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EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE
Quis magistros ipsos docebit? . |
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31 January, 2023
Oklahoma Legislators Seek To Exclude Religious Schools From New School Choice Program
As Oklahoma moves toward expanding educational opportunities for students, some Oklahomans are not happy about all the opportunities out there — particularly at religious institutions.
The 2022 re-election of Governor Stitt and the election of the new superintendent for public instruction, Ryan Walters, was viewed as a “mandate” for enacting school choice policies in the state, and proposals for universal school choice are already in motion.
In the state legislature, there are now two pending bills that propose education savings account programs for Oklahoma students — one more restrictive in student eligibility than the other.
In their current states, both bills say that any participating private school “shall not be required to alter its creed, practices, admissions policy, or curriculum to accept payments.”
Yet Democrats are not on board, a conservative think tank at Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, has pointed out.
One Democrat in the state house, Andy Fugate, is attempting to introduce legislation that would prevent private schools from using “the state funds to provide religious instruction or religious activities.” In a statement, he said his bill “addresses the concerns of those who fear school indoctrination.”
Mr. Fugate’s bill would make optional all religious instruction and rituals for students at religious schools who pay for tuition with ESAs, as well as prevent faith-based consideration in the admissions process for schools that accept the state funds.
“Oklahoma families should not have to exchange their religious freedom for their education,” he added.
Mr. Fugate’s bill relies on a status-use distinction between public funding for religious institutions that the Supreme Court has rejected, most forcefully this past summer in Carson v. Makin.
In Carson, the court ruled that Maine’s prohibition on the use of voucher funds at religious schools was tantamount to “discrimination against religion.”
Another Democratic lawmaker in Oklahoma has proposed legislation that would require schools receiving public money to operate under “the same laws, rules, regulations, and mandates prescribed for public schools.”
The Oklahoma supreme court has ruled that voucher funds do not constitute public aid once in the hands of parents.
“When the parents and not the government are the ones determining which private school offers the best learning environment for their child, the circuit between government and religion is broken,” the justices said in 2016 in a ruling on whether vouchers for disabled students could be used at religious schools.
Meanwhile, the Sooner State made waves in December when its attorney general at the time, John O’Connor, green-lit the possibility of religious charters in an advisory opinion.
Oklahoma — like all states with charter schools — currently has a prohibition on licensing religious charter schools. Mr. O’Connor, however, wrote that such a prohibition likely violates the Constitution and should not be enforced.
The opinion has paved the way for what could be the first religious charter school in the country. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City filed its application to operate a charter school Monday morning.
Yet Catholics in Oklahoma are not relying solely on the possibility of a Catholic charter school to advance their educational mission. The executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, Brett Farley, said the group would be “heavily involved” in lobbying for ESAs in the state.
In an email to the Sun, Mr. Farley said he and his colleagues were “more or less agnostic” as to how to achieve their goal of universal school choice in Oklahoma.
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Schools Secretly War Against Parents’, Taxpayers’ Values
Government schools are increasingly keeping secrets from parents regarding their children, a development suggestive of an elite ruling class that recognizes few, if any, limits on its power. A current controversy in Indiana is emblematic. A school district secretly developed a plan to encourage children to adopt the identity of the opposite sex at school without their parents’ consent or even knowledge, The Daily Signalreports:
Following the exposure of a hidden “Gender Support Plan” and policy to conceal student transgender procedures from parents, the whistleblower, counselor Kathy McCord, has been placed on immediate and indefinite leave, and could be facing termination.
McCord, a counselor at Pendleton Heights High School in the South Madison Community School Corporation in Indiana, confirmed documents unearthed by parents in Madison County showing that counselors were asking teachers not to reveal a student’s new name and pronouns to parents.
McCord had toldThe Daily Signal about the new policy two days before a school board meeting last December 8:
School counselor Kathy McCord went on the record with The Daily Signal to outline the shady methods the school district employed to keep the so-called Gender Support Plan away from teachers and parents. McCord also described how she was ordered to compel speech from teachers by requiring them to use one set of names and pronouns with students and another with parents. …
McCord told The Daily Signal that Assistant Superintendent Andrew Kruer, [Superintendent Mark] Hall’s subordinate, had informed all counselors that this procedure of keeping information from parents was a school board-approved policy. Kruer also told counselors that the district’s legal counsel, LGBTQ+ advocate Jessica Heiser, had informed the counseling staff it was federal law.
This effort to indoctrinate students into values antithetical to those of their parents and of the taxpayers who pay for the schools is spreading rapidly across the United States, as we have regularlyreported at Heartland Daily News:
Even in strongly Republican areas where most parents are likely to be conservative, schools are implanting a radical, extremist ideology in children, The Federalist reports.
“One of the most visible ways many Idaho public schools push extremism common to far-left locales is in exposing kids to adult sexual practices and gender ideology, often without parent[s’] knowledge or consent,” writes Joy Pullman for The Federalist.
This is no minor difference of opinion. Regardless of whether one agrees with the substance of these teachings, it is a gigantic case of government overreach for schools to push on children a worldview radically different from what their parents are teaching them and what the taxpayers think they are paying for.
This puts educators, counselors, and administrators who think differently in an awful position:
The Daily Signal reported that McCord and another counselor, who chose to remain anonymous, expressed distress at the district policy. They said that they became school counselors to work with students and parents, not to come between them.
The fact that these issues are new and the required thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors are completely in opposition to those of someone as far left as Barack Obama only a decade ago means many thousands of people working in the government education system have had to change their minds radically about these fundamental aspects of life, learn to love cognitive dissonance, move to lower-paying parochial schools, or find a new line of work. Those whose values do not align with the program cannot remain. The Indiana case shows this, as The Daily Signalreports:
Amanda Keegan, a geography and psychology teacher at Pendleton Heights High School, says she resigned in part to protest this policy.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal, Keegan said, “When I had to look at that parent, and feel like I was lying to that parent … I was sick to my stomach. I can’t lie to parents. I can’t do that again.”
The education establishment benefits from teacher exits because it accelerates the ideological purification of its workforce. The plan is simple and obvious: indoctrinate the teachers in woke colleges and universities and push out any current teachers, counselors, and administrators who dare to differ. Then, complain teachers are not paid nearly enough, and note teacher shortages are looming, thus requiring still-higher pay. When parents and other taxpayers expose your actions in school board meetings, shut off the microphone and have the boldest ones arrested, as Heartland Daily News has reported here, here, here, and in numerous other news stories and commentaries.
The matter of choice is central here. If parents choose to hand over their offspring to people who will teach them whatever the experts care to convey and will not tell the parents what they are doing, that may be the parents’ right, however foolish it would be for them to do so.
That is not the situation in these schools. The government compels parents to send their children to school and forces taxpayers to finance the system. With that power behind it, a government-established cadre of people manipulates their captive children to question basic elements of their identity and their place in the world. Giving such power to government is obviously a gravely risky decision.
Regardless of whether one agrees with the agenda being taught in these schools, it is obvious the parents who are handing over their children to them deserve to know what their kids are being taught, and the taxpayers who fund these institutions have a right to know whether their money is being spent on what they intend it to be devoted to.
State governments have full authority over the schools they create and fund. Parents have a right to complain to the school boards and should continue to do so. Real change, however, will remain a pipedream until parents and other taxpayers punish lawmakers in the voting booth for their negligence or complicity in allowing this. Only then will the government take seriously the movement for school choice and parents’ rights.
S.T. Karnick: skarnick@heartland.org
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The truth about Australia’s education system: bullying, indoctrination, and intimidation
Recently, I interviewed an 18-year-old New South Wales University student named Tallesha. My goal was to get a first-hand glimpse of what is really going on in the education system.
It was incredibly insightful to speak with Tallesha. While high school is still vivid in her mind, she is now undertaking the transition into the university lifestyle. She recently completed a bridging course consisting of sociology, business, media, and writing; and will now study political science. She has the ambition of becoming a political journalist.
Drawing on her experiences, Tallesha summed up her thoughts by saying, ‘I believe a lot of the political issues we’re facing at the moment stem from the information and behaviours being taught in schools and universities.’
She went on to say, ‘What is currently being assumed about the education system is definitely not an overreaction, a large extent of genuine indoctrination is happening and it’s definitely getting worse.’
Expanding on those comments, Tallesha drew on her own specific experiences. ‘It’s very hard to openly disagree with the lecturers because your marks could suffer,’ she explained. ‘In my bridging course I did sociology and that was obviously very far left. So, in assignments, that would be based on Marxist theory. You had to accept their way as truth. If you debated that, you wouldn’t get the marks, because you would be seen as incorrect.’
She backed up her comments by providing an example.
‘A question on one of my tests was, “Is gender fixed?” And the correct answer was “false”, because it is supposed to be fluid. If you disagreed with that, you would lose that mark.’
Identifying as a Christian conservative, Tallesha obviously had an issue with this answer, but she can see no way of bypassing having to go along with the Marxist ideology that oppose her own beliefs. She appears to be in the tiny minority, however, as according to Tallesha, 95 per cent of her fellow students lean openly left.
This prompted me to ask Tallesha if she feels comfortable expressing her views in her classes. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘You pretty much can’t.’
From the moment her lecturers enter, there is clear ideology expressed. She told me that without fail, every lecturer introduces themselves with their pronouns. Is it little surprise that the students also follow suit, as Tallesha told me, ‘I had my graduation recently, and any speaker that got up, all announced their pronouns.’
With such a dominant lean towards leftist ideology, I asked Tallesha if any of her fellow students ever acknowledge that things should be more balanced. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘A lot of them don’t think they lean that far left. They think, “This is mainstream. Every young person should share our views. If you don’t then there’s something wrong with you.”’
Tallesha was then able to provide more context of how the peer pressure is applied.
‘In sociology, the way the other side was depicted is uneducated and misinformed. So, they make it seem like if you are part of the other side, it would be embarrassing,’ Tallesha recounted. ‘It was almost like bullying. My lecturer would always make jokes about conservative views, constantly.’
With the peer pressure in place, then comes the indoctrination.
Of the subjects she studied in her bridging course, Tallesha found business to be the most centrist, but her writing course contained clear left bias. ‘It was a uni prep course, so it teaches you all the skills you need to succeed in uni,’ she explained. ‘But each skill was taught in a context, and all the context they were taught in were some sort of left subject. Climate change was used. The freedom movement, the anti-vaccine moment was used.’
I find it hard to understand how anyone can paint ‘freedom’ in a negative light, but Tallesha was quick to inform me that ‘white supremacy’ is linked to the freedom movement. ‘They make lots of links that just don’t make sense,’ she said.
This prompted me to ask if any figures of the right are ridiculed. ‘Trump was definitely brought up a few times,’ she replied. ‘Even the Liberal Party, even though they’re not very conservative, the Liberal Party is attacked as well.’
I then asked if there is any politician that her lecturers adore. Her response was interesting. ‘No, I don’t think there are any specific ones.’
It seems if you attack your enemies constantly, then there is no need to defend your side.
My final question to Tallesha was, ‘What needs to happen to reform the education system?’
‘Honestly, I don’t really know. It’s pretty much that far gone. Because everyone in it and within it, is all left. Maybe ten years ago it could be saved, but now it’s all left. It’s too far infiltrated. You can’t get conservatives in there. If you aren’t left and you’re a lecturer, you’re not going to get a job. And if you are a conservative student, you’re very likely to be kicked out if you say the wrong thing.’
‘It’s almost bullying.’ Tallesha added, speaking of the peer pressure that is placed upon students. ‘All of them are so eager to fit in. The conservative side is being portrayed as embarrassing to be a part of and you’ll be made fun of if you’re part of that side. So, everyone is swaying away from that. It sways anyone that is not sure on their political views to the left pretty quickly, because they want to fit in.’
Interviewing Tallesha did not fill me with much hope. After all, this is our youth. This is our future. If Tallesha is correct and 95 per cent of students are left-leaning, then the other side of politics is faced with a big problem.
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30 January, 2023
The Priestly Cycle of Universities: Why Do They Rise, Wokify, Fall and Rise Again?
Ed Dutton has been studying the histories of universities and notes how they are constantly changing. He sees them undergoing a life-cycle and identifies places like Stanford and Oxford as in an intellectually declining state
Along the way he notes the iron law that prestige not fixed. A university will be prestigious only as long as its teachers and students are high quality. Once a university's intellectual standards decline, so that university's prestige will decline.
One you start diluting student quality by letting in a "representstive" group of students rather than high merit students, you have set in train the destruction of that university's prestige. So the writing is on the wall for places like Stanford and Oxford. Degrees from there are still prestigious but will gradually become less so
I like Ed's claim that a high-achieving academic has to have both a top IQ and be socially non-conforming. That is a pretty good description of a high-functioning autistic and I note Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen's claim that the markers of high IQ and autism are essentially the same. So there is an academic type, as Ed says.
Ed likes to do a funny bit at the beginning of his videos but what follows is a serious exposition of his theory about the evolutionary stages a university undergoes
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Adams, Banks are refusing to fight for good NYC public schools on multiple fronts
Perhaps Michael Bloomberg’s greatest achievement as mayor was fostering the creation of more good public schools in the city, giving middle-class families more reason to stay and lower-income parents real hope for their kids. Mayor Bill de Blasio then went to war on those schools — and the Eric Adams administration keeps blinking on undoing the damage.
Part of Blas’ war was prolonged assault on charters. But another was an attack on selective middle and high schools in the name of “equity.” And the results are now in from one of the most controversial moves: the “Diversity Plan” imposed on Brooklyn’s District 15 in 2018.
City Hall spent big to muscle D15 into “voluntarily” shifting all middle-school admissions to a lottery managed by educrats, ending the screens that some schools used to ensure new students were prepared for demanding classwork.
The plan was announced from MS 51, the school Blas’ own children (and those of then-City Council Brad Lander, another big booster of the plan) had already graduated from.
Prior to the change, the school had been the fourth biggest feeder to specialized high schools in the city. Now it’s the 16th. And it’s not just the most gifted who are hurting: seventh-grade math proficiency scores have fallen from 81% to 48%, with huge declines across all the racial groups the city tracks — a level of learning loss worse than other schools saw amid the pandemic — as student concerns over safety skyrocket.
We only know this now because a group of outraged parents fought for the info under the Freedom of Information laws. But in the meantime, Team Blas fostered similar changes in Manhattan’s District 2, then exploited the pandemic to impose lotteries on selective schools across the city. And today merit-based admissions are back only at 30% of previous levels.
That’s likely a permanent change, because Chancellor David Banks left every district’s superintendent to decide on whether to allow the return of selective admissions, and many declined — including District 2’s Kelly McGuire, who simply ignored clear parent fervor to save school standards.
It’s easier not to stand for excellence against moves in the name of “equity” that in reality on deliver mediocrity — at best.
Citywide public-school enrollment is already plummeting, and this will only speed up the exodus.
One safety valve could be allowing greater growth of charters, alternate public schools that offer new opportunity, especially for striving low-income families in areas where the regular public schools don’t deliver. But Team Adams isn’t standing up for them, either.
We’re thinking, of course, of Banks’ recent decision, plainly in cooperation with the Mayor’s Office, to give up on long-laid plans to provide space for three new Success Academy primary schools. That’s a signal that all charters will find it near-impossible to grow, even though Blas is finally gone.
The ideologues and special interests like the United Federation of Teachers don’t care about what parents want or children need; they’d rather rule absolutely over a public-education system that’s dying — and a mayor and chancellor who surely know better won’t fight back.
It’s a tragedy in (not very) slow motion.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/29/adams-banks-are-refusing-to-fight-for-good-public-schools/
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War of words erupts between Opus Dei schools and Australia's ABC
Old-fashioned Biblical ideas -- like no sex before marriage -- are taught there. How disgraceful! No wonder the Leftist ABC is up in arms!
NSW’s powerful education authority is investigating Sydney schools linked to Opus Dei amid a war of words between the ultra-conservative Catholic group and the public broadcaster.
The ABC’s Four Corners is planning to air a program on Monday night titled Purity: An Education in Opus Dei, alleging “disturbing practices” by the controversial organisation in several schools and exploring its influence in the NSW Liberal Party.
Premier Dominic Perrottet attended Redfield College, one of the schools featured in the ABC expose, while Finance Minister Damien Tudehope also has links to the schools. Labor’s upper house MLC Greg Donnelly is described as an “Old Dad of Redfield”.
Redfield, Tangara School for Girls, Wollemi College and Montgrove College are operated by the Parents for Education Foundation (Pared). The schools are independent and not part of the Catholic diocese.
In a letter sent to parents this week co-signed by the principals of the four schools, the Pared Foundation claimed Monday’s episode “seems to be an attack on the Catholic faith” and an “attempt at damaging the political career” of Perrottet ahead of the March 25 state election.
That claim has been rejected by the ABC, which said the episode by reporter Louise Milligan “investigates serious allegations that are clearly in the public’s interest to be informed about, including opposing consent education, encouraging students to make decisions contrary to medical advice, harm to students as a result of their education, homophobia and recruitment of students under the guise of pastoral care”.
“There is nothing in the program that is an attack on the Catholic faith,” a spokesperson said.
“It is purely about Opus Dei and its affiliated educational institutions. The timing of the story is not connected to the NSW election and in fact it is being broadcast as far out from the election as it could be.”
The premier’s office declined to comment.
In the episode, Milligan - who has a long history covering the Catholic Church including issues surrounding Cardinal George Pell - reveals “in some cases the schools are not following state curriculum and are accused of persistent attempts to recruit teenagers to Opus Dei and have taught misinformation about sexual health, including discouraging girls from getting the human papillomavirus cervical cancer vaccine”.
A spokesperson for the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) told the Herald the agency was investigating the schools after allegations made by the ABC.
Pared confirmed NESA had contacted the group “to clarify how we address” concerns about the health and personal development curriculum.
The letter sent to parents from the principals lists multiple questions they claim were put to the schools by the ABC. It said the foundation would never discourage students from following medical advice but acknowledged it had changed how it addressed some issues, including the HPV vaccine.
“Prior to 2020, when the HPV vaccine was relatively new, and in response to many queries from concerned parents, Tangara issued some letters to parents with some reference material on the HPV vaccination program. Letters such as these were not sent after that period,” the letter said.
Redfield’s headmaster Matthew Aldous told the Herald: “Whenever specific concerns are brought to our attention they are dealt with immediately and professionally. It’s ludicrous to suggest that anything short of that would be done in this day and age.”
Opus Dei, a highly conservative and private Catholic prelature, was founded in the 1920s and given approval within the Catholic Church in 1950. Tangara and Redfield were founded by Pared in 1982 and each have school chaplains that are Opus Dei priests.
Dallas McInerney, the chief executive officer of Catholic Schools NSW, said the four schools investigated by the ABC are “good local schools”.
“Any targeted media attention by the ABC risks collateral damage for the children who are current students and who are returning to school. They shouldn’t be caught up in a wider agenda by the ABC,” McInerney, a senior Liberal in the party’s right-wing faction, said.
“They are not insular schools. These are good schools, doing good work on behalf of their students and families.”
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29 January, 2023
AP Teacher’s Guide Proves DeSantis Right in African-American Studies Clash
Last week’s rejection by Florida governor Ron DeSantis of the College Board’s pilot AP African-American Studies (APAAS) course has kicked up a controversy. Last Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre falsely accused DeSantis of trying to “block . . . the study of black Americans.”
In reality, DeSantis barred only this specific and very biased APAAS course plan — while inviting the College Board to revise it. Florida’s Stop WOKE Act actually mandates the teaching of a series of topics in the history of black Americans, from slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination, to the overcoming of these injustices, and more.
So there is no question here of “blocking the study of black Americans.” The issue is what specific sort of curriculum a given state should favor.
The debate over APAAS has been complicated by the College Board’s secrecy. The College Board has steadfastly refused to release the APAAS curriculum framework or associated materials. Nonetheless, I obtained a copy of the APAAS curriculum and wrote about it in September, laying out its socialist agenda and its promotion of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Unfortunately, no one could judge the accuracy of my characterization because the curriculum remained secret. I confined myself at the time to a “fair use” discussion of the framework, declining to publish the full curriculum out of respect for the College Board’s insistence that it was a “trade secret.” In the wake of the controversy, however, the Florida Standard newspaper has obtained a copy of the pilot APAAS curriculum and made it public.
In another new development, I have now obtained a copy of a second document, the “APAAS Pilot Course Guide,” a manual designed for use by teachers. Taken together, the curriculum framework and the teacher’s guide expand our understanding of the course in a way that confirms the wisdom of DeSantis’s decision.
The most serious problems in APAAS are in the final quarter of the class (“Unit 4: Movements and Debates”). This is where the course grapples with contemporary political and cultural controversies. Overwhelmingly, APAAS’s approach is from the socialist Left, with very little in the way of even conventional liberal perspectives represented, not to mention conservative views. Most of the topics in the final quarter present controversial leftist authors as if their views were authoritative, with no critical or contrasting perspectives supplied. The scarcely disguised goal is to recruit students to various leftist political causes. Now let’s get down to cases.
The fourth quarter of the course features a topic on “The Movement for Black Lives.” The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was started by the Marxist organizers who founded Black Lives Matter. Yet M4BL extends far beyond BLM, encompassing “over 170 Black-led organizations.” M4BL is organized around an extensive policy platform, the “Vision for Black Lives.” That platform is radical, to say the least. As you might expect, it includes planks such as defunding the police. M4BL’s platform goes further, however, by calling for the abolition of all money bail, and even all pretrial detention. To this end, the “Vision for Black Lives” endorses federal legislation by “Squad” member, Representative Ayanna Pressley.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of M4BL’s extensive policy menu as a mere attempt to influence the platform of the Democratic Party. As explained by Marxist activist Robin D. G. Kelley (whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic), the real purpose of M4BL’s platform is to serve as a “blueprint for social transformation,” radically changing the structure of American society by shifting us away from market principles and toward “’collective ownership’ of certain economic institutions” and a universal basic income.
Kelley also highlights the expansive nature of what he calls M4BL’s most controversial demand: reparations. For M4BL, the concept of reparations goes far beyond massive monetary awards and includes even “mandated changes in the school curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality.” According to Kelley, M4BL wants these changes so schools can undermine “the common narrative that American wealth is the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education.” In other words, M4BL (and Kelley) want schools to inculcate the basic premises of Critical Race Theory.
The APAAS teacher’s guide presents M4BL’s agenda in a way that is entirely free of criticism or alternative viewpoints. All the recommended topic readings support Black Lives Matter, and the “possible focus areas” provided for teachers uncritically summarize M4BL’s policy platform.
One of two recommended books for this topic is From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor is a socialist, and in no way shy about it. Her book argues that BLM is a step toward what ought to be a revolutionary socialist transformation of the United States. While Taylor rejects Stalin’s authoritarianism, she remains quite fond of Marx and Lenin. Taylor sees capitalism as synonymous with racism, and she argues that any successful struggle against racism must ultimately replace capitalism as well. Taylor also dismisses “colorblindness” as a ploy to disguise the racism inherent in the capitalist system. (This view of colorblindness is excluded from Florida’s curriculum by law.)
Far from BLM fulfilling American ideals, as Taylor sees it, “when the Black movement goes into motion, it destabilizes all political life in the United States,” exposing “the foundational lie of the United States as a free and democratic society.” Taylor ends her book with a quote from the Marxist intellectual and “revolutionary,” C. L. R. James: “The hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among [Blacks] to a degree greater than in any other section of the population in the United States.”
Virtually all APAAS authors in the final quarter of the course are part of the same tight group of far-left activists. Taylor’s book carries an enthusiastic blurb from Barbara Ransby, the author of the other book assigned for this topic; another blurb from Robin D. G. Kelley, the Marxist radical whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic; and a blurb from Michelle Alexander, whose work is the subject of a previous APAAS topic. In general, readings by authors assigned in the final quarter of APAAS endorse, are endorsed by, and overlap with, other APAAS readings. When it comes to APAAS’s treatment of contemporary policy debates, conventional American liberals and conservatives need not apply.
The APAAS topic immediately prior to the topic on “The Movement for Black Lives” covers “The Reparations Movement.” We’ve just seen that the most controversial demand of M4BL is reparations, expansively defined to include even mandated school curricula. So why does APAAS include yet another topic on reparations? It may not add up as an educational strategy, but it is an effective political recruiting tool.
The three suggested items for study in the reparations topic are Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations,” a button that the teacher’s guide says serves to “promote” reparations for the Tulsa race massacre, and the copy of H.R. 40, a federal bill that sets up a commission to develop proposals for reparations. It’s clear from these assignments that APAAS itself is promoting reparations. No article criticizing this highly controversial policy is assigned. In effect, APAAS is pushing students to lobby for legislation. And by the way, M4BL also endorses H.R. 40, so students will find the same de facto call to legislative lobbying waiting for them in two successive topics.
The teacher’s guide purports to outline “debates” over reparations, yet the so-called debates don’t actually involve arguments against reparations. By “debates,” the guide simply means practical disagreements about who exactly should pay for reparations, who exactly should benefit, and the precise mixture of monetary compensation and public apology to be demanded. There is no disagreement about reparations as such. This is political advocacy, pure and simple.
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Chinese Communist Party Targets American Kids by Infiltrating K-12 Schools
Congressional Republicans and Asia policy experts are sounding the alarm over the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on K-12 education as well as colleges in America through what are called Confucius Classrooms and Confucius Institutes.
“Confucius Institutes and Classrooms allow the Chinese Communist Party to wield influence throughout the American education system, projecting the CCP’s preferred message in the United States,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., chairman of a new House select committee on China, told The Daily Signal in an email.
The full name of the panel created Jan. 10 by Republican leadership is the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party.
“The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party will fight back against the malign influence of the CCP wherever it impacts American interests and national security, whether that be in the private sector or in the classroom,” Gallagher said.
Confucius Institutes, founded in 2004, are China-funded “cultural” centers that operate on college campuses. In the past few years, these centers have come under increased scrutiny as operations of Chinese state influence.
“For years, the Chinese Communist Party has been using Confucius Institutes as a Trojan horse to push their propaganda and revisionist history in American universities. Their goal is to control what we see, hear, and think about China,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn, who introduced related legislation called the Transparency for Confucius Institutes Act in 2021, told The Daily Signal in an email.
“No foreign government should have the ability to influence American education—especially a rogue regime that commits egregious human rights violations and consistently undermines our democracy. Confucius Institutes, in any form, must be erased from U.S. society immediately,” Blackburn said.
An estimated 500 K-12 schools in the U.S. have had Confucius Classrooms, according to a National Association of Scholars report, “After Confucius Institutes: China’s Enduring Influence on American Higher Education.”
“Confucius Classrooms are essentially the K-12 parallel to Confucius Institutes, but they’re a lot less well documented. In many cases, they have survived even when the Confucius Institutes they were attached to have closed, which is particularly interesting,” John Metz, president of the Athenai Institute, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
The Athenai Institute describes itself as a nonpartisan, student-founded organization focused on removing the influence of the Chinese Communist Party from American college campuses.
“A number of them were established alongside or sort of in conjunction with the Asia Society,” Metz said of Confucius Classrooms. “But in January 2022, they announced that they were discontinuing their formal affiliation with Hanban.”
Hanban, also known as Confucius Institute Headquarters, changed its name in July 2020 to the Center for Language Education and Cooperation, Fox News reported. The center is part of the Chinese Ministry of Education.
“But a lot of those Confucius Classrooms remain, and in a nutshell, we see Confucius Classrooms as yet another way that the CCP tries to exercise control over, really, the way Americans think about China,” Metz told The Daily Signal.
Metz continued:
I think a lot of people might think that because Confucius Classrooms don’t necessarily provide access to cutting-edge research and because K-12 schools don’t necessarily, in a lot of people’s minds, play the same role in sort of shaping a generation of leaders, that therefore they’re not as important. But there are hundreds of [Confucius Classrooms] around the country.
At least 500 American school districts, K–12 school districts, have established … Confucius Classrooms at one time or another. And a lot of them provide the same kind of opportunity to shape discussion, not just of the Chinese language, but also of sensitive subjects like Chinese history in a way that’s favorable to the CCP.
Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms are “just one other example of how the CCP manipulates the interests of U.S. educational institutions for its gain,” said Michael Cunningham, a research fellow in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
“So, they fund programs in the U.S., and they are able to staff them with their own teacher, their own instructors. They’re able to prescribe the curriculum that’s used and really create the curriculum,” Cunningham told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
Ian Oxnevad, program research associate at the National Association of Scholars and co-author of the report “After Confucius Institutes: China’s Enduring Influence on American Higher Education,” warned of the potential threats and dangers associated with Confucius Classrooms, which he said “are largely the same” as Confucius Institutes.
“You still have foreign influence, obviously, shaping of the views of China of American kids, and that’s going to affect future public sentiment toward China,” Oxnevad told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “China’s not a benign regime, so … the influence operation matters.”
Oxnevad continued:
But on top of that, the fact that it’s just a matter of educational sovereignty. This is not something that really gets talked about. But if you have sovereignty as a concept, it should be applied to education as well. You shouldn’t be inviting a foreign power in to teach your children.
What country in their right mind would do that? Neocolonial powers do that. Colonial powers back in the day did that in developing countries. That’s not a healthy thing that a country should do.
Oxnevad also outlined what he thinks should be done about Confucius Classrooms.
“Make them illegal and shut them down,” Oxnevad said. “There’s no Catch-22 here. You wouldn’t let the Soviet Union come in and teach Russian to children, nor would you let Nazi Germany do the same with German. Why would you want China doing this? Especially when there’s plenty of resources here to teach Chinese as it is.”
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Parents Seethe Over Schools’ ‘Social-Emotional Learning’ Exercises
Activists and parents are protesting what they see as increasing pressure on children to divulge personal information in school activities in an effort to build empathy in social-emotional learning exercises.
The latest example comes from the coast of Long Island, New York, where Shelter Island parents stormed a local school board earlier this month after an activity that crossed the line for many parents.
The activity, “Cross the Line,” asked students to respond to various prompts about their identity. Students situated themselves on either side of a line in response to the prompt, hence the name. Middle-school students were asked questions about their identity — political affiliations, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation, gender identity, and personal traumas.
According to the Shelter Island Reporter, some were even asked whether they had been victims of sexual assault or had suicidal ideations. The Reporter says the activity’s goal was “to make students aware of differences and similarities and … to develop empathy.”
Apparently, however, empathy was not increased universally after the activity, and students were bullied based on their responses. Parents demanded resignations and asked that the “Cross the Line” exercise never be conducted again.
The district superintendent, Brian Doelger, apologized and admitted to the Reporter that there was flawed execution in the program.
“Cross the Line” is just one activity related to social-emotional learning goals, which aim to work on students’ soft skills — self-awareness, empathy, decision-making, and more.
It’s also a fast-growing industry of curriculum sales and facilitated workshops, a market valued at about $1 billion annually, with public school districts shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars collectively for resources on SEL.
While social-emotional learning has not generated as much opposition as critical race and gender ideology, they are viewed as part and parcel by some school administrators — including the New York education department.
The state education department sees “equity” as an important part of its social-emotional learning mandate, particularly understanding the root causes and manifestations of so-called implicit bias, or judging others based on stereotypes.
“Implicit bias stands as a major obstacle to achieving equity in education, but increasing SEL competencies can help us to manage it,” a primer from the state on social-emotional learning reads. “Equity, implicit bias, CRT, and SEL are inextricably intertwined.”
One of the major parental rights activist groups, Parents Defending Education, has dedicated resources for learning about SEL and fighting what they call “transformative SEL” programs in schools.
“‘Transformative SEL’ is basically race and gender ideology embedded into what had previously been neutral student competencies,” the Parents Defending Education guide reads.
The organization’s vice president, Asra Nomani, has called SEL a “Trojan horse” used to funnel more controversial ideas about race and gender into classrooms. It’s another flashpoint in the ongoing battle between parent activists and teachers.
The largest teachers union in the country, the National Education Association, says SEL programs “increase student achievement” and help them develop lifelong skills.
The conflict between parents and schools on the issue will be headed to court in a new lawsuit. On Wednesday, America First Legal announced a lawsuit against a Pennsylvania school district for refusing to grant religious exemptions to SEL instruction.
The plaintiffs in the case believe the school’s SEL curriculum “conflicts with their Christian beliefs.” The school administration refused to grant the request for an exemption because the parents did not identify “specific instruction within the curriculum” that was antithetical to Christianity.
Elsewhere, the issue is being addressed by statewide policy makers. In Louisiana, the state board of education is revisiting its SEL curriculum and standards after receiving hundreds of comments opposing it, according to NOLA.com.
Critics allege that the current iteration would encourage conversations about gender identity in students as young as 5 years old.
In Arizona, the recently elected superintendent of public instruction has planted a firm flag in the anti-SEL camp. The superintendent, Tom Horne, canceled all seminars on social-emotional learning at a statewide teachers conference this week. He also canceled sessions on diversity and race.
https://www.nysun.com/article/parents-seethe-over-schools-social-emotional-learning-exercises
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27 January, 2023
College Board to Change Course After DeSantis Stands Up to 'African-American Studies' AP Class
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has once more found himself in the news as he's weathered standing up to woke ideologies and agendas. Last week, as Guy covered, the governor's office expressed concern that the pilot version of an AP African-American Studies (APAAS) course violated state law, with Guy providing subsequent information in defense of such concerns. On Tuesday, however, the governor's office released a statement indicating that the College Board has said it would revise the course.
A statement from the College Board is included in Lydia Nusbaum's report for Florida's Voice:
“Before a new AP course is made broadly available, it is piloted in a small number of high schools to gather feedback from high schools and colleges. The official course framework incorporates this feedback and defines what students will encounter on the AP Exam for college credit and placement,” the College Board said. “We are grateful for the contributions of experts, teachers, and students and look forward to sharing the framework broadly.”
The governor's office also rereleased a statement from Florida Department of Education (FDOE) Communications Director Alex Lanfranconi. "We are glad the College Board has recognized that the originally submitted course curriculum is problematic, and we are encouraged to see the College Board express a willingness to amend. AP courses are standardized nationwide, and as a result of Florida’s strong stance against identity politics and indoctrination, students across the country will consequentially have access to an historically accurate, unbiased course," Lanfranconi said.
Lanfranconi also referenced Gov. DeSantis' commitment to stop wokeness in Florida schools. "As Governor DeSantis said, African American History is American History, and we will not allow any organization to use an academic course as a gateway for indoctrination and a political agenda," his statement continued.
In December of 2021, the governor signed the Stop WOKE Act as a way ensure Critical Race Theory (CRT) is kept out of schools and the workplace. DeSantis and the legislation were granted a win earlier this year thanks to a decision from U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker.
Additionally, DeSantis has spoken out against woke indoctrination time and time again. During a Monday announcement on pay increases for Florida teachers, the governor defended the rejection of the APAAS.
"In the state of Florida, our education standards not only don't prevent, but they require teaching black history--all the important things that's part of our core curriculum," he reminded, pointing out that it "was a separate course on top of that for advanced placement credit."
