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30 April, 2023
Louisiana Bill Would Ban K-12 Classroom Discussion of Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity
New Louisiana legislation would ban public school teachers and personnel from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with students from kindergarten through the end of high school.
That’s not all. Republican Louisiana state Rep. Dodie Horton’s HB 466 would also prevent teachers from discussing their own sexual orientation or gender identity with students or using pronouns for a student that differ from the pronouns that “reflect the sex indicated on the student’s birth certificate.”
If the parents provide written permission, school employees could use pronouns for a student that differ from the pronouns on their birth certificate.
HB 466 passed out of Louisiana’s House Education Committee on a 7-5 vote on Wednesday, Horton said in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. It now heads to the House for debate.
“It is important to be able to protect our children while they’re in the classroom and from those who wish to push their ideology on them,” she said. “Our children are our greatest commodity, and the world is fighting over them. We must be able to assure our parents that when they drop their children off at our public schools, their children are going to be taught the approved state standard class curriculum and [teachers will] not deviate [from] that and infringe on parental rights in sharing their own philosophy of life with the student.”
Most teachers respect parental rights, Horton said. They are there for the child. But with this growing trend of teachers pushing ideology on children, “we must do all we can to protect them.”
Horton believes Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, would veto the legislation if it reaches his desk. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.
“If it does, we have a supermajority in the House and the Senate, and I pray that people will be bold enough and courageous enough to override a veto,” she said.
Critics have already labelled it “Don’t Say Gay,” Horton told The Daily Signal, comparing it to Florida’s controversial legislation. On Wednesday, Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast warned: “This is a Don’t Say Gay bill that would prohibit educators from discussing sexual orientation in the classroom.”
Polling conducted by outlets like The Daily Wire and Politico shows that most Americans don’t want gender identity being taught in schools.
Florida’s Parental Rights in Education (HB 1557) also bans classroom discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation for little children. Media and activists who labelled the bill “Don’t Say Gay” most notably took issue with the law’s statement that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Kindergarten students are typically about 5 years old. Third graders are typically 8 or 9 years old.
The legislation, which Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March 2022, never even mentions the word gay. It does mention the word parent 32 times.
Asked if she conferred with Florida legislators on HB 466, Horton said that she had spoken with DeSantis himself about the bill a few months ago. At the time, she said, she questioned the Florida governor about why HB 1577 stopped at the third grade.
Florida’s Board of Education recently expanded HB 1557 to ban discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity through all grades.
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Villanova Students Required to Read Graphic Trans Sex Scene Between Minors
An English seminar class at Villanova University reportedly required students to read a play depicting a graphic sex scene between minors, one of whom identifies as transgender.
Jennifer Joyce teaches the Core Literature and Writing Seminar Class at Villanova, ENG 1975-020, titled Narratives of Belonging in Contemporary Irish Literature. The specific class is one of several options for students who are required to take the core seminar, though students may be forced to take the class if the other class options have been filled.
On Tuesday, Joyce led discussions of the play “Scorch” by Stacey Gregg. “Scorch” is inspired by stories of biological women in the United Kingdom who tricked other women into having sex with them by pretending to be men. Examples include Fiona Manson, who now goes by Kyran Lee, charged with assault by penetration for having sex with another woman while pretending to be a man, as well as Gayle Newland, sentenced to eight years in prison for pretending to be a man in order to dupe her friend into having sex with her.
“Scorch” takes the side of the woman doing the duping.
“The reading was mandatory because there was a quiz on it, so if you did not do the reading, you would have failed the quiz in class,” a female student who is taking the class told The Daily Signal. “Further, the discussion in class labeled everyone who did not understand what the main character ‘Kes’ was going through as homophobic or transphobic.”
The student, who asked to remain anonymous since the class is currently still in session, said the play contains a sex scene between two minors who are 17 and 15. Both of the minors (Kes and Jules) are biologically female and met on a dating app, she said, but Jules thinks that Kes is a boy. Kes’ character is reportedly “confused” about her gender identity and deciding whether or not to transition to attempt to become a boy.
When the sex scene takes place, Jules is apparently unaware that she is having a sexual encounter with a biological female.
“I was visibly uncomfortable throughout the whole discussion as the teacher offered no opportunity for dissent and was oblivious to the members of the class who were clearly [made] uncomfortable by this transgender sex scene,” the student told The Daily Signal.
“Even the most liberal members of the class did not know which pronouns to use to describe the main character of the play because the main character is a girl who is clearly lesbian and hasn’t undergone a transition yet, but goes to a transgender support group where they talk the character into using terms like ‘agender,’ ‘gender fluid,’ etc., etc. and convince her it is a good thing to transition,” the female student explained.
The Daily Signal spoke with this student following a report from The Daily Caller’s Sarah Weaver that Villanova had removed a number of gender identity terms from its housing application. The move came after The Daily Caller reached out to the university asking why it included the gender options, such as “two-spirit,” “gender fluid,” and “gender queer.”
Villanova told The Daily Caller that the initial options were provided by an “outside vendor,” and its housing application form now offers only three gender options for students: male, female, and “nonbinary,” terms reportedly consistent with those on the Common Application.
“The latest version of the housing application included a more comprehensive list of gender identity options than Villanova typically uses; this default list was provided by an outside vendor and has since been updated,” the school said.
“The Office of Residence Life is committed to ensuring every student feels comfortable and welcome in their on-campus housing situation. As part of our Augustinian values of Veritas, Unitas, Caritas—Truth, Unity and Love—Villanova seeks to be a welcoming and inclusive community that respects members of all backgrounds, identities and faiths.”
The female student who spoke with The Daily Signal said that she feels like she has been “slowly going insane” as she strives to get a good grade in Joyce’s class, believing that she must emphasize themes of sexism in order to please her instructor.
“The whole class is about identity, I feel like my identity is being shredded here, because I kind of have no choice. I feel like I’m slowly losing my soul,” she said, describing her experience in the class as being “gaslit, 24/7.”
“And also, I’m at a Catholic school where my parents paid so much money to send me, and the fact that this is being taught in a Catholic school is probably the most frustrating part,” she added.
Villanova is, in fact, known as a private, Catholic university, but it is unclear how faithful to Catholicism the institution actually is. As The Daily Caller reported, it boasts of so-called anti-racist and diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings as well as uses “gender inclusive” practices in language and curriculum.
It is not among the Catholic colleges promoted by The Cardinal Newman Society, an organization which advocates for solidly faithful Catholic education. Many thousands of Catholic families reference the Newman Guide when deciding where to send their children for college.
“An authentic Catholic university is devoted to the truth of Catholic teaching, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not recognize a ‘nonbinary’ gender,” Patrick Reilly, president and founder of The Cardinal Newman Society, told The Daily Signal. “The complementary of men and women is essential to Christian anthropology and marriage.”
“Yes, a Catholic university should welcome students who struggle with error and seek the truth,” he added, “but a university that willingly compromises truth is worthless and even dangerous.”
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University of Queensland forced to apologise over ‘white privilege’ medical assignment
The University of Queensland has been forced to apologise and scrap the results of a controversial “white privilege” medical assignment after students feared they could be expelled for failing.
First year UQ medical students had been asked to write about their own “white privilege” and institutional racism in a two-part assignment.
The Sunday Mail understands when students received their grades last week the majority of the cohort received a fail mark.
One medical student told The Sunday Mail, on the condition of anonymity, they believed the ones who had passed had effectively lied about admitting to being racist.
“The people who did well have frankly lied, they played into the notion that they’re racist, even if they’re not,” they said.
Following backlash from the medical cohort, the prestigious university has been forced to apologise and remove the results of the assignment from end-of-year grades.
Prior to the decision, students had been concerned that the university was at liberty to expel them from the program if they failed.
The medical student said that the passing grade on the assignment was required for an overall passing grade of the year.
The student said the cohort had feared that a fail on this subject could be the difference between getting an overall high distinction or a distinction which could impact postgraduate employment.
“UQ has a very good reputation internationally but students with all As in assignments are looked at better than B,” they said prior to UQ’s announcement. “You could be the best doctor in the world but fail on this.”
A UQ spokeswoman said there was no suggestion that students could be expelled for failing the assignment as the university took a “whole of approach” to progression.
The spokeswoman did not respond to questions about how many students failed the exam.
A leaked email from UQ’s dean of medical school Professor Stuart Carney to students, seen by the Sunday Mail, confirmed the results of the assignment had been removed from the final component.
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28 April, 2023
UK: Labour’s ‘lessons for boys’ plan is a sinister sideshow
What are schools for? The answer used to be obvious: school was where children went to learn how to read, write and count, while the lucky ones picked up some history, algebra, chemistry and literature along the way. But not any more. Nowadays, academic subjects have become a sideshow to the main event: changing children’s attitudes and values.
Whether it is relationships and sex education classes that teach children there are 73 genders, citizenship lessons that preach the importance of fair trade, or personal, social and health education workshops on white privilege, today’s schools seem more concerned with coercing children into accepting a particular set of beliefs than they are with teaching subject knowledge. The bad news for Britain’s children is that if Labour wins the next election, this programme of radical indoctrination will be put on speed.
The Labour party’s latest plan is for part of the school day to be set aside to make boys hear from women who have been victims of male violence and abuse. Speaking at an event in south London this week, Keir Starmer announced that he wants to see the national curriculum expanded to include compulsory lessons on the importance of respecting women. His hope is that this will help to ‘bring about cultural change’ and embolden boys to ‘call out’ friends who act in a misogynistic way. Labour hopes that rooting out inappropriate behaviour in young boys will help halve incidents of violence against women and girls within a decade.
That Labour has a ‘woman problem’ is clear for all to see. Recently, Starmer rushed to condemn Dominic Raab for bullying but he has had little to say about the vile abuse directed at his colleague Rosie Duffield. And although his ability to define ‘women’ has improved, he still thinks one-in-a-thousand females have a penis. In this context, popping up at an event alongside high-profile women who have been victims of sexual assault feels opportunistic.
But back to education. If Starmer is really determined to stamp out sexual assault in schools, he could announce plans to enforce single-sex toilets, changing rooms and dormitories on school trips. The Labour party could warn teachers that girls have a right to insist on single-sex spaces and sports. None of this will happen, of course.
In singling out boys, Starmer has taken the political path of least resistance. Boys have long been seen as a problem, with white, working class boys the biggest problem of all. A narrative of toxic masculinity portrays men as a danger to women, society and themselves. As boys grow up to be men, and therefore potential perpetrators of abuse, schools are expected to provide a moral prophylactic. According to Starmer, this should involve subjecting them to first-hand accounts of victims of sexual harassment and assault. As a boy, you must have your original sin firmly stamped out.
Perhaps some of this would be justified if it did actually work in preventing domestic violence. But just as it is not possible to draw a straight line between sexist school boy banter and adult misogyny, neither can we prove that school workshops prevent sexual assault. The only thing new in Starmer’s announcement about respect lessons was his recourse to the national curriculum. More general programmes to educate boys about the wrongs of domestic violence and abuse have been around for at least a quarter of a century. Yet throughout this time the number of women being murdered by a current or former partner has remained stubbornly persistent.
Common sense tells us that poverty makes it more difficult for people to leave relationships that are under enormous strain. It tells us that gaining a few qualifications while at school makes employment more likely. We know that, at present, white working class boys are most likely to leave school without any qualifications at all and least likely to go to university.
Subjecting underperforming boys to yet more lessons on why they are inherently bad is unlikely to turn them on to school.
The flipside of all this is the message such lessons send to girls – the ostensible winners of the feminisation of education. There is the hypocrisy of schools proffering lessons in the importance of respecting girls – just not the girls who don’t want to see a penis when they get changed after PE. But we should also be concerned about continually telling girls that being a woman is to be a victim of harassment and abuse. This is hardly an enticing prospect for adulthood and perhaps offers one explanation as to why increasing numbers of girls are choosing to opt out of womanhood altogether.
Under a Conservative government, schools have come perilously close to morphing into cultural re-education centres. Starmer’s talk of lessons in respect shows that under a Labour administration this process will not just continue but be intensified. This is bad for children, bad for society and terrible for education.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/labours-lessons-for-boys-plan-is-a-sinister-sideshow/
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Handful of Colleges Hold Out, Push Back on Cultural Marxism on Campus
Former University of Kentucky championship swimmer Riley Gaines was recently assaulted by demonstrators at San Francisco State University for her support of keeping biological men out of women’s sports.
Federal Appeals Court Judge Kyle Duncan was shouted down at Stanford Law School.
Cornell University’s student government recently passed a resolution calling for automatic trigger warnings from faculty—though, thankfully, the administration rejected it.
College campuses have long been the front line for America’s culture wars. Columbia University, Princeton, Brandeis, and the University of California at San Diego gave jobs to Marxists, such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm in the 1940s.
Harvard University filled a stadium with students for the newly victorious Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro in 1959. It was Students for a Democratic Society who led the way for the New Left and primed American cities for violence and riots in the 1960s.
It was also students who became Marxist terrorists as members of the Weather Underground, and it was other students, radicals in the 1960s, who became faculty members and helped disseminate their extreme ideas throughout higher education.
Today, many college campuses have embraced cultural Marxism, a poisonous mix of identity politics, intolerance of dissent, and a vision of the world locked in structural conflict.
The new brigades of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” administrators serve as thought police, enforcing the new orthodoxy. A recent study by Jay Greene of The Heritage Foundation and James Paul of the Educational Freedom Institute found that DEI staff now make up an average of 3.4 positions for every 100 tenured faculty, and that “these programs are bloated, relative to academic pursuits and do not contribute to reported student well-being on campus.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
The progressive elite running our universities today have not only rejected the canon of Western civilization, but they are also dismantling such bedrock principles as equal treatment under the law, the dignity of every individual, even the very notion of truth itself.
The cultural Marxists have instead embraced the collectivist ideology of equity—that dystopian myth that all individuals can be forced to achieve the same outcome. They embrace the power required to enforce that myth and jealously guard their exclusive right to decide who constitutes the privileged group and who must be punished or silenced.
But a handful of colleges and universities are notably pushing back.
Hillsdale College is perhaps the best known, thanks to the publication of its anti-woke monthly Imprimis, which reaches more than 6 million readers, and to its outspoken president, Larry Arnn.
Others include Christendom College, Liberty University, Grove City College, Wyoming Catholic College, and Patrick Henry College.
A key part of their ability to reject the woke culture is their rejection of federal funding. For a longer list of colleges that don’t accept federal funding, look here.
Other colleges worth mentioning include Colorado Christian University, the College of the Ozarks, Palm Beach Atlantic University, and the New College of Florida, whose seven new board members appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis recently fired the president and then closed down its DEI office.
Now, there’s a new entrant that has stepped up to the front line of the campus wars: Southern Wesleyan University, based in Central, South Carolina.
William Barker, the university’s new president, said in his inaugural speech on Oct. 28, that he wanted the university to serve as a stronghold and a refuge: “We have the capacity here at SWU to build a ‘Helm’s Deep,’” referring to the stronghold of the Rohirrim in J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy “The Lord of the Rings,” and a scene of a major battle between the forces of good and evil.
Barker continued, “This stronghold is not a hiding place. This is not a call to retreat from the world. Rather, let our stronghold be the place where people take shelter from the storm, long enough to strategize anew, to train, and then go forth to reengage with greater strength and purpose in the long conflict with evil in whatever its new forms may be.”
For Barker, it’s an important distinction that Southern Wesleyan University is a Christian university, a holy university, and as such, the education it offers is different from the education of a secular university.
“The secular university teaches knowledge and innovation, but because of its foundations, the holy university adds to these the pursuit of ultimate truth, wisdom, and virtue,” Barker said, adding:
Our secular counterparts often offer a pale imitation of higher education, because by eliminating the Christian faith, they have thereby eliminated the God of wisdom from the university.
But unfortunately, simply being a Christian university is not sufficient inoculation against the disease of radical progressive ideology that has swept through so many universities of late.
In a recent interview, Barker said, “There are a number of colleges that go by the label of ‘Christian,’ and they will say to their donors, and to their trustees, and to the prospective parents, everything is well, ‘We are following biblical norms.’ But internally, they are endorsing, teaching, and setting into policy—and dangerously—personnel, those with a progressive agenda on matters of human sexuality, gender, and race.”
He had made a similar point in his inaugural speech:
I have already seen the sickening emails between senior administrators at other institutions encouraging one another not to take a stand on any controversial issue for fear of alienating any constituencies and thereby, in their minds, jeopardizing the college’s future.
It’s encouraging to know that at least Southern Wesleyan University has joined the ranks of those that will not give in to the allure of progressive approbation, but will stand strong, even if the battle seems a daunting one right now.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/18/front-line-campus-wars
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Academic Fakery Equals Made-Up Racism
When the “experts” in the academic class use their positions of power to promote a particular political worldview, disaster ensues.
As this author has canvased before, professors have huge incentives to lie about data. In the case of Professor Eric Stewart of Florida State University, it got him a six-figure salary, job security, and a position of power from which he could spread the lies he fostered. In his 17 years on the job, the criminology professor was subject to several complaints about data fabrication and inaccuracies in his scholarly works.
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, commented: “Stewart’s case looks like an instance of someone who knowingly and deliberately made stuff up. Why? And how did he get away with it for so long? We may never know the full answer, but he does fall into the general category of race hustler: someone who sought personal benefit by attempting to aggravate racial tensions.”
At the University of Minnesota, there is a whole cadre of academics who use their DEI positions to publish pseudo-academic papers to forward the cultural Marxism of the Left’s political views.
These biased professors work in places at the university called the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity, School of Public Health, and the Antiracism Research center. The University of Minnesota is deeply invested in making a connection between health inequities and racism. However, many of the researchers are ill-qualified for the research, as they do not hold medical degrees. This specific type of credentialism is actually important for the types of claims these professors are making, especially regarding issues like abortion and crime rates among races and the health outcomes associated therein.
For example, one professor, Rachel Hardeman, was paid $800,000 to study “racialized violence” and the corresponding health inequities along racial lines. This person is a public health professor without a medical degree but is familiar with critical race theory and uses it routinely to try to link and politicize her work. (Though if you actually read some of her papers, she admits there is no real link between racism and health inequities.)
Perhaps the biggest scandal is the forced retraction of three other professors at the University of Minnesota for similar infractions. Janette Dill, Stuart Grande, and Tongtan Chantarat published a paper entitled “Transactional and transformative diversity, equity, and inclusion activities in health services research departments” on January 8. This paper has been retracted by the authors because “their characterisation [sic] of specific data (personal narratives and experiences) was either inaccurate, misleading, or false.”
Ultimately, these academics are harming victims of actual hate crimes and racism; they aren’t bringing about social justice. These “scholars” are also undermining what little credibility the “expert class” has left in American society. The fact that dishonest teachers like these are given authority over the next generation of college students is the real crime. It robs them of truth.
Perhaps that is the ultimate ideological point. After all, the leftists’ first premise is that there is no God, and if there is no God, then morality is a social construct. If morality is a social construct, then there is no incentive to tell the truth. Truth, according to them, is subjective. Who’s to say their “truth” is anymore true than that which can be proven by data, common sense, reason, and science?
It is a recipe for ignorance and chaos, and these professors should be held to account for their dishonesty.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96753-academic-fakery-equals-made-up-racism-2023-04-25
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27 April, 2023
Marxian Education
John Stossel
Some schools are ditching traditional grading. Instead, they use "labor-based grading," an idea promoted by Arizona State University professor Asao Inoue. Labor-based grading means basing grades more on effort than the quality of work.
In addition, Inoue lectured a conference of rhetoric professors "stop saying that we have to teach this dominant English. ... If you use a single standard to grade your students' languaging, you engage in racism!"
So I reported that Inoue opposes teaching standard English. He complained that I was being unfair.
"What I'm saying is that students should have choices," says Inoue in my latest video. "Is it possible that a student comes in who wants to learn the standardized English in my classes? Absolutely."
My German-speaking parents made me learn proper English. Where would I be if they hadn't? "There are absolutely benefits to a standardized English," says Inoue. "But that same world creates those same benefits through certain kinds of biases. Those can be bad."
Lecturing to professors, Inoue says, "White people like you ... built the steel cage of white language supremacy ... handmaiden to white bias in the world, the kind that kills Black men on the streets!"
What? Teaching standard English kills Black men?
"I think it can," says Inoue. "We have Eric Garner saying, 'I can't breathe.' But no one's listening and he dies. That's the logics that we get."
I still don't get it. Eric Garner died because white people teach standard English? He uses words like "logics"? "Languaging"?
Much of the time, I don't understand what Inoue is talking about. If this is how professors speak now, I see why students are bored and depressed.
Twenty-six years ago, a school board in Oakland, California, announced that its Black students were "bilingual." They spoke both Black English (Ebonics) and standard English, and the schools should give "instruction to African-American students in their primary language."
Ebonics advocates told teachers not to correct students who "she here" instead of "she is here."
When many people, including Black parents, objected, Oakland officials said that they never intended to teach Ebonics, just to recognize it as a legitimate language.
Inoue says that the Ebonics movement didn't do enough. "Everyone says, yes, we believe in that, but they didn't do anything in their classrooms."
No wonder his students label him "easy grader." I'm glad he doesn't teach engineering.
Inoue identifies as "Japanese American."
I tell him that Japanese Americans earn, on average, $21,000 a year more than average Americans, yet he keeps talking about America's "white supremacy." "What kind of white supremacist country lets that happen?" I joke.
Inoue replies, "Japanese American communities wanted to be seen as more American" and made great efforts to join American culture.
Exactly! Japanese Americans prospered because of it. So do other immigrant groups. Several now earn more than whites in America. They succeed by speaking standard English, and because America is relatively color blind.
"I get a little uncomfortable with colorblindness," replies Inoue, "That's not how humans work ... there's no such thing as a neutrality."
"But there is," I say. "Hire people based on the highest test score, you're being neutral about other factors."
"Depends on how you see the test," he answers. Tests may be biased. He also criticizes high school honors classes, calling them "pretty white spaces."
Inoue says he believes in "Marxian" ideas, and asks things like, "Who owns the means of opportunity production in the classroom?"
"Where has Marxian philosophy ever helped people?" I ask.
Marxian philosophies "don't give us a plan of action. They're not socialism," he says. As for capitalism, "I think we can do better."
I doubt it. For years, intellectuals promised Marx's ideas will work better than capitalism. Instead, socialism perpetuated poverty.
Nevertheless, on campuses today, Marx's views thrive. Students often hear them unchallenged.
At least Inoue was willing to come on Stossel TV to debate. Most "Marxian" professors refuse.
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/04/26/marxian-education-n2622419
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Teachers Union Thuggery
If thugs were hurting your kid, you'd do almost anything to stop them. The harm inflicted by the teachers unions is legalized thuggery. Here's what you can do.
The tragic consequences of union strong-arming will be on display Wednesday, when a House subcommittee grills American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on how the unions muscled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February 2021 into setting impossible-to-meet requirements for reopening schools during COVID.
Closing schools in the spring of 2020, when no one understood COVID, was understandable. But once science showed negligible risk to students in returning to the classroom, prolonging closures became child abuse. Yet on orders from the Biden White House, the CDC followed the unions' dictates instead of the science.
School closures led to severe learning loss, setting back many kids for years, possibly the rest of their lives. "This is potentially going to be a real problem for this generation," warns University of Oxford researcher Bastian Betthauser. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company calls the impact on students' basic skills "grim." A staggering 37% of high school students reported suffering mental health struggles during the lockdowns, according to a CDC survey.
Weingarten has already lawyered up for the hearing. Expect fireworks but no concrete changes. State laws, not Congress, determine what powers teachers unions have.
Action is urgently needed. Since 2008, learning progress in public schools has stagnated, and U.S. kids are falling behind their peers in other countries. The COVID lockdowns dealt a devastating blow, but schools were in crisis long before that.
Laws in 38 states guarantee collective bargaining, not just over pay but often over every aspect of the school day, even curriculum. Unions use these powers to block school reform, opposing standardized testing, merit pay and teacher accountability. And to stuff the curriculum with political indoctrination -- what the AFT calls "social justice."
The unions also buy political influence outright. The National Education Association and the AFT -- the nation's two biggest teachers unions -- are among the largest donors to politicians, and at least 94% of that money goes to Democrats, according to Open Secrets. No wonder Biden's White House ordered the CDC to grovel to Weingarten and the teachers unions.
It's a racket, explains Philip Howard, author of "Not Accountable," a riveting expose about public unions. They support Democrats handsomely, and in return, they get what they want at the bargaining table.
The good news is that in red and purple states, reformers are pushing to change that. Five states are banning unions from deducting dues from teachers' paychecks, making it harder to raise millions for political clout.
Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders are also moving to curb unions from dictating curriculum, such as teaching elementary school kids gender theory instead of arithmetic and reading.
Sadly, deep blue states like Illinois and New York are union captives. That explains the otherwise inexplicably destructive policy the New York State Education Department is adopting. New York is making the abysmal reading and math scores of kids tested just after the lockdowns ended into the baseline or "new normal" against which future students will be measured. That redefines "proficiency" down to rock bottom. A teacher's students only have to do as well as kids who were locked at home with no classroom time at all.
At the end of 2022, Weingarten admitted lockdowns were a mistake and asked for "pandemic amnesty." Expect her to ask for it again at Wednesday's hearing.
No way she deserves that. Everyone makes mistakes, but Weingarten lied to benefit her union members at the expense of the kids.
And she's still doing it. She's supporting a bill, introduced by New York Rep. and former teachers union member Jamaal Bowman, to eliminate federally mandated standardized testing. She claims it's best for kids not to be tested. Ridiculous. Getting rid of tests is a ploy to cover up failing teachers and schools.
Parents, join the fight to limit union power and put kids first.
https://townhall.com/columnists/betsymccaughey/2023/04/26/teachers-union-thuggery-n2622412
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Australia: Queensland’s top 150 high schools ranked by Better Education
Note that of all schools that got ratings of 99 or 100 only 2 out of 25 were State schools and both of those had selective admission
More than 30 public schools have been named alongside some of the state’s powerhouse colleges to be ranked in Queensland’s top 150.
Independent schools specialist website Better Education has revealed Queensland’s best schools a compilation of both government and private schools between years 7-10.
The selective Queensland Academy for Science, Mathematics and Technology retained the top spot in 2022 with a perfect score of 100. The Toowong-based school had full marks for English and Maths.
It was closely followed by Brisbane Grammar School, Brisbane Girls Grammar School, Brisbane State High School, Somerset College, Ormiston College, Whitsunday Anglican School and St Aidan’s Anglican Girls’ School all with perfect scores.
Whitsunday Anglican School, which charges about $12,000 at a fraction of those in the top 10, was the only school from outside of the South East pocket.
Some of the top public schools included Mansfield State High School, Indooroopilly State High School and Brisbane and Cairns schools of distance education.
Some of the most improved schools included Ipswich Grammar School which went from 28 to 13, Redeemer Lutheran College (39 to 22) and the Brisbane School of Distance Education (111 to 37).
Cairns School of Distance Education, Mount Gravatt State High School, Northpine Christian College and Coolum State High School were all new entries for 2022.
Better Education’s list is based on Year 9 results with English and Maths rated out of five and the overall academic performance with three rating scales.
Better Education is an independently-run site that aims to provide “informative and comparative school performance … to parents wanting to make choices about schooling for their children”.
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26 April, 2023
School Choice Movement to Shape Presidential, Federal Races in 2024
In response to plunging test scores that have been made worse by the pandemic, states across the country have been implementing school choice reforms that are making public funding of schools portable.
In October 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, informally known as the “nation’s report card,” revealed that test scores nationwide have plunged to the lowest levels in the last 30 years in reading, while recording the biggest drop ever in math since the assessments began in 1990.
Some states are implementing reforms by creating education scholarship accounts, or ESAs. Such funding allows students to take public dollars out of failing school systems and use them for tuition and other education expenses via private schools, homeschooling, and tutoring.
ESAs are primarily targeted at lower-income students in households that cannot afford tutors or that need tuition assistance in order to afford private schools.
But universal ESAs that are available to students regardless of household income are becoming an increasingly popular option for some states.
As of March, there are 11 states with some type of ESA program, EducationWeek reported.
The school choice nonprofit EdChoice is calling 2023 “the year of universal school choice,” as 31 state legislatures are considering bills to either expand or start school choice programs, many of which include ESA options.
“Parents aren’t asking for school choice, they’re demanding it. Many states and schools will get left behind if they’re not receptive to the school choice movement, because it’s not stopping anytime soon,” Darrell Jones, president of the Stanley M. Herzog Charitable Foundation—which concentrates on Christian education—told The Epoch Times in a statement.
Lawmakers in states as diverse as West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and Florida are listening to parents, said one expert.
“When you see a state like West Virginia adopt an education savings account that is available to nearly every child in the state, … lawmakers and families in Arizona say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have the nation’s first education savings account program. There’s no reason that these options should not be available to the low-income children outside of Tucson,’” Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times.
The general result has been a land rush business in ESAs, he said, with Florida, Iowa, Utah, and Arkansas following West Virginia.
“I think what we can kind of take from this is that policymakers who believe that conservative solutions are the best answer to the assigned school system are looking to school choice as an indicator of their commitment to conservative answers,” added Butcher.
Impact on Upcoming Elections
Experts who spoke with The Epoch Times said that these reforms will have a large impact on federal races, including the 2024 presidential race, regardless of whether the candidates believe in conservative solutions.
“First of all, I’ll especially guarantee that this will be a major issue in the 2024 presidential race,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Epoch Times.
“Second, when they reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, you will see a big move towards really opening up the system everywhere,” he added.
Gingrich said that one of the driving forces behind the school choice movement is the renewed emphasis on parental rights in education, which he says he believes carries about an 84 percent approval rating.
One national pollster agrees with that general assessment, but would not cite specific numbers.
“The pandemic really opened up eyes for what happens in classrooms for parents all across the country. As a parent myself, it was concerning,” Trevor Smith, chief research officer for WPA Intelligence, told The Epoch Times. “The pandemic was the catalyst to the change.”
Smith said that candidates across the country are busy crafting their positions on school choice no matter what level of government that they seek to represent.
School Choice a Wedge Issue for Women
The issue has the potential to drive a wedge in an important voting block for Democrats, one expert said.
