stronger than ever.”
Not one company indicated support for color-blind admissions. The gap between the business world and the American public is staggering. Corporate America’s HR departments are pushing DEI, but most Americans want people judged on their individual merits. A Pew Research poll found 74% believe race and ethnicity shouldn’t be factors in admissions decisions.
Justice Elena Kagan asked about preferential hiring to create a diverse police department or a diverse set of law clerks. She challenged the notion that “it just doesn’t matter if our institutions look like America.”
An attorney for SFFA replied that “merit and your worth as a person” are “not correlated with your skin color.” Amen.
Expect the court to look askance at DEI programs in businesses that push aside white males to meet numerical goals for the advancement of underrepresented minorities. Several big companies, including AT&T, are already getting sued for allegedly doing that.
Another SFFA lawyer summed up the issue: Racial classifications “cause resentment by treating people differently based on something they can’t change.”
President Joe Biden promised to unite the nation, but his racial favoritism has done the opposite. A court ruling striking down racial preferences will help bring the nation together.
The ugly facts revealed about admissions at UNC and Harvard confirm what Chief Justice Roberts said long ago: “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”
https://nypost.com/2022/11/01/supreme-court-cases-expose-ugly-truth-of-elite-colleges-inhumane-racial-admissions/
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Colleges: Go Back to Basics
Colleges perform two vital functions: They disseminate to the people (especially their own students) the knowledge and wisdom acquired through time in ways that enhance the common good, and they also expand that core of knowledge through research.
The typical university today, however, tries to do many other things peripheral to these main tasks, often diverting themselves from successfully accomplishing their two major functions.
They feed and house people, own hospitals and clinics, and run sometimes financially substantial entertainment venues (often featuring ball-throwing and kicking contests of various kinds). All the while, they claim they are also contributing to saving the planet from climate-driven catastrophe; alleviating racial, ethnic, or gender injustice by using their allegedly superior intellectual and moral values to improve the quality if not the quantity of human and other forms of life; and encouraging non-academics (especially what Leona Helmsley once called “the little people”) to do the same.
Few large universities spend more than a third of their funds paying the people who do the actual teaching. Financially, we can evaluate these assertions by examining university expenditures.
To be sure, spending varies enormously by type of institution, from modest community colleges to massive research universities. But few large universities spend more than one-third of their funds paying the people who do the actual teaching and direct the research—the faculty. Many of those schools do a bad job performing all sorts of tasks that are often better performed by specialists in the private sector—running campus transportation systems, housing, or cafeterias, for example.
Inside Higher Ed recently reported that Eastern Michigan University, in desperation and despite faculty opposition, is turning to a private company to build new dormitories for many of its students. Why? Enrollment has declined sharply, partly, many feel, because university-provided housing is old and dingy, with only one dorm even having central air-conditioning.
Recently, I traveled to Michigan to visit Tom Monaghan, who made a large fortune starting Domino’s Pizza near the Eastern Michigan campus, partly because kids craved his tasty pizzas over university-provided food. So he extended that concept, putting Domino’s near campuses nationwide.
Why don’t we allow pizza specialists like Monaghan and other food impresarios to take over feeding students, concentrating collegiate attention on educating them and doing research leading to new lifesaving drugs or other useful things? Why don’t we do the same with housing, student healthcare, and other functions that are best done through market competition?
To a limited extent, some universities do. And some things universities do have dual functions, both a traditional academic purpose and broader applications. I think here especially of hospitals and clinics associated with university medical centers. A small portion of their activity involves students working with faculty to examine patients, or running patient trials of new potential drugs discovered at the university.
But administrators at university medical centers seem determined today to grab the biggest market share providing healthcare services in the area, a distinctly different function than the educational purpose of teaching and research. I know of at least one huge research university (Ohio State) at which the budget of medical center–related activities equals that of the entire remaining institution.
An even bigger problem is the vast increase in resources used to achieve nonacademic goals. An even bigger problem is the vast increase in resources now used to achieve nonacademic goals. College officials use funds that come from exorbitant tuition revenues, arising as a byproduct of the federal student-loan program (the availability of generous student-loan money has incentivized colleges to aggressively raise their fees). They then spend on programs and activities with little or no educational value.
