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EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE
Quis magistros ipsos docebit? . |
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29 February, 2024
Building Evacuated as Angry Mob of Berkeley Students Violently Shuts Down Jewish Event: ‘Dirty Jew’
Berkeley lives up to its far-Left reputation
Pro-Palestine protesters at the University of California, Berkeley, violently shut down an event that featured a former Israel Defence Forces member on Monday night.
The event on Monday night featuring Ran Bar Yoshafat, a former member of the IDF and lawyer, was titled “Israel at War: Combat the Lies,” and would address the country’s “international legal challenges,” according to the Daily Californian. It was sponsored by Bears for Israel, Tikvah, Club Z, and the Israeli Consulate to the Pacific Northwest.
Bears for Palestine, a Pro-Palestine group at the University of California, Berkeley, announced on social media before the event that it would be “SHUTTING IT DOWN.”
”In October of 2023, Ran Bar-Yoshafat was serving in the IOF, partaking in the obliteration of Gaza and extermination of Palestinians,” a Sunday post by the group states. “He has now been invited to speak on our campus to spread settler colonial Zionist propaganda about the very genocide he has participated in. This individual is dangerous. Ran Bar-Yoshafat has Palestinian blood on his hands. He has committed crimes against humanity, is a genocide denier, and we will not allow for this event to go on. GENOCIDAL MURDERERS OUT OF BERKELEY.”
The group went on to encourage others to help “shut it down” at 6 p.m. and gave protesters the location of the event.
Pro-Palestine protesters successfully prevented Yoshafat from speaking, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, smashing a window and shutting down the event. Around 200 protesters mobbed the building and prevented people from entering, the university said, adding that doors were broken and the building was evacuated.
”Minutes before the event was to start, a crowd of some 200 protesters began to surround the building. Doors were broken open and the protesters gained unauthorized entry to the building. The event was canceled, and the building was evacuated to protect the speaker and members of the audience,” reads a university statement.
Danielle Sobkin, an organizer for the event and co-president of Bears for Israel, told The Chronicle that one of the people in the mob grabbed a sophomore attempting to enter the event and called him a “dirty Jew,” also spitting on him.
Sobkin said that a senior was also shoved into an auditorium door by the protesters and a freshman was grabbed by her neck.
“This isn’t an isolated incident. This is a continuous trend that’s persisted my entire time on campus. Jewish hate. The targeting of Jewish students,” Sobkin said. “For a lot of us, this was the tipping point. The last straw,”
Dan Mogulof, a spokesperson for the university, told the outlet that about 200 students mobbed Zellerbach Playhouse on campus, where the event took place.
“I can’t emphasize how seriously we’re taking this, and how appalling it is,” he said, adding that the students stationed at Sather Gate are also violating campus rules. “We are working as we speak to address that,” Mogulof said.
The event was initially set to take place outside of Wheeler Hall on campus, but a massive crowd gathered outside the building interrupted classes, Sobkin said, prompting a shift to Zellerbach Playhouse, where protesters followed.
Bears for Palestine, who organized the protest that turned violent, hasn’t apologized for the event and continues to promote its “Apartheid Week,” which is a series of on-campus events scheduled for March 3-8.
In a post titled “Upholding our Values,” Chancellor Carol Christ and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin wrote that the protest violated university policies.
”We are committed to responding to violations of our “Time, Place, and Manner” rules. We deeply respect the right to protest as intrinsic to the values of a democracy and an institution of higher education,” they wrote. “Yet, we cannot ignore protest activity that interferes with the rights of others to hear and/or express perspectives of their choosing. We cannot allow the use or threat of force to violate the First Amendment rights of a speaker, no matter how much we might disagree with their views. We cannot allow the use or threat of force to imperil members of our community and deny them the ability to feel safe and welcome on our campus. We cannot cede our values to those willing to engage in transgressive behavior.”
”We will in the days ahead decide on the best possible path to fully understand what happened and why; to determine how we will address what occurred; and to do everything possible to preclude a repeat of what happened,” the administrators added.
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Las Vegas school district agrees to protect free speech rights of pro-life students after lawsuit
Pro-life activist Terrisa Bukovinac urges DOJ to investigate potential 'crime' behind abortions of 'The Five'
Progressive pro-life activist Terrisa Bukovinac spoke to Fox News Digital on Wednesday about the DOJ allegedly covering up an investigation into whether five babies in were aborted illegally in D.C. in 2022.
A Las Vegas school district has agreed to protect pro-life students' views after current and former students sued their high school, the district and school administrators, alleging discrimination against their campus club.
The group of students from the Students for Life chapter at East Career and Technical Academy (ECTA) filed their lawsuit in 2022 in response to "ongoing bias" against the club for its beliefs, the Thomas More Society said.
The legal group representing the students announced they recently reached a settlement agreement with the Clark County School District (CCSD) to make changes to the school's student handbook and distribute a memorandum to district administration reminding them to protect students' First Amendment rights.
The agreement will ensure pro-life students' views are protected in the district's more than 300 schools, the Thomas More Society touted.
"This public, taxpayer funded, school district and high school were actively violating the Equal Access Act, the Nevada Constitution, and the United States Constitution, apparently due to ongoing bias against the club’s pro-life beliefs and actions," Joan Mannix, Executive Vice President and counsel for the Thomas More Society, said in a statement.
Mannix was "pleased" with the settlement, but said it was "regrettable" that school officials needed this reminder, and they were violating their own district policies on discrimination regarding student clubs.
Fox News Digital previously reported the Students for Life group had accused ECTA of denying their fliers with images in the school newspaper, despite other groups being allowed to include pictures in their fliers. The suit also claimed the ECTA assistant principal had "refused" to allow students to post fliers referring to an adoption agency and pregnancy resource clinic during the 2019-2020 school year.
The school also reportedly rejected a club meeting announcement which depicted pictures of students declaring, "I reject abortion," as "too controversial," while allowing faculty to display pro-abortion posters in classrooms.
The school district had previously found itself in legal trouble with another student in 2015 after initially refusing to approve her application to start a pro-life club on campus at a different high school, the lawsuit claimed.
Kristan Hawkins, President of Students for Life of America, which assisted the local chapter in its fight, vowed to keep holding schools accountable for trying to silence pro-life students.
"As hostile attacks on pro-life free speech steadily grow, Students for Life of America will not allow school administrations to overlook or instigate First Amendment violations against the Pro-Life Generation," she said in a statement. "Free speech includes pro-life speech, whether you like it or not. Pro-life students will always have a voice for the voiceless, and Students for Life of America will ensure their freedom to do so is respected."
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Alabama lawmakers push for families to receive state dollars for children to attend private school, tutoring
Wall Street Journal writer Jason Riley reacts to the Supreme Court ruling Maine's tuition program violates the First Amendment for excluding religious schools.
Alabama lawmakers have advanced a school voucher-like program that could provide eligible families with state dollars to help pay for private school or home school expenses.
The Alabama House of Representatives voted 69-34 Tuesday for the proposal that now moves to the Alabama Senate. Six Republicans joined Democrats in voting against the bill. The bill comes as Republicans in a number of states have debated voucher proposals under the banner of expanding school choice.
The proposal, championed by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and dubbed the CHOOSE Act, would allow eligible families to access up to $7,000 in state dollars for private school tuition, tutoring or transfer fees to move to another public school. Parents could get also get up to $2,000 for home school expenses.
"The CHOOSE Act will provide provide an opportunity for students to learn and thrive in an environment that best meets their needs, which could be another public school," Republican Rep. Danny Garrett, the bill's sponsor, told lawmakers.
The first 500 slots would be reserved for families of students with disabilities. Eligibility would initially be limited to families earning up to 300% of the federal poverty level — which would be about $77,460 for a family of three. The income cap would go away in 2027, but lower-income families and families with students with disabilities would have priority for receiving funds.
Democrats expressed concern about using public dollars for private schools.
"If we keep pulling away from public education, how are ever going to make it better?" asked Democratic Rep. Barbara Drummond of Mobile.
Some Democrats also questioned the financial sustainability of the program and if it is intended to be a mechanism for white families to leave public schools.
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28 February, 2024
Biden Transfers More Student Loans to Taxpayers, Wants a ‘Thank You’
Democrats are nothing if not shameless in how they go about buying votes. Worse, Joe Biden is using your money to buy other people’s votes via his student loan “forgiveness” transfer program. He added another 153,000 borrowers to that roster for about $1.2 billion this week.
The timing was exquisite. With all the concern over the fact that he’s in steep cognitive decline, Biden needed to remind voters that he’s a “sympathetic” and “well-meaning” man, not just an “elderly” one with “a poor memory.”
Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in 2021 that “the president can’t do” what Biden eventually did anyway. “The president can only postpone, delay, but not forgive,” she explained, saying anything of that sort would require “an act of Congress.”
Frankly, that, too, would be unconstitutional. The Constitution does not grant the federal government the authority to abrogate private contracts between lenders and borrowers, forcing taxpayers to pay back loans they did not take for college degrees they did not earn.
But since when did Washington politicians care much for that musty old parchment?
Indeed, in August 2022, Biden did it anyway in a transparent ploy for votes. In July 2023, the Supreme Court rebuked him in a resounding 6-3 ruling. Biden immediately proceeded to ignore the Court and implemented a workaround to keep up the transfer payments in smaller batches.
Since then, a new White House “fact sheet” says, “The Biden-Harris Administration has now approved nearly $138 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 3.9 million borrowers through more than two dozen executive actions.” Billions more dollars will be spent leading up to the election because millions more borrowers are registered in his program.
Biden has no authority to do that, and the Supreme Court told him so. He doesn’t care. In fact, he’s blatantly daring anyone to play the villain and stop him.
“Tens of millions of people in debt were literally about to be canceled, their debts,” he said Wednesday in revising the history. “But my MAGA Republican friends in the Congress, elected officials, and special interests stepped in and sued us, and the Supreme Court blocked it. They blocked it. But that didn’t stop me.”
Constitutional authority? Malarkey. Checks and balances? Please. Totally unfair to send the bill for loans to people who didn’t take them out? Whatever.
Kind Uncle Joe is here to take care of (not so) poor college graduates struggling to get by, and mean, stingy Republicans aren’t going to stop him.
Remember, this is the same guy warning that Donald Trump is a would-be dictator who threatens democracy.
Speaking of Trump, one thing Biden did learn from his predecessor is to put his name on the check. When approving COVID stimulus checks under his administration, Trump made sure his name was on the checks. Team Biden promised such political games would stop under his administration. They did until they didn’t.
“I promise you I’m never going to stop fighting for hardworking American families,” Biden said Wednesday. “So if you qualify, you’ll be hearing from me shortly.” Politico reported that “he’s sending emails to make sure they know whom to thank for it.” Indeed, in that email, he says, “I hope this relief gives you a little more breathing room.” It ends with his signature.
Again, he’s also making sure people know who to blame if this money gets taken away from them.
“A lot of people can’t even repay, and they try — they don’t miss payments,” Biden said. “They work like the devil every month to pay the bills.”
What about those of us who worked like the devil and paid off our own student loans? What about those of us whose mortgage and escrow payments have gone up hundreds of dollars a month, not because we bought a new house but because of the inflation Joe Biden caused? Where’s our relief?
We get none. We just get another bill so Biden can buy votes. And, as with rampant inflation, we know whose name is on that bill.
Unfortunately, millions of Americans benefit from Biden’s graft, and Republicans are going to have a difficult time opposing or stopping him. House Republicans passed a bill to block him last year, but it failed in the Senate. He wouldn’t sign it anyway.
Establishing standing in court will likewise be tough; without standing, who can sue? Since Biden began the smaller rounds of debt transfer payments, no major lawsuit has been filed.
No, Biden will likely get away with this, and he knows it. The result will be an entitled generation that is learning to depend on the federal government, more expensive college tuition bills going forward, increased federal debt ($34 trillion and counting), and one more huge chunk missing from the constitutional order of checks and balances.
Biden is “saving democracy,” and we’re all paying dearly for it.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104671 ?
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Students at Beverly Hills middle school hit with AI-generated nude deepfake images
A Beverly Hills middle school was rocked by photos that circulated the internet last week of real students’ faces superimposed on artificial intelligence-generated nude bodies.
According to the Beverly Hills Unified School District, the X-rated deepfake images were created and shared by students at Beverly Vista Middle School — the Los Angeles school district’s sole institution for sixth to eighth grades, according to the Los Angeles Times.
About 750 students age 11 through 14 are enrolled in Beverly Vista, the LA Times reported.
It wasn’t immediately clear who created the nude photos, which were initially shared via group chats between students.
School administrators said they won’t hesitate to expel the culprits when they are identified.
It’s not just Taylor Swift ‘nudes’: Millions of teen girls victimized as classmates turn them into deepfake porn
“Any student found to be creating, disseminating, or in possession of AI-generated images of this nature will face disciplinary actions, including, but not limited to, a recommendation for expulsion,” they said in a statement mailed to parents last week,” the school district’s officials said in a note mailed to parents, per the LA Times.
Parents were also advised to “speak with your children about this dangerous behavior,” which they said “is becoming more and more accessible to individuals of all ages.”
“Students, please talk to your friends about how disturbing and inappropriate this manipulation of images is.”
As of Monday, the school has also launched an investigation with the Beverly Hills Police Department into the nude deepfakes, NBC 4 Los Angeles reported.
“We will be looking at the appropriate discipline so that students understand there are consequences and accountability for their actions,” said Dr. Michael Bregy, Superintendent of the Beverly Hills Unified School District.
Beverly Vista principal Kelly Skon has used her regularly scheduled “administrative chats” to discuss the issue with students in all three grades at the school, she said in another note sent to parents.
Skon said she asked students to “make sure your social media accounts are private and you do not have people you do not know following your accounts,” per the LA Times.
A Beverly Vista student who wished not to be identified told NBC: “It is very scary people can’t feel safe to come to school.”
“They are scared people will show off explicit photos of them,” the student added.
In December, two students were suspended from a Miami high school for using an AI deepfake software to create nude images using headshots of male and female students obtained from the school’s social media account.
One parent whose daughter was a victim of the scheme at Pinecrest Cove Preparatory Academy said she’s hesitant to return to school out of humiliation and fear.
“She’s been crying,” parent Vanessa Posso told CBS at the time. “She hasn’t been eating. She’s just been mentally unstable. She does cheer and she didn’t even want to come to school to do it.”
The offending students were suspended for 10 days from the Florida charter school, but some parents want them booted permanently.
Weeks earlier, more than 30 female students at New Jersey’s Westfield High School fell victim to the practice after learning that the manufactured images were in wide circulation.
According to visual threat intelligence company Sensity, more than 90% of deepfake images are pornographic.
Many also use celebrities’ likenesses, including Taylor Swift, who was the subject of deepfakes — which showed Swift in various sexualized positions at a Kansas City Chiefs game, a nod to her highly-publicized romance with the team’s tight end, Travis Kelce — that took the internet by storm last month.
The account reportedly garnered the images of Swift from Celeb Jihad, which boasts a collection of fake pornographic imagery, or “deepfakes,” using celebrities’ likenesses.
It wasn’t immediately clear which AI website was used to create the pornographic images that circulated Beverly Vista, though there are many free AI-backed image generators on the internet, including OpenAI’s Dall-E, Adobe’s Firefly and Canva, as well as a slew of lesser-known tools such as Freepik, Wepik, Craiyon and Fotor, just to name a few.
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Laken Riley murder: Students on UGA campus, joggers nationwide shocked after alleged illegal immigrant killing
The brutal murder of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus last week has sparked concerns among other students and women joggers who run alone.
Riley, a student at Augusta University, was allegedly murdered by 26-year-old Jose Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, while she was jogging along dirt trails near Lake Herrick in Athens in what UGA Police described as a "crime of opportunity."
"It's a mother's worst nightmare," Michelle, the mother of a female UGA student and a UGA alumnus, previously told Fox News Digital.
Michelle said she’s told her daughter countless times to be careful when she walks alone and to only go running with her Labrador retriever.
"It shakes people to their core because it makes people realize there’s a dirty underbelly we don’t see," she said. "My heart breaks. I’ve been praying for [Riley’s] mom every time she comes to mind."
Numerous women have taken to social media to share safety tips for solo female joggers and share their own stories of scary encounters while running. Sarah Lyoness, a Chicago-based runner who is training for a marathon, produced a video sharing jogger safety tips that went viral on TikTok.
"I used to live in Omaha, Nebraska, and there was a trail … away from a lot of traffic. You could see cornfields for miles, and so it was pretty empty. And if I would go early in the morning, if I allowed myself to think about it too much, like, ‘Oh, someone could pop out of the cornfields or I could see a car following me' I was just always aware of my surroundings," she told Fox News Digital. She added that her mom eventually bought a bike to ride with her while she was running in that area.
Lyoness suggests other solo runners always carry a phone or smartwatch, be aware of their surroundings and have a safety weapon like pepper spray while out jogging.
Michael Arterburn, a former police officer, told Fox News Digital running in groups or in daylight isn't feasible for some runners and shared tips for those who run alone.
"Either wear no headphones or just wear one headphone. They made the bone conduction headphones now so that you can hear what's going on around you if someone runs up behind you. You don't want to take away one of your senses," he said. "I recommend runner's pepper gel. … It stays in your hand and instantly activates with just the flick of your thumb."
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27 February, 2024
What if digital learning is a catastrophe?
There’s a lot of talk in the papers about the importance of banning smartphones from schools. Quite right too. The privacy issues, the cyber-bullying, the airdropping of dickpics, the kids filming themselves taking ketamine in morning break… all those dismaying differences from the conkers and ink pellets and innocent tuck-shop japes we remember from our own youth. More than that, smartphones are extraordinarily distracting. How are the children to learn if they’re surreptitiously WhatsApping one another under the desk?
But this focus on smartphones in schools seems to me to ignore another issue: what happens outside school. The comprehensive my two older children attend is, as I understand it, typical in not allowing but requiring almost all its out-of-school learning to be done online. Physical textbooks are seldom seen. Exercise books are barely used. Homework is set, completed and marked in cyberspace. This has certain admirable effects – among other things, email alerts can let parents know when homework hasn’t been handed in, and you can see in one place which assignments are required for all the different classes.
Schools seem to have made a put-everything-on-black-and-spin-the-wheel sort of bet on digital learning
And yet and yet. The first problem with this is the obvious one. The school carefully and conscientiously insists that during school hours children should not be distracted by smartphones. But then come the end of school hours, the point at which children are expected to develop the vital skills of self-guided learning, unsupervised, the work must be done on one of the very devices that are most likely to distract and interrupt. On a laptop, or on an iPad, you are only an alt-tab away from TikTok, YouTube shorts, Spotify, Instagram, or any of the other internet timesinks that Silicon Valley has engineered to be addictively more-ish. Grown adults struggle to disengage from them, let alone teenagers with their spongy and unformed brains.
Yes, parents have a role here. I am all too aware of it. Do not imagine, reader, that I am not by now intimately familiar with the ins-and-outs of Broadband Shield; that I do not frequently (and at some cost of time and grief) block various sites at the router during homework hours; that I have not got to the stage of hiding the master password to the parent account offline after discovering my kid was using the saved passwords on my Chrome profile to place TikTok on the always-allowed list. Do not think I haven’t spent a lot of time googling whether it’s possible to prevent a child deleting their internet history (it isn’t). Or arguing about whether homework could be done somewhere the student in question can be supervised full time (student in question very aggressively not keen on this). It’s exhausting.
So, there’s that: the do-your-homework-on-the-distraction-machine thing. That’s the obvious one. But there is something more, and it’s deeper. I worry it may be a nationwide or first-worldwide generational problem. We have shifted learning almost entirely online, and as far as I know we have done so without any evidenced consideration of whether kids learn in the same way, or as well, reading and writing on screens as they do when reading from physical textbooks and writing with pen on paper. Not for nothing has this distinctive mode of online engagement been described as ‘continuous partial attention’. There is good reason to believe you just don’t take in what you read on a website in the same way you do what you read in a book.
Memory and spatial awareness are intimately connected in the brain. We have known this since ancient times. The ‘method of loci’ – popularised by Hannibal Lecter’s ‘memory palace’; you remember things by placing them in an imaginary architecture – goes back to Simonides of Ceos (circa 500BC; absolutely the man you want on the scene if your temple has collapsed and you need to identify some mangled bodies) and is still used by competitive mnemonists. The hippocampus, which is notoriously enlarged in black cab drivers, is the seat of memory and of geography.
This isn’t a trivial point. When you read a physical book you have a series of spatial clues in the process: a sense of left-hand page or right-hand page; orientation with regard to the corners; the physical memory of how far through the book you are, and so on. You can flick back and forth much faster than you can scroll a long document. Everyone who has ever looked for a quotation will know that feeling of three-quarters-up-a-left-hand-page-ness. It may be that a new generation of digital natives will navigate online pdfs with the same ease – that the problem here is old dogs and new tricks – but I have my doubts. Cognition and memory are much more embodied than we like to imagine. Other associative sensory cues – smell, sound, touch, colour – contribute to memory (just ask Proust). Those sensory cues are not present in the nowhere of cyberspace.
My wife and I – even allowing for the teenager’s natural resistance to interference – have really struggled to try to help our daughter with her exam revision. It’s quite impossible to follow what she’s doing as she flicks uncertainly back and forth between Google Classroom, online textbooks, half-written documents, gamified quiz programmes like Caboodle and Seneca and Lord alone knows what else. She’s pursuing her work through a trackless wasteland of tabs and windows. It gives me palpitations just watching her.
As it happens, when you look closely, you see that her school has supplied her with excellent teaching materials, notes, textbook extracts and so on. It’s navigating them that is the challenge. The closest we’ve come to being able to make sense of them was when we printed out hard copies – just like an old-fashioned book. We have even, tentatively, suggested that taking old-fashioned longhand notes might here and there function as an aide-memoire in a way that the provisional, ephemeral, disembodied quality of a note in a Word document may not.
There are lots of reasons why this shift to digital has been made. Some are practical: it’s a lot cheaper and easier not to have to buy textbooks or gather up handwritten essays for marking, to be able to distribute and check homework through tools like Google Classroom. These are quality-of-life improvements for teachers, and quality-of-budget improvements for schools. Others are more utopian. There’s the seductive sense in the culture that learning online must be better because the digital world is the future. There are all sorts of big tech companies with shiny PR machines and billions to gain economically from inserting their products into the education of our children.
But it’s far from clear that – in terms of cultivating deep reading, structured learning and the sort of continual focused attention that educational attainment requires – this is an improvement on the use of dead trees and ink rather than otherwise. Such academic studies as we have on the subject seem to suggest that it is not – though of course it’s tricky to make rigorous or authoritative comparisons, and the data are complex.
A forthcoming study from Columbia University Teachers College, reported a few weeks ago, concludes that: ‘Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning’.
A 2018 meta-analysis of studies involving more than 170,000 participants, published in Educational Research Review, found a consistent advantage to comprehension on paper over that on screen (at least in digesting informational rather than narrative texts). What’s more, it tentatively suggested that digitally literate users might actually get worse rather than better at taking in texts on screen, citing as a possible explanation ‘people’s stronger inclination toward shallow work in digital-based environments than in paper-based ones’.
I don’t demand we return to blackboards and chalk or inkwells and exercise books. But I do note that schools up and down the country seem to have made a put-everything-on-black-and-spin-the-wheel sort of bet on digital learning, and done so before much in the way of data on the subject was in. It’ll be a generational betrayal if, ten years from now, it becomes clear that the roulette ball’s going to clatter into red.
Education should be one of the things, surely, that helps growing people make sense of hectic chaos of the world – an anchor against being swept up in what Cory Doctorow has memorably called the internet’s ‘ecosystem of interruption technologies’. It will be a catastrophe if education itself is co-opted by that very ecosystem.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/what-if-digital-learning-is-a-catastrophe/
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UK: Why shortening the school summer holidays helps no one
A new report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, has recommended that the six-week school summer holiday should be reduced to four weeks, and the two weeks redistributed so that schools have a two-week half-term in October and February. Lee Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said that spreading out the holidays more equally throughout the year would ‘improve the wellbeing of pupils and the working lives of teachers, balance out childcare costs for parents, and potentially boost academic results for many children’.
I’m not convinced shortening the summer holidays would actually do any of those things. Firstly, I highly doubt that having extra time off in October and February – two of the darkest, coldest, wettest months of the year – would do much to improve staff or pupil wellbeing. Teachers would inevitably end up working through most of it, and pupils would spend the extra time festering inside, probably glued to multiple screens, because sports camps and social clubs don’t run over winter when the pitches are waterlogged and the energy bills are too high. Instead, we would have them locked up for the whole of July, sweating away in non-air-conditioned classrooms, when the days are longer, lighter, and warmer. Anyone who has ever taught in a school, or read Romeo and Juliet, knows that heat is a catalyst for bad behaviour.
I’m also not sure how it would balance out childcare costs, given that employed parents still get the same number of annual leave days a year, and so would still have the same administrative issue to resolve. Here’s one thing it would definitely do though: push up the already eye-wateringly expensive premium on holidays out of term time. Parents will probably be less willing to go abroad in October and February, where you have to fly long-haul for guaranteed sunshine, meaning that the vast majority of families will be competing to go away in the same four weeks: cue larger costs, larger crowds, and a large impact on seasonal economies like Cornwall’s. Some will choose, understandably, to take their children on holiday in term time instead, as a £60 fine is insignificant compared to the hundreds or even thousands you might save on an off-peak all-inclusive holiday or some earlier Easyjet flights.
