Tag: education

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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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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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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

Don’t Mention the Menace

school board, education, schools, gangs, censorship

“It was a chaotic ending to the public comment period during Tuesday night’s Loudoun County [Virginia] School Board meeting,” reports WJLA, the ABC affiliate in our nation’s capital, “when Chair Melinda Mansfield ended that portion of the hearing after giving multiple warnings to parents raising concerns about a current student with alleged gang ties [who] was arrested last year for carrying a gun and making threats to kill a classmate.”

Well, a public official did indeed put parents on notice not to talk further about the problem they came to discuss. However, a student who carries a firearm to school and threatens to murder his or her peers does perhaps warrant some smidgen of dialogue. 

“According to sources with knowledge of the situation,” WJLA informs, “the student is allegedly connected to the MS-13 gang and is in the U.S. illegally.”

Parent Abbie Platt divulged that her “daughter is terrified to go to school with him.”

Four parents addressed the school board regarding this student; each was cut off by the board’s chair who accused them of “breaking the school board policy” by “providing information that could identify the student.”

“Everything that was brought up in this public comment is already public knowledge,” explains Tiffany Polifko, a parent and former school board member, telling the board that to “stop your constituents from speaking” is a classic violation of the First Amendment.

A spokesperson for Loudon County Public Schools defended the board’s speech squelching: “Even some minor details could lead . . . to the identity of a student, that’s just not a situation we’re comfortable with, that we’re going to accept.”

So, your kid needs to accept the risk of brutal torture and death, and you need to be quiet about it — because even discussing the danger might reveal the identity of the murder-and-mayhem-threatening student.

Those are public school priorities. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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education and schooling government transparency

The Secret Teachings of Our Age

education, school, ideology, politics

The high school course was not “Logic and Semiotics in Western Culture” — or “Eastern.” It was not “Memes for Momes.” Or even “Cartoons from Cave Walls to Bathroom Stalls.”

It was “A History of Ethnic and Gender Studies.”

Do we dare ask what’s in it?

Doesn’t matter. Because we’re not allowed to see what’s in it.

“Michigan parents can’t request some school curricula under public record acts after the Michigan Supreme Court chose not to hear an appeal from a lower court,” explains the Michigan Capitol Confidential.

“On Sept. 25, the state’s top court denied an appeal filed by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy on behalf of a Rochester parent who requested the curriculum for a class held in the Rochester Public Schools district.” Using the “the state’s Freedom of Information Act, Carol Beth Litkouhi in 2022 sought course materials” for the class mentioned above. “Rochester Public Schools refused. The district argued that the law did not require it to provide records held by teachers.”

And so far — and barring a revision of state law — the public schools have won. 

Not a happy story, but even more than bad news for Michigan parents and (by extension) their children (the students in public schools), it demonstrates a mindset we’ve encountered before, and not confined to one school district or one state.

According to educators in public service, they have a right to teach your kids and not tell you what they are doing.

They are committed to doing this.

They are indoctrinators and not on your side.

They must be stopped. Politically. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

The Racial Land Mine of First Grade

BLM, Black Lives Matter, all lives matter, education, schools

You can’t let kids get away with anything.

Schools must apply some discipline. Otherwise, chaos would ensue. Talking out of turn, pulling pigtails, passing notes . . . and, not least, an epidemic of expressing benign thoughts inconsistent with the poisonous race-conscious ideology that some schools seek to inculcate.

In March 2021, a little girl known as “B.B.” in court documents got into trouble for drawing a group of classmates of different races. She added the words “Black Lives Matter” and, below that, “any life.” She gave the drawing to a black classmate to try to comfort him, as she later explained.

Had B.B. been more attuned to the racial controversies of the day — does she not follow The New York Times and CNN? — she might have realized what treacherous waters she had dived into. 

As it was, she was surprised when the school forced her to apologize to her classmate and forbade her from drawing any more pictures while in school and from attending recess for two weeks.

The parents sued. A district court ruled in favor of the school, but the parents, helped by Pacific Legal Foundation, are appealing.

The district judge says that whether First Amendment protections of free speech apply here depends on whether such speech, however innocent, would “significantly interfere with the discipline needed for the school to function.”

The drawing could hardly have thus interfered unless part of the school’s “function” is to impose race-conscious orthodoxy. 

And suppress even the slightest peep of unwary dissent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom too much government

The State vs. Homework

school, education, teaching, home work

Oy, the stress. Of doing stuff. It’s nonstop.

If a California lawmaker gets her way, it will stop, though, at least in the schools. Or at least slow way down.

Consider the pressure, the horrible grinding pressure of having to practice math problems, peer at chemical formulas, read assigned readings, summarize, spell, grammarize, memorize names and dates and Spanish vocabulary, and on and on and on . . . en casa. . . .

It’s the kind of thing that can curdle a kid’s physical and mental health. Not to mention cut into playtime.

So is the legislation AB2999 justified?

Is Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo warranted in hoping to require school boards to ponder the “reasonable amount of time spent on homework per student that should not be exceeded” or whether “homework should be assigned . . . in any elementary school grade, inclusive” or perhaps that homework be “optional and not graded,” et cetera?

Well, if we think about this, we must admit that there is one and only one reason to ever require students to spend time at home mastering what is introduced in class. Only to prepare them for earning a living and living life by helping them obtain knowledge and skills and realize their potential.

But that’s it. That’s the only reason.

Of course, individual teachers, if competent and conscientious, already think about what homework is appropriate to assign. They must, we hope, want their students to function capably in life. And maybe also to learn that learning is not torture.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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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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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