Today, women are evenly divided between the abortion issue and school choice, political commentator and former strategist Dick Morris told The Epoch Times.
“I think that while the abortion issue is the focus of single women, there is an increasing movement among married women with children to focus on school choice. And I think that that’s going to be fundamental,” Morris said.
Smith at WPA said that while he hasn’t polled the numbers, he generally agreed with that assessment. Morris also broke down the demographics.
“When I say unmarried women, it makes no difference if they are unmarried, widowed or divorced or separated. And if they’re married, it makes no difference if they’re married or just cohabitating,” Morris added.
Both Morris and Gingrich cited the threat that ESAs pose to one of the biggest players in federal education policy—teachers unions—as a key driver of the 2024 campaigns.
Allowing students to take federal dollars out of failing public school systems and move them to competitive schools could be a game changer, they both agreed, really weakening the power of teachers unions.
“I think we have to realize the seminal role, the founding role that teachers unions play in the leftist revolution going on [in] the country. The ‘woke’ culture starts with teachers in elementary school, with students nurtured by them until they go to left-wing colleges,” Morris said.
Freedom Versus Bureaucracy
Gingrich noted that public employee unions, such as teachers unions, have created a dangerous schism today that looks a lot like the country’s antebellum period, prior to the Civil War.
“What you’re seeing is almost a little bit scary in that it’s like the 1840s and 50s, where the free states and the slave states were drifting apart,” Gingrich said. “Today, you’re seeing the left wing bureaucratic cities and states are drifting in one direction, and everybody else is going in a different direction.”
Gingrich predicted that in the next few years, 50 to 60 percent of the country will have ESA school choice programs, while the entrenched bureaucratic teachers unions will control the rest.
He said the outcome would be both “really bad” and “really expensive” for schools in the deepest Democrat cities, still dominated by teachers unions.
“What you have is this very deep difference about the nature of America, with most—but not all—Democrats still trapped in a unionized bureaucratic model, where the government gets to coerce you,” said Gingrich, “and the Republicans and some Democrats increasingly moving towards a model of freedom, where you have real choices, and you have real power.”
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Woke school district in shambles over petty PC obsessions
Biology class must be really confusing in Easthampton, Mass.
That is, if the town’s search for their school superintendent is any indication.
The whole thing has turned into a farcical endeavor that seems more like a “South Park” episode than an earnest effort to fill a top administrative role.
To sum it up: a female school committee member thinks it’s offensive to call her and another colleague “ladies,” while a student wants anyone and everyone to be called a lady if they so choose.
It’s dizzying, even for 2023.
A few weeks ago, the town made national headlines after their first choice for the job — longtime educator Vito Perrone — lost the gig during email negotiations when he addressed women on the school committee as “ladies.”
Perrone said that the school committee chairperson, Cynthia Kwiecinski, told him that using the plural of lady was a “microaggression” and “the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem.”
Perrone said he was simply trying to be respectful during a good faith negotiation — but his offer was rescinded by the committee.
Maybe if he had read New York Magazine’s ridiculous etiquette rules back in February, he would know that addressing more than one woman as “ladies” is frowned upon. From men, it’s “oddly creepy;” from women, it’s “an unnecessary attempt to feign some kind of unity,” according to the magazine.
Odds are, if he did read it, he laughed, assuming it was satire and not a harbinger of his own career sabotage.
What should be a routine hiring became even more mired in the woke muck a few days ago when the second candidate, a woman named Erica Faginski-Stark, reportedly withdrew her application because she failed a student’s purity test.
An unnamed student wrote to the town’s mayor expressing “extreme concerns” about Faginski-Stark’s Facebook posts from two years ago.
Those posts included a petition to “Defend Title IX” and expressed a sentiment that would seem universally rational only a hot second ago: “Only girls should play girls’ sports!”
In 2021, she posted a video from conservative site PragerU, writing, “For EVERY female athlete out there, it’s time to speak up. As a former Div. 1 scholarship athlete and academic & athletic ALL American, our young women just got stripped of their equal rights and equal opportunity.”
The student wrote to Mayor Nicole LaChapelle: “Under the belief that this is her Facebook account, she has posted conservative transphobic rhetoric a multitude of times.”
It’s unclear if Faginski-Stark withdrew her application because she was told it would go no further, but according to the Boston Herald, the police — in an excellent use of resources — verified that it was her Facebook account.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/24/woke-school-district-in-shambles-over-pc-obsessions/
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Tradesmen happier, richer in their 20s than university grads
New research from the Ai Group shows that nearly half of all 25 year olds have a degree level qualification but are less likely to be in full-time employment.
Bachelor's degrees are a popular option among young students, but new data claims university might not be the best option for those seeking happiness and wealth in the early years of employment.
Almost 3,000 young people were surveyed as part of Australian Industry (Ai) Group's research into the "real trajectories and early career pathways" of 25-year-olds, with nearly half holding a Bachelor or postgraduate degree.
Tradies performed better than their tertiary-educated counterparts, with a difference of 16 per cent between the groups' wages at that age.
Feeling like the grass – and hip pocket – was greener on the other side, Braidan Quinlan dropped his teaching studies to undertake a carpentry trade.
It's a path he almost never explored, having been pressured in high school to attend university. "When I was in year 12, there wasn't really any talk of a trade or TAFE – it was more just pushing for university," Mr Quinlan said.
"Everyone wanted to go to university, everyone thought it was the right way to go, but if I could go back I would've started an apprenticeship when I was [a teenager]. "It would've been a good way to get ahead, I think."
The third-year apprentice was fed up with the narrative he needed a degree to "get forward in life". "I went [to university] for a few years … but found it really wasn't for me," Mr Quinlan said.
"I got offered this great apprenticeship at HNT Builders and have been enjoying it ever since."
One of the key findings in Ai Group's report was the benefit of "learning in a real-world setting", with almost all postgraduates and apprentices reporting full employment by 25 – meanwhile, only 92 per cent of those holding a Bachelor are employed at this age.
Postgraduates and apprentices also recorded the highest levels of job satisfaction, with respondents particularly pleased with the opportunities for further training as well as the chance to use their skills and experience on the job.
"I'm loving it," Mr Quinlan said. "The skills I've developed, both from trade school and on-the-job, have been phenomenal."
Although he admits a teaching salary would've been "a lot nicer" than the apprentice wages he started on, Mr Quinlan has his eyes set on the big picture. "Long-term, I feel there's so many more avenues to potentially make more money [as a tradie]," he said. "You can start your own business or jump over to the commercial sector.
"There's just more opportunity to make a better living, and that's part of why I moved away from [studying to be a teacher]."
Putting in the hours
The data shows, although tradies are raking in the cash, they also work the most hours. Apprentices undertake an average of seven additional hours, increasing their work week to 42 hours.
"These findings are a strong endorsement of the apprentice/trainee pathway and the many benefits that can follow, including higher pay," Ai Group said.
In the long run
"We should exercise some caution in drawing conclusions comparing pay at age 25 [as] other evidence suggests higher-qualified workers are likely to have stronger wage growth over their careers," the report notes.
But, in those early career years, the job satisfaction of university graduates often suffers as a result of being over-qualified for the positions they hold.
"A total of 36 per cent of Bachelor's degree holders [are] working in jobs below the skill level aligned with their qualification," Ai Group reported.
"Higher education students likely need to combine the deep knowledge of a degree with other types of learning and experience to forge a career.
"This suggests we need a more flexible education and training system that allows young people to acquire knowledge, skills and capabilities throughout their time 'learning' and to continue while they are 'earning and learning'."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-26/tradies-happier-than-university-graduates/102266290
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25 April, 2023
Professors forced into retraction on 'false' research accusing employer of pervasive racism
University of Minnesota academics were forced to retract an article they wrote about "structural racism" at the institution because its claims were "inaccurate, misleading, or false," according to a note on the withdrawn article.
The article in question was written in the journal of Health Services Research by UM employees with doctoral degrees who focus on racial equity: Stuart Grande, a senior lecturer, Janette Dill, an associate professor, and Tongtan Chantarat, a research scientist.
Retraction Watch, a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers, first reported that the piece was withdrawn months after the original publishing date.
The research probed into the university's diversity, equity and inclusion policies (DEI) at the Division of Health Policy and Management that were implemented after George Floyd's death at the hands of police in 2020.
The paper labeled some of their employer's efforts as simply "performative."
"An important theme … is that current DEI work within … departments is often ‘tokenistic’ or performative rather than substantive or aimed at structural change [to combat racism]," the article said.
"Performative DEI work is identified as planning activities, committee work, task force initiatives that are not backed by meaningful actions," the article continued. "Many of these activities are disingenuous, such as … website placement of photos of racialized faculty, students, or staff, or sweeping claims about commitment to racial justice."
The authors solicited feedback from staff and students at the university, some who said they were exhausted with the DEI initiatives and others who said there was pervasive racism at the University of Minnesota.
"This communication provided specific experiences of racist behaviors by faculty, staff, and students, and widespread systemic and structural racism within our institution," the research paper said. "Structural racism is structuring opportunity and assigning value within an institution based on race, unfairly disadvantaging some individuals and groups while advantaging others."
Months after the article was originally published, a note said, "The… article… has been retracted by agreement between the authors [and] the journal's Editor-in-Chief."
"The retraction has been agreed following concerns raised by the authors following publication that their characterisation (sic) of specific data (personal narratives and experiences) was either inaccurate, misleading, or false. The final submitted manuscript unintentionally contained content that mischaracterised (sic) the authenticity of experiences represented, and the authors have requested retraction."
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Uniformed School Resource Officers Aren't the Solution to Stop Mass Public Shootings
With six murdered at the Covenant School in Nashville at the end of March, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee proposed over $200 million in new measures to protect schools and prevent more such attacks. One of his proposals is to put “an armed security guard in every school in Tennessee.” Both Republican Senators from Tennessee have offered similar legislation in the form of the federal Safe Schools Act.
Governor Lee understandably wants to do something to prevent this type of violence from ever happening again. But allowing teachers to carry firearms in their classrooms is a much more effective and less costly solution. A bill advanced by a Tennessee state House committee last week would do just that.
Having an armed ally in a school could stop attacks. but identifiable officers are easily targeted.
“A deputy in uniform has an extremely difficult job in stopping these attacks,” noted Sarasota County, Florida, Sheriff Kurt Hoffman. “These terrorists have huge strategic advantages in determining the time and place of attacks. They can wait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location. Even when police or deputies are in the right place at the right time, those in uniform who can be readily identified as guards may as well be holding up neon signs saying, ‘Shoot me first.’ My deputies know that we cannot be everywhere.”
There's a good reason air marshals on planes don't wear uniforms.
If you have an armed officer in a school, don’t put him in uniform and make him readily identifiable. Give him a staff position in the school so it won’t be obvious that he is the one person with a gun.
The prospect of armed resistance deterred the Covenant School shooter from choosing another target. “There was another location that was mentioned, but because of a threat assessment by the suspect of too much security, they decided not to,” said Nashville Police Chief John Drake.
Unfortunately, no one at the Covenant school had a gun to fight back with.
These murderers count on gun-free zones to ensure they will be the only armed person. Last year, the Buffalo, NY shooter wrote in his manifesto: “Areas where CCW permits are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack.”
Unfortunately, national media refuses to report such explicit statements by attackers. Nor do they report that 94% of mass public shootings occur in places where civilians are banned from having guns.
Violating gun-free school zones in Tennessee means a six-year prison term. While that is a severe penalty for law-abiding citizens, an additional six years for someone such as the Covenant school mass murderer is irrelevant, even if they had lived. The murderer would already be facing six life sentences or the death penalty.
Twenty states already allow teachers and staff to carry concealed handguns. Any teacher with a concealed handgun permit can carry in Utah and New Hampshire. In other states, school boards or superintendents decide the policy.
In the thousands of schools where teachers are permitted to carry, no one has been wounded or killed in an attack during school hours. Only at schools where guns are banned have people been hurt or killed in school shootings.
Other common concerns about allowing teachers to carry guns — such as students getting a hold of the weapons or teachers losing their tempers — have never actually occurred.
Surveys show that criminologists and economists strongly support abolishing gun-free zones in places such as schools.
President Biden is right that we shouldn't impose security measures which make schools resemble prisons. There is another alternative. Instead of posting gun-free zone signs in front of schools, let’s post signs which warn attackers that there are teachers with concealed handguns.
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Christian university blocks Maoist China survivor from speaking over anti-woke views: 'Extra concerning'
The student government at Whitworth University denied a Republican group's request to invite Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of Maoist China, to speak on campus, citing her criticism of "woke culture" and her comparisons of the ideology to her experience under communist rule.
The student government at Whitworth University, a private Christian university in Spokane, Washington, voted 9-4 to reject the Turning Point USA chapter’s request to host Van Fleet during a meeting on April 12, arguing that her positions, represented by her tweets critical of woke culture, could be deemed "hurtful or offensive," Campus Reform reported.
The Virginia mother, who endured Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution before immigrating to the U.S., has emerged as an outspoken opponent of critical race theory and frequently warns about similarities she sees between the "woke revolution" and her experience living under Mayo Zedong's Chinese Cultural Revolution, including the suppression of opposing viewpoints.
Grace Stiger, president of the Turning Point USA chapter at Whitworth University said she wanted Van Fleet to "tell her story," and provide students with a unique perspective as a survivor under Zedong's rule. But the student government objected to Stiger's request, citing Van Fleet's anti-woke tweets, which they said targets diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQ community and "environmental justice" among other social justice initiatives, Campus Reform reported.
Van Fleet denounced the student government's decision to block her from speaking in an interview with the website, calling it "extra concerning that this happened [at] a Christian college, which is supposedly more conservative."
"What are they afraid of?" she asked. "Those people who believe in lived experience, then they are going to get the lived experience from me because I’m not talking about an idea that I read or researched or studied."
Van Fleet said that while she is "not surprised at all" and is "very familiar with what’s happening on American campuses," she hopes students will learn from the history of China's Cultural Revolution.
"When you cancel people now," she said, "you have to be prepared to be canceled later."
Stiger told Campus Reform that while speakers are regularly requested, her Republican group is subject to more pushback and opposing votes "than any other club." The student government has voted down previous proposals from conservative groups, including a 2019 request from Young America’s Foundation (YAF) to host Ben Shapiro, the website reported.
On its website, Whitworth writes that it seeks to affirm "freedom of expression for its students, staff and faculty" through faith.
"Our commitment to free expression is grounded in our faith in the triune God who creates and redeems a good world for flourishing through his life-giving Word, Jesus Christ.[1] We take Jesus Christ as the model for engagement in public discourse and for exploration and expression of ideas," the website reads.
"We affirm free expression because it is essential to exploration," the statement continues. "We believe every aspect of God's creation is worthy of study because God's creation reflects God's glory and is bound together by the life-giving Word, Jesus Christ
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24 April, 2023
Alabama GOP Gov. Kay Ivey ousts education official over 'woke concepts' in Pre-K educational materials
Ivey's office said in a Friday press release that last week it "was brought to the Administration's attention that there was concerning content in a pre-K educator resource book, content that is simply not in line with what the Ivey Administration or the people of Alabama stand for or believe."
Upon learning about the specific content, Ivey's office said the governor sought to review and confirm the educational material before she asked ADECE Sec. Barbara Cooper to "send a memo to disavow this book and to immediately discontinue its use."
"The education of Alabama’s children is my top priority as governor, and there is absolutely no room to distract or take away from this mission. Let me be crystal clear: Woke concepts that have zero to do with a proper education and that are divisive at the core have no place in Alabama classrooms at any age level, let alone with our youngest learners," Ivey said in a statement.
While it is unclear how Cooper responded to the matter, Ivey's office said the governor had accepted Cooper's resignation after calling for a "change in leadership."
"Alabama’s First Class Pre-K is the best in the country, and those children are at too critical of a juncture in their educational journeys and development to get it wrong. I remain confident in the wonderful teachers we have in pre-K classrooms around our state and in the necessity of our children receiving a strong start to their educational journeys in our First Class Pre-K program," Ivey added.
"I thank Dr. Cooper for her service, but I believe it is best we continue this historically strong program on its forward trajectory under new leadership."
Ivey's office said Dr. Jan Hume will serve as interim secretary of the ADECE while the governor weighs an official replacement.
Ivey communications director Gina Maiola told Fox News Digital the book in question is a pre-K educator resource book called the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book, 4th edition.
The material that led to Cooper's resignation, according to Ivey's office, "invokes ideas for teachers that there are ‘larger systemic forces that perpetuate systems of White privilege’ or that ‘the United States is built on systemic and structural racism.’"
"Also included for four-year-olds to learn is that ‘LGBTQIA+ need to hear and see messages that promote equality, dignity and worth.’ The glossary includes equally disturbing concepts that the Ivey Administration and the people of Alabama in no way, shape or form believe should be used to influence school children, let alone four-year-olds," Ivey's office noted.
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Jean-Pierre faces blowback for 'disprovable lies' about Florida education law: 'Red herrings all the way down'
Karine Jean-Pierre attacks dystopian Florida education law
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that the expansion of Floridas "dystopian" education law prevents gay teachers from showing their spouses.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was blasted on social media for calling Florida’s education law "dystopian," claiming gay teachers cannot show pictures of their spouses anymore.
Prior to answering questions at Thursday’s press conference, Jean-Pierre addressed the Florida Board of Education’s recent expansion of Gov. Ron DeSantis’, R-Fla., Parental Rights in Education law from kindergarten through 3rd grade to all grades. This law would prevent school employees from giving instruction on "sexual orientation" or "gender identity" unless required by state guidelines or part of optional sexual health instruction.
Jean-Pierre referred to this law as the "dystopian Don’t Say Gay law" and claimed that gay teachers have been forced to remove pictures of their spouses as a response.
"I also want to say a word about the decision yesterday made by the Florida Board of Education to expand the state’s dystopian Don’t Say Gay law. As this measure takes effect, it will prohibit all students up to seniors in high school from learning about our, or, learning about or even discussing LGBTQI+ people in the classrooms," Jean-Pierre said.
She continued, "Teachers in Florida have already faced the devastating consequences of the existing law. Under threat of having their licenses revoked, gay teachers have been forced to take down pictures of their spouses from their desks and censor their classroom materials. Censoring our classes is not how public education is supposed to work in a free country. Conservative politicians love to complain about the so-called cancel culture, all while threatening teachers with losing their jobs if they teach something that the MAGA extremists don’t agree with."
This description of the law faced pushback on Twitter as "disprovable lies."
Political consultant Noah Pollak wrote, "All of her claims here are easily disprovable lies, but what's interesting is how progressives are unable to defend their culture war on anything close to the merits. It's red herrings all the way down."
"The fact that the press secretary lies daily doesn't seem to bother liberals," National Review contributor Pradheep Shanker exclaimed.
"This is, of course, a lie," Substack writer Jim Treacher wrote.
"Putting aside that this is just not true, does anyone over 40 remember discussing sexuality, gender or any of this stuff with their teachers growing up? It’s laughably ridiculous. Back in my day we did math, science and social studies. You know, old fashioned racist stuff. And we had to walk up hill in the snow both ways without shoes to get to school. Now get off my lawn!" political commentator Dave Rubin tweeted.
"Remember WH Press Briefing live all hands on deck fact checks? I 'member," The Spectator contributing editor Stephen Miller commented.
NewsNation reporter Zaid Jilani wrote, "There's a reasonable debate to be had about what should and shouldn't be promoted in public schools, but it feels like a lot of these debates are based on things that don't exist?"
Since the law was introduced in 2022, Democrats and members of the media have dubbed it as the "Don’t Say Gay" law, claiming that the law censors any discussion of being gay in schools.
DeSantis has shot back at media critics of the law for mischaracterizing the law.
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Australia: Call for national approach to phone ban by federal Education Minister
Rules around mobile phone use in schools could be implemented in every state in Australia with growing calls for a national policy.
Queensland is the only state not to have implemented phone rules for state schools, with other jurisdictions either imposing a ban or asking students to turn them off.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare says that he will meet with his state and territory counterparts in the coming months to discuss implementing a national policy.
“I think the time has come for a national approach to the banning or the restriction, the use of mobile phones by students in schools,” he told ABC Radio Brisbane.
“I think there is a good argument that we should be moving to a national best practice approach. And I’m intending to put this on the agenda when education ministers meet again in the middle of this year.
“But also not make the decision on our own, talk to parents, talk to principals, talk to teachers about what‘s the best approach to take.”
NSW is the latest state to introduce rules around mobile phones, banning their use in public secondary schools from Term 4 2023 with the ban was already in place in NSW public primary schools.
The ban will apply during class, as well as during recess and lunch times.
“I know many parents who are anxious about the pervasiveness of phones and technology in our children’s learning environments,” NSW Premier Chris Minns said.
“It’s time to clear our classrooms of unnecessary distractions and create better environments for learning.”
There are also blanket bans for phones in public schools in Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania.
South Australia is trailing phone restrictions with a ban in place in 44 government schools, while mobiles aren’t allowed at Northern Territory primary schools and high school students must turn them off during the day.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said that her state would “step up to the plate” if Mr Clare’s desire for a national phone policy comes into place.
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23 April, 2023
Biden's Education Secretary Doesn't Even Know What Confucius Institutes Are
For more than two years, Miguel Cardona has been the United States Secretary of Education, supposedly advising President Joe Biden and overseeing a massive portfolio of student debt and seemingly bowing to teacher unions and woke culture warriors at any opportunity to the detriment of America's students.
This week, however, Americans learned again that Secretary Cardona is just as uninformed and unqualified as several other members of Biden's cabinet when the man in charge of America's education system admitted that he doesn't know about Confucius Institutes, one of the Chinese Communist Party's Trojan horses.
When asked by Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) whether he's aware of any attempts by the Chinese Communist Party "to influence U.S. education," Cardona said he didn't have "any information around specific efforts" by the CCP.
Getting more specific, Moolenaar pressed Cardona on whether he was even familiar with Confucius Institutes.
"I don't have information on the Confucius Institutes now," Cardona said revealing his lack of knowledge on the subject. "But I can- I'm sure my team may be aware of it and we can look into that," he added trying to save face.
Here's the exchange in which Cardona struggled to come up with an answer to questions about the CCP's influence in American education:
While the U.S. Secretary of Education is apparently unaware of Confucius Institutes and therefore unconcerned about the Chinese Communist Party's reach within institutions of learning in the U.S., many Americans, think tanks, and academic associations have been warning about the outposts for CCP activity that permeate U.S. schools and universities.
The Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Scholars (NAS) have warned of the CCP's "soft power" being wielded within American institutions:
Founded in 2004, the Confucius Institutes are a global phenomenon, enrolling more than nine million students at 525 institutes in 146 countries and regions. More than 100 institutes have opened in the United States, including at prestigious universities such as Columbia and Stanford. They are mostly staffed and funded by an agency of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education—the Office of Chinese Languages Council International, or Hanban. The Hanban also operates Confucius Classrooms in an estimated 500 primary and secondary schools in the United States.
A 243-page NAS report described in detail the many strings attached to the goodies offered by Confucius Institutes:
Intellectual freedom. Chinese teachers—hired, paid by and accountable to the Communist Chinese government—are pressured to avoid “sensitive” topics like the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Cultural Revolution.
Transparency. Contracts between American universities and the Hanban are rarely made public. One university went so far as to forbid Rachelle Peterson from visiting their campus as part of her research.
Entanglement. Confucius Institutes cover all the expenses of classes and also offer scholarships to American students to study abroad. With such financial incentives, universities find it difficult to criticize Chinese policies like its genocidal treatment of Muslim Uyghurs in Western China.
Soft power. Confucius Institutes avoid discussing China’s widespread human-rights abuses and present Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed Chinese territories. As a result, writes Peterson, the institutes “develop a generation of American students with selective knowledge of a major country”—and a major adversary. Confucius Institutes are a textbook example of soft power that causes universities in receipt of Chinese largesse to stay silent about controversial subjects like China’s use of forced labor to pick cotton, a 21st century variation of the slavery of the ante-bellum South.
The Confucius Institutes pretend to be a Chinese version of cultural institutions like the Alliance Française or the Goethe Institute, but they are in reality a propaganda machine funded and directed by the Chinese government. Based on the findings of its 2017 report, the NAS recommends that “all universities close their Confucius Institutes.”
So, China has been running CCP propaganda operations — not to mention stealing intellectual property — on U.S. soil for nearly two decades, and the Secretary of Education doesn't know about it.
Even worse, shortly after taking office in 2021, the Biden administration quietly ended efforts launched by the Trump administration to track Confucius Institutes and root out their CCP-driven activities, meaning Confucius Institutes should be known to those serving in the president's cabinet. But Cardona, as demonstrated this week, doesn't have a clue.
With this "know-nothing" display, Cardona joins other Biden administration colleagues such as ATF Director Steve Dettelbach who couldn't define "assault weapon" when asked to explain the firearms he and Biden have demanded be banned.
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Brandon Johnson bad for education in Chicago
As violent crime, political corruption, a population exodus, and an enormous budget shortfall continue to plague Chicago, another grave issue looms over the future of the Windy City: a floundering education system.
In early April, Chicago voters elected Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teacher, to become the city's next mayor. Johnson, who is more progressive than outgoing mayor Lori Lightfoot, defeated former CPS CEO Paul Vallas.
Unlike Johnson, Vallas was at least willing to consider implementing a form of school choice in Chicago, seeing as how CPS is completely failing to educate Chicago's youth, let alone keep them safe while in school.
In Chicago, only 25 percent of elementary students tested at or above the proficient reading level, and only 21 percent did so in math. What's worse, those numbers generally go down, not up, as students "progress" through middle school and high school.
Chicago families are yearning for answers concerning the city's failing education system, as these shortcomings persist despite CPS spending $29,400 per student in 2023. For context, in 2013, CPS spent $13,200 per pupil. Evidently, more spending does not necessarily translate into better results.
On the other hand, increased competition in the education realm, in the form of school choice, wherein parents have the freedom to choose what schools their children attend, seems to be a commonsense solution to what ails CPS.
In fact, school choice seems to be the only solution to the endless cycle of corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse that has become endemic throughout CPS. At a bare minimum, school choice would offer a much needed alternative path for thousands of Chicago families who have no choice other than to send their kids to woefully underperforming public schools.
Not only does school choice seem to be a worthwhile solution, but it is vastly popular among nearly every demographic group. School choice is one of the few issues that is popular regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum. Moreover, as recent polling demonstrates, school choice is widely supported across racial, socioeconomic, and even generational lines.
Despite this overwhelming support for school choice, Chicago voters elected Johnson, a champion for CPS and dedicated to further empowering the already too powerful Chicago Teachers Union. Sadly, with the election of Johnson, the odds of a robust school choice program in Chicago are less likely than ever before
But the damage Johnson is prepared to inflict does not stop here.
Johnson has also made it clear that he will not do away with the practice of "social promotion," where students who fail to meet bare minimum grade-level requirements are pushed forward regardless and graduate despite never reaching proficiency in core subjects.
Further compounding the consequences of social promotion, Johnson has also pledged to dim the standards by which a school's success is rated.
Now, granted, I don't want to paint this as overly black and white. I do see some merit in a standard that is not uniform. However, reducing standards and student achievement just to make the schools appear better is a total disservice to Chicagoans, who deserve more from their public schools.
That being said, there needs to be some objective standards for parents and administrators to assess whether or not these schools are doing the job of educating students.
Submission to this principle of low expectations, combined with the practice of social promotion by which children with no business proceeding to the next grade are pushed forward, will be a travesty for the development of Chicago's next generation.
So, in short, the plan is fewer options for schooling, less incentive to improve schools, less incentive for student success, and less accountability for school failure. Check, check, check, and check. The Chicago Teachers Union got its way, on account of the more than $764,000 it forked over to Brandon Johnson's campaign. And it did so at the expense of the children who need help the most. Chicago voters have no one to blame but themselves.
Now, Chicagoans must live with the consequences of their choice to elect Johnson. For the time being, Chicagoans can only watch helplessly as the school choice movement in the Windy City comes to a screeching halt. Hopefully, next time around, Chicago voters consider someone who is more amenable to school choice.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/brandon_johnson_and_education_in_chicago.html
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Zombie school rules prove COVID alarmism was ALWAYS a cult
Want proof COVID alarmism is a cult, pure and simple?
Look no further than the Elizabeth Anne Clune Montessori school in Ithaca. There, as chronicled by David Zweig at the Free Press, children must be masked, including outdoors, and are actually forbidden from speaking during lunch.
That’s right: In 2023,
long after the pandemic has receded
years after the data have established both that there is near-zero risk to kids from the disease and that interventions like masking (and monastic silences) are next to useless
Still, one tiny private school is clinging to hygiene theater with insane vigilance.
Zweig reports that the enforced silence at lunch drove the school’s children — like political prisoners in a Soviet gulag — to contrive secret hand signals as a way of communicating.
The school kept these restrictions in place after the end of New York’s mask mandate at the request of teachers.
Proving yet again that the discipline (even beyond the grasp of the state’s unions) is filled with left-wing fanatics who embrace COVID theater with the same blind surety they bring to arguments about race or climate change.
There’s zero real evidence that Clune’s policies made the slightest difference to COVID outcomes.
But that’s not what COVID alarmism is about.
It’s a ritualized system of power and political conformity, enforced by hurting the most vulnerable.
Yet it’s not unbeatable or inevitable.
Just look at Florida’s Centner Academy.
Equally dedicated to vague, hippy-dippy principles — it employs a “director of brain optimization” and hosts a dedicated space for failure — Centner from the get-go nonetheless took a common-sense approach to the insanities around COVID.
The school — correctly — opened for in-person study way ahead of the curve for Miami-Dade, reasoning — again correctly — that the virus posed little threat to students or its mostly young teachers.
And it went mask-optional in the fall of 2020.
As a result, its students suffered none of the pointless interruptions to learning that plagued kids nationwide for more than a year, egged on by union fatcats like Randi Weingarten, hysteria-mongering media like The New York Times and the cowardly political trimmers advising President Joe Biden on science.
Yes, Centner is not above criticism.
The state rightly slapped down the school’s deeply silly policy that vaccinated students needed to miss 30 days post-shot.
But there were no mass outbreaks at Centner. No apocalyptic virus waves or pediatric deaths.