Anyone who has ever taught in a school knows that heat is a catalyst for bad behaviour
There is an argument that cutting the summer holidays may help to mitigate the learning loss that happens over a longer break, sometimes called the ‘summer slide’. Yet other countries with excellent education systems have much longer summer holidays than us: Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal have 12 weeks; Estonia and Finland have 11 weeks; Canada has ten weeks; America and Sweden have nine weeks; whilst China and South Korea have eight weeks. The UK is already an outlier in many respects: we have the fewest public holidays of any country in the world bar Mexico, the shortest summer holidays of any country in Europe, and we also start school two or three years earlier than most OECD countries. I am not sure quantity of education is the issue here.
Maybe I am just being nostalgic and sentimental, but I genuinely believe that the summer holidays are a sacred time: a precious break from the pressure of homework and tests; a chance for children to spend time outdoors; an opportunity to learn important life skills or pursue extracurricular activities or, God forbid, to cope with being bored. When I think of summer holidays, I think of disappearing on bikes with friends until the sun went down, or setting up makeshift camps in the garden with a hastily-assembled picnic, or endless made-up games with my siblings in the driveway: precious, formative experiences that probably would never have been achieved over this February half-term, where it rained everyday except one.
Perhaps a better alternative would be to keep the summer holidays the length they are (something the majority of teachers and parents want), and instead seriously consider how we can better support working parents, single parents, or disadvantaged families. For example, in Sweden, parents can apply for income-linked summer camps, where children can try fishing, drama and sports, as well as helping out with chores including cooking and cleaning, all for as little as £0 to £28 per day. There are some similar, more affordable options in the UK, like Forest Schools, National Citizen Service, or YMCA and YHA Camps, but the reality is that discounts are limited, and often only for pupils on free school meals. If you are not eligible, then one charity estimates it will cost you on average £943 per child for provision over the holiday, and so the subsidies or opportunities on offer do not go anywhere near far enough.
Shortening the school summer holidays therefore does nothing to ease financial pressures or logistical stresses, but it does take away from the welcome reprieve and mental and physical freedom those six weeks bring. If anything, we should be giving families more flexibility to choose when to take holiday rather than less, because education happens as much outside of school as it does inside.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/why-shortening-the-school-summer-holidays-helps-no-one/
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Decolonising (or radicalising) the Australian curriculum
It appears our educational elites have learned nothing from 2023’s referendum on the Voice to Parliament. Despite promises of a ‘back to basics’ curriculum, this year Victorian teachers will have to contend with a curriculum blinded by Woke racial ideology and historical myth.
One of the ‘texts’ teachers can select for VCE English is a four-minute video of an Australian Indigenous actor reciting a monologue from his play City of Gold featured on Q&A in June 2020. Described as a ‘howl of rage at the injustice, inequality and wilful amnesia of this country’s 21st Century’, an ‘urgent and necessary play’ in light of ‘the global Black Lives Matter movement’, and a ‘powerful message’ urging students to ‘offend your family, call them out’ – the monologue asks that we ‘re-write’ the ‘colonial narrative’.
Classified by the IPA as a text that fits with the agenda of ‘decolonisation theory’, which, according to the pedagogy, involves combating ‘systemic racism’ by not simply including ‘token intellectual achievements of non-white cultures’ into a curriculum but by occasioning a ‘paradigm shift from a culture of exclusion and denial to the making of space for other political philosophies and knowledge systems … a culture shift to think more widely about why common knowledge is what it is, and in so doing adjusting cultural perceptions and power relations in real and significant ways’, the artist addresses students as a ‘Blak Australian’ and tells us that they ‘hate[s] being a token. Some box to tick, part of some diversity angle’.
The monologue then mentions the regularly repeated, but historically incorrect claim that Indigenous Australians were covered by the Flora and Fauna Act which did not classify them as human beings, and that this only changed when the Constitution was amended following the 1967 referendum. ‘C’mon man we was flora and fauna before 1967’ cries the monologue, cadit quaestio. ‘Adjusting cultural perceptions’ and ‘making space for other knowledge systems’, indeed, the play is ‘decolonisation’ theory in action.
This long-debunked myth about the Flora and Fauna Act has made its way into a text set for year 12 Victorian English in 2024. So much for ‘back to basics’. And where are the fact checkers when you need them?
Interestingly, in the VCE annotation for teachers that accompanies the text, the VCLAA warns that the play ‘contains explicit language’. No mention of the historically incorrect claim, of course, as decolonisation theory dictates that ‘anti-racism’ trumps facts. The IPA analysed the list in full here where I also show how the 2024 rules mean that teachers cannot avoid selecting Woke, in particular, ‘decolonisation theory’ texts.
This is all despite Australians voting overwhelming against dividing our country along racial lines only last year. It seems that the educational Powers That Be did not get the memo. The VCLAA, the body responsible for the 2024 text list teachers are to select from, insists on continuing to indoctrinate students with critical race theory largely imported from the United States, providing a list of texts that purport to ‘directly explore Australian knowledge, experience, and voices’ but are thinly veiled anti-colonial or ‘anti-racists’ manifestos.
This monologue is just one of an inordinate number of texts on race in the VCE 2024 English document, with the first post-colonial African novel in English, Chinua Achebe’s 1958 Things Fall Apart, topping the list. Of the 16 texts assigned under the ‘Framework of Ideas’ section, over half deal directly with race, with this monologue and another titled The Hate Race standing out as particularly overt.
The Hate Race is a memoir that links the experience of Indigenous Australians to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The teachers’ resource states that the text ‘is framed by the racist policies and politics that define Australia’ and gives suggestions on how to approach teaching the text. It illustrates explicitly how Critical Race and Decolonisation theory is weaponised for our Australian context. ‘The Atlantic Slave trade’ is to be considered alongside ‘the impacts of colonisation on Indigenous Australian communities’, while ‘the Ku Klux Klan in the USA, Enoch Powell in the UK, and Pauline Hanson in Australia’ are all grouped under the heading ‘white supremacist political movements’ and suggested to teachers as ‘aspects of history and contemporary politics’ relevant to a discussion of the VCE text.
Faced with a text list that more resembles the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement than English literature as we once knew it, students will miss out on not only the ‘greats’ of the Western canon, but a wealth of Australian literature that celebrates our distinctively Australian way of life based on fairness, equality, freedom, and tolerance. As executive director of the IPA Scott Hargreaves pointed out in 2021, classic works in which Australian artists and writers told their countrymen of our nation and asserted the innate worth of a national culture are now either explicitly cancelled or simply crowed out by a right-on national curriculum full of Woke preening and second-rate texts. Disturbingly, the new 2024 rules mean that the teaching of this ideology is now unavoidable.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/decolonising-or-radicalising-the-curriculum/
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26 February, 2024
GOP Senator Demands Answers About Taxpayer Funding For ‘Woke Kindergarten’ at California...
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana announced on Friday that he was seeking information about a California elementary school that spent hundreds of thousands on a “Woke Kindergarten” program.
Glassbrook Elementary School reportedly spent $250,000 on “Woke Kindergarten,” a nonprofit that encourages a “global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem.” Cassidy raised concerns in several letters to the nonprofit and the California Department of Education requesting information on the purpose of the program’s inclusion in light of “failing test scores in crucial subjects like math and reading.”
“The reports regarding Woke Kindergarten are serious. Teachers at Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward, California, reportedly stated that the Woke Kindergarten program is ‘rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages mixed in with the goal of making schools safe, joyful and supportive for all children,’” Cassidy wrote in a letter to the department.
The nonprofit’s website includes “woke read alouds” in which the founder, Akiea Gross, reads books about the importance “for all of us to affirm people’s identities.” The website also includes resources titled “lil’ comrade convos,” “woke words of the day” and “teach Palestine.”
Cassidy demanded that Woke Kindergarten explain the “purpose” of its activities, as well as “produce copies of all materials used in connection with your program,” according to the letter. The Louisiana senator asked the department to explain if it was aware of the program’s use at Glassbrook and if the department knew where the federal funds were coming from to pay for the program.
During the program’s implementation in the 2022–2023 school year, grades also dropped significantly in crucial subjects, with reading and math at 16% and 14% respectively, according to the California School Dashboard. The school was also ranked as one of the worst-performing elementary schools in the state.
The Hayward Unified School District canceled the contract with Woke Kindergarten in February after immense backlash from conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Jesse Waters and the activist account Libs of Tik Tok. The program was halted because it was “distracting the district,” according to Michael Bazeley, HUSD spokesperson, who formerly spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation about the situation.
Woke Kindergarten, Glassbrook and the department did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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The School Funding Fraud
Politico reports that billions of dollars in federal pandemic relief aid to schools is running dry.The money must be spent by September, and there is “urgent concern over how schools might get burned when the money’s gone, as the process to request extensions to looming spending deadlines heats up in the coming months.”
Schools might be burned?!
We are led to believe that the cheapskate American taxpayers are not forking over enough cash to the government school monopoly. But the data tell a very different story.
According to the invaluable Just Facts, which is dedicated to researching and publishing verifiable data about the critical public policy issues of our time, the U.S. spent $1.2 trillion on education in 2022. The bulk of the spending, $834 billion, goes to elementary and secondary education, while $226 billion is spent on higher education, and $121 billion goes to libraries and other forms of education.
This total breaks down to $8,993 for every household in the U.S., 4.6% of the U.S. gross domestic product, and 14% of the government’s current expenditures. It’s important to note that these figures don’t include land purchases for schools and other facilities, as well as some of the costs of durable items like buildings and computers. The unfunded liabilities of post-employment non-pension benefits (like health insurance) are also not included.
Unimpressed by any such data, California Teacher Association president David Goldberg bellyached in early February that California has suffered through “decades of deliberate disinvestment in public schools.” The union boss added, “This erratic system of starved school budgets during economic boom years mustn’t continue. We need to find lasting solutions to California’s broken budget system.”
We are led to believe that Golden State legislators are siphoning money from cash-poor schools. However, the Public Policy Institute of California discloses that school spending per pupil is roughly 65% higher than a decade ago in the Golden State. In 2021, the state allotted $22,684 per student, compared to $14,245 in 2012–13. This amount doesn’t include federal monies, which brings the total to almost $24,000. So, a class of 25 students costs taxpayers about $600,000.
The money grabbers’ basic assumption (or at least their selling point) is that spending more equates to better education results. Sadly, so many people buy into this myth and have done so for many years. In 2008, Dan Lips, then senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, wrote, “American spending on public K-12 education is at an all-time high and is still rising. Polls show that many believe a lack of resources is a primary problem facing public schools. Yet spending on American K-12 public Education is at an all-time high. Approximately $9,300 is spent per pupil. Real spending per student has increased by 23.5 percent over the past decade and by 49 percent over the past 20 years.”
It cannot be said enough that there is no correlation between the amount of funding and the level of student proficiency. The most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) noted that the U.S. had additional funding of more than $75,000 per student over a ten-year period. Still, it did not have additional positive effects on academic achievement.
https://heartland.org/opinion/the-school-funding-fraud/
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Going to university is not always the right choice
Students with poor grades in high school will be encouraged to go to university and set on a career path that is wrong for them, experts warn, under sweeping recommendations in the federal government’s higher education review that are coming under fire from vice-chancellors.
One higher education expert warned that students with ATARs as low as 45 could make it into university under the blueprint for the sector outlined in the Universities Accord review’s final report, released by Education Minister Jason Clare on Sunday.
The biggest review of tertiary education in 15 years has called on the Albanese government to double the number of university places in the next 25 years, reduce the high fees students pay in some subjects and reform the HECS loan scheme to ease the financial impact on graduates.
The recommendations in the review will cost tens of billions of dollars over the next 25 years if fully implemented. They aim to create a highly educated workforce, with more than 55 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds having a bachelor degree or above by 2050.
The review recommends more government funding to dramatically increase the number of disadvantaged students from poor backgrounds and regional areas at university.
“At the moment almost half of young people in their 20s and 30s have a uni degree. But not … in the outer suburbs … not in our regions. And the accord is about changing that,” Mr Clare said. Although the report was welcomed by most universities, Australian National University higher education expert Andrew Norton warned the attendance target meant that students with an ATAR of only 45 would be going to university,
“Historically most students with ATARs below 50 don’t go,” Professor Norton writes in The Australian. “Those who do, face a high risk of dropping out, and if they finish a reduced chance of getting a well-paid job. Nobody should be encouraged to take courses that probably won’t leave them better off.”
While most of the recommendations are uncosted, Australia’s three wealthiest universities – Sydney, Melbourne and Monash – have slammed a key proposal to tax university income and redistribute resources from richer institutions to poorer ones.
The report calls for all universities to pay an impost on “untied” revenue they earn through their own efforts, including international student fees, unsubsidised domestic student fees, interest and investment income, and business earnings.
The tax, which will fall mainly on universities with high international student income, will contribute half of a $10bn investment in the Higher Education Future Fund, to pay for university infrastructure including campus buildings and student accommodation. The $5bn raised in tax would be matched by the government.
Monash University vice-chancellor Sharon Pickering said the future fund plan would interfere with universities’ ability to deliver on the accord review’s goals of increasing numbers of disadvantaged students and building the workforce skills needed in a modern economy.
University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell said he was concerned by the proposal. “A new tax on universities will weaken Australia’s current and future productivity, innovative potential and prosperity,” he said.
University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott, who is also chair of the Group of Eight universities which benefit most from international student fees, said the future fund tax plan “would hurt our reputation and our capacity to attract international students”.
The report made no recommendations on the level of the tax but said it should only commence once a new university funding system was in place and should cease when $5bn had been raised.
It would mainly affect five of the Group of Eight universities which have large numbers of high fee paying Chinese students – Sydney, Melbourne, Monash, UNSW and Queensland.
Western Sydney University vice-chancellor Barney Glover, a member of the accord review panel, said the fund was “important future proofing for the sector” but there was “work to do on design and timing”.
On Sunday Mr Clare said he had an open mind on the tax and the future fund, and would decide over the next weeks and months. “There are some universities who hate it, there are other universities who love it,” he told the ABC.
The review called on the government to reduce the high fees student pay in some subjects, and reform the HECS loan scheme to ease the financial impact on graduates. The review says high university fees of over $16,000 a year in some fields – including humanities, communications, and other society and culture subjects such as human movement – should be reduced.
It also urged reforms to HECS to ease the effect high inflation has on increasing the amount students owe and to reduce the financial impact on HECS debtors when their income first hits the loan repayment threshold.
The report says banks lending practices should be reviewed so people don’t have their home loan borrowing capacity unduly affected by HECS debt.
The review panel, headed by former NSW chief scientist Mary O’Kane, makes 47 recommendations for reforming tertiary education, aimed at dramatically increasing the number of Australians who continue education after finishing school.
The review recommends a goal of having 80 per cent of working age Australians with at least one tertiary qualification (vocational or higher education) by 2050 compared to 60 per cent at the moment.
It urges the government to set an achievement target of having 55 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds holding a bachelor degree or above by 2050, compared to 45 per cent now. This will require a doubling of commonwealth supported university places for domestic students from 860,000 in 2022 to 1.8 million in 2050.
The review says universities should get more government funding for educating students with higher needs, such as those from low socio-economic status backgrounds, from regional and remote areas, and Indigenous students.
The review also calls for more innovative types of courses such as micro-credentials and degree apprenticeships, payments to students for compulsory internships, free university preparatory courses, higher living allowances for needy students, better recognition of prior learning for people starting qualifications, and a “jobs broker” to help students find part-time jobs while they are studying in the area of their course.
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25 February, 2024
Reflections on the College Admissions Process
In the past two years, I’ve felt my life becoming a collection of useful and beautiful images. I spend early mornings on boats in the Chicago River. I run into Lake Michigan in the winter’s snow. I’m given a private dinner and the chance to ask questions to a journalist persecuted by the Russian state. One Friday night, I write a short play about humans and fish people in love and see it performed by talented actors the next day. I am surrounded by stone arches and nineteen-year-olds who love poetry.
There’s a certain swagger I’ve attained here at an “elite university,” a certain pep in my step now that I feel I’ve become a person worth watching. Students here wear our school colors in our hometowns, contemplate solipsism at “the low IQ of the American population” on flights (as posted on the institution-specific anonymous social platform Sidechat), feel special dancing on the knife’s edge of self-importance and conviction to create change and actualize the potential for which we were chosen. We’re made of our experiences; currently, I owe mine to the institution where I live and learn.
Dispatches from the outside remind me that it wasn’t easy to get here. Claire spoke to me during a free period between two Advanced Placement Classes in her high school’s library. Claire is from my hometown of Durham, North Carolina, and she and I worked together the past few summers. I’d remembered her as precocious and kind–patient with the kids and always carrying a novel. Now, she’s a senior at one of the top private high schools in North Carolina and going through the college process herself.
I told her on the phone that I was staring at a bust of Walt Whitman, sitting on the landing by a library as well. It had been a long morning, and I struggled to form coherent sentences on my first tries. Claire had no such difficulties, even in expressing feelings of stress. Her voice was caring and articulate.
“Last night, after cross country practice and homework, it was 10:30 or 11 and I decided I needed to finish my Duke supp[lemental]. I woke up this morning and tried to go for a run and thought, this is not happening.” She confided in me that she was applying to Duke under the binding early decision program, but that no one had told her how difficult it would be to balance a senior-year course load with college applications. Though she had reservations about her choice to commit to one school so early, she felt it was an opportunity she couldn’t waste. She had so much to say that my hands began to cramp while typing it all up.
“You have the golden handcuffs, right?” I interrupted. I knew this all too well. Many top universities offer tuition benefits to children of certain employees. At Duke, this amounts to $63,000 per year. Claire’s parents are both tenured faculty at Duke’s hospital, and eligible for the benefit. My own father was, too.
“My family has three daughters,” she said. “I couldn’t fathom not having that available to me.” The benefit played a large role in her choice to commit to early decision. “I’m participating in it because you have to, but I find it unethical.”
I was also struck by how matter-of-factly she stated that you have to. It implied she understood that admission to an elite college would be the beginning of a life of successes. Claire’s profile is competitive. Beyond her high test scores, challenging classes, and involvement in school extracurriculars, she spent two years as the president of an organization that represents youth interests to the statewide Democratic party. But for high achievers who want to guarantee entry to the next stage of their lives, college admissions is a game whose rules must be followed.
Before World War II, American colleges accepted virtually all qualified applicants, which were largely white, Protestant men. After a general shift to expand the demographics of student bodies, average test scores increased and admissions processes purported to focus on students’ academic merit, making the process much more selective. Merit itself is complicated; tests like the SAT are known to be historically biased based on race and class. And beyond academics, students already immersed in elite environments through private high schools and wealthy families often have the ability to do high-level research, train extensively at sports, or create nonprofits to do charity work funded out of their parents’ pockets–factors which allow them to add “diversity” to a school in a way their socioeconomic status most likely doesn’t.
Now, admissions rates hover under ten percent for the most selective schools. All twelve “Ivy-plus” schools offer early admission plans (seven early decision, five early action). While early action programs are non-binding, early decision is its own set of golden handcuffs, requiring students to attend if admitted. Through early decision, selective institutions can accept students that they know will be able to pay and fill a certain portion of a new class early. Claire told me her friends who would need to take out loans to pay for college weren’t considering early decision programs.
After all, most applicants to university don’t have the benefit that Claire and I enjoy. According to a study by Ipsos and Sallie Mae, families paid an average of $28,026 for college in 2022, half of which was out of pocket. And money provides not just the means of attending college, but freedom to strategize one’s way into an elite space.
There’s a wealth of scholarship into the question of who gets in, and why. Economics professors Christopher Avery and Jonathan Levin, from Harvard and Stanford, investigated the function of early admission programs to selective universities in 201o using a game theoretical model. They found that, because elite schools want students who are both academically qualified and enthusiastic to attend, early applications serve to sort students who are not only well-prepared, but judge themselves to be good fits for the university.
Here, everything, from your idealized love for a school, to the story about becoming proud of your racial identity, to the hours you poured into the SAT math section, to the niche musical instrument you play, is a resource to spend. And in the application game, you’re rewarded for thinking this way, since there’s a decided advantage to applying early. Controlling for student variables, early admission programs provide a 20 to 30% increase in chance of admission–a similar boost to a 100-point increase on the SAT. And for elite schools that are outside of HYPSM (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, the colleges consistently judged to be the most prestigious in America), there’s a competitive effect of attracting top students like Claire who want to hedge their bets.
As Claire suspected, early decision applicants tend to possess more material wealth and more cultural capital–subtler social factors that influence class mobility, like connections and inherited knowledge. Professors of education Julie Park and Kevin Eagan found in 2011 that, for every 1% increase in college-counselor-to-student ratio at a high school, students became 1.3% more likely to enroll through college with an early program. Use of a private college counselor increased the figure by 14%. Claire praised her high school’s counseling department to me, saying that applying early was what they’d decided together was Claire’s best option. The resource confirms what most of us already know, that for college applications, knowledge of the game is a resource we pay to have.
And of course, the stress of the year goes beyond financials.
“I have to turn down dinner party invitations, because I know that I will get grilled.” Claire functions as a big sister figure in her family and her community, a fact she told me she’d emphasized in her common application essay. Her parents’ friends often tried to use her as a test run for their own children, or would question her about her “strategy” rather than her academic interests. I realized I’d been making the same mistake and asked her if she was interested in political science. She laughed.
“I couldn’t stand working in politics anymore. It’s been a special place to be.” Claire continually used the term “special,” colored with a certain darkened tone, to mark difficult experiences. It struck me as a conscious attempt to reframe. Claire had a similar attitude when I asked her about admissions-related content online.
“I find relatable college content funny, but I try to stay away from the advice.” She mentioned a TikTok creator who attends Duke and makes attention-grabbing videos predicting where a certain set of stats and extracurriculars would be accepted. For me, consuming this content was like a job, a daily search for data points into what was an ultimately unknowable context: my own admission. Claire continued.
“It created this feeling of insufficiency in myself that I didn’t want to let hang out.”
“You sound very healthy.” I told her. Claire was similar to me–a high-achieving wealthy white girl with many of the same academic interests, but she seemed to be avoiding the worst of it. What had made one of us spiral into online spaces of stress and the other manage perfectly fine?
“I hope I can stay that way.” It’s only October. Gaining early admission would end Claire’s college process as quickly as possible, but there will be many more months of waiting if not.
More here:
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More than 150,000 students sue
More than 150,000 students are taking legal action against their universities over online teaching during the pandemic.
They claim education chiefs breached their contractual duty to provide in-person teaching and facilities.
The students want partial refunds of around £5,000 – the typical pre-pandemic difference between the £9,250 in-person degree fee and an online one. It could cost the sector up to £765million.
Their claims are being handled by law firms on a no-win, no-fee basis. The first case, against University College London, is likely to go ahead over the next year. It was paused last summer when a judge gave parties eight months to come to a compromise, but negotiations were unsuccessful.
Canadian Maiah Thompson, 20, spent 16 months unsuccessfully chasing refunds of her £32,100 international fee through existing channels.
She told The Times: 'It wasn't what I was promised. I signed up for a world-famous university, not Zoom lessons.'
UCL vice-provost Professor Kathy Armour said she was disappointed lawyers had 'flatly rejected' alternative resolution routes, adding: 'Throughout the pandemic, we prioritised the health and safety of our whole community and followed Government guidance.'
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Co-ed schools ‘healthy’ for teens asserts Australian PM amid elite private schools’ battle of the sexes
This is an old, old debate but there is no denying that single sex schools have produced many notable graduates. There is some argument that single-sex schools are better for girls but not for boys. That would pose quite a policy conundrum
Mr Albanese praised his old boys’ high school, St Mary’s Cathedral College in Sydney, for its decision to admit girls from Years 1 to 7, from 2025. “It’s a good thing they’ve made that decision,’’ he said.
“I think there’s something healthy about boys and girls not being separated until they hit uni is my own personal view.
“My son went to a co-ed school, went through the entire system at Dully and what’s now known as Sydney Secondary College, but to me as Leichardt High and Glebe High.
“From my recollection, I remember that there would be a bit of craziness when we’d have school dances with St Bridget’s at Marrickville or Holy Cross at Woollahra, and that probably wasn’t the ideal.‘’
Mr Albanese’s comments came after two elite private schools began a war of the sexes, over plans for Newington College to become a coeducational school after a girls’ headmaster decreed his students would never play sport with girls from a rival college.
Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC) Sydney principal Dr Paul Burgis has cautioned that girls in coeducational schools risk being distracted by boys showing off, or joining in popularity contests to impress male classmates.
In a note to PLC parents this month, Dr Burgis gave an assurance that their daughters would never take part in any sporting, public speaking or musical collaboration with the soon-to-be coeducational Newington College.
“Pubescent girls benefit from being able to practice (sic) and play hard and freely, without an awareness of watching eyes,’’ he wrote.
“No coeducational school is allowed to compete in the sport, speech or cultural programs with IGSA (Independent Girls’ Schools Association) schools.
“I note this because if Newington is to become a coeducational school, it will need to look much further afield than the IGSA schools for its sport, public speaking and musical collaboration.’’
