Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Signs of the Times

Donald Trump, sign, censorship

Texas A&M University’s Student Code of Conduct office is harassing a student for posting pro-Biden signs on campus last November.

Don’t believe it? 

Well, ya got me. The signs were pro-Trump, not pro-Biden.

I committed this small and fleeting deception to make a point. The fact that posting of signs, announcements, etc., on a university campus, including the Texas A&M campus, is nothing unusual. The kids these days (along with those of the last umpteen centuries) have always engaged in political debate on campus, trying to promulgate their views.

Doing so doesn’t typically cause big problems with officials of U.S. universities. Unless — and, alas, increasingly — the message being promulgated contradicts approved establishmentarian political themes.

According to a CampusReform.org report, Dion Okeke, president of Students for Trump, received a letter from the school’s Student Conduct Office saying he’d better meet with the Student Conduct office about posting the signs. Otherwise, he could face charges of improper student conduct, and his registration could be placed on “administrative hold.”

Universities doubtless have rules about sign placement. Okeke’s sign-posting sounds like a minor infraction at worst.

If it even was an infraction at all.

Are the veiled and not-so-veiled threats in the letter signed by Jessica Welsch, assistant coordinator of the Student Conduct Office, a proportionate response to any alleged sin by Dion Okeke? No.

Meanwhile, a Texas A&M student who perpetrated a hoax about alleged racism last summer is not in any trouble with the school.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Disparate Outcomes, Desperate Logic

race, racism, education, testing, quota

“Virginia AG’s office finds elite Loudoun STEM school discriminates against Black, Hispanic students,” declared The Washington Post headline. 

Falsely. 

On Friday, Attorney General Mark Herring — another blackface-wearing state government leader — issued a 61-page report, saying “the Office of Attorney General Division of Human Rights finds there is reasonable cause to believe that Loudoun County Public Schools’ administration of the Academies of Loudoun program resulted in a discriminatory disparate impact on Black/African-American and Latinx/Hispanic students.” 

Though the investigation found the admission process to be “facially-neutral,” The Post informs that the program “in fact barred from admission qualified Black and Hispanic students who applied during the fall 2018 cycle.”

Yet blacks and Latinos were not barred. 

This year, 7 percent of black applicants were accepted and 11 percent of Hispanics. True, the acceptance rate for Asians was 13 percent and 15 percent for whites. But this gets tricky. Given their percentage of the overall student body, Asians were 42 percent overrepresented in the applicant pool, while blacks were 4 percent underrepresented, Latinos 6 percent, and whites underrepresented by a whopping 23 percent. 

“We request that Loudoun County Public Schools eliminate its discriminatory practices,” the report concludes. But . . . it did not stipulate any specific form of discrimination. Rather, it instructed the school district to work with the Loudoun County NAACP “to begin developing revised policies within 60 days.”

What sort of revisions are likely? 

Lower the entry requirements, reduce testing and “take into consideration the principle of geography/socio-economic equity.” 

You see, the problem they’re trying to fix isn’t racism, but the lack thereof.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

Merit No More

grades, race, school, education, prejudice, racism

San Diego’s school district is weakening its grading system because of “racial disparities.”

Yearly averaging of grades will end. Why? The practice, it is said, has penalized students who do poorly early in the year, presumably unfairly.

Teachers will also be prohibited from taking into account whether homework is submitted on time and how students behave in class. These aspects of performance will instead be incorporated into a “citizen grade.”

Richard Barrera, VP of the school district, says “to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.”

Student behavior has sometimes been called “deportment.” Grading it separately is nothing new. But San Diego’s rationale for doing so is bad. And eliminating a yearly average (or semester average) discourages students from working diligently all year long.

What if, under the hobbled system, grades still exhibit “racial disparities”? The logical conclusion is an end to grades and to merit-based distinctions.

Many reasons for academic disparities among different groups are possible. But let’s say that kids of certain color tend to have lousier home lives than kids of other color, and therefore do worse in school. 

If so, disparities in performance cannot be attributed to attempts to objectively assess schoolwork. 

And the problems won’t disappear if grades disappear.

Any silver lining? 

Well, if you’re a substandard teacher, meaningless grades for students will also make it harder to know when you, the teacher, are doing substandard work.

Though the metal most apt, here, is much baser than “silver.”

Lead seems about right. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly

Not Fired for Teaching

words, racism, PC culture

The headline states that a “USC Professor Who Used Chinese Word That Sounds Like English Slur” was “ ‘Not Dismissed Nor Suspended.’ ”

Sure. The professor was “only” removed from the course he was teaching.

Greg Patton, who teaches business communication at the University of Southern California, had been telling students about “filler words,” which for native English speakers is stuff like “uh, uh, uh.” We apparently don’t all grope for words in exactly the same way. If one grew up speaking Mandarin, one tends to say “nèi ge, nèi ge, nèi ge.”