DeSantis also went on to discuss what kind of "guidelines" and "standards" Florida has. "And the issue is we have guidelines and standards in Florida. We want education, not indoctrination. If you fall on the side of indoctrination, we're going to decline. If it's education, then we will do [it]. [W]hen I heard it didn't meet the standards, I figured, yeah, they may be something [concerning] here. It's way more than that. This is a course on black history—[and] what's one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now who would say that an important part of black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids," he explained. "And so, when you look and see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons--that's a political agenda. That's the wrong side of the line for Florida's standards. We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don't believe they should have an agenda imposed on them. When you try to use black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes."
Lanfranconi's statement also made reference to specific issues with the curriculum. "We look forward to reviewing the College Board’s changes and expect the removal of content on Critical Race Theory, Black Queer Studies, Intersectionality, and other topics that violate our laws," he concluded.
As Guy included in his subsequent reporting, the governor's office had indicated in a letter from the FDOE to the College Board that "FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion."
Guy also was able to get a copy of the curriculum. Not only did it contain problematic content, but, as Nusbaum had also mentioned in her piece, the curriculum had been kept hidden from public view, despite being having already released as a pilot program in 60 schools.
In his initial coverage, Guy predicted that "the stupid, knee-jerk reply in some quarters" would be because of their claims that "Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans who run the state are racists." How right he was.
Chief among them, of course, was MSNBC's Joy Reid. During last Thursday's episode of "The ReidOut" she claimed, that DeSantis wanted a pro-slavery curriculum. Kevin Tober highlighted and clipped the segment for NewsBusters.
Given that the College Board has agreed to come back to the table, the responsible course of action would be for Reid to mention that during a show in the near future, preferably this very week. We're not holding our breaths though, that she would let facts get in the way of her narrative, given how many times she's tried to smear the governor as a supposed racist.
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Harvard’s New President Embodies Everything Wrong with Higher-Ed
In its last issue of 2022, The Crimson, Harvard University’s undergraduate newspaper, ran a column from one of its editors containing the following sentences:
“Like superheroes, Black women are supposed to be reliable and resilient. When buildings are burning and people need to save the day, we are often called on to put the fire out… We run into each crisis with the weight of the world on our shoulders.”
This was a column of celebration. Harvard had just announced that Claudine Gay, the current Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, would be its next president. Gay is the superhero; Harvard is the burning building. When she officially takes over in June, Gay will be the first-ever black president of Harvard.
The Crimson column accidentally captures the scandal in this announcement. Think of everything wrong with higher education: the fetish for diversity at the expense of merit; the rapid expansion of anti-intellectual administrative bloat; the censorship of dissident voices; the popularity of a progressive politics that prefers performing victimhood over making substantive improvements in the lives of real people.
All these trends find their purest manifestation in Claudine Gay.
Consider her “diversity.” It’s the skin-deep “brochure diversity” decried by Justice Samuel Alito in oral argument for Harvard vs. Students for Fair Admissions, the pending Supreme Court case against Harvard.
Harvard stands accused of rigging applicant “personality scores” to artificially cap the number of Asian admits and of considering certain racial categories not merely as the simple “plus factor” approved by existing Court precedent, but as an enormous advantage comparable to hundreds of additional points on the SAT.
Chief Justice John Roberts openly wondered if Harvard’s existing admissions practices effectively lump all black applicants into a homogeneous category of “disadvantaged” and blindly provide them with plus points regardless of personal biography. The existing composition of Harvard’s undergraduate student body certainly seems to substantiate that suspicion.
Roughly 70 percent of black Harvard students come from affluent families. And in the Ivy League overall, fully 41 percent of black students are actually first- and second-generation African immigrants. Affirmative action, originally conceived as a systematic counterbalance to the effects of institutional racism on the descendants of American slaves, is now being used to aid the offspring of, say, a Nigerian orthopedic surgeon or a Dominican senior partner at McKinsey.
Or the daughter of a Haitian engineer, like Gay. Her father came to the United States for college, worked in the Army Corps of Engineers and raised her in upper middle class comfort. After graduating from Exeter, Gay went to Stanford, first as an undergrad then as faculty, and then took a tenured job in the Harvard political science department.
To hear Harvard tell it, Gay has rapidly ascended higher ed because she’s a research rockstar, “one of the Academy’s most creative and rigorous thinkers about vital aspects of democracy and political participation,” as a university press release puts it.
And yet, Gay’s official CV barely breaks three pages, boasts just a handful of poorly cited articles, and is devoid of even a single published book–a bare minimum requirement for a tenured position at most major universities. But, she is “diverse,” a black woman in an academic job market that puts a premium on that particular identity.
Gay’s true talent is not intellectual innovation; it’s administration. Her signature achievement as dean is a campus-wide “Inequality Initiative,” which appears to have done nothing more than host zoom calls and finance endless subcommittee “clusters” and add a couple new positions to the university’s already vast army of “equity, inclusion and belonging” administrators. This is exactly the kind of campaign against inequality easily embraced by an institution sitting on a $60 billion endowment and boasting a single-digit undergraduate admissions rate. It’s utterly unthreatening to the status quo.
Gay’s exact opposite is Roland Fryer. Abandoned at birth by his mom and raised by an alcoholic dad, Fryer is the youngest tenured black economist in Harvard’s history. He eschews empty bureaucracy and woke incantations in favor of hard science, focusing his work on concrete ways to boost black opportunity.
Fryer pursues provocative research lines and reports the results even when they break neat progressive pieties. Most famously, Fryer found that there was no racial bias in police shootings in the Houston police department. Roughly four years ago, Fryer was the victim of a coordinated professional assassination. And as detailed in my team’s documentary investigation about his case, the chief architect of that assassination was none other than Claudine Gay.
It’s tough not to suspect that Gay is a cynical PR prophylactic. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears ready to strike down as unconstitutional the school’s existing racial preference regime. If it does, black representation among the undergraduate study body is expected to fall precipitously, from 15 percent today to possibly as low as three percent.
An empty diversity hire may be exactly what Harvard wants: a bureaucrat with the right skin tone to keep that $60 billion endowment steadily growing -- and to distract from all the ways the university fails to advance true equality and opportunity.
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Ted Cruz Files Key School Choice Bill That Would Be ‘Most Significant Reform’ Since GI Bill
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, commemorated National School Choice Week by filing two bills to advance school choice, one of which his staff said would be the most significant educational reform since the GI bill.
“We need to provide students with a variety of educational options to fit their needs,” Cruz told The Daily Signal in an email statement Tuesday. “I have often said that school choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century, and I believe no differently today than I did when I began serving in the Senate a decade ago.
“Each student learns differently and ought to be afforded the opportunity regardless of where they come from, how they learn, or what they plan to do, from pursuing a college degree to attending vocational school,” he added.
Cruz filed two bills, the Student Empowerment Act and the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act on Tuesday.
The Student Empowerment Act builds on Cruz’s Student Opportunity Amendment, an edited version of which passed as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. That amendment enabled families to spend up to $10,000 from 529 tax-advantaged savings plans for various non-public K-12 education expenses. Since 2017, 529 plans have grown from 13.3 million to more than 15.9 million in 2022, according to the National Association of State Treasurers.
“The Student Empowerment Act restores the original intent of Sen. Cruz’s Student Opportunity Amendment,” a Cruz spokesperson told The Daily Signal. The original amendment “allowed parents and guardians to use 529 accounts for almost all K-12 expenses—most notably homeschooling expenses and various types of special needs therapies. In an effort to strip the entire amendment from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Democrats challenged the amendment’s germaneness, and were able to get the Senate Parliamentarian to strip out homeschooling and special therapies from the amendment.”
The Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act creates a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations and workforce training organizations. The bill allocates $5 billion for education and $5 billion for workforce training per year, for a combined investment of $100 billion over 10 years.
“Now more than ever, it is important to give children and their families the freedom to choose alternative educational options,” the Cruz spokesperson said. The pandemic showed parents what their children are, and are not, being taught in schools—parents didn’t like what they saw.”
Cruz has spoken out against critical race theory, the politicization of classrooms, and the stranglehold teachers unions have over education.
“The Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act expands the elementary, secondary, and vocational education options for all children, and allows parents to direct the education of their own children,” the spokesperson added. “The importance of this bill cannot be overstated—if this bill became law, it would be the most significant educational reform since the passage of the GI bill.”
The bills have little hope of passing in the Democratic-majority Senate, but Cruz’s move sets an important agenda for school choice legislation going forward.
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26 January, 2023
Harvard’s Cave-In to Human Rights Watch Is Part of a Bigger Problem
The decision by the dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to reverse his veto of a fellowship for Kenneth Roth, the ex-head of Human Rights Watch, should dismay those long concerned by the group’s disproportionate criticism of Israel. One may have questions about Israeli policies, but Human Rights Watch is not one for nuance.
In April 2021, it issued a 213-page report that Israeli authorities are committing “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians.” In contrast, the group, though harshly critical of Chinese policy toward Muslim minorities, does not go so far as to term them a crime against humanity.
Even if Dean Douglas Elmendorf of the Kennedy School (where I served as Director, Case Studies, between 1987 and 2006), had not yielded to public pressure to reinstate Roth, it would not have resolved the underlying problem represented by groups such as the Carr Center for Human Rights, the school’s center which proposed the fellowship for Mr. Roth.
The Center is one of many quasi-research entities which have sprung up at universities across the country whose purposes are more causist than scholarly. The Carr Center cites its purpose as “research, teaching, and training in the human rights domain.”
In practice, this vague language leads to such publications as “Not My AI: Towards Critical Feminist Frameworks to Resist Oppressive AI Systems” which aspires to “help us question algorithmic decision-making systems that may be racist and patriarchal, shifting to a future that is more focused on equity and social-environmental justice.” A worthy goal perhaps but hardly a detached and scholarly one.
The Carr Center, moreover, is far from alone in emphasizing advocacy over scholarship. Boston University is the home of the Center for Antiracist Research, led by Ibram X. Kendi, who is said to be “leading an antiracist movement for social change.” The Center says it includes “scholars, advocates, and thought leaders, all of whom bring to the table a relentless commitment to social justice.”
Race in America is without doubt a proper focus of research for a range of academic disciplines. The Antiracist Center, though, is clear about distinguishing itself from such: the “Center fosters an interdisciplinary approach to identify comprehensive solutions beyond the reach of most academic institutions that primarily focus on research.”
There are, it should be noted, similar centers at American University (Antiracism Center); the University of Southern California (USC Race and Equity Center); Temple University (Center for Antiracism); the University of Michigan (Center for Racial Justice).
To be fair, it is also the case that causes associated with political conservatives have their own academic homes. The University of Arkansas hosts the Center for Education Reform, which has long championed charter schools and school choice more broadly. Its work includes a “parental power index,” rating the extent to which “your state empowers parents and educators to foster the best education environment for students.”
One may well applaud such efforts — I do ‚— but they still must be distinguished from, say, a professional school for future teachers or detached research. The list of advocacy centers in academe goes on. Princeton hosts the Eviction Lab, which “creates data, interactive tools, and research to help neighbors and policy makers understand the eviction crisis.” The key assumption: that there is such a crisis.
Wake Forest hosts the Center for the Study of Capitalism, where “we believe well-functioning free markets act as a force for positive change and progress.. . .”
New York University has its “Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a research unit to inform policy related to these linked societal and scientific concerns.”
“The nexus of animal agriculture, climate change, and conservation represents one of the most pressing and least understood threats to a sustainable future and will be a main focal point of the Center’s activities,” says Dale Jamieson, the Center’s founding director. It’s a long way from being an agricultural extension service for farmers.
Dean Elmendorf is facing criticism that he has been influenced by donors with Zionist leanings. All the Centers above, though, have their donors with their own favorite causes, all looking to have the stamp of university approval. The BU Antiracism Center, say,has been backed by the Open Society, Ford, Gates and Casey Foundations.
The Gates, Ford, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative all support Princeton’s Eviction Lab. The Carr Center reflects the fact that an individual donor—tech mogul Greg Carr—can establish a Center at Harvard to further his world view. Whatever one’s views of these various causes, they all reflect advocacy over scholarship. Their presence is, what’s more, not unrelated to debates about free speech on campus. When university-approved centers are established with explicit goals, students must inevitably think twice about criticizing them. It’s a long way from John Stuart Mill.
https://www.nysun.com/article/harvards-cave-in-to-human-rights-watch-is-part-of-a-bigger-problem ?
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School Choice Movement Declares Victory in Iowa
Iowa has become the first state in the nation to pass a school choice measure this year, an education savings account plan championed by Governor Reynolds.
A school choice advocate at the Heritage Foundation, Jason Bedrick, called the new law “a major win for families looking for education freedom and choice.”
Dubbed the Students First Act, the legislation flew through the state legislature after the governor introduced it earlier this month.
The recently re-elected Ms. Reynolds signaled throughout election season that school choice would be a top priority during the state’s spring legislative session.
She endorsed a handful of political newcomers in Republican primaries against incumbent holdouts on her school choice agenda after failing to pass similar legislation last year. In four districts, Ms. Reynolds’s endorsees ousted incumbents in primaries and went on to win the general elections.
The bill passed in the state senate early Tuesday morning, and Ms. Reynolds signed it into law at the start of the workday.
“Public schools are the foundation of our educational system, and for most families, they’ll continue to be the option of choice, but they aren’t the only choice,” Ms. Reynolds told a crowd at Des Moines on Tuesday. “With this bill, every child in Iowa, regardless of ZIP code or income, will have access to the school best suited to their individual needs.”
The school choice program takes the form of education savings accounts, which have become the taxpayer-funded scholarship of choice in recent years.
In Iowa, students will have access to about $7,600 — roughly equivalent to what Iowa pays per-student in public schools — to spend on education-related costs.
Per its title, the funds are disbursed in savings accounts. Funds roll over from year to year, which proponents see as an advantage by incentivizing economization in education spending.
“The idea is that it gives families a much greater degree of freedom and flexibility,” Mr. Bedrick of the Heritage Fund told the Sun. “Often they’re used for tuition, but they can be used for things like tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curricula, online learning, special needs, and more.”
Iowa’s ESA program will phase in over the course of three years. In the upcoming 2023-24 school year, savings accounts will be available for low-income families and families seeking to leave the traditional public school system.
In the second year, eligibility will expand to include more middle class families. By the 2025-26 school year, it will be a universal education savings account program, much like Arizona’s.
While the new head of state in Arizona is trying to repeal its program, other states are following Iowa’s lead. Governors and Republican-held legislatures in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Idaho are eyeing similar legislation in the coming year.
In Florida, the first house bill of the legislative session would make universal its education savings account program, another feather in the cap of the Sunshine State’s education agenda if passed.
https://www.nysun.com/article/school-choice-movement-declares-victory-in-iowa
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Arizona Senate Panel Debates Parental Rights & School ‘Pronouns’ Bill
The Arizona state Senate Education Committee met Wednesday to consider SB 1001, The Given Name Act, a one-page, 21-line bill that states that any individual involved in the Arizona public education system would be required to use the pronoun associated with a student’s biological sex unless the student’s public school or charter school received other instructions from the student’s parent or parents.
No public or charter school staff member, full time or contractor, would be able to use alternative pronouns for a student without the written permission of the student’s parents.
The legislation would reinforce parents’ ultimate authority in deciding what names their children should and should not be called by staff members, providing a stopgap via parental approval before public districts attempt to treat or affirm gender dysphoria with only the minor’s limited understanding of what they are going through.
State Sen. John Kavanagh, Scottsdale Republican, the sponsor of SB 1001, said that if a child had serious psychological distress as a result of the gender dysphoria he or she was dealing with, then parents need to be alerted immediately so that the child can be given immediate medical and psychological care parents deem necessary.
Kavanagh disputed the common counterargument that many parents would be unsupportive and would therefore be a danger to their “transgender child.”
“The vast majority of parents will want to help their child,” he said, “What a horrible condemnation of the average American parent” to suggest otherwise. He added that Child Protective Services was still obligated, as always, to investigate any concerns of child abuse.
At no time during the committee hearing was Kavanagh’s concern for the high rate of student-suicide correlation addressed by Democratic members.
State Sen. Sally Ann Gonzales, Tucson Democrat, said, “For lots of indigenous children, their names were changed without parental permission—Maria got changed to Mary, Roberto got changed to Robert. I think that’s wrong for that to be happening. I’m not sure what the intent is for allowing … contractors and employers also not to say their names.”
Kavanagh responded that the bill would allow students to go by nicknames.
State Sen. Christine Marsh, Phoenix Democrat, suggested that the bill would go against the rights of parents who might agree with a child wanting different pronouns. “What if the parent agrees to a child having alternative pronouns?” she asked.
Kavanagh countered by citing the first sentence of his bill, which states that parental permission would allow a child to go by whatever pronouns the parent wishes.
Marsh took issue with the second portion of the bill, which states that a teacher or contractor could not be required to use a student’s pronouns, protecting their religious and moral liberties. She said that as a teacher for 33 years, she never had to fall back on “religious beliefs” as a standard for how she would respond to a student. “Are there other examples or situations in which a teacher’s religious beliefs override the parent’s?” she asked.
Kavanagh responded with an example of a Jewish or Muslim cafeteria worker being exempt from having to serve pork to students at school lunches. He also cited dress code considerations for students of different religions. After providing those examples, Kavanagh asked whether Marsh would agree with him that parents should be notified of potential mental health issues associated with gender dysphoria.
“No, I don’t agree, I just want the hypocrisy of the bill to be pointed out,” Marsh replied.
Several testimonials were offered by concerned parents, students, and activists, both for and against the bill.
One educator from Scottsdale praised the bill, claiming that as a Jew, she has religious objections to using pronouns or names that conflict with a student’s biological sex.
One activist claimed that parents should be involved and be aware of what their kids are going through, but suggested that students should be allowed to decide when their parents are ready to find out about it.
One critical point ignored by those opposing the bill is the inability of a minor under severe mental distress to safely self-treat gender dysphoria or any severe mental health issue or trauma. Encouraging minors to decide how best to treat themselves sets a dangerous precedent—and risks a very real threat of suicide or self-harm without the parent having an opportunity to aid his or her child.
One transgender advocate claimed that “no one commits suicide because they are gender dysphoric,” but implied that bullying was the cause.
While 20.2% of students claim to have been bullied, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 8.9% have admitted attempting suicide. In contrast, while 51% of transgender individuals have claimed to be victims of bullying, 40% of transgender individuals admitted attempting suicide.
One opponent of the bill called Kavanagh “Senator Coward,” during his testimony, to which Kavanagh quipped, “You’re free to call me that [under this bill], as long as you get written permission from my parents.”
With only a one-seat advantage on the Senate Education Committee, Republicans will likely revise The Given Name Act and clarify a few points of language via amendments over the next several weeks.
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25 January, 2023
'Fund Students, Not Systems' with Universal School Choice
With education reform taking center stage, states are pushing school choice reforms during the annual National School Choice Week happening this week.
The appetite for school choice is there. Why? There's a healthy and growing distrust among parents with entrusting corrupt teachers' unions (who selfishly put themselves ahead of students) with their kids– a change resulting from the COVID pandemic. School curriculums have strayed away from writing, reading, and arithmetic for critical race theory (CRT), America-bashing, and disturbing sexually-explicit content. Adding insult to injury, school administrators suppressed National Merit Scholar announcements, especially notices here in Northern Virginia, under the guise of not “offending” their classmates. This blatant act is being treated as a civil rights violation. As it should.
Public schools held hostage by support teachers unions are in serious need of competition. Education savings accounts (ESAs) are a surefire way to remove Randi Weingarten and her ilk’s grip over students.
What are Education Savings Accounts (ESAs)?
With ESAs catching on, there’s a lot of confusion about them – namely disinformation. Powerful teacher's unions and corresponding special interests groups, naturally, are hellbent on maintaining their dominance over students and keeping them trapped in failing low-performing schools.
That’s why ESAs are viewed as a superior alternative to what’s currently being offered by Big Education.
Ed Choice defines ESAs as the following: “Education savings accounts (ESAs) allow parents to withdraw their children from public district or charter schools and receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts with restricted, but multiple, uses. Those funds—which families generally access via an online platform—can cover private school tuition and fees, online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, higher education expenses, and other approved customized learning services and materials. Some ESAs, but not all, even allow students to use their funds to pay for a combination of public school courses and private services.”
What’s wrong with education dollars following the student? Nothing–that’s the way it should be. But Big Education puts their interests ahead of students and expects taxpayers to ceaselessly fund their charade without accountability. Not anymore. School choice could rein in this long-standing abuse.
Which States Have Successfully Implemented ESAs?
Two states–Arizona and West Virginia– activated ESA programs in 2022.
The Grand Canyon State became the first state in the Union to adopt “universal school choice” last year. Arizona’s program, dubbed the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA), is available to all Arizona school-age children (as of September 2022). For the 2022-2023 school year, eligible participants will receive approximately $7,000 for the ESA based on “90 percent of the state’s per-student base funding.”
Previously, school choice offerings were limited to “disabled students, those in failing schools, and other specific circumstances.” Since going into effect last September, it has serviced nearly 46,000 students as of this writing.
Moving out East, West Virginia has the Hope Scholarship. And despite massive support for the program, it faced several high-profile court challenges. Ultimately, the state Supreme Court determined it was legal and could proceed last fall.
The program is available to 93% of school-aged children in the Mountaineer State. In contrast with Arizona’s ESA program, Hope Scholarships “are equal to 100 percent of the prior year’s statewide average net state aid allotted per pupil based on net enrollment adjusted for state aid purposes (about $4,600 in 2020–21), which is about 38 percent the value of public school per-student spending.” A bonus: unused funds from this school year can be carried over to the 2023-2024 school year.
States Mulling ESA Bills in 2023
There are already several states mulling universal school choice, namely to establish ESA programs, this legislative session.
Utah is expected to create its answer– Utah Fits All Scholarship Program–this session with House Bill 215. If passed–there’s a high likelihood it will– HB 215 will award $8,000 to each eligible student representing 57% of the Beehive State’s per-pupil spending. And it also increases teacher pay.
It recently passed by a wide margin in the Utah House of Representatives and is expected to make its way to the State Senate and Governor Spencer Cox’s desk for signing.
Florida, a school choice-friendly state, is expected to expand its ESA program this session, as well. House Bill 1 was recently introduced to expand the Sunshine State’s ESA program: the Family Empowerment Scholarship Program.
And while the math is more difficult in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earl-Sears (formerly a Virginia Board of Education member) and Delegate Glenn Davis (R-Virginia Beach) are determined to get their ESA bill, HB 1508, passed in both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly. If created, the Virginia Education Success Account Program. It would give individual Virginia school-aged kids about $6,300 annually to apply toward their schooling. But Democrat resistance in the State Senate, sadly, will doom these prospects.
Conclusion
Support for school choice, regardless of geography or political party, continues to rise in the U.S. And that makes corrupt teachers' unions and their bosses squirm. They know their days of monopolizing education are numbered.
As American Federation for Children senior fellow Corey DeAngelis aptly retorts: it’s time to fund students and not systems.
Will more states buck Big Education and adopt school choice–especially ESAs? Let’s hope they do.
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DeSantis Makes a Major Move Against Unions During School Choice Week
It's School Choice Week in states across the country. In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is taking more power away from leftist teachers unions and reallocating it to parents, students and teachers who don't want to be part of the political union machine.
"The Governor’s proposal will create more accountability and transparency for public sector unions, including K-12 teacher unions and higher education unions. This proposal will require school unions to represent at least 60% of employees eligible for representation, an increase over the current 50% threshold, and allow state investigations into unions suspected of fraud, waste and abuse. Additionally, the proposal will require annual audits and financial disclosures for unions," DeSantis office released in a statement. "To further ensure that school boards are acting in the best interests of Florida’s teachers and students, this proposal reduces term limits for school board members from 12 years to 8 years and seeks to make school board elections a partisan election. A joint resolution for the 2023 Legislative Session has already been filed by Senator Gruters and Representative Roach to begin this process."
While taking on the unions, DeSantis is backing individual teachers and increasing their pay.
“This is a huge package to increase teacher pay, support teacher empowerment and protect teachers’ paychecks by ensuring they have control over their hard-earned salary,” DeSantis said. “We want more transparency into how school unions operate, and we are going to fight against school union haggling that holds teachers and their salary increases hostage. Partisan groups should not be given special privileges.”
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Australia: Back to the future. One year teaching qualification to be revived
Two-year post-graduate teaching degrees would be scrapped and replaced with a one-year course under a major overhaul to attract aspiring teachers into classrooms as schools battle chronic staff shortages, particularly in maths and science.
The proposal will be rolled out if the NSW Coalition government is reelected in March. It follows the NSW Productivity Commission releasing data that reveals the shift to the longer qualification has deterred more than 9000 would-be teachers from entering the profession.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said the reform was part of a push to modernise education and make a teaching career a reality sooner for those already in the workforce.
“People at all stages of their lives have the potential to be great teachers, for those who already have an undergraduate degree we want a more streamlined approach for them to start a teaching career,” Perrottet said.
Under a NSW Coalition government, those with an undergraduate degree will be able to complete a one-year full-time postgraduate degree to become a secondary school teacher from 2024, and streamlined postgraduate courses for primary school teachers would be available by 2026.
NSW Productivity Commissioner Peter Achterstraat said evidence shows longer courses have created significant hurdles for those looking to retrain as teachers, and there were unintended costs to students and teachers with the shift to a two-year postgraduate degree.
“There are potentially 9400 aspiring teachers who would have completed under the old one-year course and that’s enough to staff 140 high schools,” Achterstraat said.
In 2013, a national approach to the accreditation of education degrees was phased in, requiring university graduates to undertake a two-year master’s degree to enter the profession. Previously, a one-year graduate diploma was sufficient.
“Would-be teachers are deterred from joining the profession because of the extra cost, the extra year of training, and the fact they are going miss out on salary,” Achterstraat said.
“You might have a maths degree and be perfect for teaching, but if you have a family and a mortgage, taking two years off work to do the training is probably not viable,” he said.
The Commission examined the economic impacts of longer postgraduate initial teacher education, and found that since NSW doubled the length of postgraduate initial teacher education, the number of students completing degrees has trended down.
It found the move to a two-year master’s is a disincentive for mid-career professionals wanting to retrain as teachers, and has cost around $3 billion in lost welfare over the past seven years.
“These costs comprise loss of teacher earnings, additional student debt for teachers, and loss of lifetime income for students. Had initial teacher education (ITE) remained as a one-year graduate diploma, we could expect more than 9000 additional ITE completions over the 2015 to 2022 period,” the report said.
The shortfall in teaching graduates with specialised skills on out-of-field teaching – where students are being taught by someone without expertise in their subject – is “concerning”, the report said. The Commission estimates that the poorer outcomes from additional out-of-field teaching costs around 95,000 students $25,000 each in lost lifetime earnings.
“These additional teachers might have alleviated the current growing shortage of qualified teachers which is well documented,” the report said.
There is scarce evidence that longer training pathways result in a better quality of teaching and many high-achieving education systems overseas such as Singapore (ranked second worldwide in PISA results) offer one-year postgraduate teaching qualifications, the report said.
“Based on a review of empirical evidence, the Commission estimates that teachers with an additional year of ITE have a negligible impact on student achievement. On the other hand, the literature consistently points to additional years of on-the-job teaching experience having a positive impact, especially for early-career teachers.”
Teacher shortages are biting across Australia – especially in maths, design and technology and science – while data reported by the Herald last year showed more than 100,000 students in NSW are taught by someone without expertise in their subject.
“While extending the initial teacher education to two years was likely done to improve teacher quality, we now know that it has not achieved that outcome. We are confident that returning to a one-year initial teacher qualification will not lower teaching standards,” Achterstraat said.
Minister for Education and Early Learning Sarah Mitchell said the current two-year master’s degree requirement was a disincentive for aspiring teachers, particularly mid-career professionals, and didn’t have a clear enough impact on student outcomes.
“This decision [to move to a one-year pathway] is backed by strong research which shows that the best way for teachers to hit the ground running is to spend more time in schools.”
The government said it will work with universities and the profession “to ensure these new courses are high-quality and prepare trainee teachers for the classroom”, and will push for it to be on the national agenda at next month’s education ministers meeting.
A policy paper released last year by conservative think tank the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) argued mandating a two-year requirement for postgraduate teaching was crippling teacher supply. The one-year graduate diploma of education is currently held by about 60,000 teachers nationally.
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24 January, 2023
New Report Details Massive Fraud and Abuse Allegations in Chicago Public Schools
On January 1, 2023, the Chicago Board of Education’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued its Fiscal Year 2022 Annual Report, which details allegations of widespread sexual abuse throughout Chicago Public Schools (CPS), rampant corruption, massive fraud, and other troubling findings.
According to the report, CPS received $2.8 billion in federal pandemic relief funds. To date, CPS has spent nearly 50 percent of that amount, with “77% of its $1.49 billion in pandemic relief funding expenditures to date on employee salaries and benefits.”
Much of that money has been allocated to CPS staff in the form of “Extra Pay.” As the report notes, “In 2021, Extra Pay hit nearly $74 million — a 17 percent increase from the most recent pre-pandemic calendar year of 2019. Over five years, Extra Pay jumped 74 percent — far more than the average teacher’s salary rose over a similar five-year period.”
What’s more, “Pre-pandemic versus post-pandemic Stipend expenditures systemwide more than tripled, jumping from $8.5 million in calendar year 2019 to $28.9 million in 2021.”
The report also documents wide-ranging fraud via “buddy punching,” wherein a CPS employee would clock in or out for other employees. In one particular case, a CPS employee earned more than $150,000 over four years in “Extra Pay” even though videos documented the employee was gambling in casinos while being compensated for “Extra Pay.”
CPS has a long history of misspending funds; however, the district has taken this to a whole new level in recent years after it received almost $3 billion in emergency funds that were supposed to be spent on reopening its schools in the wake of the pandemic.
As if engaging in financial fraud is not bad enough, an even more disturbing set of allegations concerning extensive adult-on-student sexual abuse was uncovered throughout CPS. Per the report, over the past four years, the OIG’s Sexual Allegations Unit (SAU) has investigated 1,733 cases of adult-on-student sexual abuse. In 2022 alone, SAU opened 477 cases of potential sexual abuse allegations. Since 2018, the SAU has confirmed more than 300 cases of adult-on-student sexual abuse in CPS. Strangely, only 16 of those cases have resulted in criminal charges.
Another red flag highlighted in the report documents the fact that CPS has a “chronic problem” mislabeling truant students as transfer students. Since 2014, the OIG has launched five probes into this ongoing issue, however, the problem persists. In 2022, the OIG uncovered “extensive evidence” that schools throughout the district have repeatedly marked students who have dropped out as transfers even though this violates state law and CPS policy.
“We have not been able to confirm or see any evidence that CPS is taking adequate corrective actions even when these audits bear out that schools are not in compliance with what they’re supposed to be doing to verify transfers or missing students,” the report notes.
Although the mislabeling accusations pale in comparison to the outright fraud and sexual abuse allegations, it matters because these students are unlikely to re-register after they have been coded as a transfer. In fact, data show that since CPS decided to shut down its schools for in-person learning during the pandemic, there has been an even more significant drop-off in student attendance across the district. As far as we know, hundreds, if not thousands of students have completely fallen off of CPS’ radar because the district has failed to “address the improper use of leave codes and the documentation of transfers and dropouts.”
Interestingly, the problems that have engulfed CPS in recent years have not occurred across the Windy City’s private schools. During the pandemic, the overwhelming majority of private and charter schools throughout Chicago maintained in-person learning, despite not receiving a single penny in federal pandemic relief funds. There have also been no bombshell reports of rampant sexual abuse allegations in Chicago’s many non-public schools. It also should be noted that Chicago’s private and charter schools have not been accused of mislabeling their students as transfers to hide the fact that they have dropped out.
Perhaps this report will convince more Chicago parents that school choice is the ultimate answer to the dysfunctional Chicago Public Schools racket. CPS is responsible for educating more than 350,000 students on an annual basis, yet it has shown itself to be wholly incapable of educating these young people, let alone keeping them safe from sexual assaults by CPS staff.
If this report, with all of its shocking claims, does not move the needle towards a school choice revolution in Chicago, the students will continue to pay the price as the so-called adults in the room plunder and destroy their futures.
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Every parent should fight back vs. the left’s war on merit
It used to be obvious that merit is part of achieving the American dream. But like it’s doing to so many self-evident things, the left is attempting to destroy this idea as it pursues a Sovietesque system of “equity.”
Parents might not see merit’s decline as a more pressing concern than their children being told they can be any gender they choose from day to day. Most kids are academically average. Why fight over merit when there are so many other ideological fights to be had?
Parents have to see merit as part and parcel of the left’s push to impose its ridiculous concepts on our kids.
The idea that everyone can have an equal outcome has been tried again and again in failed socialist countries. When the left succeeds in ending merit in a school, you can be sure the rest of the woke ideas parents abhor have already taken over the curriculum.
Beyond that, our schools’ loss of rigor has dumbed down our country, and the retreat from pursuing merit has slowed success for so many kids.
This isn’t theoretical. Nor is it accidental.
Virginia mom Asra Nomani recently discovered that in September 2020, her son received National Merit recognition, a prestigious honor given to a handful of kids across the country — but her son’s school, Thomas Jefferson HS for Science and Technology, hid it from the family.
The majority-Asian school is neck deep and drowning in leftist ideology, pursuing “equity,” equal outcomes for children based on the color of their skin. Asians are out, as TJ has simply too many successful ones. Nomani’s son was the wrong color, and the school’s racists decided he should not be presented with the award.
Learning this news two years too late, Nomani’s son was denied the ability to note the achievement on his college applications and seek scholarships that stem from this award. The school hurt his chances to succeed, and it did it on purpose.
Lest anyone think this is just one bad principal at one school, state officials are investigating more than a dozen schools in northern Virginia for doing the same thing.
In Sunday’s Post, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wrote that he’s proposed a bill “to eliminate the withholding of any recognition, award, or postsecondary scholarship eligibility earned by Virginia students” — “parents and students will be notified immediately about these honors.”
That’s a start. But the schools that harmed so many kids’ futures because they put their political ideology ahead of student success need to be punished, and everyone involved must be fired.
As Youngkin points out, Fairfax County has spent “$455,000 of taxpayer dollars to fund equity training in schools.” This is absurd and akin to setting nearly half a million of our tax dollars on fire. We can’t let this go on.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has launched an investigation into whether these schools violated the students’ civil rights. It seems obvious they have, and accountability is necessary. Any school found to have withheld merit awards from children, for any reason, should have the choice of a fully new administration or losing its federal funding.
Schools receive this money to support kids’ education and success, not to impose their twisted Communist-like social system. If public schools can’t or won’t do that, they don’t deserve to exist.
The behavior of everyone involved in this scandal is so far beyond the pale, there can be no second chances. They deserve to lose it all.
The left treats our public schools like its personal fiefdom. This has to stop now. Parents should fight for school choice and for a child’s education funding to follow the student, but (particularly in blue states where that’s an uphill battle) they have to simultaneously fight for our public schools.
