Tag: education

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom

Letting DEI Die

MIT, DEI, college, racism, collectivism, sexism

The good news? 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will no longer require applicants to make DEI statements.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth says the school can “build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Correct on both counts, but a bit blah as indictments go. And inadequate. Forget “inclusive.” This is merely a pledge to refrain from being arbitrarily exclusionary.

But the new policy is better than the status quo.

DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) may sound innocuous, at worst pointless. But DEI guidelines have functioned as a particularly odious form of ideological litmus test. The goal has been to force instructors to toe certain leftist (or collectivist) ideological lines as if the ideas imposed were as self-​evidently true as declarations that the cloudless sky is cerrulian blue.

For example, if you dare disagree that race-​conscious “antiracist” policies making skin color — and maybe also “gender” — more important than quality of work or some reliable leading indicators of productivity, your views may put you on the wrong side of the DEI divide.

So MIT’s dropping of mandatory DEI-​fealty statements is a big step in the right direction. By as prestigious an institution of higher learning as any in the world.

The bad news? 

MIT has apparently not fired the “diversity deans” that it hired in 2021 — and hired not on the basis of excellence of qualifications: serious plagiarism complaints have been filed against two of these personnel!

If MIT retains six “diversity deans” in place, able to run around causing trouble for those faculty who reject DEI edicts, it hasn’t purged itself of the poison quite yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Kids Paid to Propagandize

Pravda, propaganda, education, government spending

“You get paid good.” 

So said one student when asked “Why should students join CFJ?”

How well-​paid? $1,400, for learning to fight for “racial justice” and “social justice.” 

Parrot left-​wing propaganda, that is.

The activist group Californians for Justice has paid at least 78 public high school students a total of around $100,000 to take CFJ’s ideological training. Another $20,200 has gone to parents for participating.

The training apparently does not include lessons in independent thinking or assessing alternative viewpoints, such as the view that “social justice” is typically a euphemism for collectivist injustice.

One teacher, who preferred to remain anonymous lest she lose her job, told The Free Press that it’s helpful to know what students think “would help them learn better, but” the students were “obviously reading scripts that have words that they don’t know how to say.” One trainee advised this teacher that students would “come to class on time if we built relationships with them.”

Another teacher in the district, agreed that “CFJ is not helping students find their own voices.… They’re teaching them parroting … the exact opposite of how you empower children.” 

The focus on “racial justice” is manifested in CFJ’s own recruiting: its website reports that CFJ has “trained hundreds of youth of color in Long Beach to be community leaders and organizers.” Why only “of color”?

The training is not funded by strictly voluntary donations, of course. Long Beach Unified School District has been subsidizing it, using taxpayer dollars. The district has already given CFJ nearly $2 million.

The whole operation stinks to high heaven. But they’re “paid good.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly general freedom

School Choice Reform at Last

public school, home schooling, radicalize children, nanny state, education

How to get school choice reform? Keep fighting.

Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Republican, worked with families and school choice activists to pass school-​choice legislation.

SB1 would have given parents who want to take their kids from public to private schools $8,000 a year for tuition, textbooks, and other expenses: taxpayer money that parents would have been able to spend as they saw fit instead of being forced to let public schools get it regardless of performance.

The educrats and their allies were opposed. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Period,” was the comprehensive argument of the Texas Democratic Party chairman.

With his own party constituting a majority of lawmakers in each legislative chamber, it seemed that Governor Abbott and families could have won anyway. The state senate did pass school-​choice legislation. As it turned out, though, too many Republican lawmaker in the house were on the anti-​choice team.

Which Republicans? The ones that Abbott and other friends of school choice targeted in this year’s primaries. They spent millions of dollars backing challengers who support school choice. And the governor appeared at campaign events to criticize incumbent Republicans who oppose it.

The net result? Of the current 21 anti-​school-​choice GOP representatives, only six to ten will be returning to the legislature in 2025. (The exact number won’t be known until runoffs on May 28.)

The elections may thus bring enough of a change in the state legislature to let school choice happen for parents and their students in Texas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Homeschooling Surge

home school, education

Although homeschooling had once been common in the United States, by the 1970s few families taught their kids at home.

This began to change in the 1980s and 1990s. Researcher Brian Day estimates that by 2019, some 2,300,000 children were being homeschooled.