For instance, when I began teaching college in the mid-1960s, there were no affirmative action personnel at my school or most others. Today, however, schools like the University of Michigan have an expensive bureaucracy measuring in the triple digits, who, in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” run roughshod over academic quality, reduce freedom of campus expression that is the heart of the intellectually examined life, and, through campus judicial proceedings, make a mockery of the rule of law and due process ideas going back to Magna Carta.
All of that spending has an opportunity cost—programs and projects that would help students learn more and become better prepared for life after they graduate.
Then there are intercollegiate athletics, which are non-existent in almost all other countries of the world. While ball-throwing, batting, and kicking contests are wildly popular throughout the planet, in over 90 percent of it they are conducted outside of the domain of universities.
As college sport has become hugely commercialized in America, honest accounting suggests it is carried out typically at an enormous financial loss. Eastern Michigan University, for example, typically loses well over $20 million annually on its college sports competitions. This is more than $1,000 a year per student, on a campus about six miles away from the more athletically successful University of Michigan.
Eastern Michigan is a university at which, the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard tells us, 46 percent of students are low-income enough to obtain federal Pell Grants. Why increase the cost of their degrees with athletics programs that most don’t care about?
Another cost-driver is administrative bloat.
Once, I did a historical perspective of staffing at my typical, mid-quality state university, Ohio University. In the 1970s, there were roughly two faculty members for every non-teaching/research person we can call “administrators.” Few of those positions have anything to do with actual education. Today, the number of administrators is larger than the number of faculty. Tuition costs have more than tripled for in-state students, adjusting for inflation.
Today, the number of administrators is larger than the number of faculty.These students are paying to finance an army of apparatchiks who neither teach nor expand the frontiers of knowledge. Indeed, many of them are anti-academic individuals whose work lowers the quality of the examined life on my campus. The same story can be told across the land.
Lastly, while research can be a useful function of colleges, much of it is pointless, an exercise in filling up pages in journals that no one reads. Professor Mark Bauerlein makes that point clearly in his Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “The Research Bust.”
Colleges give many professors very light teaching loads so that they will have time to do research in their fields. The problem is that many of them have nothing valuable to say. Therefore, the commitment to research adds to costs with negligible resulting value.
A more sensible system would be to expect all faculty members to carry a full teaching load but to reduce it if outside parties want their research badly enough to buy their time. That would eliminate the “research for the sake of doing research” cost and probably improve teaching at the same time.
We should rethink how we finance colleges and incentivize them to return to basics—emphasizing job one, teaching, and job two, doing worthwhile academic research.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14324&omhide=true&trk=rm
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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1 November, 2022
NYC schools will get extra $12M in funding for migrant students — but protesters say aid isn’t enough
New York City public schools seeing an influx of migrant students will receive an extra $12 million in funding, education officials announced Monday — minutes before a protest over the agency’s handling of the crisis.
Under the policy, schools who have at least six or more new students in temporary housing — an indicator of migrant kids in shelters — will receive $2,000 per head, the Department of Education said.
Advocates and local pols, including City Council Education Committee Chair Rita Joseph and Comptroller Brad Lander, had been set to call on the DOE to provide more resources for the asylum seekers at the protest, before the boost in funding was announced.
The demonstrators maintained the just-announced added cash doesn’t go far enough to fully support the estimated 7,200 migrant kids who’ve entered the system this school year.
“We need more treats and fewer tricks for all our students this Halloween — most certainly including those that are in families who have come here seeking asylum,” said Lander, who earlier this month called on the DOE to shell out at least another $34 million.
Lander also asked for more transparency from the city agency, which doesn’t publicly provide or update a number of asylum-seeking students on a weekly basis or the schools they’re enrolling in across the five boroughs.
In addition to the extra cash, the protesters want the department to make sure Spanish-speaking students are placed in schools that meet their needs, such as by having enough bilingual teachers.
Schools across the city have reported not having the resources necessary to hire bilingual teachers and social workers — including PS 33 where The Post reported only one teacher was certified for that purpose.