The February 8 email refers parents to a link to a longer missive Dr Burgis wrote in 2022, when Newington College announced its divisive plan to become a coeducational school.
Plans by the 161-year-old Uniting Church boys’ school to admit girls has upset an influential “old boys’’ network.
Some “Old Newingtonians’’ have even withdrawn their bequests to the school in protest.
Dr Burgis’s original missive – which was circulated among Old Newingtonians yesterday – noted that a successful co-ed school “needs to have a majority female population’’.
“I hold this view because in your average group of boys, some will be likely to take on the role of gaining attention by acting counter to what it is the class is trying to achieve,’’ he wrote.
“This may be outwardly disruptive behaviour, or it may be attention-seeking behaviour.
“It could have the purpose of creating laughter or fun.
“Girls are more likely to support the cultural project of the classroom, and would prefer to settle quickly, to be able to listen well, and to talk through any difficulties they might have.
“The needs of girls can easily be set aside in a coeducational setting.’’
The principal of PLC – which charges $42,000 a year in tuition fees for senior students – wrote that “girls learn better in single sex schools’’.
He said the “toughest school for girls’’ is one with a “male-oriented culture’’.
“Is it ethically a good idea to introduce girls because it could benefit boys?’’ he wrote.
“Why … would a highly successful school for boys, with long waiting lists, choose to go coeducational?
“They must have arrived at the belief that something in the culture of the boys is better if girls are about.
“The change is being driven by a perception about boys, rather than the needs of girls.’’
Dr Burgis wrote that “having boys about is an opportunity for distraction’’. “Some girls will seek to be ‘popular’ with the boys. “Others will feel the need to respond to this.’’
Dr Burgis wrote that “it is easy for some of us males, when relaxing, to take up quite a bit of room on the lounge’’.
“On average, we will take up more lounge space more often than our sisters,’’ he wrote. “The effect is that they will have to accommodate us. “In a girls school, girls get a comfortable seat on the lounge without even having to ask.’’
Dr Burgis yesterday told The Australian that his memos to parents should not be mistaken for “us seeking to tell a different independent school what they should do’’.
“Of course as a school which believes wholeheartedly in the education of girls in a single sex environment, PLC Sydney will communicate strongly and positively about the advantages of a girls only education to our families and the broader community,’’ he said.
“We will also explain how girls only sporting programs work.’’
A Newington College spokeswoman declined to comment on the rival school’s critique.
The Newington College website shows that it never intended to join the girls’-only IGSA sporting contests, but plans for girls to compete in the Independent Sporting Association (ISA) contests with co-ed schools Barker, Redlands and St Andrews.
Newington College, which charges up to $42,000 a year, will admit the first girls to preparatory and Year 5 students in 2026, but will wait until 2028 to admit the first female high school students to Years 7 and 11 until 2028.
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22 February, 2024
SCOTUS’s skittishness on race-based admissions suggests the left’s intimidation is working
The left’s drive to intimidate the Supreme Court is working: Just witness the justices’ decision to blink on an open-and-shut racial-discrimination case.
On Tuesday, the court declined to take on the question of race-based admissions at specialized high schools, effectively OK’ing policies that discriminate against Asian-American students.
Parents brought the case, Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, after Fairfax County, Va., rewrote the rules for entry to elite Thomas Jefferson HS for Science and Technology — ditching a process that relied mainly on race-blind standardized testing for one that auto-admitted students from each of the local middle schools and also considered factors like socioeconomic status.
The school claimed the new policies were “race neutral,” but communication between school officials and board members made it clear that increasing racial diversity (by decreasing the number of Asian-American students) was a primary goal of the change.
And, in fact, the change dropped Asian-American admissions from 70% to about 54% of the freshman class.
This cuts straight against the high court’s ruling in two college-admission cases (centered on Harvard and the University of North Carolina) last year, which ordered a complete end to race-based quotas, with strong language about not making up excuses for continued discrimination.
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, issued a scathing dissent to the court’s decision to not to take up the Virginia case, saying that the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in the school’s favor “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.”
Correct. So why did Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett take a dive?
Maybe they didn’t want to risk another controversial decision in a federal election year, after the Supremes’ strikedown of Roe v. Wade became a huge Democratic rallying cry in the 2022 midterms.
And never mind that while elites fumed over the college-admissions rulings, the majority of Americans, 68%, said the decision was “mostly a good thing.”
But perhaps the left’s long-term drive to delegitimize the court has the justices worried.
That includes physical intimidations like the protests outside justices’ homes in the runup to the Roe reversal, as well hysterical smears — of Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh during their confirmations, and bogus ethics complaints against Justice Thomas.
Not to mention the 2021 drive to pack the court with new liberal members.
The left’s message: If SCOTUS won’t give us what we want, there will be hell to pay.
Alito and Thomas deserve kudos for standing up to the bullies; too bad they seem to be standing alone.
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Chairwoman Foxx on Biden Transferring Billions in Student Loan Debt to Taxpayers
Education and the Workforce Committee:
WASHINGTON – Today, Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) issued the following statement in response to the Biden administration transferring $1.2 billion in student loan debt to taxpayers as President Biden continues to implement his radical income-driven repayment (IDR) rule—known as “Savings on a Valuable Education (SAVE)” plan:
“If President Biden spent half as much time working to address the root causes of our broken student loan system as he does peddling his illegal free college agenda, college costs would be lower, the student loan repayment process would be simpler, and students and families would be able to fill out the FAFSA.
“Unfortunately, Biden believes that more government dependence means more votes come election day—and as a result—has focused his time and energy on harmful initiatives to bolster his ratings.
“Don’t be fooled by this administration’s so-called free college agenda. It means less money in the pockets of hardworking taxpayers, more debt, and a continuing decline of an already failing student loan system.”
Biden’s SAVE scheme:
Is estimated to cost as much as $559 billion – making it the most expensive regulation in history and more than doubling the cost of the current IDR program.
Exacerbates the problems of rising college costs and excessive borrowing.
Subsidizes some graduate students’ loans more than what low-income households receive in federal housing assistance.
Guarantees that up to 80 percent of undergraduate student loan borrowers will never repay their loans fully.
More on Republican solutions to lower college costs:
Last month the Committee passed H.R. 6951, the College Cost Reduction Act. The bill includes bipartisan proposals to tackle widespread concern that the cost of postsecondary education has become insurmountable for too many Americans. This legislation addresses the issues of low completion rates, unaffordable student debt, and the inflated cost of obtaining a college degree. Specifically, H.R. 6951:
Ensures information about costs and return on investment is clear, accessible, and personalized for prospective students and families.
Holds institutions financially responsible for overpriced degrees that leave students with unaffordable debt.
Provides targeted relief to struggling borrowers rather than blanket bailouts for those who don’t need them.
Funds colleges based on student outcomes and lifts excessive regulations that further increase costs to families.
Press release
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Harvard condemns anti-Semitic image circulated by student and faculty groups
Harvard University issued a campuswide message Tuesday evening from its interim president condemning an antisemitic cartoon that was circulated – and then disavowed – by two student groups and a faculty organisation.
“Perpetuating vile and hateful antisemitic tropes, or otherwise engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or sharing images that demean people on the basis of their identity, is precisely the opposite of what this moment demands of us,” wrote Alan Garber, the university’s interim president.
“The University will review the situation to better understand who was responsible for the posting and to determine what further steps are warranted.”
The latest controversy at the prestigious university comes after a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism that played a role in the last president’s ouster, as well as recently launched federal investigations into antisemitism and anti-Muslim harassment on a number of campuses, including Harvard.
The cartoon was featured in a recent post on Instagram attempting to link the Black and Palestinian “liberation movements.” The cartoon depicted a hand etched with a Star of David and a dollar sign holding a noose around the necks of what appear to be the Black boxer and activist Muhammad Ali and Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was a longtime president of Egypt. The three groups that posted the image issued apologies after it sparked criticism on social media.
“The inclusion of the offensive caricature was an unprompted, painful error – a combination of ignorance and inadequate oversight,” wrote the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and Harvard’s African and African-American Resistance Organization in a joint statement. The groups said the cartoon had come from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an activist organisation from the 1960s.
“We apologise for the hurt that these images have caused and do not condone them in any way,” wrote the Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, which had reposted the image. “Harvard FSJP stands against all forms of hate and bigotry including antisemitism.” Walter Johnson, professor of History and of African and African-American Studies, resigned as a faculty adviser to the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and from Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.
“Like many others, I was shocked and dismayed by the image,” he wrote in an email to The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “I have stepped down from both my role as faculty adviser to the PSC and FSJP. I remain supportive of the work of those organisations in calling attention to the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. My conversations with my students and colleagues, however, are private, and I won’t comment on them.”
The university said in a statement Monday that it is reviewing the matter and referring it to the Harvard College Administrative Board, suggesting that disciplinary action could follow.
Not everyone was satisfied with the apologies. Harvard’s Jewish Law Students Association issued a statement saying that the post of the cartoon was shared by several other Harvard student groups.
“At a time when antisemitic incidents are at an all-time high and Holocaust denial is spreading both in the U.S. and abroad, Harvard faculty and students must understand and be held to account for the tremendous consequences of proliferating insidious tropes,” the group wrote. “Merely acknowledging that their content was ‘antiquated’ or removing their post does not remedy the harm they caused by lending credibility to antisemitic falsehoods.” Harvard has endured widespread scrutiny since some critics and donors accused the former president of not swiftly condemning the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and not adequately addressing antisemitism on campus. In a December congressional hearing, its then-president, Claudine Gay, was asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct. She responded that it could, depending on the context. Gay resigned in January after she was later accused of plagiarism.
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21 February, 2024
University of Chichester students launch discrimination claim after 'decolonising' black history degree is axed
University students have launched a discrimination claim after a 'decolonising' black history course was scrapped. They say the University of Chichester breached the Equality Act as the course was created to encourage more black students into academia.
The History of Africa and the African Diaspora Master's by Research (MRes) was set up in 2017 to 'decolonise the curriculum'. It was led by Professor Hakim Adi, who was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.
Labelled the first African-British history professor in the UK, Professor Adi said the axing was an 'attack' on black history.
He added yesterday: 'As a result of the MRes, we encouraged many black students to embark on PhD research. We established one of the largest cohorts of black postgraduate history students in the country. 'These students have been left without appropriate supervision and their studies have been completely disrupted.'
Figures in the curriculum included Haitian independence leader Toussaint Louverture, South African human rights activist Alice Kinloch, and Amy Ashwood Garvey, co-founder of Jamaica's Universal Negro Improvement Association and wife of Marcus Garvey.
Last summer, the university announced the course would be suspended because too few students signed up, which led to Professor Adi losing his job. It said the course was financially unviable to take on new applicants but existing students could continue.
However, the 14 students taking action say they are not taught by a specialist and have launched a 'letter before action', alleging discrimination and breach of contract.
Jacqueline McKenzie, of lawyers Leigh Day, which is representing the students, said the axing of the course 'stopped our clients' academic careers in their tracks', branding the decision 'clear discrimination'.
Jabari Osaze, an MRes student said: 'Chichester should have focused its efforts on recruiting more students like me but instead it seems they undervalued the programme.
'They have treated their students and the world-renowned expert historian who ran the programme extremely poorly.'
An online petition has gained 14,000 signatures and an open letter has been signed by more than 300 academics and staff.
In a linked case, the Black Equity Organisation is also bringing legal action and has issued a judicial review.
A university spokesman said: 'The MRes programme has not been terminated for existing students but is suspended to new applicants pending a review.
'PhD students study individual programmes of research and should not be conflated with the MRes programme.
'The university is committed to ensuring that all existing students are able to complete their studies successfully and that alternative teaching and supervisory arrangements are in place for these students.'
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California substitute teacher left elementary school students in tears after watching ‘inappropriate images’ in class
A California substitute teacher was removed from his classroom after viewing “inappropriate images” in front of his elementary students — a traumatic event that left several students in tears, officials said.
West Covina Unified School District Superintendent Emy Flores said that the disturbing incident occurred sometime before noon Friday, shortly before a concerned parent called Cameron Elementary School demanding to know why her son had called her sobbing.
When the school’s principal Slyvia Fullerton checked on the boy, she instead found “several students crying,” Flores said in a statement Sunday.
The substitute teacher — who has not been named — was ordered to leave the classroom while Fullerton tried to reassure the traumatized children before ultimately bringing them to the on-site Mental Wellness Room.
According to the kids, the man was watching “naked people” on his phone, which was blatantly displayed within the young students’ line of vision, exasperated parents told NBC 4.
Parent Stacy Mathews claimed many of the students huddled together in a corner because they felt uncomfortable. “He wouldn’t let them go to the bathroom,” Mathews told the station.
After learning what had happened, Flores immediately alerted district administrators, Child Protective Services and local law enforcement to investigate the perverted claims.
As of Wednesday, there have been no arrests in the case, but the West Covina Police Department said a probe into the incident is ongoing. “We want to reassure the community that the police department is treating these allegations with the utmost seriousness. An investigation is currently underway to thoroughly examine the situation and gather all the necessary information,” Chief Richard Bell said in a statement.
Flores said the substitute teacher had passed a rigorous background check without alerting district officials to any red flags.
Dozens of parents protested outside the elementary school Tuesday, demanding that law enforcement arrest the substitute teacher.
“When we found out on Saturday that he wasn’t arrested, [my daughter] was scared thinking that he was going to come back and come back to get them for tattling, is how she worded it,” Mathews said.
West Covina is a suburban city located roughly 19 miles east of Downtown Los Angeles.
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‘We made the wrong decisions’: COVID-era mass school closures condemned
Mass school closures that stretched for months during the pandemic were unnecessary and led to a cascade of social and educational problems that threaten a generation of Australian children, top education experts say.
Governments have failed to examine the fallout from one of the most far-reaching decisions prompted by COVID-19, which disrupted the schooling of millions of students and resulted in an attendance crisis and persistent behavioural issues.
A panel of pre-eminent Australian education experts has flagged the profound impacts that school closures during COVID-19 have had on students’ education and wellbeing.
They called for a plan for future closures that puts the long and short-term needs of children at the centre of policy decision-making.
The Sydney Morning Herald convened experts on education and child social development to assess the impact of COVID on students after the federal government failed to include the decision to close schools in its independent inquiry into how the nation managed the pandemic.
They included the chair of the NSW education regulator, Peter Shergold, and the National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds.
Schools in NSW switched to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. Strict infection controls continued to interrupt learning and social interaction for months on end.
The COVID fallout: Education
This month marks four years since China’s COVID-19 outbreak was deemed a public health emergency of international concern, heralding the start of a traumatic period many of us would prefer to forget. While a federal government inquiry is examining some national responses to the crisis, key decisions made by states will not be properly scrutinised.
The Herald is concerned our political leaders have not adequately studied the lessons – good and bad – of our most recent experience, and we plan to ask tough questions over the coming months about the pandemic’s impact on education, health, border closures and lockdowns and policing. This is the first of our three-part series looking at the impact of COVID on education. The forum discussions with nine expert panellists were broken up into two sessions: one examining the wellbeing and behaviour of students, the second on academic and learning disruption.
The panellists warned the aftershocks of the decision to close schools are still being felt in classrooms, playgrounds and homes. Some of the worst aspects were the skyrocketing truancy rate, school refusal and significant issues with student discipline and distraction in the classroom, and self-regulation in the playground.
Shergold, a former top public servant who led an independent review into the pandemic in 2022, said the lingering effects of school shutdowns on students, teachers and parents underscored the importance of scrutinising unilateral decisions by state governments to mandate remote learning.
In September, the federal government announced a long-awaited inquiry into the pandemic response, but school closures are not included in the terms of reference. Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has previously joined health experts in urging the inquiry to examine the social damage and repercussions of long periods of remote learning.
“The danger of school closures, which we always knew, was that it was going to accentuate disadvantage,” said Shergold. “After the closures in early 2020, we made the wrong policy decisions about closing school systems.”
In NSW, more than 1.2 million students either learned remotely or had minimal supervision in schools for more than five months. Schools were shut down between March and May in 2020, and then again in 2021 from July to the end of October. Hundreds of schools and childcare centres were closed again in the following months.
Unlike in Victoria, there was minimal supervision at schools for students, but attendance was discouraged. Shergold said the unity of national cabinet fractured as state governments forged ahead with decisions to shut schools, despite the federal government urging parents to send their children to classes.
State decisions were often politically driven, some panellists said, ignoring the risk of long-lasting impacts on young children and teenagers, especially the most disadvantaged students who were most affected by the closures.
“It was clearly the Commonwealth position to keep school systems open,” Shergold said. “It was states that were unpersuaded, and that’s why this present inquiry seems so bizarre that we’re not going to address their policy responses. It’s a crucial part of the story and ensuring that we’re better prepared for the next pandemic.”
He said early in 2020 there “was a fog of war, and there was ill preparation – in Australia between federal and state governments – for a pandemic”, noting it was understandable schools closed in the first months.
But after evidence emerged that children were less likely to spread the virus, and schools were not transmission hotspots, the system-wide closures were unwarranted, he said.
“We had Treasury pleading with us not to shut school systems. Part of the issue was that parents started to voluntarily withdraw their children from schools, and they were voting with their feet ... I think NSW reacted to that,” he said.
The state government also faced persistent pressure from the NSW Teachers Federation to shut down in-person classes, leaving minimal staffing to support essential frontline services workers. Some of Sydney’s private schools began to defy official advice and close, putting pressure on other systems to follow suit.
The advice provided by chief health officers was that attending school represented a low health risk to students, and studies in 2021 reaffirmed transmission between children in schools was minimal.
Hollonds agreed the first closure early in the pandemic, which lasted seven weeks, was unavoidable, but the longer closure of 2021 was unnecessary.
“Maybe they should have only been short term, where there was a ‘hot-spot’, not the 15 weeks we saw across all of NSW,” she said.
She said the public debate over school closures not only ignored the needs of children, but demonised them as “germy super-spreaders”. “It felt Dickensian, some of that discourse,” she said.
Shergold noted that the shift to online learning was implemented well across systems and schools, and effort was made to address the digital divide. But he emphasised that after the first mass closures a more targeted approach should have been taken to only close individual schools when needed.
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20 February, 2024
Edinburgh University’s new rector must save it from gender ideology
Simon Fanshawe has been installed as the rector of Edinburgh University. The arrival of the comedian and Stonewall dissident to the post will hopefully bring to an end a dismal episode in the life of one of Britain’s greatest academic institutions. But don’t bank on it. The campaign by transgender activists and others to uninstall Mr Fanshawe is already underway – and they know what they are doing.
For the past decade a collection of campus zealots has been allowed to run rampant in this supposed seat of higher learning. They have threatened the health and livelihoods of lecturers and banned freedom of speech – often with the tacit acquiescence of the university authorities.
One of Mr Fanshawe’s predecessors as rector, the Labour Party activist and feminist Ann Henderson, became afraid to appear on campus following her intimidation by trans activists, annoyed that she wouldn’t utter the dogma that ‘transwomen are women’. With the endorsement of the University and College Union (UCU) these activists have been allowed to prevent the showing of films like ‘Adult Human Female’, which was regarded as transphobic because it questions gender ideology. James Kirkup shed light on this in The Spectator as the editor of Edinburgh’s student newspaper wrote about why she stood by her decision not to cover the film’s screening.
This academic institution has been invaded by the curious quasi-religious belief that people can change sex by an act of the imagination.
Liberal minded academics like the social scientist Dr Neil Thin have faced attempts to hound them out of their jobs. In Thin’s case, it was for simply making wry observations about student groups claiming to be anti-racist yet holding events that excluded white people. Dr Thin also criticised the lamentable decision by the University Court to cancel the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume on the basis of an allegedly racist footnote to an 18th-century essay.
At the height of the recent campus culture war, university authorities shamefully agreed to rename the Hume Tower after they received a petition from students claiming that it offended the international student body. They couldn’t bear the pain of attending lectures in a building dedicated to such a racist, even though Hume was a lifelong opponent of racism. They were reportedly going to rename it the Julius Nyerere tower, until someone pointed out that the Tanzanian dictator and Edinburgh alumnus was a rampant homophobe. It is now called after its address, 40 George Square – which was built in 1766 and bears the name of the monarch, George III, who vastly extended the British Empire. It would take a stone not to laugh.
Mr Fanshawe will find no shortage of comic material in Edinburgh University campus but the campaign against him is no joke. The black-balling bigots are well versed in the arts of covert intimidation and until now have gone largely unchallenged by a supine university administration that seems incapable of defending its own staff let alone freedom of speech.
So who are these people? Edinburgh University Labour Students have leapt to condemn Fanshawe’s election because of his alleged views on transgenderism. An open letter has been set up by an anonymous user on Organise.com that accuses the new rector of being a transphobe and a bigot.
Fanshawe is neither. Nor has he threatened ‘the legitimacy of trans people’ as has been alleged by Jonathan MacBride of the University’s staff pride network. Fanshawe was one of the founders of the LGBT campaign group Stonewall and has been a lifelong campaigner for the rights of sexual minorities. His crime however has been to be openly critical of Stonewall’s insistence on promoting the idea that ‘transwomen are women’ and demonising anyone who disagrees. He has also spoken in favour of ‘women’s sex-based rights and protections’, rather in the manner of the author JK Rowling who has been one of the biggest donors to the University in the past. Certainly, the group Edinburgh Academics for Academic Freedom can hardly believe what has happened: ‘We’re over the moon’
The fact that the lecturers’ trade union, the UCU, has supported the curbs on free speech and thought in Edinburgh University, for example with the Adult Human Female showing, tells you all you need to know. This academic institution has been invaded by the curious quasi-religious belief that people can change sex by an act of the imagination.
I am myself a former elected rector of Edinburgh University and I have been bewildered and appalled at what has happened to this institution since I stood down in 2012. I could never have imagined that this flight into obscurantism could have happened here of all places. But as Sir Tom Devine, emeritus professor of history at Edinburgh, said: ‘A sinister culture had been allowed to develop in Scotland’s greatest university.’ Hopefully Fanshawe, an open-minded rector and chair of the university court, will be able to guide this addled institution back to something resembling sanity.
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Drag as Subversive Education
One element of the LGBTQ+ assault on childhood is Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), in which children are entertained by fat men dressed as prostitutes. These events have become common across the country in libraries, bookstores, schools, and (God help us) church.
Since no child has ever asked to be read to by a freakish man bursting out of a spandex dress, woke parents presumably expose their children to DQSH to advertise their own progressive bona fides. Drag is, indisputably, “adult” entertainment for a hardcore sexual subculture, but the woke narrative maintains that the raunch is toned down for the kiddies. “It’s innocent fun!” “Kids love dressing up in bright colors and glitter!” “There’s no explicit stuff, so what’s the harm?” “It’s an entertaining family atmosphere!”
But Big Drag (yes, DQSH has turned into an industry) is a bit more honest about what’s going on than are the welcoming venues and complicit parents. The home website crows that DQSH “captures . . . the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids . . . unabashedly queer role models. . . .” Presenting gender fluidity as an established fact and offering “queer role models” to children suggests that the goal isn’t just to entertain but to accomplish something that starts with “gr” and ends with “ooming.”
And Big Drag’s aspirations go far beyond the occasional event at the local library. Academic literature from the realm of K-12 education now argues that drag should be considered a valid part of a child’s schooling. That literature, buried in journals the average person will never read, removes any doubt about what DSQH’s “family-friendly fun” is actually up to.
A good example of the academic infusion of drag into schooling is a 2021 paper published in the journal Curriculum Inquiry and entitled “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood.” The paper is co-authored by a Canadian education professor and a New York drag queen who goes by “Lil Miss Hot Mess.” (Yes, that’s the name under which he published this supposedly professional paper.)
This paper promotes “queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education” and describes drag as one of these components. Drag, it argues, is a way to teach children to be transgressive, to break rules and deconstruct norms. DQSH is thus part of what the paper advocates as “drag pedagogy” that “offers one model for learning not simply about queer lives, but how to live queerly” (emphasis in the original). “This approach,” the paper says, “can support students in finding the unique or queer aspects of themselves – rather than attempting to understand what it’s like to be LGBG.”
So drag helps children learn not just to empathize with people who identify as LGBT, but to live that way themselves. Further, this shattering of norms must extend beyond sex roles and behaviors to disruption of the racist, white-supremacist capitalist system itself (what the paper calls “coloniality and racial capitalism” that imposes “gender normativity” on children who just want to be free – to “live queerly”).
The paper repeatedly emphasizes drag as a vehicle for deconstructing all aspects of normal society. While learning through play is a staple of early-childhood pedagogy, this paper argues that drag is an even better form of educational play because “it ultimately has no rules – its defining quality is often to break as many rules as possible! . . . [D]rag is firmly rooted in play as a site of queer pleasure, resistance, and self-fashioning.” The drag queen’s presence announces that the focus will be on “bending and breaking the rules” with “a premium on standing out, on artfully desecrating the sacred.” He will “foster collective unruliness” so that children will learn “strategic defiance” of all limits and norms.
The paper also promotes what it calls “camp curriculum” – “embrac[ing] failure and shame.” For example, the picture book The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish “encourages kids to move their hips in ways often coded as effeminate.” (This book was written by Lil Miss Hot Mess, of whose literary talents there apparently is no end.) And drag has a strong element of critical theory, encouraging the analysis and deconstruction of culture through a queer lens.
