Tag: education

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education and schooling

Mississippi Learning

Mississippi, education, phonics, reading

“Thank God for Mississippi” was something I heard a lot in my younger years, after moving to Arkansas. Friends from Alabama and Louisiana also know the saying well. 

Back then, Mississippi was ranked 50th in so many categories by which the states were measured against each other that the Magnolia State saved those inhabiting states near the bottom from occupying that un-coveted dead last place. 

This was still the case in 2005, when Mississippi ranked 50th in fourth-grade reading scores. In 2013, Mississippi students climbed one rung, to 49th. Then things started to change.

“The transformation began in 2013 with the passage of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, a controversial law that allows schools to hold back students who cannot read by third grade,” WAPT, Jackson’s ABC-TV affiliate, recently reported.

“The curriculum shifted from balanced literacy to a phonics-forward approach,” WAPT explained, “and the state invested millions into phonics-based instruction, strict accountability measures, and instructional coaches who work inside schools daily.”

Imagine going back to the way generations were taught to read and, lo and behold, it still works!!!

“Results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed Mississippi fourth graders ranked 9th in the nation for reading scores and 16th in the nation for math scores,” the TeachMS website informs. “Since 2013, that same category of students ranks No. 1 nationally for gains in reading and math.”

“Mississippi has skyrocketed on national tests, while blue states lag,” acknowledged a New York Times account earlier this year, adding that “adjusted for poverty and other student demographics, Mississippi is No. 1 for fourth grade reading and math, and at or near the top in eighth grade, according to the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank.”

Thank God for Mississippi. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

Unhealthy Kid Stuff

AOC, healthcare, Milton Friedman, education

Julian Shapiro-Barnum is the host and creator of Recess Therapy, where he regularly records conversations with kids. Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) joined his program to discuss healthcare policy. 

“The children agreed with AOC,” a Washington Post editorial noted, “and brought the same level of sophistication to political and economic questions that Americans have come to expect from the four-term congresswoman.”

AOC and the youngsters shown think healthcare should be free, which The Post used as a jumping off point to have an adult conversation about government-run healthcare, specifically the National Health Service in the United Kingdom.

“Despite the government funding and running a universal health care system, private hospital admissions in the United Kingdom reached their highest level ever in 2024,” readers were informed. 

“The number of people opting to buy private health insurance rose to 6.5 million in 2024, the highest number in a quarter-century, according to the Association of British Insurers.”

The Brits “have learned the hard way that the promise of ‘free’ care is only as good as their ability to get an appointment,” wrote the editors. 

The editorial further explained that “government systems can only stay afloat when they are rationed, often with backlogs that can leave people waiting months for serious procedures.”

“America’s health system is a mess,” The Post concluded, “but the belief that a full government takeover would lead to better outcomes is just childish.”

One of the nation’s largest newspapers appears to be growing up. 

AOC? 

Not so much. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture international affairs subsidy

The Price of a Canadian Education?

Canada, education, authoritarianism, freedom

At a convention of Canadian Liberals, tech executive Patrick Pichette proposed that youngsters eager to escape Canada be charged a half-million dollars for what he apparently regards as a privilege, not a right.

We must remind ourselves that the word “liberal,” here, is used in its modern, anti-liberal sense: of the ideology of ever-increasing restraints on everybody.

Very illiberal.

Even if Pichette means Canadian dollars, that’s still $360,000 in real USD dollars. Hardly a ten-dollar processing fee. More like extortion. He rationalizes that the kids owe that much anyway thanks to Canada’s heavily subsidized education system.

Terry Newman observes that Pichette “is a Canadian who left Canada for better opportunities himself.” He went to California and Google and now lives in London.

But Pichette and his de facto self-exemption are not the problem. The problem is all Liberals who “want to govern as many aspects [of the economy] as possible, pick winners, and unload the tax burden of the massive bureaucracy onto Canadians, the smartest of which understand this clearly and choose to leave.”

While Pichette’s proposal had his audience of Canadian Liberals cheering, sane individuals rightfully express varying degrees of alarm. After all, punishing people for leaving a country is eerily reminiscent of what totalitarian states do: prevent them from leaving altogether.

Pichette’s rationale itself is based on a misunderstanding. Are the half-million per student subsidies really there to educate? More like to placate well-organized lobbies of too-often ideologically driven careerists. 

The idea that Canadian students actually receive half-a-million-dollar educations is not believable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Equality, Not Excellence

Zohran Mamdani, schools, education, New York City, egalitarianism

The really socialist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, the city’s new Handicapper General, wants to prevent the brightest children in the city’s school system from getting any extra training of their gifts and intelligence.

So he’s trying to do what one of his predecessors, the pretty socialist Bill DeBlasio, failed to do: eliminate the public school system’s Gifted and Talented programs.

What benefit could there be to students, their parents, and New Yorkers in general, in preventing gifted children from studying in schools and classrooms that give them the best chance of developing their gifts early in life? 

None whatsoever. 

