Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Girls [sic] Sports Saved

The only thing that should have been required to save the T‑shirt? 

An apostrophe.

The T‑shirt boldly proclaimed “Save Girls* Sports.”

But matters were more complicated for students of Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Riverside, California, who wore the shirts to protest their school’s decision to let a boy claiming to be a girl join the girls’ cross-​country team.

The school sent students wearing the shirt to detention, allegedly for violating the dress code. Two of the girls who wore it said that school administrators compared the wearing of it to wearing a T‑shirt with a swastika.

Those two students and their families sued the school and school district on constitutional grounds.

Maybe it was the lawsuit, or maybe it was the show of solidarity — but something caused MLK High to cave. And hundreds of other students did show up wearing the “Save Girls Sports” T‑shirt, willing to buck the dress code or thought code, whatever it is, to support their classmates.

Somehow the school failed to place these hundreds of students in detention and has apparently dropped the detention policy.

Students at other schools in the area had also started wearing the T‑shirts.

With regard to the policy of letting boys play on girls’ sports teams, the Riverside Unified School District says that its hands are tied. “RUSD is bound to follow California law,” which requires letting students “participate in sex-​segregated” activities in a way “consistent with his or her gender identity.”

Laws are meant to be changed, however, if not through California’s legislature, then through the state’s citizen initiative process.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * We leave the [sic] for the title.

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education and schooling folly

Disaffirmative Action

DEI, race, bias, affirmative action

Even making the horrific DEI steamroller illegal can’t deter the determined indoctrinators at the University of Oklahoma.

As we all know by now, woke administrators and educators, chanting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” endeavor to induce guilt in (and otherwise punish) persons of certain races, sex, etc., for the grave sin of allegedly benefiting from “systemic” “privileges.” DEI arbiters are ever eager to promote preferential treatment that benefits members of currently favored groups as defined by unchosen physical traits.

Since December 2023, Oklahoma state law has prohibited universities from requiring anybody “to participate in … or receive any education … to the extent such education … grants preference based on one person’s particular race, color, sex, ethnicity or national origin over another’s.”

Nevertheless, Oklahoma University requires undergrads pursuing a degree in education to take a course preaching alleged white-​person complicity in institutional racism.

We do find organizational racism in today’s world. But not quite in the way preached. It’s not hidden beneath surfaces and doesn’t have to be arbitrarily imputed. The course itself, full of topics like “Critical Whiteness in Education” and “Microaggressions in Educational Spaces,” manifests such racism.

A spokesman for the governor’s office says it’s “insane that this is a required course. It’s time to look at the accreditation entities that are pushing courses like this and bring common sense back to the classroom.”

DEI policies somewhat resemble the affirmation action policies of yesteryear. But they aspire to be much more thorough and pervasive. They are animated by a mentality of totalitarian control, a mentality loath to, let us say, course-correct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling

A Cheating Culture

Cheating has always been a problem in higher education, but ChatGPT has caused it to metastasize.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the percentage of students at one college who admit cheating has jumped “from 35 percent in 2019 to 65 percent in 2024.” This school is not an outlier.

Teachers can see how bad it’s gotten. One professor emailed a student caught using ChatGPT to write a paper to warn that she would fail the course if she did it again. The student replied with a heartfelt apology but soon did it again. It turned out that the apology itself had been spewed by ChatGPT.

How to combat the trend? 

There are many ways if one is serious about it. Detecting prose that is ChatGPT-​spawned is usually not hard. But if students suffer no real costs for cheating, as is often the case, cheating will only remain routine.

“Researchers have long documented that many students cheat at some point in their educational career,” the author of the Chronicle article explains, “and that their motivations are situational rather than character based.”

