Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling

Not College Material?

His grade point average was 4.42. His SAT score was 1590. Right out of high school, he was hired as a software engineer.

It wasn’t good enough. In the words of The College Fix, this super-smart kid was “perfect on paper but rejected due to his ethnicity” — by 16 out of the 18 colleges to which he had applied, including five University of California schools.

By then, Stanley had already proved his mettle as a programmer by designing an alternative to DocuSign called RabbitSign. According to Amazon’s Well-Architected Review, RabbitSign was “one of the most efficient and secure accounts” that it had ever seen. Amazon highlighted Stanley’s work in a case study.

After Google engineers assessed his skills, the company gave Stanley a job offer in 2023 — beating Amazon to the punch. He had just turned 18.

This kind of recognition of Mr. Zhong’s abilities probably made it a little easier to cope with the flood of rejections of his college applications. He obviously does not need a college degree to succeed. But he’s not just putting all that nonsense behind him. He and his dad, Nan Zhong, are suing the University of California for their racially discriminatory — and illegal — admissions policies.

The fight is for Stanley but not just Stanley, says his father, who reports on the case at the SWORD website. SWORD stands for Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination.

“What we’re trying to get out of this is a fair treatment of Asian applicants. Including my other kids and my future grandkids.”

And ours.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Diversity versus Merit

quota, race, racism, sexism, hiring

Northwestern University is being sued for “consciously discriminating” in favor of women and racial minorities at the expense of obviously better qualified candidates.

The suit is brought by a group of white male professors that does not include Eugene Volokh, one of its examples of applicants summarily ignored under the alleged hiring practices.

“Northwestern University School of Law refuses,” the plaintiff’s complaint reads, “to even consider hiring white male faculty candidates with stellar credentials, while it eagerly hires candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records. . . .

“Professor Volokh’s candidacy was never even presented to the Northwestern faculty for a vote, while candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records were interviewed and received offers because of their preferred demographic characteristics.”

One of those with the requisite demographic characteristics is Destiny Peery, a black woman who graduated near the bottom of her class at Northwestern Law School.

The suit alleges that Dan Rodriguez, the dean in 2014, the year she was hired, threatened to penalize faculty members who voted against her. She would “never even have been considered” for the appointment but for her sex and race.

Rodriguez also ordered the faculty to abstain from discussing candidates on the faculty listserv and mentioned the risk of litigation as his reason for the ban. In other words, this administrator knew that his policy was illegal and sought to cover it up.

Now the feared lawsuit has arrived, brought against Northwestern by Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP).

Wobbly acronym, sure, but Federal law is clear in outlawing hiring discrimination based on race or sex.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling national politics & policies Tenth Amendment federalism

Nixon & Trans Athletes

Trump, federalism, state's rights, Constitution

The President of the United States clashed with the governor of Maine over transgender participation in government-organized athletics. Quite a hoot.

Behind this fracas looms the legacy of . . . Richard M. Nixon.

First, the fracas: “In a tense exchange with Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, President Donald Trump threatened to strip Maine of its federal funding,” explains CNN, “if the state refuses to comply with his executive order banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports.”

The brief volley of promises (threats) between the governor and the president made other governors “uncomfortable.” Yes, that’s a news story.

“Is Maine here?” he wondered aloud. “The governor of Maine?”

“Yeah,” Gov. Janet Mills answered from across the room. “I’m here.”

And then came a testy political exchange, the kind you don’t often see, culminating in this from Trump: “You better comply, you better comply, because, otherwise, you’re not getting any federal funding.” 

“See you in court,” she promised.

“Good; I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

Trump may not be wrong. He may have the better legal case.

But doesn’t it seem weird that the president of the United States can extort compliance from the states on matters that are not enumerated in the Constitution?

Well, back in his first term Trump signed an executive order to direct a new devolution process of turning back education to the states. But the transgender issue is a big deal, and most Americans (around 80 percent) are against “biological” “men” competing with girls and women in sports, and since much of sports in America takes place in state-directed/taxpayer-funded contexts, Trump is leveraging federal bloc grants against states that balk at his agenda.

Thank Nixon and his “New Federalism.” While an attempt to give power back to the states, it also tied federal money to the devolution, which has effectively turned states into welfare queens begging big bucks off Washington, severely compromising the states’ . . . basic competence.

It’s this policy that Trump should be fighting.

But that would make governors even more uncomfortable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability education and schooling

Skill-Free Teachers

education, testing, public

The new non-requirement for becoming a teacher in New Jersey — pushed by the teacher’s union there — reminds me of some of my own classroom experiences as a kid.

Applicants no longer need to pass a test that asks basic questions about English and math and other subjects in order to get the job. Why not? Because formal confirmation of basic skills is an obstacle. New Jersey needs more teachers. Remove obstacle, get more teachers. Simple addition.

Schools have other ways to determine whether applicants have the basic skills they need in order to teach those skills. But the reason for scrapping the test is evidently to ensure that deficiency in these skills, as such, won’t prevent you from being hired.

My alternative plan: accelerate free-market reforms of education, school choice, so we don’t have to “rely on” illiterate, innumerate, government-foisted “teachers.”

In 1983, when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he instituted a competency test that, according to a 1985 Washington Post story, ten percent of the state’s public school teachers flunked. More than one-third of teachers in the state’s worst county failed this basic test.

One reason that poor and minority communities had such poor outcomes was that many of their teachers were illiterate and couldn’t do math. If you asked my fifth-grade math teacher, a product of that system, what is the sum of two plus two, she’d have had to look it up.

I survived. I now know that two plus two make eleventy. But I would not want any of today’s students to undergo the same so-called instruction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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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