Up north in Ithaca, change is supposedly on the way at Clune (possibly sparked by Zweig’s scrutiny).
But it’s too late for the kids — and parents — who suffered under the school’s regime.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/22/covid-alarmism-was-always-a-cult-zombie-school-rules-prove/
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21 April, 2023
Sending little kids to childcare is not good for them
Judith Sloan mentions a number of considerations below but fails to mention that most children in childcare have much higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol -- compared with their levels at home. Chidcare is DEMONSTRABLY bad for chidren. You can see it at the physical level. Organizational childcare stresses and worries the little kids. They feel afraid, not secure. It destroys their confidence in their environment. And it sometimes has lasting bad effects. See, for instance:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23772818/
Children develop best in a loving home. It has to be a really bad home for childcare centers to be beneficial
I have a confession to make: I never sent my children to childcare. They did go to kinder/preschool when there were four for a few days each week during the school term, but that was it. Sorry, kids.
Actually, I’m not sorry. While I was at work, they were happy at home being looked after by the same loving nanny we were lucky to have. Even to this day, I’m not convinced of the benefits of centre-based childcare, particularly for very young children.
I get it; a lot of parents have no choice but to place their kids in childcare centres for financial reasons. It’s only by going down this path that the generous taxpayer-funded subsidies are available. Notwithstanding the restricted hours these centres operate, they do provide potentially more reliable care than (expensive) nannies or relatives during the core working hours.
I also get why many parents want to believe that centre-based childcare, including the incorporated preschool programs, offers their children a range of benefits such as socialising with other children and play-based learning (whatever that is). Less mention is made of the frequent bouts of infectious diseases that children pick up at these centres and the rapid-fire phone calls from management to collect the children within five minutes.
It has got to the point where parents are brainwashed into believing that it is their civic duty to plonk their very young child in a childcare centre as soon as possible after birth and return to the workforce in order to boost the economy and pay taxes. Throw in a bit of self-actualisation and is there really any choice?
Mind you, the busybody feminists whose aim in life is to have every woman working full-time, pre- and post-partum, remain frustrated that so many young mother apparently are happy to work part-time while their children are young.
To be sure, many more women with children now participate in the workforce than was once the case. In 1991, just under 60 per cent of women with children under the age of 15 worked; by 2020, this proportion had climbed to nearly 75 per cent. But the majority of mothers with young children (4 and under) opt to work part-time.
These same activist feminists, who have generally had dream runs in the workforce ending in cushy corporate board positions, argue that it is the way that childcare fee subsidies work that explains the dominance of part-time work among new mothers. Those extra days of work are simply not worth it. It doesn’t occur to these campaigners that most mothers actually prefer to spend as much time as possible with their babies and toddlers because this is good for the children and for them.
This relentless advocacy has all the hallmarks of the old Soviet model of child-rearing. Women were forced to leave their very young children (cared for by women workers) in order to undertake full-time jobs to support the communist state. The idea that mothers would be given any choice was of course anathema to the autocratic rulers – they must be made to work for the state.
The early model of the kibbutz in Israel also involved communal child-rearing in which some women would be assigned the role of looking after all the children while the other women undertook the various other tasks at hand. In some instances, parents wouldn’t see their children all week. Unsurprisingly, this feature of the kibbutz ultimately didn’t survive as parents expressed their desire to be fully involved in bringing up their own children.
So let’s go back to current day Australia and examine the articles of faith to which the Labor party (and to some extent, the Liberal party) adhere. They are: centre-based childcare is good; it must be heavily subsidised by taxpayers, with the most generous assistance being directed to those on the lowest incomes; renaming it early childhood education and asserting that it is beneficial for children, both in the present and the future, provides the basis for even more generous subsidisation, even ‘free’ childcare.
In Labor’s case, you can throw in the potential for the unionisation of childcare workers and the scope for generous pay rises based on either arbitration or enterprise bargaining. Let’s face it, there’s no hope of getting nannies into the union and mothers staying at home are no good either.
One of the most astonishing aspects of the debate about childcare and the role of government is the relative absence of research on the impact on the children. There is a very old study – the Perry study from the US – that is often quoted to support the benefits of structured, free-of-charge childcare. But the numbers in the study were tiny and the parents selected for the study came from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds. (Some of the fathers were in jail.)
It is hardly surprising that those children who attended childcare compared with the control group did better on a number of measures, including behaviour, progress at school, staying out of jail and the like. But there was never any scope to generalise the findings because they were mainly driven by the socioeconomic backgrounds of the treatment and control groups.
A more recent study and quoted by Rod Liddle in this magazine relates to childcare in Quebec. The provincial government decided many years ago to provide close-to-free childcare; the rest of Canada did not follow suit. According to Liddle, ‘studies showed a significant development decrease in Quebec children relative to those in the rest of Canada’. He quotes some alarming figure in relation to ‘social competence, external problems and adult-child conflict.’
Perhaps the most worrying finding is that the negative effects of childcare appear to be long-lived. ‘By age 15, extensive hours before age four-and-a-half [in childcare] predicted problem behaviours… even after controlling for daycare quality, socioeconomic background and parenting quality.’
In the case of Australia, we are only too aware of declining school student performance over the past decade and a half, coinciding with a period of rising participation in centre-based childcare. Of course, this correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation but it’s not a great start for the advocates of further government subsidisation of childcare.
A final word of warning: when you read about the benefits of early childhood education in Australia, a lot of conflating goes on. Centre-based childcare for very young children is not early childhood education and a few days per week of preschool for three- and four-year-olds is not full-time childcare.
Keep these differences in mind when assessing the self-interested demands being made by the various lobbyists.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/but-what-about-the-children/ ?
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UK: Single-sex schools will be able to reject transgender pupils and teachers can refuse to call children by their preferred pronouns under new Government guidelines
Single-sex schools will be able to reject transgender pupils under new government guidelines.
The move comes after school leaders and governors met with lawyers amid fears about discrimination claims from parents of transgender pupils if they refused to accommodate them.
The guidance, which will apply to all state and independent single-sex schools in England and be issued in weeks, is being drawn up by Education Secretary Gillian Keegan and equalities minister Kemi Badenoch.
Under it, school leaders will also be able to refuse demands by pupils to use different pronouns. A Department for Education source said: 'Single-sex schools can refuse to admit pupils of the other legal sex regardless of whether the child is questioning their gender.'
The document will also set out that children who change their gender identity cannot share changing or shower facilities with the opposite sex.
The guidance is intended to clarify how schools should respond to children with gender dysphoria and comes after a dramatic increase in the number of children who claim they are trans.
A leader of a girls' school in London told the Telegraph: 'There's anxiety around litigious parents. Most schools say they will be supportive but there are grey areas the Department for Education needs to clarify.'
It comes after Mrs Keegan insisted teachers should be able to say 'good morning, girls' at a single-sex school.
Urging schools to take 'a big dose of common sense' when navigating trans issues, she said: 'We need to look after the wellbeing of all pupils. In that case, the wellbeing of girls is also very important and 'good morning, girls' is absolutely fine to say in a girls' school to a girls' class.'
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Indiana Public School Officials Admit Lying to Parents About Critical Race Theory
Tony Kinnett
When I received an email from Nathalie Henderson, chief schools officer of Indianapolis Public Schools, demanding that I and other administrators lie to our parents and teachers about teaching critical race theory, I was amazed at the boldness in her request that I be dishonest.
At the time, I was the science coordinator for Indianapolis Public Schools.
Henderson instructed us, as fellow school system administrators, to tell parents that we weren’t teaching critical race theory, but just a form of “racial equity.”
By dodging parents’ questions and misleading them with alternative terms deemed not upsetting, we were sheltering our inboxes from the disgust of parents, whose approval we didn’t concern ourselves with.
After a virtual meeting with critical race theory scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings in which I watched my colleagues laugh about teaching critical race theory and how proud they were of it, I decided that I’d had enough.
The next morning, Nov. 4, 2021, I recorded and tweeted a video explaining exactly how Indianapolis Public Schools teaches critical race theory, cited my sources, and warned parents to “keep looking” whenever a public school administrator brushed off their concerns.
I was called a liar by Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project. I was banned from entering any property of Indianapolis Public Schools for fear that I might “psychologically traumatize” fellow staff. And I eventually was fired by the school system.
I was told that I was imagining things, that critical race theory was taught only in graduate schools, and that school system administrators weren’t lying to parents.
Now many of those administrators, who I was assured never would lie to parents about what schools were teaching, have been exposed while admitting that they constantly mislead parents about what’s being taught in the classroom.
A recent hidden-camera investigation by Accuracy in Media, on which the organization reported Wednesday, revealed that principals and superintendents in Indiana knowingly and regularly obstruct curricular and pedagogical transparency by misleading parents with different terms for critical race theory and social and emotional learning so that parents won’t get upset.
Brad Sheppard, an assistant superintendent at Elkhart (Indiana) Community Schools, told the investigators: “We just have to avoid the words, you know? The labels.”
Social and emotional learning, Sheppard said, “has become a bad phrase and we don’t openly use that phrase but we’re still doing it, so… I mean, just to avoid anything, I mean, we have not really been hit with it, but just to even avoid it.”
Critical race theory is a societal view stating that the cause of every historical event, the foundation of every system, and each facet of U.S. life is built upon white supremacy. Social and emotional learning is a style of education that encourages children to analyze and manipulate emotional responses based on a set of fluid values, often reflective of education philosopher John Dewey’s “Humanist Manifesto.”
Due to events such as the Indianapolis Public Schools’ exposure by Accuracy in Media, parents are now aware that school districts rebrand principles of critical race theory as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” So other school districts also have begun avoiding labeling anything as DEI.
Tracey Noe, assistant superintendent of curriculum, instruction, and assessment for Indiana’s Goshen Community Schools, told Accuracy in Media’s investigators that administrators had renamed their “Equity and Inclusion Committee” a “work group,” explaining that “we just didn’t want to make a target of it.”
It’s not hard to imagine why school district administrators who adhere to critical race theory and certain social and emotional learning styles are trying to hide these curricula and practices from parents: The content is very unpopular with parents.
Since Accuracy in Media published its video, Elkhart Community Schools’ Sheppard and Goshen Community Schools’ Noe have been placed on leave, pending an investigation.
The Goshen school district claims that Noe “misrepresented the district” with her statements. The Elkhart district hasn’t stated why it placed Sheppard on leave, but called on Accuracy in Media to release the entire video, sans editing, “in order for the full context to be understood.”
Penn High School, near South Bend, Indiana, was caught giving teachers a social and emotional learning lesson on “Racism and Anti-Racism” in early 2021, according to documents unearthed by Parents Defending Education. The lesson equated supporting former President Donald Trump, saying “MAGA,” and calling for detention of illegal immigrants with “Calls for Violence” and “Genocide.”
Northview Middle School, in Washington Township in Indianapolis, informed a woman that her son could not join an engineering program because he was “not a minority.” After some backlash, the school’s principal reluctantly informed the mother that her son could apply for the program (but did so after the application deadline had passed).
Parental dissatisfaction with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs led to the sweep of “pro-parent” school board candidates in 2022 at Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Fishers, Indiana.
The election results followed a series of scandals in which Hamilton Southeastern Schools planned to punish students for “microaggressions,” spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on social and emotional learning surveys, and required teachers to participate in disturbingly discriminatory racial equity training sessions.
As additional public school districts—not just in Indiana, but across the United States—continue to be exposed for their strange fascination with critical race theory and other progressive education methods, I encourage parents to continue looking. Don’t take administrators’ word for it.
Every secret recording, email, document, assignment, training, and policy reinforces what parents have discovered post-COVID-19: Many administrators think they know better than parents and will ignore, obfuscate, and tell outright lies to continue their work.
My message remains the same since November 2021. When officials tell you critical race theory isn’t taught in our schools, they’re lying. Keep looking.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/17/indiana-school-officials-lie-to-parents-about-crt
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20 April, 2023
Ohio School District Arms Teachers and Staff: "'Our Schools Will No Longer Be Soft Targets'
In response to concerns about active shooter response times, Ohio’s River Valley Local School District in rural Marion County has adopted a new policy allowing teachers and school staff to be armed.
According to the Marion Star, River Valley joins 22 other Ohio school districts that permit approved staff members to carry weapons on campus.
Superintendent Adam Wickham stated that schools would no longer be “soft targets and unprotected,” noting that most active-shooter events occur in areas designated as “gun-free zones” or with minimal safety measures.
He emphasized the importance of ensuring that their schools will not be soft targets.
Wickham also highlighted the potential for armed staff in rural communities to save lives due to longer response times in the event of an active shooter.
He cited recent school shootings in Nashville, Uvalde, and Parkland as examples of how quicker response times could potentially save lives.
Wickham confirmed that each of the district’s four buildings, including a high school, a middle school, and two elementary schools, would have an armed staff member in addition to the school resource officer on campus from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office.
While some parents have expressed concerns about the training and selection process, the superintendent noted that the majority of parents appreciate the proactive approach to protecting their children.
Wickham acknowledged that not everyone would support the program, but emphasized that every safety measure, including the use of armed staff, is put in place to ensure the safe return of staff and students to their families each day.
Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed House Bill 99 on June 13, 2022, allowing school districts across the state to authorize teachers, principals, and other staff to carry guns into classrooms with 24 hours of training.
Despite criticism from some Democrats who argued that the law sent the wrong message following the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, lawmakers fast-tracked the legislation.
Wickham stated that armed staff in the River Valley Local School District would undergo more training than recommended by the state. In 2020, the district required a total of 50 hours of training for armed staff members.
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This Christian college is booming as campus enrollment has more than tripled in the last decade
A conservative, Christian college has tripled its enrollment in the last decade by establishing a "new model for higher education" that makes college affordable to all socioeconomic classes, the university president told Fox News.
"When families hear that there's an affordable private Christian university in Phoenix, Arizona, it's very attractive to come and visit," Grand Canyon University president Brian Mueller said. "Core competency, we think, is to understand where the economy is going, where the jobs are going to be, how people can build great careers and how they can do it without taking on large amounts of debt."
Grand Canyon University, a private Christian college in Phoenix, Arizona, founded in 1949, has grown from 7,602 on-campus students in 2012 to 25,350 in 2022, according to a university spokesperson. Online enrollment also doubled in the last decade.
"Every class is another record-breaking class in terms of numbers," Mueller said. "In the next 10 years or less it will grow somewhere around 50,000 students. We have acquired the land and have the building process in place to do that."
In 2008, Mueller joined GCU as their president when the college had only around 1,000 students. Since then, GCU has invested billions into the campus and grown its academic programs from 100 to 300 for on-campus and online students as students flooded in, the university president said. Mueller attributed some of the university's growth to the college building up the campus in a disadvantaged neighborhood, freezing tuition costs and offering generous scholarships.
"We were in a neighborhood that was very, very challenged from a crime perspective, from a poverty perspective," Mueller said. "But we thought we could use this to create a new model for higher education, one that would make it affordable to all socioeconomic classes of Americans."
GCU, which is located in West Phoenix, offers free tutoring to local K-12 students and provides a full-tuition scholarship program to local high school students that is meant to encourage more low-income, first generation students to go to their college.
The university also launched several local businesses that generate jobs for students and residents.
"When you're able to do that, you're able to fulfill the real goal and objective of higher education, which is to lift all boats," Mueller said.
"Higher education should be a great democratizing force in our country," Mueller told Fox News.
Lower tuition costs have driven student debt down, creating "an environment where socioeconomically we're extremely diverse," Mueller said.
The average GCU student paid $9,200 in tuition before scholarships this past year and about $8,897 for room and board on campus, a university spokesperson told Fox News. In 2022, the college offered $180 million in scholarships. Costs are kept low by employing a small staff to serve both in person and online students.
The numbers run counter to other private universities across the country. Average tuition for private institutions increase 4% in 2022-2023 to $39,723, according to an annual U.S. News and World Report survey.
"We haven't raised tuition for 10 years," Mueller said. "And the average student graduates with less debt than the average state university student."
The average debt level for GCU graduates was $21,557, according to a university spokesperson. In comparison, the debt of college graduates at private institutions averaged $31,820 in 2021, according to a U.S. News and World Report survey of 1,047 colleges.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/christian-college-booming-campus-enrollment-tripled-last-decade
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Jews no longer so welcome at the Ivies
At every point in their history the Ivies have revealed what the existing elite values and whom it is willing to welcome into its ranks. Jews benefited from the meritocratic system of elite production that the Ivies administered in the postwar years and are at an apparent disadvantage now that the old system is considered exclusionary, unrepresentative, and otherwise ill-suited to the current needs and values of the people oveerseeing it. The Ivy League now presents conflicting answers as to whether Jews have a place within whatever post-meritocratic national elite the schools understand themselves to be building.
American Jews—at least the wealthy and relatively liberal ones who cluster in the Northeast—achieved their present status through a mid-to-late-20th-century credentialing system that tried and failed to exclude them. From the 1920s until the early 1960s, Yale’s administration implemented a series of secret admissions rules that had the effect of keeping the Jewish percentage of the student body at a consistent 10%. “They publicly said, and said it to themselves: We are not discriminating against Jews per se. We’re just trying to set up criteria so that the Jews we bring in will be the right kind of Jews,” said Daniel Oren, a psychologist and author of a book about the history of Jews at Yale. Harvard officially admitted to having a quota system in the early 1920s. In research for a 2017 senior thesis on the history of Jews at Dartmouth, Sandor Farkas found evidence that the school’s quotas on Jewish admissions lasted through the 1960s.
Aspects of the quotas have lingered on—it is harder for just about any student from the Northeast not classified as a racial minority, including Jews, to get into Harvard than it is for one applying from Iowa or Nebraska. But beginning in the mid ’60s, Jews were the primary beneficiaries of a half-century window in which the path to the Ivy League became reasonably straightforward: Excellent grades and a high SAT score could get you into a place like Penn, which had a 41% acceptance rate in 1990. That window is now just about closed. Unlike in the ’90s, the Ivies now solicit a high volume of applicants, and it has become harder to establish variance across the applicant pool than it was in past decades. Deliberate, systematic grade and SAT-score inflation have obliterated any obvious quantitative differences between students who are truly great and those who are merely very good. Earlier this year, Columbia became the first Ivy League school to drop its SAT requirement entirely. With the end of the last comparatively objective means of evaluating applicants, admissions criteria have become “holistic” and hard to even identify.
There is compelling though occasional anecdotal proof that top students are clustering in those schools that do continue to select on merit: 21 of the 25 top finishers in last year’s William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition were MIT students. Such proof isn’t needed though, because the Ivies openly and proudly admit that they are no longer taking the top applicants: “If we wanted to, we could take students who had only perfect GPAs and only perfect board scores and fill a class with them,” Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber told CBS in 2017, before confirming that “we do take race and ethnicity into account in building a diverse campus.” Harvard is currently the defendant in a Supreme Court case in which the university is arguing for its right to continue assessing applicants based on their ethnic background, anticipated personality traits, and other factors that have little to with the usual notions of academic merit. “Yale will not waver in its commitment to educating a student body whose diversity is a mark of its excellence,” Yale President Peter Solovay wrote in 2020, arguing that Yale retains its status as a top school as a result of its admissions office’s skill at demographic engineering.
In practice, the commitment to diversity, which the Ivies view as part of their larger mission to improve society, is reflected in drop-offs in the white percentage of student bodies. “Jews are de facto discriminated against, even if it’s not based on animus” a nationally renowned mathematician employed at an Ivy League school said of Jewish applicants to top colleges. “The counterargument is that they’re discriminated against the same way any other white person in the Northeast whose parents went to top schools are discriminated against.”
This “discrimination” against Jewish applicants isn’t narrowly the result of affirmative action, at least not in the sense of the redistribution of benefits, like elite university admissions, as a way of rectifying historical wrongdoing. Instead, the muddling of admission standards under the sign of social justice is an expression of a deeper and much older mentality among the Ivy administrations, one that predates affirmative action by decades or even centuries. The Ivy League schools are jealously protective of their self-image as the vanguard of the national elite—a self-appointed purpose that was always the sole determinant of whether Jews or any other demographic group would be admitted in large numbers. The Ivies operate like rentier states whose legitimacy depends on the wise dispersal of a lucrative and diminishing resource. In Ivy League administrations, that resource is prestige.
Toward the middle of the 20th century, after decades of trying and failing to maintain their status as exclusionary clubs for monied Northeastern men, the times called for the prestige-supply of the Ivies to be distributed among the best and most qualified students—male and female, gentile and Jewish—in order for the Ivies to credibly retain their gatekeeping role. Conversely, in the 2020s, another period of social upheaval, excellence has gone out of fashion among an elite whose new watchword is “equity.” Given that Jews are less than 2% of the U.S. population, harsher and even more significant reductions in already-declining Jewish undergraduate populations at the Ivies would be necessary in order for closely curated student bodies to “look like America.”
In their implementation, the Ivies’ attempts at demographic engineering have little to do with any clear idea of either merit or justice. Indeed, if historical wrongdoing was the core issue, it would be hard to find a group in America that was explicitly targeted for exclusion for longer and to greater effect than Jews, including by the Ivies themselves. Instead, the Ivy student bodies reveal the absurdity of present efforts to equitably distribute prestige in an increasingly unequal society. At Penn, the percentage of Black students barely changed between 2010 and 2016, a time when the Jewish population sharply declined. The percentage of Asians and international students markedly rose—along with the average income of families sending their kids to Penn. “The admissions data allowed Penn to virtue-signal that it was doing something for diversity,” said one source familiar with Jewish life at the school. “But what it really was doing was swapping out wealthy Jews for wealthy Asians.” This was partly enabled through an initiative to prioritize “first generation” college students in admissions. But the university employs a tortured definition of “first generation,” one that allows it to create the illusion of greater equity without risking its academic reputation or its bottom line: At Penn, a “first generation” applicant includes people whose parents earned college degrees outside the United States—the children of nearly anyone who immigrated to the U.S. with a degree, no matter how rich or poor—or who did not “attend a research university with the resources and opportunities a Penn education provides.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/ivy-league-exodus
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19 April, 2023
Ivy League university moves to prioritize 'free expression' months after students heckled conservative pundit
Cornell University will announce plans to feature "free expression and academic freedom" as its theme for the 2023-2024 academic year on Monday, dealing another blow to censorship on college campuses.
The preliminary announcement came Friday, months after students heckled conservative speaker Ann Coulter, a Cornell alumna, at a November 2022 event by blasting music, blowing whistles and more, the university's newspaper, The Cornell Review, reported at the time.
Cornell President Martha E. Pollack is expected to announce the theme, encouraging students to "engage with these ideas, and in civil discourse about them, through a wide range of scholarly and creative events and activities, from lectures to community book reads to artistic exhibitions and performances," according to Friday's announcement.
Pollack called the initiative "critical," per the report, arguing that the university's must focus on its mission to "think deeply about freedom of expression and the challenges that result from assaults on it, which today come from both ends of the political spectrum."
"Learning from difference, learning to engage with difference and learning to communicate across difference are key parts of a Cornell education. Free expression and academic freedom are the bedrock not just of the university, but of democracy," she said.
The university will reportedly launch a website dedicated to the theme this fall, detailing the corresponding goals and events aimed at furthering free expression and academic freedom on its multiple campuses.
"Early planning anticipates reading groups on free expression, debates with invited speakers modeling respectful dialogue, and exhibitions that may span art, film and fashion," the announcement reads, continuing later with, "the programming aims to offer students, faculty and staff opportunities to further develop the fluency and skills necessary for democratic participation, such as active listening, leading controversial discussions, leading effective advocacy and managing responses to controversial interactions."
The announcement also highlights the themes as "core parts" of the institution's "identity" and "founding." Cornell also adopted "free and open inquiry and expression – even of ideas some may consider wrong or offensive" in its 2019 outline of core values and, according to the release from Friday, adopted a policy statement two years later, affirming a free speech commitment.
The announcement comes after Pollack struck down a Student Assembly resolution to precede potentially offensive or triggering class discussions with trigger warnings earlier this month, citing the move "would infringe on our core commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry" in conflict with the institution's goals.
Pollack, in a joint rejection with provost Michael I. Kotlikoff, said the resolution would potentially curb free speech by restricting faculty members' "fundamental right" to determine what curriculum to teach.
Pollack also urged the importance of free speech on campus after the Coulter incident in November, urging students to listen to as many perspectives as they can, including those they disagree with.
"Don’t avoid people whose viewpoints you think are wrong. Don’t try to shout them down. Hear them out. Ask them questions. Put in the effort to understand their point of view," she said, according to The Cornell Review.
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Female teacher at £20,000-a-year British girls' school is forced to apologise to pupils for saying 'Good afternoon, girls'
A teacher claims she was left 'humiliated' after being ordered to apologise to 11-year-olds at a private girls' school – for calling them girls.
Bosses at the £20,000-a-year school told the woman to deliver the mea culpa after her class complained that she had said 'good afternoon, girls' at the start of a lesson, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
After being told by the pupils that 'not everyone here identifies as female', she arrived in class the following day to find they had pointedly written their names and pronouns on the board, including one who used they/them.
They also held a lunchtime protest after she refused to acknowledge their demands.
Last night, the philosophy and religious education teacher spoke of her belief that she was 'managed out' by senior staff at the prestigious institution, which is part of the independent Girls' Day School Trust, but only after she was forced to publicly apologise.
The woman, who gave evidence last week to an ongoing review into child and adolescent gender dysphoria care, led by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, said the problems began in May 2021 after some Year 7 students complained when she greeted the class with 'good afternoon, girls.'
After being told that not everyone identified as female, one pupil stood up and challenged her to 'acknowledge' their pronouns.
But the teacher, who has requested anonymity to protect the pupils, replied that if their pronouns differed from their biological sex, she would need to involve parents.
The teacher then said she sought guidance from the head of year about what to do if a pupil was experiencing gender dysphoria – a term used to describe a mismatch between biological sex and gender.
But her superior allegedly told her she had no knowledge of the terminology or whether any communications had been had with parents on the issue.
The students then held a lunchtime protest against the teacher – and she said senior staff appeared to side with them. 'I was told that they made placards with slogans on such as 'Trans lives matter',' she said.
'Before the end of the week I was in some sort of disciplinary process and the head of year was telling me I had to apologise to the girls.'
The teacher then described how she was accompanied by the head of year, who addressed the pupils while she stood to one side.
She said: 'She spoke to the children on my behalf saying no one here would want to hurt you and you're all really loved by us.
'She then worded the apology in terms of, 'I am sorry you're upset and we didn't mean to offend. I'm sorry you felt bad.' But it was all pretty humiliating and embarrassing.'
The teacher said the problems started less than a week after the sixth form's 'diversity and inclusion' prefects delivered an assembly on gender and pronouns.
During the session, the 17- and 18-year-olds showed a video discussing gender identities and sex being assigned at birth.
The tutor believes that as a result of her refusal to capitulate to her students' gender demands she was 'managed out'.
She said the head teacher rejected her application to remain at the school after her one-term contract came to an end.
The Girls' Day School Trust, a group of 25 schools and academies, attracted attention in January 2022 after it controversially updated its gender identity policy to ban applications from students who are legally male but identify as trans or non-binary.
It defended the move, saying that it was necessary to protect its schools' single sex status.
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Muslims Turning the Tide in the School Culture Wars
In a slap to Muslim girls at Stuyvesant High School, the school is cancelling single-sex swim lessons, even though swim instruction is required to graduate. That forces the girls to choose between preserving their modesty and getting a diploma.
Count on Muslim families to fight back and likely prevail. Nationwide, Muslims are taking up the battle in schools to protect traditional religious values, including modesty.
Move over, Roman Catholics, evangelical Christians and conservative Jews. Reinforcements have arrived, and they're turning the tide.
Even in the Ivy League. After weeks of protests by female Muslim students, Yale University is switching its campus housing policy for the coming academic year to offer single-gender dorms and bathrooms.
From Michigan to Virginia, Muslim parents are showing up at local school board meetings to oppose graphic sex education and gender fluidity indoctrination. Their engagement is impacting politics. More Muslims are voting Republican, concluding that the Democratic Party is trampling Islamist values.
In Dearborn, Michigan, left-wing Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib opposed the Muslim parents in her district protesting sexually explicit materials in school.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues its lurch to the extreme left. President Joe Biden's Department of Education announced double-barreled rule changes last week, one favoring transgender athletes in elementary and middle school, and the other revoking a Trump-era commitment by the department to protect religious clubs and associations on college campuses. Flipping the bird to people of faith twice in a single week.
Sexual modesty is a core value in Islam. Muslims observe a dress code and guard against physical contact between sexes once students reach adolescence.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects an employee's right to practice religion in the workplace, but there is no comparable statutory protection for students. Muslims are waging the battle one campus demonstration and school board meeting at a time, often winning.
Muslims are powerful at Yale. In 2021, undergrads elected a Muslim woman to be student body president. And on March 10, Yale acceded to demands from the Muslim Student Association, Orthodox Jews at Yale and other religious groups to provide single-sex campus housing. Muslim women students had protested that with men in the bathroom, they couldn't even remove their hijab.
Modesty is the issue at Stuyvesant High School, too. Brian Moran, assistant principal of physical education, told the student newspaper that the girls' single-sex swim classes clashed with other scheduling priorities. He made it sound like a mere scheduling inconvenience was justification enough for the change, and told the girls to wear full-body burkinis. Sorry, but those still cling to the body when wet.
New York City's Board of Education website promises trans students "alternative arrangements" for anyone with "a need or desire for increased privacy." Why should Muslim students get less? One in every 10 students in the city's school system is Muslim.
Last September, Muslim women at Syracuse University waged a battle for swim time without men in the college pool and won a concession that starts next fall.
In Utah, the Muslim Civic League worked with the Sikh and Jewish communities to pass a state law in February allowing school athletes to wear turbans, hijabs and modest pants and tops in competition instead of the regulation form fitting uniforms.
Luna Banuri, the league's executive director, said: "All faiths have modesty standards. We believe this affects multiple communities." Maryland and Illinois recently passed similar laws.
In Bethel, Ohio, a coalition of Muslim and Christian parents are suing to preserve single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms and halt a rule change that would allow biological boys to use the girls' facilities.
Most Muslims still vote Democratic, but the shift is beginning. According to a Wall Street Journal exit poll, 28% voted Republican in the 2022 midterms, a double-digit increase over the 2018 midterms.
