Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling international affairs

Subsidizing Chinese Attacks on American Ideals

Should the federal government fund organizations working at the behest of China and the Chinese Communist Party?

Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee have blocked an amendment sponsored by Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) that, in her words, would have banned funding of academic institutions “if they have a partnership with any entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the government of the People’s Republic of China or organized under the laws of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The entities being referred to are so-called Confucius Institutes, which, in addition to promoting innocuous educational goals, help spread the propaganda of the misnamed CCP. (The Chinese Communist Party should really now be called the Chinazi Party. Post-Mao, the Chinese have stopped trying to communize everything and now permit markets to function to a significant extent — but, as in the fascist Nazi version of totalitarianism, always subject to sweeping interference and oppression.)

The current number of active Confucius Institutes in the U.S. is uncertain, but the National Association of Scholars counts at least 55, including 48 at colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, as part of a freeze on regulations issued toward the end of the Trump administration, President Biden has withdrawn a proposed rule that would have required schools to reveal any ties to Confucius Institutes.

Is it a bad idea to find out which schools are facilitating Chinazi propaganda? 

Is it a good idea to directly or indirectly fund Chinazi propaganda? 

No and no.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling too much government

Where the Rubber Room Meets the Road

school, education, Covid, government, teacher's union

The “rubber room” neatly symbolizes, I think, the institution of the American public school. That is a room where New York’s bad teachers are sent to keep them away from students . . . all the while still receiving full paychecks. 

You see, unions have made it mighty hard to fire a teacher.

But rubber rooms sadly have competition in the category of outstanding tax-dollar waste and bureaucratic madness. 

Welcome to the roads of Fairfax, Virginia.

“Fairfax County, Va., wants to keep paying its school-bus drivers even though its schools are operating online. The solution?  Send the drivers out to drive anyway,” wrote Kyle Smith at National Review. “Food-service workers in schools are also not needed as long as the online-only schooling model continues. So what has happened to them? Zero layoffs. Not even any furloughs. Everybody is still getting their regular paycheck.”

But that was from last Fall. Now, teachers in Fairfax have moved to the front of the line in receiving the coronavirus vaccine, but still refuse to teach until all kids are vaccinated. Since kids have proven not to be a vector for the disease’s transmission, and are themselves the least at risk age group from the advanced respiratory illness associated with it, this seems a tad rubber-roomy.

It gets weirder. Virginia’s House Bill 2118 would replace diesel buses with electric buses. 

Quite an “investment.” Especially while no students are riding school buses.

The much-vaunted “new normal” is apparently to spend more on so-called legacy services that are no longer being used at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom

The Only Choice Left?

teacher, union, Covid

Over the last year, we have learned that the risk to children and teachers of being infected by the COVID-19 virus while in classrooms is relatively low.

Although precautions are warranted to keep that risk as low as possible, resuming in-person classwork is feasible. Many parents therefore want their kids back in school. Especially if those kids find it hard to learn “virtually.”

But around the country, many teachers, led by adamant teachers unions, refuse to return to work. Chicago, California, West Virginia, and DC are among the cities and states having trouble getting teachers to reenter classrooms.

I encourage parents to consider teaching their kids themselves (as my wife and I have done, her mainly). Not every family can homeschool. But some who could do it just haven’t given the possibility much thought. Now would be the time to give it a little more thought.

More parents could also send their kids to private schools with the help of tax breaks or vouchers. What I mean is that if a kid costs $5,000 a year to educate at a public school, let parents have $5,000 in the form of a tax credit or voucher to send their kid to a private school that is open for business.

The politics of expanding school choice is often difficult. But if more parents start pushing, we can do this. Beleaguered parents in teacher-union-blockaded regions have a good argument: the fact that they have no other choice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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deficits and debt education and schooling general freedom international affairs

The Great School Reset

reset, Phoenix

A reset is going to happen; the status quo is not an option.

The major institutions of the modern welfare state were unsustainable before COVID-19, which is why Klaus Schwab had been talking up The Great Reset for years. He and his Davos crowd — convening right now, virtually, at the 2021 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum — want to fix everything with a huge heaping helping of intrusive government.

The pandemic panics have merely forced the technocrats to speed up their timeline.

Which may be one reason why Deep State aficionados in the Biden administration and in the media have set their eyes upon squelching the populist movements that increasingly want to chuck them along with their globalist policies.

But populism isn’t their only problem. For a real education, look at “education.”

“We are witnessing an exodus from public schools that’s unprecedented in modern U.S. history,” writes Corey A. DeAngelis in the December Reason. “Families are fleeing the traditional system and turning to homeschooling, virtual charters, microschools, and — more controversially — ‘pandemic pods,’ in which families band together to help small groups of kids learn at home.”

All these new ways around the failed centralized institutions of government schooling that DeAngelis discusses are increasingly seen as liberatory. Will a people accustomed to increasing freedom and excellence in one realm easily succumb to a pitch to decrease freedom and increase government in all others?

Seems a tough sell. Which suggests a small sliver of hope that we might get a Freedom Reset instead of a technocratic one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Bully for Your Thoughts

Professor William Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor who also publishes the popular Legal Insurrection blog, got into trouble last summer by criticizing the violent Marxist organization Black Lives Matters.

BLM’s standard weapons include rioting, burning, looting, and screaming.

Jacobson had argued that the “Hands up, don’t shoot” version of the Michael Brown case is a lie and, in another post, that all the “bloodletting and wilding” around the country was primarily about tearing down the country, not about George Floyd.

These opinions upset the bullies.

Being a conservative professor on a liberal campus had all along made Jacobson feel like a “mouse waiting for the cat to pounce.” After 12 years at Cornell, though, the summer of 2020 was the first time that fellow Cornellians actively sought his ouster.

Six months later, we sure hope Professor Jacobson has managed to land on his feet. And he has. Back then, he was a professor at Cornell Law School. Today, he is a professor at Cornell Law school.

Why didn’t he seek friendlier pastures?

“I don’t see why I should be forced to change my life because they are so intolerant and they are so malicious,” he recently told The Daily Signal podcast. “Why don’t they leave? I’m not going to leave voluntarily. And if they do try to interfere in the renewal of my contract in a year and a half, I will take them to court over it.”

Bully for you, Professor. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Totalitarians Gloat

The Odyssey, Ulysses

For generations, even millennia, boys read The Iliad with admiration for Achilles, and men referenced the clever Odysseus from that other Homeric epic, The Odyssey. 

By my day, neither were required reading. If I’ve read The Odyssey, it was the same version the Coen Brothers referenced when concocting their terrific film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) — the Classic Comics version.

Nowadays, teachers gloat, online, about expunging the poem from the canon.

Rod Dreher, in “Cancel Cult Comes For Homer,” explains the context for this latter development: the politically correct “intersectionalism” of public school teachers in the “#DisruptTexts” movement. “‘Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),’ tweeted Shea Martin in June. ‘Hahaha,’ replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. ‘Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!’”

Why? All that ancient racism and sexism.

Expelling the classics from schooling is absurd, of course, exposure to a diversity of ideas and historical achievements being what we used to call a “liberal education.” But today’s canon controllers are not liberal activists. They are, Dreher insists, totalitarian ones.

And they are quite emboldened — their ground-up, crowdsourced movement gets the usual pat approval by tax-funded educational institutions. It’s not a conspiracy if they boast about it on Twitter.

Here is a fun fact about The Odyssey: Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), conjectured that the real author of the poem was a woman. Yes, an “authoress.”

Nevertheless, that would not likely convince woke cultists to put The Odyssey back on your kids’ reading lists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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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