An arresting admission in the DQSH paper occurs as a brief mention in the Conclusion section. Normal people are constantly assured that children are safe at LGBTQ events such as DQSH and pride parades because those events are designed to be “family-friendly” (see here, here, and here, for example). Is DQSH in fact family-friendly?
"It may be that DQSH is 'family friendly,' in the sense that t is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is 'family friendly' in the sense of 'family' as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street," the paper offered.
In other words, DQSH isn’t intended to offer children wholesome entertainment free of sexual imagery or innuendo; rather, it aims to welcome kids into the greater queer “family,” where they can shake off all conventions, norms, and values - including those of their parents. This “old-school queer code” is being used to snooker naïve parents into handing over their children to a very different, and very dark, world.
From the queens’ point of view, perhaps the greatest advantage of DQSH is the simplest: It gives them physical access to innocent children. The paper agrees that “many queens reflect that DQSH allows them to build relationships with young people that otherwise might not be possible.” What is meant by “building relationships” is left unsaid.
If woke parents understood what DQSH advocates are actually trying to accomplish, they might let their kids spend their free time playing in the back yard. But given the cultural lure of appearing more progressive than thou, maybe not. In any event, DQSH has a mission, and that mission extends far beyond bright colors and glitter.
https://townhall.com/columnists/janerobbins/2024/02/20/drag-as-subversive-education-n2635455
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A Teacher Was Filmed Cross-Dressing at School. Here's What Happened Next
A Texas teacher who was filmed cross-dressing at school was placed on administrative leave after a video of his extravagant Valentine’s Day outfit was circulated by Libs of TikTok.
The teacher, Rachmad Tjachyadi, teaches chemistry at Hebron High School in Lewisville.
According to the New York Post, Tjachyadi wore an “all-out pink dress and cowboy hat” on Valentine’s Day at the school. A video of the outfit was posted on X (formerly known as Twitter).
Libs of TikTok claimed that the teacher has a fetish for wearing women’s clothing.
In an email to parents, Hebron Principal Amy Boughton said, “the staff member has been placed on administrative leave while the district reviews the situation.”
“It would be natural for our families to have questions about this situation, but because this is a personnel matter currently under review, there is no additional information the district can share,” Boughton added.
Students at the school have created an online Change.org petition demanding that he be allowed back to school. So far, it has over 12,000 signatures.
"Recently, Mr.Tjachyadi was put on blast on twitter for wearing a pink dress for a spirit day. He is being called a pedophile, among other names, however, this is NOT the case and he is beloved by many students at Hebron. He is a great teacher, he explains chemistry very well and has created a very fun and safe environment for his students. He does not deserve to be defamed and lose his job,” the description stated.
“He has been an inspiration to many students, and has created a space where everyone can feel valued and safe. He is in no way a pedophile or publicizing a "fetish,” it added.
Reportedly, Tjachyadi has been teaching in Texas schools since 2002.
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19 February, 2024
Texas High School Put Students on Panel to Review Sexually Explicit Books
A high school principal in Texas slow-walked a review of nearly 200 books in the school library that parents flagged for sexually explicit material, setting a timetable of 22 years to reconsider them, according to documents and emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
Parents in Llano, Texas, told The Daily Signal that they began expressing concerns to Llano High School’s principal in January 2023 about library books rated “adult” by the publishers. Several of the books include extremely graphic sex scenes.
The parents shared their emails to Llano Principal Scott Patrick with The Daily Signal, which has not been able to verify their authenticity independently. The high school didn’t confirm or deny the authenticity of the emails, which also indicate that Patrick included students on a panel reviewing challenged books.
Llano High School serves 529 students in Llano Independent School District, based in Llano, Texas.
On Jan. 17, Bonnie Wallace, the mother of a former student, filed a detailed form, called a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” for the book “Call Me by Your Name” by Andre Aciman, which was available for students to check out of the high school library.
Wallace said the book contains explicit sexual scenes that are unsuitable for distribution to minors by a taxpayer-funded school, such as this one on page 144:
I saw one of them enter my room and reach for the fruit, and with the fruit in hand, come to my bed and bring it to my hard c***… and gently press the soft overripe peach on my c*** till I’d pierced the fruit along the crease that reminded me so much of Oliver’s a**.
A Texas bill passed in June 2023, the READER Act, requires public schools to remove books that include material that is “sexually explicit, harmful, pervasively vulgar, or educationally unsuitable” from classrooms and libraries accessible to minors. The law reinforces existing Texas Education Agency policy forbidding schools from providing explicit materials to minors.
Through January, Wallace filed reports on four other books with similar issues for concerned parents.
Patrick didn’t remove the books or respond to the vulgar, sexually explicit paragraphs that Wallace cited in her reports. It appears that the high school’s principal also ignored or disregarded books’ changed statuses as “adult” by publishers and distributors.
The book “A Court of Silver Flames” by Sarah Maas contains multiple scenes in which the narrator describes a character’s request to “f*** me … on this table, on this chair, on every surface in this house.”
Other sexual scenes in Maas’ book are too vulgar for The Daily Signal to print, yet students may read them in Llano High School’s library.
The publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, changed the rating of the Maas’ entire “Court of Thorns and Roses” series from “young adult” to “adult” in September 2020, as Wallace pointed out to Patrick in an email. As of publication of this story, the designation for “A Court of Silver Flames’” remains “young adult” in Llano High School’s library.
In a January 22 email obtained by The Daily Signal, Patrick laid out for Wallace and other parents how the school district would review the cited books. The principal said he anticipated that process would take “roughly 30 days” for each book. His email suggests that the committee would review books one at a time.
Parents have reported 198 books in Llano High School as violating the Texas Education Agency’s regulation and the Texas READER Act. At a rate of nine working months per year, Patrick’s email suggests that the Llano school district would spend over 22.5 years reviewing the cited books.
On Friday, exactly 30 days later, Patrick informed Wallace of the reconsideration committee’s decision on “Call Me by Your Name,” the first of the concerning books in line.
“The reconsideration committee has voted to remove the book from circulation by a vote of 7:0,” the principal wrote.
Patrick didn’t provide a reason in the email for removing the book, nor did he respond to The Daily Signal’s question about why the book remained on the shelves of his school’s library during the review.
The other books with explicit passages, cited in forms shared by parents, appear to remain accessible to students in Llano High School’s library. The Daily Signal sought to confirm this with Patrick and the school district, but neither responded by publication time.
According to Patrick’s emails, the “book reconsideration” committee included students until a lawyer recommended their removal from the process. It isn’t clear when the school district or the high school selected students to review the sexually explicit books, nor how many students of what ages were recruited.
Neither Patrick nor any other administrator in the Llano school district answered The Daily Signal’s questions about how students found out about the book review committee and were added to it, or why Patrick suddenly removed them.
Patrick told Wallace in a Jan. 31 email: “Students were placed on the committee after the district received parental consent for them to participate.”
In a Feb. 6 email to Wallace, Patrick said of the students on the review committee: “Although their participation is allowed by policy, the district determined it is in their best interest to be removed from the process so that they are insulated from any potential controversy.”
The Llano school district did not confirm the authenticity of the emails and forms sent between Patrick and Wallace.
Assuming the emails are authentic, Patrick may have recognized a potential controversy in asking students, some perhaps minors, to read “adult” books with passages detailing sex, gore, and drug use in vulgar fashion.
The school district’s 2023-2024 Student Handbook bans the use of “profane language” in class and on clothing, which presumably includes vulgar slang for male and female genitalia and sexual acts.
According to parents, Patrick acknowledged receiving complaints highlighting sexual passages in the books. The principal didn’t explain why he didn’t immediately remove the books from the school library until they had been reviewed, given parents’ concerns.
Parents told The Daily Signal that the books remain available in the school library while under review.
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The fight for civilization in higher education
Hatred of Western civilization is the bittersweet of the college curriculum. It is an invasive idea that once ensconced in the classroom strangles every other idea in the minds of many students. It reduces the world into a neat division between the Evil West and the Innocent Rest. In this arrangement, the latter maintain their innocence no matter what they do. Hamas is but the latest beneficiary of this indulgence. Montaigne found nobility in his 1590 essay, “Of Cannibals,” in the Brazilians who cooked their enemies for food. Western intellectuals been busy ever since devising excuses for those who prize primitive appetite over civilized rule.
This romancing of the barbaric is helped along by the ease of finding plenty of episodes in the Western past — and present — in which civilization failed to prevent our descent into horrific acts, or worse, the perpetrators of horrors announced they were indeed the agents of civilization. Were the Argives at Troy civilized? The Athenians of the Peloponnesian wars? There is no shortage of savagery in Western history, up through and including slavery, genocide and world war.
So by what stretch do we call ourselves civilized and mean by that something good? That question is the seed of the bittersweet vine that will strangle all education if we let it in.
Therefore, it is best to answer the question. We are civilized because we recognize a sovereign God of justice and mercy. We are civilized because we recognize that the universe is governed by laws that can be discovered through rational inquiry. We are civilized because we have harnessed the powers of literacy and mechanical innovation. We are civilized because we conceive all of humanity as possessing fundamental dignity. All of these are perfectly good answers and, of course, they are all part of endless and unresolved dispute. To be civilized is to take that dispute seriously. Whether we are under God’s laws or a godless nature’s laws; whether we possess spiritual kinship or merely biological affinity; whether we are accidental “winners” by virtue of guns, germs and steel, or the purposeful champions of higher values, we the civilized are always struggling to say what that means.
The uncivilized are those who sneer at the whole idea. They go for the easy answer that civilization is just the exercise of brute power by those in a position to exert it, though they typically disguise their domination by spreading lies to control the minds of those they oppress.
This is, I confess, a hurried lesson in how the anti-civilization forces have gained ground in higher education. Their primary teaching is that Western civilization is a terrible thing, but its terrors can only be seen clearly by those who have learned how to see through the illusions by which it shields itself from critical examination. The purpose of higher education, in this view, is literally to dis-illusion students. They need to acquire sufficient cynicism to free themselves from Western civilization’s constant efforts to raise itself up as good. “Wokeness” is acquired by spitting at those efforts.
Anti-civilization now has a strong grip on most of our colleges and universities. In what I will venture to call the post-Gay era — as in Claudine, not LGBTQ — however, we are seeing some signs of civilization getting back on its feet. The latest of these is a bill introduced in the Utah legislature, SB-226, which would, to quote Stanley Kurtz, “restore the kind of Great Books curriculum centered on Western civilization, American history, and civics that was central to American higher education until the past few decades.”
The bill, the “School of General Education Act,” has a long way to go before becoming law, but as far as I know, it is the first serious attempt in our era by a state legislature to insist that all students in a state’s public university system take a prescribed sequence of courses that will take them through most of Western history from Homer to Hannah Arendt and beyond. Kurtz’s explanation is better than any I can provide, so I will leave that to him. But I should acknowledge that one of my staff at the National Association of Scholars, David Randall, a historian of Western civilization, is among those who drafted a model curriculum that the Utah legislators appear to have studied.
The prime mover of the Utah legislation is Senate education committee chairman John Johnson, who is an economist and a professor at the John M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. Senator Johnson’s academic position is worth noting because economics — and his specialty, management information systems — is far enough away from the humanities and (the soft) social sciences to be insulated from the worst of anti-Western hysteria that pervades so much of higher education. Who would have thought that an economist would lead the charge to restore the West? That’s easy. Anybody paying attention.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-fight-for-civilization-in-higher-education
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The NYT finally admits it: Schools are teaching our kids divisive critical race theory
Schools are just teaching honest history.
That’s been the lie educators, teachers unions and the mainstream media have parroted for three years in response to the growing chorus of parents of all political stripes asserting schools are indoctrinating the nation’s children in critical race theory and leftist politics.
Now the paper of record concedes we parents were right.
In a front-page article in Friday’s New York Times, “Ethnic Studies Collides With Israel-Hamas War,” education reporter Dana Goldstein exposes the truth about K-12 education.
The article is ostensibly about the blatant antisemitism embedded in California’s ethnic-studies curriculum, which must be in all public high schools by 2025 and a graduation requirement by 2030.
The legislation was pushed, of course, by the 310,000-member-strong California Teachers Association, the largest affiliate of our country’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association.
As Goldstein reports, pro-Palestinian activism is a core component of the ethnic-studies discipline.
California’s curriculum likens Palestinians to Native Americans, refers to Israel’s founding as “settler colonialism,” categorizes Israeli Jews as “European settlers” and oppressors and harps on the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement.
Goldstein quotes University of California, Riverside, professor Dylan Rodriguez equating teaching Zionism to teaching creationism and climate-change denialism; he “would analogize” learning about Israel’s creation to “learning the history of slavery.”
While the antisemitism embedded in ethnic studies is newsworthy enough, it’s not the big story here.
In a 2022 white paper, “The Very Foundation of Good Citizenship: The Legal and Pedagogical Case for Culturally Responsive and Racially Inclusive Public Education for All Students,” the NEA defines ethnic studies as “the interdisciplinary study of the social, political, economic, and historical perspectives of the United States’ diverse racial and ethnic groups. Ethnic studies helps foster cross-cultural understanding among both students of color and white students, and aids students in valuing their own cultural identity while appreciating the differences around them.”
Goldstein exposes this as a lie.
Ethnic studies, Rodriguez explains, is not “a descriptive curriculum that speaks to various ethnic and racial groups’ experiences.”
It’s “a critical analysis of the way power works in societies.”
Goldstein herself confesses ethnic studies is indeed “ideological” and California’s 700-page model curriculum “retains the discipline’s leftist, activist bent,” asking: “How should millions of California teenagers engage with these explicitly activist concepts in the classroom?”
And now the kicker: Critical race theory and systemic racism are “key concepts in the discipline,” and California’s curriculum includes “gender expression.”
The New York Times — on its cover no less — just confirmed everything parents have been ridiculed, shamed, silenced and labeled domestic terrorists by our own federal government for saying.
Lest one think the discipline is confined to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s progressive paradise and its 1.9 million public high-school students, the Times reports that states across the country are planning legislation to introduce K-12 ethnic studies.
Nor is ethnic studies confined to a single class.
California schools can “incorporate ethnic studies either as a stand-along course or by adding an ethnic studies lens to subjects such as history or literature.” This is key.
American education has been thoroughly corrupted. Schools say they teach English and history, but they don’t.
They use these subjects as props to promote a political agenda.
Math and science aren’t unaffected.
Uber-prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy offers a course on Mathematics of Social Justice.
Rice University, often called the Harvard of the South, recently made headlines for its new offering, Afrochemistry.
Ethnic studies’ ideology, rooted in critical race theory and based on power dynamics and the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy, is embedded in nearly every K-12 school and university in this country.
It’s the foundation of the diversity-equity-and-inclusion regime implanted in our corporations, military and federal government.
It took the horrific events of Oct. 7 and the explosion of antisemitism in its aftermath for many to wake up to the toxic progressive ideology that’s corrupted our institutions and education system.
Even The New York Times has spoken.
Just as it finally gave us permission to question lab leaks and masks’ utility, acknowledge the harms of school closures and gender-transition surgeries and discuss President Biden’s mental acuity, we now have clearance to talk about our kids’ political indoctrination in polite company.
Let’s hope this spurs more of us to find the courage to speak up and join the fight to take back our schools.
Our country’s survival depends on it.
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18 February, 2024
The Poison Ivy League: How Taxpayers Subsidize Wealthy Universities
The federal government provides enormous subsidies to the wealthiest universities in the country. People may imagine that the bulk of these subsidies assist low-income students in covering the high and rising costs of attending these universities, but that is not what the federal government primarily funds. The largest type of subsidy that wealthy universities receive is in the form of payments for overhead costs on federal research grants. During fiscal year (FY) 2022, Ivy League universities received $1.8 billion for overhead on government-funded research grants. That represents 84 percent of the total amount of government subsidy those universities received.
Research grants are not subsidies, because every dollar received has to be spent according to the terms of the grant. But for every dollar Ivy League universities receive for research, they charge the government an additional 64 cents, on average, for overhead. Ostensibly, overhead covers things such as the cost of the building where the research takes place and the electricity that keeps the lights on. But universities do not have to account for the use of these funds for overhead. They can be used for virtually any purposes that university administrators prefer, and, as past research has demonstrated, these discretionary uses of overhead funds include building diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies and indulging whatever other ideological activity they wish..
The money that directly funds research may not be a subsidy, but the overhead—or, as it is often called, “indirect” money—is clearly a subsidy, because it is almost entirely fungible and unaccountable.
The eight universities in the Ivy League receive $1.8 billion each year from taxpayers despite the fact that these universities are sitting on $192 billion in endowment funds. If they need money for buildings and electricity, donors have already given them plenty. There is no need for taxpayers to give the richest universities $1.8 billion each year to cover the costs of buildings that their donors have already enabled them to maintain and update.
It makes no sense for taxpayers to continue to subsidize the construction of new research infrastructure at wealthy universities unless there is a specific justification, such as supporting the construction of a particular telescope, laser, or particle accelerator. Giving taxpayer money to wealthy universities that already have plenty of resources for buildings, laboratories, and maintenance is simply providing those institutions with a slush fund that they can use for any purpose, including those hostile to taxpayers’ preferences and interests.
Just as the tax code often phases out subsidies such as the child tax credit for wealthier individuals, governmental programs that fund university research could phase out the provision of overhead funding for wealthier universities. Arguably, universities with more than $5 billion in endowment do not require any money from taxpayers to build and maintain their research infrastructure. And perhaps the rate for overhead could be capped at 15 cents for every dollar meant for research for universities with more than $2 billion in endowment—significantly less than the overhead rates in excess of 60 cents now common at universities.
There is no reason to fear a mass abandonment of research if taxpayers fail to lavish extra money for overhead on universities that already have the research infrastructure. Those universities have reputational reasons to conduct research even if doing so does not generate a slush fund for administrators. And there is reason to hope that redirecting overhead subsidies outside of the few dozen universities that are too rich to need it might help spread research expertise more evenly around the country, improving educational and economic opportunities in large parts of the country that currently have their best researchers hired away to the coasts by the richest universities.
Capping and eliminating overhead subsidies is likely to be broadly popular. The only opposition is most likely to come from the highly paid administrators and researchers at wealthy universities. But universities and researchers at other institutions would be helped or unaffected, because their overhead funding would not change or might increase. Those interested in maximizing the benefits of government-funded research would also be helped or unaffected because the nation’s total capacity to produce research would remain unchanged or expand. And most importantly, taxpayers would benefit by no longer having to pay for unaccountable slush funds at wealthy universities that do not need that money to do their jobs.
The Origin and Purpose of Overhead on Research Grants
The federal government began systematically funding scientific research at universities following World War II. Several federal agencies pay for this research, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Office of Naval Research, and U.S. Department of Education. From the beginning, federal sponsors of research provided some funds for overhead with their research grants.2
Greene and Schoof, “Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense.”
At first, the rate was capped at 8 percent, meaning that for every dollar supporting itemized research costs, universities could get an additional 8 cents to cover the fixed costs of building and maintaining a research infrastructure. That cap was raised to 15 percent and then 20 percent. In 1966 the cap was removed and universities were simply allowed to set rates based on an arbitrary cost formula that is easily inflated but provides a “patina of objectivity and technical respectability.”
Once the cap was removed, the rate universities charged for overhead rose dramatically so that by 1990 the rate at Stanford was 70 percent. A series of scandals revealed that these overhead funds were being used for things such as yachts and redecorating the offices of university administrators. Rates dropped below 50 percent before creeping up over 60 percent in recent years.
There is no question that research activity involves both direct costs that can be attributed to the specific project and indirect costs that have to be spread across the entire set of research activities at a university. The amount required for these indirect or overhead costs is ambiguous and has clearly varied dramatically across time.
Universities that have less private support may need public assistance in building and maintaining their research infrastructure if it is a priority to increase total research activity. But universities that have generous private support, as indicated by very large endowments, do not require public assistance to have significant research capacity. To put in perspective how rich U.S. universities can be, Harvard’s endowment of $53 billion exceeds the gross domestic product of 124 countries, including Tunisia, Uganda, Bolivia, and Estonia.
With endowments that big, they have enough funding to build and maintain research infrastructure. And given the nonprofit status these universities have been granted to pursue the discovery and dissemination of knowledge, they have an obligation to use their resources to build and maintain research infrastructure even if taxpayers do not provide them with additional funds for that purpose.
Data and Methodology
Information on the resources Ivy League universities have at their disposal from private donations as well as from government funding is readily available.
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Reversing the Department of Education’s Anti-Market Orientation in Higher Education
For two decades, during the tenures of the Obama and Biden Administrations, the Department of Education has tried to curtail access to for-profit colleges and universities (known as the “proprietary” sector in higher education) through a growing tome of federal regulations.1
U.S.C. § 1002(a)(1)(A).?
Oversight of the nonprofit and public sectors has been much slower in coming. Indeed, rather than cast a critical eye at the return on investment of traditional higher education, the Biden Administration is pursuing every possible avenue for student loan debt amnesty, a massive handout to nonprofit and public colleges and universities. Rather than singling out the for-profit sector, which is meeting the needs of non-traditional students in particular, the department should hold all sectors to the same standards instead of expressing the anti-market biases described in the following.
Furthermore, while it continues to exist, the department should strive to encourage innovation in postsecondary education. Nascent technology companies—in whatever ways they intend to serve postsecondary institutions—cannot easily take the financial risk of building partnerships when the department’s regulatory regime stifles them and threatens their finances. Instead, the next Administration should rescind many of the anti-market regulations promulgated in recent years.
Summary of Anti-Market Regulations Under Secretary Cardona
The U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary Miguel Cardona, has taken a heavy-handed approach against for-profit enterprises in postsecondary education, whether those enterprises are institutions or simply for-profit partners of nonprofit institutions. This Backgrounder summarizes the policies that have been explained in more detail elsewhere.
“Gainful Employment.” The Higher Education Act defines a proprietary (for-profit) institution primarily as a “school” that is neither public nor nonprofit and “provides an eligible program of training to prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation.”2
U.S.C. § 1002(b)(1).?
From this one reference, the department has produced a significant cascade of “gainful employment” regulations. These rules set alumni income and debt standards almost exclusively for proprietary institutions. Meanwhile, the agency has not produced similar regulations to hold public or nonprofit institutions accountable for the outcomes of their students. Gainful employment regulations were promulgated under President Obama, but the Trump Administration rescinded them, correctly arguing that the set of regulations “wrongfully targets some academic programs and institutions while ignoring other programs that may result in lesser outcomes and higher student debt.”
“Borrower Defense.” The Higher Education Act authorizes the Department of Education to “specify in regulations which acts or omissions of an institution of higher education a borrower may assert as a defense to repayment.”5
U.S.C. § 1087e(h).?
Since the 1990s, such regulations have focused on “any act or omission of the school attended by the student that would give rise to a cause of action against the school under applicable State law (the State law standard),” and only 10 claims were recorded prior to 2015.
But the “borrower defense” regulations today extend far past the department’s authorization to describe possible defenses that a borrower may assert against repayment. A traditional borrower defense would be, for instance, that an institution intentionally misstated material information about future employment prospects or the license required to accompany a degree in order for a graduate to be allowed to work in a state. But the department has also asserted its own authority to “initiate a proceeding to collect” loan amounts from the school on behalf of the student even in the absence of a successful claim in court.7
C.F.R. § 685.206(c)(4).?
Once the department successfully collects the funds, it cancels the student’s debt. These regulations make the department judge, jury, and executioner in order to cancel student loans and claw back student aid funding.
During the Obama Administration, the department went a step beyond its alleged authority to “collect.” The department required institutions to have the money available just in case the department came to collect it. This requirement took the form of astronomical letters of credit (certifications from banks that the money would be provided, if needed), which successfully knocked proprietary institutions out of the education market.
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Australian university chiefs lecture schools on maths and science teaching
University chiefs have caned schools for failing to prepare “Zoomers” for tertiary education, with domestic enrolments diving 10 per cent as Gen Z teenagers shun study for gap years, jobs and travel.
As the Albanese government prepares to launch its landmark Universities Accord reforms, cash-strapped universities are demanding more financial assistance for students struggling to pay the rent during a cost of living crisis that is pushing poorer teenagers straight from school into the workforce.
University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott – a former teacher and director-general of the NSW Education Department – said schools were struggling with a shortage of maths and science teachers to prepare teenagers for university.
“Students at some schools are being discouraged from attempting that more demanding maths, perhaps not linked to the ability of the student, but more the availability of staff,’’ he said.
“There’s a chronic, entrenched shortage of mathematics teachers around the country now. I think the true shortage is often concealed because … there are plenty of PE (physical education) teachers who are being retrained in maths to just try and get a qualified teacher in front of the class.’’
Professor Scott said universities might need to offer more summer schools and intensive tutoring to get school leavers “up to speed’’ for university degrees.
“We are increasingly concerned, as we target students from low SES (socio-economic) backgrounds, that they are not getting the opportunity to study maths at a level that has been an important prerequisite for entry to some of our courses,’’ he said.
“There are a range of courses, from economics and business to science and engineering, that have required maths prerequisites, that we can see fewer and fewer students reaching because fewer students are doing maths at that advanced level.’’