Parents know how to do it. They successfully beat back critical-race-theory and gender-ideology training in many public schools, even in blue areas. Fighting for merit is the next frontier and one that has to matter to all of us.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/22/every-parent-should-fight-back-vs-the-lefts-war-on-merit/
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For public school teachers, there can be no right to strike
THE MASSACHUSETTS Teachers Association, the largest teachers union in the state, has unveiled its top priorities for the next two years. Those priorities do not include holding instructors to more rigorous standards or ensuring that students do better on exams. They do, however, include making it lawful for public employees to go on strike — something that has been flatly illegal in Massachusetts for the past century.
"This outright ban on public employee strikes is unjust," declares the state's largest teachers union. It "unfairly restricts the ability of public employees to take collective action in support of themselves and the communities they serve."
In fact, the ban on strikes by government workers is neither unjust nor unfair. It is essential. When public-sector employees refuse to work, they victimize innocent third parties. It isn't corporate managers who feel the pain. Ordinary citizens do. Strikes by public employees are intended to deprive the community of essential services — classroom teaching, public safety, trash collection, mass transit. The widespread distress caused by such strikes is intentional: Their underlying strategy is to make the public miserable, thereby increasing the pressure on government officials to bow to the union's demands.
The president of the teachers union, Max Page, calls it a "fundamental labor and human right" for teachers and other government employees to be able to walk off the job. Page assured the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that if his members engaged in a work stoppage it would not be for selfish motives but "out of love for their students." Love? Teachers who go on strike hurt their students. They cause academic achievement to suffer. They inflict particular harm on special-needs students, those with disabilities, and those who rely on school for their meals.
When teachers refuse to work, parents are often thrown into turmoil. During one of Chicago's numerous teachers strikes, the Chicago Sun-Times described the "citywide epidemic" of "stressed-out parents" struggling to cope with the chaos unleashed by the Chicago Teachers Union.
"Parents and guardians frantically sought last-minute child care [and] pleaded with their bosses for leniency. . . . . Citywide, for thousands of families, stress was high and consequences were real." The paper quoted Martina Watts, a mother in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods: "I might be losing my job over this. As long as they're on strike, I can't work. I'm not getting paid."
In the private sector, employees who go on strike are subject to market discipline. They know that there are limits to the claims they can make of an employer — after all, private companies must remain profitable or fail. Let unions demand too much and management may respond by closing a facility, increasing automation, or relocating to another state. Private-sector job actions generally turn on economic disputes over how to divide a pie whose size is fixed. Unions claim their members should get more of the profits they help produce; management resists those claims. If a strike is declared, both sides pay a price — the company loses business, the employees lose income, and both are constrained by the hard reality of the bottom line.
But in government, there are no profits to divvy up. Labor disputes in the public sector are about public dollars, which neither employees nor managers produce. When teachers, transit workers, or sanitation workers threaten to strike, it isn't to squeeze more out of management. It is to extract more from taxpayers — yet taxpayers get no seat at the table.
Unlike in the private sector, collective bargaining in the public sector is political. It amounts to the making of public policy through antidemocratic means. Union officials who have no mandate from the voters are empowered to play a direct role in crafting government policy and deciding how public funds will be spent. In a democracy, that should be intolerable.
For a long time, it was. "The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote in 1937. In the private workplace, organized employees should have every right to negotiate with employers. But not in the public sector, said FDR, where "the employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress."
Not only should teachers and other public workers not be permitted to strike, they shouldn't be permitted to engage in collective bargaining. The salaries and benefits paid to government workers, their hours and conditions of employment, the obligations they are expected to meet — these are all matters of public policy and should be decided by public policymakers. Labor unions ought to have no more of a say in the fashioning of those policies than any other interest group. And public employees who go on strike should be treated as the scofflaws they are, not indulged and encouraged and flattered.
It has become normal in recent years for Massachusetts teachers unions to extort more money and other contract concessions by striking or threatening to do so. "Two more illegal strikes have hit Massachusetts!" excitedly reported the union activist project Labor Notes on its website last fall. It was referring to strikes by teachers in Haverhill and Malden; those came in the wake of strikes, strike threats, or work slowdowns in Andover, Brookline, Dedham, and Belmont. Most recently, the teachers union in Melrose authorized a strike and was promptly rewarded with a lucrative new three-year contract.
Massachusetts voters and politicians haven't just gotten used to this extortion, they enable it. Teachers who refuse to work know perfectly well they won't lose their jobs for breaking the law.
The state's education commissioner, Jeff Riley, pronounced himself "shocked" that the Massachusetts Teachers Union is now demanding that public employee strikes not be merely tolerated but legalized.
Really, though, should he be so surprised? By allowing government-employee unions to engage in collective bargaining, Massachusetts strengthened those unions at the expense of the state's voters and taxpayers. Declining to enforce the ban on public-sector strikes strengthened them even more. Abolishing the ban altogether is the logical next step. None of this will lead to better schools, improved education, or higher test grades. But that's OK. The teachers unions "love" their students, and you always hurt the one you love.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26706/for-public-school-teachers-there-can-be-no-right
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23 January, 2023
Is the American Bachelor’s Degree Losing Its Luster?
Is the sheen wearing off the American liberal arts degree? Plummeting enrollment at colleges and universities, and the increasing number of both government and private sector employers abandoning their college-degree requirements for new hires, suggest that it might be.
According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, undergraduate enrollment fell in the fall of 2022, albeit more slowly than in recent years.
Enrollment for the fall term dropped by 1.1 percent, bringing the total two-year decline since 2020 to 4.2 percent. Although there was a significant decline in 18- to 20-year-olds enrolled, much of this decline was driven by older and part-time students.
A former press secretary for the Department of Education during the Trump administration, Angela Morabito, speculates that this decline and the ensuing abandonment of degree requirements is due to the colleges themselves.
“Colleges are making themselves irrelevant,” Ms. Morabito said in a tweet. “I talk to people ALL the time who needed a college education to *get* their job but not to actually *do* their job.”
As college enrollment and the number of new graduates decline, states are now beginning to do away with college degree requirements for many jobs.
Pennsylvania has become the latest state to do so, with Governor Shapiro signing an executive order Wednesday that does away with the four-year degree requirements for 92 percent of state jobs.
“I want to make it clear to all Pennsylvanians, whether they went to college or they gained experience through work, job training, or an apprenticeship program: we value your skills and talents, and we want you to apply for a job with the Commonwealth,” Mr. Shapiro said in a speech Wednesday.
Pennsylvania, under the leadership of Mr. Shapiro, a Democrat, joins Utah and Maryland in dropping the requirement for a four-year degree for most government jobs.
In December, Governor Cox of Utah, a Republican, announced that the state would be dropping a college degree requirement for 98 percent of the jobs in the state’s executive branch.
“Degrees have become a blanketed barrier-to-entry in too many jobs,” Mr. Cox said. “Instead of focusing on demonstrated competence, the focus too often has been on a piece of paper. We are changing that.”
Maryland was the state that started the trend, with Governor Hogan’s “no skilled worker left behind” program. The program drops degree requirements for job seekers 25 and older who have a high school diploma or equivalent and are able to show they have gained skills through alternative routes.
These “Skilled Through Alternative Routes” job seekers might use community college education, apprenticeship, military service, skill bootcamps, and on-the-job training to waive the degree requirement.
These programs have also garnered support from the White House, with President Biden last spring calling on employers to focus on the skills of job applicants instead of their degrees.
With a tight labor market, companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Bank of America, and General Motors have dropped degree requirements for certain roles in an effort to gain an advantage in attracting talent.
A recent study by a employment analytics firm, Remote, has also recently found that the salaries in comparable roles are relatively unaffected by an employee’s degree or lack thereof.
Remote’s CEO, Job van der Voort, says that companies should focus more on a potential employee’s “experiences, teachability, adaptability, and resilience.”
“Rather than using a candidate’s level of formal education as the sole indicator of how they will perform in a position, we instead suggest removing degree requirements wherever possible,” Mr. van der Voort said.
https://www.nysun.com/article/is-the-american-bachelors-degree-losing-its-luster ?
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Parents line up to slam woke Michigan school board member for saying 'whiteness is evil' and that white people are more dangerous than WILD ANIMALS
Parents demanded a Michigan school board member be fired on Tuesday after she tweeted 'whiteness is evil' and insisted Caucasian people are more dangerous than wild animals.
Kesha Hamilton has written a series of inflammatory posts on Twitter claiming whiteness was 'synonymous with racism' and urging people to 'be safe' around 'white folks'.
Hamilton, whose ex-husband is white, faced parents and teachers in a tense board meeting for Jackson Public Schools which required extra security due to protests staged at the school by a far-right group.
One mom insisted her 'racist comments should not be condoned'.
On December 18 she wrote on Twitter: 'Whiteness is so evil, it manipulates then says I won't apologize for my dishonesty and trauma inducing practices and thinks you should applaud it for being honest about its ability to manipulate and be dishonest.'
In a separate post on December 3 she said: 'The last thing you have to worry about is an animal - though that could be a very real threat... more dangerous are any white folks you may see on the trail... be safe!'
The mother-of-six doubled down on her statements which she has not deleted from her public profile.
She told the meeting this week: 'We have to ask ourselves what are we angered over - the fact that it was said or the fact that it is true?'
She added: 'We must educate ourselves [about] how these racial disparities are impacting us and our neighbors and not let them be successful in silencing us.'
She continues to work as a board member for Jackson Public Schools which represents several schools across Jackson, Michigan.
Hamilton was elected in 2020 though her term expires at the end of 2026. It is unclear how much she is paid for the role.
One parent told Tuesday's meeting that Hamilton was 'an angry and bitter judge'.
Mom Gina Hastings added: ' Someone in her influential position must be held to a high standard. She must be a representative for all students in the JPS system.
'Her racist comments should not be condoned. How can all kids feel safe when physical characteristics over which they have no control are being called evil and dangerous.'
After the meeting, Hamilton insisted it had been a success, writing on Facebook: 'Thank you Jackson! I can’t express enough how much each of you and your presence on Tuesday night meant personally to me.
'Those in person and those online.'
She added: 'I felt your support deeply in my spirit and what was also very clear was your recognition of the Real Issue. Our students. Our teachers. Our data. The continuation of a racial equity focus. And the embracing of diverse leadership.'
Hamilton, who has also endorsed anti-police sentiments on social media, runs her own consultancy firm Diverse Minds Consulting, LLC, which claims to 'fill the gaps that exist in the messaging and training of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and anti-racism'.
She claims in her biography on its website that she was inspired by her experiences of being married to a white man and having mixed-race children.
In 2020 she ran a campaign to become a board member of Jackson Public Schools which she successfully won.
At the time, she said three of her children attended schools under the board's remit.
Last year, Hamilton became involved in a dispute with superintendent Jeff Beal who she accused of harassment and bullying.
However an independent investigation found there was not enough evidence to substantiate the claims.
Hamilton's recent posts have attracted widespread outrage, prompting local far-right group Proud Boys to hand out flyers in the school which said 'Jackson School Board hates White people.'
The board was forced to move Tuesday's meeting after being warned of the possible attendance of 'outside agitator groups' by Jackson Police and Fire Services.
Prior to the meeting, Superintendent Jeff Beal told local site MLive: ' I received attention from several concerned citizens within the last month who are frustrated with the racial tones or undertones of trustee Kesha Hamilton’s social media.
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Washington Township School District removes rainbow ‘safe space’ signs after parents complain
A New Jersey school district removed rainbow-colored “Safe Zone” signs hanging outside classrooms at its middle school after parents deemed them non-inclusive.
Washington Township Superintendent Peter Turnamian announced the measure at its board of education meeting on Jan. 3, according to NJ.com.
The square signs, which hung at Long Valley Middle School, resembled the rainbow-striped Pride flag, known to represent the LGBTQ+ community.
They were displayed to illustrate that the rooms were designated safe spaces for its LBTQ+ student body.
However, parents expressed concern over the fact that other groups were not represented, violating the school’s inclusion policies, The Epoch Times reported.
The signs, which were erected in 2019, will be swapped out for ones depicting the school’s panther mascot in an effort to promote respect for all.
“Ultimately, the advice of legal counsel was to have them come down,” Turnamian said at the meeting, adding that the district received “appropriate criticism” about showing favoritism.
Recently elected school board member John Holly addressed the board in January about its lack of inclusion, saying, “School should be a safe space for all kids, not just some kids.”
In December, a lesbian and gender-queer student at the school expressed her concern to the board.
“I can say the LGBTQ+ community is constantly bullied and belittled in our school system,” said a student named Rose. “The safe zone rainbow stickers let kids like me know that they are not alone despite their differences.
Christian Fuscarino, the executive director of Garden State Equality, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group in New Jersey, told the outlet that the removal of the signage, “sends a message to LGBTQ youth that they are not fully welcomed in the school environment.”
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22 January, 2023
California college professor says 'completely fabricated' claims of racism may cost him his job
A California college professor said after he and a group of faculty committed to free speech questioned diversity measures on campus, they were targeted with false allegations of racism that puts his job on the line.
A California college professor is fighting back after he says his job has been threatened due to allegations of racism and hate speech that he said were "completely fabricated."
Tenured Bakersfield College history professor Matthew Garrett said he and other faculty members of a free speech coalition were targeted with false allegations after they asked questions during a campus diversity meeting last October. Shortly afterwards, Garrett received a notice of unprofessional conduct by the administration that claimed he had caused "real harm" to students and said he was being removed from the diversity committee "effective immediately."
In December, vice president of the school district's Board of Trustees John Corkins made headlines after he lashed out at the group during a board meeting saying the "abusive" and "disrespectful" minority of teachers needed to be "culled," and taken "to the slaughterhouse."
Professor Garrett told Fox News Digital he wasn't the only one who had "growing campus frustrations" with the "radical" changes that the district had made in the past few years.
"Many of the faculty quietly tell me thank you for speaking up because we're afraid to do so," he said.
He described how critical race theory and other racial equity initiatives had become popular after Black Lives Matter drew national attention in 2020.
"Our campus has been really radically transformed in the last two years or so. In the last two years we've adopted critical race theory, diversity training, implicit bias training, micro aggression trainings. We've adopted racial quotas and preferences, affirmative action-type behavior, we've adopted racially segregated classes, we've adopted mandated masks, compulsory vaccines, and location tracking software. We've got funding going to propaganda webpages you can track through grants," he said.
Other professors had raised concerns these social equity initiatives were weakening academic standards, he claimed.
"A lot of the faculty are really concerned about the dissolution of rigor," Garrett said, as academic programs were replaced with social programs focused on "inclusivity, [where] everyone passes."
The professor filed a federal lawsuit against the school in 2021 after his job was initially threatened for pushing back against some of these initiatives. His attorney Arthur Willner said his case described a growing problem of intolerance to free speech on college campuses.
"The district's notion that students and faculty members have a right not to be offended, and not to hear ideas that they find disagreeable, somehow trumps the First Amendment rights of everybody else," Willner said.
The lawyer said this hostility to the First Amendment pressured many faculty members with opposing ideas to keep silent for fear of losing their jobs and livelihoods.
Garrett said certain faculty members on board with these left-wing social policies were "colluding" with the administration to target faculty members who questioned them.
He shared how one professor specifically said she did not want a diversity of opinions on her race committee, while another argued free speech was a "conservative ruse."
"So the person doesn't believe conservatives should be able to speak and if they do speak they should be able to be disciplined?" he said, calling these admissions "very disturbing."
Still, the professor said he wasn't going to back down and offered hope to other faculty who may be afraid to stand out.
"None of us want to be unprofessional or disruptive or troublesome. That's not the goal. The goal is to facilitate open discussions and make sure other faculty know they're allowed to ask questions, that they're allowed to question policies they disagree with," he argued.
Garrett said he plans to keep fighting the district but expects them to throw the kitchen sink at him to pressure him into a settlement.
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DeSantis Scores Win Against 'Woke" Public Education, Bans Historically Inaccurate African-American Studies AP Course
Florida Governor and possible 2024 candidate for President Ron DeSantis has done it again. This time Governor DeSantis has axed an allegedly woke African-American advanced placement (AP) course claiming the course violates state law and the content is historically inaccurate.
Via The Blaze:
The Florida Department of Education has rejected an AP African-American studies class, asserting that the course runs afoul of state law and largely “lacks educational value.”
“As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,” a letter from the Department of Education’s Office of Articulation to College Board Florida Partnership senior director Brian Barnes reads. “In the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion.”
This is exactly why Republicans almost universally admire the Florida Governor.
Many GOP politicians pretend to be conservative but once in office tend to vote with the RINOs.
The Florida Governor however is the real deal and has consistently run his state as a true conservative would, with amazing results.
While this latest action banning an African-American AP class will be met with screams of racism from the left you can bet most of residents of that state will support this latest action.
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Ireland: Christian teacher who spent 100 days behind bars for refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns is SACKED by his school
Enoch Burke has two weeks to launch an appeal after he was dismissed from his teaching post yesterday, following a chaotic disciplinary hearing.
Mr Burke is entitled to appeal within ten working days after Thursday's 'stage 4' hearing to decide if he should be fired.
The teacher, who spent three months in prison for defying a court order to stay away from his school following a row that started over the preferred pronouns of a transgender pupil, was informed of the decision yesterday.
In a statement, the Burke family declined to comment on whether he would appeal. But they alleged that 'solicitors unlawfully sought to conduct the purported disciplinary hearing' and that the school chairman was absent, which may form the basis of an appeal.
Thursday's hearing was loudly disrupted by Mr Burke and his family, who are evangelical Christians.
Mr Burke was summoned to Wilson's Hospital School in Multyfarnham, Co. Westmeath, yesterday and was informed at 3.30pm in the presence of the board of management chairman John Rogers, and principal Frank Milling that he had been dismissed.
Mr Burke said that his dismissal was based on the 'purported' meeting of the board of management in Mullingar Park Hotel from which Mr Rogers was absent.
The meeting on Thursday heard that Mr Rogers was absent as he had taken ill on Wednesday night. Gardaí had to escort board members from a Mullingar hotel while they were being followed by members of Burke's family after Thursday's hearing.
The decision to dismiss Mr Burke came under stage four of Department of Education and Skills procedures for the suspension or dismissal of teachers. Evidence included a written principal's report and allowing Mr Burke to speak to the board at the Mullingar meeting.
Sanctions open to the board included demotion and dismissal and the board decided, rapidly, to opt for dismissal. Mr Burke had spent 107 days in prison before Christmas for refusing to obey a High Court order to stay away from the school until the hearing took place.
The row originated after Mr Burke first refused to use different pronouns for a student and then loudly remonstrated with the school principal about the pronoun issue during an event to celebrate the school's 260th anniversary.
Yesterday, Mr Rogers was present to tell Mr Burke that the long-running dispute over gender pronouns was over – he was fired from the school just a day after the Mullingar hearing.
On Wednesday, the High Court refused to grant Mr Burke an injunction to prevent the hearing and noted that he did not obey High Court orders to stay away from the school.
He had been suspended on full pay by the school.
Mr Burke was eventually released from Mountjoy Prison on December 21. Upon releasing him Judge Brian O'Moore made it very clear to him that he could be reincarcerated if he showed up at the school again.
Despite the warning, the teacher continued to attend the school, against the school board's wishes, since it reopened after the Christmas holidays on 5 January.
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20 January, 2023
Art professor SUES Hamline University for defamation and RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION after she was fired and branded Islamophobic for showing a painting of Muhammad
Professor Erika López Prater, 42, has announced she's suing Hamline College in St Paul for dismissing her for showing a class a painting of Muhammad
An art professor has sued a college for defamation and religious discrimination after she was ousted for showing students a painting of the Prophet Muhammad and branded Islamophobic.
Erika Lopez Prater announced the suit against Hamline University in Minnesota Tuesday evening, the Star Tribune reported.
Hamline - which initially defended its authoritarian behavior - said its decision to accuse Prater of discrimination against Muslims was 'flawed,' as the suit was announced.
Prater's lawsuit highlights how she repeatedly warned students before October's class about the image she planned to show, which was painted by a Muslim.
Many Muslims say it is forbidden to display images of the Prophet Muhammad, although America's largest Muslim rights organization has defended Prater, and agrees her behavior was not Islamophobic.
Despite the warnings, one student named Arem Wedatalla complained, starting a chain of events which culminated in Prater's dismissal.
Her suit says: 'Students viewing the online class had ample warning about the paintings.
'Students viewing the online class also had ample opportunity to turn away from their computer screens, turn their screens away from them, turn off their screens, or even leave their rooms before the paintings were displayed.'
Prater's attorney David Redden further alleges that she was told by a department leader that it sounded as if she'd 'done everything right.'
But in November, Prater was told her class was being canceled from spring, with the woke college's Office of Inclusive Excellence sending around an email branding Prater's class 'undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.'
Redden alleges this was defamatory, and says Hamline staff turned his client into a 'pariah,' while crushing anyone who tried to support her.
He said she was further defamed in a student newspaper 'discussion' about her behavior, and alleges Prater herself was the victim of religious discrimination.
Redden says this is because Prater 'is not Muslim, because she did not conform her conduct to the specific beliefs of a Muslim sect, and because she did not conform her conduct to the religion-based preferences of Hamline that images of Muhammad not be shown to any Hamline student.'
The lawsuit came hours after a top Muslim rights group panned accusations of Islamophobia surrounding a college professor who was fired for showing a painting of the prophet Muhammad to her students.
Conscious that in some branches of Islam it is blasphemous to look at any image of the Prophet, Prater warned student in writing the class would feature pictures of the 14th-century religious figure.
Despite allowing students to leave the room during the lesson, several complained - and Prater, 42, lost her job. Afterwards, the students, led by 23-year-old Wedatalla, touted the dismissal as a victory.
The incident has since spawned responses from civil rights groups who have condemned the firing - with the National Executive Director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) now the latest to contest the decision.
In a press release Friday, the Washington DC- based advocacy group offered its official stance on the controversy, asserting that academics should not be condemned as 'bigots' without the proper justification.
The response comes after an executive of the civil right's group's Minnesota chapter celebrated the firing, condemning the Muhammad depiction as 'blasphemy' and an infringement on students' rights.
The CAIR, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group, joins organizations like The American Civil Liberties Union ACLU, PEN America, The New York Times and Fox News in condemning the decision.
'Academics should not be condemned as bigots without evidence or lose their positions without justification,' an excerpt from the statement read.
'Although we strongly discourage showing visual depictions of the Prophet, we recognize that professors who analyze ancient paintings for an academic purpose are not the same as Islamophobes who show such images to cause offense,' it continued.
'Based on what we know up to this point, we see no evidence that Professor Erika López Prater acted with Islamophobic intent or engaged in conduct that meets our definition of Islamophobia.'
The statement did not mention how the firing was earlier celebrated by CAIR-MN's Jaylani Hussein, executive director of its Minnesota sect.
Hussein, like several others who have supported Prater's firing in recent months, slammed the academic's decision to show the art piece offensive and 'an act of Islamophobia.'
A day after the CAIR slammed the firing, Prater made her first public appearance, appearing in open forum discussing her firing presided over by Islam and global affairs Muqtedar Khan.
Khan, a professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware where he heads its Islamic Studies Program, was joined by scholars Dr. Christiane Gruber, Salam Al-Marayati, and Dr. Hyder Khan in a pointed talk about the repercussions of the university's decision.
During the discussion, Prater - who plans to teach at Macalester College in the spring - revealed that she had had a discussion with at least one of the students who her spurred her firing, who she said 'had some pretty strong feelings' on the matter.
'We did have a conversation with one of the students who was objecting to it after the class, right - like, what were her principal objections besides saying that this is forbidden in Islam. She had some pretty strong feelings that she expressed to me.
'One of them that perhaps gets to the heart of the matter,' she continued, 'was that she thought that the warnings that I had provided to the class didn't even matter.
'She believed that images of the Prophet Muhammad should never be shown full stop - even if those are pedagogically relevant images.'
Lopez Prater said that while she may disagree with the university's decision, she respected the student's stance - despite giving multiple written and verbal warnings that the art history course would touch on religious iconography, including the famed 14th-century painting of Muhammad, which DailyMail.com has chosen not to publish.
The saga started October 6, when Lopez Prater was teaching the online class about Islamic art that was part of a wider curriculum on pieces from all over the world. That day, she chose to analyze a 14th-century depiction of the angel Gabriel delivering the Prophet's first revelation.
Conscious that in some branches of Islam it is blasphemous to look at any image of the Prophet, Professor Lopez Prater gave students two minutes to look away from the screen or log out before she projected the image onto her presentation.
Wedatalla, the president of the university's Muslim association who spearheaded the campaigning to get Lopez Prater fired, chose to remain online in the class.
Afterwards, she and others promptly complained to school officials that the image 'blindsided' her and made her feel marginalized.
Lopez Prater was fired after more students - including some who were not in the class - complained.
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NYC special needs school is filled with rats and filth
A New York City school for special needs children is a filth hole where roaches climb on children, rats roam the halls and “good-old-boy” staff members engage in sexual harassment, a lawsuit filed by a former employee this week alleges.
The International Institute for the Brain (iBRAIN)’s building on East 91st Street was “extremely filthy” and crawling with vermin– all while receiving up to $350,000 in taxpayer funding per student, ex-worker Katelyn Newman claims in the New York Supreme Court suit filed Jan. 16.
“Leaks in the plumbing were stuffed up with Dorito bags or whatever else was readily available,” when Newman began working at the facility, the complaint reads.
“The carcass of a rat could be seen for an extended time period before it was finally removed, and the ceiling over the entryway where the children entered the building was falling down.”
Despite allegedly receiving $1 million in PPP money in 2020 and $800,000 in 2021, the school also struggled with a “severe lack of equipment,” and students were reportedly forced to sleep on dirty mats.
According to the lawsuit, first reported by The Daily Beast, one student was hospitalized after an incompetent staffer botched a medical procedure, blocking his circulation and causing his legs to swell.
The troubling picture Newman paints of the floundering institution is a far-cry from its advertising.
Founded in 2018, iBRAIN professes to be a “highly specialized educational opportunity” for students ages five through 21 with severe brain injuries or neurological disorders.
Newman worked at the school as a publicity associate beginning in Aug. 2022. She quit in mid-December after what she describes as a prolonged campaign of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.
The suit’s most concerning allegations come against Dr. Victor Pedro, who she claims falsified his credentials as a “Board Certified Chiropractic Neurologist” made “sexually suggestive” remarks to female staff.
She says Pedro, the school’s Chief Innovation Officer (CIO), pushed an unfounded treatment called Cortical Integrated Therapy (CIT) — which in Newman’s view, used children as “human guinea pigs.”
Although the lawsuit did not describe what CIT entails, Pedro’s website hawks PEDROCIT®, which he claims is a non-invasive system that “accurately pinpoints and identifies the injured or under-performing areas of the brain.”
The lawsuit notes that the United States Department of Health and Human Services rejected Pedro’s application to have CIT covered by Medicare in 2017.
Two years later, The Providence Journal reported that Rhode Island yanked $1 million in state budget funding for the treatment.
Students were also allegedly exposed to bogus treatments by Rodney Robinson, who is now facing federal charges over a years-long con during which he posed as “Dr. Alim Shariff,” a Harvard-educated behavioral psychologist, the suit said.
Newman also cites inappropriate behavior by Patrick Donohue, iBRAIN’s founder and chairman, whom she says fostered a “‘good old boy’ fraternity” environment among staffers.
Neither Pedro, school officials nor Donohue replied to The Post’s request for comments. Robinson could not immediately be reached for comment.
The stressful environment at iBRAIN, Newman alleges, was further exacerbated by Arthur Mielnik, the Deputy Director of Strategic Planning, and Suzanne Wallach, Director of Strategic Planning.
Wallach’s alleged constant pestering after work hours, in particular, left Newman “depressed, stressed and exhausted,” and she was “compelled to seek professional therapeutic assistance.”
Both Mielnik and Wallach are named in the lawsuit, and did not reply to The Post’s request for comments.
After first attempting resign in Nov. 2022, Newman formally tendered her resignation on Dec. 13.
At this point, the lawsuit states, iBRAIN’s administrators sent letters to her parents, her fiancée, and several professional contacts. The letter accused Newman of violating “‘the New York State Child Abuse and Neglect statues,’” as well as spreading “false, inaccurate and unfounded information” about the school.
“Upon information and belief, defendants clear intent in sending these false written accusations against her to her family members and business contacts was to destroy her personal and professional reputation,” the suit reads.
Speaking to The Daily Beast this week, Newman described her experience as “psychological torture.” She did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for a comment.
The lawsuit seeks a jury trial, with damages to be determined in court. When reached by phone, Newman’s lawyer, Kenneth F. McCallion, declined to comment on the case.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/18/nyc-special-needs-school-filthy-run-by-quack-chiropractor-lawsuit/
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Harvard Medical School withdraws from leading ranking system over dean's 'philosophical concerns'
Harvard University Medical School is withdrawing from an annual rankings of top medical schools in the country amid claims it discourages support for low-income students.
Citing 'philosophical' issues with US News & World Report's long-running list, Dean George Daley aired the decision Tuesday in a message to members of the medical school community .
The list ranks the best medical schools in the nation, and is often used by prospective students and parents when determining which colleges to apply to.
Opponents are now calling the yearly compilation 'flawed', alleging it can unfairly influence students' chances when applying for jobs, graduate school, and PHD programs.
Previously, Harvard's medical school was ranked the best in the country in terms of research, and ninth for primary care.
Announcing the school's decision to abstain from sending information to to media company for its tabulations, Dean Daley said he was inspired by recent decisions from Harvard and Yale's law schools to pull out from its list of top law institutions over concerns involving equity.
'Rankings cannot meaningfully reflect the high aspirations for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster in our medical education program,' said Daley, a longtime member of the HMS faculty who assumed deanship of the school in 2017.
The dean cited issues educational leaders have had with the methodology used by US News & World Report for its lists, which had been dominated by Yale and Harvard since the 1980s.
Daley, a recognized leader in stem cell science and cancer biology, argued that the rankings create 'perverse' incentives for institutions to report misleading or inaccurate data to garner a better rating.
The biologist added that instead of aiding those with a financial need, school set policies designed to raise their rankings, thus diverting financial aid only toward high-performing students, and not the ones who may actually need it.
'Ultimately, the suitability of any particular medical school for any given student is too complex, nuanced, and individualized to be served by a rigid ranked list, no matter the methodology,' Daley said.
The U.S. News medical-school ranking relies on peer assessment surveys, with 15 percent of a school's score based on reviews from deans, admissions directors and other academics.
Another 15 percent is based on reviews from residency program directors. Also taken into account are median scores on the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT, and candidates undergraduate grade-point averages.
Research activity and the production of primary-care doctors are also factored in, for each of the two medical school lists.
Daley said that while not intentional, the rankings encourages schools to fudge numbers to earn a better spot, diverting aid from students with need to those with the high test scores in the process.
Instead, Daley insisted that his priority is not to receive a top ranking, but to focus on the 'quality and richness of the educational experience' for students at the Massachusetts medical school, while creating an environment optimal for students' personal growth and 'lifelong learning.'
The school official then pivoted to the recent decisions from the deans from both Yale and Harvard law, commending them as 'bold and courageous'.
Both school caused a stir in November, when they recused themselves from US report's law-school version of the list in November.
Daley said the school's maneuvers - which have since faced criticism - set the blueprint for his decision.
Announcing their intent to stop providing information to US Report to be tapulated, the school's criticized the rankings’ methodology as fundamentally flawed, saying it discourages support for low-income students.
The dean of Yale Law, Heather Gerken, argued that the system incentivizes schools to give aid to those who get high scores rather than for the low-income applicants who need it more.
Gerken said the current list devalues programs aimed at providing aid for low-income students and programs that encourage low-paying public interest jobs.
'The U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed,' Gerken said in a statement. 'They disincentivize programs that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession.
'Its approach not only fails to advance the legal profession, but stands squarely in the way of progress.'
The dean ultimately said the system undermines altruistic efforts to give students opportunities as colleges focus on rankings for prestige.
'In fact, in recent years, we have invested significant energy and capital in important initiatives that make our law school a better place but perversely work to lower our scores,' she said of the university's work.
She also criticized the rankings preference over schools that give scholarships to the students with the best scores, not for those who need the financial aid.
'This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses,' Gerken said.
'At a moment when concerns about economic equity stand at the center of our national dialogue, only two law schools in the country continue to give aid based entirely on need — Harvard and Yale.'
The dean added that graduates appeared to be classified as unemployed in the US News ranking if they took school-funded fellowship for public interest jobs, or if they went on to enroll for higher education.
U.S. News & World Report - which began these lists in the 80s - has since faced criticism in the ensuing months, with several academic institutions, including Harvard Law, cutting ties with the company.
Several other law schools have joined Yale and Harvard - two of the top performing schools in the country - in withdrawing from the rankings.
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19 January, 2023
How wokeness could destroy higher education
“Get woke, go broke.” It’s a phrase people coined to describe the failure of Hollywood’s recent politics-drenched efforts at blockbuster films, from which viewers stayed away in droves. But now it applies to another field: higher education.
College and graduate degrees were comparatively rare before about 1970. People could be quite successful without them, and there was little stigma attached to their absence.
That changed as the baby boomers and the GI Bill hit colleges. By the 1970s, college became an essential ticket to entry in the managerial and professional classes (and even to military promotions). Where higher ed had once been a luxury, it became a necessity to membership in the middle, and especially the upper-middle, class.
Parents struggled to live in districts with “top” public schools so they could get their kids into good colleges. Once admitted, the students often borrowed huge sums (most of which went into the colleges’ pockets) to attend. The goal was a degree from a “prestige” school, which would guarantee a good job out of college or admission to a top law, medical or other professional school and thus a secure position among the haute bourgeoisie.
That system is falling apart. Higher education’s enormous costs, which have grown at a rate exceeding that of most other items in today’s budgets, have become such that even a good job as a doctor or lawyer often isn’t enough to justify them, and hardly any other professional jobs even come close.
As a result, college enrollments are plummeting — nationwide undergraduate enrollment fell by 650,000 in a single year, spring 2021 to 2022. It’s down 14% in the past decade, even as the US population grows.
But there’s a new wrinkle. It’s not just colleges that are “woke,” it’s also employers. And woke employers are pursuing a new strategy that may make colleges go broke faster, as notions of “equity” and “privilege” popular on campus spread to the corporate world.
As The Post reported recently, some employers are asking applicants to leave the colleges they attended off their applications. Instead of the school, they are simply to list the degree. Whether it came from Harvard or Slippery Rock won’t matter anymore because the employer doesn’t want to know. Prestige degrees confer “privilege,” you know, and that’s bad for equity.
Well, of course people know prestige degrees confer privilege. That’s why they pursue them. But now all that studying, all those contrived extracurricular activities, all those anguished nights spent writing a heartrending “personal essay” are for naught. You might as well have gone to a school whose admissions requirement was the ability to exhale warm air. The degree counts the same.
