Category: education and schooling

None of That Happened

A high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland, has only passed three courses in his last four years of “study.”

But here’s the kicker: his 0.1373 Grade Point Average is average at his school. Out of 120 students in his class, the young man ranks 62nd, with 58 others failing to reach his hardly stratospheric GPA.

“Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June,” explained Project Baltimore, the local Fox affiliate’s watchdog effort on education. “But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over.”

The television exposé found that in three years her son had “failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days.”

But for some inexplicable reason, though the unnamed lad was flunking roughly nine out of ten classes, Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts continued to pass him on to higher grades and more advanced classes than those he had just bombed on.

“I’ve seen many transcripts, many report cards, like this particular student,” informed an anonymous (for fear of reprisal) administrator with the City Schools.

“He’s a good kid,” his mother offered. “[H]e’s willing, he’s trying, but who would he turn to when the people that’s supposed to help him is not? Who do he turn to?”

Baltimore City Schools released a long statement detailing their bureaucratic procedures and protocols to prevent students from falling through the cracks. “France says none of that happened,” reported Project Baltimore.

I was privileged to have two parents who would never have allowed me to be so mis-educated. But when parents struggle, the theory is that public schools are there to help. In actual practice, though, this theory fails.

But gets passed along anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Subsidizing Chinese Attacks on American Ideals

Post author By Editor
Post date February 23, 2021
2 Comments on 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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Tags China, Chinazi, Communism, fascism

education and schooling too much government

Where the Rubber Room Meets the Road

Post author By Editor
Post date February 15, 2021
3 Comments on 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?

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

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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