No sooner had the example been provided than a contingent of the perpetually aggrieved lurched into action. 

Their failure to simply talk to Professor Patton, and the overkill of their response — including a letter claiming that his utterance “offended all of the Black members of our Class. . . . Our mental health has been affected. . . .” — suggests the disingenuousness of that response.

A USC dean issued an abject public apology. 

Patton also, regrettably, apologized.

Fortunately, many of Patton’s students, and others, rose to his defense, including Chinese class members who noted that Patton’s “use of ‘nei ge’ [was] an accurate rendition of common Chinese use, and an entirely appropriate . . . illustration of the use of pauses.”

If only the professor had been a mind reader and expert military strategist, he might have avoided this land mine. But training in proactive appeasement of bullies is not the solution here. 

What’s needed is a determination to stop appeasing bullies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly general freedom

The Foam Rubber Bullet

OBEY

The reports say the color of the top of the Nerf gun is neon green. In the photo I saw, it seemed less colorful than “neon” — but that hardly matters. It is a toy gun. Its ammo is nerfy soft. And it was held by a boy, Isaiah Elliott, briefly, during a Zoom chat educational session as has become common during these days of the pandemic. And his teacher saw it.

And things spiraled out of control from there.

Now, while cities are burning and Marxists are sharpening their knives and dulling their wits for the summer season’s final gasps of “protest,” you might think that teachers and public school administrators would have obtained some perspective.

But no. This is 2020 and we are to be spared nothing.

In a decades-long tradition of educators freaking out at boyish (and girlish) play with pretend firearms, the teacher informed on Master Elliott — though she knew it was a toy gun. 

And the school suspended the lad for five days.

This has nothing to do with school safety, of course. The school is virtual, now. Pretense that this is about safety is an insult to not only adult intelligence, but child intelligence, too.

I guess what public school administrators want to teach their charges is that they are running a cult, that boys and girls and all on the sliding scale in-between must OBEY. 

Must not offend against the State by showing even playful reverence for the Great Taboo and Talisman of Freedom, the Gun.

Thankfully, young Isaiah is headed to a different school.

And his Nerf play days are not over.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Panic Over Pods

education, equality, freedom

“You really want to get the best for your child,” a father told NBC News, describing his family’s motivation to secure private educational services.* They are part of the “Pandemic Pod” movement “now sweeping the nation” — as so many public schools offer only remote learning this fall. 

Increasingly, parents are getting together to form small groups — or “pods” — and hire a teacher to better provide instruction to their children. 

It shows initiative — and a refreshing sense of parental responsibility. Of course, not everyone can afford to hire a private teacher. 

“It just seems really privileged,” a Portland, Oregon, woman advised The Washington Post.

“The frantic activity . . . of families soliciting private tutors for their children,” San Francisco school board member Alison Collins explained, “is frightening to many black parents and parents of color.” 

L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, associate professor of sociology of education at New York University, called the private effort: “opportunity hoarding.” 

“For those families that are most vulnerable, particularly lower-income families, black families, brown families, language-minority families,” declared the professor, “they are locked out of that.”

“Experts say that will widen the education gap,” NBC reporter Stephanie Gosk chimed in. 

Ah, the experts — and their Procrustean** obsession!

Their fixation on gaps and inequality, as opposed to enhancing opportunities and achievement where possible, leads to the absurd notion that we should deny educational opportunities to some children (our children) unless we can provide those benefits to all children . . . city-wide, statewide, nationwide — or worldwide.

Read a bedtime story to your kid or grandchild tonight. Insist on quality . . . and leave the equality to feckless education theorists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The father and the family happen to be black.

** Procrustes, in Greek myth, was a robber who made his victims lie on a bed and stretched them out if they were too short for the bed, or lopped parts of them off, if too tall; killed by Theseus on said bed: “Procrustean” is a synonym for absurdly strict egalitarianism.

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education and schooling ideological culture international affairs

Expelling Dissent

Drew Pavlout, China,

The University of Queensland may expel 20-year-old philosophy major Drew Pavlou. He has been protesting against the Chinese Communist Party and in support of the Hong Kong protesters, but perhaps most tellingly has criticized his school’s ties to China.

Xu Jie, the Chinese consul general in Brisbane, has blasted Pavlou for being an “anti-China activist.”

This same man, Xu Jie, also happens to be an adjunct professor at the university.

The Queensland campus is home to one of many Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes, often benignly described as promoting Chinese culture. FBI Director Christopher Wray says that the institutes “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.”

The Economist allows that the Institutes “project soft power” with “occasional hints of politics,” offering as an example an exhibition at the University of Maryland, whitewashing China’s relationship to Tibet. 

Just a smidgen of politics here and there.

According to Pavlou, “Beijing exercises so much financial leverage over our universities that it can stifle all criticism of the Chinese government on campus.”