But wait, there’s more. The Gartner consulting firm recently recommended its 15,000 clients, in the name of equity, consider hiring people without degrees at all. The focus on degrees is bad for “underrepresented candidates” because they’re less likely to have attended, or finished, college. Gartner suggests employers instead focus on “assessing candidates solely on their ability to perform in the role,” rather than on their “formal education and experience.”
Far be it from me to criticize hiring people based on their ability to do the job instead of the polish of their résumés, but this is a huge departure from the past, and it spells bad news for the people who’ve been selling the polish. If employees are no longer hired based on credentials, the market for credentials is going to head south.
And there are problems on the other end, too. Why should parents struggle to get their kids into “top” public schools if they don’t need to get them into prestige colleges?
This goes double since some top public schools are embracing “equity,” too. At least seven high schools in tony Fairfax County, Va., turn out not to have told their students they’d won National Merit Scholarship awards. That sort of merit-based recognition is bad for “equity,” they felt, and the announcement might make the students who didn’t win feel bad.
So if working hard in a top high school won’t get you a scholarship to attend a prestige school that won’t get you a fancy job afterward, why bother? Why not start work sooner and develop skills and a track record employers will want?
Why not indeed? I don’t think there’s a happy ending for prestige colleges in this. Maybe pushing “equity” so hard was a mistake.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/16/how-the-wokeness-it-pushes-could-destroy-higher-ed/
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The Critical Race Theory debate is turning parents into unlikely activists
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is among the most divisive doctrines to ever threaten America’s schoolchildren, and it has sparked an unprecedented grassroots uprising of parents whose stories of ideological resistance have been detailed in our new book The Great Parent Revolt.
A multidisciplinary education philosophy that places race at the center of American history and culture, CRT is akin to racial Marxism — with whites viewed as oppressors and non-whites framed as the oppressed. The philosophy is at the center of high-profile intellectual efforts, such as The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project, which claims that slavery and anti-black racism are at the core of the entire American experience. In The Great Parent Revolt, we profile more than a dozen parents, students, and grassroots leaders who have courageously stood up and fought CRT.
One unlikely hero is Gabs Clark, a widowed low-income African-American mother of five children who had been living in a motel in Las Vegas.
Her high school-aged son, William, was in a local charter school which required a course called Sociology of Change. According to Clark, the course included an assignment that asked students “to list your identities, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your religion.”
William, who is mixed race with blonde hair and blue eyes, refused to complete the assignment and was given a failing grade for the class, which kept him from graduating. According to Clark, because of his fair complexion, the class viewed her son as “a dirty filthy oppressor. “
Clark filed a federal lawsuit charging the school with violating William’s First Amendment free speech rights, Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights, and federal anti-discrimination rights for compelling him to complete the race-based assignment. The case has since been settled out of court.
Parents, says Clark, must realize that it is up to them to challenge CRT’s impact on education as she did. “Just because you have these rights,” she said, “if you don’t fight for them, then it’s like you ain’t got them.”
William’s case is no anomaly. We interviewed a California student named Joshua, who asked that his real name not be divulged, who told us shocking stories of the CRT-type exercises he has endured in the classroom.
The Great Parent Revolt
As a seventh grader he had to participate in a so-called “privilege walk.” In this absurd exercise, the entire class formed a line as their teacher read out characteristics of privilege, such as “I am white” or “I am male;” students had to take a step forward if a characteristic applied to them.
Joshua said it felt like a criminal lineup with students “singled out for privileges that they really can’t help or control.”
Those personal details “shouldn’t be the concern of other students in my class and they aren’t entitled to that information,” said Joshua, who is white. He added that students and teachers are “scared about what they say for fear that they may mess up regarding one’s race or pronouns or identities.”
If that sounds like Communist China, then just ask immigrant mom Xi Van Fleet. Now living in Virginia, Van Fleet grew up in China during Mao Zedong’s dreaded Cultural Revolution, which resulted in millions of deaths. She recalls Mao’s Red Guards, who were mostly middle and high school-aged students, identifying supposed anti-revolutionaries and parading them into town and organizing public trials.
“In China, we were taught at a very young age to just shut up,” says Van Fleet, who sees similarities between today’s hyper-racialized climate and Mao-era China..
“Everything that’s going on here happened in China during the Cultural Revolution,” she told us, which is why CRT “should have no place in our schools.”
CRT, she says, will result in “the total control of the population by a few on top.”
This type of control is on display in Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School, the state’s top academic school, which is located in Fairfax County.
Asra Nomani, an immigrant mom from India whose father marched with Mahatma Gandhi, has been a key parent leader protesting against the school’s change in admissions policy that de-emphasizes grades and test scores in favor of subjective factors like student “lived” experiences and limiting the number of students admitted from Asian-heavy schools. The aim, she says, “is to keep out too many Asian-American students.”
Nomani blames CRT, “which praises or blames members of a particular race solely because they happen to be that race.” Supporters of the new admissions policy derisively labeled Asian parents as White-adjacent, but Nomani said, “we were unapologetic.”
Nomani helped start a coalition of Thomas Jefferson parents that is suing to overturn the school’s admissions policy. Their efforts also resulted in Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares investigating the school for possible violations of state law.
We also talked with Lia Rensin, a California mom who is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Rensin is fighting what she describes as a CRT-influenced version of ethnic studies, often dubbed “liberated ethnic studies,” which formed the basis of a draft ethnic studies model curriculum proposed by California education officials. That draft also included anti-semitic elements such as a song lyric demonizing Jewish control of the media.
A huge grassroots outcry from groups such as Rensin’s own Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies forced California officials to pull the extreme draft curriculum and approve a more moderate ethnic studies model curriculum.
“The resistance,” Rensin says, “has to come from people who are aware of what’s going on, who push back and say…you’re not supposed to be indoctrinating my kids.”
The Pledge of Allegiance says that we are one nation indivisible. As I learned while researching our new book, parents such as these are true American heroes leading the fight to ensure we remain a land of liberty and justice for all.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/14/the-crt-debate-is-turning-parents-into-unlikely-activists/
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Catholic Schools Sue Michigan Over Civil Rights Reinterpretation
Catholic schools are suing Michigan after the Great Lake State’s highest court ruled last year that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected under the state’s civil rights law — even at religious institutions.
Two separate suits have been filed in the Western District of Michigan by Catholic institutions, with major players in religious liberties litigation at the helms of their cases.
Sacred Heart Academy, a classical Catholic school, filed suit in late December under the auspices of the Alliance Defending Freedom. Meanwhile, St. Joseph Catholic Church, a parish that operates a school 20 miles north of Lansing, will be represented by the Becket Fund in its concurrent suit.
The twin suits come after the state’s supreme court expanded the definition of sex in the state’s anti-discrimination ordinance, the Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act.
The 1977 statute prohibits discrimination in the state on the basis of “religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, familial status, or marital status” in a variety of services, including “educational facilities.” The legislation does not provide an exemption for religious institutions.
In July 2022, the Michigan supreme court ruled that “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation necessarily involves discrimination because of sex,” thereby violating the civil rights law.
Both schools raise concerns that the teaching and observance of Catholic doctrine could be curbed by the new ruling.
The suits include a litany of current practices at the school that accord with Catholic faith but could be deemed illegal under the expanded definition of sexually based discrimination — including curricular materials, gender-separated activities, and a commitment to traditional understandings of gender and marriage.
“Michigan’s new understanding of ‘sex’ discrimination deems it unlawful for St. Joseph’s to follow the 2,000-year-old teachings of the Catholic Church, including its teaching that marriage is a lifelong commitment between one man and one woman, that sexual relations are limited to marriage, and that human beings are created as either male or female,” the parish’s counsel at Becket wrote in its brief.
The Grand Rapids-based Sacred Heart Academy says the school “cannot embrace a vision of marriage and human sexuality that is inconsistent with Catholic doctrine because that undermines Sacred Heart’s vision of human flourishing.”
The suits additionally highlight how such an anti-discrimination regime would compel the institutions to change their hiring practices, potentially violating the legal principle of “ministerial exception.”
The legal doctrine, affirmed by the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, grants religious institutions autonomy in employment practices “without government intrusion” — exempting them from federal anti-discrimination law.
Conflicts between civil rights protections and religious liberties have been growing since LGBT individuals emerged as a protected class, challenging the autonomy of both believers and their institutions.
Liberals and conservatives are in an ongoing struggle to define discrimination — or at least to prioritize which comes first. LGBT activists argue that religious institutions should be prohibited from discriminating against homosexuality and transgender ideology.
Conservatives, however, say that such arguments discriminate against religion, and religious institutions — and believers — should not be compelled to violate their core tenets by anti-discrimination laws.
Currently, the Supreme Court is deciding a case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, that hinges on a similar principle with regard to Colorado civil rights law. In the case, a Christian web designer, Lorie Smith, wants to advertise her work on wedding websites. Because of her religious convictions, however, Ms. Smith does not create wedding materials for same-sex marriages, which is a violation of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law as currently understood.
In Michigan, the court’s expansion of sexually based discrimination comes after decades of failed legislative attempts to include LGBT individuals in the Elliot-Larsen Act. Amendments to this effect have never passed the state legislature. The Republican co-sponsor of the original anti-discrimination bill in the Michigan state house, Melvin Larsen, is himself a former Catholic school principal.
https://www.nysun.com/article/catholic-schools-sue-michigan-over-civil-rights-reinterpretation
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18 January, 2023
Northern Illinois University plans woke staff workshops on ‘White Fatigue’, ‘Anti-racism’, ‘De-colonization in the classroom’
Northern Illinois University (NIU) is set to host a number of sessions for faculty and instructors on topics such as decolonizing teaching and learning and understanding and rethinking resistance for equity in the classroom.
The Faculty of Academy of Cultural Competence and Equity (FACCE) will focus on access, equity, and inclusion.
Participants will be able to join either a monthly workshop series during the fall 2022 and spring 2023 semesters or a weeklong summer institute in summer 2023.
NIU faculty experts will speak on how to make classrooms and teaching more inclusive.
The first session for the 2023 academic year will be held on January 27 and will explore forms of resistance that can arise in classrooms, such as white guilt, white fragility and white fatigue.
Workshop titles include The Act of Decolonizing: Examining Classroom Spaces and Curricula Through a Lens of Justice, Anti-Racism: Tracing The Roots, Persistence, and Countering of a Racial Hierarchy, and Decolonizing Gender and Sexuality In Our Teaching and Learning Contexts.
Another workshop concentrates on 'Working Through And With Our Implicit Biases'.
The University said in a statement: 'Northern Illinois University’s Faculty Academy for Cultural Competence and Equity is a natural outgrowth of our commitment to equity and inclusion.
'The academy, which is voluntary, provides interested faculty with the opportunity to develop cultural competencies and hone their teaching practices so that they can connect with students from all backgrounds.
'Doing so improves the learning experience for all NIU students and prepares them to succeed on campus and beyond.'
The NIU webpage for the academy curriculum includes outlined learning objectives.
Those who partake will gain a better understanding of the 'historical and societal context of issues related to social injustice, inequity, and oppression'.
They will also 'undergo critical self-reflection of internalized messaging and biases' and 'apply anti-racism and decolonialization as frameworks for pedagogical practice and curriculum development'.
A Certificate of Completion for the monthly FACCE series is handed out to participants who attend seven of the Fall and Spring semester sessions, or successfully complete the 2023 Summer Academy.
At least 236 colleges or universities have some type of compulsory student training of coursework on ideas related to critical race theory (CRT), according to a database with information from more than 500 institutions.
Among those are 149 institutions that have some form of mandatory staff or faculty training, with 138 mandating school-wide curricular requirements.
In December, the University of Oregon's student government made a proposal that would require anyone getting a bachelor's degree to take a course in Critical Race Theory.
The school, which serves 18,604 undergrads and receives a $912.5billion endowment from the taxpayers, requires courses that teach inequality or global perspectives, but this would be the first requirement directly related to CRT.
Isaiah Boyd, a political science major and the president of the Associated Students of the University of Oregon, laid out the plan at the university board of trustees meeting.
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Britain: Schools told they can use volunteers to stay open as teachers vote for 7 days of strike action
Teachers across England and Wales have voted to strike over the next two months amid fears walkouts will lead to a return to online lessons and Covid-style classes.
Nine out of 10 members of the National Education Union (NEU) voted for the action and the union passed the 50 per cent ballot turnout required by law.
The NEU announced there would be seven days of walkouts between now and mid-March, but said any individual school will be affected only on four days.
The Department for Education (DfE) has issued updated guidance for schools. The guidance calls on headteachers to “take all reasonable steps to keep the school open for as many pupils as possible”.
While the decision to open, restrict attendance or close academy schools lies with the academy trust, the DfE said it is usually delegated to the principal, and the decision for maintained schools rests with the headteacher.
The latest guidance stated: “It is best practice for headteachers to consult governors, parents and the local authority, academy trust or diocesan representative (where appropriate) before deciding whether to close.”
Headteachers are entitled to ask staff whether they intend to strike, the DfE added.
The first day of strikes will be on February 1, when more than 23,000 schools in England and Wales are expected to be affected, the NEU said.
The date is the same day as a “national day of action” that will see rallies across the country and a strike by 100,000 civil servants.
The union is also to target the Budget, on March 15, in a bid to send a message to ministers. Teachers will also hold a rally in Westminster that day, it said.
As well as strike action the union asked all its members to write to their MP - and visit their surgeries - to make the case for an inflation-proof pay rise.
Downing Street had called on the unions to call off any strike. No 10 said that teachers should not strike and inflict "substantial damage" to children's education, especially after so many missed out on schooling during the pandemic.
Earlier, Mary Bousted, the leader of the NEU predicted her members would vote to strike, but said it was "highly unlikely" action would take place during exams.
Making the announcement, Ms Bousted and her colleague Kevin Courtney said: “We have continually raised our concerns with successive education secretaries about teacher and support staff pay, and its funding in schools and colleges, but instead of seeking to resolve the issue they have sat on their hands.
“It is disappointing that the Government prefers to talk about yet more draconian anti-strike legislation, rather than work with us to address the causes of strike action.”
Ahead of the strike ballot results, the Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "We would continue to call on teachers not to strike given we know what substantial damage was caused to children's education during the pandemic and it's certainly not something we want to see repeated.
"We would hope they would continue to discuss with us their concerns rather than withdraw education from children."
Last week, a ballot of members of members of another union, the NASUWT teachers' union, failed to reach the required 50 per cent turnout threshold, although nine in 10 of those who did vote backed strikes.
Teachers are the latest public sector workers to vote to strike, as the government battles a wave of industrial action which has swept the country for months.
Members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) in England will this week walk off wards on Wednesday and Thursday. But the union has warned that if progress is not made in negotiations by the end of January the next set of strikes will include all eligible members in England for the first time.
Mr Sunak has instead that the pay claims of unions are unaffordable and that they will tick to wage rises recommended by pay review bodies.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/teachers-england-vote-wales-strike-b2263201.html ?
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Racist "equity"
Over the past decade, some of the most destructive and un-American policies pushed on our children in state-run schools have been justified in the insidious name of equity.
Voters, taxpayers and suburban soccer moms who aren't paying attention would be forgiven for happily going along with the equity agenda because they erroneously mistook the intentions of left-wing social engineers as striving for equality.
However, equity and equality couldn't be more different. Of course, this is why the left employs the term equity. The word is meant to confuse and mislead. This is the only way socialists ever get their agendas passed in this country.
For example, Americans instinctively do not want government-run health care but are tricked into supporting ideas like Medicare For All or half measures described as the Affordable Care Act. The left knows what they're doing when they market and brand a bad idea that most Americans are repelled by.
The push for equity in our school systems falls into this deceptive and destructive category.
Equity, as it is employed in our state-run schools, is little more than social engineering to force the desired outcome of an elite, socialist class at the expense of hardworking, innocent children.
The latest example of equity in public education may seem trivial and even benign on its face, but when you peel it back to its core, you realize that these school administrators refusing to award excellence is the closest our nation has actually come to a full-blown communist regime.
Seventeen-year-old children who made all the right choices in school, worked their tails off, studied as their classmates played Xbox and partied, and focused on achieving at the highest academic level so that they could have a better opportunity to attend a superior college or university so that they could have a leg up on a fulfilling and prosperous career, were purposely overlooked and ignored when all of their hard work received the dividend of a national merit recognition.
Fairfax County Public Schools, a wealthy suburb of Washington, DC, likes to spend most of its public relations money on bragging to the rest of the country about its superior school systems. Of course, it's not school administrators with multiple doctorates in education who helped the school system achieve such academic accolades. It was the children, along with their parents.
But the school board and school system, now dominated by left-wing ideologues, have made it a policy to not acknowledge the very children who make them look so good with their test scores and grade point averages; lest the children who do not receive academic awards feel bad.
These national merit awards aid greatly in the college application process and help students win grants and scholarships so they can afford the astronomical cost of higher education. But the people who run our finest school systems in this country took it upon themselves to deny these children the recognition they work so hard to earn because it would be inequitable to single out anyone for their academic achievement.
There is something basic and fundamentally human about wanting the appropriate recognition and rewards for the hard work we engage in.
If we are shortchanged by our employer for a hard day's work, we recoil in indignant anger.
If our favorite team is robbed of victory because of a blind umpire or a feckless, lazy referee, we scream in righteous fury.
And if our child, after years of studying and sacrifice, is denied their moment of recognition by a professional educator so as to spare the feelings of the child's peers, we are properly upset on our child's behalf.
The same schools that hold endless pep rallies for their football teams choose to ignore the kids who get great grades and test scores... it's almost like these left-wing ideologues hold different values than we do.
There's also a level of unfathomable arrogance at play here.
Imagine the hubris required to inject oneself into this basic and fundamental work/reward process. Imagine knowing better for another person's child and rejecting this fundamental moment of recognition, all in the name of equity.
It takes real chutzpah to believe that your values are so superior to the parents who've raised this over-achieving child. To stand between a child's years of hard work and diligent study and their deserved, meritorious reward because you know what's best in the long run for all the children involved.
But, throughout history, the left has never lacked an arrogant, all-knowing superiority of what's best for humanity, no matter who gets hurt in the process of building Utopia. This latest example of the arrogance of equity falls right in place with Stalin's 5-Year Plan and Mao's Great Leap Forward.
Remember that the next time your local school board tries to pedal equity your way. Equity is not equality; equity is Marxism.
https://townhall.com/columnists/larryoconnor/2023/01/17/the-arrogance-of-equity-n2618379
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17 January, 2023
Tokyo police begin anti-groping campaign ahead of school entrance exams (!)
Police in Tokyo have launched a campaign to prevent students from being groped on trains ahead of Japan’s school entrance exam season, beginning with college entrance exams taking place this weekend.
Tweets have circulated during the past few years, stating that the annual two-day unified university entrance exam represents "opportune days for groping,” when victims would be less willing to resist or report incidents to the police out of concern of being late for the test.
On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Police Department and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s transportation bureau, operator of the Toei subway lines, gathered at Shinjuku subway station to hand out flyers stating that “Groping is a crime.”
The campaign will run through March 10 during the annual school entrance exam season.
In the meantime, the two organizations will beef up security at stations, put up new posters and broadcast awareness messaging throughout stations and trains, as well as on social media.
According to the police department, groping incidents are common during the rush-hour period of 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. To avoid becoming a victim, it suggests that passengers avoid overly crowded train cars and use women-only carriages where available.
The department also suggests groping victims request help from other passengers using its Digi Police app, which includes silent and audible functions designed to request for help via smartphone. Anyone who believes they’ve witnessed a groping incident can also use the app to silently ask a victim if they need help.
But most importantly, the cooperation and help of all surrounding passengers is crucial when incidents occur, said Satomi Tokuda, an official at the metropolitan government’s transportation bureau.
While the bureau tallies reports of groping incidents, Tokuda added that it’s difficult to say whether cases increase during exam season. Regardless, the metropolitan government is taking action as a means of precaution.
“We’re implementing this campaign in order to build an environment in which all passengers can ride the Toei subway with peace of mind,” Tokuda said.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/01/13/national/antigroping-campaign-trains-exams
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Glenn Youngkin Has One Word for Fairfax Schools' Woke Equity Agenda
Virginia's Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin hasn't shied away from the culture war playing out in some of the Commonwealth's biggest school districts after numerous scandals came to light showing significant failures and attempted cover-ups in Fairfax and Loudoun County public schools.
The latest educational malpractice to come to light was the district's failure to notify its students of their national merit recognition and, as the governor and Virginia's Attorney General Jason Miyares launch greater oversight of how Fairfax County schools are being run, Youngkin is not holding back in his criticism.
"It impacts their ability to apply to college for scholarships, and in this idea of a 'golden ticket' as it is called was withheld from them — and it seems to have been withheld from them for the purpose of not wanting to make people feel bad who didn't achieve it," Youngkin said of Fairfax schools' latest scandal in an interview with Northern Virginia ABC affiliate WJLA.
"All of a sudden, we see it spreading around to the rest of Fairfax County," Youngkin explained.
"The reality is that we have a superintendent in Fairfax schools who has explicitly stated that her top objective is equal outcomes for all students, regardless of the price," Youngkin continued. "Now we know the price includes paying $450,000 to a liberal consultant to come in and teach the administrators in Fairfax County how to do this. What it appears happened is that principals in schools decided that they were going to systematically withhold accolades and a path to college admission and scholarships from high-performing students," the governor added of the effect of Fairfax schools' woke and expensive decision to hold students back in the name of "equity."
Attorney General Miyares explained the added potential cost to students of Fairfax schools' woke agenda. "Only three percent of high school seniors get recognized," he said. "It’s a huge issue."
"We actually know of some schools that give a full four-year scholarship if you are one of those who get recognized a national merit award commendation,” Miyares continued. "How you pay for college can be as stressful as getting into college. The idea that sometimes these are $90,000 to $100,000-plus benefits of scholarships that were never going to be told that these students are eligible to apply for — that's wrong," Miyares noted.
So in addition to the $450K spent by the district to apparently indoctrinate administrators in the woke ways of "equity," the students from whom their national merit recognition was withheld could have lost out on tens of thousands of dollars in merit-based financial aid. But that's not all.
According to WJLA's story, Fairfax County schools also threw $20,000 away for a 60-minute Zoom session for teachers to hear from an author and Loudoun County schools have been spending taxpayer funds to have Equity Collaborative train its staff. In light of this, the ABC affiliate asked Youngkin if such school district expenses constitute a misuse of public funds.
"I think this is part of our investigation," was Youngkin's reply. "They have a maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs," he added of Fairfax County schools' woke agenda. "At the heart of the American dream is excelling, is advancing, is stretching and recognizing that we have students that have different capabilities," Youngkin continued. "Some students have the ability to perform at one level, others need more help, and we have to allow students to run as fast as they can to dream the biggest dreams they can possibly dream and then go get them."
Hear, hear.
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Anything but Christianity! (Or mum and dad)
Australia: News that ‘Christmas and Easter will not be celebrated in some childcare centres under new inclusion guidelines’ is, quite extraordinary.
While the silly season is all but done, the decision by the Community Child Care Association is in full swing and would be laughable if it wasn’t so ridiculous.
It has been a slow train coming. But it has now arrived.
While it seeks to sideline Christmas, the same Association requests child care centres support other cultural or religious celebrations such as Ramadan, Diwali – and yes – Pride, which has become a religion of its own, it would seem.
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and is a holy time of prayer and fasting. Diwali is a five-day festival of light celebrated by Indians and the faiths of Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism.
Pride – well – that’s celebrated every day of the week and ensconced into every aspect of modern society, including favourable employment laws and social inclusion policies.
The Executive Director of Community Child Care Association of Victoria, Julie Price, is quoted in the Herald Sun on December 21, 2022, as saying: ‘If you have families who don’t celebrate Christmas, then maybe focusing on other celebrations is more inclusive.’
How is it that Ramadan is inclusive while Christmas is not? Or Diwali? The Association appears to be inferring that it is okay to celebrate any religious festival except those relating to Christianity.
Easter and Christmas are celebrations of the Christian faith, the faith that has born this modern nation and swaddled it into a first-world country. The cancel culture proponents clearly see Western Civilisation and Christianity as obstacles to their revisionist agenda.
One can only assume then, that staff at these childcare centres will not be taking a ‘Christmas’ break or an ‘Easter’ long weekend. It stands to reason that they will also not accept the double and triple penalty pay arrangements for working these Christian-based holidays, or Christmas gifts from parents.
Similarly, the Australia Day holiday should be disregarded by staff. One wonders why anyone would want to come to this apparently disrespectful country.
The inclusivity gurus at Community Child Care Association go further.
Not satisfied with dismantling and displacing the centrepiece cultural and religious celebrations of our nation, they also want to disrupt the core family structure.
They want communications to parents to be addressed ‘to families’, ‘guardians’, or ‘adults’. It’s in with generic terms – out with mum, dad, mothers, and fathers. In the hustle to disenfranchise the family, the clock must surely be ticking for the terms ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ and ‘grandmothers’ and ‘grandfathers’
The Community Child Care Association wants Father’s and Mother’s Days to be Special Person’s days.
It is all in the name of protecting or embracing the rights and circumstances of those children who may have only one parent, queer parents, non-English speaking parents, or no parents at all.
But even one parent is either a mother or a father. Queer parents are still mums and dads, or mums and mums, or dads and dads. Even a dad one day and a mother the next if their fluidity desires are valid.
And as for parents having to declare a pronoun for their child – is there no end to this nonsense?
In truth, these contortions of titles, language, and gender have nothing to do with the children.
At age two, three, four, or five, children don’t (or should not have to) even think about these things: there are holes to be dug, buckets to fill, and kites to fly. This is the stuff of a carefree childhood and of robust beginnings to life.
Childhoods should not be squashed by the unintelligible babble of adults about non-gendered or non-Christian motivations.
Yet the inversion of reality is in full flight: the noisy few control the mob while the socially silent become the playthings of a political agenda.
The fight against the family structure ignores the role that evolution has forged through the millennia, placing the family unit as a key component of survival and success.
During the Victorian state election, Premier Andrews promised many things, including the construction of 50 government kindergartens. Will these also conform to the anti-Christian and contorted name agenda criteria of the cancel culture Woke brigade?
Such diktats are done in the name of inclusivity. But it is exclusivity that they champion. They divide, not unite. They point out difference instead of saying ‘we’re all in this together’.
Struggle is not a story for one community alone to be used for the purchase of social benefits and manipulation, even the indoctrination of others.
The bulk of Australians are fair. They are caring. They don’t look for division. They value individuals without reference to Woke titles.
The slow woke train has definitely pulled up at the station, all huffy and puffy and horns tooting.
My suggestion is you hop off, change platforms, and catch the next one back home – if we’re allowed to call it that.
Perhaps a communal dwelling site would be a better term!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/anything-but-christianity-or-mum-and-dad/
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16 January, 2023
Want to Teach in Minnesota? Christians Need Not Apply
Scott Hogenson
I grew up in Minnesota when it was a very nice, normal place; a time when the unofficial state motto was “30 Below Keeps The Riff-Raff Out,” and the meanest thing about it was that lady who scowled at Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat into the air on TV.
But in a couple years, Christians will not be allowed to work as public school teachers. Neither will Muslims or Jews. The reason for this religious bigotry is new teacher licensing rules that will require teachers to personally affirm transgender ideology.
Biology, genetics, endocrinology, physiology and anatomy have shown that, with the exception of a minuscule portion of the human race, people are born either male or female. But a growing cadre of science-denying ideologues believes people can just decide what sex they are.
I’m something of a libertarian in this regard, but there are limits. If some misguided soul wants to present himself or herself as something they're not, that’s their business. But when somebody demands we believe and affirm these delusions, under penalty of law, that’s a problem.
It's not just me. This is also a problem for Muslims who believe in the teachings of the Quran which instructs believers that in Allah’s creation, he “made of him two kinds, male and female.”
If you think this is some obscure passage, you may recall how Muslim parents in Dearborn, Michigan, last fall vocally protested against local schools that wanted to indoctrinate their children with transgender ideology. The parents were right to do so.
Transgender ideology not only violates the faith of Muslims, it violates that of Bible-believing Jews and Christians as well. The book of Genesis is pretty clear about this, stating in the very first chapter, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.”
But if you happen to be one of the roughly 5 billion people on Earth who subscribe to one of these faiths, Minnesota doesn’t want you to teach public school.
Beginning in 2025, the rules of the state Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board will require that,
“A teacher ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/ emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment” .
People who believe in the God of the Bible or the God of the Quran will be forced to affirm an ideology that is contrary to their faith. This is not a recommendation; it’s a requirement for employment.
This is inconsistent with Minnesota statutes, which plainly state, “It is the public policy of this state to secure for persons in this state, freedom from discrimination: (1) in employment because of race, color, creed, religion…”
The Minnesota Human Rights Act further says it’s an unfair labor practice to deny employment to someone, “because of race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, familial status, membership or activity in a local commission, disability, sexual orientation, or age.”
The law does provide an exception, “based on a bona fide occupational qualification,” which makes some sense. After all, it’s entirely reasonable for a synagogue to want to hire Jews. A Christian or Muslim school would probably want to hire Christians and Muslims as well. But apparently, the teacher licensing authority in Minnesota has decided that believing God created us man and woman is somehow disqualifying.
This is more than the latest skirmish in the ongoing culture wars. How is this not a violation of black-letter law? It smacks of illegal discrimination based on religion. Imagine the howls if the state required teachers to profess the faith of an established religion. I wouldn’t like that either.
Some might argue that this isn’t religious discrimination. People can still work as teachers as long as they recant their faith. This tactic has been commonly used by authoritarians across time and around the globe. It is religious persecution on par with that of North Korea and the old Soviet Union.
Will Minnesotans allow this to happen? According to Pew Research, more than 75 percent of Minnesotans are either Christian, Muslim or Jewish. That’s a big number. I would love to see 4 million people living in the Land of 10,000 Lakes stand up and demand their government not discriminate against them. It might just make the news.
But it doesn’t take 4 million people to change this bigoted, Marxist policy. I think three people could get the job done. One Muslim, one Jew and one Christian should engage counsel and sue the state, forcing it to end this religious persecution. If they open a legal defense fund, I’m happy to send a check.
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Public School Enrollment Drops By 1.4 Million Students -- Posing Financial Challenges For Big Cities
Enrollment in U.S. public schools saw a one-year drop of 1.4 million in the fall of 2020, hitting a 10-year low of 49.4 million students.
The sudden decline followed annual growth averaging 3 percent for more than a decade.
Although enrollment rebounded slightly in 2021, it remains at its lowest level since 2010 prompting some districts to consider school closures and other cost-saving measures.
New York City’s public school enrollment decreased to 903,000 in 2022 according to the website Gothamist, down some 10 percent over three years.
“We have a hemorrhaging of families that are leaving the city, leaving the school system,” Mayor Eric Adams said during an announcement in June 2022. Adams feared the loss of students would trigger the loss of federal funding to New York City schools.
Enrollment in Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD), the nation’s second-largest, has fallen from 737,000 students to some 430,000 over the past 20 years, and officials have said they expect another 28 percent decrease by 2030.
“We will have to navigate through difficult but important conversations and decisions in order not only to plan for the future but also to ensure that, during a very unstable and unsustainable set of practices and processes, we come out the other end on solid footing without compromising the viability of our school district,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told the LAUSD board in May according to EdSource.
Enrollment in Chicago Public Schools has fallen by 82,000 over nine years to around 302,000 students. The Chicago Board of Education voted to close 50 schools in 2013.
State law now prohibits further closures or consolidations until 2025. Twelve percent of Chicago’s public schools enroll fewer than 200 students.
Indianapolis Public Schools have just over 28,000 students with the capacity to handle some 46,000, leaving 60 percent of classroom space unused.
“I think people should know that everything is on the table,” Superintendent Aleesia Johnson to the nonprofit news outlet WFYI in March.
“But that doesn’t mean only closure is on the table. That means we could consider closures. We could consider consolidations; we could consider new buildings—which I think there’s certainly evidence that we need some new buildings; we could consider renovating.”
In November, the Indianapolis Public Schools board approved a reorganization plan that included closing six school buildings and changing the grade configuration of others.
Losses May Be Closer to 2 Million
The shift away from public schools may be even larger than total enrollment numbers show. Those figures include new enrollees, obscuring the actual number of students leaving public schools.
A 2022 report by Education Next indicates that between 2020 and 2022 enrollment in non-charter public schools declined from 81 percent of total school enrollment to 76.5 percent, while enrollment in public charter schools increased from 5 to 7.2 percent, private school enrollment rose from 8 to 9.7 percent, and homeschooling increased from 6 to 6.6 percent.
That indicates nearly 2 million students left traditional public schools for other educational options.
A study by the CATO Institute showed similar findings, with more private schools gaining enrollment in 2020-201.
Public schools are generally funded on a per-student basis making declining enrollment a significant financial challenge.
School districts have grappled with the problem in various ways.
Despite declining enrollment, New York City school officials have pledged not to reduce spending this year. “As we recover from the disruptions of the pandemic, we will ensure every student has the resources they need to thrive,” David Banks, Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, said in a statement. “This investment will boost our schools that face continued enrollment challenges caused by the pandemic.”
Denver Public Schools anticipates a funding shortfall of some $9 million by the end of the school year that will be covered with reserve funds, according to the district’s financial report.
One factor was lower-than-expected enrollment. School officials project an additional 3.6 percent decrease in enrollment over the next four years.
Minneapolis Public Schools have the capacity to serve 40,000 students but have enrolled just 28,000. Projections show that the district will run out of money by 2025 without some intervention, and school closures are considered likely according to StarTribune.
A year ago Oakland Unified School District closed seven schools due to a looming $50 million budget deficit and a decline in student enrollment.
During the pandemic, many states adopted hold-harmless policies that prevented schools from losing funding due to lower enrollment.
Also, public schools also received $190 billion in federal funding over the past two years through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Plan, created under the federal CARES Act in 2020 and added to by the American Rescue Plan in 2021.
When those provisions run out, the reality of declining enrollment may have an even greater financial impact.
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Australia: Push for more male teachers fails to increase numbers
False accusations against male teachers by female students have been badly handled in the past and few potential male teachers would be unaware of that. Being a male teacher is simply risky. Feminist demands to "believe the woman" are a part of that problem.
And it's a pity. My son had male mathematics teachers in his private High School and it inspired him to major in mathematics for his B.Sc.
Indemnifying male teachers against all the costs of false accusations might help
There has been no increase in the number of male teachers in public school classrooms, despite a push by the NSW Department of Education targeting them for recruitment into the profession more than four years ago.
Education experts said boys and girls benefit from more male teachers in schools because they were less likely to have stereotypical views about traditional gender roles, but recruiting men into a female-dominated field where teacher pay tops out after about 10 years is difficult.
The proportion of males employed in the public school system remained stagnant over the past four years, falling slightly from 23 per cent in 2018 to 22 per cent last year, according to the latest Department of Education data.
Numbers were steady despite the department’s diversity and inclusion strategy 2018-2022 which included an “obligation to address the gender imbalance in our teaching population, attracting and retaining more male teachers”.