The new dollars can be spent on a handful of issues, including language access staff and programs.
“Each one of our kids, whether born in the boroughs or just arrived, deserves every resource we can provide, which is why I am thrilled to be announcing this additional funding today,” said Schools Chancellor David Banks in a statement.
“Schools are the centers of our communities, and through these funds, we will ensure that our schools are fully equipped to provide the academic, emotional, and social needs of our newest New Yorkers,” he added.
The money can also be used on extracurricular activities or support for student well-being, according to a press release. Some schools may choose to fund partnerships with community-based groups, outsourcing those responsibilities to local organizations.
The announcement comes after the DOE earlier this month said it had allocated $25 million to schools in response to overall enrollment increases, regardless of student immigration status.
Enrollment across the city was being audited on Monday. School budgets are typically adjusted in the fall after enrollment is finalized on Oct. 31 — giving additional dollars to schools serving more kids than expected, and taking money away from those enrolling fewer, usually by the winter.
Councilmember Joseph, who previously worked in the city schools as an English as a new language coordinator, said that schools should be held harmless for enrollment changes as students continue to arrive from the border.
“We have to move it a little faster. Our students cannot wait,” she said.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/31/nyc-to-give-schools-extra-12-million-in-funding-for-migrant-students/
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'Parents need to stop coddling their kids': Renowned educator who raised TWO CEOs and a doctor reveals the 'unpopular' parenting rule that helped her daughters achieve success
A renowned educator has revealed the 'unpopular' parenting rule she followed as a young mother that helped her raise two CEOs and a doctor.
Esther Wojcicki, 81, is known as the 'Godmother of Silicon Valley' because of how many of her students went on to become entrepreneurs — including her own incredibly successful children.
The journalist and best-selling author of the parenting book 'How to Raise Successful People' is mom to Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube; Janet Wojcicki, a doctor and professor of pediatrics; and Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.
'Don't do anything for your kids that they can do for themselves,' Wojcicki advised in an op-ed she penned for CNBC in which she argued against helicopter parenting.
She explained that removing any and all obstacles that arise in children's lives can be detrimental to their future success, insisting that 'parents need to stop coddling their kids.'
Instead, she believes children should be held responsible for any daily tasks that they can handle on their own, including setting their own alarms, picking out their school clothes, helping with meals, and checking their own homework.
'Chores are especially important,' she said. 'Washing dishes was a big one in our house. All my daughters stood on a little stool at the sink and washed the dishes after dinner.'
She also used to have her daughters make their beds every morning even though they didn't always do the best job.
'A bed made by a kid can look like she’s still asleep in it,' she admitted. 'But I didn’t fight them. As long as they did it, I was happy.'
Wojcicki noted she had 'many unpopular parenting rules,' but this is the one that she believes is the most important.
'The more you trust your children to do things on their own, the more empowered they'll be,' she said. 'The key is to begin with guided practice: It's the "I do, we do, you do" method.'
Wojcicki taught journalism at Palo Alto High School for more than three decades and founded the school's Media Arts Program. She also served as a mentor to a number of students, including Steve Jobs' daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
As a teacher, she rewarded her students for 'learning and the hard work' they put in and 'not getting it right the first time.'
'Mastery means doing something as many times as it takes to get it right,' she said. 'Being a writing teacher taught me this. In the 80s and 90s, one of the supposed characteristics of a good teacher was that your class was so hard that many students failed.
'But the kids who got a D on their first paper found it impossible to recover and lost the motivation to improve, since they were starting out so far behind.'
Wojcicki explained that she gave her students 'the opportunity to revise their work as many times as they wanted,' and 'their grade was based on the final product.'
Parents should also be focusing on mastery and not perfection, according to the longtime teacher.
'The idea is to teach them how to cope with what life throws at them,' she said. 'One of the most important lessons I taught my daughters is that the only thing you can control is how you react to things.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11374661/Educator-reveals-unpopular-parenting-rule-helped-raise-two-CEOs-doctor.html
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Greenie fanaticism in the schools is hurting kids
The Age of Anxiety has dawned. While this may be easy to dismiss as a natural corollary of the recent pandemic, when one looks a little closer, it’s not hard to see where this phenomenon manifested and where it is sustained.