Australian National University deputy vice-chancellor Grady Venville, a former high school teacher, said schools must ensure more students were taught maths and science at the highest level.
“We’ve got kids coming right through from primary school and falling behind, and when they get to high school … they’re often not encouraged or supported to do the higher level mathematics,’’ Professor Venville said.
“We don’t have enough highly qualified maths teaching staff (in schools), so that means it’s easier for the school to encourage the students to do an easier maths. What that does is narrow down the pipeline of students who can go into things like physics or engineering, pure mathematics and even our science subjects.’’
Professor Scott said his sandstone university – renowned for its medicine and engineering faculties – was considering removing the prerequisite for advanced high school mathematics for some degrees. “We wouldn’t be decreasing the standards for our programs, but providing more help for students … without watering down our courses,’’ he said.
“Perhaps more summer programs, more introductory programs, where the university takes on a greater responsibility to get students up to speed.’’
Professor Scott said the high cost of living was discouraging students from enrolling at university, or studying full-time.
He said the University of Sydney was lobbying the NSW government to grant it social housing development concessions to build more student accommodation.
“When I was a student here in the 1980s, some of the cheapest accommodation anywhere in the Greater Sydney area was surrounding the university,’’ he said.
“You could live cheaply in Glebe and Redfern and Newtown in a way that is often not possible now at all. We’re talking to our alumni about making more scholarships available that provide accommodation support.’’
Professor Venville said university students were taking longer to finish degrees as they juggle study with part-time work or travel. She said Gen-Zs, known as “Zoomers’’, seemed less mature than previous generations of university students and were keen to take a “gap year’’ after school.
In Brisbane, Griffith University vice-chancellor Carolyn Evans said schools were encouraging too many students to take vocational subjects, rather than the more difficult academic subjects.
“(This) means perhaps not as many people are as well prepared for university as they used to be,’’ Professor Evans said. “We’re quite concerned about the decline in the number of students taking high-level maths and some of the harder science subjects. There are a lot of applied subjects being done at school level, which are appropriate for some students. But they don’t necessarily get a really strong foundation to go on and do some of the things that we critically need in this country … like engineering, medicine and some of the health disciplines.”
Professor Scott noted that teenagers were dropping out of high school at the highest rate in 30 years. In public schools, 26.4 per cent of high school students had left before finishing Year 12 last year – up from 17 per cent in 2018, the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed this week.
The latest federal Education Department data shows the number of students starting a degree fell 10.4 per cent last year to a nine-year low. First-year enrolments by domestic students fell 5.5 per cent between 2018 and 2022 – a trend that is sabotaging the federal government’s ambition to increase student numbers by one-third, to 1.2 million, over the next decade.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said skilling school-leavers for work was “not just the job of universities’’. “We need more people to finish school,’’ he said. “We need to fully fund all schools and tie that money to the reforms that will help kids who fall behind to catch up, keep up and finish school and then be able to go to TAFE or university.’’
Mr Clare said that “going to university opened up opportunities and makes you money’’.
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15 February, 2024
Teacher Strike in Los Angeles Underscores Need for Education Choice
Public school teachers in Los Angeles are on strike, affecting half a million children attending some 900 public schools in the district.
Although students in the Los Angeles Unified School District—the second-largest school district in the country—can still access the schools, classes are being taught by substitute teachers while teachers outside are striking.
Many students are staying home—leaving some parents scrambling for child care.
Students who are going to school during the strike are passing the day playing games on iPads. Missing school or being relegated to busy work as a result of public education employee strikes are critical learning days lost.
Students in Los Angeles can ill afford that: Just 18 percent of fourth-graders can read proficiently, a figure which jumps just one point to 19 percent for eighth-graders. Only one-quarter of Los Angeles fourth-graders score proficient in math, a figure that declines to 18 percent for eighth-graders.
Among the striking teachers’ demands are increased pay and smaller class sizes, along with regulations on charter schools and a push to increase the number of nonteaching personnel, such as librarians and counselors.
Yet since 1992, nonteaching staff in California has increased nearly 50 percent, greatly outpacing the 24 percent increase in the number of students.
As economist Ben Scafidi of Kennesaw State University in Georgia found, had California just kept the nonteaching staff levels on par with increases in student enrollment, the state would have saved nearly $3 billion—which could have gone toward unfunded pension liabilities.
The state’s unfunded pension liability—the gap between benefits owed and funding available for that purpose—was $107 billion in 2018.
That $3 billion also could have funded 373,000 children with $8,000 education savings accounts.
The increase in nonteaching personnel only exacerbates existing spending issues in the district.
As Chad Aldeman points out, from 2001 to 2016, the Los Angeles Unified School District increased overall spending by more than 55 percent. Public employee benefits in the district increased 138 percent.
My colleague Jonathan Butcher closely followed teachers union strikes, which last year disrupted learning in Colorado, Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. He draws three important lessons from those strikes.
First, Butcher notes, strikes are hard on families, and send parents scrambling. Strikes can test parents’ patience, even when they support the demands of the strikers.
Second, it’s school districts, rather than state lawmakers, who are ultimately responsible for teacher salaries. Third, tax increases on California taxpayers will not necessarily lead to increased teachers’ salaries.
Ultimately, school districts should be transparent in their spending, making administrators’ salaries publicly available, and they should reduce—not increase—the number of nonteaching personnel.
Furthermore, they should reward excellent teachers by basing teachers’ compensation on job performance.
During the strike, more than 117,000 students in Los Angeles are still able to attend school without being affected by the walkouts; namely, those in charter schools.
So, most critically, parents should be empowered with choice, including more charter school options and private school choice options.
Increasing spending and the number of nonteaching personnel, and further regulating education choice options, such as charter schools, will only amplify a failed status quo in California.
Instead, California should immediately empower families to choose learning options that are effective and meet their needs by moving toward increased school choice opportunities.
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Why Universal Access to Education Freedom Accounts Is the Best Choice for New Hampshire
Nearly 1 million American students participated in a school-choice program last year, according to data compiled by EdChoice. Across the country 72 choice programs operate in 32 states. And who has the most popular program in the nation? New Hampshire.
With an Education Freedom Account (EFA), parents can customize their child’s education. Families can use EFA funds for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, special-needs therapies and more.
According to EdChoice, New Hampshire’s EFA policy is the most popular education choice policy in the nation. It has had the most growth per capita nationwide over the past academic year—a whopping 58%. The number of ESA students has grown from 3,025 in 2022–23 to 4,770 scholarships awarded in 2023–24.
Those numbers show that a lot of New Hampshire families want an education that better fits their children’s individual needs. No New Hampshire student who needs a better educational fit should be denied access to this popular and effective program, especially because of politics.
Unfortunately, politics is keeping most students out of the program right now.
Expanding Education Freedom and Choice to All
Though EFAs were intended to be accessible to all students, legislators agreed initially to enroll only children from lower-income families. That was necessary to address concerns that the program would struggle to succeed in its early years or, conversely, would prove too popular to manage effectively.
Now that New Hampshire’s EFAs are an undeniable success, it’s time to take off the training wheels.
Currently, fewer than half of students in the state are eligible for an EFA, which is limited only to students from families that earn no more than 350% of the federal poverty level. That comes to $109,200 for a family of four—less than the average annual household income of a firefighter married to a registered nurse in New Hampshire. Three House bills this year would expand access to the program. One, House Bill 1634, would remove that income cap so that any student eligible to enroll in a K-12 public school in the state could qualify for an EFA.
That income cap suppresses participation. Though New Hampshire’s EFA program ranks first in the country in administration and popularity, it ranks just 42nd in eligibility nationwide.
Other states have been expanding educational opportunities. Over the last three years, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia all either enacted new universal education choice policies or expanded existing choice policies to all K-12 students.
Some people fear that universal education choice will cause a mass exodus from public schools. But that’s not what’s happened in other states. Though roughly 20 million students nationwide are eligible to participate in a school-choice program, fewer than 1 million students do.
The two largest school-choice programs in the country are Florida’s and Arizona’s. In both states, 100% of students are eligible for school choice. But only 10% of Florida students and 9% of Arizona students participate.
Here in New Hampshire, where 48% of students are eligible for EFAs, only 3% of students participate.
Education Freedom Accounts Save Taxpayers Money
Critics claim that making EFAs available to every student is unaffordable. That’s not true. U.S. Census estimates from 2022 (the most recent available) put the state’s school-age population at 189,600. How many of those students can be expected to use an EFA if all students become eligible?
Florida has the highest school choice take-up rate in the country, at 10%. Every other state with an education savings account or scholarship program has a lower take-up rate. New Hampshire’s rate of EFA use is about 3%. If we use New Hampshire’s current rate as the baseline and Florida’s as the high end, we could see a range of somewhere between 5,688 and 18,960 students enrolling in the program, though the higher number would take years to achieve and certainly would not happen overnight.
Currently, about 28% of EFA users were previous public-school students. As they received their per-pupil allotment from the Education Trust Fund before taking an EFA, they are not a new cost. Assuming the same switch rate if EFAs are expanded, a reasonable cost estimate would run somewhere between $21.5 million (at a 3% take-up rate) and $71.7 million (at a 10% take-up rate).
That might sound like a lot, but New Hampshire taxpayers spend $3.4 billion a year on K-12 public schools, and the state’s current Education Trust Fund ended the 2023 fiscal year with a surplus of $161 million. State budget officials project the Education Trust Fund to end the current fiscal year with a surplus of $232 million. Even at the high-end estimate, New Hampshire can easily afford universal EFA expansion.
And those figures don’t include local taxpayer savings. New Hampshire spends an average of $20,322 per pupil, with more than 60% of that coming from local taxation. That local portion will not be spent to educate students who use an EFA to purchase an education elsewhere.
Based on take-up rates between 3-10%, taxpayers can roughly estimate local government savings of between $86 million-$286 million were all students to become eligible for EFAs. Subtract the state costs of $21.5 million-$71.7 million and taxpayers would be looking at a net annual savings of somewhere between $64.5 million and $214 million.
Those are back-of-the-envelope calculations, but they give a general idea of the size of taxpayer savings possible if New Hampshire educates students for $5,255 per pupil instead of $20,322 per pupil. Far from a net loss for New Hampshire, Education Freedom Accounts are clearly a net gain.
School Choice Improves Public School Performance
Critics also falsely claim that school choice harms students who remain in traditional public schools. In fact, of 29 studies on the academic outcomes of public school students whose schools were faced with competition from policies, 26 found a net positive outcome for those students, one found no visible effect, and only two found a negative effect.
Moreover, the families of lower-performing students tend to be more attracted to school choice programs than those of higher-performing students. Florida State University research on Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program found that students who chose to enter the scholarship program had lower test scores in the year before they took a scholarship than did their classmates who opted not to participate. But after just a few years of using the scholarship, those students were out-performing their demographic peers.
Claims that school choice programs “cream” the best students and leave low-performing students behind in under-funded schools are false. Indeed, the reality is the very opposite: school choice benefits disadvantaged students most.
Fulfilling the Promise of Public Education
When they aren’t fear mongering about empty public schools, EFA opponents demagogue the issue by shouting that EFA expansion would have taxpayers foot the bill for educating the children of “millionaires and billionaires.”
But, of course, that’s exactly what public schools do. Every child, regardless of income, is eligible to attend his or her district public school. No one argues that the public education provided by district schools should be means tested.
Neither traditional public district schools nor public charter schools have income caps. Education Freedom Accounts shouldn’t either.
The promise of public education is that every child should have access to an education that meets his or her individual learning needs. Education Freedom Accounts help fulfill that promise by empowering families with the freedom and flexibility to choose the learning environments that work best for their children.
Expanding this opportunity to every child would improve outcomes for students, including those who prefer traditional public schools, while saving taxpayers money. For families, students and taxpayers, it’s the best option.
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More Sydney parents than ever opt for private schools
Many government schools are so dire that you can't blame them
The state’s private schools are enrolling more students than at any time on record despite soaring cost-of-living pressures and fee hikes that have pushed tuition costs above $40,000 a year at numerous Sydney private schools.
Official data released on Wednesday shows the proportion of students enrolled in NSW public schools has fallen for the fifth year running, dropping to 62.9 per cent in 2023. It is the lowest share of students attending state schools in the past two decades of reporting.
The exodus from public schools in NSW is being driven in part by the establishment of low-fee private schools in Sydney’s north- and south-west growth corridors, where the construction of new public schools over the past decade has failed to keep pace with population growth.
Most other states and territories have experienced a similar trend, the figures released by Australian Bureau of Statistics show.
In NSW, 785,847 students were enrolled in public schools last year, 267,253 in Catholic schools and 195,356 in private schools. The proportion attending private and Catholic high schools is approaching half of all secondary students, rising to 43 per cent last year.
University of Sydney education researcher Helen Proctor said the issues public schools faced were widely publicised, such as teacher shortages, which could be contributing to parents considering private options.
“There has been a long-term disparagement of public schools, there’s been many people talking them down,” Proctor said. “It is very hard for public school leaders. If they don’t talk about the crisis and the resources, how are they going to get anything done? On the other hand, if parents hear about teacher shortages, they’re naturally going to get very worried.”
A separate snapshot of data provided by the Association of Independent Schools of NSW shows 65,000 students, or 28 per cent of those enrolled in the private system, are attending a school that charges $20,000 or more.
About 60,000 pupils, or a quarter of all those enrolled in the private system, attend a school with fees below $5000 a year. Another 72,000 pupils attend a school that charges between $5000 and $10,000.
Between April 2022 and March last year, repayments on a million-dollar mortgage increased by more than $2000 a month. A survey conducted by National Australia Bank in 2022 found one in 10 parents were relying on family members, including grandparents, to pay tuition costs.
Catholic Schools NSW chief executive Dallas McInerney said systemic schools have grown at the fastest rate since 2013. They typically charge up to $3000 a year, with substantial sibling discounts.
“These numbers are a huge vote of confidence from parents because parents know they get quality and affordable education, and that their children thrive in our schools,” McInerney said.
“We provide high job prospects, further study pathways and create great citizens. It’s a massive contribution to society.”
Association of Independent Schools of NSW chief executive Margery Evans said the bulk of the growth in independent schools was in the lower and mid-fee bands under $10,000.
“The main growth has been low and mid-fee schools, many in Sydney’s north-west and south-west growth areas. We’ve also seen increasing numbers in regional schools including in Tweed Heads. These schools are affordable for parents paying off mortgages, and appealing because they are kindergarten to year 12 campuses,” she said.
“There are also almost 20 faiths represented in the independent sector across 350 schools, including Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and Jewish schools. These schools provide an education that reflects parents’ values and beliefs. Forty years ago, there weren’t any Islamic schools. There are (now) 29, with 22,000 students.”
NSW Education Minister Prue Car said over the past five years, NSW has seen the biggest drop in the country when it comes to the share of students in government schools.
“It is no coincidence that we have had 24,000 students leave the public system at the same time the previous Government oversaw a teacher shortage crisis,” she said. “The government is undertaking urgent work to repair the states’ education system, by investing in our teaching workforce and addressing the chronic teacher shortage facing our state.”
Mother Jasmine De Leon chose to send her youngest two children to a local private school, Norwest Christian College, near her home in Quakers Hill, partly because it was a co-educational pre-school to year 12 campus.
“My kids have been going to the same school since they were four years old, and having that pre-kindergarten year was what really interested us,” De Leon said.
“There is also a big sense of community and a structured environment. They also offer smaller classes and a variety of extracurricular subjects.”
She considered having her two children sit the public selective high school test, but after five years at their current school they “had become comfortable and had established strong friendship groups.”
“It’s also at the lower end for private school fees, and it was affordable for us and worth it when considering what the school could offer”.
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14 February, 2024
COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Mandates in Universities — Risk Benefit Analysis Leads to Net Harm
A prominent group of physicians, epidemiologists and bioethicists based at the most prestigious academic medical centers and universities have gone on the record that after a systematic analysis combining risk-benefit assessments as well as ethical factors the mandating of COVID-19 booster jabs at university campuses will equate to an expected net harm.
When forecasting serious adverse events as measured in cases of myopericarditis typically involving hospitalized young males as compared to the number of boosts required per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented. The net takeaway of this study: university mandates for COVID-19 boosters in the age of Omicron (milder version of the virus) cannot be orchestrated without a gross violation of ethical, moral and medical principles.
The authors of this study have expressed mounting concern during the pandemic, minority critics in large, prestigious university systems that the current mRNA vaccines are not all that the medical establishment and media cracked them up to be.
While by last August most all university mandates for COVID-19 boosters were all but gone, by August 2023, over 60 universities still mandated the COVID-19 jab.
The authors of this analysis clearly seek to not repeat the same policies in the future.
The present authors’ latest position in this essay published in Journal of Medical Ethics (BMJ) isn’t new. TrialSite reported back in September 2022, in “Bombshell Analysis: Risk-Benefit Analysis of mRNA Vaccines for You People Doesn’t Support Mandates” that the authors were essentially concluding the same recommendation—cease the COVID-19 vaccine mandates on university campuses.
Kevin Bardosh, Ph.D., from University of Washington (and University of Edinburgh), an applied medical anthropologist and implementations scientist, Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH University of California, San Francisco, professor epidemiology and statistics, Mary Makary, M.D., MPH, professor of surgery Johns Hopkins University, Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, Ph.D. physics-investigator at Acumen LLC as well as corresponding author, and bioethicist Euzebiusz Jamrozik, Ph.D. University of Oxford Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities and others go on the record again, even more forcefully declaring based on their analysis at this juncture in history more young men (age 40 and under) mandated to get the mRNA-based COVID-19 jabs face the risk of hospitalization due to myocarditis than will benefit by the vaccines as measured by per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented.
While different academic researchers conclude with different data points, and the biases associated with this group could be argued are similar to the biases linked to groups arguing for mandates (they merely use differing assumptions, interpret some studies over others, etc.), it’s the latter that increasingly deviates from all commonsensical practice.
According to the present authors, however, to prevent one COVID-19 hospitalization over a 6-month period the critical collaborative estimates 31,207 -42,836young adults (age 19-29) must receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Yet that means that according to these authors’ math, 18.5 serious adverse events from the mRNA vaccines result, derived from 1.5 – 4.6 booster 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalization).
They anticipated that 1430-4626 cases of grade ?3 reactogenicity interfering with daily activities (although typically not requiring hospitalization).
COVID-19 Mandates in Universities—Unethical
Why? The authors delineate the following elements:
Mandates are legacy from the pandemic, they are not based on an updated (Omicron era) stratified risk-benefit assessment for this age group
Based on the accumulation of medical evidence this result in a net harm to healthy young adults
Such policies are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission
The policy of mandates in universities violate the reciprocity principle because serious vaccine-related harms are not reliably compensated due to gaps in vaccine injury schemes
The mandates may result in wider social harms
But what about counterarguments?
The present authors delve int countervailing view—such as benefits like improved campus safety, “but find these are fraught with limitations and little scientific support.” For example, the vaccines’ durability levels mean breakthrough infections are commonplace.
The authors go on the record discussing how their analysis impacts COVID-19 primary series policy.
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The dangers of rugby football has led to some researchers calling for it to be banned from schools
With some researchers labelling the sport ‘a form of child abuse’ and parents questioning safety, can rugby get the balance right?
This story begins with a boy lying dazed and confused on a rugby pitch in Sussex last month. There are concussion symptoms that linger, days off school, and a stark revelation from a rugby-loving parent who provides first aid to the team. “It is not until you have cradled the head of someone else’s son, who is then unable to stand unassisted, that it really hits home how dangerous this game can be.”
Those dangers have now led to some researchers to call for rugby in schools and clubs to be banned for under-18s as it is “a form of child abuse”. Their argument, published in the Times on Friday, is that the risk of brain injuries from high-impact sports – including rugby and boxing – runs counter to child abuse laws. And neither children, nor their parents, can give informed consent as they cannot be fully aware of the long-term risks.
Once again rugby finds itself walking a tightrope: pushing the sport’s physical and mental health qualities, while facing pointed questions about safety.
Does it always get the balance right? That is what some of those parents in Sussex are now asking, especially after a second player left the same match with a suspected concussion. Was this awful luck? Absolutely. But on the touchline, others flagged another concern.
When rugby union in England returned after Covid, the Rugby Football Union extended the chance to combine age grades – in this case to under-14s playing in under-13s fixtures – to “sustain teams with lower player numbers who would otherwise not continue to play rugby”. In this match their opponents had several boys from the next age grade up.
The RFU’s decision was understandable. Player numbers in grassroots rugby have dropped. Clubs were struggling to re-establish teams. As the RFU says, the sport has huge benefits, including boosting “confidence, self-esteem, self-discipline and character”. It sounds like something from a 1920s boarding school prospectus, but it is also true.
The downside, of course, is that 12-year-old boys, many of whom have yet to hit puberty, are facing 14-year-olds, whose bodies are swimming in testosterone and other androgens which makes them taller, stronger, heavier and faster – and more dangerous. As one sports scientist told me: “We know that risk factors for injury are speed, power, strength, bulk and momentum in the tackle, so there is a fairly strong basis to say that widening the age bracket could increase risk. That doesn’t mean you don’t do it. But you have to monitor the risk and try to understand it not just quantitatively but qualitatively.”
Such a data-driven approach wasn’t in place when the RFU took its decision over combining age groups in 2020. Until this season, youth club rugby was not included in the RFU’s injury surveillance programmes, which focused on adults and some schools.
That, thankfully, is shifting. However, there is still no accurate picture of what happens when the under-13s and under-14s play together. Have injury rates gone up? Without a baseline we don’t know. When I put this to the RFU, it said there was “a robust assessment and approval process in place in our regulations to ensure a balance between player safety and retention”. Those rules include ensuring not more than half the players are from the older age grade. It also stresses that coaches must prioritise player safety and enjoyment, and work together to reduce mismatches.
But is that really enough to address parental concerns? Most 14-year-olds won’t be thinking about anything but running through defenders, regardless of whether they are younger. One idea would be to embrace the work of Dr Sean Cumming, who has argued for bio-banding in junior sport, where players are matched by maturation not their actual age. Other unions, including New Zealand, band players by weight.
None of that, of course, will make the safety issue entirely go away. Only last week, I was sent an open letter from Ceri Shaw whose husband, Chris, died last year. Chris was a keen rugby player for more than 30 years and after he died, Ceri donated his brain to Prof Willie Stewart at the University of Glasgow, who found signs of CTE – a degenerative brain condition linked to head injuries.
Given that rugby players with longer careers are more likely to develop the condition, Ceri asks why contact rugby is introduced at under-nine level in England and not, say, at 16. “During his life Chris was passionate about all aspects of rugby: the game’s ethos, the inclusive community and the conduct of fans globally,” she writes. “I would still like both my boys to play and enjoy rugby. There is research still to be done, but why risk the brain health of our children while we are waiting?”
Those in rugby tell me that teaching safe tackling technique at nine is safer than at 15 or 16, when kids will be much faster and more powerful. They also point out that World Rugby’s recent Otago study found under-13 rugby to be less dangerous than higher age groups and the adult game. But tell that to the parents of those poor boys in Sussex who sustained suspected concussions.
Even so, I still recoil at the idea of banning rugby for under-18s. The benefits of the sport still outweigh the potential costs, especially given the obesity and inactivity epidemic, which carries a different set of health risks. Ban rugby and where do we stop? Yet with every passing year, what we know about the dangers of head impacts continues to evolve. I strongly suspect rugby will have to as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/05/rugby-under-18-children-research-concussion
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New anti-woke universities ‘the only way to cancel cancel culture’, says Niall Ferguson
Setting up new and better universities is the only way to reform a sector riddled with entrenched, extremist left-wing ideology, and is even more important in the wake of the academic world’s response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, says historian Niall Ferguson.
Aa senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor Ferguson was in Austin this week to welcome the first cohort of students to enrol at the University of Austin, where he is a founding trustee along with US journalist Bari Weiss. The two have helped launch a private university in the Texan capital that will be permanently free of campus cancel culture and dedicated to free speech and academic rigour.
“There came a moment (in 2021) when people were just being cancelled left and right at universities, and we decided we’ve got to do this,” Professor Ferguson said.
The march of anti-Semitism at US universities and around the world, including in Australia, made Professor Ferguson more determined to make the University of Austin, which has already attracted $US200m ($307m) in donations and about 20 full-time faculties, a success.
“After the events of October 7th, the strange responses we saw on campus, we no longer have to explain why we are building the university,” he said.
The October 7 attacks and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war triggered an explosion of anti-Semitic protests on and off campus that shook Americans’ faith in its elite institutions.
Two Ivy League university presidents – Harvard’s Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill – resigned last year in the wake of a national outcry over their defence of anti-Semitic protests on campuses on “free speech” grounds.
In Australia, 64 per cent of Jewish students said they had experienced anti-Semitism at university after October 7 – a greater than 20 per cent jump compared with the preceding year according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
While he would not comment directly on Australian universities, Professor Ferguson said the fall of the Ivy League presidents and some academic backlash to anti-Semitism did not mean the old institutions would markedly change course any time soon.
“I don’t think the fact that two of those presidents have since left their positions means the end of wokeness,” he said.
“It’s not in retreat but rather very well entrenched. Declaring victory because Claudine Gay has stepped down (is naive); there will not be any real change in institutions, such as Harvard, which is not an outlier, until not just the president but the whole bureaucracy of diversity, equity and inclusion has been dismantled.”