The department’s latest move to draw more men into the profession was to use male teachers in social media advertisements and deploy them at careers fairs.
“High school careers advisers are also encouraged to promote work experience placements in government schools to male students,” a department spokesman said.
Data from the Universities Admissions Centre shows just 210 graduating year 12 schoolboys put primary school teaching as their first preference for university study this year.
That figure, which does not include students who applied directly to universities, is a 24 per cent decrease on the year before and is the lowest number recorded in the past seven years.
Schools across all sectors are grappling with chronic teacher shortages, with the federal government projecting a shortage of more than 4000 secondary school teachers by 2025. A national plan to address the shortage was released last month.
Independent researcher Dr Kevin McGrath, who has investigated the gender composition of the teaching workforce in Australia, said the pandemic and a workforce shortage had made it harder to attract and retain male teachers.
“Men benefit from a broad range of occupational choice in Australia which provides opportunities to avoid particular types of work and to seek out employment that provides more flexibility,” McGrath said.
Salaries for NSW teachers start at $73,737, and hit a maximum of $117,060 if they are accredited as a “highly accomplished” or “lead” teacher. Pay jumps to $126,528 if they take on more responsibilities and become an assistant principal.
“Male teachers face a greater opportunity cost for choosing a female-dominated profession, compounded by potential negative perceptions or ridicule for doing work performed predominantly by women,” McGrath said.
Research indicated that in schools with fewer male teachers, students tended to hold more stereotypical views of gender than in schools where male and female teachers were equally represented, he said.
University of Tasmania school of education lecturer Dr Vaughan Cruickshank said male teachers worked in a predominantly female environment and could struggle to find common interests with their female peers. He also said salary, low professional status, as well as fear and uncertainty about physical contact put men off becoming teachers.
A breakdown of the proportion of male teachers in primary and secondary schools for 2022 is not yet available, but last year men constituted 18 per cent of primary school teachers and 40 per cent of the teaching workforce in high school.
Private schools fare no better when it comes to attracting men, where male teachers made up 20 per cent of primary school teachers and 40 per cent of secondary school teachers.
“The percentage of male teachers in NSW independent schools has not changed significantly in recent years,” Association of Independent Schools of NSW chief executive Margery Evans said.
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15 January, 2023
Idled NYC educators do nothing but sign in remotely, even from Europe
Scores of New York City educators removed from public schools and put in “rubber rooms” — the infamous spaces where those under investigation or awaiting disciplinary trials are held — have been sent home to report remotely, The Post has learned.
The suspended staffers, while fully paid, are required to do nothing but sign in and out by email and “stay in the NYC area.”
Most comply with the rule, but a few defiantly jetted to Germany and the West Indies, a high school teacher awaiting a disciplinary hearing told The Post.
“No one knows where you are. You could be in Alaska or Hawaii on a vacation – they don’t know,” the teacher said. “You can sign in at 8 am, roll over and go back to sleep,” she added.
The tenured educators can run errands, go shopping, or meet friends for lunch while on the city payroll.
“None of the teachers I know jeopardize their jobs by traveling long distances,” said Betsy Combier, a paralegal who writes the “NYC Rubber Room Reporter” blog.
At least 200 suspended staffers are currently stationed at home, Combier estimates.
With base teacher salaries ranging from $61,070 to $128,657 a year, the taxpayer cost for these stay-at-home educators could range from $12 million to $25 million.
“What a massive waste of money. They’re sitting in ‘rubber homes’ doing nothing,” Combier said.
The exiled educators included 92 DOE staffers, including teachers and assistant principals accused last year of submitting fake COVID-19 vaccine cards. But a Brooklyn judge on Dec. 30 ordered the DOE to return staffers who sued to their former jobs until they get hearings. The DOE is in the process of sending them back. A criminal investigation is ongoing.
The DOE’s rubber room move reflects another shift in the notorious holding pens.
Ex-Mayor Bloomberg agreed in 2010 to close several massive “reassignment centers” where at least 600 teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence did nothing but read, nap, knit, and kibitz. One Queens teacher ran a lucrative real-estate business on the side. Some not terminated after sexual misconduct are permanently sidelined
Since then, the DOE has scattered smaller rubber rooms across the city.
Rubber roomers stayed home during the COVID shutdown, but returned to buildings in September 2021.
Two days before the start of this school year on Sept. 6, the DOE sent an email saying they would be “temporarily reporting remotely.” No reason was given, but one teacher was told “no central office space is available.”
“As you must be able to report in person when directed, you are required to be in the NYC area on scheduled days of work.” the missive states. “Any work assigned to you will be provided through your DOE email.”
Three teachers told The Post the DOE hasn’t told them to report in person since or given them any work – and barred them from remote workshops or training sessions.
“All I do is sign in at 8 am and sign out at 2:50 pm. No assignments, no nothing,” said another high-school teacher awaiting a decision in his administrative trial after five years as a rubber roomer. He’s fighting charges he made inappropriate comments to a female student.
Last year, the teacher went to a Queens office building where all he did was distribute mail and sometimes Xerox papers while collecting his nearly $136,000 salary. “I’m happy to go home. I didn’t want to be in that building and have to do the mail,” he said.
Another veteran teacher was accused of making an insensitive comment to a student spent last year in a DOE basement on Rockaway Boulevard with up to 15 other rubber roomers.
“Absolutely no work,” he said. “We chatted. We played board games. We did whatever we could not to kill each other.”
https://nypost.com/2023/01/14/idled-nyc-educators-do-nothing-but-sign-in-remotely-even-from-europe/
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‘Shameful Form of Indoctrination’: SPLC Promotes Teaching Kids About Black Lives Matter on MLK Day—in First Grade
The Southern Poverty Law Center‘s education arm, Learning for Justice, promoted a former teacher’s article about using Martin Luther King Jr. Day to teach first graders about the Black Lives Matter movement and the “need for continued protest and action in the face of ongoing systemic injustice.”
Critics slammed the lesson as “child abuse” and a “shameful form of indoctrination.”
Learning for Justice shared the January 2018 article, “From MLK to #BlackLivesMatter: A Throughline for Young Students,” on Twitter on Wednesday. In the article, Bret Turner (then a first grade teacher at Head-Royce School in Oakland, California) wrote that Martin Luther King Jr. Day represents “a great opportunity” to connect King’s work with “the work of today’s civil rights activists.”
“First-graders are excited to study through a lens of fairness; it is largely what drives them in their daily interactions,” Turner wrote. “If they can understand why Dr. King marched, then they can certainly wrap their minds around the need for continued protest and action in the face of ongoing systemic injustice.”
Turner emphasized the word “continued” by placing it in italics.
Turner recalled in the article: “Last year around MLK Day, we compared the guiding principles of Black Lives Matter to our school’s mission and, even closer to home, our classroom charter. We found much in common, particularly BLM’s focus on diversity, empathy and loving engagement, and its overt ties to feminism and gender identity issues.”
The first-grade teacher added that his young students are “capable of understanding why BLM is necessary through a historical lens.”
He recounted: “In my class, we’ve made our own BLM posters, explored the Oakland roots of BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, read relevant children’s literature, and observed and discussed the related work being done by our middle and high schoolers and the Black Student Union.”
Turner didn’t mention Patrice Cullors, another founder of Black Lives Matter, who infamously cashed in on activism opposing “systemic racism.”
He recalled a student’s response to a leading question:
To the guiding question ‘Why is a movement still needed today?’ one child flatly answered: ‘Because people with black and brown skin are still treated badly.’ Another remarked that ‘things are better now, but we’ve only ever had one black president and now he’s gone.’
Turner’s article quoted questions from other students, including, “Why do the police hurt Black people?” “Why is skin color so important?” and “Who decided that white people matter more than other people?”
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday celebrating the slain civil rights leader, falls on the third Monday of January, Jan. 16 this year.
Carol Swain, a retired professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University and the author of books on race in America, called this lesson a “shameful form of indoctrination.”
“My impression is that a 6-year-old is not prepared to understand anything about ‘systemic injustice’ or systemic racism,” Swain, who is black and holds a doctorate, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Thursday.
She added that exposing young children “to controversial materials or agendas, adult agendas, it robs them of their childhood. It’s a shameful form of indoctrination of children who are too young to process the materials and information being presented to them.”
Swain also noted that the lesson would affect children differently based on the color of their skin.
“Black children will start interpreting every experience they have through the lens of racism,” she predicted. “For white children, I think that it will cause them to be embarrassed, to be ashamed, and to have feelings of guilt.”
The former professor also argued that “teaching Black Lives Matter in the same context with Dr. King is confusing” because “the parts of Dr. King that we mostly focus on have to do with the fact that he wanted to bring people together, dreaming of a time when we would get beyond race.”
Meanwhile, she argued, “Black Lives Matter is all about race,” and the movement “is rooted in Marxism, in conflict theory.” (BLM co-founder Garza has described herself as a Marxist.)
“Why would anybody teach something that is rooted in conflict theory to first graders?” Swain asked.
Chloe Carmichael, a clinical psychologist and political independent with a Ph.D., told The Daily Signal that first graders “probably wouldn’t have the critical thinking skills or knowledge of our social systems to consider this issue in a meaningful way beyond simply agreeing with their teacher. That’s why some people regard it as indoctrination.”
“One problem is that a leading question, ‘Why is a movement still needed today?’ is used, rather than, ‘is a movement still needed today?'” Carmichael argued. “The phrasing of the question would be very non-inclusive of students who believed that the host of civil rights and affirmative action laws we have today are adequate to navigate cases of injustice; this is especially relevant because those laws were the hard-won fruit of the work done by MLK and the other early protesters.”
Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, told The Daily Signal: “What Learning for Justice does on a routine basis is to promote hatred—which is ironic, since fighting hatred is ostensibly the SPLC’s main job, except we all know it’s the opposite.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
“BLM is not a struggle for civil rights or for social justice,” Gonzalez noted. “It hides behind these slogans to promote anti-capitalism (read socialism), the destruction of the family unit, and the abolition of our legal system. What would follow from that is chaos, which is the goal of BLM after all, since it seeks ‘systemic’ transformation as all Marxists have done since Marx himself. To manipulate young minors in this manner is child abuse.”
The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
The Head-Royce School would not comment on Turner’s class or whether the school still teaches Black Lives Matter to first graders on MLK Day, but a spokeswoman expressed the school’s commitment to diversity and fairness.
“The Head-Royce School’s mission is rooted in core values of scholarship, diversity and citizenship,” Sarah Holliman, the spokeswoman, told The Daily Signal in an email. “We care deeply about the academic preparation and social-emotional well-being of our students and teach them to be curious and responsible citizens. Our teachers are passionate educators who help students build a strong academic foundation and help them understand concepts such as fairness and belonging through developmentally appropriate content, lessons and exercises.”
My book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center” lays out the history of the SPLC and how its program to monitor the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, Klanwatch, morphed into Hatewatch, a project that brands mainstream conservative and Christian groups as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with Klan chapters.
In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council’s headquarters in the nation’s capital, entering the lobby with a semiautomatic pistol and then shooting and wounding a guard. The man told the FBI that he found the conservative organization on the SPLC’s “hate map” and intended to kill everyone in the building. The man later pleaded guilty to committing an act of terror and received a 25-year prison sentence. The SPLC condemned the attack, but has kept the Family Research Council on the “hate map” ever since.
After the SPLC fired its cofounder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former staffer claimed that the SPLC’s accusations of “hate” are a “cynical fundraising scam” aimed at “bilking northern liberals.”
The SPLC launched its education program, Teaching Tolerance, in 1991. In 2020, the Teaching Tolerance website claimed that “our community includes more than 500,000 educators who read our magazine, screen our films, visit our website, participate in Mix It Up at Lunch Day, use our curriculum or participate in our social media community.”
The education project was rebranded as “Learning for Justice” in February 2021, and the website no longer mentions how many educators read the magazine or engage with the content.
Among other things, Learning for Justice has published a learning plan on critical race theory for grades 6 to 8. The theory encourages students to deconstruct modern American society on the premise that its institutions are “systematically racist,” despite the efforts of King and others that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and legal prohibitions against racial discrimination.
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Australia: Are private school fees worth it?
The discussion below is fairly reasonable but omits a lot and is too generalized.
What it omits are the SOCIAL as distinct from the educational advantages of a private schooling. Pupils tend to form lasting friendships from their school days and the friends from private school are often VERY advantageous.
And while private schooling may not greatly help every pupil it can be very advantageous as an escape hatch from a bad government school. The latter point is mentioned but needs emphasis
The experience of overseas travel, a new family car or 12 months’ tuition at a top Sydney school?
Private school fees breaking through the $45,000 a year barrier, as reported by this masthead last week, will leave some parents weighing up what is the tangible value of an elite education if it means trade-offs in other areas.
University of New England lecturer in education Sally Larsen said the difference in academic performance of students at public and private schools was negligible.
“There’s no difference in primary school, and it’s just a segregation effect in high school, where kids from more wealthy families are being funnelled into private schools,” she said.
Glenn Fahey, director of the education program at the Centre for Independent Studies, said there was little overall value added from a non-government education once students’ backgrounds, including socioeconomic status, were accounted for.
“What the data tells us is that students’ backgrounds, largely parental education and employment status, make a big difference,” he said.
But Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research associate professor Greg Marks said there were some tangible benefits in terms of ATAR scores for students who attend a private school.
“There is an incremental benefit, beyond that of socioeconomic status, of going to a private school, to an independent school, followed by Catholic schools, followed by government schools,” he said. “Top ATAR students often come from private schools, and they tend to get into university more, which makes a big difference to employment and lifetime income.”
Marks’ research in Victoria found that students who went to a private school achieved an ATAR rank five or six points higher than those who went to a public school.
He attributed this discrepancy to standards of teaching, discipline and a subculture of strong academic performance.
“I think in private schools, they teach at a higher standard and pitch the lessons at a higher standard so that kids are expected to reach them and therefore do,” he said. “There’s probably more of a subculture of doing well at school, and if kids are causing problems, they can get expelled.”
Marks said while the data was sparse, private school students tended to experience less unemployment, earn higher incomes and hold higher status jobs. But he also said it largely stemmed from the benefits of getting a university degree, and that paying a premium for a private school education would not benefit students of different abilities in the same way.
“Ability is quite stable, so if your kid is a top performer or isn’t going to do very well, sending them to a private school won’t make much of a difference and probably will not be worth $45,000,” he said. “For kids in the middle to top of the class, it might give them a bit of a boost to their ATAR to go to a private or selective school, which would make a difference getting into a prestigious course at university.”
While there are some international studies that show private schools can also benefit students in terms of a “peer effect”, Larsen said that impact was probably “smaller than people think,” and that the cost of private school wasn’t worth its benefits.
“The school sector that kids go into is one factor among many that help to explain where they get academically and socially,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think the benefits justify the costs.”
Marks said that eschewing a private school education and investing the money elsewhere could be better for some people, but rejected the idea of spending it on things such as overseas trips.
“There’s a reasonable argument to put the money that you would have used in the bank and get a return on that,” he said. “But taking them on trips overseas to give them ‘life training’ doesn’t make sense.”
In a Centre for Independent Studies survey of more than 1000 parents, those who chose a government school were more likely to indicate that they would have made a different choice (43 per cent) if it weren’t for the cost than parents who chose a Catholic school (30 per cent).
Redfern resident Maria Vlezko saw an immediate improvement when she moved her daughter from a public school to the International Grammar School in Glebe two years ago.
“I was highly dissatisfied with her old school,” she said. “Kids weren’t receiving as much attention in class, they got teased by other children if they did well and my daughter became very uninterested in school.”
Vlezko said the extracurricular offerings and multicultural component of Anastasia’s school were important factors in her decision to move towards private schooling.
“There’s music, drama, chess, coding, and there are kids from lots of different backgrounds, which aligns with my values and how I want my kids to grow up,” she said. “It’s an investment in our children’s future, and we only have one chance.”
Despite cost of living pressures, Vlezko said the fees of nearly $30,000 a year were worth it for 11-year-old Anastasia.
“There was massive progress straight away,” she said. “Teachers were easy to reach, they identified Anastasia’s strengths and areas for improvement straight away, and she made lots of friends with the same interests who help each other with lessons. It’s worth the sacrifice for us.”
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/are-private-school-fees-worth-it-20230111-p5cbuc.html
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13 January, 2023
Why Biden’s backdoor student-debt bailout is a hot mess
What’s a president to do when courts keep blocking his plans for being flagrantly unconstitutional? Try to quietly backdoor the same agenda in through another channel, of course.
At least, that’s the approach President Joe Biden is taking with student loans. His plan to “cancel” (read: transfer to taxpayers) up to $20,000 in student debt per graduate is tied up in court because it clearly exceeds his constitutional power to do so without Congress passing legislation. So his Department of Education just announced an income-driven repayment plan that would effectively “cancel” huge sums of student debt, at taxpayer expense, via another mechanism.
The idea behind an income-driven repayment system is that you pay back what you can based on your income and eventually the rest gets forgiven. A much less sweeping program, Revised Pay As You Earn, has been in place since 2015.
The White House’s new version is far more generous: It would require borrowers to pay at most just 5% of their discretionary income in monthly payments — and many borrowers wouldn’t have to pay anything at all. Then, in many cases, if you make those small (or in some cases nonexistent) payments for 10 years, taxpayers absorb the rest of your loan.
It’s kind of complicated, but in practice, it means many borrowers will get thousands and thousands of dollars in debt paid off by the taxpayer instead of having to repay what they owe. You don’t have to take my word for it. Policy scholar Adam Looney of the left-leaning Brookings Institution reports that while it will vary, the typical borrower will only have to pay back 50 cents for every dollar he owes — getting half his student debt “canceled” over time.
In a rare moment of candor, Biden Education Department officials called this plan a “student loan safety net.” That’s exactly what it is: a new welfare program, this time helping a relatively well-off demographic in college and professional graduates, paid for by us working taxpayers.
And it wouldn’t be cheap! The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the plan, combined with Biden’s previous proposals, will cost $600 billion — or more — over a decade. That averages out to more than $4,000 per federal income taxpayer.
But there are far more problems just the cost. Ironically, this plan would actually make the student debt problem worse. How?
Well, it’ll make borrowing money via government loans to pay for college an even more attractive option than it already is because future borrowers will know they’re only going to have to repay a fraction of what they borrow. Unlike Biden’s “cancellation” tied up in court, this isn’t a supposedly one-time deal: It changes student-loan regulations for good.
There’s more money available in loans each year than is actually taken out. So we’ll almost certainly see students taking out tens of billions more in student loans every year if this plan goes into effect — not fixing the problem but instead only blowing more air into the student-loan bubble.
Oh, and don’t be surprised if colleges jack up tuition prices to even more absurdly high levels in response.
The Biden plan would also seriously warp student incentives. It effectively rewards lower-earning graduates and punishes high earners, as you’re going to get more forgiveness if your income is lower. As a result, the most-subsidized degrees would include, per Brookings, music, fine arts, drama and cosmetology. (Not exactly degrees in hot demand, if starting salaries are anything to go by.)
The least-subsidized majors? Engineering, computer science and business. You know, all those areas with high starting salaries because they’re in most need in our economy right now.
That’s right: Biden’s policy would distort market incentives and actively push students toward less productive, lower-paying degrees by offering them more in taxpayer bailouts if they go down those paths. Isn’t that, well, the opposite of what we should be trying to do?
Of course, Biden’s move makes more sense when you consider it as a political maneuver. It will effectively accomplish his goal of funneling tax dollars to a constituency — young, highly educated people — that overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic Party (and possibly saved Dems in the midterms). But shrewd politics don’t change the fact it’s a foolish policy with awful implications — and a raw deal for taxpayers.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/12/why-bidens-backdoor-student-debt-bailout-is-a-hot-mess/
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot says political outreach email to teachers was a ‘mistake,’ blames staffer
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Thursday blamed a staffer working on her reelection campaign for sending out the widely condemned email asking teachers to incentivize students to volunteer for her with class credit, calling it a “mistake” after an investigation was launched into the matter.
The “Windy City” mayor on Thursday denounced the recruiting initiative, placing the blame on her campaign staffer for sending the email to the official work inboxes of several Chicago Public Schools teachers a day earlier. According to WTTW News, the email reportedly sent by Lightfoot’s deputy campaign manager Megan Crane, encouraged teachers to offer students “credit” for volunteering through the campaign’s “externship program.”
“There was absolutely no nefarious intent on the part of the staff person and there simply was no coercion, I’ve seen that question bubble up. There was no coercion, no intent to do that by any means by this young woman and no city resources were used,” Lightfoot said in a press conference Thursday.
Lightfoot said she was unaware of the email until earlier Thursday when she was asked about it by a reporter.
“I’ll repeat again, the outreach to the CPS teachers via their emails was a mistake, should not have happened, and is not going to happen again,” she reiterated.
Lightfoot made the comment after the inspector general for the Chicago Public Schools reportedly launched an investigation to determine whether the campaign violated any district policies by soliciting volunteers for political campaigning using official email addresses made available to Lightfoot in her position as mayor.
The email reportedly said the campaign was looking to recruit “enthusiastic, curious and hard-working young people to help her win this spring. Students also had to have contributed 12 hours per week to the Lightfoot campaign to qualify for “class credit,” WTTW first reported.
The Chicago Teachers Union reportedly slammed the move as a “shake down,” and said it was “unethical and wrong on so many levels.”
Lightfoot’s mayoral challengers also denounced the email, FOX 32 CHICAGO reported, before her campaign reportedly rescinded the offer and said it would “cease contact” with CPS employees “out of an abundance of caution.”
“All [Lightfoot campaign] staff have been reminded about the solid wall that must exist between campaign and official activities and that contacts with any city of Chicago or other sister agency employees, including CPS employees, even through publicly available sources, is off limits. Period,” the campaign told the outlet.
Earlier Thursday, the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called on Lightfoot to “renounce” the “inappropriately coercive” email, saying it raised First Amendment concerns.
“The Lightfoot campaign’s email to Chicago Public School teachers urging them to offer extra credit to students as an incentive to volunteer on the Mayor’s re-election campaign is inappropriately coercive and raises First Amendment concerns,” the nonprofit organization said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has made clear that government officials cannot use their office or power to coerce participation or to punish for lack of participation in political campaigns.”
The embattled mayor faces nine candidates vying to unseat her next month as she eyes a second term. Election Day is scheduled for Feb. 28.
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New Jersey wants to be the state of disinformation and indoctrinate its students
The state of New Jersey has launched an initiative to require that all K-12 students be taught "media literacy," because the government must enlist teachers to fight so-called misinformation.
Let’s take an imaginary look at what the first day of school would look like.
Welcome, class, to "Basic Student News Literacy," It appears in your schedules as "BS News Lit." Our wonderful governor, his Eminence Gov. Phil Murphy, ordained that we must instruct all of you in how to think.
We will be telling you in great detail about the biggest news stories of the past several years – Russiagate, the stolen election … in Georgia, the dangers of unapproved social media and the 1619 Project.
First up, turn in your phones. My assistant Igor will be collecting them.
Why do we need your phones? We are going to remove any unapproved apps. Conservative news? Gone. Twitter. Nope. You have to use Mastodon now, where people think the left, I mean right way. Mastodon knows how to shut down crazy talk about two genders or claims about Hunter Biden.
Let’s see what else … Christian apps, can’t have them. But Jenny, your Church of Satan app is just fine. Alyce, I see you have a pro-life app. You have to stay after class for special re-education run by our friends at Planned Parenthood.
The digital era gives us access to endless information. And that’s bad. We will be adding a few approved apps to your phones. That’s where you should be getting your information. Pretty standard stuff, The Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC and the American Federation of Teachers. No CNN, it’s too rightwing. That’s enough for your impressionable minds.
But you like Twitter? I told you, it’s banned. There is no big conspiracy of government trying to work with big tech to censor speech. Anything they tried to restrict was bad for you. The government only has your best interests at heart – especially when it takes away your rights. And if the legacy media don’t tell you about it, it’s for your own good.
You’ll note that this course lasts all year and has an extensive reading list. There are all the best books about the evil orange man whose name we dare not mention – Bob Woodward, Maggie Haberman and Mary Trump, as well as Howard Zinn’s "A People’s History of the United States," "Gender Queer" and "Das Kapital." All the greats.
No, Maurice, we don’t need any pro-America books. The best books are those that tell you what you know already. I’m watching you, young man. I think what we've got here is failure to communicate.
Now, let’s begin. This class is designed to help you cut through the noise of day-to-day news. The first, and most-important way to do that is to be sure not to read, watch or listen to any wrong think.
Today, we’re going to start off with truly great journalism – Pulitzer Prize winners.
I’m quoting our friends at Pulitzer, the ones who gave the New York Times and its star reporter Walter Duranty a well-deserved Pulitzer for its coverage of the alleged Russian genocide of Ukrainians in the 1930s. Pulitzer gave the Times and The Washington Post an award for coverage "of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration."
Ah, Russia, Russia, Russia. … What’s that, Kofi, the Times corporate site admits that it "has been publicly acknowledging" Duranty’s "failures" and the paper itself calls the genocide "one of the great atrocities of 20th-century Europe."
Then there’s Trump, you say, and the media didn’t actually ever prove connections between him and Russia? Even the Post admitted, "Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters."
Well, you are using bad facts – even if they come from approved sites like the Post and Times. In this institution, to get along, you go along.
Let’s go along.
We are going to discuss why you can’t trust right-wing news outlets and Republican politicians. They don’t just lie, they deny the results of elections. You can’t trust anyone who does that. Yes, Mia, the top Democrat in the House did say Trump had a "so-called election victory," and Hillary Clinton did claim the 2016 election was "stolen," but they meant well. That’s what’s important. It’s not the facts, it’s the feels.
And speaking of politicians who mean well, next month we’re going to have a special guest, Georgia Gov. Stacey Abrams. Of course, Li, the machines said she lost, but voting was suppressed, and who really can trust a machine?
I know, I know, more people did vote than before. But they voted the wrong way. So the correct votes were suppressed. I may have to set up a meeting with your birthing parents.
Next class, we are going to discuss trustworthy alternative news sources like "The Tonight Show," "The View" and top Hollywood celebrities. James Woods? That’s it, Andrew, you’re going to the principal’s office.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/new-jersey-wants-state-disinformation-indoctrinate-its-students
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12 January, 2023
College degrees are becoming obsolete
Colleges are dropping the SAT. Law schools are dropping the LSAT. And now, workplaces are dropping bachelor degrees—and experts think that should become the norm this year.
2023 will center on skills-based hiring rather than degree requirements—at least at successful companies, predicts research advisory and consulting firm Gartner in its list of top nine workplace predictions for the year. Companies must expand and diversify their talent pipelines to stay afloat, Gartner explains, thanks to their struggle to meet talent needs through more traditional recruiting strategies and employees’ increasingly nonlinear career paths.
“To fill critical roles in 2023, organizations will need to become more comfortable assessing candidates solely on their ability to perform in the role, rather than their credentials and prior experience,” Gartner wrote.
That might look like reaching out directly to candidates from nontraditional backgrounds who may not have applied otherwise, or “relaxing” degree or past-experience requirements.
Some companies are already well on their way there. Fortune 500 companies including Google, IBM, and Apple, have eschewed their longstanding degree requirements. It shows: In November 2022, just 41% of U.S.-based job postings required a bachelor’s degree, per an analysis from think tank Burning Glass Institute. That’s down from 46% in early 2019.
Way back in 2016, IBM coined the term “new collar jobs” to describe roles that require specific skills rather than a specific degree. Between 2011 and 2021, the company’s job listings that required a four-year degree dropped from 95% to under 50%. Ginni Rometty, IBM’s CEO at the time, told Fortune CEO Alan Murray that non-degree-holding hires performed just as well as those with Ph.D.s.
Gartner isn’t alone in its prediction. The next era of work will prioritize skills over pedigree, LinkedIn’s VP Aneesh Raman and Jobs for the Future’s VP Cat Ward wrote in a commentary piece for Fortune this week.
Over 70% of job listings require a college degree, which only 50% of Americans have. Last March, LinkedIn launched a suite of tools that emphasize candidates’ skills during the application process. The announcement billed a skills-first approach as the “key to navigating the next phase of the Great Reshuffle.”
"What's good for the goose..."
In such uncertain times, when employees and bosses constantly go toe-to-toe, strong, adaptive leaders will be deftly pivoting, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky told the Harvard Business Review in November.
Years ago, hiring managers didn’t have a better way of assessing talent than via job history, pedigree, or who they knew, Roslansky said. “But when the labor market is moving much quicker, we really need to figure out something to focus on, and that alternative, flexible, accessible path is really going to be based on skills.”
Workers might need to pivot too—especially with regard to highly sought-after fully remote jobs. If roles could feasibly be done by anyone around the globe, the odds are good a company will eventually outsource them overseas, where they can be filled at a much lower cost, assistant professor of work and organization studies at MIT Sloan School of Management Anna Stansbury told Fortune. In other words, your remote job could go to someone else. All the more reason for workers to keep a close eye on opportunities to upskill.
But turning away from pedigree and toward skills is ultimately more equitable, which is good for both job seekers and business. After General Motors removed degree requirements from many listings, Telva McGruder, its chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, told Fortune’s Phil Wahba, degrees aren’t “necessarily the be-all, end-all indicator of someone’s potential.”
Degrees are out of reach for many Americans and shouldn’t be mandatory to gain economic security, Google’s global affairs president, Kent Walker, wrote in 2020. “We need new, accessible job-training solutions—from enhanced vocational programs to online education—to help America recover and rebuild.”
Given the economic outlook in 2023, for most companies, recovering and rebuilding may not be a bad idea.
https://fortune.com/2023/01/09/college-degrees-declining-value-job-requirements/
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How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test
BY JAY BHATTACHARYA
We live in an age when a high public health bureaucrat can, without irony, announce to the world that if you criticize him, you are not simply criticizing a man. You are criticizing “the science” itself. The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.
The analogy goes further, unfortunately. The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did. Top universities, like Stanford, where I have been both student and professor since 1986, are supposed to protect against such orthodoxies, creating a safe space for scientists to think and to test their ideas. Sadly, Stanford has failed in this crucial aspect of its mission, as I can attest from personal experience.
I should note here that my Stanford roots go way back. I earned two degrees in economics there in 1990. In the ’90s, I earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. in economics. I’ve been a fully tenured professor at Stanford’s world-renowned medical school for nearly 15 years, happily teaching and researching many topics, including infectious disease epidemiology and health policy. If you had asked me in March 2020 whether Stanford had an academic freedom problem in medicine or the sciences, I would have scoffed at the idea. Stanford’s motto (in German) is “the winds of freedom blow,” and I would have told you at the time that Stanford lives up to that motto. I was naive then, but not now.
Academic freedom matters most in the edge cases when a faculty member or student is pursuing an idea that others at the university find inconvenient or objectionable. If Stanford cannot protect academic freedom in these cases, it cannot protect academic freedom at all.
To justify this depressing claim, I would like to relate the story of my experience during the pandemic regarding a prominent policy proposal I co-authored called the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). I could relate many additional incidents that illustrate Stanford’s stunning failure to protect academic freedom, but this one suffices to make my point.
On Oct. 4, 2020, along with two other eminent epidemiologists, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, I wrote the GBD. The declaration is a one-page document that proposed a very different way to manage the COVID-19 pandemic than had been used up to that date. The lockdown-focused strategy that much of the world followed mimicked the approach that Chinese authorities adopted in January 2020. The extended lockdowns—by which I mean public policies designed to keep people physically separate from one another to avoid spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus—were a sharp deviation from Western management of previous respiratory virus pandemics. The old pandemic plans prioritized minimizing disruption to normal social functioning, protecting vulnerable groups, and rapidly developing treatments and vaccines.
The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did.
Even by October 2020, it was clear that the Chinese-inspired lockdowns had done tremendous harm to the physical and psychological well-being of vast populations, especially children, the poor, and the working class. Closed schools consigned a generation of children worldwide to live shorter, less healthy lives. In July 2020, the Centers for Disease Control released an estimate that 1 in 4 young adults in the United States had seriously considered suicide during the previous month. The U.N. estimated that an additional 130 million people would be thrown into dire food insecurity—starvation—by the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns. The primary beneficiaries of the lockdown—if there were in fact any beneficiaries of these drastic anti-social measures—were among a narrow class of well-off people who could work from home via Zoom without risk of losing their jobs.
It was amply clear by October 2020 that the lockdown policy adopted by many Western governments, with the exception of a few holdouts like Sweden, had failed to stop the spread of COVID. It was in fact too late to adopt a policy goal of eradicating the virus. We did not have the technological means to achieve this goal, then or now. By the fall of 2020, it was abundantly clear that COVID-19 was here to stay and that many future waves would occur.
Governments had imposed lockdowns on the premise that there was nearly unanimous scientific consensus in support of them. Yet an extraordinary policy like a lockdown requires, or should require, an extraordinary scientific justification. Only near unanimity among scientists, backed by solid empirical data, suffices.
Like Gupta and Kulldorf, I knew that such unanimity did not exist. Many scientists worldwide had contacted us to tell us about their qualms with the lockdowns—their destructiveness and the poor evidence of their effectiveness. Many epidemiologists and health policy scholars favored an alternative approach, though many were scared to say so. It seemed clear to the three of us that as the next inevitable wave appeared, there was a risk that the lockdowns might return, and that scientific evidence against such steps would be ignored and smothered, at tremendous social cost.
We wrote the GBD to tell the public that there was no scientific unanimity about the lockdown. Instead, the GBD proposed a focused strategy to protect the elderly and other vulnerable populations. There is more than a thousandfold difference in mortality risk from COVID-19 infection between the old and the young, with healthy children at negligible risk of dying. The humane thing is to devote resources and ingenuity to protect the most vulnerable. The GBD and its accompanying FAQ provided many suggestions about how to do that and invited local public health communities, which know best the varied local living circumstances of the vulnerable, to devise local solutions. At the same time, the GBD advocated lifting lockdowns and opening schools to alleviate harms to children. We put the GBD on the internet, and invited other members of the public to sign it.
The GBD was published on Oct, 4, 2020. Almost immediately, tens of thousands of scientists, epidemiologists, and physicians signed the document, including many from top universities. Simultaneously, people started sending us translations of the GBD—ultimately into 40 languages—and to date, nearly a million people have signed from almost every country on Earth.
The plan received the attention of the American press, at first curious and fair, but soon thereafter hostile and tendentious. I started getting calls from reporters, including outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post, asking me why I wanted to “let the virus rip” through the population, even though that was the very opposite of what we were proposing, and questioning my credentials and motives.
It was at first quite perplexing to be the target of what turned out to be a well-organized, government-sponsored campaign of smears and suppression of scientific argument and evidence. I had taken no money for writing the declaration. Yet press outlets somehow turned Gupta, Kulldorf, and me into tools of a nefarious plot to destroy the world by spreading “disinformation” that would cause mass death. I started receiving death threats and racist hate mail.