During the recent pandemic, even more parents gave homeschooling a try. But the trend had already been intensifying for decades. Not coincidentally, of course, because public schools continued to get lousy report cards, with the quality of government-​provided education demonstrably in steep decline.

In a recent article on the growth of homeschooling, The Washington Post concludes that it has become “America’s fastest-​growing form of education” as families “embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.”

Apparently, now even normal people are rescuing their kids from the educrats (unlike back in the day, when only fringe parents like my wife and I did so).

Looking at data from some 7,000 school districts, the Post concludes:

  • The number of homeschooled kids has increased by 373 percent in Anderson, South Carolina. It increased by 358 percent in one Bronx district.
  • In 390 districts, for every ten children being taught in public schools in the 2020 – 2021 academic year, one child was homeschooled.
  • The Post estimates that between 1.9 million and 2.7 million kids are currently being homeschooled in this country.

Post-​lockdowns, the practice is still going strong. In most districts for which data is available on the 2022 – 2023 school year, homeschooling “dropped from its pandemic peak.… Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-​pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.”

That’s good. For the children.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture sports

Un-​Sportsmanlike Conduct

college football, sports, education, money

Tonight, the undefeated Dukes of James Madison University will travel to play the Thundering Herd of Marshall University in a Sun Belt Conference college football game. My youngest graduated from JMU, so I feel heavily invested in the team. 

Duuuuukes!

One might think this sport and spectacle a welcome relief from politics — and surely it is — but not entirely. Because, of course, these great college football programs are attached to public universities financed by us, by our tax dollars. 

The problem? As The Athletic put it recently: “For the second consecutive year, James Madison looks like one of the best teams in the Group of 5. And for the second consecutive year, the Dukes are ineligible for the postseason.”

The Group of 5 are the five best football-​playing conferences after the best five conferences known as the Power‑5. That’s pretty impressive — especially considering this is only the second year since James Madison made the jump from the second division into the first division of football-​playing schools of higher yearning and earning. 

JMU is in the big leagues; it can now play for the national championship. Well, not now. Again, this year, like last year, JMU’s football team is banned from playing in a bowl game or being declared the champion of the conference … even though last year they did win the conference … except for the rule that says they cannot win the conference.

This year, the Dukes are 6 – 0 and could perhaps go undefeated. What if College Football’s Magic Computers pick them as among the best? They would still be denied a chance to compete.

Why? Well, those are the rules the colleges and conferences have agreed on. The rationales don’t hold much water. It seems like a hazing ritual holdover to me. 

But, of course, the universities can do whatever they want. 

And suffering the harsh two-​year punishment is not so terrible for the coach who will possibly have a decade-​long career, or the university that will play on in perpetuity. 

All the unfairness is placed on the shoulders of the student athletes. Denied the conference honors and the post-​season play they deserve, these unpaid players who’ve earned millions for their schools have at least learned a lesson. When it comes to sports and money, the kids come last. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

Fiscal Protector

California, condoms, Gavin Newsom

Why doesn’t California Governor Gavin Newsom care about kids?

What is it with this “conservative”? 

Last week, Newsom coldly deployed his veto pen to deny to Golden State public high school students the sex subsidies — in this case, free condoms — that a solid majority of their state legislators had determined were essential to their healthy development.

Senate Bill 541 would have mandated that all public schools make condoms available free to all students, grades nine through twelve. According to an Associated Press report, the legislation would also “have made it illegal for retailers to refuse to sell condoms to youth.” 

The bill’s author, State Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Los Angeles Democrat, contends the legislation is needed to help “youth who decide to become sexually active to protect themselves and their partners from (sexually transmitted infections), while also removing barriers that potentially shame them and lead to unsafe sex.”

Newsom agreed that free condoms, even if not yet recognized as a fundamental human right, are “important to supporting improved adolescent sexual health.”

His problem? Condoms cost too much. 

“With our state facing continuing economic risk and revenue uncertainty,” explained the governor, “it is important to remain disciplined when considering bills with significant fiscal implications.”

Seems California is already running a $30 billion deficit. Becoming the condom supplier of first resort for 1.9 million hormone-​infused students each year would annually add a few million more to that deficit.

Ah, California … where Gavin Newsom is the voice of fiscal restraint. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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