Future students and their parents joined Professor Ferguson and other public intellectuals, including Michael Shellenberger and Harvard professor Roland Fryer, for a weekend of lectures and events. “The great thing about Austin is it’s cool, it’s a great place to build a university … We have a huge cluster of tech companies here, the economy is booming,” Professor Ferguson said.
Elon Musk was considering setting up a STEM- based university in the city, too, according to reports that circulated late last year in the US.
The University of Austin’s constitution, drafted largely by Professor Ferguson, explicitly enshrines free speech and includes disciplinary mechanisms for staff who contravene the free speech principles. “Universities have been perverted from their true purpose, which is not politics but scholarship,” he said.
“We have a constitution that will make that impossible.”
Professor Ferguson said cultural change at traditional elite universities, which he said had consciously chosen to transform themselves into hotbeds of radical politics under the moniker of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, would be almost impossible for a generation. “All those people have been appointed with tenure,” he said. “What are you going to do? Fire them all? It’s impossible.”
British universities, he said, weren’t as political as those in the US. “The reason that they’re not as bad in the UK, at Oxford and Cambridge, isn’t that there are not people there with same motives,” he said.
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13 February, 2024
Denver schools overwhelmed by migrant surge as mayor slashes $5M from public services to address crisis
A Denver public school teacher is sounding the alarm on the strain the migrant crisis is putting on classrooms as the city's Democratic mayor cuts millions from services for residents.
"We are already 100 students over projection, and we have new students coming in weekly. We're already past the October count. So every new student that we get, we don't have the funds to provide them with resources," teacher Priscilla Rahn told "Fox & Friends" Monday.
Mayor Mike Johnston pinned the blame on Republicans and former President Trump Friday while announcing $5 million in cuts from recreation centers, DMV services and city landscaping to pay for the migrant crisis.
"The choice by Republicans in Congress to purposefully kill a historic, bipartisan border deal this week will have a devastating impact in Denver," Johnston said after the Republicans blocked a bipartisan border deal, which included a foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel, from advancing Wednesday.
"Despite broad bipartisan support, I think [former President] Trump and Republican leaders saw this as a chance that if this bill actually passed, it would have successfully solved the problem facing cities and the border, and they would have rather seen it fail, so they could exacerbate these problems, extend the suffering of American people and of newcomers for their own electoral changes this November," he said, according to The Hill.
Rahn, a candidate for Douglas County commissioner, called the cuts "incredibly unfair" for the city's families and placed the blame directly on President Biden, Mayor Johnston and Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis.
"We have seen across America and now in Denver, the large difference between liberal ideology and the reality of governing," she said. "And so the president has created this mess. And what we've seen is the mayor respond very emotionally."
"What I'd like to see the mayor and the governor do is to address the problem at the border and ask the president to bring back some of those polices that would make it more manageable."
The cuts follow the mayor’s decision last month to divert $25 million from the city budget to the migrant crisis. That plan included pulling $10 million from a contingency fund and $15 million from a building remodel. Those actions followed the city’s decision to hold many positions vacant and review new or expanded contracts and programs.
Johnston says the crisis will cost the city around $180 million in 2024.
Texas has transported thousands of migrants to sanctuary cities like Denver, to showcase the problems that border states face when migrants flood their cities. Johnston told Fox News last week that the city was "very close" to a breaking point due to the crisis.
DHS Secretary Mayorkas to face second impeachment voteVideo
"I’m incredibly proud of how city team members have stepped up over the past year, but it is clear that the federal government is not going to support our city," Johnston said, fighting back tears at a Friday press conference.
Denver passed laws to become a sanctuary city, but it doesn't include a right-to-shelter provision, which means there is no official policy that compels the local government to provide shelter indefinitely.
Along with these department budget cuts, the city will decrease the number of migrants it serves and will continue to monitor spending, Johnston said. Earlier this week, the city began ejecting around 800 migrant families from shelters as it scales back on aid for illegal immigrants.
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Teacher Who Criticized ‘Woke Kindergarten’ Put on Leave by School District
An elementary school teacher who questioned a California school’s spending $250,000 on a teacher training program called “Woke Kindergarten” was placed on leave Thursday by his school district, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Glassbrook Elementary School used $250,000 in federal funds for underperforming schools to pay for training for teachers on how to be “anti-racist” and “disrupt whiteness” in the classroom. Now, the school district, Hayward Unified School District, has put teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley on leave for “allegations of unprofessional conduct” after he questioned the program, according to the Chronicle.
Craven-Neeley was told via a video call that he was being put on leave and ordered to turn in his keys and laptop, he told the Chronicle.
Craven-Neeley said he had voiced concerns over the program Wednesday at a staff meeting after the Chronicle last week ran an article that included his comments questioning the purpose of the program. After a short while, another teacher stood up, pointed a finger at him, and said, “You are a danger to the school or the community,” then stormed out, he told the Chronicle.
Shortly afterward, a school district administrator asked Craven-Neeley to leave the meeting, the Chronicle reported.
In comments to the Chronicle for a Feb. 3 article on “Woke Kindergarten,” Craven-Neeley questioned what it meant to “disrupt whiteness” in the classroom.
“What does that mean?” Craven-Neeley told the Chronicle. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”
Scores for English and math at Glassbrook Elementary have fallen since the program’s implementation, with fewer than 4% of students posting proficient scores in math and a little under 12% testing at grade level in English. These were decreases of nearly 4 percentage points since “Woke Kindergarten” started at the school.
Neither Glassbrook Elementary nor the Hayward School District responded immediately to requests for comment.
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International students turned away in record numbers
Australia is on track for a steep fall in net migration after federal officials turned away thousands of overseas students who applied to start courses this month, bringing student visa grants down by 20 per cent in the biggest shift in two decades.
The cut to the education program is the biggest single factor in driving the total migrant intake down to 375,000 this financial year and putting it on course for 250,000 the following year.
The government’s migration strategy unveiled last year has imposed stronger English-language tests on students and requires them to prove they are genuine students before they enter the country, while making it harder for them to stay if they do not find jobs that help fill a skills shortage.
The government remains open to more controversial measures, such as a cap on student numbers or higher fees on their visa applications.
The cuts to student visas are not being felt across all universities. The biggest impact is at private colleges with low ratings for visa approvals and some universities are also writing to overseas applicants to cancel their applications because they will fail a tougher visa test put in place last year.
Most of the country’s leading universities are not seeing any big fall in overseas student numbers, the latest results show, because they have not fallen foul of the stricter tests within the department.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil sent a formal instruction to the Department of Home Affairs last year, known as Ministerial Direction 107, to tell officials to put a priority on student visa applications for universities with a good track record and to give the lowest priority to those for institutions with a history of problems.
This means the priority takes into account the track record of all overseas students at each institution so they are given a low ranking if they have had a large number of visa refusals, fraudulent applications or students who overstay their visas.
All the Group of Eight universities are in the “tier one” category in this new system, while the “tier three” group at the lowest level of the system is mainly made up of private vocational education colleges.
Australia has more than 650,000 overseas students and an increasing number of them are prolonging their stay by applying to do a second course, with 150,000 of the total being on their second student visa.
The results from the department show that overseas students are being turned away in record numbers because the visa grant rate has been driven down to 80 per cent, the lowest since records began in 2005.
In a rare fall, the student visa grants in December were lower than in November – a sign of fewer arrivals for the coming academic year – and are 20 per cent below the same period last year.
The outcome shows the department is bringing international student visa grants down from 370,000 last financial year to 290,000 this year and believes there is a reasonable chance the outcome will be slightly lower.
The new migration figures provide the first outcomes from the dramatic shift last year when the Coalition accused Labor of planning a “big Australia by stealth” and the government vowed to lower the intake and crack down on dubious visa claims.
Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan criticised O’Neil for presiding over the biggest influx of overseas students as well as a record migrant intake last year.
“Labor says they don’t want a Big Australia but under the Albanese Government 900,000 people will arrive over two years and 1.625 million will arrive over five.”
O’Neil said the country could not sustain the big increase in migration after the borders were opened at the end of the pandemic. “Migration is too high and our government has taken action to bring it back to normal levels,” she said.
“The early signs are that these changes are working. We are seeing sharp decreases in numbers. This is led by deep cuts in the areas of higher education, where we have unfortunately seen widespread integrity issues.”
Another key factor in driving the migration intake down is a special program called the Pandemic Event Visa, which was introduced by the previous government with no fees and no skills test and attracted more than 100,000 people.
Labor closed the pandemic program to new applicants last year and expects 60 per cent to leave the country and the remainder to shift to other visas because they have skills that are in demand and jobs that pay above the $70,000 salary threshold for approval.
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12 February, 2024
Australian professor Ghassan Hage sacked by German research institute for ‘incompatible values’
A renowned German research institute has sacked an Australian scholar for what it called “incompatible values” after a series of anti-Israel social media posts by the visiting Melbourne University professor.
On Thursday, the Max Planck Society, funded by the country’s federal and state governments, said it had cut ties with professor Ghassan Hage.
In a two-page statement, Professor Hage stood by “everything I say in my social media”, saying his posts were “intellectual critiques of Israel”.
He claimed a Facebook post comparing Israel’s military operations to “Nazi anti-Semitic violence” was what led in part to his termination, among others.
“This is, in a nutshell, what has put me at odds with Max Planck Society’s lawyers … What to me is a fair, intellectual critique of Israel, for them is ‘anti-Semitism according to the law in Germany’,” he said.
Professor Hage, who is of Lebanese descent, is an anthropology professor at Melbourne University, a prolific author on race and immigration, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities.
He had been on extended leave from Melbourne University, working for two years from November 2022 at the German institute, a world leader in science and technology research.
It is unclear what other posts led to the professor’s termination, but in the past few months, on X, he questioned the two-state solution and said Israel would cease to exist as it does now.
“(The) ‘two-state solution’ is the ‘I am Groot’ of Israeli settler colonialism,” he wrote, referencing the Marvel Comics character Groot, a talking tree who says only his name. “It means anything you want and its opposite.”
He also reshared a post casting doubt on claims of sexual assault by Hamas assailants on October 7 and stated Israel would “cease to exist as a Jewish state”.
“It will cease to exist by dissolving back into what it was as Palestine: a multi-religious space where people work on coexisting with each other,” he wrote.
In posts after the institute’s statement, he seemingly criticised the fact he was being “moralised” in Germany.
“They (ethno-nationalist states) are the ones who have a long history of racial hatred, of censoring and burning books … and putting people in concentration camps,” he wrote.
“Murderous, land stealing, colonially implanted ethno-nationalist states are seriously unlikeable. I really hate them.”
In the same thread, Professor Hage said he had “never called for disliking, let alone hating, Jews”.
“Like Muslims, Christians, Greek, Lebanese or Chinese … there are some nice Jewish people and some who are pains in the arse,” he wrote.
“I am living in the very cultures that elevated Jew-hating, the burning of Jewish stores, and the putting of Jews in concentration camps and mass murdering them, into a macabre fine art, and I am being moralised on how not to be anti-Semitic.”
The Max Planck Society’s termination statement set out the values of the institute, alluding to what had driven it to cut ties.
“Recently, he (Professor Hage) has shared a series of posts on social media expressing views that are incompatible with the core values of the Max Planck Society,” it read.
“The Max Planck Society has therefore ended its working relationship with Prof Hage. The freedoms enshrined in (the German constitution) are invaluable to the Max Planck Society.
“These freedoms come with great responsibility. Researchers abuse their civil liberties when they undermine the credibility of science with publicly disseminated statements, thereby damaging the reputation and trust in the institutions that uphold it.”
“Racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, discrimination, hatred, and agitation” had no place at the institute, it said. There is no suggestion Professor Hage is any of the above, or that his posts were.
On social media platform X on Thursday, the professor took issue with the implication he was racist and referenced a series of stories in centrist Der Tagesspiegel and centre-right Welt alleging he was anti-Semitic, saying the stories were full of “half-truths … and slimy innuendo”.
In his two-page statement, Professor Hage said the environment that led to his termination was a “real German tragedy” and claimed he had chosen termination over signing a nondisclosure agreement.
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Troy University Proves You Don’t Need DEI to Achieve Campus Diversity
Recently, the Legislature in my home state of Alabama told public four-year colleges to report how much they spend on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The amount: $16.2 million. Are taxpayers getting anything for this money?
DEI advocates say it’s a good investment. Paulette Granberry Russell, the president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, says that anti-DEI legislation ultimately would prevent historically marginalized students from fully engaging in higher education.
But is that true? To find out, I looked at spending on DEI programs at prominent colleges and enrollment of black students at those schools.
Auburn University and the University of Alabama reported DEI budgets of $3 million each, according to AL.com. The University of Alabama enrolled 4,344 blacks in 2022 (less than 12% of its student body) and Auburn University 1,560 blacks (less than 5% of its students), according to the Alabama Commission on Higher Education.
How about outside Alabama? The University of Michigan reportedly spends more than $18 million on DEI staff and benefits, yet in 2022 blacks made up less than 5% of undergraduates there. George Mason University in Northern Virginia has “a ratio of 7.4 DEI staff per 100 faculty,” yet blacks made up just over 11% of students there in 2022.
How much did Troy University, where I teach, spend on DEI? Zero dollars. Yet Troy enrolled 4,421 blacks in 2022—almost 32% of its student population.
Instead of feeding bloated DEI bureaucrats on Troy’s campus, the school actively recruits international students from across the world to our small town in southeast Alabama—hence our nickname “Alabama’s international university.”
Troy University has achieved diversity in part by rejecting DEI, which negatively affects organizational culture, fostering fear and resentment rather than friendship, openness, and dialogue.
Ironically, DEI racially discriminates to remedy past racism. It stifles viewpoint diversity by bureaucratizing speech restrictions with bias-reporting systems and response teams. It mandates ideological diversity and sensitivity training, seeking to compel acceptance of controversial and suspect premises.
Some DEI initiatives are absurd. For instance, the Federal Aviation Administration’s DEI plan recommends hiring employees with psychiatric and “severe” intellectual disabilities. Will those qualities make flying safer?
DEI is dehumanizing, classifying people by immutable characteristics, not by the choices they make that reflect their character, individuality, or excellence.
The salaries of DEI officers at public universities are considerably higher than most faculty salaries, despite the dearth of evidence that DEI works.
The National Science Foundation recently awarded a grant to study why its $365 million investment in diversity failed to increase female representation in engineering.
The Heritage Foundation discovered that students at the Power Five collegiate athletic conference universities with numerous DEI staff feel less, rather than more, welcome on campus. It also found that black and Hispanic students suffered larger learning losses in public school districts with chief diversity officers.
Even among private firms, diversity programs fail. A recent New York Times headline asked, “What if Diversity Training is Doing More Harm Than Good?”
Intimidation and resentment—products of DEI—are not conducive to learning or community.
The Supreme Court recently struck down the affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
Bills limiting or defunding DEI programs at public universities have passed or been introduced in numerous jurisdictions, including Alabama. It’s time for public universities to be more like Troy University, which diversifies its student body by concentrating on education, its stated mission, and not on divisive concepts that too often accompany DEI training and bureaucracy.
The university’s motto reads, “Educate the mind to think, the heart to feel, and the body to act.” These words apply to all races, uniting diverse peoples across cultures and traditions.
My colleagues and I take this motto seriously. And the racial and demographic statistics of our student body demonstrate the merit and effectiveness of our approach.
You can’t legislate, coerce, or command a welcoming environment. But you can nurture an institutional culture in which students and faculty feel they belong.
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One third of Australian children can't read properly as teaching methods cause 'preventable tragedy', Grattan Institute says
The failed "whole word" method of teaching beloved by Leftist teachers goes back to some work by Wilhelm Wundt in the late 19th century. And they call themselves "progressive"! "destructive" would be more like it
One third of Australian students are failing to learn to read proficiently, at an estimated cost to the economy of $40 billion, according to a new report.
The Grattan Institute's Reading Guarantee report calls this a "preventable tragedy" caused by persisting with teaching styles popular at universities, but "contrary to science" and discredited by inquiries in all major English-speaking countries.
"In a typical Australian school classroom of 24 students, eight can't read well," said report lead author and Grattan education program director Jordana Hunter. "Australia is failing these children."
The estimated cost of this "failure" was profound both personally and economy-wide, with students unable to read proficiently more likely to become disruptive at school and unemployed or even jailed later in life, the report concluded.
Dr Hunter said the "conservative" financial estimate amounted to a "really significant cost" that did not include productivity benefits from increased reading.
Students left to 'guess' meaning of words
The Grattan Institute attributed the major cause of its findings to the rise of a teaching style called "whole language", which became dominant on university campuses in the 1970s.
It is underpinned by a philosophy that learning to read is a natural, unconscious process that students can master by being exposed to good literature.
Proponents say it empowers young people by giving them autonomy.
However Grattan said it left students to "guess" the meaning of words and was saddling parents with expensive tuition costs to help their children catch up.
What are the reading wars?
Phonics, or sounding out words, is part of the "structured literacy" approach, which says reading should be broken down and the elements taught explicitly
After decades of the so-called reading wars, "whole language" has incorporated elements of other approaches such as phonics, but Grattan said it remained "light touch" and "contrary to scientific recommendations".
"What we need to do is set our expectations higher. We need to stop accepting failure," Dr Hunter said. "It's not good enough that one in three students are not where they need to be in reading."
The Grattan Institute said evidence showed a much greater number of students learned to read successfully using the alternative "structured literacy" approach, and at least 90 per cent of students would be proficient using this model.
"Structured literacy" includes phonics, but also teacher-led "explicit instruction" backed by the latest science on how children's brains learn new concepts.
"The quality of teaching is the thing that will shift the dial for our young people," Dr Hunter said. "We need to make the most of every single minute we have with our young people."
Why are some schools still not using phonics?
Despite major inquiries in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States settling the argument that structured literacy teaching is superior, that hasn't flowed to all classrooms, the Grattan Institute said.
It said where school systems have embraced it, students have reaped the rewards.
Australia's 10,000 schools have a high degree of autonomy, and even in states where education departments advocate for the structured literacy approach, the report said there needed to be more support for teachers to re-train and be provided with ready-made lessons.
"The real issue here is, are governments doing enough to set teachers up for success?'" Dr Hunter said. "The challenge is making sure best practice is common practice in every single classroom."
Western Sydney University's Katina Zammit, president of the Australian Literary Educators Association, said the whole language method should not end up in history's trash can.
She said that in school systems that moved to the teaching methods championed by the Grattan Institute, some teachers found it too prescriptive.
"The teachers that I have had contact with, some of the children who are being taught this way, have either lost interest in reading because it's a whole class approach or they are not retaining the instruction," Dr Zammit said.
Dr Zammit agreed whole learning did not work for all students but said it could still be useful in the classroom. "One size doesn't fit all students," she said. "Yes, the majority it might, but we do have to look at engagement and motivation as well."
However in a statement to the ABC, Education Minister Jason Clare said the science on teaching reading had been settled. He also foreshadowed mandating teaching styles in the upcoming school funding agreement.
"The reading wars are over. We know what works. The current National School Reform Agreement doesn't include the sort of targets or reforms to move the needle here," he said.
"The new Agreement we strike this year needs to properly fund schools and tie that funding to the sort of things that work. The sort of things that will help children keep up, catch up and finish school."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/grattan-institute-reading-report/103446606
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11 February, 2024
The Person Behind a CA School District’s ‘Woke’ Education Program Wants to 'End' U.S., Israel
This week, Townhall reported about a California school district that struggled with some of the lowest math and reading scores in the country hired a company called “Woke Kindergarten” to train teachers and hopefully boost the school’s scores. Two years later, the students’ scores were reportedly worse.
Now, a report from the New York Post explained that the head of the organization has said on video that the United States and Israel have no right to exist.
The individual, Akiea ‘Ki’ Gross, who goes by “they/them” pronouns, made the announcement clear in a video posted on Instagram. It was later amplified by the X (formerly Twitter) account Libs of Tik Tok.
“Yes everyone, the rumors are true. I am anti-Israel. I am pro-Palestine and I am 100 percent, 10 toes down, anti-Israel. I believe Israel has no right to exist,” Gross said.
“I believe the United States has no right to exist. I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples, against Indigenous people, has no right to exist,” Gross said in the post.
“I believe in a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” Gross continued. “I believe one day Palestine will be free.”
“Y’all the demons. Y’all are the villains. We’ve been trying to end y’all. Get free of y’all,” she said, which essentially indicates that she supports Hamas’ attempts to “get rid of” the Israeli people.
In another video, Gross reportedly called for schools to be abolished (via NYP):
“I think about land back to Indigenous peoples globally. I think about the fact that we would not have to participate in these systems, because none of these systems would exist. That means kids wouldn’t have to go to school because the world would ultimately be their classroom,” Gross said.
“[Kids] would learn with us, they would learn from us. We would learn from them. We would create these ecosystems of community care that would make sure that everybody had what they needed, so nobody would want for anything. We would hear music everywhere. We will make art out of everything. We’ll be able to write so much more poetry, because we would have so much joy in ourselves that we would need someplace to move it, someplace for it to land. The people would have the power and the kids would have more, too.”
As Townhall covered, the Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward, California, spent $250,000 in federal funds on Gross’ education program.
The school superintendent, Jason Reimann, told the outlet that “Woke Kindergarten” was meant to boost attendance rather than test scores. He also claimed that the program was supported by parents and teachers.
"We are in favor 100% of abolishing systems of oppression where they hold our students back. What I do believe is we should pick providers based on their work and how effective they are,” Reimann said.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2024/02/07/woke-kindergarten-n2634888
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‘Micro’ K-12 Schools Offer Big Solutions for Students
New research estimates that some students’ grades will never catch back up after falling during the pandemic. Recently, some in the mainstream media worried that the federal taxpayer money that lawmakers sent to K-12 schools during COVID-19 may not be enough to help schools turn things around.
But public schools—also known as “assigned” schools—had money before the pandemic, and achievement gaps have persisted for decades among students from different economic backgrounds, long before COVID-19. Public education’s slow-motion attempts at meaningful improvement whilst holding checks from taxpayers have parents looking for alternatives.
Small ones.
“I thought schools today must have everything that I had, plus be 40 years better, only to find out that things had gone, if anything, backwards,” said Kathryn Kelly, one of the growing number of entrepreneurs behind microschools, small private schools that offer flexible schedules to students.
A parent herself, Kelly started her school in Nevada years before the pandemic because her adopted sons were “really floundering in school” and needed help. Today, her school, called I-School, is attracting families from all walks of life who have tired of the radical political orthodoxy inside many public school districts along with teachers union campaigns for more taxpayer spending.
Kelly is doing the opposite of what many public systems have tried. Instead of building new facilities and updating classroom technology, Kelly’s school in Carson City is situated in a building built in 1879 that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
She explains that the building, like her school’s focus on classic books and a traditional, liberal arts education, is meant to “give kids some magic” as they are surrounded by “history and character.”
“The bar has been set so low” at assigned schools, Kelly said in an interview. She explains that her teachers want to get students “engaged and curious and interactive instead of meekly accepting what is being handed to them.”
Kelly’s program also has an online option, and the combination of in-person and online teaching has reached a variety of students over the last 14 years. “We have full-time kids, have hybrid kids, we have kids that are part-time in the public school, part-time home-schooled. We try to be the school that I wanted when I started out, and that is very flexible for parent needs,” Kelly says.
And it’s working. Kelly explains that I-School has helped a child with cystic fibrosis remain in school while waiting for a lung transplant. Another student is one of the top-ranked high school wrestlers in Alabama who will be attending Columbia University.
Parent interest in microschools surged during and after the pandemic. Families discovered that these schools were not only flexible but could allow parents to remain involved in their children’s education through part-time and other hybrid school schedules.
Nationwide, microschool enrollment growth has been steady, but the schools are designed to be small, which means these modest operations are one part of a growing catalog of K-12 opportunities outside of assigned public schools. Combining her online school and physical location and her new faith-based Hope Academy, Kelly has 40 students enrolled.
Some state lawmakers are making it possible for more families to take advantage of small learning settings like Kelly’s, along with classical private schools, private schools focused on STEM, and more. Policymakers in nine states have adopted the school choice options of either private school scholarships (i.e., private school vouchers) or education savings accounts for which all students in those states are eligible to apply.
This year, Tennessee lawmakers are considering a proposal that would make their state the 10th to adopt such options. In some states, such as North Carolina, parents can use an education savings account to pay tuition at microschools similar to I-School in Nevada. With an education savings account, the state deposits a portion of a child’s funds from the state education funding formula that parents can then use to buy education products and services for their students (more than a dozen states have account-style opportunities for students today).
Claims that $200 billion in COVID-19 funding was not enough for schools during the pandemic are hard to stomach while innovators such as Kelly can advertise education quality to families from inside a nearly 200-year-old building.
Students who are falling behind are not catching up because the assigned school system is not catching up. Struggling students—and all students—should not have to wait for public schools to decide what to do with new money before getting the chance at a great education.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/02/micro-12-schools-offer-big-solutions-students/
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Australia: Vaping out of control in schools, warn principals
School principals are calling for an immediate crackdown on vape sales in shops and online, as the Coalition refuses to back the Albanese government’s plan to confine sales to pharmacies.