About a year later, after historian Phil Magness made a FOIA request, I learned a part of the story of how the U.S. government-sponsored propaganda campaign against the GBD came into being. Four days after we wrote the GBD, Francis Collins, the geneticist and lab scientist who was then the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, the immunologist and lab scientist who is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In the email, Collins called Martin, Sunetra, and me “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a devastating public takedown. The attacks on the three of us, aided by the cooperation of supposedly private social media platforms like Twitter, were launched shortly after Collins sent that email.
But this is not an article about the ethics of social media companies whose profits depend to a large extent on the friendliness of government regulators and whose employees may see themselves as partisan political activists. This is a critique of our best universities, which are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge—yet which turn out to be no different than government propagandists and private corporations in their self-seeking, amoral behavior.
Collins and Fauci sit atop tens of billions of dollars that the NIH uses to fund the work of nearly every biomedical scientist of note in the United States. Stanford University receives hundreds of millions of dollars of funding from the NIH, without which researchers would not have the resources to conduct many worthwhile experiments and studies. NIH funding also confers prestige and status within the scientific community. At Stanford, it is very difficult for a biomedical researcher in her department to earn tenure without landing a major NIH grant. The attack by Collins and Fauci sent a clear signal to other scientists that the GBD was a heretical document.
Among Stanford faculty, the reaction to GBD was mixed. Some members, including Nobel Prize winner Michael Leavitt, signed on enthusiastically. I received encouragement from many others throughout the university. Junior medical school faculty wrote telling me they secretly supported the GBD but were reticent to sign officially for fear of reprisal from their department heads and Stanford administrators. Others were hostile. One faculty member and former friend wrote that he was defriending me on Facebook, perhaps the mildest form of retaliation I received during the pandemic.
There is a distinction in philosophy between negative and positive rights. A negative right is a constraint placed on the authorities not to take action that would violate that right. For example, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from enacting a law limiting the free exercise of religion or speech. A positive right entails an obligation on authorities to actively promote some desirable state of the world, for instance, the right to protection in the face of dire threats to bodily harm.
The same distinction pertains to academic freedom at a university. Stanford did not fire me or break my tenure for writing the GBD. Therefore, it met the bare minimum standard of negative academic freedom. But Stanford failed to meet the higher standard of positive academic freedom, which would have required it to promote an environment where faculty members engage with each other respectfully despite fierce disagreement.
The most egregious violation of academic freedom was an implicit decision by the university to deplatform me. Though I have given dozens of talks in seminars at Stanford over the past decades, in December 2020, my department chair blocked an attempt to organize a seminar where I would publicly present the ideas of the GBD. Stanford’s former president, John Hennessey, tried to set up a discussion between me and others on COVID policy, but he was unable to, owing to the absence of support from the university.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/stanford-failed-academic-freedom-test
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Australia: Education Department pushing for number of schools teaching First Nations languages to exceed 100
What a waste of effort! What does it achieve? Very undesirable if it derails students from learning a European language such as German, French and Italian. That would cut them off from vast cultural heritage. I have gained hugely from my studies of German and Italian
The Department of Education is pushing to increase the number of Queensland state schools teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and more than a hundred state schools are primed to jump on-board in the coming years.
According to the most recent department data, current as of February 2022, only five state schools teach First Nations languages – Mabel Park State High School in Logan, Mossman State School in the Far North, and Tagai State College’s three campuses in the Torres Strait.
However, in early 2022, the Department of Education launched a dedicated program to help schools with extra resourcing in co-designing and delivering First Nations languages.
“In 2022, 44 state schools have reported that they are working collaboratively with Language Owners to teach 26 different Aboriginal language or Torres Strait Islander language in their schools,” a Department of Education spokesman said.
“Demand for teaching an Aboriginal language or Torres Strait Islander language is increasing. Currently, a further 113 state schools are in the early stages of developing a program to teach an Aboriginal language or Torres Strait Islander language.”
University of Queensland Associate Professor Marnee Shay has done extensive research on Indigenous education in her role as an academic. She is an Aboriginal woman with connections to Wagiman Country in the Northern Territory and Indigenous communities in South East Queensland.
“Many Indigenous leaders and education advocates have been championing the inclusion of Indigenous language and culture in the curriculum for many years now. It has been slow, but we finally see change and commitment at a policy level,” she said.
“As an Aboriginal person who was denied the opportunity to speak my language, I think it is excellent that the Department has made a policy commitment to increasing the number of schools teaching First Nations languages.
“Having Indigenous language as part of the curriculum at their school is identity-affirming for Indigenous students. “For non-indigenous students, it is an opportunity to learn not only the language, but the history and culture of the people who have been here for tens of thousands of years.”
However, Professor Shay said there are not enough First Nations language teachers. “We have Elders and community people that might have the knowledge and skills to teach language, but this is not always recognised by the system, which often requires people to hold university degrees,” she said.
“Indigenous people must be involved in the teaching of our own languages. You can’t teach language without culture – Indigenous people are the best people to be teaching this.
“Expanding the number [of schools teaching First Nations languages] is important, but not at the expense of process and cultural protocol – which can take time.”
All state schools are required to teach a language from at least Years 5 to 8. The four dominant languages in state schools are Japanese, French, Chinese and German.
The Department of Education spokesman said schools looking to teach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are advised to gain permission from local community elders first, and work closely with them in designing the program.
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11 January, 2023
Glenn Youngkin Keeps Getting More Popular, As Virginians Want Him to Keep Addressing Education
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) has increasingly found himself in the news, especially recently when it comes to calling on Attorney General Jason Miyares, also a Republican to use his authority to investigate Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) for reportedly withholding merit scholarship notifications until it was too late. Youngkin is once more in the news, as a majority of Virginians support his involvement and want to see him take action on the education issue, among others. This is according to a recently-released poll conducted last month by the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The poll found that 53 percent of Virginia adults want to see Youngkin intervene on education, as well as inflation and crime when it comes to the 2023 General Assembly session, which will convene next Wednesday, January 11.
Another takeaway from the poll is that a majority of Virginians also overall approve of Youngkin's performance, and it's not even close. Fifty-two percent approve, while just 32 percent disapprove. This is an improvement from the governor's numbers from that same poll in July 2022, when 49 percent of Virginians approved of Youngkin and 38 percent disapproved.
The poll also contains other particularly noteworthy points when it comes to the major issue of education. This is specially in that there is agreement among black respondents and Republicans, which are demographics often not grouped together:
More than 4 in 10 Virginians believe school-aged students in their community are still falling behind their peers in other states in reading and math proficiency. Over 35% of respondents believe school-aged children are on track or ahead in reading and math proficiency compared to their peers in other states. Political affiliation, race and age had the strongest impact on views of educational performance. Republicans, African Americans and those 35-54 years old believe children are falling behind in math and reading, while Democrats, Hispanics and those 18-34 years old think that children are ahead or on track in math and reading proficiency compared to peers in other states.
The poll was conducted December 3-16, 2022 with 807 adult Virginia respondents. The margin of error is at 6.02 percentage points.
Even before taking office, Youngkin made it an issue on the campaign trail to prioritize education, including when it comes to raising standards. Exit polls from the November 2021 gubernatorial election, during which the governor beat former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-VA), showed that Youngkin handily won on the education issue. On his first day in office, January 15, 2022, Youngkin also issued several executive orders on education.
Sadly, those concerned about education and that school-aged students in the commonwealth are falling behind have reason to be. A press release from the governor's office from late last October pointed to how data from the Nation's Report Card (NAEP) revealed that Virginia saw the largest declines in reading and math in the nation.
"Since 2017, fourth graders in Virginia suffered the largest declines in reading and math in the nation on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). For the first time in 30 years, Virginia’s 4th grade students have fallen below the national average in reading and are barely above the national average in math. The average scores of the Commonwealth's eighth graders also dropped, with statistically significant declines in both reading and math," the Youngkin press release summarized.
Also included was a statement from the governor.
"The NAEP results are another loud wake-up call: our nation’s children have experienced catastrophic learning loss, and Virginia’s students are among the hardest hit, he said. "Every parent in Virginia is now acutely aware that when my predecessors lowered educational standards, those lowered expectations were met. Virginia’s children bear the brunt of these misguided decisions. These actions were compounded by keeping children out of school for extended and unnecessary periods. Virginia may lose a generation of children—particularly among our most in need. We are redoubling our Commitment to Virginians, to prevent us from losing a generation, with additional steps to ensure that all children in Virginia have the tools and support structure to get back on track."
The press release reminded that the governor's office released "Our Commitment to Virginia's Children," which emphasizes action items such as:
Action 1: Raise the Floor and the Ceiling
Action 2: Empower Parents with Emergency Support for Students
Action 3: Launch Tutoring Partnerships
Action 4: Hold Ourselves and Our Schools Accountable
Action 5: Strengthen Virginia’s Teacher Pipeline
Action 6: Provide Parents, Students, and Teachers with Actionable Information
Action 7: Challenge School Divisions to Spend Nearly $2 Billion in Remaining Federal K-12 Funds on Learning Recovery
Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, also a Republican, has likewise made education and improving standards a high priority. A statement of hers doubled down on the demand to raise standards as well as to involve parents.
"Our children are depending on us to make good choices for their future and that’s why I continue to join with the Governor and parents across the Commonwealth, demanding that our board of education put students first, set high standards, and require accountability from everyone. I fully support Governor Youngkin’s plans to bring a quality public school system back to Virginia," her statement read in part.
On parents rights, she made clear that "I join parents in demanding that parental rights not be abused. Parents have a ‘fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.’ I will continue to work to ensure that every child has options, regardless of zip code, so that they may have a hope and a future!"
Miyares on Wednesday answered that call during a press briefing that not only announced an investigation into TJ for such a reason, but another investigation based on their admission policies.
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A New Harvard Hero
Congratulations to Harvard University and the dean of its school of government, Douglas Elmendorf, for not awarding a proposed fellowship to the ex-head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth. To have made Mr. Roth a fellow would have aligned the school with those hostile to the Jewish state and thus Jews more generally. Too, it would have been an affront to the memory of the president for whom the school is named, John F. Kennedy.
Mr. Elmendorf has taken criticism for his practice of running a tight ship on personnel. A former governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, withdrew from a fellowship amid student complaints about how he handled the drinking water crisis at Flint. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik was removed from an advisory committee for what Mr. Elmendorf considered inaccurate statements. Even JFK’s own daughter, Caroline, quit in a quarrel with Mr. Elmendorf.
We could argue those cases round or we could argue them flat, but they are context for understanding the Kennedy School’s apparent decision in the case of Mr. Roth. It turns out that instead of a kind of leftist or Democratic partisan, Mr. Elmendorf is starting to come into focus as a dean prepared to enforce the principles for which he wants the school he leads to stand. Mr. Roth certainly isn’t the first person who failed to meet Harvard’s standards.
We have had our innings with Mr. Roth going back at least to 2006, when Human Rights Watch wheeled on Israel in the middle of Hezbollah’s war against the Jewish state. More recently Mr. Roth has been most well known for pushing the claim that Israel is an apartheid state. Even honest liberals — Nicholas Kristof of the Times comes to mind — call the claim false. Bret Stephens wrote in 2019 against the “comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa.”
In January, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, called the application of the term to Israel “both offensive & wildly inaccurate.” That touches on Harvard’s very motto, Veritas, which dates back to 1643. There are additional institutional aspirations — to civil discourse, to diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and to avoidance of bigotry. Mr. Roth’s record also is sorely lacking on those fronts.
These values are important to advancing the university’s missions. Yet Mr. Roth’s reaction to the situation was a Twitter tantrum blaming Israel for “repression of Palestinians” and suggesting his failure to get a fellowship at Harvard owes to pressure from Jewish donors. Mr. Roth’s reaction itself confirms that Harvard’s decision to award him a fellowship was the correct move. Apparently he’s been taken on at the University of Pennsylvania, instead.
As for the new hero, Dean Elmendorf, let’s hope that Harvard’s incoming president, Claudine Gay, seeks him out for advice on how to turn things around at the university recently ranked worst in the nation on three measures of campus antisemitism, and where the Jewish undergraduate population has reportedly plummeted to below the level at which President Lowell in the early 20th century sought to cap the then-operating formal quotas against Jews.
Which brings us back to John Kennedy. In 1960, JFK gave a speech to American Zionists meeting in New York and spoke about his first visit to the land of Israel, in 1939. “There,” he said, “the neglect and ruin left by centuries of Ottoman misrule were slowly being transformed by miracles of labor and sacrifice.” It was, he said, “still a land of promise” rather than “a land of fulfillment.” He returned in 1951 to “see the grandeur of Israel.”
Kennedy went on at great length in one of the most extraordinary paeans to Israel ever delivered by an American leader. “I left with the conviction that the United Nations may have conferred on Israel the credentials of nationhood; but its own idealism and courage, its own sacrifice and generosity, had earned the credentials of immortality.” It’s a perfect kind of optimism for a school named after John F. Kennedy.
https://www.nysun.com/article/a-new-harvard-hero
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Proposed Student Loan Rule Is Costly and Flawed
Today, the Department of Education released a proposed rule to create a new and highly problematic income-driven repayment (IDR) plan for federal student loans. The Administration estimated their IDR plan will cost $138 billion; we believe it could cost much more if behavioral effects are more fully incorporated. Assuming the courts find the debt cancellation proposal to be legal, this means the President’s student debt proposals and actions since August 2022 would increase deficits by at least $600 billion over a decade.
The IDR plan would also drive-up tuition costs, expand student debt borrowing, encourage enrollment in low-value degrees, help many financially stable households avoid paying back their debt, and provide huge windfalls to doctors, lawyers, and other borrowers with large balances and high expected lifetime income.
The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:
Between the IDR changes, the extended pause and blanket cancellation, it now looks like the Biden Administration’s student debt proposals could cost $600 billion, or perhaps even more. This is not what the economy or the budget needs right now.
In addition to worsening deficits, the Administration’s student debt plan will stoke more inflation, increase recession risk, raise the cost of college, and deliver costly benefits to highly educated households who will be – or already are – near the top of the income spectrum.
Today’s IDR rule risks transforming the student loan system into an arbitrary grant program that creates more confusion than cohesion and establishes a series of perverse incentives that lead students to take out large sums of debt and colleges to charge increasingly exorbitant tuitions. Doctors, lawyers, and other high-income professionals will benefit by much of their interest payments being cancelled early in their career.
The idea of strengthening and reforming the IDR program is a good one, but the specifics of this proposal are a costly mess.
The Administration should abandon their unilateral effort to remake higher education financing, and instead work with Congress on a thoughtful package of reforms that truly address college costs and value. At minimum, they should dramatically scale back and improve their new proposal, for example by limiting all changes to undergraduates and re-thinking interest cancellation rules. They should also ensure the rule as a whole is fully paid for, so as not to worsen the national debt.
With inflation at a 40-year high and debt approaching record levels, it is governing malpractice to continue adding to deficits – especially by executive fiat.
https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/proposed-student-loan-rule-costly-and-flawed
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10 January, 2023
Conservative State Lawmakers Take Aim at One of Higher Education’s Holy Grails
Given the pervasive Leftism in universities, tenure is more likely to be needed to protect conservative academics rather than Leftist ones, so abolishing it would be a foot-shoot for conservative lawmakers
When the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, asked Texas colleges to disavow critical race theory, the University of Texas faculty approved a resolution defending their freedom to decide for themselves how to teach about race. Mr. Patrick said he took it as a message to “go to hell.”
In turn, Mr. Patrick, a Republican, said it was time to consider holding the faculty accountable, by targeting one of the top perks of their jobs. “Maybe we need to look at tenure,” Patrick said at a news conference in November.
It’s a sentiment being echoed by conservative officials in red states across the country. The indefinite academic appointments that come with tenure — the holy grail of university employment — have faced review from lawmakers or state oversight boards in at least half a dozen states, often presented as bids to rein in academics with liberal views.
Tenure advocates are bracing for the possibility of new threats as lawmakers return to statehouses around the country.
The trend reflects how conservative scrutiny of instruction related to race, gender, and sexuality has extended from schools to higher education. Budget considerations also play a role. Tenured faculty numbers have been declining even in more liberal states. Universities are hiring more part-time, adjunct instructors amid declines in financial support from state governments.
Traditionally, tenured professors can be terminated only under extreme circumstances, such as professional misconduct or a financial emergency. Advocates for tenure say it is a crucial component of academic freedom — especially as controversy grows over scholarly discussions about history and identity.
Without tenure, faculty are “liable to play it safe when it comes time to have a classroom discussion about a difficult topic,” the president of the American Association of University Professors, Irene Mulvey, said.
Yet in difficult financial and political times, even tenured professors may not be guaranteed employment.
In Kansas, Emporia State University this fall cut 33 faculty — most of them tenured — using an emergency pandemic measure that allowed universities to bypass policies on staff terminations to balance budgets.
Emporia State’s sole journalism professor, Max McCoy, penned a column that began, “I may be fired for writing this” — before learning this would be his last year teaching at the school. “This is a purge,” he said. He said all the fired professors were “Democrats or liberal in our thinking.”
The university spokeswoman, Gwen Larson, said individual professors were not targeted for dismissal. She said the cuts followed a review of how demand for academic programs is changing and “where we needed to move in the future.”
Attacks on higher education have been fueled by a shift in how conservatives see colleges and universities, Jeremy Young of the free-expression group PEN America said. The share of Republicans and independent-leaning Republicans who said higher education was having a negative effect on the country grew to 59 percent from 37 percent between 2015 and 2019 in Pew Research Center polling.
In Texas, university administrators are working behind the scenes to squash anticipated legislation that would target tenure, fearful it will hurt recruitment, the president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, Jeff Blodgett, said.
Some people already aren’t applying for university jobs because of the discussions, the president of the Texas Faculty Association, Pat Heintzelman, said.
In Florida, a federal judge in November blocked the "Stop-WOKE" Act, a law pushed by Governor DeSantis that restricts certain race-based conversations and analysis in colleges. The governor’s office is appealing the injunction. Compliance with the law would be part of the criteria for evaluating tenured professors under a review process that the university system’s board of governors is weighing.
Mr. DeSantis has questioned the argument that tenure provides academic freedom. “If anything, it’s created more of an intellectual orthodoxy where people that have dissenting views, it’s harder for them to be tenured in the first place,” he said at a news conference in April.
In Louisiana, lawmakers set up a task force to study tenure with the Republican-backed resolution noting that students should be confident that courses are free of “political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination.” Professors raised concerns until they learned the task force’s members were mostly tenure supporters.
In Georgia, the state’s board of regents approved a policy that made it easier to remove tenured faculty who have had a negative performance review. Elsewhere, legislation to ban or restrict tenure also has been introduced in recent years in Iowa, South Carolina, and Mississippi, but failed to win passage.
The pushback follows decades of declining rates of tenured faculty. According to the AAUP, 24 percent of faculty members held full-time tenured appointments in fall 2020, compared with 39 percent in fall 1987, the first year for which directly comparable information is available.
Part-time college instructors rarely receive benefits. They frequently must travel from campus to campus to cobble together a living.
“It’s a nightmare,” Caprice Lawless, who wrote the “Adjunct Cookbook,” replete with recipes that poorly compensated Ph.D.s can cobble together with food pantry staples, said.
“I’ve taken Ph.D.s to foodbanks and watched them cry because they can’t get enough food for their family,” Ms. Lawless said, adding that she served as a social worker of sorts before retiring two years ago from Front Range Community College at Westminster, Colorado.
The opposition to tenure has united conservatives for different reasons: Not all share the same concerns about “woke higher education,” a San Francisco State University history professor who has written about the shift to part-time faculty, Marc Stein, said.
“But,” he said, “if you attack the ‘wokeness’ of higher education and that leads to declining funding for higher education, then economic conservatives are happy.”
Tenure exploded after World War II when it helped with recruitment as the GI Bill sent enrollment soaring, a former provost of Tufts University who has written on the issue, Sol Gittleman, said. Lately, the country has overproduced Ph.D.s, Mr. Gittleman said. He predicts tenure will largely disappear in the coming decades outside the top 100 colleges and universities.
“Critical race theory — that’s an excuse,” he said. “If there was a shortage of faculty, you wouldn’t hear that.”
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Red States Need to Stop Letting Academia Flip Us Off
The beauty of federalism is that, in some states, we patriots are nominally in charge. Places like California, New York, and Massachusetts are communist hellholes, and they remain communist hellholes because the communists in charge of those hellholes demand policies that ensure the perpetuation of their communist hellholedom.
But good gravy, why are so many red states where we conservatives have the governor’s mansion and the legislature, and therefore the car keys to floor it on conservative policy, so damn spineless that we refuse to carve out the tumors of communist hellholedom that threaten to metastasize throughout our red paradises?
There are many such infested institutions, but let us focus on one of the most visible and most deadly to society because it infects and poisons the young people who will take leadership roles in society down the road (that they primarily come from colleges yet another problem). The fact is, even in red states that should damn well know better, state colleges and universities not only indoctrinate students in CRT garbage but actually build DIE infrastructures that perpetuate wokedom and crush the students who yearn to breathe and learn freely. We could stop it with a snap of our collective fingers, yet for some reason, Republicans seem terrified at the thought of offending the ragged collection of man-bunned TAs, tweed-jacketed dorks, craven, cat-fancying administrators, and daddy issue-smitten purple-haired co-eds who seem to run our colleges.
Our colleges. Ours. We, taxpayers, built them. We, taxpayers, pay for them. We, taxpayers, should dictate how they function. Why won’t we?
First of all, “we” does not include Ron DeSantis. The guy on the cutting edge of crushing CRT just gave all the public colleges in Florida a short fuse to report on their woke web of organizations and activities. The university eunuchs freaked, of course, claiming that this was just a first step toward wiping the slate clean on the government-funded woke fascism plaguing Sunshine State academia. Why diversity consultants may be fired, conformity enforcement teams curtailed, and kangaroo courts adjourned!
Yeah. Exactly. He’s going to destroy their dreams. It will be beautiful.
They should look on the bright side and celebrate the glory that is Our Democracy in action. We were told – by them and their allies endlessly over the last couple of years – that Our Democracy is facing the most perilous of perils. No longer! Heavy D ran on a platform of nuking woke and he’s simply giving the people what they wanted by about 20 percentage points.
So, why do they hate Our Democracy? Basically, if you don’t want him and his legislators to decree the policies the people have demanded – that not one red cent gets spent on this racist commie nonsense – then you are an insurrectionist of treason who hates America.
Oh wait, they are totally into that last part.
The Governor of the Falling Frozen Iguana State is also replacing the board of trustees of a super-liberal public college with people who don’t hate normal Americans, and that has the freakshow fuming. As regime media outlet Yahoo News put it, “DeSantis takes aim at Sarasota's New College, transforms board in conservative overhaul.” He sure did! His new trustees include CRTslayer Christopher Ruto and a Hillsdale College professor. The pinkos are most perturbed at the thought of classes that teach actual history, actual literature, and actual knowledge instead of woke intersectional mind goo. And too bad for them – there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.
So where are the other red governors on this? Why is Greg Abbott not taking a break from failing to use his cops and soldiers to secure the Texas border and demanding his legislature defund the police haters, as well as the rest of the motley crew that controls Lone Star academia? The joke in Texas is that UT is Berkeley with BBQ, but why should that be? Ban all CRT crap, fire all the diversitycrats, mandate that all administrator ranks be slashed, and require that all faculty hiring include proportionate numbers of patriots, believers, veterans, and people who have actually had real jobs. After all, these are our states and there is no good reason we should be subsidizing the efforts of people who hate us to enslave us.
But, of course, soft Republicans resist imposing their iron discipline on academia. Why? Well, one reason is that the regime media will call them mean and they don’t like that. Or worse, the regime media will say they hate education. But they should hate education, at least the brand being foisted on our young people today. It’s not education. It’s a joke. There are zero excuses for a guy who sweats it out on an oil rig in the Permian Basin wringing oil out of the dirt under the blazing sun getting dunned by the state for tax money that then goes to underwrite some nose-pierced princess’s degree in Marxist puppetry. Or Marxist interpretive dance. Or anything Marxist, other than how to stamp out Marxism forever.
These are the RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel GOPers, the ones who just want to go along, get along, and lose (Fire Ronna by going to www.HireHarmeet.com and make your objections known to reelect the O-5 loser to another term).
But mostly, there is also the almost willful refusal of a lot of these Buick Republicans to understand and accept that college today is not like their alma mater of yesteryear. Nostalgia is, after all, a helluva drug. They remember their fraternities and sororities, their gentleman’s C grades, lots of Budweiser, and making out in the bushes around the quad. But that college experience is gone, washed away in a tsunami of political correctness and rigid, surveillance state thought control. They don’t get that the Lamda Lamda Lamdas and Omega Mus are not attending toga parties but mandatory training on microaggressions, their privilege, and the horror of patriarchy. Sure, it’s still fun to watch football, but tailgating before the big game against the University of College is where the similarity to their college years ends. Colleges are no longer campuses creating educated citizens; they are commie conformity factories run on our dime.
This must stop throughout our country, but it must first stop out in the red states. It's a betrayal of the citizens of these states who are expected to pay for it and who want trained workers capable of contributing to society, not destroying it. It’s a betrayal of the few professors who want to teach students instead of converting them into CRT cliché- spewing automatons. And it’s a betrayal of the kids who just want to get a real degree and maybe score a little action without having to get a notarized certificate of consent before rounding second base.
Red state rulers, get on it because Ron DeSantis is again making most of the rest of you look like ineffectual saps.
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Court upholds WV law protecting women’s sports
CHARLESTON, W.V. – A federal district court issued a decision Thursday that upholds West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act, H.B. 3293, rejecting a legal challenge to the law that would have undermined women’s sports in the state by allowing males who identify as female to compete with females in girls’ and women’s sports.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys represent Lainey Armistead, a former West Virginia State University soccer player who intervened in the lawsuit, B.P.J. v. West Virginia State Board of Education, to defend the law. West Virginia enacted the law to ensure equal opportunities for women in sports.
“Today’s decision is a win for reality. The truth matters, and it is crucial that our laws and policies recognize that the physical differences between men and women matter, especially in a context like sports,” said ADF Senior Counsel Christiana Kiefer. “Female athletes deserve to compete on a level playing field. Allowing males to compete in girls’ sports destroys fair competition, safety on the field, and women’s athletic opportunities. Female athletes across the country are losing medals, podium spots, public recognition, and opportunities to compete because of males competing in women’s sports. The court was right to affirm that West Virginia’s law is not only constitutional, but consistent with Title IX.”
“While some females may be able to outperform some males, it is generally accepted that, on average, males outperform females athletically because of inherent physical differences between the sexes,” the court wrote in its decision. “This is not an overbroad generalization, but rather a general principle that realistically reflects the average physical differences between the sexes. Given [the challenger]’s concession that circulating testosterone in males creates a biological difference in athletic performance, I do not see how I could find that the state’s classification based on biological sex is not substantially related to its interest in providing equal athletic opportunities for females.”
“I believe that protecting fairness in women’s sports is a women’s rights issue,” said Armistead. “This isn’t just about fair play for me: It’s about protecting fairness and safety for female athletes across West Virginia. It’s about ensuring that future generations of female athletes are not discriminated against but have access to the same equal athletic opportunities that shaped my life. Being an athlete in college has made me even more passionate about the sport that I play. I want fairness, equality, and safety in sports. And I want to ensure those standards are protected for other girls, too.”
Timothy D. Ducar, one of more than 3,500 attorneys allied with ADF, is co-counsel for Armistead in the case. Brandon Steele is serving as local counsel.
This case isn’t over yet. There could be an appeal. When the law fails to recognize the biological differences between men and women, it’s women and girls who suffer. In states across the country, they remain unprotected.
Alliance Defending Freedom: info@adflegal.org
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9 January, 2023
New York City Public Schools Block AI Chatbot Over Cheating Concerns
The New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) has blocked OpenAI’s ChatGPT service access on its networks and devices amid fears that students will use it to cheat on assignments and other school tasks.
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot capable of producing content mimicking human speech. Accessible for free, the service can be used to generate essays, technical documents, and poetry, Chalkbeat New York reported. The program uses machine learning to pull and compile historical facts and even make logical arguments that sound convincing, all the while ensuring that the output remains grammatically correct.
“Due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content, access to ChatGPT is restricted on New York City Public Schools’ networks and devices,” NYCDOE spokesperson Jenna Lyle told Chalkbeat. “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”
However, if individual schools do need access to the site in case they wish to study the technology powering ChatGPT, they only need to put in a request, Lyle said.
ChatGPT and School Tasks
In an interview with the New York Post, Darren Hick, an assistant philosophy professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, said that academia “did not see this coming,” referring to the capabilities of ChatGPT.
In early December, Hick had asked his class to write a 500-word essay on philosopher David Hume and the paradox of horror. One of the submissions caught his eye as it featured a few hallmarks of having been created by AI.
“It’s a clean style. But it’s recognizable. I would say it writes like a very smart 12th grader,” Hick told the New York Post, adding that the bot uses “peculiar” and “odd wording.”
Dangers of AI
A problem with ChatGPT is that it is not always correct. OpenAI admits that ChatGPT “sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers,” and that fixing the issue is a challenge. As such, the service cannot be used to source critical information, like medical advice.
Many people have been raising alarm bells over the rising development of AI. In June of last year, Google put a senior software engineer in its Responsible AI ethics group on paid administrative leave after he raised concerns about the human-like behavior exhibted by LaMDA, an AI program he tested.
The employee tried to convince Google to take a look at the potentially serious “sentient” behavior of the AI. However, the company did not heed his words, he claimed.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has also warned about the dangers of AI.
“I have exposure to the very cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it,” Musk told attendees of a National Governors Association meeting in July 2017.
“I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal.”
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Modernity and the death of the Enlightenment
In Looking back on the Spanish Civil War (1943) George Orwell writes, such is the power of totalitarian thought control and how language is manipulated, we now live in a world ‘in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past … If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs’.
Whereas Enlightenment thinking is committed to rationality and reason and the ability to weigh and analyse arguments to more closely approximate the truth of things, Orwell argues: ‘Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science”. There is only “German Science” “Jewish Science”, etc”.
Fast forward to today’s world of Woke ideology and it’s obvious what Orwell feared most about totalitarian regimes is even more pervasive. As noted by Roger Scruton in Culture Counts, ‘the belief that rational inquiry leads to objective proof’ has been replaced by ‘a new cult of darkness’ where knowledge is condemned as a social construct imposed by the dominant elites.
Instead of a liberal education based on the search for wisdom and truth, the academy is now dominated by a rainbow alliance incorporating neo-Marxist critical theory, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and radical feminist, gender, and postcolonial theories all intent on overthrowing rationality and reason.
While the arts and humanities have long since been infected the situation is now so dire even mathematics and science have fallen victim to the long march. Academics at the University of Sheffield condemn UK science as ‘inherently white, since the discipline developed from European scientific enlightenment’.
Students are told ‘science can never be objective and apolitical’ and that European science must be ‘decolonised’. Students at the University College London also argue the way science is taught must be radically reshaped in terms of Critical Race Theory and postcolonial ideology.
Students argue Enlightenment science is the product of imperialist white hegemony and must be rejected as it ‘reproduces power and thought which is racialised as white, psychologically/physically fit, wealth-rich and heteropatriarchally/cisgenderly male’.
A guide to advancing health equity produced by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association also illustrates how pervasive Woke ideology now is. The guide argues it is wrong to emphasise ‘biological factors in understanding the treatment of diseases’.
Prospective doctors are told illness is caused by structural classism and racism inherent in capitalist, white society and cannot be dealt with ‘without explicit recognition and reconciliation of our country’s twin, fundamental injustices of genocide and forced labour’.
Australia’s national curriculum also suggests mathematics is a cultural construct. Students are told to study Indigenous algebra and that, ‘Content elaborations in Mathematics have been structured around identified themes in Australian First Nations Peoples’ mathematical thinking, understandings, and processes.’
While not widely known, the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce in The Crisis Of Modernity offers a compelling analysis explaining why the West has undergone such a far-reaching epistemological and cultural change.
Whereas classical Marxism is primarily economic in its focus, Del Noce argues the establishment of the Frankfurt School in Germany in the mid-to-late 1920s led to the rise of cultural Marxism involving the infiltration and takeover of institutions including universities, schools, the media, and the family.
The academics involved, including Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, embraced a revolutionary stance, one Del Noce describes as ‘a radical affirmation of the transition from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom’.
An approach drawing on critical theory that presents itself as ‘the end point of progressive thought’ involving ‘a process of liberation from authority, theological or human, transcendent or empirical’.
In addition to critical theory cultural Marxists, drawing on Louis Althusser’s concept of the ideological state apparatus, argue capitalist societies reproduce themselves by controlling what constitutes essential knowledge and the way education is structured.
As a result, Del Noce argues long-held certainties, whether the belief in a higher spiritual and transcendent order or the Enlightenment’s belief with reason and logic it is possible to better understand human nature and the wider world, are all undermined.
One of the examples Del Noce refers to illustrating the influence of the Frankfurt School is Wilhelm Reich’s book The Sexual Revolution and Reich’s belief the traditional, monogamous family must be overthrown as it was capitalist society’s ‘repressive social institution par excellence’.
Whether condemning objectivity and rationality as examples of white, Eurocentric supremacism or arguing knowledge is a social construct to be critiqued in terms of power relations Orwell was right when arguing what he feared most, instead of bombs, is the destructive nature of totalitarian mind control and group think.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/del-noce-modernity-and-the-death-of-the-enlightenment/ ?
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Wharton's Majoring in Woke Capitalism. Some Are Taking an Elective in Dissent
Wharton is Trump's alma mater
One of America’s storied Ivy League executive training grounds is elevating a view of capitalism that shuns the very enterprises from which its namesake made his fortune: In 2023, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School will offer a new major called Environmental, Social and Governance Factors for Business.
The nation’s first business school was founded in 1881 by Joseph Wharton, an industrialist who made a killing in mining and manufacturing, the sorts of “dirty” industries that ESG proponents disfavor. Now, the school that bears his name will have the distinction of becoming the first prominent institution to offer an ESG degree.
Skeptics, including former faculty and alumni of the school, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of recriminations, fear the MBA program could serve as progressivism in business sheepskin clothing. One recent graduate warned against a one-sided presentation of left-wing politics used “to justify increasing the power of the state in markets and firms while demonizing capitalism.”
Observers suggested the school’s embrace of ESG could not only presage similar curriculum changes at business schools nationwide, but also change the character of the corporate C-suites that the school’s graduates tend to populate. The thinking is that ESG-focused students will matriculate to ESG-focused executive positions in an already socially conscious corporate America, creating a feedback loop that could have an indelible impact not just on U.S.-style capitalism, but on America itself.
“By creating a major [in ESG] at Wharton you are helping to legitimize it,” said another graduate.
Proponents of Wharton’s new direction, such as Penn professor Witold J. Henisz, see it as a way to “enhance” capitalism’s “efficiency.” Henisz, vice dean and faculty director of Wharton’s ESG Initiative, told RealClearInvestigations that by incorporating “pollution, human rights, and other ESG impacts” into financial analyses, market participants can properly price such “externalities” and “mitigate” associated risks.