Republicans are gaining ground as more Muslims conclude the Democratic Party doesn't show regard for Islamic values.
Tell educators to respect families with faith-based values instead of shunning them.
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18 April, 2023
Missouri School Offered ‘Sweet Prize’ to Students for Reading Sexually Explicit Books
A Missouri high school offered prizes to students who read books featuring sexually explicit LGBT material, critical race theory, and transgender education.
The high school librarian in the Webster Groves School District, located in the suburbs of St. Louis, encouraged students to check out books from her commonly banned book list to enter a raffle for a “sweet prize.”
“Select and check out any book from this list during Banned Book Week to enter your name in a drawing to win a sweet prize,” librarian Liz Forderhase posted on the Webster Groves High School library webpage.
“Banned Book Week” was Sept. 18-24. The raffle offer was removed from the school library website after a parent activist exposed it, but the book list remains.
The list contains “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” which has been removed from libraries in at least 29 school districts nationwide due to concerns about “sexually graphic material, including descriptions of queer sex,” according to The New York Times.
Libraries around the nation are using children’s books to peddle radical gender and critical race theory. A public library in Washington, D.C., put up a display of LGBT-themed children’s books ahead of a March 30 Christian book reading. Almost 90% of books removed from Florida schools since the beginning of the academic year in September were pornographic, violent, or inappropriate for students’ grade levels, according to school district data submitted to the state’s Department of Education.
Other books on the Webster Groves High School recommended list include “Stamped From the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” by critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi; “The Hate U Give,” which has been criticized for featuring 89 instances of the f-word and promoting anti-police sentiments; “Being Jazz,” the story of a transgender teenager; and “This Book is Gay,” a guide for “anyone who’s ever dared to wonder” about their “gender or sexual preference.”
Forderhase also recommends “Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out,” which examines the “life, love, and struggles” of transgender teens; “Am I Blue: Coming Out From the Silence,” a collection of short stories about growing up gay; “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” the fictional tale of a teen sent to a “conversion therapy center”; and “Annie on My Mind,” the story of two female teenage best friends who fall in love.
The raffle was removed from the website between Feb. 24 and March 19, according to the parent activist who exposed it, and the name of the list was changed from “Commonly Challenged Books” to “Celebrate the Freedom to Read.”
When asked about the removal of the raffle offer, Webster Groves High School Principal Matt Irvin told The Daily Signal, “I understand that we are no longer doing it.” Neither Irvin nor Forderhase responded to questions about why the raffle was removed from the website.
The parent activist who exposed the school district for incentivizing high schoolers to read inappropriate books told The Daily Signal he is disappointed to see a Webster Groves librarian attempting to influence local children against the will of parents.
“Aggregating a list of books for which district parents are most likely to find inappropriate and rewarding children with prizes to read them can only be seen as activism,” he said on the condition of anonymity to protect his children from bullying at school. “Many of these books contain sexual, gender ideology, and critical theory content.”
In October, Webster Groves Schools reluctantly removed 11 books from school libraries after a Missouri bill passed banning sexually explicit materials in schools.
The district’s communications director Derek Duncan said that although it was essential for Webster Groves to follow state law by removing the books, the district would “continue to strive to provide materials that mirror our student population and celebrate the diversity that exists within the world around us.”
The parent activist, who is a father of a Webster Groves High School student, said not a single member of the Webster Groves Board of Education supported the removal of the explicit books, which he said indicates that the board members prioritize politics over children.
“It is disappointing to see the high school librarian engaged in activism as a direct representative of the Webster Groves School District,” the parent continued, “especially considering that the activism is designed to influence our children.”
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NY private school STILL enforces masks outdoors, silence lunches as part of strict COVID measures
The federal government says the COVID is over — but tell that to this upstate New York school.
A private school in Ithaca is still forcing draconian measures on its students, including making them wear masks outdoors and eat lunch in silence — three years after the pandemic began, according to a report.
The Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca (EACMSI), which costs up to $18,000 a year to attend, is currently one of the last schools in the nation to still be imposing such strict COVID measures, The Free Press reported.
Dr. Beth Stein, who pulled her kids out of EACMSI and put them in private school because of the strict measures, told The Free Press she initially welcomed the precautions, but they became overly burdensome as time went on.
“I could tolerate most of the stuff — the teachers in N95s and face shields while standing behind plexiglass barriers, the 12 feet of distance for band members, the ban on singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in class,” she said. “I just wanted them to end the outdoor masking.”
The board-certified doctor also claimed her students were almost kicked out of the school after she complained about outdoor masking.
The school doesn’t have a cafeteria and students eat lunch in their classrooms.
Stein said some days her 13-year-old daughter’s teacher would play movies during lunch, but on other days they ate in complete silence. If a student dared to ask their teacher a question during lunch, the kid would first have to put on their mask in order to speak, and then could take it off again to go back to eating.
Sometimes, teachers took the mandated silent lunch as an opportunity to keep teaching, the mom said.
Stein’s 10-year-old daughter said kids in her class wanted so badly to converse during lunch that they invented their own sign language to communicate. “We just really wanted to talk,” the girl said.
When EACMSI held a student orchestra performance indoors this January, students playing wind instruments were still required to wear masks, according to the report.
Parents had to figure out how to make or alter masks so their children could both play the instrument and have their faces covered. “I see the current situation as ridiculous,” another parent, who wished to stay anonymous, told the outlet.
The school, which enrolls about 220 kids between ages 3 to about 14 or 15, says its “pedagogy is child-centered, hands-on, individualized, and serves the development of the whole child—physical, social, emotional, cognitive.”
EACMSI’s policies go beyond the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, which only recommend indoor masking in the nurse’s office or if a community has high rates of COVID.
CDC COVID guidelines for schools also currently recommend staying home when sick, improving ventilation in school buildings and encouraging students to stay up-to-date on vaccinations.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/14/private-school-in-ny-still-enforcing-strict-covid-19-measures/
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Maryland Governor Tries to End School Choice for Low-income Families
Families and students in Maryland can breathe a sigh of relief after lawmakers agreed to provide $9 million in funding for the state’s school choice scholarship program for low-income families. The program was originally on the new governor’s chopping block.
Gov. Wes Moore’s fiscal year 2024 budget called for a 20% cut to the state’s $10 million scholarship program. He also stated his desire to entirely phase out the Broadening Options and Opportunities for Students Today, or BOOST, program, even though its price tag is a pittance compared to the state’s record $8.8 billion in spending on K-12 public schools.
Lawmakers in Annapolis restored $1 million in cut funding and removed language that would have eventually ended the program.
Moore’s initial plan to cut BOOST scholarships is a useful reminder that in politics, historic “firsts” often help candidates more than their constituents. Those constituents include many low-income students in Baltimore who likely felt a rush of pride seeing a black man ascend to the state’s highest office.
Moore himself stressed the historic nature of his gubernatorial victory. Indeed, he was sworn in on the Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass.
While Moore paints himself as a proud son of Baltimore, he actually attended Riverdale Country School, a tony private school with ivy-covered buildings that sits on 27.5 acres in the Bronx, New York. Tuition and fees there currently total $61,305 per year. The governor later graduated from another private school, Valley Forge Military Academy and College, before enrolling at Johns Hopkins University.
Moore’s early education surely fueled his long list of professional accomplishments, so it is unlikely that he opposes private schools in principle. It is hard to imagine him managing the state’s budget if he had attended one of the 23 Baltimore schools that did not have a single student who was proficient in math in 2022.
The parents working to save the BOOST program want the same fighting chance for their children that the governor’s mother wanted for him.
BOOST is not perfect by any means. The average scholarship is less than $3,500, a fact that likely explains why the program serves a disproportionate number of students who were already enrolled in private schools. But the interest groups and ideologues who want to shutter BOOST do not oppose it because it serves too few families.
Moore and anti-school choice advocates claim public dollars should not go to private schools. Yet they apply this stance only to K-12 education. No one has ever called for restricting the use of publicly funded Pell grants only to public universities. Perhaps that is because there is not a union for college professors and university administrators that is as politically influential as local and national teachers unions. Both oppose expanding charter schools and any type of school choice voucher program.
The same groups have encouraged the last two Democrats in the White House to cut a similar program in Washington, D.C. Congress created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2004 after local parents organized an effort to provide education options for low-income students. One of Barack Obama’s first acts as president was to try to axe the program. Ultimately, he was unsuccessful.
President Donald Trump increased funding for the program, but the political football was tossed again in 2021, when the Biden administration took over. Much to the delight of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, one of the first things the current administration did was move to phase out the program.
In Maryland, Moore’s initial plan to phase out the BOOST program would’ve meant fewer chances for students from low-income families to get a good education. Instead of pulling the plug, Maryland lawmakers should follow the example of other states that have embraced innovative school choice policies.
Neighboring West Virginia, for example, is one of five states that have moved to universal choice programs for all students that focus on funding students, not systems. These states recognize that the funding source and beneficiaries in a “public” education systemmatter more than the way it is delivered—public, private, or home-school.
Seven other states have developed education savings accounts for specific populations only, including low-income families and students with special needs.
These programs put the key decisions about a student’s academic future in the hands of the people who care about them most—their parents.
What is happening in Maryland should be a cautionary tale to all voters. The politicians who try to convince you that they understand your plight because you share the same skin tone often serve special interests instead.
Any politician who opposes school choice should send their own children to the low-performing public schools that they consign poor families to attend.
Progressives claim to work on behalf of the poor and middle class. But when it comes to school choice, their message is clear: Teachers’ unions matter more than students, and private schools are only for people who can afford them.
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Indian students banned or limited as Australian universities crack down on bogus applicants
At least five Australian universities have introduced bans or restrictions on students from specific Indian states in response to a surge of applications from South Asia and an accompanying rise in what the Home Affairs Department described as fraudulent applications.
An investigation by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald has obtained emails from within Victoria University, Edith Cowan University, the University of Wollongong, Torrens University, and agents working for Southern Cross University that show the crackdown on applications from Indian students.
Australia is on track for its biggest-ever annual intake of Indian students, topping 2019’s high watermark of 75,000. But the current surge has prompted concerns from government MPs and the education sector about the integrity of Australia’s immigration system and the long-term impact on the nation’s lucrative international education market.
“The volume of students arriving has come back a lot stronger than anyone was expecting,” said Jon Chew from global education firm Navitas. “We knew there would be a lot of pent-up demand, but there has also been a surge in non-genuine students.”
With many applications deemed by universities not to meet Australian visa requirements that they be a “genuine temporary entrant” coming solely for education, universities are putting restrictions in place to pre-empt their “risk rating” being downgraded.
The Home Affairs Department keeps a confidential rating of each country, with each university and college also ranked. Students from countries with higher risk ratings are required to provide more evidence that proves they will not overstay their visa, not work more hours than allowed under their visa, and not use fraudulent material in their application.
Those universities that have restricted access to some Indian states are concerned Home Affairs will reduce their ability to fast-track student visas because of the number of applicants who are actually seeking to work – not study – in Australia.
“In an effort to strengthen the profile of students from areas where we have seen increased visa risks, VU will implement a higher level of requirements in some areas in India,” the university’s regional recruitment manager Alex Hanlon wrote to education agents. A university spokeswoman said these additional requirements included “assessing gaps in applicants’ study history to determine if they are suitably qualified and prepared for international study in Australia and can support themselves adequately”.
Those restrictions came just days after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited India, in part to celebrate Australia’s education links and announce a new agreement with Australia’s universities and colleges that would, he said, herald “the most comprehensive and ambitious arrangement agreed to by India with any country”. Crucially, the agreement included a “mutual recognition of qualifications between Australia and India”, which will make travelling to either country for university study easier.
The deluge of applications from south Asia began after the Morrison government, in January 2022, removed a 20-hour per week limit on the amount of work students can do – meaning there were no longer any restrictions on how many hours students could work. The move encouraged those wanting a low-skill Australian work visas to apply to cheaper education institutions. The Albanese government will on July 1 reintroduce this work limit, but lift it to 24 hours a week.
The Age and the Herald has confirmed with five universities, or in one case agents working on a university’s behalf, that they have put restrictions on students wanting to come to Australia from India. Another list seen by The Age and the Herald and authored by one Australian education agency, showed 12 universities and colleges had put in restrictions. The agency asked not to be named for fear it would damage its relationship with education providers.
It is not just universities that are grappling with a surge in applications from people seeking to work in Australia and gain permanent residency – rather than studying – in Australia. The vocational education sector is also seeing a surge in applications from students ultimately judged to be too risky to accept.
Under the process for getting a student visa, education providers accept applicants who are then assessed by Home Affairs. In February, Home Affairs rejected an unprecedented 94 per cent of offshore applicants from India to study in Australia’s vocational sector. It compared to less than 1 per cent of student applications from countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and France. In 2006, when Home Affairs started publishing records of this nature, 91 per cent of applicants from India were accepted.
The international students pouring back into Australia fuel an overseas education industry worth about $40 billion annually, trailing only iron ore, coal and natural gas as an export.
The University of Sydney took $1.4 billion of revenue in 2021 from fee-paying overseas students, Monash University collected $917 million in tuition fees while the University of Queensland got $644 million, federal education department figures show.
“Many universities, like Monash, Melbourne, Sydney and the University of New South Wales, already receive more revenue from international students than from domestic students,” said Peter Hurley, director of Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute. “International education is an incredibly valuable resource. It is really important that we manage it properly so that it works in everyone’s interests, especially international students.”
Hurley said international students provided both students for the nation’s higher education sector, and workers for Australia’s booming jobs market. “We need this workforce,” Hurley said. No Australian university could now function without international education revenue, he said, noting international students provide some institutions with three times as much in tuition fees as a domestic student.
Education agent Ravi Singh said too many of Australia’s training colleges had become “visa factories” interested in offering immigration pathways, not an education.
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17 April, 2023
Inquiry calls for universal preschool for three-year-olds to be rolled out in SA from 2026
This is just Leftist anti-family rubbish. Karl Marx would be pleased. There is no basis for it in science. The research shows that kids do better at home rather than in preschool. Preschool in fact holds the kids back, often permanently. Mothers are the best teachers in all but the most deprived homes. See the following for summaries of the evidence:
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96091-science-says-state-run-preschool-is-not-the-way-2023-03-30
https://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5525
What Gillard "genuinely believes" is of no importance
A royal commission investigating how best to launch an earlier start to education in South Australia has recommended all three-year-olds be entitled to 600 hours of preschool a year.
The Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care was launched last year to work out how best to deliver the SA Labor Party's election promise to give three-year-old children access to preschool from 2026.
Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who was appointed to lead the $2.45 million commission, has made 33 recommendations in her interim report handed to the state government today.
Ms Gillard said three-year-olds should be offered the same universal entitlement to preschool currently offered to four-year-old children — 600 hours a year, or 15 hours a week for 40 weeks a year.
"I genuinely believe this report should be of interest to every South Australian, whether or not they have young children in their family or young children in contemplation in their families' future," she said.
"We have a moral obligation to every child to make sure every child has the best opportunity to grow and learn and thrive."
The commission recommends 15 hours a week be viewed as a minimum and is also contemplating greater entitlements to fund extra hours for children deemed most at risk of developmental delays.
"We also, as a state, have a shared economic interest in making sure that we set our children on the best pathway in life, because the research tells us crystal clear that intervention in the early years can make the biggest difference," Ms Gillard said.
"If we do not set children up well in the early years of life, if children present to school with developmental delays then it can be very hard to catch up and that disadvantage will continue to show in their adult life.
"It shows in life expectancy, in poorer health, in poorer economic outcomes, in greater welfare dependency and even potentially in involvement with crime."
The proposed approach will cost the state about $162 million a year.
The commission recommends three-year-old preschool be delivered in a mix of government and non-government settings, including in early learning centres and long day care.
The approach will need 32 new preschools to be built, at a cost of $111.2 million.
Ms Gillard said the approach would also build on the work currently being done by those who worked in early childhood education, often informally and unpaid, to link families with other support systems.
"That can be everything from recognising that a child might need to be connected to the professional services of a speech pathologist, to recommending to a family that if they need assistance with food, that is a Foodbank in the local community," she said.
"At the moment that kind of building of connections is being done as an act of goodwill of individuals, it's not built-in as a feature of practice all day every day and we want to make sure that it is."
Premier Peter Malinauskas said it would be the biggest reform to early childhood education the state had ever seen.
"What we're doing here isn't just nation-leading, but it's global-leading," he said.
"It's important we look at these recommendations with a holistic view, that we take the time to ask questions, and critically view our education system, so that any actions from this are the right ones for the next generation."
The commission, which is seeking feedback from the public on its report, found the rollout "could be completed by 2032", but is still looking into the issue of workforce supply.
The final report is scheduled to be released in August.
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Gender Curricula May Be Fueling A Dangerous Fad
Gender and sex education curricula in schools have become a highly contentious topic in recent years
The programs are becoming widespread, and while they may appear to be designed to respond to increasing gender dysphoria, mental health professionals are concerned that they may cause irreparable harm to children.
Curriculum implementation has been met with mixed reactions from parents, teachers, and policymakers.
While some argue that gender education promotes healthy relationships and informed decision-making, others contend that it is too graphic and highly inappropriate for children.
In her article in The Free Press, former case manager Jamie Reed blew the whistle on The Washington University Transgender Center (WUTC) at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which has experienced a dramatic influx of young people requesting gender affirmative care.
The increase in gender dysphoria among youth has drawn the public’s attention, Reed said. “There are more than 100 pediatric gender clinics across the U.S. I worked at one. What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling.”
While the public is beginning to learn about the impact of gender dysphoria treatment, which often includes the use of hormones and surgeries, little is known about the impact of teaching gender identity in the academic environment and its effect on the mental health of children.
The Rampant Spread Of Gender Confusion In Youth
Dr. Alex Smith, a psychologist in the Greater Philadelphia area, works closely with school-aged children. Smith is concerned that gender confusion is becoming widespread, particularly through social media.
Using a pseudonym due to concern of reprisal, Smith told The Epoch Times that children are highly influenced by the popularity of social media celebrities and influencers who are adept at spreading gender confusion. When a child realizes the attention they can get, they’re encouraged to talk about gender, especially when it appears that “changing their gender makes them cool,” Smith said.
Dr. Shannae Anderson, a psychologist from Thousand Oaks, California, told The Epoch Times, “This may be a fad, similar to the ’80s with eating disorders and ’90s with ‘cutting.’ Now, it’s identifying as LGBTQ+.”
Children often have unlimited access to social media on which they can spend an excessive amount of their time. Since its inception in 2017, TikTok has become a popular space for children in the United States, with 32.5 percent of its users being between the ages of 10 and 19.
TikTok provides image filters that can alter the appearance of someone’s face, allowing them to have a more masculine or feminine appearance in the blink of an eye. This has made it particularly popular with school-aged children who may identify as “queer” or “questioning.” (pdf)
Smith explained that on social media, children can be highly influenced by users spreading gender dysphoria. Due to the sensitive nature of this topic, biased content can cause a child to behave in a way they may perceive will help them gain acceptance.
School materials being presented to children that focus on gender and sexuality may also be contributing to the confusion.
“As a gay parent, I am concerned,” Marci Strange wrote on the website Gays Against Groomers. Strange asked why schools are sexualizing our children. She pointed to a California “Healthy Kids Survey” that asked students, “Are you straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or something else?” Another page asks if kids are different from the sex they were assigned at birth.
“Unless parents ‘opt-out,’ it can confuse and make suggestions kids may never consider,” said Strange.
A child’s desire for acceptance and popularity is no mystery to parents and school staff. Children may take drastic measures to fit in, even at their own expense. In the context of gender, children may choose to behave differently than they otherwise would to gain attention and recognition.
Dr. Barbara Ellis, a psychologist from the Greater Philadelphia area said that in middle school, children become less dependent on their family and begin to transfer more of their social interactions from family to their peers. They have a “great need to be accepted,” she said.
As children enter adolescence, identity exploration and behavioral experimentation takes off.
Because the adolescent brain is undergoing profound reconstruction and is not fully developed until age 25, we’re dealing with kids who do not have solid brain architecture, Anderson said.
This can result in dramatic shifts in their personality and behavior, said Anderson. Further, she explained that these trends often end with the behavior resolving as children mature.
https://principia-scientific.com/gender-curricula-may-be-fueling-a-dangerous-fad/
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Teen suspended for opposing trans ideology files human rights complaint: 'Shockingly discriminatory'
A lawyer for a Canadian teenager who was suspended from his Catholic high school after opposing transgender ideology has filed a human rights complaint alleging religious discrimination.
Attorney James Kitchen with Liberty Coalition Canada filed the application to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal earlier this month on behalf of his client Josh Alexander, 17, a junior who was first suspended from St. Joseph’s High School in Renfrew, Ontario, and issued a trespass notice in November.
Alexander drew the ire of school leadership when he organized a student walkout at the public Catholic high school against biological males in girls' bathrooms, according to the complaint. He also reportedly argued in class that God created two unchangeable genders.
The complaint recounts that students erupted during a math class when Alexander argued against the school's bathroom policy. When he claimed that men have penises and women have vaginas, his classmates reportedly called him a "misogynist," a "racist," and a "homophobic transphobe," while the teacher allegedly "nodded and gestured at the students yelling at Josh, indicating his approval of the students’ name-calling."
Alexander was ultimately suspended and told that his continued attendance would be detrimental to the physical and mental well-being of transgender students, the complaint says. His suspension was technically lifted in January but has effectively continued after the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board "excluded" him for the rest of the school year.
Principal Derek Lennox would allow him to return to school only if the teen stopped using the "dead name," or given name, of transgender students and avoided attending classes with two transgender students, according to the complaint. When he attempted to return to school on Feb. 6, he was arrested for allegedly violating the exclusion order.
The school board has declined to hear Alexander's appeal regarding the suspension, arguing that he has not withdrawn from parental control, according to a letter sent to Kitchen in January. The lawyer argues that the school board made its decision despite being provided affidavit evidence to the contrary.
Kitchen also filed an application at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to compel the school board to hear his client's appeal.
"Kicking Josh out of school for expressing his Christian beliefs regarding sexuality and gender is unlawful religious discrimination," Liberty Coalition Canada said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. "The application details the shockingly discriminatory conduct of teachers and students at St. Joseph’s, as well as Principal Lennox’s retaliatory decisions to suspend and exclude Josh for expressing his beliefs and organizing a student walk-out to protest St. Joseph’s policy of permitting biological males to enter and use the girls’ washrooms."
"Among other things, Josh is seeking from the HRTO a declaration that the School Board discriminated against him on the basis of his Christian beliefs," the coalition added. The school did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
The complaint points out that Alexander describes himself as a Christian and has protested transgender ideology because of his faith.
"Josh believes he is called by the Lord Jesus Christ to proclaim the truth which includes telling those around him about the Lord’s design for gender and to openly oppose the School Board’s policy of permitting males to enter the girls’ washrooms," the complaint said. "Josh believes he would commit a sin if he disregarded the Lord’s calling on his life and remained silent."
Kitchen told Fox News Digital in February that he believes freedom of religion and freedom of expression are in steep decline in Canada, but noted that religious liberty is evaporating more quickly. He said many Canadians do not understand the gravity of the threat their government increasingly poses to religious freedom, which he said is "essentially dead" after withering "for about 10 or 15 years."
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University ‘blocks’ academic from her own gender wars research over ‘dangerous’ data
Auniversity has “confiscated” the findings of an academic studying Britain’s gender wars in a row over her “dangerous” research data, The Telegraph can reveal.
Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London.
But it has descended into chaos, with the study’s author allegedly hounded out of the university, stripped of the findings she collected and barred from publishing them amid claims of transphobia.
Dr Favaro is now bringing an employment tribunal claim against City for harassment, victimisation and whistleblowing detriment, and claims she was discriminated against for her protected philosophical belief in the reality of biological sex.
The postdoctoral researcher was invited to move from Spain to City’s Department of Sociology to conduct the study, which received £18,000 from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the equalities watchdog, and £10,000 from the British Academy. She produced a summary report on her findings for the EHRC that still has not been published.
Hundreds of documents
Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender studies who identified as feminists, a representative survey of social scientists with 650 responses and hundreds of documents and tweets.
Scholars told her that they had threats of violence in the gender debate, hostility from colleagues, and others said they felt their careers “can’t survive that sort of backlash”, and that they have to have “secret conversations” to avoid reprisal and because “we are all so afraid”.
Her final work has not been published, as it was derailed by complaints about an article for Times Higher Education in which she warned that “a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold”.
Following this, she says, her line managers told her that the study had “become an institutionally sensitive issue” and that “City considers my data to be dangerous” and is “frightened of making it public”.
A research participant who “did not like the findings” and academics sympathetic to trans issues were among those who complained. One, Dr Sahra Taylor, a City lecturer, claimed it was an “attack piece on trans people [and] our existences” that has “clearly caused harm to many interviewed”.
City found following an investigation that there was “no evidence” that the research breached any ethics criteria.
But City allegedly locked the email account Dr Favaro used to communicate with survey respondents, and demanded that she hand over all of her interview and survey data and delete any copies of it, before making her redundant on March 31, despite her claiming she has a permanent contract. Dr Favaro also claims City rejected her offer to give a talk on her findings.
It means she cannot publish her survey or deposit it in the UK Data Archive, as she had hoped to, and feels her career is now in ruins.
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16 April, 2023
Transgender Teacher Who Threatened to Shoot Students Gets Booted from School
A transgender teacher in Hernando County, Florida has been fired from Fox Chapel Middle School over comments that threatened the safety of students.
Alexander Renczkowski, who goes by Ashlee, admitted to having suicidal thoughts and wanted to shoot some students, according to Fox 13. In a Hernando County Sheriff's Office report from March 24, Renczkowski told the guidance counselor being upset after learning "about a social media post where people were talking negatively about [Renczkowski's] sexual orientation." Renczkowski also revealed to be in possession of "three handguns at home" and wanting "to shoot some students due to them not performing to their ability."
After making a comment about shooting students, Renczkowski then backtracked said that would not actually happen. A sheriff deputy took custody of the handguns during a home visit. The Post Millennial reported Renczkowski's comments were found to be non-threatening, went to therapy, and was allowed to teach again, angering parents who later discovered the incident after Moms for Liberty released the sheriff's office report.
The Florida Department of Education said in a statement released on Friday Renczkowski was only fired by the school district after the Department brought the matter to the superintendent's attention.
"Therefore, the teacher is no longer at the school."
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Awakening the Sleeping Giant
There is a quote at the end of the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! by the Japanese commander after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that applies to the pro-parent education movement today: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
All over the country, parents have been “awakened” to the indoctrination of their children by the liberal, woke education establishment… and they are resolved that it will not stand.
School boards have become key ground to take and hold, both because of their influence on education and the low turnout rates which make these elections feasible to swing.
What provoked this education revolution? Drag queen story hours for children. Pornographic library books. Abolishing honors courses in the name of “equity.” Hiding a student’s gender transition efforts from his or her parents. Allowing male students to use female restrooms and locker rooms. Resisting parents’ efforts to find out exactly what their students are being taught.
These are all examples of decisions made by or under the oversight of school boards who have bought into the tenets of critical race theory and the cult of LGBTQ activism, or simply refused to stand against them. This has pushed parents and citizens to become involved in school board races — as candidates, activists, and voters. By flipping seats, they are determined to restore sanity for the sake of their children and the future of our country.
This education revolution will not succeed unless voters can determine whose side their candidates are really on. Local races are especially difficult because information is scarce and most voters do not know where to look, or what to look for. Thorough research and evaluation of candidates is needed, which is where iVoterGuide comes in.
Based on this information, each candidate receives a political ideology rating on the conservative to liberal spectrum from our volunteer panelists. These ratings are not endorsements; they are simply descriptive labels based on the evidence.
It is vital that parents are equipped and empowered to identify (and replace if necessary) those school board members who are promoting woke and gender ideologies. It's time for us to stand up and retake the power over our children’s learning back from the educational establishment. That can only happen with information. As the saying goes, knowledge is power.
Voters are motivated. I witnessed their resolve in the results of the school board elections iVoterGuide covered in 2022. Unfortunately, 25 percent of races we covered did not even have a conservative on the ballot. And 10 percent of the races had more than one conservative candidate, splitting the vote. But in the races with only one candidate who was rated on the conservative spectrum, the conservative candidate won 69 percent of the time! (72 of the 104 races.)
There are many lessons we learned through that experience. The most important is that more conservatives need to step up and run, even if they don’t have children in the public school system. I am encouraged that we see this happening! Additionally, it is essential that we cooperate to avoid splitting the vote. But none of that matters if we don’t inform conservative voters.
This year, roughly 69 percent of the nation’s school districts are holding elections. If we don’t speak up and vote on behalf of our children, others will — and have been for many years. I am praying an army of concerned citizens will commit to do three things:
1. Vote in their next school board election.
2. Cast an informed vote using sound research.
3. Encourage and equip likeminded friends and neighbors to cast an informed vote.
In addition to all this, we must be in prayer for our children, for the candidates, and for current school board members. In many cases, the policies being fought against are not just poor education; they are pure evil.
The “sleeping giant” of parents and concerned citizens has awakened. They just need the tools to succeed. When it comes to children, we can never back down from the fight.
https://townhall.com/columnists/debbiewuthnow/2023/04/15/awakening-the-sleeping-giant-n2621965
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Texas teacher fired for turning middle school classroom into student ‘fight ring’
A substitute teacher in Texas is under investigation after she allegedly turned her classroom into a cage match and encouraged students as young as 12 to fight each other.
Natally Garcia, 24, was immediately fired after the incident at Kimbrough Middle School in Mesquite on Wednesday, the school district told KXAS-TV.
Shocking footage from inside the classroom shows desks pushed into a circle to create a “fight ring” while 12- and 13-year-old students duke it out, leaving some battered and bloody.
“Her actions are appalling and intolerable,” the Mesquite ISD said in a statement.
The school district also said Garcia outlined rules for the children to follow and told one to keep watch at the door while the fights occurred.
In the video, Garcia can be heard telling her class that she “does not want this on record” and threatening to confiscate cellphones if students had them out.
The clip shows at least four students fighting each and a timer can be heard going off at different points during the melees, Garcia shouting “30 seconds” before one fight began.