Talk of motivations is off-​point. Students’ actions are “situational”-based in terms of incentives. Students come in a wide range of character, I hazard, each individual’s integrity built up by a long string of past decisions, which were, undoubtedly, influenced by incentives. When strict honesty is not taught and rewarded, and gross dishonesty not condemned and punished (with bad grades or expulsion), then even students with strong character will be tempted to cheat, and weaker students will cheat.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling national politics & policies

Forever Be Changed

Kamala Harris, power

I’ve discussed Kamala Harris’s support, as district attorney and attorney general in California, for an abusive law enabling the arrest of parents if their children miss “too much” time at school, how the law has been deployed against parents like Cheree Peoples, whose daughter has sickle cell anemia.

I’ve quoted Harris’s words.

Now I will quote more of them. But let’s also listen to those words and observe her demeanor and tone, how Kamala Harris gloats about her use of power.

“As a prosecutor … I have a huge stick. So I decided I was gonna start prosecuting parents for truancy.… ‘If you don’t go to school, Kamala’s gonna put you and me in jail.’ [laughs] … I said [to prosecutors] ‘when you go over there, look really mean.’

“I learned that with the swipe of my pen, I could charge someone with the lowest-​level offense. That person could be arrested, they could lose time from work and their family, maybe lose their job. They’d have to come out of their own pocket to help hire a lawyer.… Weeks later, I could dismiss the charges. But their life would forever be changed.”

Video of Harris saying such things is part of a political attack ad about why men needn’t be prejudiced against female candidates in order to oppose giving Kamala Harris power over everyone in the country.

In the waning days of the campaign, we could do worse than to share this evidence, her own candid, joyous testimony about herself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Nondiscrimination as Discriminatory 

DEI, diversity, quotas, race, racism, regulations, education

Two parts gall, three parts random irrationality; eye of newt, toe of frog. 

That’s how you cook up the latest leftist madness.

According to the wizards running Columbia University, deliberately race-​neutral policies are discriminatory if they have a “disproportionate impact.”

Columbia has updated its antidiscrimination policy about bad things you can do on campus that might get you investigated and sanctioned. The revised policy declares that one bad thing is “having a neutral policy or practice that has a disproportionate and unjustified adverse impact on actual and/​or perceived members or associates of one Protected Class more than others.” 

This, the policy asserts, “constitutes Discrimination” — with a capital D.

Those “protected classes” make up a formidable list. If the idea is that treating another person abusively subjects one to penalties, why not just say this? Then no groups need be listed.

But Columbia University seems to find focusing on discriminatory nondiscrimination a more productive way to spend its time than coping with unambiguous racial and ethnic hatred on campus.

Columbia is among the schools that has responded to vicious harassment of Jewish students with little more than pro forma protest. Even as a Columbia representative tells USA Today that “calls for violence have no place at Columbia,” anti-​Israel and anti-​Jewish students keep calling for violence. Will they be kicked out?

Eliana Goldin, a Jewish student at the school, says that the administration is well aware of “the credible threat to Jewish students, and they’re still playing both-sideism.”

Which strikes me as Discrimination with a Capital D.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Kamala Harris’s Attack on Parents

Kamala Harris, truancy, truant, schools, education, regulations, consequences

Among the skeletons rattling around in presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s closet is her support — while San Francisco’s district attorney and while running for state attorney general — for a law to punish parents for their children’s absences from school.

The story, reported by Huffpost, NPR, and others several years ago, has more recently been publicized by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Harris supported the harass-​parents truancy program when it was conceived in the state legislature, saying that “a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.” Under the program, which still exists, a school can refer persistent truancy to a district attorney’s office, which can then threaten to prosecute parents.

One victim was Cheree Peoples, who was arrested and handcuffed in 2013 while still in her pajamas. “You would swear I had killed somebody.” Her daughter Shayla had missed twenty days of school in the current school year. Cheree faced a possible penalty of $2,500 or a year in jail. 

Shayla has sickle cell anemia and required frequent hospitalization. 

Shayla’s mother fought the charges for a long time. Eventually, they were dropped.

Harris bragged about the truancy program while being inaugurated as attorney general. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Today, Harris says the harass-​parents law she championed has been abused by others. But isn’t the law itself the abuse?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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