In a recent opinion piece challenging critics of the “anti-ESG” or “anti-woke investment movement,” Henisz said: “Climate risk is investment risk. There is no credible other side, only an ideological opposition cynically seeking a wedge issue for upcoming political campaigns.”
When RCI asked Henisz to clarify his remarks, he said: “I believe that the science on climate risk as investment risk is settled. I do not see substantive academically grounded debate on this point.”
“There are, by contrast,” he added, “legitimate questions as to how, when and where climate risk poses investment risk and we encourage all such discourse, research and debate.”
One recent graduate, Isaiah Berg, told RCI that Henisz’s comments were “sad to see,” noting that there are “good faith disagreements that exist around ESG topics.” If Henisz’s “intent was not to persuade, but instead to intimidate those who might otherwise speak up and disagree, he likely achieved his goal.”
Others expressed similar concerns. Alex Edmans, a former Wharton professor who earned tenure at the school in part based on his writings on ESG, is a qualified supporter of the school’s push into the space.
But in a recent paper responding to Henisz’s remarks, Edmans said “ESG is not a debate on which you have to take a ‘side’ – it’s a subject. … people’s stance on a subject should evolve with the evidence rather than being anchored on a side. To be closed to the possibility of valid concerns is contrary to a culture of learning, and to assume that counterarguments are politically motivated is itself cynical.”
Nevertheless, Edmans told RCI, he supports Wharton’s introduction of the ESGB major – with two conditions. “First, the courses should be taught by professors with substantial expertise,” he said. “Other schools have launched such courses because they are popular, and faculty have suddenly reinvented themselves as ESG experts; as a result, such courses are based on wishful thinking, not scientific evidence.
“Second, the courses should cover research and evidence on both sides of the issue, rather than only what people would like to hear.”
Although those speaking out lamented that there was a distinct chill over expressing dissenting views, Edmans and recent graduates noted that in their personal experience, Wharton professors strained not to bias their presentations in classes.
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8 January, 2023
Axios Lies for Arkansas School Caught Teaching Critical Race Theory
Axios is an American news website allegedly combating "the erosion of truth, trust, safety and sanity in news".
Days before the 2022 elections, a concerned parent from Bentonville, Arkansas, sent a disturbing email to the 1776 Project PAC. The email contained a class handout and classroom audio files recorded by his son, a student at Bentonville High School. The audio files contained two recordings of lectures and class discussions by Benjamin Ring, an English teacher at Bentonville, telling his class the definition, history, and virtues of critical race theory.
Ring set aside days of his English III course to walk his students through critical race theory in detailed fashion—and the student, wishing to remain anonymous, was quick enough to hit “record.”
Throughout the lecture and discussion, Ring intones that critical race theory is a beneficial and positive thing, stating that “CRT can be useful, helping us become a better society.”
After receiving the email containing the fairly cut-and-dried evidence of critical race theory instruction, the 1776 Project PAC confronted the Bentonville School District about this material being taught in classrooms, sharing parts of the audio in a tweet on Nov. 6.
Axios jumped in on the controversy—where things took a wild turn. Axios reporter Worth Sparkman claimed that the 1776 Project PAC was lying, and that critical race theory wasn’t taught anywhere outside of post-graduate university law schools. Sparkman acknowledged receiving the audio and presentation proving CRT was taught at Bentonville, though hasn’t updated his story or apologized.
CRT defenders often make this claim, given that critical race theory is usually applied via curriculum and pedagogy and not outlined as a theory in K-12 instruction. By pointing out that the words “critical race theory” aren’t at the top of the chalkboard when students come in, progressive journalists can claim that critical race theory isn’t being directly taught.
In education, we would call this theory a part of our pedagogy (i.e. how something is taught) or praxis, rather than our curriculum (i.e. what is taught).
The Bentonville English class took it a step further by including critical race theory in both pedagogy and curriculum. Ring took specific time out of his classroom schedule to teach his English III class his interpretation of the core function and background of critical race theory, and we have the audio files and class notes to prove it.
Sparkman reached out for comment to a member of the 1776 Project PAC, who shared the evidence that Ring was directly teaching critical race theory. Sparkman ignored this evidence and continues to falsely claim that it wasn’t (and isn’t) being taught at Bentonville or anywhere else.
Sparkman and Axios have refused to provide comments to The Daily Signal concerning the dishonest “fact-check.”
Aiden Buzzetti of the 1776 Project PAC told The Daily Signal:
The audio recordings we received and released to the public confirmed without a doubt that teachers in Bentonville feel comfortable talking about critical race theory with students, even as Bentonville Schools accused the 1776 Project PAC’s concerns as ‘baseless.’ When we engaged with reporters regarding Bentonville schools, we spoke very clearly about how Critical Race Theory is applied in the classroom and does not have to be a clearly defined item in the curriculum, and yet every single local reporter ignored the audio recordings and provided handout.
The reporting by Axios and other outlets was extremely disingenuous and meant to discredit not only our concerns, but the concerns of the local candidates.
Perhaps ironically, Ring’s definition of critical race theory is rare for its accuracy and clarity. As Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and foremost scholar on CRT in education, used to say when I sat in her classes, CRT is “an interpretive lens … a way to examine how institutionalized inequality is present in our various systems and textual sources … ”
Critical race theory is simply a lens with which to analyze and criticize the role of racism its scholars claim is inherent in every facet of American society. In Indianapolis Public Schools, I watched this theory put into practice as teachers and administrators were told to dismantle white supremacy and eliminate whiteness in their classrooms and schools.
This includes shaming character traits considered “white” like: perfectionism, a “sense of urgency,” defensiveness, “quantity over quality,” the “worship of the written word,” paternalism, and “binary” thinking.
Additionally, critical race theory suggests that there exists a cultural dichotomy in American life—between those who look white and those who don’t—and that white people have unfairly benefited from privilege, and are thus complicit in institutional racism. This concept derives from the philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Paulo Freire, Marxists who suggested that individualism was evil, and that those at the “top of society” were responsible for all evils and wrongs below them.
Ring told his students, “CRT has very little to do with Marxism,” and that “Marxism is a phrase we pin on things to make them anti-American.”
Critical race theory founders and scholars like Ladson-Billings, Barbara Applebaum, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado have directly cited Marcuse and Friere’s openly Marxist works in forming their understanding of CRT and its applications. Crenshaw specifically praised Marxism as an ally to “leftist Black nationalism” and “radical feminism.”
While Ring’s presentation states that “[CRT is NOT] an assertion that all white people are racists, or even to blame for the past. (That’s a straw man fallacy.),” critical race theory scholar Applebaum disagrees. In “Being White, Being Good: White Complicity,” she claims that “ … all whites are responsible for white dominance since their ‘very being depends on it.’”
Bentonville exhibits another cautionary warning: Red states are not safe because they have Republican majorities. Indiana, Idaho, Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, and many others have case after case of schools that teach or use critical race theory, radical gender theory, and other progressive social theories regardless of parental concerns.
In Bentonville, self-described Republican and Christian board member Jennifer Faddis told Axios, “As a board member, I’ve never seen any hint of CRT in our classrooms, and as a Christian and registered Republican, I would be the first to speak out against it.” Other school board members told Axios there was no critical race theory present in Bentonville. As has often been the case with many schools caught lying, these school board members have faced no consequences for their apathy and dishonesty.
None of Bentonville’s seven school board members responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Axios exhibits a similar cautionary warning we’ve seen before: Progressive media institutions will cover for schools, overtly lying if necessary, to keep parents in the dark. Any institution that parrots press releases and official statements without further investigation is more interested in political propaganda than reporting facts.
If they won’t follow their editorial standards, then we’ll call them out on it. If schools won’t do their due diligence in investigating parents’ concerns, then we’ll elect better school boards. We’ll keep working until our children have educational opportunities wholly beneficial to them.
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Federal Appeals Court Upholds Florida’s Transgender Bathroom Ban. Now What?
The transgender bathroom wars don’t stop for the holidays.
The latest battleground is Florida, where on Dec. 30, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled that the word “sex” in educational programs means being a biological “male” or “female.”
In Adams v. School Board of St. Johns County, the court ruled that a school board’s policy of separating school bathrooms based on biological sex does not violate either the Constitution or federal civil rights law.
Transgender male student Drew Adams (a biological female) challenged the policy in 2020, claiming that it violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which provides that no state may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Adams also argued that the policy violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program that receives federal funding.
A three-judge appeals court panel initially agreed with Adams, but the full appeals court subsequently decided to take up the case and reconsider the ruling. The result was a 7-4 decision upholding the policy on both constitutional and statutory grounds.
Judge Barbara Lagoa delivered the majority opinion. She began by identifying the “unremarkable—and nearly universal—practice of separating school bathrooms based on biological sex” at issue in the case.
She then pointed to the court’s conclusion:
[W]hen we apply first principles of constitutional and statutory interpretation, this appeal largely resolves itself.
The Equal Protection Clause claim must fail because, as to the sex-discrimination claim, the bathroom policy clears the hurdle of intermediate scrutiny and because the bathroom policy does not discriminate against transgender students.
The Title IX claim must fail because Title IX allows schools to separate bathrooms by biological sex.
Adams had argued that, by separating males and females, the school board’s bathroom policy necessarily discriminated against transgender students—those students who, despite their underlying biology, identify as either male or female.
These sex-based separations were, Adams argued, a violation of the equal protection clause. The Supreme Court has held that legislative distinctions based on biological sex are subject to an “intermediate” standard of judicial review—a standard lower than “strict scrutiny,” which almost certainly makes it invalid, but higher than “rational basis,” which nearly always leaves it alone.
To satisfy intermediate scrutiny, the bathroom policy had to (1) advance an important governmental objective; and (2) be substantially related to that objective.
Lagoa wrote that the school bathroom policy cleared both hurdles because it advanced the important governmental objective of protecting students’ privacy in school bathrooms, and it did so in a way that was substantially related to that objective. With intermediate scrutiny satisfied, there was no equal protection violation.
Regarding Adams’ claim of discrimination under Title IX, Lagoa wrote that the plain and ordinary meaning of “sex” in 1972, when Title IX was enacted, was biological sex. Because of that (and through its implementing regulations), Title IX envisioned the kind of sex-segregated bathrooms that the school board’s policy required.
What’s more, the school board had attempted to accommodate transgender students by providing single-stall, sex-neutral bathrooms, which Title IX neither requires nor prohibits.
Lagoa wrote that there was no reason, as the District Court had done, to consider “sex” ambiguous. The statutory scheme and purpose of Title IX, along with the vast majority of dictionary definitions at that time, clearly defined “sex” based on biology and reproductive function.
By maintaining bathrooms separated by biological sex, the school board had satisfied its duties under Title IX.
Though she wrote the majority opinion, Lagoa took the unusual step of also writing a separate concurring opinion, warning of the adverse impact that defining “sex” under Title IX to include “transgender status” or “gender identity” would have on the rights of girls and women in education and school sports.
Reaching Adams’ desired outcome, she wrote, would have “repercussions far beyond the bathroom door.”
She wrote:
There simply is no limiting principle to cabin that definition of “sex” to the regulatory carve-out for bathrooms under Title IX, as opposed to the regulatory carve-out for sports or, for that matter, to the statutory and regulatory carve-outs for living facilities, showers, and locker rooms.
And a definition of ‘sex’ beyond ‘biological sex’ would not only cut against the vast weight of drafting-era dictionary definitions … but would also force female student athletes ‘to compete against students who have a very significant biological advantage, including students who have the size and strength of a male, but identify as female … .’
Such a proposition—i.e., commingling both biological sexes in the realm of female athletics—would ‘threaten … to undermine one of [Title IX’s] major achievements, giving young women an equal opportunity to participate in sports.’
In her concurrence, Lagoa made many of the same arguments that we at The Heritage Foundation have made in countering the Biden administration’s pending and massive alteration of Title IX to include “transgender status” (among many other changes).
The educational, athletic, and professional gains of women and girls over the course of five decades are in the crosshairs as the federal Department of Education’s rule-making process seeks to make the very changes that Lagoa decried.
If such a profound cultural and policy change were to be made, it should come from Congress, rather than unelected judges or executive branch bureaucrats.
The next phase of the bathroom wars could play out on a national scale. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a similar case decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
In Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, et al., the appeals court came to the opposite conclusion; namely, that Title IX and the Constitution’s equal protection clause protected a transgender male student (a biological female) from a school board’s bathroom policy that prohibited the student from using the bathroom that corresponded with that student’s gender identity.
Such a clear split between two federal circuit courts on the same legal issue, especially one involving both the Constitution and a federal statute, makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will decide to settle the conflict.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito predicted such a development in a dissenting opinion more than two years ago. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia (2020), in an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court interpreted the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination, to include “gender identity.”
In excoriating the majority for “legislating,” instead of “interpreting,” Alito wrote:
What the Court has done today—interpreting discrimination because of ‘sex’ to encompass discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity—is virtually certain to have far-reaching consequences.
Over 100 federal statutes prohibit discrimination because of sex … . The briefs in these cases have called to our attention the potential effects that the Court’s reasoning may have under some of these laws, but the Court waves those considerations aside.
As to Title VII itself, the Court dismisses questions about ‘bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.’ … And it declines to say anything about other statutes whose terms mirror Title VII’s.
The Court’s brusque refusal to consider the consequences of its reasoning is irresponsible … . Before issuing today’s radical decision, the Court should have given some thought to where its decision would lead.
As the briefing in these cases has warned, the position that the Court now adopts will threaten freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and personal privacy and safety.
Many court-watchers see Bostock as the pebble that triggered an avalanche of court battles over the meaning of “sex” in federal law.
Should Adams decide to appeal to the Supreme Court, the clock has already started ticking. All petitions for writ of certiorari must be filed within 90 days of entry of the federal appellate court’s judgment, making Adams’ request for review due somewhere around early April.
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DeSantis Demands Woke Colleges to Reveal How Much They Spend on CRT and Diversity Teachings
The Governor’s office of Ron DeSantis (R-Fla) announced an investigation to find out how much money woke colleges spend on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The Office of Policy and Budget director Chris Spencer called for the information to be released in a December 28 memo addressed to Florida education commissioner Manny Diaz and State University System of Florida chancellor Raymond Rodrigues.
The memo states that Florida is beginning to consider budget proposals and that the universities need to gather data on diversity initiatives.
“It is important that we have a full understanding of the operational expenses of state institutions,” the memo said, adding “this letter is a request for information from the Department of Education and the State University System regarding the expenditure of state resources on programs and initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory within our state colleges and universities.”
Each Florida college is required to submit a comprehensive list of all staff, programs, and campus activities related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and critical race theory to determine how much hard earned tax payer money went to funding these woke ideologies.
During his inauguration speech after winning a second term in a landslide victory, DeSantis vowed to continue to keep the Left’s progressive message out of kids’ lives, ensuring that students will not be exposed to it.
“We must ensure school systems are responsive to parents and students, not partisan interest groups, and we must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology,” DeSantis said, adding “we will enact more family-friendly policies to make it easier to raise children and we will defend our children against those who seek to rob them of their innocence.”
DeSantis gained a political edge for banning CRT from classrooms and drawing attention to Democrats’ radical agenda. In 2022, the Florida governor signed bills prohibiting children from being taught about sexual orientation and gender identity, which sent the Left off into a rage of fits.
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6 January, 2023
Econo-linguism: The correlation between language and wealth
I personally am rather interested in foreign languages. As is my Serbian partner. I have minor qualifications in three of them. But I don't think it is clear that anybody is rich BECAUSE he speaks another language. I think it is more likely that a third factor (such as IQ) is at work: i.e. rich people are the sort of people who are likely to speak another language.
And in any case, the findings below are slim warrant for teaching or studying another language in High School. A much better case could be made to teach another languge in the grade-school years -- when another language is most easily acquired
Do people who speak more than one language earn more money?
When Forbes released its World Billionaire List for 2022, it became apparent that a pattern could be detected: many of the billionaires were able to speak a second language. In fact, we were able to determine that a staggering 32% of the richest people in the world can speak another language.
Establishing this was achieved by focusing on the languages that these billionaires speak, as some seemed to be more popular than others – but why is this? Are some languages more useful when it comes to being financially successful than others? Do job roles asking for bilingual people tend to pay more than those that don’t?
To answer these burning questions, we analysed whether there was a connection between the languages spoken by the richest people in the world and their wealth, as well as utilising Numbeo and The World Happiness Index to see if richer, ‘happier’ countries came with languages deemed useful in the workplace.
We then focused on the top-paying jobs on LinkedIn and Glassdoor to establish whether particular languages are requested for specific job titles, as well as whether they come with healthier salaries. After all of this, we were truly able to determine whether it pays to know a second language.
Do the richest people on the planet speak more than one language?
Unsurprisingly, at the top of the list sits Tesla mogul Elon Musk, with a net worth of a staggering $219,000,000,000 (£181bn). However, despite regularly being the wealthiest person on earth, Elon does not speak a second language. Third on the list was Benard Arnault, chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton SE who is worth a whopping $158,000,000,000 (£130bn).
His first language is French, but he can also speak English, German and Italian. With Germany sitting as the third richest country in the world and the UK ranking fifth on the same list, it is not surprising that the billionaire opted to learn these languages. As Italy is hailed as a country that is rich in culture, art and history, learning the native language also makes a lot of sense for the investor and art collector.
Third on the list is Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, with a net worth of $107,000,000,000 (£88bn). While English is his first language, the entrepreneur also speaks Russian. Steve Ballmer, 10th on the rich list, is worth $91,400,000,000 (£75bn) and speaks French as well as his first language, English. A recent article detailed that a speech done entirely in French by the Internet giant left Finance Minister Christine Lagarde ‘impressed’, along with a permanent legal residency in France.
32% of the world’s richest people speak a second language
Mukesh Ambani, director of Reliance Industries Ltd and worth $90,700,000,000 (£75.2bn), comes in at 11th on the list. With Gujarati as his first language, the billionaire has managed to forge immense success – unsurprising as this dialect is spoken by over 46 million people, across India, the United States and the UK. As his second language, he also speaks English.
Michael Bloomberg, 13th on the list and worth $82,000,000,000 (£68bn), speaks English as his first language and Spanish as his second. Our data revealed that the top languages spoken by billionaires on this list were Chinese, French and Spanish – which is unsurprising, as China is the third largest country in the world. Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook and worth $67,300,000,000 (£55.8bn) speaks Chinese as his second language. With so many financial possibilities in this country, it is obvious that billionaires would want to be able to make deals there as efficiently as possible.
https://preply.com/en/blog/econo-linguism-the-correlation-between-language-and-wealth/
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CDC Urges Teachers, Administrators, School Nurses to Adopt LGBT Curriculum, Endorse Transgender Identity
Just days after Christmas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention republished a “self-assessment tool” urging teachers, administrators, school health staff, and others to become an “awesome ally” by advocating for LGBT causes in school.
The document cites multiple LGBT activist groups, including a division of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The CDC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about the document, which it originally published in October 2020.
“School administrators: Our LGBTQ inclusivity self-assessment tool can help you quickly gauge inclusivity at your school,” the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health posted on Twitter on Tuesday. “See your score today and learn ways to increase inclusivity.”
The document, “LGBTQ Inclusivity in Schools: A Self-Assessment Tool,” appears on the CDC’s youth website in a section “For Schools” and under the drop-down “Tools for Supporting LGBTQ Youth.”
“Schools play a critical role in supporting the health and academic development of all youth, including the success of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth,” the document states. “Creating and sustaining inclusive school environments, policies, programs, and practices that include LGBTQ youth is one strategy for improving the health and academic success of all youth.”
The document notes that it includes resources from nongovernmental organizations “focused on improving school inclusivity” and that the resources do not represent the CDC’s official opinion. The document further notes that the self-assessment tool is optional, not required, but it touts the document as “a focused, reasonable, and user-friendly approach to identify strategies to increase LGBTQ inclusivity in schools.”
The tool includes four assessments, one each for all users, administrators, educators, and school health services staff. The tool includes three scores: “Commit to Change,” “Beginning to Break Through,” and “Awesome Ally.”
The general self-assessment encourages education leaders to adopt certain mindsets, such as “I cannot assume a student’s gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation,” and urges them to adopt “inclusive” terminology, such as “using individuals’ chosen names/pronouns” and rejecting terms like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” for “neutral terms” like “partner.”
It also encourages leaders to “advocate for LGBTQ inclusive and affirming materials in all school and classroom environments” and to participate in the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance.
This section also lists resources from activist groups such as GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and PFLAG, along with the infamous “Gender Unicorn” graphic presenting biological sex as inherently different from gender identity.
The next section encourages administrators to alter their school health policies to include explicit anti-bullying and nondiscrimination policies for LGBTQ students, to allow “students to use the bathroom/locker room which aligns to their chosen gender,” to allow students to alter their paperwork “to present their chosen name and pronouns, rather than their legal name,” and to allow students “access to age-appropriate LGBTQ content and information.” It also encourages administrators to let teachers “develop LGBTQ inclusive curricula” and to support teachers attending LGBTQ trainings.
The document encourages educators to put up “visual labels” such as “rainbow flags, pink triangles, unisex bathroom signs” marking a classroom as “a safe space for LGBTQ students.” It urges them to teach with “LGBTQ inclusive” content and to attend LGBT trainings.
The document also urges teachers to “describe anatomy and physiology separate from gender (e.g., ‘a body with a penis’ and ‘a body with a vagina’).”
Finally, the document urges health services staff to set up “visual labels” to demonstrate support for LGBT causes in the school’s clinic, to offer intake forms with separate sections for “gender identity and sex at birth,” to use students’ chosen names and pronouns, to offer “LGBTQ-specific health pamphlets” at the school clinic, to “describe anatomy and physiology separate from gender,” and to attend LGBT trainings.
Although the CDC document insists the “self-assessment” is voluntary and does not represent an endorsement of LGBT activist groups, it encourages teachers, administrators, and health staff to endorse LGBT activist symbols, consult with LGBT activist organizations, and change school policies in an LGBT activist direction.
Parents have urged schools to remove certain books from libraries, such as Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” Although the book includes pictures of sexual acts between a boy and a man, a Fairfax County Public Schools committee defended the book, saying it depicts “difficulties nonbinary and asexual individuals may face.” The committee concluded that “the book neither depicts nor describes pedophilia,” but parents have contested this assertion.
While the CDC document does not reference “Gender Queer,” it does cite Teaching Tolerance, a project of the left-leaning SPLC which has since rebranded itself as Learning for Justice. According to critics, the SPLC brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” putting them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In 2012, a man used the SPLC “hate map” to target the Family Research Council in a terrorist attack. He was convicted of terrorism.
As I note in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC fired its co-founder and had its president resign amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019. During that scandal, a former SPLC staffer admitted that the organization’s accusations of “hate” are a “cynical fundraising scam” aimed at “bilking Northern liberals.”
The CDC did not respond to questions regarding its decision to cite the SPLC.
The CDC also did not respond to questions about how it might defend the LGBT “self-assessment tool” as a necessary health measure. It also did not respond to questions regarding its apparent endorsement of transgender ideology.
While many national health organizations support experimental transgender medical interventions in the name of “gender-affirming care,” medical organizations both in the U.S. and around the world are reversing course. The Florida Board of Medicine and the Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine last month approved a new rule banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries for minors.
Karolinska Hospital in Sweden announced in May 2021 that it would not prescribe hormonal treatments to minors under 16. In June 2021, Finland released medical guidelines opposing such drugs for minors, noting: “Cross-sex identification in childhood, even in extreme cases, generally disappears during puberty.” In April 2021, Britain’s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence concluded that the evidence for using puberty-blocking drugs to treat young people is “very low” and that existing studies of the drugs were small and “subject to bias and confounding.”
The CDC also did not respond to concerns that the document represents activism in the name of promoting public health. The agency also declined to comment on whether it would consider promoting alternative materials from organizations that do not endorse LGBT activism.
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DeSantis Takes Aim at ‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion’ Efforts on Florida College Campuses
Florida’s combative Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a possible presidential contender, is poised to ramp up his battle against so-called woke ideology on college campuses, if a letter his office sent to the bosses of the state’s college and university systems is any indication.
The letter, sent just before the New Year to the state’s education commissioner, Manny Diaz, and to the chancellor of the state university system, Ray Rodrigues, said the governor’s office was preparing budget proposals ahead of the 2023 legislative session and requested data “regarding the expenditures of state resources on programs and initiatives related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and critical race theory within our state colleges and universities.”
The letter requested data on the number of staff attached to such programs, the funding spent by each university to support such programs, and the portion of that spending that comes from state sources. The universities were given until January 13 to turn over the information.
Mr. DeSantis has in the past made no bones about his beef with the leftward drift of Florida’s public schools, at both the primary and secondary levels, and what he calls the “indoctrination” of students in the state. His “Stop Woke” act, which has been challenged in court, was aimed at racial instruction in public schools, and a subsequent Parental Rights in Education Act took aim at sexual instruction and gender ideology in lower grades. Now, he appears to be setting his sights more urgently on higher education.
In his second inaugural speech on Tuesday, the governor made clear his intentions. “We must ensure school systems are responsive to parents and to students, not partisan interest groups, and we must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology,” Mr. DeSantis said.
Florida’s state university system consists of 12 universities spread across the state, among them Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, Florida State, and the flagship University of Florida at Gainesville. The request for information from his office was also directed at the leadership of the 28 community and state colleges that make up the Florida College System.
The universities alone in Florida’s state system had an operating budget of $14.3 billion for the 2021-22 school year, a number that is expected to increase to $14.8 billion for 2022-23. About $2.7 billion of that budget comes from state sources, according to the Florida Department of Education. How much of that expenditure goes toward programs revolving around diversity, equity, and inclusion is unclear from the publicly available budget documents.
A recent study by the conservative Heritage Foundation, though, made the case that university spending on diversity and related programs has swollen in recent years, to the point that there are now more staff devoted to these programs on many campuses than there are, for example, history professors. At the University of Michigan alone, the study found, there are more than 163 staffers dedicated to the programs.
A scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has also studied the issue, Max Eden, welcomed the Florida governor’s effort to shed light on the topic. Republicans, he said, are coming around to the notion that “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” is merely a marketing term for “Applied Critical Race Theory.”
“There is no public interest in funding personnel or programs that aim to impose a divisive and intellectually stultifying orthodoxy on institutions of higher education. Hopefully DeSantis’s request is an opening move toward defunding DEI on campus,” Mr. Eden told the Sun. “Republicans should have taken the initiative on this a decade ago, but hopefully DeSantis's leadership will, as it has before, spur copycat efforts in other states.”
Some members of the faculty and staff at the Florida colleges and universities — as well as Democratic lawmakers in Tallahassee — are not on board with Mr. DeSantis’s request, however. The head of United Faculty of Florida, a teachers’ union that has sued to block several of Mr. DeSantis’s measures, Andrew Gothard, called the directive “horrible” and said the union is “deeply concerned” by the precedent.
“Attempts such as these by the governor to chill speech and to intimidate those he disagrees with into remaining silent, altering their curriculum, and silencing their students are an affront to democracy and the American way of life,” Mr. Gothard, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, told the News Service of Florida. “Let those who supported Governor DeSantis in the recent election heed this warning: A man who will silence those with whom he disagrees — in the classroom and beyond — will one day find a reason to silence you as well.”
A Democratic state representative of Jacksonville, Angie Nixon, also attacked the initiative. “In the so-called free state of Florida under Gov. DeSantis, the freedom to run DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs at public colleges and universities appears next on the radar for destruction. Nothing is safe and it’s sickening,” Ms. Nixon said on Twitter.
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5 January, 2023
Do teachers deserve higher pay?
In the article excerpted below, Roger A. Reid, Ph.D. puts up an eloquent argument to say that they do and I guess we would all like to see that. He omits to mention some relevant things, though.
The biggest is that teacher salaries already take a big slice out of state and local budgets. Even a small increase in salaries would therefore add up to a huge hit on the relevant budgets. Multiplying an increase by the large number of teachers makes a salary increase very difficult.
The other thing he overlooks is that a teaching certificate is no guarantee of anything. One hopes that certificated teachers are better at the job than someone who merely has a relevant degree but it is not always true. The school principal should be free to decide that after observing the candidate teacher in action. I must admit a personal interest here. I taught High School with very good results even though I had a degree only, no specific teacher qualification.
So I think the policies adopted by Governor Doug Ducey are reasonable. Not only are eased qualifications reasonable but even the resort to larger class sizes can be reasonable. The research generally shows little correlation between class size and educational outcomes. Putting a large number of pupils before a good teacher can have better resuts than putting smaller classes under mediocre teachers
So, sorry, Roger. You are being too one-eyed about this
The job teachers do today determines the quality and condition of tomorrow’s world.
It’s a foundational component of predicting how well we’ll get along with others. It also influences how many young people decide to pursue a particular profession. And that’s in addition to imparting a minimum level of proficiency with math, reading, and a general understanding of how the world works.
It’s a big responsibility.
And you’d think someone with the credentials, experience, education, patience, vision, and perspective to perform this job would be at the top of the list of professional compensation — similar to a doctor, lawyer, or the CEO of a major company. Because a teacher’s paycheck is more than compensation. It’s an investment that pays future dividends.
But that’s not the reality.
The reality is a sad mix of budget cuts, low salaries, and unsafe working conditions that essentially say, “Why did you become a teacher? We don’t value you or your contribution.”
Why such a discrepancy between the importance of the job and the compensation?
State legislators say they don’t have the money.
That’s a lie. They don’t have money for teachers. Conversely, they have plenty of money for pet projects, political grandstanding, and funding agenda-based projects that buy votes, seniority, and tenure.
The result? Teachers are leaving — walking away from an honorable, vital, and necessary profession because they can’t financially support themselves and their families.
To put that into perspective, let’s compare the compensation of two professional groups. The median compensation for a public school teacher is just over $51,000. By comparison, a family doctor can expect a median income of $ 197,000.
But wait! Certainly, a doctor’s job is much more important than a teacher’s, right?
If you believe that, ask your family doctor what inspired her to pursue a medical career. Ask her how important her teachers were in motivating her to become a doctor.
If compensation is any indication of how much we value the profession, teachers might as well pack it up and hit the road. Because frankly, it’s pathetic — an embarrassing reminder of how much we take teachers for granted.
Seems like a teacher shortage would be enough to motivate legislators to re-consider their budgets for public education. And it has. But not in the way you might think.
The answer coming out of Arizona isn’t in favor of higher wages. No, instead of paying teachers what they’re worth, the intellectual brain-trust that is the Arizona legislature has decided the answer to the problem is to lower the hiring standards — to be less scrutinous when hiring those who perform the most important job in the country.
In a nutshell, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey recently signed legislation that creates exceptions to laws that previously required traditional public school teachers to have a college degree and/or to have completed some form of supervised, in-classroom training.
And that means the current generation of Arizona parents can now anticipate a less qualified individual taking over the responsibility for the education of their children.
https://medium.com/publishous/roger-reid-teaching-is-a-thankless-profession-e9771e4943d
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With Schools Ditching Merit for Diversity, Families of High Achievers Head for the Door
Alex Shilkrut has deep roots in Manhattan, where he has lived for 16 years, works as a physician, and sends his daughter to a public elementary school for gifted students in coveted District 2.
It’s a good life. But Shilkrut regretfully says he may leave the city, as well as a job he likes in a Manhattan hospital, because of sweeping changes in October that ended selective admissions in most New York City middle schools.
These merit-based schools, which screened for students who met their high standards, will permanently switch to a lottery for admissions that will almost certainly enroll more blacks and Latinos in the pursuit of racial integration.
Shilkrut is one of many parents who are dismayed by the city’s dismantling of competitive education. He says he values diversity but is concerned that the expectation that academic rigor will be scaled back to accommodate a broad range of students in a lottery is what’s driving him and other parents to seek alternatives.
Although it’s too early to know how many students might leave the school system due to the enrollment changes, some parents say they may opt for private education at $50,000 a year and others plan to uproot their lives for the suburbs despite the burdens of such moves.
“We will very likely leave the public schools,” says Shilkrut, adding that he knows 10 Manhattan families who also plan to depart. “And if these policies continue, there won’t be many middle- and upper middle-class families left in the public schools.”
A National Battle Over Merit
The battle in New York City is an example writ large of a high-stakes gamble playing out in cities across the country – essentially a large experiment in urban education aiming to improve the decades-old lag in performance of mostly black and Latino students. By ending screened admissions that segregate poorer performers and instead placing them in lottery schools with higher achievers, the theory goes, all students benefit.
But the research cuts both ways on the academic impact of mixed-ability classrooms, and many New York City parents say they don’t want to roll the dice on their kids’ education. If a large number of families do exit the city’s public schools in 2023, it would mean another financial blow to a system that has already lost more than 100,000 students since the beginning of the pandemic. Yet some of these parents may decide to remain in the public system and augment their kids’ education with advanced after-school classes, a common practice.
“When desegregation policies have been adopted in other cities, some parents who object stick it out and adapt,” says David Armor, a professor emeritus at George Mason University who has extensively researched integration policies. “But I would expect some degree of middle-class flight in New York City given how the lottery is going to change the academic composition of the middle schools.”
Diversity advocates – school educators, local politicians, and progressive nonprofits and parents – dismiss the threat of an exodus as scaremongering while they score wins. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, an affluent, progressive NYC neighborhood, it was parents who led the charge to end selective middle schools several years ago in a prelude to the citywide policy shift this fall. But Park Slope isn’t representative of the more moderate politics of much of the city like Manhattan’s District 2, where most parents at a recent series of community meetings strongly backed selective education.
Nationwide, about 185 school districts and charters in 39 states have adopted integration policies, ranging from redrawing school boundaries to preferential admissions for low-income and black and Latino students, according to the Century Foundation, an advocacy group. A quarter of them have been implemented since 2017.
“Students benefit educationally and socially from racially and economically integrated schools,” says a report from New York Appleseed, an advocacy group that lobbied for the removal of admission screens. “Society and our political systems benefit from the reduction in racial prejudice.”
But advocates don’t win them all, suffering a remarkable setback in progressive San Francisco in 2022. After the Board of Education angered some parents, particularly Asian Americans, by shifting Lowell, the city’s premier selective high school, to a lottery system during the pandemic, a grassroots campaign formed and successfully recalled three members in a landslide vote. The new board voted to keep screened enrollment at Lowell.
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SGO Raises $1.7 Million for Students to Attend Christian Schools
Beginning with its launch just nine months ago through the end of 2022, the Ohio Christian Education Network Scholarship Granting Organization (OCEN SGO) raised $1.7 million for student scholarships to attend Christian schools. Thanks to a surge of Ohioans taking advantage of a new state tax credit for a gift to OCEN SGO, thousands of students will receive financial assistance for the 2023-24 school year that provides access to a life-giving education at the Christian school of their choice.
The state tax credit is granted to OCEN SGO donors on a dollar-for-dollar basis up to $750 per individual or $1,500 for a couple filing jointly. So a gift that blesses worthy students essentially costs the donor nothing, as their tax liability is reduced by the amount of their gift.