Video from the classroom shows at least four students fighting in pairs of two with desks and chairs pushed to the side.
“I was devastated. I was like, I couldn’t watch the full video,” Beatriz Martinez, whose daughter recorded the incident, said. “I had to stop it multiple times because I didn’t think it was real. I was like, this must be a prank. This is not real.“
“There’s no explanation, she just wanted those kids to fight,” she added.
Martinez said Garcia taught her daughter’s class at least twice before and there had been no previous incidents.
She said her daughter had been pushed to fight three girls during the makeshift fight club, but the class concluded before that could happen.
The school district called Garcia’s actions “appalling and intolerable” in a statement.
Mesquite ISD said Garcia had been hired on March 6, but she was fired after the incident and is not eligible to be rehired.
“Our investigation revealed that this substitute teacher encouraged students to fight each other during class, outlined rules for the students to follow and even instructed a student to monitor the classroom door while the fights took place,” the school district said.
“As educators, our hearts are heavy knowing that an individual entrusted with the supervision and care of our students could behave in this manner, and we share the disgust that the families of students in this class must feel,” the district added.
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14 April, 2023
This liberal university disarmed its police after the 2020 riots. Now they're reversing course
Portland State University has quietly returned guns to its campus police force, nearly three years after the anti-police protests and riots that drove the Oregon school to disarm security officers.
"Unfortunately, the environment around the PSU campus has changed since that time," the university's president Stephen Percy wrote Tuesday in an announcement.
Percy cited rising crime, an increase in weapons near campus and lack of support from the Portland Police Bureau for the policy change.
Student activists had lobbied for years to have campus police disarmed. Calls intensified in 2018 after campus police shot and killed Navy veteran Jason Washington as he tried to break up a fight outside a bar.
But it wasn't until the height of the 2020 protests, which raged for more than 100 consecutive nights, that Portland State announced its officers would stop routinely carrying guns on patrol.
"We can do an effective job without weapons," PSU campus safety chief Willi Halliburton told The Oregonian at the time. "I know they’re talented to do their jobs without the use of a weapon."
But then crime increased three years in a row across Portland. The city smashed its previous homicide record in 2021 and again last year. Many businesses have fled the city due to repeated burglaries and vandalism.
PSU reversed course on Feb. 14, according to The Oregonian, but didn't announce the change until this week.
"Recently, our officers encountered individuals on campus with weapons," Halliburton said. "This has made me make the hard decision to have more armed patrols on campus."
The college now has nine armed patrol officers, seven public safety officers and eight campus ambassadors, according to Halliburton.
"We have not abandoned unarmed patrols," he said. "You will see our officers respond to certain calls in an unarmed manner. This was done so at the officers' discretion and when it's safe."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/liberal-university-disarmed-police-2020-riots-now-reversing-course
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SUNY drops SAT, ACT testing requirement for admission
The State University of New York will no longer require students to take either the SAT and ACT tests to apply to its four-year undergraduate colleges as enrollment declines.
The SUNY board of trustees unanimously scrapped the admission test requirement — for decades a rite of passage for high school students applying to colleges — during a meeting this week.
Like many other higher education institutions, SUNY, which boasts being the largest comprehensive public university system in the US with 64 campuses throughout the state, had temporarily suspended the standardized testing requirements from 2020 through the 2023 academic years, citing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But SUNY Chancellor John King said the use of SAT and ACT test results for admission purposes should be nixed indefinitely.
“It is recommended that the current authorization for campuses to suspend the undergraduate admissions requirement to submit SAT and ACT scores be continued prospectively, with flexibility maintained for campuses (students may still submit standardized test scores if available),” King said in a resolution that was submitted to the governing board.
“Maintaining a test-optional policy is consistent with national trends at peer institutions.”
A survey conducted last fall by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing found that more than 80% of US bachelor-degree granting colleges did not require students seeking fall 2023 admission to submit either ACT or SAT standardized exam scores.
The University of California system also will not consider ACT or SAT test scores for admissions decisions or the awarding of scholarships for any applicants.
“An overwhelming majority of undergraduate admissions offices now make selection decisions without relying on ACT/SAT results,” FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder said.
“These schools recognize that standardized test scores do not measure academic ‘merit.’ What they do assess quite accurately is family wealth, but that should not be the criteria for getting into college.”
Feder continued, “De-emphasizing standardized exam scores is a model that all of US education — from K-12 through graduate schools — should follow.”
Last month, New York’s Columbia University became the first ivy league school to make SAT and ACT tests optional for applicants.
SUNY’s enrollment has shrunk 20% over the last decade, though King did not cite the drop as a major factor in eliminating SAT-ACT scores for admissions.
He did say fewer New York State high school students are taking the SAT,” especially among historically underrepresented groups” — black and Latino students.
“Each SUNY campus will continue its longstanding commitment to a holistic review of student applications that includes grades, program of study, academic achievements, non-academic achievements, and other activities that allow for the evaluation of the potential success of a candidate for admission,” the chancellor said.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/13/suny-drops-sat-act-testing-requirement-for-admission/
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‘Deeply Perverse’: California School Board ‘Turns Education on its Head’ in Transgender Vote; Faces Lawsuit
The Center for American Liberty has filed suit against the superintendent and school board members of the Chico Unified School District in Northern California on behalf of Chico parent Aurora Regino.
At an April 5 Chico Unified School Board meeting, Regino claimed that Chico Unified transitioned her daughter without her knowledge or consent. According to Regino, during a time of intense stress in which Regino’s father had died and she was battling breast cancer, her elementary school-age daughter sought help from a school “mental wellness” counselor.
Regino further claimed that her daughter, also known as A.S., told the counselor that she wanted to tell Regino about the counseling sessions and her struggles with her sexual identity—but the counselor ignored A.S. Regino stated that because Chico Unified kept her daughter’s struggles and mental health crisis from her, her daughter was left to face bullying and other trauma alone.
At this point during Regino’s statement, individuals who sat on either side of the aisle and wore pride flags behind Regino rolled their eyes.
Pro-LGBTQ+ protesters showed up en masse to the school board meeting in support of the hidden transgender policy. Lindsay Briggs, a professor of public health at California State University-Chico, posted a disturbing message on Twitter celebrating “So many beautiful, radical, queer babes” coming to Chico to support the board’s decision to keep the secretive policy. The image below the tweet depicts a woman aiming a pistol with the caption, “Not gay as in happy, but queer as in f— you.”
Briggs’ profile on Twitter depicts two fists with the caption “Queers Bash Back.”
Briggs led many of the pro-LGBTQ+ protesters in heckles and chants against concerned parents during the school board meeting. None of the school board members made an effort to maintain order or quiet down the hecklers.
Regino told the Center for American Liberty that the Chico Unified Board’s response underscores the need for the lawsuit:
I’m still in awe about what I saw last night and how the Board allowed people to heckle and bully parents who were speaking about the right to be involved in their own children’s lives. … This decision is devastating for parents not only here in our community but also across the country. The next step to fight back is legal action and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
Speaking to The Daily Signal, Jay Richards of The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society pointed out a critical flaw in Chico Unified’s policy of keeping parents in the dark:
This policy turns education on its head. Rather than treating parents as holding the primary authority for teaching children, which they may delegate to a school, this policy makes the educational the primary arbiter of a child’s education, and the parents as potential threats to that authority. It’s deeply perverse.
Like Chico Unified, many schools across the country that have enacted secretive transgender policies at the expense of parental rights. A March investigation from Parents Defending Education reported that almost 9,000 schools across all 50 states have policies in which parents are kept in the dark if their child is struggling with transgender-related mental health issues.
Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, criticized the push to hide “sensitive issues” from parents amid the current academic performance crisis. She told The Daily Signal:
Instead of developing plots to keep parents in the dark about sensitive issues pertaining to their children in school, the board should focus on getting the district back to basics. But sadly, parents shouldn’t hold their breath. The district system has long been beholden to powerful teachers unions like the National Education Association, an anti-parent special interest group whose modus operandi is looking out for the adults in the system and shielding public schools from any meaningful accountability to families.
While many states are in the process of passing legislation that would forbid public school districts from keeping parents in the dark concerning their child’s mental health, California has not yet passed such a bill. Instead, it has enshrined the “right” of a 12-year-old to withhold gender identity information from parents.
For states lacking parental rights laws, lawsuits appear to be the only answer for many parents. The Center for American Liberty is attempting to fill that gap.
“The Chico Unified School Board’s decision to keep the parental secrecy policy in place is a slap in the face to every parent whose child is under their care,” said the Center for American Liberty’s CEO, Harmeet Dhillon. “It makes a mockery of fundamental, constitutionally protected, parental rights and puts every child’s safety at risk. If the Board won’t rescind this unconstitutional policy, our lawsuit will prompt the court to do it for them.”
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13 April, 2023
A University Gets Free Speech Right … Mostly
Students are proving that they learned their social justice lessons well, as shout-downs of conservative campus speakers at universities like Stanford demonstrate. But when students demanded that state-funded George Mason University cancel Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as this year’s commencement speaker, the university refused. The university president defended the decision to host Youngkin because, in his view, universities should expose students to different ideas. His response got it right—mostly.
Youngkin’s policies to protect parental rights in public education triggered backlash from several student groups when they learned that he would give this year’s commencement address at George Mason. His selection as speaker, they say, is harmful and will promote hate.
This rhetoric is unsurprising. As early as elementary school, students are being taught to react rather than reason and cancel rather than converse. And as incidents at Stanford and other universities have shown, administrators and diversity, equity, and inclusion offices are empowering and encouraging students to apply these lessons to shut down and silence opposing views.
But George Mason has chosen a different path. In response to students’ demands, university President Gregory Washington issued a public statement defending the university’s decision to host the popular governor.
Washington emphasized that encountering opposing views will make students better advocates for themselves beyond the university. After all, he explained, the university is a place to discuss precisely those topics on which people disagree. If George Mason shielded its students from ideas they didn’t like, the university would fail to fulfill its purpose.
Washington got this much right: George Mason would be doing its students a disservice by denying them exposure to ideas with which they disagree. Universities exist to equip students to engage with a multiplicity of views and claims, to ask hard questions, and to think for themselves. The university is more than a marketplace of ideas; it is (or should be) a place to be fully alive in the pursuit of objective, knowable truth.
This is why intellectual diversity on campus is so important. As Washington rightly acknowledged, diversity is not about skin pigment. It is about something deeper: the unique experiences, views, ideas, talents, and personalities each of us bring to the table. It is about recognizing that each person has inherent dignity as a human being that makes each person’s views worth hearing and discussing, even if those views are wrong.
And far from being an assault on dignity, encouraging students to consider different perspectives on difficult topics respects everyone’s dignity by inviting them to pursue the truth for themselves. We thrive when we keep the public square open for multiple perspectives and dialog on the topics that trouble us the most.
But Washington missed an important point: Discourse about difficult topics is not just an opportunity to become a better advocate for yourself. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on your own beliefs and to consider whether they might be wrong.
Although Washington didn’t mention this in his letter, we suspect the protesting students know it. In fact, we suspect their opposition to Youngkin’s speech is motivated chiefly by the fear of having to wrestle with facts and arguments that challenge their own beliefs.
With administrator-backed student protests becoming a fad across the country, it is refreshing to see a university stand up to cancel culture. Other universities could learn a lot from George Mason’s example. But while we applaud the school’s commitment to free speech, including for commencement speakers, the president’s statement is only the beginning.
Now the real test begins: Will George Mason lead the way in cultivating real discourse, or will the governor receive a Stanford-style welcome?
We hope that students will heed Washington’s advice, put aside the disruption and hate, and embrace discourse. Even better, they should hold out the possibility that their beliefs and opinions might be wrong.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/03/a-university-gets-free-speech-right-mostly
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Michigan Public Schools Admit Teaching Critical Race Theory
State governments in places like Florida, Virginia, and Arkansas are leading the fight against the use of race and sex to divide the country. These are welcome steps. But on the other side of the ledger, you have states like Michigan. There, the public schools are going in exactly the opposite direction.
Take Detroit, for example. Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti admitted that the schools are “deeply using critical race theory.”
Critical race theory is a body of work that teaches that racism is “systemic” in America. The teaching of this theory and its tenets in schools has been rejected by the likes of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Virginia counterpart, Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Vitti insists, however, that critical race theory will help Michigan students and that these students should understand systemic racism. Yet this type of curriculum encourages divisiveness rather than promoting family and American values.
Another example is in Livingston County. Mona Shand, a top aide to Democratic U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, sits on a “diversity council” that lobbies for teaching critical race theory within local schools.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, the council’s website bio for Shand was recently edited to remove references to Slotkin, changing from “Livingston County Representative for Rep. Elissa Slotkin” to “civic leader.” The council also removed a call to action for parents to advocate for critical race theory because of increasing pressure from parents who were upset with the potential for it to be included in the curriculum.
The current vice president of the Michigan State Board of Education, Pamela Pugh, is also pushing the divisive rhetoric. She is currently fighting Michigan Senate Bill 460, which would strip 5% of school funding for teaching the derivatives of critical race theory, while at the same time maintaining that critical race theory is not being taught in Michigan schools. She said that this legislation would confuse educators.
Pugh said to state legislators: “I go further to call on this body and your colleagues to embrace critical race theory as a framework for you to better understand educational inequality and structural racism so as to find solutions that lead to justice for all who live, work, learn, and play in Michigan.”
According to Michigan’s school code, the state requires that every school district provide education without discrimination as to religion, creed, color, or national origin. For a school to provide materials and opportunities in favor of one race over another would be discriminatory and violate that code.
Teaching true history is not about indoctrinating our children to the canard that this country is “systemically racist.” True history is teaching from an accurate lens that does not seek to persuade the students to adopt a political fad.
Critical race theory is, of course, not the only leftist fad affecting schools across the country and in the Great Lakes State.
At Gull Lake Community Schools in Michigan, teachers are promoting LGBTQ issues on social media platforms to students. A first-grade teacher in the district shared an image on Twitter that warned that children must have access to LGBTQ books and that those who do not promote them are guilty of discrimination.
Taxpayer dollars should not be used to promote gender ideology material or material that persuades a child to think that America is racist. Embracing an ideology that perpetuates division is not healthy for a school system. Threatening school districts that they must teach children about gender theory to further a political narrative is wrong for the district and its students.
There are some remedies, though. For example, public school officials in Michigan should publicize the course materials (syllabi, titles of assigned books, homework lessons, and in-class assignments) online. This would provide transparency for parents.
Additionally, schools need to return to teaching the values that America was founded upon, such as the fundamental principle that all men are created equal, which is the opposite of critical race theory. How are we going to appeal to tomorrow’s generation when we fall short of promoting American values?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/03/michigan-schools-admit-pushing-critical-race-theory/
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Push for more Australian government support of vocational education
Australian National University chief Brian Schmidt has called on the federal government to extend HECS loans to vocational courses, and to open the way for new hybrid institutions spanning higher education and vocational education, to give students the sophisticated skills needed for the next wave of jobs.
In an unusual move for a university leader, Professor Schmidt outlined his vision for tertiary education in his own personal submission to the government’s universities review, which will publish its first report in June.
At the end of this year he will stand down as ANU vice-chancellor after eight years in the job and he said his submission was a “distillation” of his experience. “I’ve thought a lot about higher education in the last seven and a bit years. We need to rethink the system from nose-to-tail,” he told The Australian.
Professor Schmidt said it was critical to bring together federally funded higher education system and the largely state-funded vocational education systems so that students could use HECS loans, which he would limit to non-profit education institutions, to do courses that spanned both.
He said university students also needed the sophisticated skills best taught in hands-on vocational education courses, and vocational graduates often wanted to upgrade their qualifications to degree level. “The current system doesn’t do hybrid well. If people can’t move between the two it’s problematic,” he said.
In his submission the Nobel prize winner also tells the universities review panel that Australia needs a clear and properly funded strategy for research that focuses on long-term national goals.
“We have in Australia no long-term vision for what research can do for the Australian people over time. We have a program here that lasts a year, a program there that lasts a year. We don’t have a national vision,” Professor Schmidt says.
He says the government should give universities clear research missions, such as “energy transformation” and then fund them to succeed both in basic research and in applied research that translates into technology.
He says it is vitally important for Australia to have a sovereign research capacity and it could not continue to use international student fees to pay for university research. “We outsource (the funding of) research to international students, including to strategic rivals. It’s not only not sustainable, it’s just not right,” Professor Schmidt says.
His thinking on faults of the tertiary education system is a far cry from his Nobel prize, awarded in 2011 for his joint discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating – evidence that space was imbued with a mysterious dark energy driving the galaxies apart. But in 2016 he made the surprise transition from astrophysicist to university administrator and wants to help create a tertiary education system that sets Australia up for the future.
He says an example of the new skills people need to learn – not just in post-school education but through their lives – is competency in working with artificial intelligence. “You’re either going to be replaced by ChatGPT-like things or you’re going to use them to be more productive,” he says.
In his submission Professor Schmidt warns that universities and vocational colleges need to be ready to compete with new low-cost, online-education companies that will offer courses at scale and threaten the future of public universities and TAFE colleges.
“These providers will deliver only a limited subset of activities, and use their cheaper costs structures to focus on those areas that are profitable, thereby reducing the financial viability of Australia’s TAFEs and universities, which have much broader societal expectations,” he says.
He says a hybrid education approach would “improve the agility of tertiary and higher education institutions to compete”.
Professor Schmidt’s submission also argues that HECS fees should be standardised for all courses, unlike the current system where annual fees range from about $4000 to more than $15,000 depending on the course.
He also tells the review panel that universities need to do more to give academic and research staff more career certainty. He blames the high level of casualisation of university staff partly on the “inappropriate (government) funding for teaching and research” but “some of it must be attributed to institutions putting other objectives ahead of the reasonable treatment of staff”.
He says the attraction of an academic career has diminished over the past two decades and that stipends for PhD students, who carry out much of the research work, must be improved.
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12 April, 2023
Parents Scrub Toilets So Their Kids Can Attend This Christian School
One Christian school in Texas provides such a great education opportunity for children that parents are cleaning toilets at the school to afford tuition.
Braveheart Christian Academy in Arlington, Texas, provides children in preschool through sixth grade with an individualized approach to education and classroom sizes with a student-teacher ratio of 8 to 1.
Administrators say Braveheart focuses on a holistic approach, attempting to build both content knowledge and Christian character in each student.
Headmistress Chrystal Bernard told The Daily Signal that Braveheart individualizes education by assessing students’ gaps in reading, math, and social skills when they arrive at the school via placement tests—then each student’s teacher and parents work together over regular meetings to ensure those gaps are filled.
Bernard says that parents are thrilled to have such individualized feedback.
“We go over what specific skills the student has mastered, what they’re familiar with, and what they need to be introduced to,” the headmistress said. “Parents then know what needs to be addressed, supported, and worked on at home.”
Student classrooms are comprised of grade bands, rather than individual grades. Preschool and kindergarten are grouped together, along with first through third grades and fourth through sixth grades. Students are sorted regularly into subject-tasked small groups where teachers provide specialized instruction.
Braveheart students practice their skills in small, focused groups. (Photo courtesy of Braveheart Christian Academy)
Bernard, who used to teach math in public school, provides detailed instruction in math while others provide science projects, history lessons, physical education, and so on.
Bernard explained that grouping students into these “bands” provides a model of mentorship and discipleship among the students.
“It’s very community-heavy,” she said.
Bernard shared an example of her students’ success while testifying last week before the Texas Senate Education Committee. When one fourth grade student joined Braveheart, she said, his academic performance lagged at a first grade level. In just over a year, he has caught up academically with his peers.
Braveheart Christian Academy also runs a summer program to prevent learning loss between the spring and fall semesters. In the mornings, students participate in reading and math exercises to keep their minds sharp—then enjoy an afternoon full of fun activities such as moviegoing or swimming.
These “academic retention summer camps,” Bernard told The Daily Signal, are well attended by local children enrolled in both private and public schools.
Braveheart was founded amid the fallout from the COVID-19 school-closure disaster. The Bernards had just started homeschooling their children before COVID-19 reached pandemic status. As schools were closed and students in public schools suffered, word of the Bernards’ homeschooling approaches began to travel.
Before long, parents were asking the Bernards to tutor their children. Tutoring children individually was a stellar success, and the demand continued to grow until the Bernards founded Braveheart Christian Academy in autumn of 2021.
“If we don’t help these kids, life is not going to be the best for their kids or their generation, or the following generation,” Bernard said. “It’s a legacy we’re investing in.”
Tuition at Braveheart is $7,000 per year, which goes toward paying teacher salaries and building costs. Bernard told The Daily Signal that neither she nor her husband Joshua draw a salary from the school.
Chrystal and Joshua Bernard also are co-pastors at Believer’s Connection Church in Arlington.
Although many parents desire to see their children attend Braveheart Christian Academy, they are unable to afford it. In an effort to provide some assistance, Braveheart runs a program in which parents may volunteer at the school for up to eight hours per month at a rate of $25 an hour.
Parents do office work, clean classrooms, scrub toilets and restrooms, and perform other tasks to make sure their kids can take advantage of the opportunities at Braveheart.
Parents aren’t the only ones willing to make sacrifices to be a part of Braveheart. Two teachers took pay cuts by leaving the Dallas public school system to teach there. Bernard laments being unable to pay her teachers more, requiring some to DoorDash, babysit, and nanny after hours.
For both her students and teachers, Bernard says, she is hopeful Texas will pass a bill providing education savings accounts for families to spend on opportunities such as Braveheart:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/05/parents-scrub-toilets-so-kids-can-attend-christian-school/
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Higher Education and the Law of Diminishing Returns
Early in the introductory college economics course, instructors talk about the Law of Diminishing Returns. An illustration: A farmer has a 100-acre field on which he wants to harvest wheat. If he does all the work himself, he can get 5,000 bushels of grain. With a second worker helping him, he can get 8,000 bushels, and with two helpers, 9,000. As more workers are added, output rises, but by sharply diminishing amounts.
Another example: The first ice cream cone a consumer eats adds a lot of pleasure (what economists call “utility”), but if the consumer is forced to eat lots of them, by the sixth or seventh cone the consumer may actually be uncomfortable from consuming too much of a good thing.
Like most things in life, higher education is subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns. Unfortunately, academics often ignore it, which leads to a massive misallocation of resources as government policy pushes us past the point of diminishing returns with college attendance.
Let’s start with the most fundamental question: How long should a student go to college in order to be certified as having “graduated,” or as having had a learning achievement justifying granting a bachelor’s degree? At America’s first university, Harvard, and nearly all others, the answer typically is four years, with a “year” in academia (unlike for the rest of humankind) defined as roughly 32 weeks of instruction. (The other 20 weeks in the calendar year were originally devoted to helping plant and harvest crops on the family farm.)
Yet at Britain’s first university, Oxford, a bachelor’s degree is typically awarded after three years of even more abbreviated (24 weeks of instruction) annual terms.
Why did it take Thomas Jefferson, a formidable intellect and prodigious bibliophile, only two years to graduate from the College of William and Mary, when our most recent presidents, with far lesser reputations for erudition, took twice as long to earn their degrees?
During a traditional liberal-arts education (which, increasingly, is being shunned in favor of more vocational-type training), students take foundational courses in their freshman and sophomore years, perhaps developing a good familiarity with literary titans and even mastering the rudiments of a foreign language or solidifying their knowledge of basic science and math. Students usually also gain at least a core understanding of the subject of their “major.” The junior and senior years are then devoted to deeper study of the major and the completion of a variety of electives.
All of that may be enlightening, but at some point, diminishing returns set in.
Using my subject of economics as an example, the critically important concepts are introduced in the first course or two: the importance of scarcity and opportunity costs, how market prices and competition help allocate resources efficiently, how and why output varies over time, and so forth. In the third and fourth year, students take specialized courses in relatively narrow areas of economics: money and banking, public finance, game theory, international trade issues, labor economics, statistics, and econometrics.
Rarely do graduating students use much of the knowledge gained in these latter classes extensively in the postgraduate world—with the exception being some students who go on to get advanced economics degrees.
On the basis of six decades of teaching, I would say that probably 60 percent of the important economic insights for the average student are learned in the first Principles of Economics survey course. The next 10 courses provide the other 40 percent. The Law of Diminishing Returns is at work here, and I think the same applies to most other academic disciplines.
Nevertheless, the cost to the student of college remains roughly the same in the senior year as it was in the first year of study. But the educational benefits sharply decline. Many students might want to leave after, say, three years, but the monetary “sheepskin effect” of having a diploma is substantial. Most employers are dazzled by the degree itself, not the student’s useful knowledge. If degree-completion were shortened to the European three-year standard, student costs would decline about 25 percent, and student borrowing to finance college would fall dramatically.
So why doesn’t it happen?
For one thing, money: Colleges want four years or even more of tuition fees per student, not just three years. For another, faculty want to teach relatively esoteric, low-demand advanced courses that seniors might feel compelled to take rather than packed courses with freshmen or sophomores.
Moreover, the colleges control the accrediting organizations that help enforce the four-year graduation standard. A school wanting to switch to a three-year degree would likely get flack from its general accreditor, which is essentially controlled by the competing schools it accredits. Accreditation reeks of monopoly elements, disastrous conflicts of interest, and other maladies that are worthy of a few essays of their own on another day. [Editor’s note: Read the Martin Center’s most recent take on the subject here.]
If colleges went to a three-year bachelor’s degree with internship/apprenticeship opportunities, students could get a good general education and solid training in a major field of study, along with practical experience in the real world of work.
Earnings data suggest that a large part of the human capital of our workers comes not through their formal study as children and young adults but via their on-the-job training. College graduates at age 50 typically make much more money (often at least double) than what their similarly trained 23-year-old counterparts make. Getting students out into the world a year or so earlier via three-year degrees would reduce education costs, increase the working proportion of the population, reduce student debt, and improve the national output. Let’s do it.
One caveat is in order. Some college education at present is effectively high-level vocational training, which may take four years to do correctly. I am thinking of degrees in engineering or architecture, for example. The optimal amount of higher education probably varies by discipline.
For students learning to do computer coding, a rigorous one- or two-year course works beautifully and avoids the unproductive diminishing returns associated with taking a plethora of largely irrelevant courses. I read stories of students who, after a couple of years of intensive training, get extremely well-paid jobs in computer-intensive fields. No extraneous coursework, no brainwashing in diversity and equity—just useful training. Such programs evidently do not go past the point of diminishing returns.
Higher education could learn from this experience. To be sure, we now offer professional degrees for those wanting to enter highly skilled vocations like medicine or law. But even here, I think reform is needed. I will save that for the second installment on this topic, coming next month.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14471&omhide=true&trk=rm
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NYC school spending soars 33% as enrollment, test scores dwindle
Spending on the New York City school system skyrocketed nearly 33% since 2016 as enrollment plummeted and test scores struggled, according to new data released Tuesday.
The cost per K-12 city Department of Education student totaled more than $37,000 for the fiscal year 2022 — and that figure is only expected to rise, surpassing $41,000 by 2026 if enrollment continues to drop off, the policy briefing by the Citizens Budget Commission found.
The system lost more than 141,000 students between the school years 2015-’16 and 2021-’22, it said.
“Simultaneous spending increases and enrollment declines led to rapid increases in K-12 DOE per-student spending,” the CBC found.
The staggering data comes as the DOE faces a fiscal cliff — 30% of the recent spending increase was fueled by a one-time boost in federal pandemic aid, which is drying up, according to the report.
Because of enrollment declines, the government cost per student shot up 15% in the fiscal year 2022 from the prior year, to $37,136 per K-to-12 student.
That figure equates to an eye-popping 47% increase since 2016 when there were more than 1 million students in the public school system. Now there are 900,000 students.
Current public school spending is $37.6 billion, a nearly 5% annual increase over the past seven years.
“As projected enrollment continues to decline, per-student spending will increase to nearly $38,000 in fiscal year 2024 and more than $41,000 in fiscal year 2026, or nearly $44,000 with likely collective bargaining costs,” the CBC said, referring to a likely new labor contract with the teachers’ union that will include salary hikes.
“Decisions about the DOE’s budget should consider enrollment declines and the City’s precarious fiscal condition.”
Education spending in upcoming fiscal year 2024 budget is projected to drop by a modest $401 million to $36.5 billion, primarily due to a $243 million decrease in federal pandemic aid.
Despite the explosion in spending, students’ results on the state’s standardized test scores sunk or were flat last school year following shutdowns during the COVID-19 outbreak.
The number of third to eighth-graders proficient in math dropped nearly eight points from 45.6% of students to 38%.
Meanwhile, the pass rate on the English Language Arts exam was up a tad from 47% of students proficient in 2019 to 49%, though there was a considerable drop in proficiency among third and fourth graders.
One parent activist-turned-state lawmaker said the Big Apple is getting weak bang for its buck.
“This unchecked spending is a shame,” said Assemblyman Sam Pirozzolo (R-Staten Island), who formerly served seven years as parent president of Staten Island ‘s Community Education Council 31.
“We are pouring money into a school system that doesn’t work. Students are not performing well.”
When Pirozzolo was on the school panel, the city was spending about $25,000 per student.
“It’s the definition of insanity. It’s doing the same thing over and over again,” the Republican said.
“What’s the politicians’ response? They want to stop successful charter schools.”
Democratic lawmakers and the powerful teachers union have been fighting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal to lift the regional cap to open up to 100 new charter schools in the city as part of the state budget.
The CBC said the Adams administration and the DOE will have to manage the impact of enrollment declines in individual schools by reducing staffing and funding while minimizing disruptions.
The budget watchdog also suggested the DOE be candid with the public if it plans to shrink or scrap programs currently propped up with federal pandemic funds.
The analysts said the mayor’s educrats must take a scalpel to ineffective or wasteful programs and “prioritize those that deliver maximum impact to the target populations.”
Hochul and state lawmakers have struggled to adopt a new state budget, which was due April 1.
The two sides have been so deadlocked in debate over changing bail reform and housing issues that serious talks about charter school expansion haven’t even begun.
Asked about the sobering CBC analysis, a mayoral spokesman said Adams and the DOE have prepared for the budget challenge.
“This administration has been open and honest about the long-term, combined challenges of declining enrollment, programs funded by one-time federal stimulus dollars, and rising costs tied to unfunded mandates from the state,” the City Hall rep said.