In 2021, The Lancet published a global survey of responses from 10,000 young people, aged 16–25 years from Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK, and America.
The survey found that 84 per cent of young people aged between 16-25 were ‘moderately to extremely worried’ about climate change. More than 50 per cent of respondents reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty.
Over 75 per cent said that they think the future is ‘frightening’. Climate anxiety and distress were correlated with perceived inadequate government response and associated feelings of betrayal.
Yet despite decades of technological and medical advances and the raising of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, the natural question that arises is, where did this anxiety come from?
You need look no further than our education system and what is being taught to students of all ages on a daily basis.
For years the University of Sydney’s Environment Institute (SEI) has been at the forefront of Woke ideology and radical climate activism. According to the SEI’s worldview, radical climate activism is an antidote to falling education standards and eco-related mental health problems.
Ultimately, activism-driven anxiety is a product of the left-wing vanity project to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050.
It’s a dream being fuelled by Australia’s oldest and most prestigious sandstone university and its treatment of the climate debate.
Who cares about numeracy and literacy? We have a global apocalypse on our hands! This is the mantra repeated by the Greta Thunbergs of the world and supported by SEI research.
The upshot: schools should be replaced with climate activism camps.
According to SEI Postdoctoral Fellow Blanche Verlie and Melbourne University’s Alicia Flynn, ‘ecocidal global socio-economic systems’ can be blamed for most problems in the modern world.
Verlie and Flynn ask, ‘What if education is not the solution, but part of the problem?’
They question whether education has ‘young people’s best interests at heart’ and claim schools constrain ‘cultural and political agency and effect’.
‘The transformative response is to reorient educational structures, practices, and relations towards those that sustain life on Earth. It is time for education to reckon with its role in the climate crisis and its entanglement within colonial-capitalist extractivism.’
In other words, the likes of Verlie and Flynn believe schools should be turned into centres where future social justice warriors can be trained the transform the ‘ecocidal’ structures from within.
Verlie and Flynn also remain stubbornly attached to the notion that there is ‘insufficient climate change education in schools’.
Perhaps they have not read the latest version of the National Curriculum, which is liberally littered with environmental content, thanks to the presence of ideologically driven cross-curriculum priorities like ‘sustainability’.
The criticism doesn’t just stop at schools, it extends to universities as well.
‘Our ecocidal global socio-economic systems (namely colonial-capitalism) are largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs,’ Verlie and Flynn claim. ‘The transformative response is to reorient educational structures, practices, and relations towards those that sustain life on Earth.’
Well then, out with the old and in with the new!
Such extreme rejection of the Western intellectual tradition also undermines the SEI’s role as a department of research, but we cannot be surprised. After all, it was the University of Sydney that promoted the Unlearn campaign encouraging students to ‘demolish social norms and rebuild new ones in their place’.
To promote research and innovation, the University of Sydney said that preconceived ideas about ‘truth’, ‘love’, ‘medicine’, and ‘criminal’ must be questioned. Calling for students to ‘unlearn’ basic fundamental ideas of knowledge will leave young and impressionable Australians unaware of the basic principles which built our way of knowing and way of life.
Similarly, advising students – terrified that the end of the world is nigh – to attend climate rallies, is a recipe for disaster.
More activism is the last thing that Australian children need at school right now. The most recent report from the OECD Program for International Student Assessment confirmed that Australia has continued its 20-year decline in education standards.
Throwing education out the window entirely and replacing it with more climate activism is not the answer. Neither is it the answer to the growing mental health crisis among younger generations.
The educated SEI elite, living in a world of ideas, rather than reality, must start to present real solutions to the problems they identify.
Obliterating the entire ‘ecocidal’ system which includes Western literature, culture, education, morals, values, institutions – to make way for a green new world – is a fine example of Einstein’s observation of infinite ‘human stupidity’, not progress.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/the-kids-arent-alright-2/?
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http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.
TERMINOLOGY: The English "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".
MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).
There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.
The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed
Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.
Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor
I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.
Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".
For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933
I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.
I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!
Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.
Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.
Comments above by John Ray
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