Although the school nebulously accuses Pavlou of “harassing” others, his real sin seems to be not going with the flow. Threatening Pavlou with expulsion and even prosecution hardly proves that Queensland would never act to squelch dissent at the behest of China.

There is only one fair resolution. The university should apologize for its CCP ties, reject funding from China, kick out its Confucius Institute, kick out Xu, and commend Pavlou for urging the school to reform its bad conduct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Drew Pavlout, China,

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education and schooling

End Educational Freedom Now!

home schooling, education, Harvard, authoritarianism,

“A rapidly increasing number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school,” Erin O’Donnell informs in the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine, “choosing instead to educate them at home.” 

Yippee! Thanks for the great news — right?

Not to O’Donnell, or to Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet. O’Donnell’s article is something of a friendly regurgitation of Bartholet’s Arizona Law Review article, entitled, “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection.”

Bartholet “recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling.” Why? Because, as O’Donnell offers, it “violates children’s right to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse . . .”

Her evidence? Professor Bartholet offers none. Harvard Magazine does not need any.

Avoided, perhaps, because research shows students educated at home significantly outperform public school students on standardized tests. 

As for the specter of homeschooling as massive smokescreen enabling vicious child predators? “The limited evidence available shows that homeschooled children are abused at a lower rate than are those in the general public,” Dr. Brian Ray reported in 2018, adding that “an estimated 10% (or more) of public and private schoolchildren experience sexual maltreatment at the hands of school personnel.”

So, what is going on here? 

Perhaps O’Donnell provides the explanation, writing that “surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families . . . are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture.” 

Oh, my, can that be permitted? Should people choose their own religious and cultural beliefs? May parents freely educate their kids?

Bartholet calls that “essentially authoritarian control,” which is “dangerous.”

There, she is correct. Homeschooling is dangerous . . . to experts hell-bent on telling us what to think.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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home schooling, education, Harvard, authoritarianism,

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The Awful Strain of Insurmountable Parody

Hitler, Downfall, parody,

What if “political correctness” were really a problem of rampant cowardice?

University of Massachusetts Amherst administrators removed Catherine West Lowry from her 13-year gig as an accounting lecturer because of an extra-credit project. 

She had shown a previous year’s student-produced parody video using the infamous Hitler breakdown scene in the excellent 2004 movie Downfall. I assume you’ve seen dozens of these; I know I have. Their ubiquity notwithstanding, the university claims to have received student complaints about the one Ms. Lowry showed.

The proper response to a protestation of offense at a Downfall parody? Eye rolls. Were I a professor, I’d have to resist the nearly irresistible desire to reduce office hours starting immediately. 

Any other response, especially dismissing the lecturer, is pure pusillanimity.

Or, make that cowardice of the impure variety, for I suppose something else could be going on here.

Lowry claims that she’d shown this particular effort in previous years and no one had complained. And I believe her.

Can we believe the university’s claim to have received complaints from students this year?

Before we accept such a statement, we should peruse the evidence. After all, in the case of the Wilfrid Laurier University mistreatment of the T.A. who had shown a Jordan Peterson video in class, administrators had simply lied — there had been no complaints.

Had UMass Amherst actually received complaints, then their response would be merely cowardice. But were there no complaints, the whole thing becomes far more ominous.

And I wonder: what would today’s university make of Hogan’s Heroes?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Hitler, Downfall, parody,

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education and schooling national politics & policies

A Flip-Flop, Not an Echo

Joe Biden, school choice, meme, flip-flop,

“If I’m President, Betsy DeVos’s whole notion [of school choice], from charter schools to this, are gone.”

That’s what Joe Biden, presidential candidate, had to say this December at an education forum.

Charter schools are K-12 schools that are publicly funded but managed semi-independently— not by the standard educational bureaucracy. Biden’s repudiation represents a break with the Obama administration, which had voiced support for charter schools. 

One reason for Obama’s support may have been that so many Democratic voters, like other voters, want an alternative to standard public schools. 

According to a survey conducted by Beck Research, 56 percent of Democrats “favor the concept of school choice,” with “school choice” understood to mean giving parents “the right to use tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs.”

Once upon a time, Biden supported greater educational opportunity — explicitly, not just tacitly as a member of the Obama administration. But now he slams charter schools for taking money from public schools. (But in a different way from how public schools take money from taxpayers.) More and more, this man’s “moderation” seems indistinguishable from opposition to any even halting expansion of our freedom.

Andrew Cuff of the Commonwealth Foundation suggests that a Democratic presidential candidate who advocates school choice will gain an edge over his competitors — given the popularity of school choice among Democratic voters.

How about it, Joe? Flip-flop again.

But this time in favor of freedom.

And better education.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Joe Biden, school choice, meme, flip-flop,

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