“Our mission for New York City Public Schools is to provide our students with exceptional foundational skills that will set them up for long-term social and economic success, and we will do so with all of our interested partners through the budget process.”
https://nypost.com/2023/04/11/nyc-school-spending-up-33-as-enrollment-test-scores-fall/
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11 April, 2023
Two Alabama districts show stark divide in pandemic’s toll on schools
TUSKEGEE, Ala. — Delicia Peoples stood at the door of her first-period math class, trying to inject some joy into the task before her. She forced one ninth-grader to relinquish his earpods. (“I love you so, I’m taking them to save you from yourself.”) She greeted another with a hardy “You’re here today! Look at the Lord work miracles!”
And as she approached the whiteboard to begin the day’s lesson, she led the class in a chant meant to reinforce a core rule of algebra — when simplifying equations, one must perform the same operation on both sides of the equals sign.
“Both sides!” most of the class said in unison.
Sitting quietly in the back was Hayley Strickland, who didn’t understand any of it. As the classwork began in earnest, she copied the problems neatly onto notepaper, alternating between orange and pink pens. But she had no clue how to solve for “y,” as Peoples was instructing.
x+2y=7
The class had a few minutes to try to solve the problem. Hayley stared at her paper. When the timer rang, she had written nothing.
For many students across Macon County, Ala. — and much of the nation — this is the reality of school three years after the covid-19 pandemic began: They are lost.
In Macon, a rural county east of Montgomery, students last year were almost a full grade below where their same-age peers were before the pandemic in math, and a half grade lower in reading, according to an analysis by researchers from Harvard and Stanford universities.
But results like this are not universal. In the county next door, a very different district is having a very different experience. In the Pike Road City Schools, where the median income of families is more than double that in Macon County and where developers are busy turning farmland into McMansions, the same analysis found that test scores had actually improved over the course of the pandemic.
The American school system has long been unequal — both in the depth of the need and resources to meet it. But while the pandemic affected all schools in profound ways, research shows it did more damage to those that were already the most vulnerable, with the recovery harder and slower.
The science on remote schooling is now clear. Here’s who it hurt most.
For students who were learning from home, especially those in low-income families, the challenges were acute. Many lacked reliable internet, a quiet place to study and a parent on-site to make sure they paid attention.
“We turned off schools and inequality grew a lot,” said Tom Kane, faculty director for the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, who helped create the Education Recovery Scorecard, a project of Harvard and Stanford universities.
His partner on the project, Sean Reardon of Stanford, said that before the pandemic, students from the wealthiest school communities were about five grade levels ahead of those from the poorest in math. By last year, that gap had grown to 5.5 grade levels.
“Socioeconomic status makes a difference in almost everything,” said Keith Lankford, the superintendent of Pike Road schools. In the years since the coronavirus emptied schools, that is proving truer than ever.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/04/05/two-alabama-districts-pandemic-learning/
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DEI Captures the University of Florida
The University of Florida has created a radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy that promotes racial and political preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a twelve-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains racially segregated scholarship programs that violate federal civil rights law.
I have obtained a cache of internal documents via Sunshine Law records requests revealing the stunning scope, scale, and radicalism of UF’s “diversity and inclusion” programs. Officially, the university has reported to Governor Ron DeSantis that it hosts 31 DEI initiatives at a cost of $5 million per year. But these figures don’t capture the extent of the university’s rapidly growing DEI complex. In reality, DEI is not a series of standalone programs but an ideology that has been embedded in virtually every department on campus. (In an email, a University of Florida spokesman declined to answer specific questions about UF’s DEI bureaucracy and claimed that the university is “not indoctrinating.”)
These changes happened quickly. Following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, UF leaders rolled out a massive number of diversity-focused initiatives. In July 2020, chief diversity officer Antonio Farias organized a university-wide plan for “antiracism measures,” which included mandatory diversity training for all students, faculty, and staff; an entire academic year focused on “the Black experience, racism and inequity”; a presidential task force to explore the university’s racist past; recommendations for renaming buildings, removing monuments, and banning “historic racist imagery”; and a host of programs, speakers, workshops, and town halls dedicated to racialist ideology.
The programs quickly spread. Under chief diversity officer Marsha McGriff, who replaced Farias in December 2021, DEI blitzed through the university administration. According to internal documents, McGriff’s three-year plan included the creation of an “institutional equity and inclusion blueprint,” the expansion of a university-wide “DEI infrastructure,” and the deployment of DEI cadres to each division, school, and college, to monitor and enforce DEI ideology at every level of the bureaucracy. As part of this program, the embedded cadres were tasked with conducting loyalty surveys, with questionnaires asking faculty and staff to rate their agreement with statements evaluating their unit’s “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” financial support for DEI, and trainings on “unconscious bias” and “micro-aggressions.”
The “institutional equity and inclusion blueprint” has already had a major impact. Slides from a presentation on UF’s six-month “DEI inventory” study, conducted by Damon Williams, a strategist for diversity leadership retained by the university, would appear to show that UF has created 1,018 separate DEI initiatives (slide 55). Williams’s preliminary survey suggests that the process of ideological capture has spread throughout the university’s departments and divisions: 73 percent “have a DEI committee” and “DEI officer”; 70 percent “espoused commitment to DEI”; 53 percent “have a DEI strategic plan”; and 30 percent have “DEI in annual reports” and use “DEI in performance review.”
One area of focus for the DEI bureaucrats is to forcibly recompose the racial demographics of the professoriate. In 2021, DEI officials administered a survey to measure affirmative action efforts in faculty hiring and to question departments about their commitment to DEI-style hiring. The list of favored practices included “specific formal training in diversity, equity, and inclusion,” advertising through organizations “formed around DEI identity,” retaining an “equity specialist” to advise search committees, explicit race-based recruiting of individuals “from historically underrepresented groups,” and measuring “current workforce demographics” against targets and benchmarks.
The message from the top is not hard to decipher: departments must stack the deck in favor of racial minorities and use racial identity, rather than pure academic merit, as a key qualification in faculty hiring. And the administration will be watching—DEI bureaucrats are maintaining a spreadsheet of departments and faculty that comply with these practices and those that do not.
In addition, UF’s Human Resources department has established an “inclusive hiring hub” that offers trainings, guidelines, and an official Inclusive Hiring Badge in support of race-based hiring. As part of this initiative, faculty are encouraged to submit to racial training programs and participate in racially segregated conversation groups, or “affinity groups.” The university’s official “inclusive hiring” rubric explicitly prioritizes commitments to DEI ideology as part of the faculty hiring process, elevating “commitment to diversity” as one of the “key competencies” for job candidates. Other recommendations include a mandatory “statement on diversity and inclusion,” which, in practice, serves as a political loyalty test.
How does the HR bureaucracy view white faculty and staff? With derision. In a multi-day training program called Connected by UF, for example, the HR department and gender studies professor Trysh Travis lectured employees about their “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and the “‘unearned advantages’ of whiteness.” These supposed aspects of white racial identity, according to Travis, require “diagnosis” and “follow-up” to achieve a cure. As part of their “personal journey,” white participants were encouraged to engage with a twelve-step program called Racists Anonymous and internalize a series of mantras, including: “We admit our collective history is rooted in white supremacy”; “I have come to admit that I am powerless over my addiction to racism”; “I believe that only a power greater than me can restore me in my humanness to the non-racist creature as God designed me to be.” The ultimate goal? According to one featured resource: “the abolition of whiteness.”
The UF Counseling & Wellness Center has also become a hotbed of racial ideology. In 2021, the counseling department held a training program, “Healing and Transforming Racial Trauma in the Counseling Field,” that was designed, in the words of speaker Sandra Kim, to dismantle “white supremacy, patriarchy, [and] exploitive capitalism,” which are based on pathological “whiteness.”
The event resembled something of an intersectionality competition, with presenters—all professional-class academics, therapists, and consultants—taking turns positioning themselves with multi-hyphenated oppressed identities and claiming complex “ancestral traumas.” They translated the basic narrative of critical race theory into therapeutic terms, arguing that counselors must practice “intersectionality-oriented care” that transforms the personal into the political—and demand an overturning of society’s basic structures. While whites might have an “individual identity,” explained UF counseling professor Ana Puig, minorities have a “collectivistic identity” and, therefore, healing personal trauma is only possible through political liberation.
Today, Counseling & Wellness Center continues to use psychotherapy as a vehicle for ideology. Administrators and therapists hold racially segregated group-therapy sessions—always organized with a political valence—and promote resources from the activist organization Academics for Black Survival and Wellness, which accuses whites of “white terrorism” and encourages blacks to perform “black resistance.” In this program, one presenter argues that whites are guilty of “physical repression, beatings, whippings, police brutalization, racial programs, [and] psychological torture.” Another claims that “the culture of academia” itself is an oppressive environment that also perpetuates the “institutionalized effects of white terror.”
The objective is not academic scholarship, but Marxist activism: “We got to save life in the universe from these capitalists in America. They’re out to destroy every damn thing. So that’s the mission.”
UF’s descent into race-based ideology affects student programs, too. Scholarships and other opportunities have turned into something resembling a spoils system, punishing members of the oppressor class and rewarding members of the oppressed class. The university administers and promotes a range of scholarships that explicitly prohibit whites, and sometimes Asians, from applying. The UF/Santa Fe College Faculty Development Project, Minority Teacher Education Scholarship, and McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, to name a few, all prohibit white students from submitting applications, with the latter also excluding Asian students. These racially segregated programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but as DEI ideology has become ubiquitous in higher education, administrators have grown accustomed to violating the law with little consequence.
Fortunately, legislators in Tallahassee have taken notice. House Republicans have proposed legislation that would eliminate DEI programming at all Florida public universities. They need to recognize, though, that DEI has embedded itself in every department, program, and initiative. It will take continued vigilance and aggressive enforcement to root out DEI and restore academic excellence as the guiding light of Florida’s public university system.
https://www.city-journal.org/dei-captures-university-of-florida ?
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Melbourne principal says schools struggling to combat vaping as minister blasts ‘public health menace’
The principal of a Melbourne secondary school says students addicted to nicotine vaping have trouble with their concentration and behaviour. Photograph: Nicholas.T Ansell/PA
Aschool principal at a major Melbourne high school has spoken of the significant resources being allocated to combat vaping, as students addicted to nicotine struggle with concentration and behaviour.
“When they’re experiencing withdrawal or experiencing a craving for nicotine, they experience tiredness, irritability, restlessness and appetite changes,” said the principal, who asked not to be identified.
“We get reports from teachers of young people leaving class and being found vaping. I think that’s a really big challenge for a young kid addicted to vaping, to be able to get through a one-hour period.”
A recent survey of 218 school staff members across public, Catholic and independent secondary schools found nearly half (46%) reported finding a student with an e-cigarette on campus at least monthly, and one-third of principals who responded reported suspending or expelling students at least monthly for e-cigarette possession or use.
The health minister, Mark Butler, said on Tuesday that he regularly receives concerns about vaping “from parents and from school communities”.
“This has become a very serious public health menace,” he said. “We’re determined to take really strong action against it. All health ministers are committed to strong reform in this area but also recognise that it can’t just be done at a commonwealth level or at a state level alone. We need to do it together.”
The principal said while Victoria’s education department was providing resources to teachers, addressing vaping in schools was complex work that goes beyond just educating children, and relying on school resources alone is not enough.
“I couldn’t give you a hard and fast number on how much money we have spent addressing vaping,” she said.
“We have spent money on upgrading our physical resources such as bathroom spaces and putting vape detectors in those, but it’s the human resource and the time resource that I can’t put the number on. Each school needs to gather data from their own community to identify when, where and why vaping is occurring. We spent a fair bit of time and work doing that.”
The principal said while health and sport curriculums had been updated to incorporate the harms of vaping, parents needed to be educated too.
“With some parents who maybe have previously been smokers themselves or may use vapes themselves, it is challenging,” she said. “They may not see vaping as a big deal or priority. We do sometimes get parents that talk about the fact that their child is not smoking, so vaping is perceived as being ‘better’.
“A lot of the work we’re doing at the moment is really targeting kids, which is absolutely necessary. But I also think there’s a really important role that parents play.”
The federal government is considering which reforms to introduce before the end of the year to curb youth vaping. A University of Sydney health law researcher, barrister Neil Francey, said there was an urgent need for the Australian Competition Consumer Commission (ACCC) to enforce consumer laws to tackle the issue.
Francey, who has extensive experience in tobacco litigation, said marketing strategies used to promote vaping to children, deficiencies in age verification requirements, easy payment and delivery methods, and false and misleading marketing claims by many vaping companies are in contravention of consumer law. He said this marketing, often directed to children, amounts to “unconscionable conduct”.
However, he said while “the ACCC should urgently consider enforcement action, the practicability of securing compliance with the law is another matter”.
“Prosecuting false representations and seeking injunctions to restrain misleading statements and unconscionable conduct can only be on a case by case basis,” he said. “It can’t be done on an industry-wide basis.”
An ACCC spokesperson said that vaporiser products require “a tailored regulatory approach … best managed by the Department of Health and Aged Care under the Therapeutic Goods Administration regime”.
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10 April, 2023
New York Schools Are Normalizing Post-Covid Low Expectations
As New York schools struggle to recover from damaging Covid shutdowns, the Board of Regents is set to lower standards for what is a “good enough” education in New York.
After years of learning loss, Empire State educational “experts” appear to have decided the best remedy is to simply wipe the slate clean and accept their own self-inflicted fate.
As an elected parent leader, I am appalled that the Board of Regents is using gimmicks to hide the learning loss caused by school closures and mask mandates. We need a plan to address the learning loss and hold districts accountable — not an abdication of duty.
Students aren’t learning — so why bother testing them at all?
In the district that I represent, 25 percent of students are not proficient in English Language Arts and 30 percent are not proficient in Math. My district covers two-thirds of Manhattan and it is known for being one of the wealthiest and highest-performing school districts in NYC.
The situation is even worse across the state: a report from Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli shows that younger students in New York State lost more learning than the national average.
“We’re at this new normal. So for New York we are saying the new baseline is 2022,” the co-chairwoman of the Technical Advisory Committee, Marianne Perie, said at the latest Board of Regents meeting, as she tried to explain how the new proficiency scores will be decided for state tests in grades 3-8.
In short, instead of using the pre-Covid data from 2019 as the basis of comparison, students will now be measured against the lower 2022 numbers.
We cannot accept the “new normal” of lower expectations — indeed, this “new normal” establishes lower expectations for my youngest son than what I had a few years ago for my oldest child.
How can New York students hope to compete with students from other states that have not given up on them? How can our students compete in the highly competitive global marketplace against students from other countries with much higher academic proficiencies?
The research is clear. Students suffered the consequences of prolonged school closures and toddler mask mandates. Students in Florida and Texas — and in other countries — reaped the benefits of staying in school. We can see now the price our children are paying.
It is too late to go back in time and undo this harm. We must work to get our students back on track. Lowering the bar, however, is not the answer. Such a move will only cement the learning loss already suffered — and set these students up for a lifetime of subpar achievement.
It is imperative that the body responsible for education policy in New York focus its energy on developing a clear plan to collect data on the learning loss and hold school districts accountable in addressing it.
Instead, our state seems intent on digging the hole deeper. Legislators rejected Governor Hochul’s proposal to dedicate $250 million for high-impact tutoring. Why isn’t the Board of Regents supporting this important proposal that would provide tutoring for New York families who can’t afford it?
High-impact tutoring is a proven strategy to address learning loss; it was recommended by the federal government at the start of the pandemic and is widely used around the country. Just last month, both Washington, D.C., and New Jersey expanded their high-impact tutoring programs to keep the pace of closing achievement gaps for more students.
States like Colorado allowed the public a transparent view into the details of its learning loss strategies and associated outcomes at the statewide, district, and school levels.
New York seems content to let its own students wither while other states remediate the Covid-related learning loss.
The education commissioner, Betty Rosa, keeps celebrating that New York has distributed more than $14 billion in federal Covid aid funding to schools and districts, yet what are the outcomes for children from all these resources?
There is little solace to be found when New York spends more money per-pupil than any other state, but scores 46th nationally in fourth-grade math performance.
If we are going to move on from the pandemic, we have to right our education system. If we lower the educational expectations of our students now, we condemn them to a lifetime of lowered outcomes. Our families are tired of New York being no. 1 only on per-pupil funding.
https://www.nysun.com/article/new-york-schools-are-normalizing-post-covid-low-expectations
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Swimmer Riley Gaines, Advocate Against Transgender Competitors, Assaulted at California Campus Speech
A young woman who advocates for keeping biological males out of women’s sports has been assaulted during an appearance at a California university.
A former 12-time All American swimmer, Riley Gaines, traveled to San Francisco State University on Thursday to speak to a local Turning Point USA chapter about the necessity of keeping women safe in their own athletic spaces.
In a video posted online, Ms. Gaines can be seen fleeing a classroom with police by her side as a large group of transgender activists chase her down a hallway.
“The prisoners are running the asylum at SFSU,” Ms. Gaines wrote on Twitter. “I was ambushed and physically hit twice by a man. This is proof that women need sex-protected spaces.”
In another video, Ms. Gaines can be seen rushing down a hallway as she is protected by two law enforcement officers, who then unlock a door and barricade her inside. Dozens of protesters remained outside of the room where Ms. Gaines was held, demanding payment in exchange for her safe passage from campus. She was locked inside for three hours before she was able to leave.
Ms. Gaines’s husband, Louis Barker, told Fox News that he was frustrated police could not protect his wife. “She told me she was hit multiple times by a guy in a dress,” Mr. Barker said. “I was shaking. It made me that mad. It makes me sick to feel so helpless about it. She was under police protection and was still hit by a man wearing a dress.”
Since graduating from college last year, Ms. Gaines has become an outspoken advocate for keeping biological men out of women’s sports. She campaigned alongside a Georgia U.S. Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, ahead of last year’s midterm elections.
In an advertisement where she is seen sitting beside Mr. Walker, Ms. Gaines recalls how college sports associations showed little regard for the biologically female athletes who worked “so hard” to get the recognition they deserved.
“My senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male,” Ms. Gaines says in the advertisement, referring to the University of Pennsylvania swimmer, Lia Thomas, who is transgender and won the 2022 women’s NCAA swimming championship.
“A man won the swimming title that belonged to a woman,” Ms. Gaines says.
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National Teachers Group Censors Climate Science That Doesn’t Conform To Disaster Agenda
A growing debate on how climate science is taught in classrooms was highlighted last week at the National Science Teaching Association’s annual convention in Atlanta, Georgia.
The CO2 Coalition paid for a booth at the event. Despite approving the booth, the NSTA told the group it would have to remove its literature from display at the convention or it would be kicked out.
The material was critical of the association’s position that climate science should be taught as an absolute consensus and never presented as having any uncertainty.
Greg Wrightstone, president of the CO2 Coalition, refused to remove the offending material and was escorted out of the building.
“We accused them of censoring science, and then they confirmed that,” Wrightstone told Cowboy State Daily.
In a YouTube video of the altercation, Wrightstone is told by an event official that, “You can take down your literature or you can go home. It’s your choice.”
“So, we’re being kicked out?” Wrightstone asked. “Yes,” was the reply. “Unless you take down your literature. Then you can stay.” When the CO2 Coalition refused again, they were told, “You should pack up and get out.”
The NSTA is an organization with 40,000 members dedicated to developing best practices for teaching science, technology, engineering and math
The organization has an official position statement that encourages teachers to present climate science as having a singular view that is only questioned by pseudoscientific skeptics.
“Efforts to properly teach the science of climate change are regularly challenged by those seeking to frame it as being different from other scientific fields, often with claims that it is either ‘uncertain’ or ‘controversial,’” the statement reads.
What the NSTA considers beyond question is not just that carbon dioxide has an impact on the climate. It asks teachers to “clarify that societal controversies surrounding climate change are not scientific in nature, but are social, political and economic.”
Included in what it considers beyond question is that fossil fuels provide a net harm to society.
“Carbon-dense fossil fuels led to the Industrial Revolution and ultimately made our modern way of life possible. The continued extensive use of these same fuels now jeopardizes that very way of life,” the NSTA states.
Cowboy State Daily contacted the NSTA for an interview and didn’t receive a response.
Positive Feedback
The CO2 Coalition published a critique of the NSTA position statement arguing that science is not determined by consensus, but by experimentation and observation.
The coalition’s 120 members are scientists and professionals, 90% of whom have a Ph.D. or commiserate degree, such as a medical degree.
Wrightstone said that until they were kicked out of the NSTA convention, they were receiving positive feedback from teachers who came to the booth.
“We had other teachers saying, ‘I agree entirely with you, but I dare not teach this in my class or I’ll be fired,’” Wrightstone said.
He said his group sold out of its lesson plans in the first two hours.
Wrightstone argues that the ideal classroom wouldn’t be purged of any teaching of the idea that climate change produces catastrophic results justifying a rapid elimination of fossil fuels, but it would present science-based challenges to that viewpoint.
The NSTA, Wrightstone said, “has answers to the climate change situation. And those answers can’t be questioned.”
Too Negative
In Wyoming, the state has standards that all school districts must follow, but individual districts have a lot of room to set their own curricula.
In February, a spokesperson for two districts in Wyoming told Cowboy State Daily their policies require balanced perspectives in the classroom.
That same month, the Texas Board of Education was accused of undermining the basic tenets of climate science when it altered the state’s teaching standards to include discussions of the positive benefits of fossil fuels.
The board member, Patricia Hardy, who proposed the changes, told Cowboy State Daily the NSTA had representatives at a meeting where the changes were discussed. Hardy said she asked one of the representatives how plastics were going to be produced without petroleum.
“They just looked at me, like, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’” Hardy said.
E&E News reported that since Hardy thinks the teaching on climate science is too negative, she rejects mainstream climate science.
Minor Changes
Among the changes to the state education guidelines was the addition of the line, “Materials should focus on scientific processes and recognize the ongoing process of scientific discovery and change over time in the natural world.”
E&E News reported this was a “common climate denial talking point” because, even though it doesn’t in any way deny that carbon dioxide emissions impact climate, the statement suggests that temperatures change naturally.
Wrightstone said it’s a scientific fact that, long before humans were burning fossil fuels, temperatures wildly fluctuated on Earth. At times when life flourished on Earth, temperatures were much higher than they are now, as were levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Nonetheless, many feel this shouldn’t be taught in classrooms.
Previously, the board’s guidance stated that teaching materials should include teaching positive aspects of the United States and its heritage. In February, the board changed it to include positive aspects of Texas and its “abundant natural resources.”
E&E News quoted Texas State Board of Education member Rebecca Bell-Metereau claiming these minor changes would “steer schools toward buying books that emphasize baseless climate theories.”
Hardy said the purpose was only to create a more balanced presentation of energy in the classroom.
“We wanted our standards to be balanced. We didn’t want them to be biased,” Hardy said.
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9 April, 2023
GOP pushes to arm staff, eliminate 'ineffective' gun-free school zones after Nashville shooting
House Republicans this week put forward three proposals aimed at making it easier to train and arm school staff to defend themselves from school shooters, just days after a school shooting in Nashville took the lives of three young students and three staff members.
The March 27 shooting at The Covenant School, a private religious school, once more prompted Democrats to call for more gun control measures. But Republican lawmakers introduced three bills based on the idea that the best way to protect schools is to make them less of a target.
"Gun-free zones are ineffective and make our schools less safe. Since 1950, 94 percent of mass public shootings have occurred in places where citizens are banned from having guns," Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said this week. "Banks, churches, sports stadiums, and many of my colleagues in Congress are protected with firearms. Yet children inside the classroom are too frequently left vulnerable."
Massie and more than 20 House Republicans introduced the Safe Students Act on Thursday, which would repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. He said repealing that law would make it easier for state and local governments to set their own firearms rules.
Massie’s bill is supported by groups like the Gun Owners of America, DC Project – Women for Gun Rights and the American Firearms Association.
"More than three decades of evidence since the passage of the 'Gun-Free School Zones Act' shows us that those who wish to do harm to others specifically target schools because they know everyone there is a sitting duck," said Patrick Parsons of The American Firearms Association. "These 'gun free zones' don't work, they empower criminals and endanger students, teachers and staff."
Also on Thursday, Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Calif., proposed legislation on his own that redirect unused COVID funding meant for schools so state education agencies can fund school security improvements. Those improvements include physical security measures but also armed school resource officers.
Garcia’s bill aims to hire at least two armed officers for every 500 students at a school, and the lawmaker noted that recent data shows fewer than half of schools have a resource officer on campus for a least one day a week.
"Nobody in this country wants to see these tragic events continue, and now we must work together to find solutions to deter future violence from taking place," said Garcia, who called his bill a "commonsense" measure aimed at hardening schools against violent crimes.
A third bill offered on Thursday, from Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., takes a similar approach and establishes a federal grant program aimed at boosting school security, including by training and hiring veterans and former police officers as school safety officers.
Mass shooting events have typically led to little in the way of new legislation, as Republicans and Democrats have opposing ideas on how to prevent them. Last week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre accused Republicans of doing "nothing" in the wake of the Nashville shooting, and again called for new gun control laws.
"We need to pass an assault weapons ban, mandate universal background checks, require safe storage of guns, hold manufacturers accountable," she said. "These are just commonsense policies with broad public support."
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Is nothing sacred? Foul-mouthed woke protesters are accused of destroying a BIBLE while trying to shut down conservative event at upstate NY public university
Woke protestors were accused of destroying a bible while screaming down a conservative speaker at the University of Albany on Tuesday.
Conservative speaker Ian Haworth posted a picture of a crumpled up bible which he said protestors destroyed 'for no reason whatsoever' while they were shouting down his remarks about free speech on college campuses.
He had been invited to the public university to speak by its chapter of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), an organization dedicated to promoting conservative politics founded by right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
But as he began his presentation, Haworth said a crowd of students 'stormed' into the room and began shouting profanities at him, calling him a fascist member of the KKK, and even forming a conga line and dance circle to prevent him from speaking. He noted that the protesters did help themselves to the event's pizza.
Haworth was eventually able to continue his speech after law enforcement and faculty helped remove the disruptive students. In their 'official response' to the incident, the Young Democrat Socialists of America group which organized the protest said their removal was 'a clear suppression of free speech.'
Haworth took to Twitter to share photos and videos from the event, which showed a large group of people clearly preventing him from speaking by screaming and dancing, a tactic he referred to as 'the heckler's veto.'
He wrote that his planned discussion was about how he felt 'free speech is being destroyed on college campuses.'
'Like clockwork, some deranged protesters showed up and used the heckler's veto to try and shut down the event,' he wrote.
He posted videos of the protestors shouting things like 'F**k TPUSA,' 'Trans rights are human rights,' 'F**k Ian,' 'F**k you, fascists,' and 'No cops, no KKK, no TPUSA.' Haworth noted that he was Jewish.
At one point, a woman could be seen screaming 'This is what free speech looks like.'
In a video showing the protesters dancing in a conga line, Haworth wrote 'Not one person seemed concerned that this is a traditional Cuban carnival dance, and is therefore an act of cultural appropriation.'
Haworth published a piece in the Washington Examiner reflecting on the event, in which he wrote 'It's spectacularly ironic that these students aggressively attempted to prevent free speech during an event dedicated to the importance of free speech on college campuses.'
'Yes, the event was able to proceed after several hours, but only after protesters were escorted away by police. The fact remains, as these activists demonstrated, that college campuses are no longer a place for ideas to flourish. They're where ideas go to die.'
In their official response, the protesters accused Haworth of being an 'infamous transphobic alt-right figure,' and that his presence was a 'clear danger and significant threat to the many queer students at the University.'
The group said 'students attended the event as a peaceful demonstration of queer solidarity and joy,' and that their rights to free speech were denied them when authorities later removed them so the event could continue.
They insisted that was 'ironic considering that TPUSA and their guest Ian Haworth claim to uphold these rights.'
After quoting a number of rules in the student handbook they claimed were violated in the removal of dancing and screaming students from a lecture, the group demanded the university install a number of gender affirming measures. They also asked that any pictures of videos of them at the protest be removed from the internet.
In a statement to Fox News, the University of Albany said 'Consistent with the mission of an institution of higher learning, we expect members of our community to be able to voice their views in a manner that promotes constructive dialogue and honors UAlbany's commitment to freedom of expression.'
'This is especially important when it involves speech that members of our community find offensive or objectionable.'
'Our constitutional obligation to protect speech, even when that speech fundamentally conflicts with our core values, is a pillar of our democratic system. We are equally committed to fostering an environment in which all students feel safe and included — and that the right to protest is also protected.'
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Supreme Court Tells Maine to Stop Religiously Discriminating. Maine Gets Creative, Does It Anyway
Last term, in Carson v. Makin, the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Maine could not prevent parents from using otherwise generally available state school choice funds at religious schools simply because those schools provided religious instruction. But the state is back at it again, discriminating against families and the religious schools they want to send their kids to.
Crosspoint Church, which operates the Christian school that two of the Carson plaintiffs attended, is suing Maine state officials in response to a law that, once again, tries to keep private religious (or “sectarian”) schools from receiving tuition assistance program funds, this time by adding an eligibility requirement that they must comply with the state’s LGBT anti-discrimination policy.
The Pine Tree State just can’t seem to take a hint.
Maine does not operate public schools in every town, particularly in rural far northern Maine, but students must still attend K-12 schools. That means that in many cases, religious schools are the only option available for families looking for a quality local education.
For the first 100 years of its tuition assistance program, the state allowed families and children to choose any school using tuition assistance dollars—whether the schools were public or private, religious or secular.
But in 1981, the state enacted a new restriction: Any school receiving tuition assistance payments had to be “nonsectarian,” having no “religious practice” involved. A school could be named after a patron saint of the Catholic Church, for example, but teachers could not celebrate those ideas or even add value-laden concepts into the school curriculum.
In separating schools that were religious in name only from schools that actually practiced religion, lawmakers thought they could keep “truly” religious schools from accessing publicly available funds.
The plaintiff families in Carson v. Makin argued that the state program’s “nonsectarian” requirement violated the U.S. Constitution by discriminating against religion, and last year, the Supreme Court agreed.