At least one in three Australian teenagers has tried vaping, the Cancer Council revealed on Friday when it released a survey showing 93 per cent of parents want vapes banned without a valid prescription.
Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andy Mison called on both sides of politics to back a ban on vape sales.
He said teenage students had sworn at him and threatened to bash him when he confiscated their vapes.
“They’re fixated on getting their next hit, are very disruptive and distracted from learning,’’ he said. “We see the behavioural effects of withdrawal, as kids disappear from the classroom so they can get nicotine hits.
“When you confiscate them, some kids act angrily. I’ve been sworn at, I’ve been threatened with bashings.’’
Mr Mison said manufacturers were targeting children with brightly coloured vapes made to look like highlighter pens.
“The vapes are bright and colourful and clearly designed to attract kids,’’ he said. “They have sweet combinations of flavours like mango and pineapple, and they’re so addictive.
“Kids will be more likely to be using vapes much more frequently than they might have smoked cigarettes.’’
A Senate inquiry into classroom disruption this week identified “strong links between vaping, nicotine withdrawal and classroom disruption’’.
The NSW Primary Principals Association told the inquiry of “increasing evidence of vaping being a problem in primary schools’’. “Vaping should be urgently addressed as a health problem, not a school discipline problem to solve,’’ it said.
Cancer Council chief executive Tanya Buchanan said vapes often contained nicotine and carcinogens such as formaldehyde and metals, which are not declared on the label.
Professor Buchanan said nicotine harms children’s developing brains, affecting the part of the brain that controls attention, learning, moods and impulse control.
“Retailers are still knowingly selling nicotine-containing vapes in local shops near schools, with enticing displays of lollies lining the entrance, attracting the attention of young people,’’ she said.
“Without the Parliament’s support for the federal government’s upcoming reforms, purchasing e-cigarettes will remain alarmingly common and easy for young people.’’
Retailers are banned from selling vapes to children, but enforcement is lax.
The Albanese government banned the importation of single-use vapes on January 1, but retailers are allowed to sell any vapes they have in stock to adults.
The government plans to introduce legislation this month to limit the sale of vapes to pharmacies, with a prescription, for use by smokers trying to quit.
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler called on the opposition to back Australia’s “world-leading vaping reforms’’.
“Once the legislation passes the parliament later this year the only legal way to buy vapes will be therapeutically, through a pharmacy,’’ he said.
The federal opposition refused to commit to the reform, with Nationals leader David Littleproud insisting that retailers be allowed to sell vapes to adults without a prescription.
Mr Littleproud – whose party has received donations from tobacco companies – refused to say if he would support the ban on vape sales in shops.
“We need to protect children from vaping and crack down on the uncontrolled black market,’’ he said.
“The Nationals support a process to develop a comprehensive regulatory framework for e-cigarettes to keep them out of the hands of children.
“We believe that regulating e-cigarettes is also crucial to weakening the illicit black market.’’
The federal Opposition’s education spokeswoman, Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson, said that vaping in schools was “rampant and educators need every possible support to combat this scourge’’.
“With over a quarter of young people aged 14 to 17 admitting to having tried or regularly use vapes, Australian schools need tough action from this government to prevent vaping spiralling out of control,’’ she said.
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8 February, 2024
Kids Finally Returned to School After a Lengthy Teachers Strike. Here’s How the Teachers Union Reacted
Students in Newton, Massachusetts returned to the classroom this week following a teachers strike that lasted more than two weeks, according to several reports.
The walkout began on Jan. 19, impacting 2,000 instructors and about 12,000 students, according to The Washington Post. It was the sixth teachers strike in the state since 2022 and the longest, though strikes are illegal in the state.
Reportedly, the strike occurred over wages for employees. The Newton Teachers Association bargained with Newton Public Schools for 10 months before the previous contract expired on August 31, 2023. On Sunday, a new contract was solidified (via WBUR):
Ratified by NTA members Sunday, it includes a 30% raise in starting salary for teacher aides — from $28,270 to $36,778 — and a district promise to hire at least five more social workers at the elementary schools. The union and the district also agreed to double the number of district-paid parental leave days from 10 days to 20 days and allow total paid parental leave of 60 days, up from 40 days. They also negotiated a 12% increase to annual cost of living adjustments for all educators over the next four years.
The new terms will cost the Newton Public Schools an additional $53 million compared with the last contract. A return to work agreement, meantime, specifies that no educators will face disciplinary action for the work stoppage.
In a statement, a teachers union bargainer, Ryan Normandin, said that the teachers taught their students to “stand up for themselves.”
“We taught our students not to be afraid that when those in power try to take away your rights, that they should stand up for themselves, that they should not do it alone, but together,” Normandin said. “We taught every other district in this state what will happen if they try to balance their budgets on the backs of our students and educators.”
Nicki Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, reacted to the statement on X.
“You robbed your innocent students of the ability to receive an education,” she wrote.
In recent years, has Townhall covered how many teachers unions across the country went on strike ahead of the 2022-2023 school year. This is the same time most school districts planned to return to full-time, in-person and "normal" schooling since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in record breaking learning loss.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2024/02/07/newton-teachers-strike-statement-n2634830
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At Columbia Law School, only one student club was rejected this year — the one formed to oppose antisemitism
LONG BEFORE antisemitism erupted on college campuses last fall, Marie-Alice Legrand knew what hostility to Jews could lead to.
As a young girl growing up in Hamburg, Germany, Legrand could look from her bedroom window onto the bare expanse of the Bornplatz, the site of what was once the city's largest synagogue. The great Jewish house of worship was torched on Kristallnacht by antisemitic mobs; a few months later the Nazis ordered the Jewish community to demolish what remained of the building and turn over the land to the city. The deportation of Hamburg's Jews to the death camps began in 1941. In the summer of 1942, the Jewish family that owned what would later become Legrand's childhood home was murdered in Auschwitz.
Like all schoolchildren in modern Germany, Legrand was taught from an early age about the Holocaust. "I always thought about what those individuals must have gone through," she told me in a phone conversation Monday. "When we learned about the hatred of the Jews, about the mass murder, I tried hard to relate to the people who were involved."
A Black German of French Caribbean descent, Legrand went to Paris to study history and management, then moved to New York to earn a law degree at Columbia University. She said she hadn't expected to become an activist in her final year, but everything changed after Israel was savagely attacked on Oct. 7.
Legrand was shocked when the Columbia campus erupted in "blatant antisemitism and hate," as she wrote on LinkedIn. Anti-Israel throngs publicly cheered the Hamas atrocities and marched behind banners bearing Palestinian flags and the words "By Any Means Necessary." A tenured Columbia professor waxed ecstatic over the murders, rapes, and abductions of Israelis, which he called "astounding," "awesome," and "victories of the resistance." More than 140 other faculty members signed a letter defending the barbaric assault as a legitimate "military action" against the Jewish state.
The callousness of what she was seeing scandalized Legrand. She knew students at Columbia who had lost friends or relatives in the Oct. 7 pogrom, she told me, but "there was not one ounce of sympathy or compassion extended to my Jewish and Israeli friends." She reached out on social media. "You are not alone," she posted. "I unequivocally support and stand with you."
She decided to offer more than comfort. Over the next few months, Legrand assembled a group of students, Jews and non-Jews alike, to create a new campus club, Law Students Against Antisemitism. They drafted a charter laying out their objectives: to raise awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, to foster dialogue, and to provide support for students targeted by antisemitism.
Student groups are ubiquitous at Columbia — the university boasts that there are more than 500 clubs and organizations, at least 85 in the law school alone. Given the surge of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bigotry, especially among young Americans and in academia, the need for groups like Law Students Against Antisemitism is self-evident.
On Jan. 23, Legrand and the group's other officers appeared before the law school student senate to request official recognition for their club. Such recognition, which is needed to reserve space on campus and be assigned a Columbia email address, is normally a routine formality. Eight other clubs requested approval last month; all eight were rubber-stamped in a few minutes.
But not Law Students Against Antisemitism.
Before the vote was held, a delegation of progressive students showed up to demand that Legrand's group be rejected on the grounds that it would "silence pro-Palestine activists on campus and brand their political speech as antisemitic." It would do so, they claimed, by adopting the standard definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The accusation was ridiculous on multiple grounds. First and most obviously, no voluntary student group has the power to silence anyone, on campus or off. Second, as recent months have made plain, there has been no shortage of pro-Palestine expression on Columbia's campus.
Above all, it is beyond surreal to denounce an organization opposed to antisemitism for adopting the most widely used definition of the term. The IHRA formulation has been accepted by 42 countries — including the United States — and by well over 1,000 states, provinces, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. In fact, it is the definition relied on by the federal government in its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
In the end, the absurdity of the attack made no difference. For an hour, Legrand and her colleagues were grilled by the student senate. Then, by an anonymous vote, Law Students Against Antisemitism was rejected.
Legrand knows only too well how tenacious antisemitism can be. She said she was "heartbroken" by the student senate vote and by the moral perversity of those who would mobilize to kill an organization like hers. But she is not giving up. She hasn't forgotten the view from her childhood bedroom window. And she knows that in the fight against antisemitism, surrender can be fatal.
https://jeffjacoby.com/27539/at-columbia-law-school-only-one-student-club-was
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Classroom chaos linked to Aussie teaching styles
Teachers should instruct rowdy students in good behaviour and use back-to-basic teaching methods, a senate inquiry into chaotic classrooms will recommend on Wednesday.
Schools need closer ties with health services to give students faster access to psychologists, social workers and behaviour specialists, the Senate Standing Committee on Education has concluded after a 15-month inquiry into the issue of increasing disruption in classrooms.
The committee will recommend that the Senate begin a follow-up inquiry, to investigate Australia’s declining academic standards, focusing on literacy and numeracy.
Its final report contains fresh data from student surveys in the latest global testing of 15-year-old students in maths and science, the 2021 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).
A startling 83 per cent of students responded that “students do not listen to what the teacher said’’ in mathematics lessons.
Ten per cent said students failed to listen in “every lesson’’, one in four said classmates did not listen to the teacher “most lessons’’, and half said students failed to listen during “some lessons’’.
In contrast, just 1 per cent of students in Japan – one of the highest-performing countries – said students failed to listen in every lesson. Only one in 20 Japanese students said classmates ignored the teacher in most lessons, and one-third said students failed to listen in some lessons.
An analysis prepared for the senate committee found that the “disciplinary climate’’ in Australian schools was the fifth-lowest among 37 nations in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development).
The senate inquiry, chaired by Liberal Party Senator Matt O’Sullivan, will recommend the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (ACARA) devise a “behaviour curriculum’’ to teach students how to behave in class.
It calls on teachers to use evidence-based teaching methods, including “explicit instruction’’ with step-by-step explanations, and practice and testing to ensure all children mastered each lesson.
The committee has called for an end to open-plan classrooms, which can be noisy and distracting for teachers and students.
Teachers told the inquiry that out-of-control students had sexually assaulted and threatened to kill them, punched classmates, and dealt drugs in the playground.
The National Catholic Education Commission said principals were the victims of physical violence at 11 times the rate of average Australians. The Australian Psychological Society said disruptive behaviour could be linked to low levels of literacy.
Children and Media Australia said violent videos and games were a risk factor for aggression among children and teenager.
Vaping was singled out by the NSW Primary Principals’ Association.
The Australian Secondary Principals’ Association said many teachers were at “breaking point and the addition of disruptive youth adds to this load’’.
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7 February, 2024
Virginia May Be a Purple State, but Many of Its Colleges Are ‘Social Justice’ Blue
Virginia is a very purple state, evenly divided between conservatives and liberals, but its universities are not equally balanced ideologically.
A simple way to gauge how “woke” universities are is to search for certain terms in their course catalogs. The more “woke” words that appear in the titles and descriptions of courses and programs, the more left-leaning the university is likely to be.
Harry R. Lewis, a computer science professor and former dean of Harvard College, recently did this to demonstrate how radical Harvard had become. Terms like “social justice,” “decolonization,” and “oppression” have become ubiquitous in its course catalog.
Replicating Lewis’ approach for the 15 public universities in Virginia reveals some unexpected patterns.
The term “social justice” appears 72 times in the course catalog of James Madison University, 59 times for George Mason University, and 53 times for Virginia Commonwealth University.
None of the other dozen public universities in Virginia have even half as many mentions of “social justice” in their catalogs. Virginia’s two historically black public universities, Norfolk State University and Virginia State University, don’t even mention “social justice” a dozen times in their catalogs.
But these universities are not all the same size and may not have an equal number of courses and programs described in their catalogs. For a better apples-to-apples comparison, we can also look at how often more traditional terms, such as “Constitution,” appear in their catalogs.
The term “social justice” appears in the James Madison University catalog 4.5 times as often as the term “Constitution.” For Virginia Commonwealth University, “social justice” is 3.1 times as common as “Constitution.” At George Mason University, it is 2.6 times as common.
For the historically black institutions, Norfolk State and Virginia State, their catalogs mention “Constitution” more often than they do “social justice.” The same is true for the flagship University of Virginia, as well as at Old Dominion University, Christopher Newport University, Longwood University, and Virginia Military Institute.
In fact, VMI does not have a single course or program that includes the terms “social justice,” “decolonization,” “liberation,” “white supremacy,” or “intersectionality” in their titles or descriptions, but it does have 13 with the term “Constitution.” By contrast, William & Mary University’s catalog mentions these woke terms 17 times. The Constitution? Only three times.
Obviously, these are not perfect proxies for how woke universities are, but they roughly give us a flavor of the ideological tilt of their academic offerings.
And it’s important to note that benign-sounding terms such as “social justice” are often anything but benign.
In their highly useful “cheat sheet for policymakers,” titled “Responding to Social Justice Rhetoric,” authors Bruce Gilley, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay explain that “social justice,” as the woke define it, means “group entitlements, which is the reframing of particular political demands as universal moral imperatives [and] a denial of just rewards to individuals who follow the law.”
The relative frequency of woke terms such as “social justice” in course and program titles, and descriptions that feature more traditional topics, such as the Constitution, does not seem to be related to the size of the university or its demographic composition.
Woke universities in Virginia come in all sizes, from very large ones such as George Mason, James Madison, and Virginia Commonwealth to very small ones, such as William & Mary and the University of Mary Washington. And those with greater ideological balance are as big as the University of Virginia and as small as VMI.
The fact that Virginia’s two public historically black institutions, as well as some universities with relatively high percentages of low-income students (as measured by Pell Grants), such as Longwood and Old Dominion universities, have very little interest in woke courses and programs suggests that this is not being driven by student demographics or demand.
When universities go woke, it’s the result of decisions made by their leaders. And it’s their leaders who need to be held accountable.
University presidents, provosts, and deans make choices about how to allocate resources, hire additional faculty, and create new academic programs. Boards of trustees approve those decisions and review the performance of senior administrators. Those decisions determine whether a university has dozens of social justice courses and programs and only a handful on the Constitution.
It’s time for us all to remember that these universities are public institutions and are ultimately accountable to the residents of Virginia. If they deviate too far from what Virginians want, voters will demand that their political representatives appoint administrators who will restore ideological balance.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/30/virginia-may-be-purple-state-many-its-colleges-blue/
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Indiana AG Launches Portal for Parents to Monitor Public Schools’ Discriminatory Policies, Content
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced, in an exclusive interview Monday with The Daily Signal, the launch of a public portal online for parents in the state’s public schools to submit and monitor content of concern to them.
“This is a tool to empower parents in their dealings with their own school system so they can better raise their kids, which is their job and not the schools’,” Rokita, a Republican, said of the online portal.
The past several years have seen national concern about public school systems hiding discriminatory and sexually or racially inappropriate content and policies from parents. Indiana is no exception.
Dozens of Indiana schools have incorporated critical race theory and gender transition plans without the consent of, much less the awareness of, many Hoosier parents.
Accuracy in Media last year released undercover videos in which several administrators at five Indiana public schools admitted to teaching critical race theory despite telling parents otherwise. At least two of those administrators since have stepped down or been placed on leave.
A previous report by The Daily Signal exposed one Indiana school system’s hidden gender support plan, which required teachers to omit information about a student’s “gender transition” in conversations with his or her parents. The school system fired that whistleblower, a school counselor, for revealing the information; she is currently suing the district.
As attorney general, Rokita outlined these “constituent concerns” as the rationale behind his office’s new “Eyes on Education” online portal, which would allow parents to submit policies, lesson plans, and other concerning matters to be reviewed by the Attorney General’s office and placed on a public database for other parents to see.
The vision for the portal began to take shape around the end of 2021, Rokita told The Daily Signal:
Parents were sending me lesson plans. This is around the time that we were calling out critical race theory and this social [and] emotional learning that was being taught to teachers and then teachers to the students, and it was corrupting the whole educational experience.
Many teachers and administrators claimed that critical race theory and radical gender ideology were not being taught in public schools. But, using social media, many parents posted concerning videos, screenshots, lessons, and policies that showed otherwise.
“So either these parents are part of a huge conspiracy and making all this stuff up, as the teachers and principals and school board members would have you believe,” Rokita said, “or there’s really something going on—even in good ol’ Indiana. So we’ve been collecting these different submissions for about the last year and a half.”
I asked Rokita what plans were in place to verify materials sent to the Indiana Attorney General’s Office—citing a situation in which many Hoosier parents were fooled by a hoax about litter boxes at a high school in Kokomo, Indiana.
Rokita responded that “rumor mill” submissions would result in a call to the individual who submitted the material, followed up by a second look by his office’s investigators.
“We deal with very complex, complicated professional licensing issues, so to speak, and ten of thousands of other cases per year,” Rokita responded. “We can get to the root of a liar, of a fake, pretty easy. But really it’s also for self-policing.”
The attorney general said he thinks this is a job for the state superintendent of schools. But just like the Parents Bill of Rights document that Rokita launched in June 2021, he said, he took on this project because “no one’s picking up the mantle.”
The theme of the entire project is transparency, Rokita said. If a school system disagrees with what has been posted by his office, the attorney general said, the “denial” also will be posted.
“I’m not going to go and start investigating schools,” Rokita said. “No. 1, I don’t have the statutory authority to go in there. But this is going to be a portal, a transparent portal where we can cut through the rumor mill.”
To cut through this “rumor mill,” Rokita said, his office would post only primary documents and verified material, letters, and policies from the schools.
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A Democrat Mayor Voiced His Support to Remove Police From Schools. Here’s How the Community Responded
In an interview late last month, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said that he supports ending a program that puts uniformed police officers in dozens of Chicago Public Schools.
The mayor made the remarks in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. In the interview, he voiced his support to end the $10.3 million contract with the Chicago Police Department. CPS officials reportedly told school principals last month to prepare for the removal of the officers next fall.
“The Board of Education is moving in the direction that I do support,” the mayor told the outlet. “There is an intergovernmental agreement between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department. To end that agreement, there’s no qualms from me there.”
Johnson as a mayoral candidate said he would remove all officers and focus on those alternative solutions. But once he took office, he backed off, saying Local School Councils should make individual decisions. Now he has once again reversed course.
A Chicago school principal and several lawmakers, on the other hand, expressed that the city’s Board of Education should not make the decision on whether or not police stay in schools.
William Howard Taft High School Principal Mark Grishaber told Fox News that the removal of school resource officers (SRO) at CPS should be decided by the Local School Councils (LSC) as opposed to the Board of Education.
"Let each school's LSC decide if they want to retain their SRO's or let them go. Many years ago the system was broke, but through the efforts of Jadine Chou and CPS, the SRO's are now in the schools that want them and the SRO's are now trained," Grishaber said in an email to Fox News Digital.
Reportedly, earlier last month, the Chicago Board of Education wanted to strip Local School Councils, which are made up of parents, teachers, and students, of their power to choose whether to have SROs at their schools.
"Each school in CPS is different. Principals and other community members on Local School Councils understand the environment and needs of their schools. They are best equipped to determine the necessity of school resource officers," the Illinois Policy Institute told Fox. "Local School Councils already have the power to remove officers, but district leaders are taking away that local control."
Grishaber added: "If the Mayor and the Board really believe what they say, that the safety of our students is their number one concern and the Mayor and the board really believe in listening to student and community voices then the decision should be crystal clear.”
The Sun-Times noted that Alderman Peter Chico, a Democrat, said that police officers were removed from George Washington High School in the city. As a result, he heard complaints from CPD that calls from the school increased. And, parents didn’t feel comfortable with the lack of police presence.
Ald. Ruth Cruz added that parents have spoken to her about their concerns with a lack of police in schools. Cruz, a former LSC member, said that these decisions should be left up to these committees.
This debate about police officers in schools has occurred in other school districts across the country. In Alexandria, Virginia, the Alexandria City Council voted in 2021 to return police to schools after the school board and superintendent worked to remove them (via the Washington Post):
After several incidents involving students and guns this fall escalated safety concerns, parents and top school officials pleaded with the council to reinstate the decades-old initiative. This week, their calls were enough to sway just one key lawmaker.
“I’m willing to take that step back,” said council member John T. Chapman (D), who had initially voted to defund SROs. “We know this program is not a silver bullet, but we have to do something here tonight.”
City council members had previously voted to reallocate $800,000 for SROs to expand mental health programs for students.
“We want to thank the Alexandria City Council for its decision to work with us and agree to the reinstatement of our [SROs],” Alexandria City schools spokeswoman Julia Burgos said. “SROs serve as a proactive safety mechanism while serving as a trusted adult for our students.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2024/02/06/chicago-cops-in-schools-n2634788
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6 February, 2024
‘Did Not Align With Our Mission’: Catholic University Fires Professor Who Brought in ‘Abortion Doula’
Catholic University confirmed to The Daily Signal that it has terminated the contract of the professor who invited a self-declared “abortion doula” to speak to students about coaching women through abortions and “pregnant men” through a “seahorse birth.”
Catholic University President Peter Kilpatrick announced to students on Jan. 30 that the university “terminated our contract with the professor who invited the speaker” after obtaining “clear evidence that the content of the class did not align with our mission and identity.”
“We first heard of the incident on Wednesday and began to gather information from the students and the professor,” Kilpatrick explained. “We had been told that one student had a recording of the class, and had plans to send it to the media, but the recording was not shared with the university administration.”
“We received one media inquiry Thursday, and one on Friday, asking for comment,” he continued. “While we were unable to confirm what exactly was said in the class, we did determine that the speaker’s views on life issues and on the anthropology of the human person were not consistent with our mission and identity as a faithful Catholic university, and that she should not be allowed to address the class again.”
Kilpatrick emphasized that Catholic University is strongly committed to promoting “the full truth of the human person and to protecting human life from conception to natural death.”
“In our rigorous pursuit of truth and justice, we engage at times with arguments or ideologies contrary to reason or to the Gospel,” he said. “But we do so fully confident in the clarity given by the combined lights of reason and faith, and we commit to never advocate for sin or to give moral equivalence to error. As witnessed by the life and virtue of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose feast we just celebrated as a community, such engagement with opposing ideas helps us both to grow in our command of truth and to respond to error with empathy, compassion, and mercy.”
“Here at Catholic University, we have the unique opportunity and common blessing to pursue truth, to grow in faith, and to exercise charity,” he added. “Our studies aim at producing wisdom, which includes excellence in living and sharing the truth with others. May our common study help us to understand life, to love goodness, and to promote and protect the dignity of the human person.”
The Daily Signal first reported the story of the “abortion doula” last week after a Catholic University nursing student detailed the abortion lecture. The student noted that the guest speaker said she also practices Reiki, a controversial Japanese method of spiritual healing and self-improvement.
“It was really unsettling,” nursing student Felipe Avila, 20, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Friday. “The fundamental point is to understand human development from conception to natural death, right? And they brought in someone who counsels women to terminate life.”
Psychology lecturer Melissa Goldberg (who did not respond to requests for comment) invited the doula, Rachel Carbonneau, to address her class, titled Psychology 379: Lifespan Development.
The term doula usually refers to a professional who provides physical and emotional support to a woman before, during, and shortly after childbirth. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, defines an abortion doula as someone who “provides physical and emotional support to a patient during their abortion process.”
Carbonneau identified herself to the class as an “abortion doula,” according to the audio recording obtained by The Daily Signal. The founder and CEO of the LGBTQ-aligned doula company Family Ways also was an English lecturer at Catholic University from 2005 to 2008, her LinkedIn profile says.
Avila, the nursing student, said he first recognized the doula’s misalignment with the Catholic school’s values when Carbonneau began “using terms like birthing persons [and] pregnant person.” The lecturer was “very strategic in avoiding the word ‘woman,’” Avila said.
One of Avila’s classmates repeatedly asked Carbonneau how abortion ties into her work as a doula, which prompted the lecturer to share her pro-abortion stance openly.
“This is a space I feel comfortable navigating,” the doula said in response to questions.
Carbonneau also described what she called “seahorse birth.”
“We work with trans clients,” Carbonneau told students, according to the audio. “I have some men who have given birth; it’s amazing, we call it seahorse birth. It’s lovely, especially when it’s a water birth; it’s fantastic.”
Female seahorses still produce eggs and male seahorses fertilize them, but male seahorses incubate the young in a special pouch, from which the young emerge. This does not mean male seahorses become female, but they do appear to “give birth,” in a sense, so pro-transgender activists claim that when a “transgender man” gives birth, that is similar to a male seahorse doing so.
She insisted: “It’s not my business as a doula or a human being to pass judgment on how anybody else chooses to live their life.”