Killing the more demanding academic work does not thereby improve what the average public-school classroom offers students. It also does not improve the ability of students who are not currently qualified to enter the most advanced programs. The only goal achieved is that of a nearer approach to the egalitarian “ideal,” the world of “Harrison Bergeron.”

If the concern were really to improve the average or below-average classrooms, this could be done — conceivably — by focusing on what could be improved in those classrooms. Are there bad teachers who could be fired? Disruptive students who could be better disciplined or shown the door? Vapid, unchallenging, or politically warped curriculum that could be overhauled?

Under the DeBlasio mayoralty, many parents protested his plan to erase opportunities for the Gifted and Talented, managing to thwart that plan. They’ll have to protest again if they want to stop Mamdani from stomping out excellence.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Zero/Not-Zero

Fulnecky, essay, trans, gender, Bible

Forty-four million views later, the University of Oklahoma has advised student Samantha Fulnecky that the zero her paper received won’t be factored into her final course grade.

While it’s good that the school won’t hold that zero against her, she deserves a grade — an honest, objective grade — for her work.

Fulnecky did submit a paper, contrary to what is implied by the zero. She did indeed turn in an essay on the topic of “gender, peer relations and mental health” that her class was assigned.

Perhaps the word “gender” has given you the clue. You guessed it: she took the wrong view.

The Washington Post reports that her essay “rejected the concept of multiple genders and cited the Bible to support her view that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes. ‘Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,’ Fulnecky wrote.”

Turning Point USA, which collected 44,000,000 views for its post about the controversy, has also posted the essay itself.

Whether Samantha Fulnecky’s work precisely follows the requirements of the assignment I don’t know; these have not been posted as well. Though not deathless prose, the essay is intelligible and on the assigned topic, if perhaps annoying to those who, like the transgender professor who assigned the paper, disagree with its Biblical perspective and non-novel view of male and female.

In other words, it’s not nothing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Ugly Surge

antisemitism, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, education, schools

Is the ugly surge of antisemitism in the United States — whether homegrown or imported or both — now infecting primary school education?

According to a lawsuit filed against a school in Northern Virginia, an 11-year-old girl was subjected to repeated antisemitic harassment after the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel.

The bullying grew worse, the accusation goes further, after the proprietor of the school, Kenneth Nysmith, allegedly hung a Palestinian flag in the school gym.

When the parents complained, Nysmith initially told them that their daughter needed to “toughen up.” Then the student and her two siblings were summarily expelled from the school without prior notice or real explanation.

The suit alleges that the three Jewish children were expelled because their parents had objected to “the school’s unwillingness to respond to anti-Semitic harassment of their 11-year-old daughter. The school had allowed anti-Semitism to take root in her class — in, for example, [a] picture of a social studies class project depicting the attributes of a ‘strong historical leader’” — featuring the face of Adolf Hitler.

Right up there with other strong historical leaders, such as Tamerlane, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot.

With allegations so over the top, we probably should proceed with care. But it turns out that the 11-year-old was not the one who first told her parents about how she was being treated. In February, a concerned classmate asked his mother to call one of the parents, Brian Vazquez. “With Mr. Vazquez on speakerphone, the classmate described a disturbing pattern of harassment and bullying.”

The lawsuit calls for an investigation of the school, an order that the school enforce its nondiscrimination policies and eliminate its hostile environment, damages, and other remedies.

We will see how the legal battle proceeds. This is a private school, which has a right to “educate” in its own way. However, the school must follow its own rules.

And, if these allegations are accurate, I hope the school will soon experience another aspect of being private: going out of business. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

Goals, Goals, Goals

education, schools, literacy

Aleysha Ortiz wants to be a writer. There’s a hitch: she says she’s illiterate.

Ya gotta have goals, as teachers used to say in the Seventies.

When goals were still in vogue.

Her near-term goal, however, is suing the school she graduated from, in Hartford, Connecticut, for . . . graduating her with honors!

She has a case. While graduating illiterates has almost become a tradition in America — teachers’ unions are on board — you would think that even a woke administrator might judge graduating an illiterate with honors a step too far.

Now, in truth, the 19-year-old can read and write, a bit. But she’s always had trouble, she says. 

“Ortiz is suing the Hartford Board of Education, the City of Hartford and her special education case manager, Tilda Santiago,” explains The New York Post, “for negligence.” 

The negligence being that the school was too slow in testing for and following up on her dyslexia. “Just one month before graduation, she began receiving the testing, which was not completed until the last day of high school,” the Post clarifies. “The testing concluded that Ortiz was in fact dyslexic and ‘required explicitly taught phonics, fluency and reading comprehension.’”

There is more to the story, of course. She was born in Puerto Rico, came to the U.S. at five, and didn’t speak English at all well when she started school.

A lot of folks raise skepticism about the now-college-freshman (!), more than implying she was just an unmotivated student. And that a multi-million-dollar lawsuit seems a bit much.

But ya gotta have goals.

Pity that our government schools’ goals have so little to do with education.

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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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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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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