The court relied on its decisions in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017) and Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) to perform a straightforward resolution of the case. In Trinity Lutheran, the court held that Missouri could not discriminate against otherwise eligible recipients of public benefits because of their religion. And in Espinoza, the court held unconstitutional a provision of the Montana Constitution that barred aid to a school “controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination.”
In Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court determined that when private individuals use taxpayer funding to choose a religious K-12 school for their children, those individuals are not using public money to “establish” a religion—something that would be prohibited under the First Amendment to the Constitution. They’re simply making the best educational choice for their children.
Less than a year later, Maine education officials are back in federal court.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Carson, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey released a statement saying he was “terribly disappointed and disheartened” by the outcome. What’s more, Frey stressed that religious schools were still ineligible for the tuition program because of their religious stance on sexuality and gender—positions that he called “fundamentally at odds with values we hold dear.”
Frey promised to explore with “members of the Legislature statutory amendments to address the Court’s decision and ensure that public money is not used to promote discrimination, intolerance, and bigotry.” It was clear that to keep discriminating against religious schools, the Maine Legislature would need to get creative.
The outcome of Frey’s promised “exploration” was a law requiring academic institutions participating in the state’s school choice program to adhere to the Maine Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Originally, all religious schools were exempt from the nondiscrimination provisions in the Human Rights Act to accommodate their religious beliefs. But in anticipation of Carson, the Maine Legislature narrowed the religious exemption in the Human Rights Act to protect only religious schools that do not participate in the tuition program.
Without an exemption from the LGBT discrimination provisions, religious schools can face investigations, complaints, and fines for teaching students in accordance with their sincerely held religious beliefs on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In its case on behalf of Crosspoint Church, public interest law firm First Liberty Institute calls the narrowed exemption a “poison pill” that deters religious schools from participating in the tuition assistance program and perpetuates the exact religious discrimination that the Supreme Court had already determined was unconstitutional.
In addition, the lawsuit points to a tweet by then-state House Speaker Ryan Fecteau in which he said that he’d “anticipated the ludicrous decision from the far-right [Supreme Court].” Fecteau stopped just shy of saying that in Maine’s search for ways to continue discriminating, they’d had a head start.
The law is on Crosspoint’s side. Not only has the Supreme Court already struck down the tuition program once for being unconstitutional, it has also clarified that a “government fails to act neutrally when it proceeds in a manner intolerant of religious beliefs or restricts practices because of their religious nature.”
The statements of government officials Frey and Fecteau are nothing if not intolerant.
Apparently, one lawsuit wasn’t enough to deter Maine from religious discrimination. Maybe this time, it will take the hint.
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7 April, 2023
Kansas Legislature OKs opt-outs for LGBTQ materials in schools
Kansas lawmakers approved a bill Thursday aimed at helping parents opt their children out of public school lessons with LGBTQ-themed materials, as a Democratic lawmaker whose vote was crucial to banning transgender female athletes from girls' and women's sports faced calls to resign.
The Republican-controlled Kansas House voted 76-46 to approve a "parental rights" measure that would allow a parent to place their child in an alternative to a public K-12 school lesson or activity that "impairs the parent’s sincerely held beliefs, values or principles." The GOP-dominated Senate approved the measure last week, so it goes next to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.
"If there is one family who are denied their rights, we need to address it," said Republican state Rep. Susan Estes, of Wichita.
While the measure covers lessons and materials dealing with race and possibly even evolution, it also is in line with the push by Republicans in statehouses across the U.S. to roll back LGBTQ rights, particularly transgender rights. State Rep. Heather Meyer, a Kansas City-area Democrat, called the measure a "perfect vehicle" for anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
"We can see what’s been done in other states across the country where they have used this as a vehicle to attack the LGBTQ community," said Meyer, who is bisexual and has a 13-year-old transgender son.
The Legislature on Tuesday approved a broad bathroom bill and on Wednesday voted to override Kelly's veto of the measure on transgender athletes. Kansas is the 20th state to enact such a sports ban, and its law applies to club and school sports from kindergarten through college starting July 1.
GOP lawmakers also hoped to pass a bill Thursday that would require Kansas public schools to keep transgender girls from rooming with cisgendered girls and transgender boys, with cisgendered boys, on overnight school trips.
GOP conservatives also hadn’t given up on trying to pass a bill aimed at ending gender-affirming care for minors.
Kelly vetoed a bill last year that would have made it easier for parents to try to remove classroom or library materials. Supporters of this year's bill still were short of the two-thirds majorities in both chambers necessary to override a veto.
"What we heard in committee were parents who not only went to their teacher, they went to their principal and higher up in their school district and did not have their concerns addressed," Estes said.
Meanwhile, conservative Republicans were able to override Kelly's third veto of a bill on transgender athletes in three years because of the "yes" vote from a single Democrat, freshman Rep. Marvin Robinson, of Kansas City.
That Kansas vote came a day before President Joe Biden's administration announced a proposal to bar schools and colleges from enacting outright bans on transgender athletes but allow them to set some limits to preserve fairness.
Robinson represents a heavily Democratic district and replaced a retiring lawmaker who voted against overriding Kelly's veto in 2022. Kansas Young Democrats and the state Democratic Party's LGBTQ+ and Progressive caucuses demanded that he step down after Wednesday's vote.
Robinson also supported the parents' rights measure. Kansas House Democratic Leader Vic Miller said he would be "pleased" if Robinson resigned.
"Right now, he’s voting more with the other party than he is with ours," Miller said. "He ran as a Democrat, but he doesn’t seem to be serving as a Democrat."
Robinson told a conservative Kansas City radio talk show Thursday morning that he thought he was "on the same page" as Kelly because of a television commercial she aired during her reelection campaign. In that ad, Kelly looked into the camera and said: "Of course men should not play girls’ sports. OK, we all agree there."
At the time, Republicans accused Kelly of lying about her record. LGBTQ-rights advocates interpreted her comment as saying men playing girl's sports wasn't an issue because transgender girls and women are female.
Robinson told The Associated Press that no one in the Democratic Party told him last year that he was expected to vote against bills on transgender athletes. He also said a female Democratic colleague that he declined to name "told me I should die."
He rejected criticism that his vote is "hurting people’s kids." "Who could mistreat and look down on anybody?" he said. "You know, everybody is God’s creation."
He told the radio host that friends told him: "Man, you're up there with a bunch of demons."
Meyer said "absolutely none" of Robinson's fellow Democrats would have told him after the vote that he should die. "We care about mental health and we care about our colleagues, even if we disagree," Meyer said.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kansas-legislature-oks-opt-outs-lgbtq-materials-schools
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Opting Out of College
Economist Herbert Stein once famously said, when discussing the size of our national debt compared to GDP, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
That logic might appear obvious, but our nation’s colleges and universities have in recent decades seemed impervious to it. “US college costs just keep climbing,” Bloomberg reports. “And the increase is pushing the annual price for the upcoming academic year at Ivy League schools toward yet another hold-on-to-your-mortarboard mark: $90,000. Full costs at elite private colleges already stretch well into the $80,000s.” That’s well above what the typical American household earns in a year.
It’s a wonder our university system hasn’t yet bumped into Stein’s Law, and a wonder more folks haven’t had enough. “At some point, that math stops working out,” said Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an economist who focuses on higher education. “We get to a place where these degrees are just no longer worth it.”
Compounding these runaway costs is a growing mental health crisis on campus. A recent Gallup study found that 41% of college students have considered “stopping out” in the past six months, with 55% of those who’ve considered calling it quits citing emotional stress as a reason why.
So there’s the cost, and there’s the stress — although the latter seems to say more about the fragile state of our young people than the rigors of college. And then there’s the intrinsic appeal of a college education, which doesn’t seem to be what it once was.
As former Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder writes: “We have lost sight of the basics: are our young learning a lot about things that prepare them to be responsible and productive citizens in the future? Are we downplaying the dissemination of truth and beauty in favor of spending resources on other things? For example, do universities really need umpteen bureaucrats who neither teach nor do research that might help future generations?”
Vedder’s point about the bloated bureaucracy is a good one. And nowhere is it more apparent than in the “diversity” industry that has infected colleges large and small with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staff up and down the hierarchy.
A 2021 report from The Heritage Foundation notes that many universities’ DEI programs “are bloated relative to academic pursuits and do not contribute to reported student well-being on campus.” The University of Michigan, for example, lists a whopping 163 staffers as having formal responsibility for providing DEI programming and services.
As for the breakdown of these, ahem, educational staff, Heritage writes: “Nineteen of those people work in a central office of DEI, headed by a Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion & Chief Diversity Officer, who is subsequently supported by three people with the title Assistant Vice Provost for Equity, Inclusion & Academic Affairs. Five people are listed in the Multicultural Center, another 24 are found in the Center for the Education of Women, and the LGBTQ Spectrum Center has 12 people. Eighteen people are listed on the Multiethnic Student Affairs website with another 14 found at the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives. Moreover, colleges and departments at the University of Michigan have their own DEI staff.”
Here’s another way to look at it: For every 14 people tasked with promoting DEI at the U of M, there is one person responsible for providing services to students with disabilities. And another way: Michigan has more than twice as many DEI staff as it does history faculty.
When one of the nation’s top-ranked public universities has 163 people on its payroll dedicated to “diversity,” it’s safe to assume that this university has not only failed to properly steward taxpayers’ money but, more fundamentally, has lost its way as an educational institution.
The American Spectator’s Dov Fischer weighed in on this DEI phenomenon as it pertained to the recent row at Stanford Law School, where an invited guest speaker, Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan, was disgracefully shouted down by dozens of future leftist lawyers and lectured by the school’s diversity officer, Tirien Steinbach, who was later suspended for her role in ginning up the mob.
Fischer wrote: “These DEI deans are malignancies on the body academic, absolute poison. They get paid boatloads of money collected from overblown tuition, which saddles students and their parents with debt for life, to provide an ostensibly valuable service that my law degree, rabbinical degree, advanced history degree, and other educational attainments still leave me unable to fathom.
What do these noxious DEI warts do to better society other than to promote reverse racism, divide people by ethnicities and skin color, in many cases promote anti-Semitism, and preach virtue-signaling effluvium that, once analyzed objectively between the lines, promote nothing but hate, the good woke kind of hate, hate for the values that once made America great?”
These are all great questions — whether about cost, value, wokeness, diversity, or misplaced priorities — and they don’t lend themselves to great answers.
No wonder so many young people are dropping out, and so many others are refusing to even drop in.
As Professor Vedder concludes: “For years, the American public unflinchingly accepted the siren calls of the ‘college for all’ crowd: You will not succeed in life unless you go to college. They increasingly are rejecting that … [and] the trust in colleges being the path to opportunity in America has severely eroded.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96246-opting-out-of-college-2023-04-05
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The Left’s ‘Banned Books’ Racket Is Actually a War on Parents’ Rights
Furor over banned books allows liberals to feign indignation over the alleged ‘authoritarianism’ of Republicans who don’t want kids reading identitarian pseudohistories or books depicting rape, violence, or gender dysphoria in their schools.
While checking out the “banned and challenged” display at my local Barnes & Noble recently, I was reminded that the entire kerfuffle is a giant racket. For publishers and booksellers, “banned” books are likely a money-making racket.
Virtually every allegedly “banned” book on the display table is already a massive (sometimes generational) bestseller. Not that this reality stops authors like Jodi Picoult, whose books dot virtually every bookstore in the country, from running around pretending their novels are “banned” because a sliver of taxpayers are no longer on the hook to buy them.
For the left, the banned book claim is a political racket, allowing them to feign indignation over the alleged “authoritarianism” of Republicans who don’t want kids reading identitarian pseudohistories or books depicting oral sex, rape, violence, or gender dysphoria in their schools.
Yet, major media now regularly contend, as indisputable fact, that “book bans” are in place. The claim is embedded in the Democrats’ daily rhetoric. After the mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, we were not plunged into another inane discussion about “stochastic terrorism” or political violence, but rather a preposterous comparison of Tennessee’s “book bans” and lax gun control.
As Congresswoman Liz Cheney noted, “if we really want to keep our children safe, we need to spend less time banning books and more time stopping the horrific gun violence in our schools.”
Books are banned in Tennessee in the same way a person can’t say the word “gay” in Florida. It’s a myth. Yet, here is a recent headline from NPR: “Plot twist: Activists skirt book bans with guerrilla giveaways and pop-up libraries.” In the piece, the reader learns that with “a record number of book bans” on the horizon, “some activists are finding creative ways to make banned books available to young readers anyway.”
“Activists” buying books at a local Barnes & Noble, where an endless supply exists, and handing them to other people’s children against the wishes of parents isn’t so much “creative” as it is creepy. NPR makes it sound as if these people were risking their lives trading samizdat one step ahead of the Secret Police. Any dope with a car, a bus pass, a bicycle, legs, or an internet connection can hand some impressionable kid softcore porn. Because there are no banned books.
Now, if conservative activists set up “pop-up” libraries around the corner from schools in progressive districts handing out “Huck Finn” and books celebrating the Second Amendment or the superiority of traditional families, one imagines NPR would find the guerrilla effort less charming.
One New York Times columnist argues that parents who vote for legislators that temper the cultural Marxist agenda in schools are engaging in a “state-sanctioned heckler’s veto.” So much for “democracy,” I guess. It is true that leftists, who run virtually every major school district in the nation, don’t need any laws or vetoes to dictate curriculums.
Yet most schools are run by the state. How else are parents supposed to initiate change? Well, they aren’t, right? That’s the point. The contemporary left doesn’t believe that parents have any say in which state-run school their children attend or what they are taught in them. Who’s the authoritarian, again?
Teacher-union types like to argue that parental rights bills are tantamount to telling a doctor how to operate on a patient. A more apt analogy is to say that Democrats want to force patients to undergo elective surgeries performed by untrained quacks.
Parental rights bills don’t instruct teachers on methods, they only stop strangers from exposing kids to revisionist histories and ideas about sexuality and ideologies that conflict with their beliefs. Then again, even if parents who don’t want their prepubescent kids indoctrinated with these ideas are in the minority, why should they be forced to accept instruction or books that have nothing to do with genuine civics or a well-rounded education?
When the government restricts free association in the marketplace, or giant tech companies are engaged in a concerted effort to censor ideas and news, we have a reason to worry about the state of free speech. When a heckler’s veto that dominates universities makes it virtually impossible to have an open discourse on campuses, we have reason to worry. “Book bans,” however, are just curriculum choices leftists don’t like.
It is certainly true that sometimes priggish moralists are overzealous in their targeting of books, sometimes the bans are plain stupid, sometimes they are political, and sometimes they are initiated by left-wing administrations (as has been the case for years).
Yet for the most part, “book ban” is just a euphemism for progressive administrators and teachers losing some of their power over your kids. While parents are compelled to live with the devastating professional failures of a teacher-union-dominated monopoly that struggles to teach basic math, reading, writing and science, there is no reason for them to accept political indoctrination, as well.
https://www.nysun.com/article/the-lefts-banned-books-racket-is-actually-a-war-on-parents-rights
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6 April, 2023
Victory of Yeshivas in Court Opens an Avenue for Legislative Relief for Religious Families
New York’s Orthodox Jewish schools, or yeshivas, won a major victory in court last week. However, fully resolving the issues raised in the lawsuit will require legislative intervention.
Under pressure from a string of hostile and error-ridden stories in the New York Times and a campaign backed by the teachers union boss, Randi Weingarten, New York state has attempted to revive a century-old, largely dormant law that required students who enroll in private schools to be given an education that is “substantially equivalent” to that provided by New York’s public schools.
Last year the state issued new regulations to enforce this old statute, requiring inspections of nonpublic schools unless they were exempt due to their accreditation or participation in the state test. If the inspectors deem that private schools do not adequately cover the 18 subjects listed in state law, the state could require parents to unenroll their children and force the schools to close.
The state’s chasidic yeshivas were just about the only schools not covered by an exemption and would be subject to inspections and closure. In last week’s court decision, the judge stuck down the central part of the state’s effort to crack down on the yeshivas. The ruling forbids the state from closing private schools that failed inspections.
Judge Christina Ryba’s ruling noted that the law “places the burden for ensuring a child’s education squarely on the parent, not the school….” Parents can ensure that their children receive an education meeting all criteria of the compulsory education law, even if the school they choose does not.
Even if private schools do not cover everything required by substantial equivalence, Judge Ryba wrote, “parents should be permitted to supplement the education that their children receive at a nonpublic school” to be in full compliance, “such as by providing supplemental home instruction.”
Effectively, New York’s Compulsory Education Law treats everyone enrolled in noncompliant private schools as if they are hybrid homeschoolers who can cobble together their education from a combination of private school instruction and outside-of-school activities.
If the state wants to continue with its inspection regime and declare a number of yeshivas deficient, it will turn tens of thousands of private school students into hybrid homeschoolers, who will then have to complete various forms to describe how they are supplementing their private school instruction to comply with the compulsory education statute.
This will be a burden on those families, but it will be an even bigger burden on the state. Not only will state employees have to process and review all of these forms, they will then have to select which among the tens of thousands of families to investigate and — if found deficient after multiple rounds of remediation and appeals — which to sanction.
This will be a huge strain on state resources. Also it is certain to raise constitutional issues of discrimination and arbitrariness in selective enforcement that the judge ruled were “not yet ripe” in her decision last week.
There is an elegant solution that extracts the state of New York from this mess: Revise the Compulsory Education Law to redefine what constitutes an education.
Currently, the law contains a highly prescriptive list of 18 subjects and other requirements, including instruction in highway safety and traffic regulations, arson prevention, CPR, sex ed, patriotism, and “the history, meaning, significance and effect of … the Constitution of the State of New York and amendments thereto.”
However, the statute fails to appreciate the educational value of a yeshiva education, which, as Professor Moshe Krakowski has described, “more closely resemble[s] upper-level humanities coursework in a university than clerical training or contemplation of the Divine.”
New York would be better served by adopting a broad definition of education, similar to other states, that would properly distinguish between the traditional, if atypical, approaches that yeshivas have been using for hundreds of years and real truants who are not being educated at all.
The yeshiva victory in court has fended off the prospect of the state closing their schools, but leaves the state — and families — facing an enforcement nightmare. Fortunately, the problem can be solved with a modest and entirely reasonable legislative fix.
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Another COVID Fail: School Budget Cliffs With Gaping Holes
Although the funds were nonrecurring, the nation’s largest school district used some of the money for enduring budget items and programs, including hiring 500 social workers, opening new bilingual programs, and expanding summer learning centers.
Now, the district faces a “fiscal cliff,” a situation in which spending creates budgetary needs in the future after a financial windfall is depleted.
“I am … deeply concerned about how the [New York City Department of Education] will sustain many long-term program expansions, which rely heavily on federal relief funds,” Rita Joseph, a New York City Council Member and the chair of the council's Education Committee, told her colleagues in November.
New York is joined by numerous other school systems that used the temporary funds to beef up staff. Some are already handing out pink slips.
In Stockton, Calif., the district is laying off 19 full-time employees hired with part of the $241 million the school district received in COVID relief. The district acknowledged that some of the money, which funded a total of 163 positions, was misspent.
Seattle schools received $145 million in relief and is handing out pink slips to up to 70 employees as it struggles with enrollment that has dropped 16% since 2020. Relief spending included $1.4 million on “equity work” and “response to racism.”
The district acknowledged its economic mismanagement in a public notice explaining its $131 million deficit: “Enrollment has decreased … while staff has increased.”
The fiscal cliff did not come out of the blue, as districts were warned of the challenges they would face in sustaining longer-term programs after the federal tranche was exhausted.
K-12 education last faced widespread financial trouble in 2009, as the Great Recession prompted government to provide nearly $50 billion in relief to districts, which reacted in a way similar to now. Layoffs and budget problems soon followed hiring and expansion.
“Districts are optimistic that something will happen that will not force them into making hard decisions,” said Chad Aldeman, a school finance pundit and founder of readnotguess.com, a reading instruction website. “They see labor costs as fixed, so they don’t do a good job of scaling up or down. They have a hard time downsizing.”
A recent Rand study found that 77% of school districts used the federal money on exactly what numerous other fiscal hawks cautioned against: beefing up staffing with little regard for the future. “Roughly half of district leaders see a fiscal cliff looming after coronavirus disease (COVID-19) federal aid expires,” Rand researchers reported. The study noted that over three-quarters of public school districts have “increased their number of teaching and non-teaching staff above pre-pandemic levels.”
As in Seattle, districts across the U.S. are realizing that they made a mistake. The jobs of teachers, mid-level administrators, and low-level employees alike are on the chopping block. Also in danger are after-school programs, tutoring, and counseling, all aimed at addressing the damage caused by widespread school closures, typically locked down under strong pressure from teacher unions.
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Hamline University president will RETIRE after Prophet Muhammad controversy where art professor who showed image in class was fired
The president of Hamline University will retire months after a scandal involving a professor who showed images of the Prophet Muhammad in an art history class.
President Fayneese Miller initially defended the small school in Minnesota's decision not to renew the contract of adjunct professor Erika Lopez Prater who had shown students the Muslim prophet - after providing them with a warning.
But the school finally backtracked after widespread criticism and a lawsuit filed by the professor.
Previously, leaders at Hamline said 71 of 92 faculty members who attended a meeting in January voted to call on Miller to resign immediately.
They said they had lost faith in Miller because of her handling of an objection lodged by a Muslim student who said seeing the artwork violated her religious beliefs.
The Monday email announcing Dr. Miller's 2024 retirement did not make mention of the controversy.
'Hamline is forever grateful for Dr. Miller's tireless and dedicated service,' wrote Ellen Watters, the chairwoman of the university's board of trustees, who also called Miller's tenure' innovative and transformational.'
In October, adjunct professor Prater showed an online class an image of the Prophet Muhammad as part of an art history class.
She warned the students watching virtually what she planned to do, and gave them ample warning to look away from the image if they were so inclined.
In some - but not all - Islamic sects, it is forbidden to look at the image of the prophet.
After the class, Aram Wedatalla - a student who is also the president of the university's Muslim association - complained.
Wedatalla, who spearheaded the campaign to get Lopez Prater fired, chose to remain online in the class.
Afterward, she and others promptly complained to school officials that the image 'blindsided' her and made her feel marginalized.
'I'm 23 years old. I have never once seen an image of the prophet,' she said in a conference streamed live on CAIR-MN's Facebook page, adding that she felt marginalized.
'It just breaks my heart that I have to stand here to tell people that something is Islamophobic and something actually hurts all of us, not only me.'
Prater, who'd been hired that semester for the first time and was due to return for the spring semester, was shown the door.
The university, bending to the demands of the Muslim association, called the incident 'Islamophobic'.
It sparked uproar among other Muslims and professors across the country, who said the school had stifled academic freedom.
One Muslim professor accused the school of advancing an 'extreme' Islamist view that is only held by a small number of people.
The school dug its heels in initially, saying it wanted to protect its Muslim students and make them feel heard before eventually retracting a statement that labeled Prater's actions Islamophobic.
When Prater broke her silence, she said: 'In my syllabus, I did note that I would be showing both representational and non representational images of holy figures such as the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ and Buddha.
'Of course, in an art history classroom, images are the primary source documents that we use as evidence in order to learn about diverse cultures and thinking and attitudes.
'I spent a couple minutes explaining to students, before I showed the images. I told my students if they didn't feel comfortable engaging visually, they were free to do what made most sense to them.
'I tried to empower them to walk away from the video portion of the online classroom, or do what kind of made most sense to them.
'I'm not a mind reader. My discussion in my class was fact based and on explaining the beginnings of Islam itself.
'All of the images that I used were very respectful, they were meant to be instructional and also referential in their original historical contexts.'
Professor Prater added that the student said her warnings 'didn't matter.'
'She had some pretty strong feelings that she expressed to me. But one of them that perhaps gets to the heart of the matter was she thought the warnings that I had provided to the class didn't even matter, because she believed that images of the Prophet Muhammad should never be shown full stop.'
In her lawsuit, Prater alleged that Hamline subjected her to religious discrimination and defamation, and damaged her professional and personal reputation.
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5 April, 2023
Stanford University president promises to 'safeguard' free speech in blistering attack on woke law students after federal judges said they will refuse to hire them as clerks in wake of ambush on conservative member of the bench
The president of Stanford Law School is promising to 'safeguard' free speech after an embarrassing protest by a woke student mob - joined by the school's dean of 'equity' - at a Trump-appointed judge's speaking engagement at the school.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne - who previously published a public apology to Judge Kyle Duncan - also promised 'new initiatives to safeguard and strengthen' campus freedom of speech.
Duncan, from the fifth circuit of appeals, was ambushed by associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion Tirien Steinbach during a discussion in early March.
Steinbach - a former ACLU lawyer who previously defended free speech - initially claimed Duncan had a right to express his views. But she then launched into an impassioned six minute speech - which she had written down - condemning his life's work.
Tessier-Lavigne cited the talk - which now has federal judges promising not to hire Stanford Law students as clerks - as a 'deeply disappointing event' and believed that the school must 'reject such corrosive conduct.'
In the letter, Tessier-Lavigne continues: 'We all navigate disagreements and differences with the people that we live and work with every day. As members of a university community, we are called on to extend our empathy beyond our close personal relationships – to see one another as people with complexity, not as partisan types.'
He also promised that freshman students would be given workshops that would teach them how to discuss contentious issues in a constructive manner.
'We must continue building understanding and active dialogue about both the opportunities and the expectations of being members of this community, including shared commitments to both free expression and to dignity and integrity in our interactions.'
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Muzzling Free Expression on Campus Causes Self-Censorship
Societies advance through the creation, expression, and evaluation of alternative ideas. Therefore, for almost a millennium, we have had universities where ideas and discoveries are born and different perspectives are debated in “marketplaces of ideas” or “learning communities.” Yet there has been a decline in rational, reasonable discourse on issues of the day on modern campuses. This has been demonstrated by numerous suppressions of speakers, including one recently—and most shockingly—at the Stanford Law School, where a federal judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan, was prevented from speaking by a student protest, aided and abetted by the law school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dean.
The university’s own administration was helping to lead the suppression of speech and ideas. It is incidents like this one that have made members of university communities afraid to express themselves, fearing potential negative outcomes (e.g., insults, attacks on character, possible physical attack, or efforts to dismiss) from individuals opposed to their viewpoints. Hence, expressed viewpoint diversity is on a notable decline. We are moving at least partway in the direction of universities in 20th-century totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. And this movement has spread to the broader society.
Individuals are increasingly engaging in self-censorship—the consequences of using an inappropriate word become too costly, so we muzzle our expression. One recent example came courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg, who is hardly a paragon of reactionary anti-woke thinking. She recently was pressured into apologizing for suggesting that some people had been “gypped”—a synonym for “cheated” or “ripped off.” Goldberg has profusely apologized for using a word that some apparently find offensive. Why? It turns out that the word may be thought to imply that Roma people (commonly referred to as “gypsies”) are untrustworthy. These individuals, constituting a tiny fraction of one percent of the world’s population, live predominantly in Europe but are found throughout the world. Words that came into colloquial usage hundreds of years ago become verboten as decreed by a woke aristocracy increasingly funded by universities and supported by their DEI offices. As we economists say, “The cost of expressing an opinion outside the prevailing progressive academic mainstream has risen sharply.”
Let me offer the personal observation of an octogenarian whose higher education experiences span eight decades—from the 1950s as a young undergraduate through the 2020s as a professor. Throughout the first five of those decades, the last half of the 20th century, I felt that I could pretty much say what I wanted, protected most of the time by academic tenure. I sometimes was outspoken. In the 1980s, Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste attacked me publicly because, through op-ed writings, I promoted a voter referendum to roll back a massive income tax increase that Celeste advocated and the legislature approved. The president of my university was pressured by prominent politicians to fire me, but he appropriately said, “Professor Vedder has tenure, and, moreover, we believe in freedom of expression.”
I survived. However, if I had been born several decades later and the tax increase had taken place in, say, 2015 or 2020, would I have publicly spoken up? I doubt it. I would have censored myself, remaining quiet rather than writing op-eds opposing the governor. Why? Because I believe that the university administration very possibly would have joined politicians in condemning my behavior, perhaps even firing me. I likely would be further condemned by the faculty senate, and some DEI administrators might call a rally condemning my efforts to restrict taxation as hurtful to minorities and thus morally, if not legally, forbidden.
Although difficult to precisely quantify, I think the gap between the political perspective of university faculty and the general electorate has widened over time, mainly reflecting an increasingly progressive faculty orientation. The ivory tower has always been perceived as being a bit flakier and more leftist than the real world, but that difference now is huge. Today’s faculty are generally highly aware that they are, in effect, wards of the state, as their schools are dependent on governments not only for direct subsidies and research grants but also indirectly for funds from tuition fees artificially inflated over time by various federal student assistance programs.
Thus, colleges have been increasingly allied to progressive interests favoring governmental solutions to problems and denigrating private or market-derived ways of solving social issues. Moreover, within colleges and universities, the balance of power has shifted away from faculty, favoring non-academic administrators who are less imbued with the collegiate traditions of open and free inquiry embodied in such documents as the First Amendment or even the “Chicago Principles” (and related “Kalven Report”), which some prominent schools (e.g., Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, North Carolina, and Purdue) have explicitly adopted.
The recent case of Amy Wax, an eminent tenured University of Pennsylvania law professor, personifies why self-censorship is on the rise. In May, Penn will have a hearing that could lead to her dismissal. What is Professor Wax’s great alleged crime? Did she neglect teaching classes or verbally attack individual students? Is she extremely deficient in publication or research? No, Wax has won teaching awards and publishes frequently. She is being sanctioned for her expression of views in writings on issues like immigration or the advantages of traditional two-parent marriages. How can academics avoid the Wax nightmare? Keep your views to yourself—self-censor.
The move toward what Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg perceptively called “the all-administrative university” has been augmented by a pronounced increase in the power of the federal bureaucracy, especially the Department of Education. The balance of collegiate power has passed from a once largely dispassionate faculty highly respectful of First Amendment values and civil debate to a bureaucracy both within the universities and beyond that views its job, to borrow from a British royalty job description, as “defender of the Faith.” The “Faith” is the woke ideology prevalent in the academy, the media, and amongst many politicians. Dialogues are being replaced by ideologues.