“When we launched OCEN SGO, we had a vision to make Christian education affordable for every student in our state. The first year of giving toward this vision far surpassed what we had originally hoped for in year one,” said Troy McIntosh, Executive Director of the Ohio Christian Education Network. “The way people across the state generously responded indicates just how strongly they believe in the importance of Christian schools in today’s culture. At OCEN, we believe providing students an education that is rooted in a biblical worldview is among the most powerful strategies to win the hearts and minds of our children for God’s kingdom.”
OCEN SGO plans to make 2023 an even bigger year, with more participating schools, more scholarship funds, and more student recipients. Contributions to the scholarship fund can be made by visiting ohiocen.org/sgo. Donors may select the participating school of their choice to benefit from their gift, and a worthy student attending that school will be the recipient.
“We believe every student in our state should have access to an education that teaches them to frame their thinking with a biblical perspective. The great problems of our day will only be solved by a new generation who knows how to apply Christian thought to those problems,” said McIntosh.
From ocen@ccv.org
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4 January, 2023
General Motors Funds Transgenderism Efforts in Children’s Classrooms
General Motors (GM) provided a grant to a pro-transgender organization that supplies kindergarten and elementary classrooms with children’s books that support its ideology.
The Detroit-based automaker made a donation last year to the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s (GLSEN) “Rainbow Library” Program, according to its 2021 Social Impact Report (pdf).
The pro-transgender organization is known for lobbying school districts to allow boys who have undergone sex changes to play on girls’ sports teams and use female-specific restrooms, Breitbart reported.
The GM report admitted to funding the “Rainbow Library’s” efforts to provide “supportive curriculum materials and book sets that are LGBTQ+ centered, racially diverse, and multicultural to K-12 schools.”
“This innovative program also provides ongoing support and professional guidance for educators to create inclusive, supportive and identity-safe classrooms nationwide,” it continued.
GM did not mention how much money was awarded to the pro-transgender group, but did it provide “$86.7 million in cash and in-kind donations to nonprofits working to help create inclusive solutions to social issues around the world” in 2021, according to the report.
Pro-Transgender Organization Attempts to Change School Curriculum
GLSEN has been accused of allegedly trying to add “trans and non-binary” gender theory into school policies and curriculum.
According to its website, GLSEN provides a list of lesson plans, “educator guides” and professional development training for educators.
Although the GLSEN has no complete list of the titles in their program, the books were selected based on the Stonewall Award and the Rainbow Book List of the American Library Association, according to School Library Journal.
One of the books, which can be found on Amazon, is called “I am Jazz,” about a boy who discovered that he was a girl from the age of two.
Another example from the book list is the sexually explicit “Gender Queer” by Maia Kabobe, which contains depictions of sexual activities and descriptions of fantasies and experiments.
Megan Brock, a parent’s rights advocate, accused GLSEN of attempting to exploit their “Rainbow Library” program to “covertly groom children and influence educational policy,” in a Twitter post.
Brock posted a video of a GLSEN meeting of what appears to be staff discussing the promotion of transgender books to children.
In addition to children’s books, the organization has been trying to influence school math departments with articles like “How Do We Make Math Class More Inclusive of Trans and Non-Binary Identities?”
Schools And Educators Promote Transgender Group’s Agenda
GLSEN created a “Trans Action Kit” (pdf) for students and teachers to engage in pro-LGBT activism and encouraged the construction of pseudo-religious altars for the celebration of its “Transgender Day of Remembrance,” so kids could pray for deceased transgender persons.
Meanwhile, Chevrolet, which is also owned by GM, donated an additional $25,000 to GLSEN, The Post Millennial reported.
“With this latest LGBTQ+ focused partnership, we are building on that history and reinforcing Chevy’s commitment to driving substantive cultural progress,” said Chevrolet’s Vice President of Marketing, Steve Majoros.
Over the past several years, GM said it has been supportive of LGBT workers, according to its website.
“In recent years, GM and Chevrolet have provided grants to GLSEN to support their work to create safe, supportive and LGBTQ-inclusive learning environments for students. This is just one of the many initiatives and causes that GM has supported as the company provides philanthropic grants to hundreds of nonprofits each year,” wrote a spokeswoman for GM and Chevrolet to The Epoch Times.
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Masks make a comeback: Hundreds of thousands of students across the US will be forced to wear face coverings when classes go back
Hundreds of thousands of students across the US will be forced to wear face masks in class when schools go back this week as controversial mandates make a return.
Despite Covid infection rates plateauing for months, elementary and high schools in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania have made face coverings a condition of entry for students returning from the holidays.
Education officials claim the policy is to prevent a boom in respiratory illnesses after increased mixing during the first normal Christmas and New Year in years.
But there is little evidence that face masks actually reduce infection rates, and mounting research shows the mandates stunted children's social development and education, and robbed them of vital immunity to other seasonal bugs like flu and RSV.
There are growing concerns that damaging Covid policies could creep back into American life after the US Government announced all passengers from China - suffering a major outbreak - would be tested upon entry, despite no proof that policy works either.
Covid infections in the US are running at around 400,000 per week now compared to 4 million this time last year and 1.3 million the previous year.
Weekly cases have been stable since late summer, which has been attributed to high levels of immunity in populations through vaccination and waves of infections.
Schools in New Jersey are justifying the latest mask mandates due to the state suffering increases in Covid, flu and RSV cases.
It comes as 22 states were recording 'very high' flu activity in the week before Christmas - down from 26 the week prior. Six states were recording the highest levels of transmission, down from eight in early December.
America's flu season came unseasonably early, although cases of both flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) cratered for the second straight week just before Christmas — meaning the 'tripledemic' in America could soon reach its end.
Canada joins US in requiring all Chinese travelers to test negative for Covid
Travelers from Covid-stricken China will need a negative Covid test to enter Canada and Australia from this weekend
RSV is also a few weeks ahead of the flu crisis. Cases peaked in November but rates remain very high. Both have led to hospitals, particularly pediatric hospitals, being overwhelmed.
The bacterial infection Strep A is also rising among children and has killed at least two in Colorado. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an urgent advisory message about the infection before Christmas, notifying doctors and public health authorities of the situation.
Paradoxically, masks and lockdowns were blamed for the surge in minors because it prevented them from developing the natural immunity they would have otherwise gained.
Paterson Public Schools in Passaic County and Camden City School District in New Jersey became the latest to enforce masks indoors for students.
Paterson Public Schools' new rule will begin from tomorrow (January 3) and apply to its 25,000 students from pre-kindergarten through to 12th grade.
In a letter to parents, the school district's superintendent Eileen Shafer said: 'I know this is a relief to some, and a frustration to others. No matter what your position may be, I ask for your cooperation.'
She added: 'Please continue to maintain universal masking throughout our buildings and we encourage you to take all other precautions against the spread of the Covid-19, RSV, flu virus including frequent hand washing, avoiding large gatherings, and staying home when sick.'
Camden City School District, which has 75,000 students between kindergarten and 12th grade, will ask anyone entering its buildings to mask up inside for at least two weeks, until January 17.
The school district superintendent said in a letter to families that the move was 'in an effort to be proactive and remain vigilant'.
The school district of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania is also forcing students to wear masks for at least 10 days, starting January 3 and ending January 13 if it is not extended.
Meanwhile, Boston Public Schools (BPS) in Massachusetts announced on Friday that students and staff would be asked to wear face coverings between January 4 and January 13.
BPS said in a statement the temporary masking was an 'ask and expectation' and 'not a mandate', and said no one would be sent home or disciplined if they refused to wear one.
And in Washington state, Wilson Elementary school mandated masks for a week in December due to rising respiratory illnesses leaving roughly 30 percent of its students absent on one day.
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Las Vegas parents SUE school district for $50,000 after making daughter, 15, read out X-rated assignment about 'd**ks' and lesbianism in theater class - that was even too explicit to be read aloud at school board meeting
Two Las Vegas parents have sued their daughter's school district after the 15-year-old was made to memorize and read out a sexually-explicit monologue in front of her theater class.
Parents Candra and Terrell Evans filed the $50,000 lawsuit against the Clark County School District and its superintendent, Dr. Jesus Jara, alleging they engaged in 'unlawful grooming and abuse of a minor' over the assignment which they characterized as 'pornographic material.'
They say their unnamed daughter, a student at the Las Vegas Academy of the Arts, was made to perform the monologue written by a fellow student - in which a narrator came out as lesbian and talked about not liking 'd**ks.'
The passage was so lewd that Ms. Evans' microphone was cut off as she read it aloud during a school district board meeting last spring, and she was admonished for violating the board's decorum rules.
The Evans allege that last March their daughter's theater teacher, Kelly Hawes, told her students to write monologues which their classmates would then memorize and read aloud before the class.
The lawsuit said the monologue their daughter was given 'contained explicit, obscene and sexually violent material,' and that Hawes 'helped the other student edit their obscenely violent pornographic monologue knowing that it would then be provided to another student to read, memorize and perform in front of the class.'
The monologue the 15-year-old performed involved a woman telling her ex-boyfriend that she was a lesbian, described how she never like his penis or having sex with him, that she'd begun sleeping with a college roommate.
In addition to reading the monologue aloud, the girl was made to act it out in front of the class.
According to the lawsuit, the monologue the Evans' daughter was made to read was as follows:
'I don't love you. It's not you, it's just (looks down) your d***. I don't like your d*** or any d*** in that case. I cheated Joe. We were long distance and I'm in college and me and this girl, my roommate, started having some drinks and you know, I thought it was a one-time thing but then we started going out for coffee, and started sleeping in the same bed.'
'I never thought it would get this far but God, it was like fireworks, and made me realize that with you it was always like a pencil sharpener that keeps getting jammed. I've tried to look at it from all different perspectives, but the truth is, I'm a f***** lesbian. I'll never love you or any man, or any f****** d***.
'I hope you find a nice straight girl because that's not me, and I'm tired of pretending that it is.'
Ms. Evans learned of the assignment a month after it was performed and raised concerns about it with school administrators. An administrator then told her the school district would handle the issue.
'[The administrator] empathized with them that he would be very upset if he found out that assignment had been given to his daughter,' the lawsuit read. 'He told them that plaintiffs were handling the issue better than he would and that it would not be swept under the rug. He promised he would make sure that it never happened again.
'Further, he agreed that [the teacher] should have stopped [the teenager] as soon as she heard the first line of the monologue.'
The Evans then agreed to let the administrator discuss the assignment with their daughter, but only if a female member of faulty was present. However, during the meeting with their daughter only the male administrator was there.
The parents then called for another meeting with more staff members, who then 'defended the obscene monologue and then blamed [the student] for reading it, stating that she could have said 'no,' but she didn't.'
The lawsuit said some faculty members later 'backtracked and admitted that the assignment was not appropriate for the classroom.'
'At any point, Hawes could have prevented this pornographic material from getting into the hands of children, but she refused,' the lawsuit said. 'When confronted about this, [Las Vegas Academy of the Arts Principal Scott Walker] and CCSD did nothing.'
According to her biography on the Vegas Theater Company website, Hawes is a Massachusetts native who graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
In May, the Evans informed the regional superintendent about the situation, and an official agreed to investigate.
Shortly after they also spoke with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, who told them they needed to file a report with the Clark County School District Police. The lawsuit said the Evans filed a report, but it was falsified by an officer who 'conspired with others.'
Later that month Ms. Evans brought her complaints to a meeting of the Clark County School District board (CCSD), where she tried to read aloud from the monologue before being silenced.
'I am going to read you an assignment given to my 15-year-old daughter at a local high school,' she said at the meeting. 'This will be horrifying for me to read to you but that will give you perspective on how she must have felt when her teacher required her to memorize this and to act it out in front of her entire class.'
As she began to read, her microphone cut and board trustee Evelyn Garcia Morales told her off for using the profane language.
'That you for your comment,' Morales said. 'Forgive me, we are not using profanity. This is a public meeting; I ask for decorum.'
'If you don't want me to read it to you, what was it like for my 15-year-old daughter to have to memorize pornographic material,' Evans replied.
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3 January, 2023
High Marks for This Education Policy, but Still Room for Improvement
As a classroom teacher and mother of 10 children, Esther Fleurant knows that every child has different needs. And she knows how important education is for their futures.
“I love for my kids to know more than I did,” says Esther. “Knowledge is powerful. You give that to your kids, and you open the world to them.”
But finding the learning environment that’s the right fit for each child can be tough. Fortunately for Esther, she and her kids live in New Hampshire, where they have access to Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs). This has allowed her family to explore a variety of options, including different private schools and homeschooling.
State lawmakers created EFAs last year to expand access to a wide range of education options. Families earning up to 300% of the federal poverty level ($83,250 for a family of four in 2022-23) can use EFAs to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curricula, online courses, educational therapies and more.
The EFAs were an instant hit with families. Last fall, more than 1,600 students received EFAs—about 1% of students in the state. This school year, there are more than 3,000 EFA students. Additionally, more than 1,300 students are using tax-credit scholarships—up from last year by about 30%—and about 5,000 students are attending public charter schools.
New Hampshire’s commitment to empowering families with so many education options is one reason the Live Free or Die state fared so well in the Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card—a survey of all 50 states in the areas of education choice, academic transparency, regulatory freedom for schools and a high return on investment for taxpayer spending on education.
New Hampshire ranked 19th in the nation for education freedom overall and 15th for its education choice policies.
Studies find that offering children additional public and private learning options results in higher levels of achievement and school attainment, greater civic participation and tolerance, and lower levels of crime. Choice policies even benefit students who remain in the district school system. Of 28 studies of the effects of education choice policies on the performance of district schools, 25 found statistically significant positive effects.
New Hampshire could improve its education choice score by expanding eligibility to its EFAs to all K-12 students.
More parents are choosing how and where their children learn today because watchdogs have found educators are using radical ideas about gender and race in classrooms. Surveys taken around the country find most parents say that the idea that America is systemically racist or that minor-age children can “choose” their “gender” does not reflect their values—nor are such ideas based on facts. New Hampshire lawmakers were among the first in the U.S. to reject the application of critical race theory in K-12 classrooms by adopting a proposal that says no teacher or student can be compelled to believe the theory’s discriminatory concepts. In our report, New Hampshire ranks 13th for academic transparency based, in part, on this provision.
A high degree of transparency enables parents to hold schools accountable directly. The best way to ensure quality is not through top-down regulations and red tape, but rather bottom-up accountability. New Hampshire takes the latter approach, ranking ninth in the nation for regulatory freedom. Schools and teachers have a lot of leeway to operate as they see fit, and parents provide accountability through their freedom to choose the schools that work best for their kids.
Still, there’s room to improve by making it easier for aspiring teachers to enter the profession. Policymakers could do that by opening alternative pathways to teacher certification (or by eliminating teacher certification requirements altogether) and by allowing full reciprocity of teacher licensure with other states.
New Hampshire policymakers also need to do more to get spending under control, particularly at the local level. The average per-pupil expenditure, when adjusted for regional cost of living, is the 10th highest in the nation. High spending combined with a significant unfunded pension liability makes for a low return on investment for taxpayers—43rd in the nation.
One area where policymakers could rein in spending is non-teaching staff. New Hampshire’s district schools employ 12 non-teachers for every 10 teachers. This may help to swell union ranks but does little to keep taxpayer resources in classrooms to help prepare students.
In short, New Hampshire has much to be proud of and much to improve.
As for Esther’s children, she says she can “see how they are growing.” Homeschooling with an EFA has given them “the liberty to try different things. Giving your child a chance to get to know themselves is huge.”
All children should have the same opportunities. As Esther observed: “It’s better when you have choices.”
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/high-marks-education-policy-still-room-improvement
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Why I’m leaving college and choosing education over indoctrination
By CJ Pearson
Higher education isn’t what it used to be; in fact, it’s become the stark opposite of what it was intended to be.
What was once an arena of competing and dueling beliefs with fertile soil for the cultivation of bold and fresh ideas has become a barren desert, occupied almost exclusively by the woke-left agenda.
It’s become an institution more fixated on teaching students what to think than how to think. It’s focused on turning students into perpetual victims, anti-American sympathizers and — if it really hits the jackpot — full-fledged social-justice warriors by graduation.
And that delusion is why I’m leaving — even as a University of Alabama junior, with just three semesters to go.
I no longer have any interest in paying to be told my blackness is a disability and all white people are evil. And asked what my pronouns are when — at least in my opinion — it should be clear as day.
When I made the decision to go to college, it was a no-brainer. It was what I was supposed to do, or at least that’s what I was led to believe.
It felt not only as if it were the right choice; it felt like the only choice. And this wasn’t a feeling unique to me but one shared by many among the millions of students who enter college every single year — and their parents, who more often than not are the ones footing the bill to send them there.
But what if I were to tell you the feeling is rooted in a lie? That, according to a Georgetown University study, there are 30 million jobs paying more than $55,000 a year that don’t require a college degree? That there are six-figure opportunities in careers such as welding, carpentry and even tech that not only don’t require a degree but also don’t come with a prerequisite of hating America?
The woke university implosion — and what comes next
Or what if I were to tell you that this lie — implanted deep into the psyche of our society — is not by accident but by design, as it allows leftist professors to act with near-absolute impunity?
It allows institutions like Stanford University to shamelessly embrace the absurd: labeling words such as “American” and “grandfather” racist and harmful. It allows Rutgers University to declare a war on grammar — casting it aside as racist in an effort to “stand with and respond to” the Black Lives Matter movement. And it’s why places like Berkeley — once heralded as a bastion of free speech — have become symbolic of everything wrong with higher education today.
Colleges and universities act with impunity because they’re guided by the belief that we need them more than they need us. Conservatives must make it clear that’s simply not the case.
Colleges are a business. And it is high time conservatives start making their voices heard using their dollars.
If your college goes woke, help them go broke: Withhold your tuition dollars, suspend your alumni contributions or skip a football game or two. (And if you’re a fan of Stanford University football but not a fan of their new harmful-language guide, it should be especially easy: They went 3-9 this past season!)
All jokes aside, a false dichotomy has existed among conservatives for far too long: that they must accept the status quo of America’s college campuses or forgo their dreams of living a successful and fruitful life altogether.
But this dichotomy is exactly that — false — and conservatives have not just the means to fight back against the woke agenda that pervades our campuses but a moral obligation as well.
I say this all to note that I am not opposed to college.
I enjoyed the vast majority of my time at the University of Alabama, but even in the Yellowhammer State, my campus experience didn’t come without its challenges. In my freshman year, my dorm-room door was plastered with an expletive-laden anti-Trump posting. During my sophomore year, while campaigning for student government, I was targeted by my school newspaper — slandered as a racist, labeled a homophobe and called a threat to our campus’ marginalized communities. The author of that piece is a white male.
I have thick skin, however. And my decision to leave has less to do with my own campus than it does with having a deeply held passion for helping other conservative students in far less-ideal situations hold their own on theirs.
We cannot afford to lose our college campuses to the radical left. That would mean we have lost a generation. And to have lost a generation would mean we have lost our country.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/02/why-im-leaving-college-and-choosing-education-over-indoctrination/
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US News & World Report to revamp ‘flawed’ law school rankings: report
US News & World Report is overhauling parts of its controversial law school rankings after deans at more than a dozen top law schools slammed the value of the powerful and closely followed list.
On Monday, US News sent a letter to the deans of the 188 law schools it ranks, saying it would make changes to its criteria, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Specifically, US News said it would put less weight on reputational surveys completed by deans, faculty, lawyers and judges, and it won’t take into account per-student expenditures that favor the wealthiest schools.
As part of the changes, the new rankings, which will be released next year, will count graduates with school-funded public-interest legal fellowships or those who go on to additional graduate programs the same as they would other employed graduates, the Journal said.
US News did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The change comes weeks after US News’ rankings team held meetings with more than 100 deans and other law school administrators. The publication was pressured to re-evaluate its rankings system after the perennially No. 1-ranked Yale Law School said in November that it would no longer provide information to help US News compile its list.
“The U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed,” Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken said at the time. “Its approach not only fails to advance the legal profession, but stands squarely in the way of progress.”
Affirmative action drove Yale, Harvard to leave U.S. News rankings: Vivek Ramaswamy
After Yale’s declaration, Harvard Law School followed suit the same day, and by the end of the week, top law schools Georgetown, Columbia, the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford also moved to skip engaging in the powerful list.
When the dust settled, 12 of the 14 top-rated schools said they wouldn’t provide the publication with any additional information for the rankings. Some law schools that said they would continue to share the requested information also criticized the existing system, the Journal said.
According to the letter, Robert Morse, US News’ chief data strategist, and Stephanie Salmon, senior vice president for data and information strategy, spent most of last month in Zoom meetings with deans, coming to a compromise.
“Based on those discussions, our own research and our iterative rankings review process, we are making a series of modifications in this year’s rankings that reflect those inputs and allow us to publish the best available data,” they wrote in Monday’s letter.
The change in methodology could be due to necessity. The Journal said that while US News gleans much of its data from the American Bar Association and said it would rank schools whether or not they cooperated, the publication relies on schools to provide the spending figures and to complete peer-review surveys.
“If the top 15 schools suddenly drop down to No. 50, the rankings don’t have much credibility,” Russell Korobkin, interim dean of the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Journal.
The old ranking system used a survey completed by academics, which counted for 25% of its total score, the Journal said. A survey for judges, law firm hiring partners and other attorneys made up another 15% of a school’s score.
US News did not break down what weight those surveys would carry under the new system.
Other issues that were of concern included how US News considers diversity and loan forgiveness and potentially encourages awarding scholarships based on LSAT scores rather than on financial need. In Monday’s letter, the publication said those issues “will require additional time and collaboration to address” so they won’t be overhauled now.
US News also said it plans on offering more detailed profiles of schools moving forward.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/02/us-news-world-report-to-revamp-flawed-law-school-rankings-report/
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2 January, 2023
In the name of ‘equity,’ companies are now ignoring educational achievement
By David Christopher Kaufman
Today, at least two-thirds of higher education institutions, including Harvard and Stanford, don’t require the SAT for admission. The American Bar Association recently announced it will drop the LSAT as an admissions requirement for law school. And now, some are calling for the prestigious MCAT to be scrapped as the gold standard for medical school admissions — all in the name of racial equity.
Now, the latest standard on the chopping block are colleges themselves, as a recent job posting for a director position demonstrates.
A LinkedIn posting by HR&A Advisors, the TriBeCa-based real estate consultancy, asked applicants for the $121,668- to $138,432-a-year position to remove “all undergraduate and graduate school name references” from their résumés and only cite the degree itself. A quick spin through a few other HR&A job postings confirmed that this policy extends company-wide as part of their “ongoing work to build a hiring system that is free from bias and based on candidate merit and performance.”
At a time when equity and inclusion policies have become corporate must-haves, efforts to ignore educational bona fides for new hires are hardly surprising. After all, as colleges and even the military (which no longer requires a high school diploma) drop the most basic entry requirements, why shouldn’t the private sector follow suit?
There’s no doubt that access to fancy schools and pricy education has historically shut out racial and economic minorities from many employment arenas — particularly at the highest ends of the earning spectrum. But obscuring education histories won’t solve these inequities. It simply creates new ones.
For one thing, education still matters to companies like HR&A. If it didn’t, they would ask candidates to entirely remove schooling from their CVs, not just school names.
Secondly, education also matters to job applicants. Many have worked hard and taken out loans to acquire college degrees that, they think, mean something to the HR&As of the world. Many have also devoted hours to the college sports teams, academic societies and other extracurricular activities that are both resume-building and deeply rewarding.
I myself attended universities (Brandeis, NYU) that were far above my family’s affordability level precisely because I knew they were investments in my long-term earning potential as well as a way to keep me on the straight and narrow in high school. Sure, as with many Americans — particularly African-Americans like myself — I took on student debt. But the quest for academic success not only helped me avoid (most) teenage troubles, it also helped me secure a career with good pay and a strong sense of self-worth and satisfaction.
Policies like HR&As are not just punitive, they’re downright lazy. Telling young people —particularly the young people-of-color this “school-blind hiring” purports to benefit—that academic prestige doesn’t matter literally reinforces the worst stereotypes of minority cultures. It says academic prestige doesn’t matter to them.
Furthermore, for HR folks and recruiters, ignoring educational bona fides — while appearing benevolent—is a missed opportunity to truly learn, as they say in woke-speak, about the “lived experiences” of the diverse workforce they are so desperate to attract.
Many black students (like my own grandparents, for instance) have attended Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). These are not just places of learning, but integral components of their graduates’ identities. HBCUs mean something: they matter. And yet, these well-intentioned initiatives, led mostly by white liberals, completely erase that meaning.
This is why school-blind hiring feels so frustrating — and phony. In this period of quiet-quitting and mass resignations, it offers already unmotivated workers one less task to tick off while burnishing their anti-bias credentials for literally doing nothing.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that graduates of schools less costly or “lower ranking” than my own should be denied a chance at the American Dream. Rather, hiring teams need to work harder to figure out how to get them there without erasing the educational achievements of others.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/31/in-the-name-of-equity-companies-are-now-ignoring-education/
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Federal appeals court backs Florida school district that blocked transgender student from using boys bathroom
A federal appeals court has ruled in favor of a Florida school district’s policy that separates school bathrooms by biological sex.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals announced its 7-4 decision on Friday, ruling that the St. Johns County School Board did not discriminate against transgender students based on sex, or violate federal civil rights law by requiring transgender students to use gender-neutral bathrooms or bathrooms matching their biological sex.
The court’s decision was split down party lines, with seven justices appointed by Republican presidents siding with the school district and four justices appointed by Democratic presidents siding with Drew Adams, a biological female, who sued the district in 2017 after not being allowed to use the boys restroom.
A three-judge panel from the appeals court previously sided with Adams in 2020, but the full appeals court decided to take up the case.
Judge Barbara Lagoa wrote in the majority opinion that the school board policy advances the important governmental objective of protecting students’ privacy in school bathrooms. She said the district’s policy does not violate the law because it’s based on biological sex, not gender identity.
Judge Jill Pryor wrote in a dissenting opinion that the interest of protecting privacy is not absolute and must coexist alongside fundamental principles of equality, specifically where exclusion implies inferiority.
Two other federal appeals courts have ruled that transgender students can use bathrooms that accord with their identities.
Friday's decision increases the likelihood that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the issue.
"This is an aberrant ruling that contradicts the rulings of every other circuit to consider the question across the country," Tara Borelli, a spokesperson for LGBT advocacy group Lambda Legal who provided aid to Adams, told Fox News Digital in a statement. "It is also lengthy. We will be reviewing and evaluating this distressing decision over the weekend and will have a fuller response next week."
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Pandemic learning loss could cost students thousands in income over their lifetime: study
A Stanford University study showed that learning loss suffered by students during pandemic restrictions could result in lower incomes throughout their lifetime.
"The pandemic has had devastating effects in many areas, but none are as potentially severe as those on education," the study's author, Eric A. Hanushek, wrote in its conclusion. "There is overwhelming evidence that students in school during the closure period and during the subsequent adjustments to the pandemic are achieving at significantly lower levels than would have been expected without the pandemic."
The study, entitled "The Economic Cost of the Pandemic," analyzed National Assessment of Educational Progress data and found that between 2019 and 2022, test scores in math and English dropped an average of eight points across the country. The drastic drop came after nearly two decades of progress, the study noted, erasing all the gains in test scores made between 2000 and 2019.
Hanushek notes that while most policymakers and the media have focused solely on the pandemic's impact on test scores, the loss in student achievements could have severe economic repercussions. According to the study, students enrolled in schools during pandemic restrictions will face an average of a two to nine percent drop in lifetime earnings, resulting in states facing a 0.6 to 2.9 percent drop in total GDP.
"At the extreme, California is estimated to have lost $1.3 trillion because of learning losses during the pandemic. These losses are permanent unless a state’s schools can get better than their pre-pandemic levels," the study reads.
Unless schools are able to make up for the declines, students enrolled in schools during the pandemic will enter the workforce with lower cognitive skills needed to succeed in a constantly evolving economy.
"Extensive research demonstrates a simple fact: those with higher achievement and greater cognitive skills earn more," the study reads. "The evidence suggests that the value of higher achievement persists across a student’s entire work life."
The study notes that the "United States rewards skills more than almost all other developed countries," something that will hamper current students' ability to navigate a "technologically driven economy where workers are continually adjusting to new jobs and new ways of doing things."
Hanushek concludes that while the responsibility for the losses does not solely fall on schools, it will be up to them to lead the effort towards recovering lost skills. However, the study warns that efforts so far have been insufficient to make up the gap.
"Efforts to date have not been sufficient to arrest the losses," the study concludes. "If the schools are not made better, there will be continuing economic impacts as individuals and the nation will suffer from a society with lower skills."
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1 January, 2023
AZ to Require Parental Permission For Schools to Refer to Students As Different Pronouns
State senator-elect John Kavanagh (R-AZ) introduced a proposal that would require parental permission for schools to refer to students' desired pronouns that are opposite their biological sex.
“An employee or independent contractor of a school district or charter school may not knowingly address, identify or refer to a student who is under eighteen years of age by a pronoun that differs from the pronoun that aligns with the student’s biological sex unless the school district or charter school receives written permission from the student’s parent,” Kavanagh’s proposal read.
The bill also protects those who have moral and religious obligations. It states that a school district or charter school may not require staff to refer to a person that differs from their biological pronoun if it contradicts their religious or moral convictions.
“Under my bill, you can call a person by a different pronoun or you can even call the person by a name associated with the opposite biological gender, so long as the parents have given permission,” the Republicans said.
Kavanagh added that this will help students who need help, find it.
“Transgender students are often under psychological stress… in fact, there’s a term called gender dysphoria and that type of condition needs parental assistance and perhaps even medical attention that the parents refer the students to. This cannot happen if the school keeps the parents in the dark,” he continued.
However, newly-elected governor Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) could potentially throw the bill away.
“I’m not willing to assume that Gov. Hobbs would want to keep parents in the dark, especially when the children have a condition that results overall in higher suicide rates,” Kavanagh said, adding, “I think parents need to know, they need to get help for the children and counseling. I’m not going to assume the governor would oppose that.”
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‘Voice in the Wilderness’ Mounts Run for Harvard Board
One of Harvey Silverglate’s first cases was defending protesting students who took over Harvard’s University Hall in 1969. The long-time lawyer has now found a new front for his fight for civil rights: a bid for Harvard’s Board of Overseers, its governing body tasked with supervising the university’s “overarching academic mission.”
The crusading outsider, who founded the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is making a move for the inner circle. He promises to shine a light into the “dark crevices” of a university he feels has lost its way.
Mr. Silverglate, a Harvard Law graduate who lives at Cambridge, calls himself a “voice in the wilderness” and a “dissident” who aims to bring a new perspective. He argues that the way “Harvard is run is absurd,” and castigates the “suppression of free speech and thought” that has taken root at the 386-year-old school.
Asked about Harvard’s new president, Claudine Gay, Mr. Silverglate observes that she is “very bad news for Harvard” and finds it unfortunate that the school chose someone from the “inside.” Ms. Gay previously served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, a post that gave her purview over Harvard’s factitious faculty.
Mr. Silverglate asserts that Ms. Gay is “super politically correct.” He suggests that her predecessor, Lawrence Bacow, was undone by an administration staffed by bureaucrats “over which he had no control.” Mr. Bacow is stepping down after five years at the helm.
The lawyer, who has represented Michael Milken, Leona Helmsley, and the Church of Scientology, sees “administrative bloat” as a national malady. “Deans need something to do,” he laments, and the result is less free speech and impoverished due process rights for students. He says that he would fire the majority of Harvard's administrators.
Mr. Silverglate, described in the New York Times as an “old-fashioned civil libertarian,” is the author of “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses.” He avers that “affirmative action has been a disaster” and anticipates that the Supreme Court will hand Harvard a legal loss and end the practice when it rules on its constitutionality this June.
This is Mr. Silverglate’s second bid for a seat on the Board of Overseers, and he is working to garner the requisite signatures to secure a spot on the ballot. He says the number of signatures needed to do so has been raised 10-fold from the number required when he first ran for overseer, to 3,000. Members are elected to the body via a vote of Harvard’s alumni, who will cast their ballots between the first of April and the 16th of March.
https://www.nysun.com/article/voice-in-the-wilderness-mounts-run-for-harvard-board
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The decay of the universities
Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public—and often enraged alumni.
Over the last 30 years, enrollments in the humanities and history crashed. So did tenure-track faculty positions. Some $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans have only greenlighted inflated tuition—and masked the contagion of political indoctrination and watered-down courses.
But “gradually” imploding has now become “suddenly.” Zoom courses, a declining pool of students, and soaring costs all prompt the public to question the college experience altogether.
Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4% alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.
Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students—an all-time high.
Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
The number of history majors has collapsed by 50% in just the last 20 years. Tenured history positions have declined by one-third to half at major state universities.
In the last decade alone, English majors across the nation’s universities have fallen by a third.
At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff—in near one-to-one fashion.
In the past, such costly praetorian bloat would have sparked a faculty rebellion. Not now. The new six-figure salaried “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars are feared and exempt from criticism.
Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird “reparatory” admissions. Purported “marginalized populations” have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population.
Consequently, “problematic” standardized tests are damned as biased and antithetical to “diversity.”
To accommodate radical diversity reengineering, the only demographic deemed expendable are white males. Their plunging numbers on campus, especially from the working class, are now much less than their percentages in the general population—regardless of grades or test scores.
At Yale, the class of 2026 is listed as 50% white and 55% female. Fourteen percent were admitted as “legacies.” In sum, qualified but poor white males without privilege or connections seem mostly excluded.
Stanford’s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of “23% white.” Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests—but recently conceded it rejects about 70% of those with perfect SAT scores.
In fact, universities are quietly junking test score requirements. Ironically, these time-honored standardized tests were originally designed to offer those from underprivileged backgrounds, or less competitive high schools, a meritocratic pathway into elite schools.
At Cornell, students push for pass/fail courses only and the abolition of all grades. At the New School in New York, students demand that everyone receives “A” grades. Dean’s lists and class and school rankings are equally suspect as counterrevolutionary. Even as courses are watered down, entitled students still assume that their admission must automatically guarantee graduation—or else!
Skeptical American employers, to remain globally competitive, will likely soon administer their own hiring tests. They already suspect that prestigious university degrees are hollow and certify very little
Traditional colleges will seize the moment and expand by sticking to meritocratic criteria as proof of the competency of their prized graduates.
Private and online venues will also fill a national need to teach Western civilization and humanities courses—by non-woke faculty who do not institutionalize bias.
More students will continue to seek vocational training alternatives. Some will get their degrees online for a fraction of the cost.
Alumni will either curb giving, put further restrictions on their gifting, or disconnect.
Eventually, even elite schools will lose their current veneer of prestige. Their costly cattle brands will be synonymous with equality-of-result, overpriced indoctrination echo chambers, where therapy replaced singular rigor and their tarnished degrees become irrelevant.
How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards—history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/12/26/are-universities-doomed/
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