When discussing the stigma of “pregnant men,” Carbonneau urged students to “normalize” the discussion of women who identify as men giving birth.
“I think just normalizing it, right? Using the gender-neutral language, talking about pregnant men as pregnant people, pregnant women, pregnant men, pregnant humans,” she told the class.
Carbonneau acknowledged the tension between her support for abortion and the Catholic position on the issue, saying she herself had studied at the university.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that abortion is a “moral evil” and “gravely contrary to the moral law.”
The doula’s presentation Tuesday at Catholic University felt “unsettling,” Avila said. The student pointed out that “one of the many reasons that students like me and many of my peers made the decision to attend Catholic University is for that Catholic identity.”
“The university should not wait for there to be public pressure or a public outcry for there to be some kind of change … if they want to preserve the Catholic identity, then they need to take these things a lot more seriously,” Avila added.
Carbonneau said she uses Reiki, a Japanese spiritual healing technique condemned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as incompatible with Christian teaching and scientific evidence. In 2009, the conference said that “it would be inappropriate for Catholic institutions … to promote or to provide support for Reiki therapy.”
Catholic University acknowledged the contradiction between Carbonneau’s support for abortion and the institution’s own values on Friday in a statement to The Daily Signal.
“The Catholic University of America was appalled to learn about reports regarding this guest speaker,” the university told The Daily Signal. “It does not reflect our mission and values as a university that is committed to upholding the dignity of life at all stages.”
“The guest speaker will not be speaking again to the class, and we are re-communicating the terms and expectations by which all outside speakers are vetted and invited,” the university, added, referring to Carbonneau.
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Missouri AG Orders School District to Cease Teaching Radical Gender Ideology Without Parents’ OK
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey this week ordered a local school district to “cease and desist” teaching students about human sexuality, including gender ideology, without parental consent ahead of time.
In a letter Monday exclusively obtained by The Daily Signal, Bailey also ordered the Webster Groves School District to review all classroom materials for compliance with the law.
“Failing to notify parents in advance, failing to provide parents with the content of the instruction and materials, failing to clearly offer an opportunity to opt out, or failing to uphold a parent’s opt-out decision violates Missouri law and represents a direct assault upon parents’ rights,” Bailey, a Republican, wrote to John Simpson, superintendent of schools for the Webster Groves district.
Tenth-graders at Webster Groves High School, in the suburbs of St. Louis, were required to watch a slideshow on “oppression and privilege” that appeared to violate state law by using information from a Planned Parenthood affiliate that lists abortion clinics on its website, The Daily Signal reported in October.
The website of the Planned Parenthood affiliate, Teen Health Source, tells teens about “porn literacy” and “hookups” for casual sex. The organization defines abortion as “a safe medical procedure that ends a pregnancy” and suggests “trangender care” clinics that offer minors sterilizing hormone therapy and referrals for transgender surgery.
“My office has received reports that Webster Groves School District has provided materials related to human sexuality to students without notifying parents in advance, without providing a clear opportunity for parents to opt-out their child, and in some instances refusing to honor parents’ opt-out decisions,” Bailey says in his letter to Simpson.
The Missouri attorney general describes the slideshow presentation as discussing gender identity, sexual orientation, and abortion, all topics of “human sexuality.”
“Missouri law requires every school district and charter school to notify each student’s parent or guardian before providing any human sexuality materials or instruction to students,” Bailey writes to the Webster Groves superintendent, citing specific provisions of law. “Schools must provide to parents the content of any human sexuality materials or instruction and give parents the opportunity to opt their child out.”
Derek Duncan, communications director for the school district, confirmed Friday that Simpson had received Bailey’s letter.
“We did receive a notice from the AG’s office,” Duncan told The Daily Signal. “We will address and respond to the concerns raised in a cooperative and transparent manner.”
Parents have the “natural right” to direct their children’s upbringing and education, Bailey tells Simpson in the letter:
According to long-established Supreme Court precedent and Missouri state statute, schools must respect parents’ rights concerning human sexuality instruction and materials.
Specifically, this means that schools must notify parents in advance and provide them with information about the instructional content and materials that will be shared with their children in order to give each parent a clear opt-out opportunity.
Plainly stated, parents get to make decisions about the kind of human sexuality education their children will receive and schools are legally obligated to respect parents’ decisions.
Bailey ordered the district to “cease and desist” its use of human sexuality materials that have not been approved by parents in advance and to review all its class materials.
“Moreover, Webster Groves School District must immediately review all instructional resources, including reading lists, classroom and campus libraries, and any diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging materials that address issues of human sexuality, to ensure they comply with state law,” Bailey writes.
The Webster Groves school system had destroyed her family’s trust in school officials’ judgment, one mother told The Daily Signal in response Friday to the attorney general’s order.
“Their pattern of hiding gender ideology education from parents is well established and it’s simply a matter of time before parental rights are once again violated with an inappropriate survey, slideshow, or nudge towards activism,” the mother, who asked not to be identified, said.
She said she hopes Bailey’s letter will create a sense of urgency for Simpson as superintendent.
“He must draw a hard line with would-be activist staff—inform parents ahead of any human sexuality content or consequences will follow,” she said.
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School Choice Revolution Helps Homeschoolers, Too
A school choice revolution is sweeping the nation. Ten states ha ve passed universal education choice initiatives in the last two years. In addition to private school tuition, most of these new programs allow families to use their children’s taxpayer-funded education dollars to cover certain homeschool expenses.
The loudest and most influential pushback against school choice comes from Democratic politicians in the pocket of the teachers unions, who want to protect their monopoly over education. However, others have voiced the opposite concern that school choice could increase government regulation of private education.
The concern that "with government shekels come government shackles" is understandable, but misplaced. Shackles can be imposed even without subsidies, and states that have education choice policies tend to respect homeschooling autonomy more than those that don’t.
The government can already regulate private education without providing any funding. It has happened historically and still happens today. Oregon went as far as outlawing private education altogether in 1922 at the behest of the Ku Klux Klan, which sought to shut down Catholic schools. Thankfully, in 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that bigoted law, famously ruling that "the child is not the mere creature of the State."
Yet funding need not come with burdensome regulations. States without school choice policies—including Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island—are among the worst states when it comes to burdensome regulations for homeschool families according to the Home School Legal Defense Association. Meanwhile, states like Iowa, Indiana and Oklahoma respect the autonomy of homeschool families and have universal or nearly universal education choice policies.
States with more school choice generally have more freedom to homeschool. In fact, last year, Ohio lawmakers passed both universal school choice and a reduction in homeschool regulation.
Education choice policies shift the locus of control over education from politicians and bureaucrats to families. When a government-run school fails to meet a child’s individual learning needs or is pushing values that run contrary to her family’s values, choice policies give that family an immediate escape hatch.
Empowering families with education choice also reduces the likelihood of harmful government regulation. As more families benefit from private and home education, the coalition willing to fight for the autonomy of private education will also grow.
The school choice coalition has been careful to support legislation that includes language preserving the autonomy of private education providers. For example, Arizona’s education savings account (ESA) statute states that a school "shall not be required to alter its creed, practices, admissions policy or curriculum" as a condition of accepting ESA students. Arizona enacted ESAs more than a decade ago and there have been no encroachments on the freedoms of private schools or homeschoolers.
Nearly every state constitution requires the state legislature to subsidize education to grant every child access to schooling. The question is only whether that subsidy will be in the form of government-run schools to which students are assigned, or directly to families who have the freedom to choose where and how their children are educated.
School choice is always voluntary. No school choice policy has ever forced a family or a school to participate. All families and schools can weigh the costs and benefits and make their own decisions.
Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. As economist Thomas Sowell often reminded us, "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs." School choice isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s the most viable option we have today. America’s education system would be much better off if every family had access to the learning environments that worked best for their children.
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/school-choice-revolution-helps-homeschoolers-too
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5 February, 2024
The shame of Britain’s ‘cash for courses’ universities
‘If you can take the lift, why go through the hardest route?’ a recruitment officer representing four Russell Group universities asked an undercover reporter for the Sunday Times.
He boasted that ‘foundation’ course pathways onto undergraduate courses at Russell Group universities are much easier than the entry requirements for British applicants: overseas applicants ‘pay more money […] so they give leeway for international students […] It’s not something they want to tell you, but it’s the truth.’
And how. The paper reports that ‘overseas students wishing to study an economics degree using one of the pathways needed grades of CCC at Bristol; CCD at Durham; DDE at Exeter; DDE at Newcastle; and just a single D at Leeds. Yet the same universities’ A-level entry requirements for UK students is A*AA or AAA.’ Odd, isn’t it, when we’re making such a noise about immigration policy favouring only the cream of international talent that we seem to be applying the opposite metric when it comes to university admissions. I don’t think it makes you a little Englander to find it perverse that it’s much harder for British than foreign students to get a place in a British university.
Britain’s higher education sector has, historically, been something to be proud of
These universities have been quick to pooh-pooh the Sunday Times’s reporting – which, as Mandy Rice-Davies might have said, ‘they would, wouldn’t they?’ They say that it can’t possibly be the case that foreign students are ‘squeezing out’ domestic applicants because, look, domestic admissions to Russell Group universities are at a record high and foreign applications have slumped. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re right about this. I would be surprised, though, if that trend was privately regarded by the average vice-chancellor with anything but horror. There’s a reason they spend millions pimping themselves abroad.
If there’s a temporary shortage of foreign students, in other words, it’s not for want of trying. The slump in foreign students, particularly from the EU, is down to that awkwardness in 2016. That and the fact our general enthusiasm for making it harder for foreigners to live here may yet put a dent in the flow of Indian and Chinese money. This will cook the universities’ gooses yet further. The way university funding is now set up means that all but a very few universities positively rely on foreigners to pay the bills.
The universities further complain that the Sunday Times failed to differentiate between the traditional, front-door admission system via UCAS and the one-year ‘foundation’ courses offered to foreign students. It seems to me that the paper differentiated between them rather well: it made the point that getting into the latter, more or less, requires the offspring of your average Chinese billionaire to be able to make a smudge on a bit of paper with his thumb, whereas the former asks a native Briton to get a clutch of A*s at A-level. They grumble that this is not comparing like with like… but that’s sort of the point.
Sure, a foundation course doesn’t guarantee a straight-C student will go on to join the regular undergraduate course the following year alongside higher-achieving British peers. But the paper found all sorts of people prepared to testify that the end-of-year exams needed to get you through aren’t especially taxing. Pass rates of between 93 and 100 per cent were reported. So the back door does, to all intents and purposes, exist.
And why on earth wouldn’t it? Vice-chancellors are encouraged to run universities as businesses, and businesses tend to look for profit. If student fees for Britons are capped at a quarter of what you can charge a foreigner, you’re going to do everything you can to get some wealthy foreigners in through the door before you go bust.
There are two models of what a university education is for, and they have always jostled along together. One is the humanistic, perhaps slightly hippy-dippy notion that learning is in and of itself a good thing: that it benefits both the individual human and the common lot of humanity, on average, to have minds expanded and assumptions tested. This is the version that thinks that the Greats are great, that studying poems for three years partially or wholly on the taxpayer’s dime is just the sort of thing a civilised society should encourage, and that universities are the engines of our commonwealth of knowledge.
Then there’s the instrumental version, which is that learning is a good thing because it increases your human capital, creates the sort of people who will power a high-skill economy, boosts the graduate’s expected lifetime earnings by a measurable amount, and all in all keeps the wheels of industry whizzing merrily round. This is the version, increasingly favoured by government these last few decades, which wants to see a return on investment one way or another. It wants its students to cover their bills; and it wants, with a view to boosting the wider economy, to encourage the sorts of students who go on to become engineers or tech wizards rather than poets. (There is, of course, a third model of what a university education is for, favoured by many undergraduates back when it was free, which had to do with getting blootered and trying to shag people, but that need not detain us overmuch here.)
As I say, these models have always jostled along together. The balance has shifted dramatically to the latter lately, with times being tough and Wordsworth looking more optional. But there’s always been a sense that universities do both things at once. I’m not sure if the current funding situation continues, though, that they are likely to be able to do either for much longer.
The trend is towards a larger number of foreign students, and a larger number of students tout court. As Kingsley Amis said, ‘More will mean worse.’ If, as the Sunday Times suggests, they aren’t starting on an even academic footing with their British fellows, teaching wealthy but derr-brained foreign students will slow the progress of the brighter kids. One lecturer told the paper: ‘They might struggle to keep up on the courses, especially with the written work, and this can mean more work for me and a slower pace for the rest of the students in the class.’
Even if these foreign cash-cows aren’t actively displacing domestic students, they are unlikely to stick around – and will become ever more unlikely to as we make it harder for foreign graduates to live and work here. In effect, they’ll swoop in, enjoy the cachet of an elite education, and then repatriate their human capital smartly to their countries of origin or to the international job market. The national circulatory system of scholarship – where the smartest graduates either boost the UK economy by working here or refresh the lifeblood of British academia with postgraduate work – will have sprung a leak. Or, perhaps, invited a vampire across the threshold.
Britain’s higher education sector has, historically, been something to be proud of. The fact that all these foreigners still want to study here is testament to that. But if its short-to-medium-term survival strategy is to lower its standards and change its demographic, which over time will diminish its attraction to foreign students in the first place, there may not be a long term.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/the-shame-of-britains-cash-for-courses-universities/ ?
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Harvard Plagiarism: Et Tu?
Fresh off the Claudine Gay scandal, an even more obvious plagiarist seems to be embedded in the ranks of Harvard University. Sherri Ann Charleston is the storied university's chief diversity officer. She was hired by the school in 2020 and was partially responsible for Gay's ascension to the presidency. Charleston previously held a similar position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where her title was chief affirmative action officer.
So you're starting to get a picture already of what sort of academic Charleston is. She is ideologically focused on Racial Marxism initiatives, much like Claudine Gay. The next question is, how is her body of scholarly work? Is she actually an academic, or is she riding on the coattails of other people's work and her own intersectional status?
An anonymous complaint has been filed against her alleging 40 examples of plagiarism in her body of academic work. Her dissertation, like Gay's, was riddled with lack of attribution or proper use of quotation marks when referencing others.
Charleston's worst offense, though, involved a 2014 paper (her only peer-reviewed work) in which she apparently plagiarized her husband. LaVar Charleston, a fellow academic of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) infrastructure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote a 2012 study for the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. He then teamed up with his wife and another academic, Jerlando Jackson, and basically republished the 2012 study through the Journal of Negro Education in 2014.
The 2014 study quoted the same interviewees as the original, and it even included the same findings. All in all, about 20% of the 2014 paper was ripped straight from the original 2012 study conducted by LaVar. What makes it worse is they cited the 2012 paper in the writings to undergird that paper's main theory.
This type of academic fraud is called "duplicate publication" and is "typically a form of self-plagiarism in which authors republish old work in a bid to pad their résumés," according to The Washington Free Beacon. "Here, though, the duplicate paper added two new authors, Sherri Ann Charleston and Jerlando Jackson, who had no involvement in the original, letting them claim credit for the research and making them party to the con."
If these allegations are true, then not only Sherri Charleston but also her husband and Jerlando Jackson all enjoyed career boosts based on this fraudulent paper. However, holding academics to account is more than just calling out their academic malfeasance. One could perhaps start to conclude that intellectual dishonesty is rife throughout the DEI infrastructure within the higher education system.
The diversity, equity, and inclusion grift is a cancer on our academic institutions, though hardly the only one. There are several insidious aspects to DEI. First, it creates a culture within academia that lets DEI adherents get away with any and every intellectual malpractice and not be held to account.
This has largely proven true until this point because DEI aligns politically with the rest of higher ed's left-leaning agendas. Second, DEIers have a built-in get-out-of-jail-free card. If anyone calls them out, they can cry racism and accusers will usually back down. Third, and finally, DEI is a disservice to those academics of color who are in university positions because of their stellar academic work and incredible teaching.
DEI isn't about merit but about making sure the playing field is equal. If individuals have to cheat to make the playing field "equal," it's justified in their minds. However, to the public at large, as well as to the scholars who didn't take the racist DEI shortcut, this is a bad look.
Harvard is once again showing just how much it has fallen from its former academic glory by those it chooses to promote to leadership.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104052-harvard-plagiarism-et-tu-2024-02-01
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Anti-Israel protesters spew anti-cop chants, clash with officers at Columbia University: ‘NYPD, burn in hell!’
Anti-Israel protesters spewing anti-cop chants clashed with police at a rally outside Columbia University on Friday — leading to nine arrests over several hours.
The “All Out for Palestine” demonstration kicked off at 3 p.m. and less than two hours later protesters waving Palestinian flags could be seen in footage posted to social media scuffling with NYPD officers in the street.
“NYPD, KKK. IDF they’re all the same,” the group chanted as at least one protester was seen being detained by police.
A swarm of screaming protesters tried to intervene and rip cops off a woman as they tried to take her into custody in a scuffle, the clip shows.
The demonstration was organized in response to allegations that anti-Israel student demonstrators were sprayed with an unknown, foul-smelling chemical on Jan. 19 while marching through the campus of Columbia University.
The two alleged assailants were banned from campus following the incident and police kicked off an investigation into what “appears to have been serious crimes, possibly hate crimes,” Interim Provost Dennis A. Mitchell said last month.
When Friday’s main protest — attended by hundreds — died down, a smaller group marched south to West 107th Street and Broadway, where more arrests were made.
“You are violent thugs. You are criminals! You are the most violent. You are the most f–king violent,” one protester in custody yelled at cops from the back of a police van.
“It is right to rebel. NYPD, burn in hell! It is right to rebel. NYPD, burn in hell!” others chanted.
A woman holding up a poster of kidnapped Israelis was chanting “Am Yisrael Chai” — a Jewish solidarity anthem — when protesters surrounded her and ripped it out of her hands.
“Don’t you dare!” the pro-Israel woman yelled before cops separated her from the crowd.
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4 February, 2024
Supreme Court allows West Point to continue using race as a factor in admissions
The Supreme Court is allowing West Point to continue taking race into account in admissions, while a lawsuit over its policies continues.
The justices on Friday rejected an emergency appeal seeking to force a change in the admissions process at West Point. The order, issued without any noted dissents, comes as the military academy is making decisions on whom to admit for its next entering class, the Class of 2028.
The military academy had been explicitly left out of the court’s decision in June that ended affirmative action almost everywhere in college admissions.
The court’s conservative majority said race-conscious admissions plans violate the U.S. Constitution, in cases from Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public colleges, respectively. But the high court made clear that its decision did not cover West Point and the nation’s other service academies, raising the possibility that national security interests could affect the legal analysis.
In their brief unsigned order Friday, the justices cautioned against reading too much into it, noting “this order should not be construed as expressing any view on the merits of the constitutional question.”
Students for Fair Admissions, the group behind the Harvard and North Carolina cases, sued the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in September. It filed a similar suit against the U.S. Naval Academy in October.
Lower courts had declined to block the admissions policies at both schools while the lawsuits are ongoing. Only the West Point ruling has been appealed to the Supreme Court.
“Every day that passes between now and then is one where West Point, employing an illegal race-based admissions process, can end another applicant’s dream of joining the Long Gray Line,” lawyers for Students for Fair Admissions wrote in a court filing.
West Point graduates account make up about 20% of all Army officers and nearly half the Army’s current four-star generals, the Justice Department wrote in its brief asking the court to leave the school’s current policies in place.
In recent years, West Point, located on the west bank of the Hudson River about 40 miles (about 65 kilometers) north of New York City, has taken steps to diversify its ranks by increasing outreach to metropolitan areas including New York, Atlanta and Detroit.
“For more than forty years, our Nation’s military leaders have determined that a diverse Army officer corps is a national-security imperative and that achieving that diversity requires limited consideration of race in selecting those who join the Army as cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point,” wrote Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer.
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Florida University System Removes ‘Left-Wing’ Sociology Course From Core Requirements
The 17-member board of governors of the Florida University System decided Wednesday to eliminate a sociology course from the core requirements to graduate and to replace it with an American history class, according to a press release.
The new class, Introductory Survey to 1877, will introduce students to America’s founding, slavery, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction era and will replace Principles of Sociology as a course requirement, according to a State University System of Florida press release.
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz has previously derided sociology, saying the discipline has been taken over by “left-wing activists,” and Florida University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said the move would have a “positive impact.”
“I am proud of the Board’s decision today and look forward to the positive impact the addition of this course will have on our students’ and their future success. Florida’s students of our State University System will have the opportunity to learn about the creation and development of our nation as part of the core course options,” Rodrigues said in a Wednesday press release.
The American Sociological Association criticized the decision, asserting the move was uninformed.
“The decision seems to be coming not from an informed perspective, but rather from a gross misunderstanding of sociology as an illegitimate discipline driven by ‘radical’ and ‘woke’ ideology,” a statement from the American Sociological Association Wednesday said, according to The New York Times.
The Florida board of education also replaced a sociology requirement with an American history requirement, according to a Jan. 17 press release.
“Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students,” Diaz said in a December statement.
Florida’s university system has over 430,000 students, making it one of the largest public university systems, according to the Times.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made a point of instituting reforms to the university system, alleging it has a left-wing bias, according to the Times. DeSantis appointed six trustees to the New College of Florida board in January 2023 and the college has since eliminated its diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and its gender studies courses.
The UF system did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Charter School Authorizers Need a New Association Focused More on Students, Innovation
Charter schools, which are public schools authorized by state laws, differ from traditional public schools, primarily because they enjoy exemptions from most of the state’s educational bureaucracy and regulations in exchange for accountability to parents and authorizers.
The authorizers negotiate the charter contract, under which the school promises to operate in certain ways, and those authorizers can withdraw the contract under certain circumstances.
Authorizers also can help charter schools innovate and learn from one another.
But what if the national association of authorizers, as it develops “best practices,” encourages members to replace one bureaucracy with another? Or issues ideological pressure? Or uses its assessment of the regulatory regime as its test of quality, rather than innovation or the number of charter schools in a state or actual student outcomes?
That’s the situation we are in today under the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA). Authorizers need a new association, one focused on innovation and student outcomes.
As Heritage Foundation research fellow Jason Bedrick has demonstrated, NACSA has pushed “diversity, equity and inclusion,” substituting its own ideological judgment for that of state and local authorizers and parents themselves. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Meanwhile, NACSA’s push for a laundry list of authorization requirements has, perversely, made it harder for minority identity groups to succeed.
Bedrick notes academic research supporting that conclusion:
NACSA’s policy recommendations disproportionately prevent black aspiring school leaders from receiving authorization to operate charter schools. The recommendations also disproportionately result in the closure of charter schools that serve a higher proportion of black students.
Furthermore, NACSA ranks states’ regulatory regimes more in terms of bureaucratic hurdles than in terms of quality or quantity of outcomes.
As another Heritage Foundation research fellow, Jay P. Greene, noted in 2021:
NACSA rankings seem to prefer approaches that lead to few or no charter schools actually opening. And those NACSA rankings bear no relationship to test-score measures of school performance or later life outcomes. This approach to ranking simply does not make sense.
Rankings can inspire states to compete and do better, so some good news is that the Education Freedom Institute has offered an outcomes-oriented approach to replace NACSA’s.
But that still leaves NACSA as an authorizer association focused on the wrong things. Instead, this being National School Choice Week 2024, we propose a new association of charter school authorizers that focuses on best practices for innovation and student-centered outcomes.
Here are some principles and ideas that the new association would promote:
An authorizer should interpret ambiguities in state law liberally—on the side of permission and innovation.
The role of an authorizer is to be ideologically neutral. An authorizer should not pressure schools, their governing boards, or itself to create identity-group “diversity.” At the same time, an authorizer should not pressure schools or governing boards that choose liberal policies (or any other ideology) to change its values or policies.
An authorizer should strive to enforce no more and no less than the state law describes. An authorizer should stay in its lane and leave rulemaking up to the legislature.
An authorizer should work to protect charter schools from state agencies that seek to interfere with the schools’ autonomy. For example, in West Virginia, a charter school was told by one agency that its after-school programs had to be regulated like a day care site. In response, the state authorizer successfully advocated for a change in state law to make it clear that a charter school is not subject to the dozens (if not hundreds) of pages of rules that this agency was saying were required.
Parents tend to be the best source of accountability for charter schools (while, of course, an authorizer also considers financial audits and other technicalities that parents often cannot access). Parents often see a charter school as the best option compared with the alternatives, so they enroll their children there and decide whether to keep them there. Parents who like or dislike standardized tests can use test scores or ignore them as they make their choices. Parents who prefer workforce or college-going outcomes or a variety of other values also make their own choices.
Ultimately, while a school should adhere to any outcome metrics it has promised in its contract, enrollment and retention are excellent proxies for the relative quality of a school.
The new association also should provide guidance on evaluating applications; on how to help struggling schools; on which policies and provisions of law can increase innovation and student service, and on which provisions unduly interfere; on where to find government funding; on how to help schools find and engage private donors; on how to promote funding equity between charter schools and non-charter public schools; and on how to assess whether it’s time to withdraw a charter.
NACSA’s analysis shows there are about 20 states with independent authorizing boards, whether governmental or nonprofit. These are the authorizers most likely to want to join the new association. (Where a state department of education is the authorizer, we are not optimistic that most departments can see the value of a minimalist regulatory approach.)
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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