Reducing fear of self-expression may be a positive effect of a surging national movement to suppress DEI initiatives in the universities and, perhaps, stop the excessive use of them in private business. Practices such as requiring employees to sign allegiance to diversity practices are inimical to free expression, and initiatives in many states—including large ones like Texas, Florida, and Ohio—to restrict or even outlaw DEI bureaucracies could end campus efforts to enforce viewpoint conformity. If, as I suspect, DEI becomes a political—and, thus, a potentially severe financial—liability for state universities, freedom of campus speech will likely eventually become rejuvenated, enhancing a vital intellectual life characterized by robust but civilized debate.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14464&omhide=true&trk=title
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University cheats on notice after launch of ChatGPT detection software
Australia’s universities will gain access to new technology designed to crack down on cheats using ChatGPT but some top institutions are shunning the software as teachers look to redesign tests to combat the rise of artificial intelligence.
Most universities nationwide will on Wednesday have the option of using popular anti-plagiarism software service Turnitin to detect whether a student has used a chatbot to help write an essay or complete an assessment.
But some of the country’s biggest institutions including the University of Sydney, Monash University and Deakin University have said they will not use the software – at least initially – and are instead ramping up other detection methods to catch students using ChatGPT to write papers.
Academic integrity expert at the University of NSW, Cath Ellis, said there is a “real fear” the detection tool could lead universities to falsely accusing students of using ChatGPT to do their work.
“We could also end up with a massive tidal wave of referrals coming through from academics that we can’t handle, many that could be false accusations,” she said.
“Turnitin are releasing this tool, but the perception among the higher education sector is that the type of testing that has been done hasn’t been effectively communicated.”
James Thorley, regional vice president of Turnitin, claims the company’s new tool can identify if a student has used an AI chatbot in their work with 98 per cent confidence. He said about 780 high schools in Australia used Turnitin and will have access to the new tool.
“Banning ChatGPT isn’t feasible long-term,” said Thorley. “This detector isn’t just about maintaining academic integrity but is also about understanding how AI writing tools are changing the future of assessment,” he said.
However, Benjamin Miller, an English lecturer at Sydney University, said he is opting to redesign assessments for his first year students to deal with chatbots.
“I immediately started thinking about the ethics of using ChatGPT in academic writing, and I was surprised how well it could write and how widespread its use is,” he said.
“I now give students a sample of writing that ChatGPT has created, and they will be tested on how well it analyses and demonstrates critical thinking. They are also tested on how they exceed the capabilities of a chatbot.”
“ChatGPT isn’t great at analysis and evaluation, and often doesn’t connect ideas across paragraphs, so you can often pick up if it’s been used that way.”
A spokesperson for Sydney University said the institution would not be using Turnitin’s new AI detection feature immediately.
“We aim to avoid making major changes to our systems mid-semester, and without adequate testing or visibility, or time to prepare staff,” they said.
‘We could also end up with a massive tidal wave of referrals coming through from academics that we can’t handle, many that could be false accusations.’
Cath Ellis, Academic integrity expert at the University of NSW
The university said it would be reviewing the feature’s capability to see if it would help markers when assessing if a student’s work was original.
The university is also ramping up face-to-face supervision during oral exams and more pen-and-paper assessments.
Monash University has also decided against using Turnitin’s tool “given the technology is in its infancy”.
Deakin University said claims Turnitin’s tool has a 98 per cent accuracy rate in the detection of AI-generated text have not been verified by the institution, and flagged concerns it had been trained using out-of-date AI text generator models.
“Until the university can test its efficacy, Deakin has chosen not to apply the tool in the marking of student assessments,” said Associate Professor Trish McCluskey, Director, Digital Learning.
“This is to protect student data and is in line with the approach adopted by a growing list of global education providers, and we expect many Australian universities will follow our lead.”
However, UNSW said the feature would be available for academics to consider cautiously, but that staff would not be relying on it in any way.
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4 April, 2023
How trans ideology took over our schools
Concern with what schools are teaching about sex, gender and relationships has been growing. Parents worry their children are being exposed to inappropriate sexualised content and that they are being taught to question their gender identity. Some even report discovering their children are using new names and pronouns while at school without their knowledge or consent. Yet these fears are frequently dismissed as reactionary parents trading in anecdotes and panic. Nothing to see here, has been the message from schools and campaigning organisations alike. Until now.
A report from Policy Exchange reveals the extent to which gender ideology is being promoted in schools and the shocking ways in which this puts children at risk. In Asleep at the Wheel: An Examination of Gender and Safeguarding in Schools, Lottie Moore uses hard data to expose the true proportion of schools that are leading children down the transgender path.
More than a quarter of schools allow male pupils to use the same toilets as girls
This research shows that an astonishing four in ten secondary schools now operate a policy of gender self-identification. This means that teachers ignore all records of a child’s biological sex and instead treat pupils as whatever gender they declare themselves to be. The safeguarding risks of this approach should be immediately obvious. Policy Exchange has the statistics: at least 28 per cent of secondary schools are not maintaining single sex toilets, and 19 per cent are not maintaining single-sex changing rooms.
In other words, at a time when concern about sexual harassment among teenagers is rife, more than a quarter of schools allow male pupils to use the same toilets as girls. And almost one third of schools now teach pupils that a person who self-identifies as a man or a woman should be treated as a man or woman in all circumstances, even if this does not match their biological sex. Presumably such moral lessons hold true when that person seeks to undress next to you in a changing room. Shockingly, girls are being instructed not to have boundaries or to expect privacy when it comes to their own bodies.
Sadly, it is all too easy to see how this situation has arisen. When faced with seemingly competing demands to safeguard pupils and to adhere to a contested gender ideology, headteachers and school governing bodies have taken the politically easier option and decided to appease transgender activists. But this may leave schools in breach of the law.
Take another shocking statistic the research has uncovered: only 28 per cent of secondary schools are reliably informing parents as soon as a child discloses feelings of gender distress. They allow pupils to adopt a new gender while at school and conspire to keep this from their parents. It is difficult to square this practice with Article 8 of the Human Rights Act which sets out the ‘right to respect for private and family life’.
Schools argue they are having to deal with a growing number of children presenting with gender distress and have, not unreasonably, sought help from external agencies on how best to handle this new problem. But this overlooks the role schools have played in promoting gender distress in the first place. Asleep at the Wheel reveals that 25 per cent of schools are teaching children that some people ‘may be born in the wrong body’ and almost three quarters of schools teach that people have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex.
This makes it abundantly clear that it is not one or two activist teachers promoting regressive stereotypes over biological facts but that such ‘lessons’ are being repeated in the overwhelming majority of schools. This is in contravention of Sections 406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996 which dictates that schools have a legal obligation to be politically impartial and that where political viewpoints are raised, children should be offered a balanced presentation of opposing views.
In attempting to address a problem at least partially of their own making, schools end up exacerbating confusion about gender still further. More than two-thirds of secondary schools insist that all pupils affirm a gender-distressed child’s new identity, presumably by using their preferred name and pronouns. In this way, children are compelled to speak untruths, and schools yet again fall foul of the Human Rights Act 1998, which protects the right to freedom of expression.
The Policy Exchange research on gender and safeguarding is to be welcomed. Never again will activist teachers or political campaigners be able to deny the reality of what is happening within our schools. In an important foreword to the report, Labour’s Rosie Duffield is clear:
‘This government has failed children by allowing partisan beliefs to become entrenched within the education system. Meanwhile, the Opposition has failed to pull them up on it.’
This cannot be allowed to continue.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/how-trans-ideology-took-over-our-schools/
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University of California Proposes Guaranteed Admission for Qualified Transfer Students
The University of California (UC) proposed a plan this week to guarantee admission to qualified community college students—but only for certain campuses.
UC officials presented their plans to state legislators during a March 28 state Assembly budget hearing.
To be guaranteed admission, students must be enrolled in a state community college and would need to complete general education courses required by UC and earn a minimum grade point average, according to UC officials.
Such transfer students may request the UC campus of their choice—and if they are not admitted, they are guaranteed admission to UC Santa Cruz, UC Merced, or UC Riverside.
Additionally, six of nine UC campuses already offer transfer-guaranteed admission programs—UC Merced, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Barbara.
UC Academic Senate Chair Susan Cochran said during the meeting that the system hopes to simplify the process for transfer students so they don’t take more community college classes than they need to.
“The key to transfer is to ask students only what they need to do and not more,” Cochran said. “We think this proposal … is a positive step forward for simplifying transfers and helping UC meet its responsibilities to the people of the state of California.”
The proposal comes as UC transfer applications have fallen across all campuses—from 46,155 in fall 2021 to 39,363 for fall 2023—and total applications have dropped from 249,855 to 245,768 during the same time period.
As an incentive to increase enrollment, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed a 5 percent increase in funding for both the UC and California State University (CSU) systems in his 2023–24 fiscal budget proposal.
The increases amount to $216 million for UC and $227 million for CSU and fulfill a pledge Newsom made last year to give the systems five percent annual budget increases for the next five years if they agreed to work toward improving graduation and enrollment rates, particularly among California residents.
Newsom also promised UC an additional $30 million as an incentive to boost enrollment among California residents.
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British Universities are accused of giving students the green light for cheating as they reject technology aimed at tackling AI plagiarism
Universities have been accused of giving students a green light to cheat after boycotting the rollout of new technology this week aimed at tackling an 'epidemic' of AI plagiarism.
Academics say they fear the implementation of the new software would be too close to exam season.
But last night, Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said the boycott was akin to 'aiding and abetting cheating'.
Some 98 per cent of universities already use existing software called Turnitin to check whether work has been plagiarised.
The firm has now updated the software in order to keep pace with rapid developments in cheating due to AI technology.
But UCISA – which represents universities in the tech sector – wrote to the company to say that 88 per cent of universities were opposed to introducing the updated version of the software.
Deborah Green, chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA), which coordinated the response, described the move to introduce it as 'completely unheard of' during the summer exam period and said that most universities opted out over fairness to students, some of whom will have already submitted work.
Experts have warned that the cheating epidemic is already at the point where AI can write entire projects, and then a different AI tool can reword it to make AI undetectable.
A spokesman for Universities UK said: 'Universities are absolutely committed to academic integrity and have become increasingly experienced at dealing with the issues raised by new technology such as AI.'
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3 April, 2023
Westminster School and the sad decline of boys’ schools
Westminster School, one of Britain’s oldest public schools, has announced it will go fully ‘co-ed’ from 2030. Having first admitted girls to the sixth form in the 1970s, the school will now admit girls from the age of 13. This decision means that soon there will only be four remaining boys’ boarding schools left in the UK: Radley, Eton, Harrow and Tonbridge. Westminster says the decision is ‘based on a desire fully to reflect the community we serve, and to shape that community by educating brilliant young men and women with a commitment to making a difference.’ But the decline and fall of boys’ schools is not something to celebrate.
There are roughly 800 single sex schools left in England, but most of these are for girls. That’s good for parents looking for an empowering education for their daughters, but bad if you have a son who would benefit from a single-sex education.
There are about 24,000 schools in England. If paying fees is beyond you (which it is for most) then your chances of finding a state boys’ school are slim: only 157 state schools offer an education just for boys. Many of these are grammars who cling to their single-sex traditions. Single sex schools, and particularly those for boys, are disappearing fast as more and more schools follow Westminster’s lead and go ‘co-ed’. So much for diversity and choice.
These schools appear to have convinced themselves that boys somehow ‘need’ girls to civilise them (imagine the same being said in reverse) and that boys do better with hard working girls to pull them up. The evidence is not all one way. An academic study conducted in 2003 found that boys did better in an all-boys classroom when other factors had been controlled for, something the researcher claimed ‘directly contradicted the educational myth that males performed better in classrooms if females were present’.
When academics got together and looked at the data for single sex schooling, they concluded it didn’t really have much impact on exam results. It is the social side of school where this makes a difference.
Being a teenager is hard enough without the added stress of the presence of the opposite sex. Some boys will do well with the supposed civility of girls, but, for others, mixing with the other sex during their teenage years will make life harder. In the end, parents will know best – but that is pointless without the choice.
You don’t have to be a parent of a boy to understand that boys and girls are wired differently. A school that can structure its education just for boys should then be something we welcome. But they are quickly going out of fashion.
‘Boys don’t feel that schools are listening to them or taking the problems they face seriously enough. The emphasis has to be on schools to take more care of boys,’ Mark Brooks, a co-founder of the Men and Boys Coalition, told the Times earlier this week. He’s right – and we should start by protecting those schools that offer education only to boys, before it’s too late.
The demise of boys only schools should leave us wondering where boys can learn to be boys; an environment just for them. Parents should have much greater choice in education, allowing them to decide what is best for their son or daughter. After all, we will regret the loss of boys’ schools once they are gone.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/westminster-school-and-the-sad-decline-of-boys-schools/ ?
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The Yeshivas Story the Times Deems Unfit To Print
It’s passing strange, at least to us, that the most important development in yeshiva education all year hasn’t been fronted, if it has been covered at all, by the New York Times. Since September, the Gray Lady has published more than a dozen stories deriding the education provided by chasidic yeshivas and alleging all sorts of misconduct in its schools — particularly the failure of some of them to teach profane subjects that the schools deem heretical.
Yet it’s now been more than a week since a New York court ruled that the state’s education bureau has no power to do what the Times so clearly is campaigning for — that is, to shut down chasidic yeshivas that won’t provide a secular education like that of public schools or to mandate that parents transfer their children. The ruling is a breathtaking defeat for the Times’ campaign. Yet the cat has seems to have got the Gray Lady’s tongue.
The Associated Press, the Daily News, and the Sun all have covered the ruling. Yet the Gray Lady is mum despite her ambition to own the chasidic beat. Times reporters have been practically begging regulators and legislators to meddle in the education of thousands of religious Jews to ensure that their secular studies are up to snuff — with, at least, what the Times’ readers think chasidic youth should be learning, nevermind their parents, let alone God.
The so-called paper of record likes to take credit for new regulations introduced in September. Why not cover the fact that the regulators of schools were blocked by a court a week ago from enforcing their rules in yeshivas? The rules, which were passed two days after the Times’ first piece about the yeshivas, aim to subject yeshivas to oversight by the public schools from which parents are trying to protect their children.
Its reporters also overreached in its of coverage of a recent bill in the state senate against corporal punishment in schools — claiming it was introduced because of the Times’ reporting on discipline in yeshivas. Yet Senator Julia Salazar, who introduced one of the bills, tweets that the bill was introduced “because the law should *explicitly* ban corporal punishment in all schools.” She adds: “I haven’t seen any evidence of it being a pattern in yeshivas.”
That’s been the Gray Lady’s modus operandi in its investigation into yeshivas. The paper has cherry picked stories about New York’s fervently Orthodox Jews — largely from those who left the community. Schools and operators about whom the paper wrote claim the Times’ reports were riddled with error. An entire community feels that it has been misrepresented at a time when antisemitic attacks are on the rise.
Plus, too, it turns out that the Times has been tilting at what the court says is the wrong target — and yet the Times won’t even cover the court ruling for its own readers. The paper claims that yeshivas are “flush” with state and federal funding and misusing those funds by not providing secular education. Yet such funds are not tied to substantial equivalence. They are merely for providing mandated services, such as attendance and immunization records.
What the court said is that education regulators have no power to close schools or to mandate that parents transfer their children — making substantial equivalence regulations on schools essentially unenforceable. Compulsory education law, the court ruled, binds not schools but parents. In theory, it looks like New York State could pursue parents for freely exercising their religion. If the state does put parents in jail, no one will begrudge the Times the credit.
https://www.nysun.com/article/the-yeshivas-story-the-times-deems-unfit-to-print
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Federal judges announce they will refuse to hire clerks from Stanford Law School after woke students and diversity dean ambushed conservative member of the bench
Two federal judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, both appointed by former President Donald Trump, have announced that they will no longer hire law clerks from Stanford Law School.
The boycott is in response to the mistreatment of a fellow judge during a recent visit to the California school.
Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch had previously announced a similar boycott of Yale Law School last year, after a series of free speech incidents in which they complained about the school's approach to 'cancel culture.'
The boycotts will only apply to future students and not those currently enrolled as law students at the school.
'We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future,' Ho said during a speech to the Texas Review of Law and Politics.
Yale and Stanford Law Schools are some of the most prestigious law schools in the country, having produced numerous prominent leaders, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford, at least five current US senators, and four current Supreme Court Justices.
Ho called the treatment of Fifth Circuit appellate judge Stuart Kyle Duncan 'intellectual terrorism.'
Duncan was shouted down by hundreds of students and berated by Stanford Diversity Dean Tirien Steinbach during his visit to the law school last month.
Students called him 'scum,' asked why he couldn't 'find the c***,' and screamed, 'We hope your daughters get raped.'
Steinbach is currently on leave and Stanford has ruled out disciplining the hecklers, who by the school's own admission violated its free speech policy.
Duncan was greeted with posters along the walls of the prestigious university - saying he had committed crimes against women, gays, blacks and 'trans people' in reference to a case.
He was asked to give a speech at the famous law school earlier in March about the circuit's Court of Appeals by the student chapter of the conservative Federalist Society but was met with abuse.
Fifth Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan eventually asked for an administrator when the heckling wouldn't stop and in stepped the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach
Associate Dean Steinbach stepped in during the screaming, but instead of calming the students down, she started piously lecturing Judge Duncan for six minutes using pre-prepared notes.
Law School Dean, Jenny Martinez, and Stanford President, Marc Tessier-Lavinge, have since 'formally apologized, confirming that protesters and administrators had violated Stanford policy' days later.
In his speech, Ho argued that the treatment of Duncan reflected 'rampant' viewpoint discrimination at elite law schools, some of which do not employ a single center-right professor.
'Rules aren't rules without consequences,' Ho said. 'And students who practice intolerance don't belong in the legal profession.'
He implied that a more politically diverse faculty and less ideologically uniform administration would go a long way towards lifting the boycott.
'How do we know everyone's views will be protected, if everyone's views aren't represented?', Ho asked.
'What some law schools tolerate and even encourage today is not intellectual exploration—but intellectual terrorism,' Ho suggested.
'Students don’t try to engage and learn from one another. They engage in disruption, intimidation, and public shaming. They try to terrorize people into submission and self-censorship, in a deliberate campaign to eradicate certain viewpoints from the public discourse,' he added.
'Law schools like to say that they’re training the next generation of leaders. But schools aren’t even teaching students how to be good citizens—let alone good lawyers. We’re not teaching the basic terms of our democracy.'
Ho's announcement is the latest and most dramatic effort to hold Stanford accountable for its treatment of Duncan, and he hopes his colleagues will follow suit.
In a subsequent interview following the Standford incident, Judge Duncan said the entire debacle was an embarrassment that made him fear for the country's future.
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2 April, 2023
Violent Transgender Activists and Antifa Agitators Shut Down Pro-Life Event at Virginia Commonwealth University
Violent transgender activists and Antifa agitators interrupted the final Students for Life “Lies Pro-Choicers Believe” Tour at Virginia Commonwealth University on Wednesday and shut the event down.
Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins’ and student ambassador Isabel Brown’s speaking tour concluded at the Richmond, Virginia, public university in violence as police arrested protesters and forced the speakers to leave.
“We were deeply disappointed in how campus and city police handled the incident as First Amendment rights were trampled upon and physical attacks were made due to inaction,” Students for Life press strategist and staff writer Caroline Wharton told The Daily Signal. “Pro-life speech is free speech and should have been firmly defended as such, especially at a public university.”
“Two people were arrested Wednesday evening after there was some disruption at an event in VCU’s University Student Commons,” the university told The Daily Signal. “The student organization ‘Students for Life at VCU’ invited a pro-life speaker to its meeting, which was open to the public and attracted about 70 people. The meeting was disrupted by the unruly conduct of some attendees, and VCU Police were called at about 5:40 p.m.”
The school said that two individuals not related to the university were arrested.
Antifa agitators showed up to the event holding signs for Black Lives Matter and the transgender movement while goading other protesters in the crowd. Antifa, an organization known for instigating violence, caused numerous altercations between the protesters and Students for Life staff, including documentarian Kevin Feliciano. Autumn Walser, president of Students for Life at VCU, received a leg injury while other students received scratches and cuts.
“Antifa came for a fight,” Students for Life of America Executive Vice President Tina Whittington said after the event. “The protesters had three chants they kept recycling: ‘Fascists Go Home,’ ‘Nazis Go Home,’ and ‘F— Pro-lifers.’”
“It was so ridiculous. That’s the definition of fascism and Nazism—not allowing for free speech,” Whittington said. “They wouldn’t allow other ideas to be expressed, and in a way, they won, even though pro-life students stayed to talk after the event.”
VCU police arrived and did not address the crowd of violent agitators but instead asked Hawkins to leave, to which she replied, “You would have to arrest me. I’m not leaving.”
“Students for Life will be providing security for Autumn on campus for the near future until we can be sure that she is safe here,” said Hawkins. “And we will be demanding that VCU invite me and Isabel back to hold an event that is safe for all to attend.”
Currently, VCU’s policy on the use of event space says that the school “recognizes that the free expression of ideas and open inquiry are essential in fulfilling its academic mission by embracing rigorous open discourse, argumentation, speaking, listening, learning and the exploration of ideas.”
This was not the first time Antifa had protested Hawkins, but this instance was the most violent yet, according to Students for Life.
According to Whittington, VCU police detained Students for Life team members and pro-life students while Antifa and the transgender activists were dispersed. VCU’s campus police did not respond when The Daily Signal reached out for a comment.
“Silencing the peaceful people because of fear of the loud and violent makes us all less safe,” said Hawkins. “We will be back to ensure that free speech truly exists at VCU.”
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Science Says State-Run Preschool Is Not the Way
The Biden administration is set on ensuring every disadvantaged toddler has access to a preschool. To some parents, the idea of sending their toddler off to preschool sounds like a dream. Finally, a break from a demanding toddler who just refuses to nap. Finally, the government offering a “free” babysitting service to some parents who desperately need it.
What are the effects of state-run preschool?
As many of us know, it is important to follow the science because if we don’t, we are immediately dismissed and become a danger to society. The science tells us that state-run pre-K is not the way to go, especially if the child is considered disadvantaged. A 2022 study found on PubMed that included 2,900 children from low-income families shows that “the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade.” The study also reveals, “A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services.”
If the idea of that alone time and free babysitting still sounds appealing to parents, Chalkbeat Tennessee reports: “There’s too much focus on group instruction and rigid behavioral controls… Even discussion during ‘story time’ is generally limited to questions with a single ‘right’ answer, instead of engaging children to think more deeply.”
It is unrealistic to expect preschoolers to have deep and philosophical thoughts, and rigid instruction time with limited thought processes are not realistic either. Those who have been or are parents to preschool-aged children know that it is almost impossible to keep their child restricted and still for even a moment. At this age, children ought to be involved in free play and allowed the freedom to develop their own thoughts with the guidance of their parents. In fact, many homeschool parents with children of this age do not encourage formal instruction until age seven.
Although the intent of “free” state-run pre-K sounds like an attempt to help parents and give children a leg up with their education, that is not the case. As school districts across our country talk about the wonders of the “whole child” approach, we must remember that this is merely an attempt to further remove a child from the parents. When schools attempt to care for a child’s every need, the parent becomes an object in the way of the school. Suddenly, that alone time and free babysitter don’t sound so great after all.
Parenthood is tough and it is a lifetime commitment. Parenthood often comes with no breaks and turning down invites for a night around town. Social media does a great job of telling young parents what a drag parenthood is. But let us remember that our children at any age are a blessing, tough times will pass, and we the parents direct the upbringing of our children, not the government.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96091-science-says-state-run-preschool-is-not-the-way-2023-03-30
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Australia: Blame politicians, not teachers
Our political elite are to blame for our educational malaise, not our educators…
At the start of another academic year, a quick survey of the educational scene is in order. Unsurprisingly, as anyone who’s taken even a cursory glance at our schools will note, the results are grim. Along with our slide down the PISA scales, there are plans to reform NAPLAN, install tutors in classrooms, and abolish the ATAR. All of this occurs alongside the sobering realisation that for all our increases in technology and funding, little has been achieved in tangible results.
In fact, we’ve gone backwards. As the latest PISA results show, over the last two decades Australia has slipped from being a top-ten performer to a country that fails to ‘exceed the OECD average in one of the assessment domains’. We’ve dropped ‘from fourth to 16th in reading, eighth to 17th in science and 11th to 29th in maths’. Even the commercial media are talking about a ‘crisis in education’.
Who’s to blame then? That’s easy: teachers. Across the political divide, there has been a unanimous answer to our educational malaise: we lack quality teachers. As piece after piece after piece has pointed out, improving teacher quality is the easiest way to lift educational outcomes and productivity.
It’s no surprise then that figures like Victoria’s Shadow Minister for Education, Matthew Bach, have waded into these murky old waters. Writing in The Australian and Spectator Australia, he cites a Productivity Commission report summarising the prevailing wisdom by stating, ‘…the largest single factor in student success, and their ability to go on and make a meaningful economic contribution, is teacher quality.’
Cue then the usual easy answers to what has been an intractable problem. Per Bach et al, what’s needed are relevant reforms: something inclusive of a higher ATAR entrance and a training regime with ‘meaningful and rigorous systems of teacher appraisal’. Simply put, hire brighter teachers and give them the right tools and training, and decades of decline will vanish overnight.
This is clearly not the response we require. In part, it’s impractical and tautological. In any field of endeavour, having higher-quality practitioners will lead to better results. Better chefs will improve our restaurants; better builders our houses. And dare I say it, better politicians will improve our politics. If Canberra expects a Montessori in every classroom, are we not entitled to a Metternich in return? Speaking as a qualified teacher, I can confirm that – like all jobs – our teachers reflect the usual range of abilities and intelligence. And that the majority carry out their roles with aplomb.
Yet this is not the primary problem. While there is some truth to the remarks that teachers have a part to play, it is my opinion that their main function is to obfuscate. The goal is to shift our social failures onto teachers and away from politicians. It’s a cynical ploy designed to exculpate the political class for their vast errors and offer up teachers in return. It appears to have become little more than a vanity project in which the innumerable problems now afflicting education and the economy can be alleviated with a sole teacher-led silver bullet.
As those really responsible for our decline are our elite and not our educators. A notion that is evident with even the most basic logic. For one, we already have a generation that has spent much more time in education than their predecessors – with more of us earning a degree than ever – for far inferior results. How do we square the circle that prior teachers – with their one year ‘dip-eds’ – spent far less time in training for far superior results?
Primarily, what recommendations such as Bach’s ignore is the decline in the social context in which teaching takes place. As like many such articles, little mention is made of the vast socio-cultural changes that have taken place and within which schools now operate.
The most obvious is our diversity. As is often noted, Australia is one of the most diverse societies in the world. Something that is not unrelated to our educational decline. As unfortunately for the cosmopolitans, per Pisa, the most successful education systems tend to be found in places of profound homogeneity. Aside from Singapore, the best-performing systems are in traditionalist locales like East Asia and Eastern Europe – and not the liberal West.
The negative effects of diversity are also witnessed within countries. As American author and educator Freddie de Boer has noted, there are a large and persistent gaps in educational attainment between different groups – and of which teachers can do little.
Related to this is the issue of classroom management. A notion that is the sine qua non of teaching and without with no learning can take place. This is something that continually successful systems such as Japan take for granted, yet it’s an area in which Australia performs particularly badly.
As a recent article in The Australian observed, our educators are now on the front lines of ‘classroom war zones’. A trend that has led to staff shortages as teachers leave the profession in droves as they are ‘stabbed…kicked…[and] bitten’. As the OECD confirms ‘Australian classrooms are among the least disciplined in the world’ with a third of surveyed students reporting that ‘the teacher has to wait a long time for students to quieten down’ and that ‘students don’t listen’.
This is not to mention even more extreme cases. Aside from ill-discipline and poor behaviour, pupils are now permitted religiously-sanctioned weapons, students are stabbed in schools, and schoolboys are killed in gang riots. On top of this are the increasing number of students with some form of learning disability such as ADHD or autism.
The state of the family is another concern. Even in schools of relative success and stability, many children are now attending without the support of a stay-at-home mum or traditional two-parent family. A trend that’s predictive of an assortment of negative outcomes and that starts from the earliest years of education. As American author Mary Eberstadt has observed, more time in child care and away from parents correlates with maladies such as sickness, disobedience, and aggression.
These are trends that are evident in Australia too. Despite the desires of our politicians, the farming out of infants to the State is not in their best interests or ours. Most importantly, even the much-touted economic calculus doesn’t add up. As Virginia Tapscott recently noted in The Australian:
Even the economic rationale of childcare has been called into question. While group care is the cheaper option in the short term due to a high carer to child ratio, the likes of Peter Cook, an Australian family psychiatrist, and Jay Belsky, a researcher with the University of California, have long argued that the consequences of childcare make it more expensive than parent care in the long run.
As like much economic thinking, it fails to consider non-economic criteria. In essence, many of the benefits of childcare are illusory. As Tapscott, citing the Australian psychiatrist Peter Cook, states: ‘Generous parental leave and caregiver support … would actually cost less than the consequences of parental absence.’
That’s right: it’s cheaper (and better) in the long run for parents to actually parent their children than to hand them off to strangers and the State. Childcare is thus a false economy. Like cheap wine or junk food, it’s something that appears to be a ‘financial saving at the outset but ends up leading to greater expenditure’.
All of which is related to our broader subordination of education to economics. Witness the state of our universities, for example. Now dominated by (full fee-paying) foreign students, tertiary education in Australia has become a farce: with worries by academics about the decline in literacy, numeracy, and academic standards ignored by administrators only concerned about the bottom line.
An explicit focus on teachers (and teaching) also ignores the main social trends taking place and against which teachers are essentially impotent. Book reading is down. Screen time is up. As is the continued dominance of America-led liberalism and its vulgar tendencies: like Hollywood, fast-food, and the coarseness and crudity it promotes. An ‘Empire of Lies’, as some have called it.
So by all means, train our teachers as well as we can. But don’t use them as a scapegoats for an elite-led social failure. It’s the political class who are to blame for our malaise, not our educators. It’s they who’ve changed the character of our schools and suburbs. It’s they who’ve reduced education to a business. It’s they who’ve helped eviscerate the family. It’s they who’ve overseen the deterioration in reading and culture. They are to blame for our decline, not our teachers.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/blame-politicians-not-teachers/
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