Tag: education

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education and schooling ideological culture

Counterintuitive?

education, equality, egalitarianism

In this increasingly complex technological world, what can our school systems do to help students excel in advanced math?

Well, here’s a novel approach: “Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school,” The Boston Globe reports.

Hmmm. Rather counterintuitive: Take access away from students.

Silly me, helping students master advanced mathematics isn’t even on the list of concerns for this Massachusetts city’s “education” officialdom. “The district’s aim,” explains The Globe, “was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers.” 

By reducing the learning opportunities for all. 

“School districts throughout the country are moving to axe certain academic standards such as advanced courses, grades and homework in the name of equity,” The Daily Caller informs, “in California, a high school recently stopped offering honors courses because the courses were failing to enroll enough black and Latino students.”

The impetus behind these moves is racist and wrong. Moreover, the results are both predictable and pernicious: “limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons.”

“They’re shortchanging a significant number of students,” one parent complains, “overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.” This is the case because many of the more affluent parents can afford to bypass the antagonistic public schools and get their kids the education they need to succeed. 

Public schools are increasingly throwing in the towel on teaching low-income and many black and brown kids, deciding that racial “equity” can most easily be achieved by taking away educational opportunities from white and Asian students.

Is this where the logic of public education leads — race as an excuse to play Procrustes, sawing off the tops of our heads to make us “equal”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling national politics & policies

The Sin of Skin Color

education, race, racism

Zack De Piero, who taught English at Pennsylvania State University for several years, was pushed out of his job in 2022 for opposing race-based grading and opposing “diversity” training that tells white people that they are inherently racist. De Piero is white.

With the help of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, he is suing the school for racial discrimination, specifically for being “singled out for ridicule and humiliation because of the color of his skin.”

According to the lawsuit, various of the defendants told De Piero that “outcomes alone — regardless of the legitimacy of methods of evaluation, mastery of subject matter, or intentions — demonstrate whether a faculty member’s actions are racist or not. . . . The logic of Defendants’ demands required that De Piero also penalize students academically on the basis of race.”

The filing details a litany of such conduct.

De Piero told Fox News: “I think there is almost a religious, cult-like environment where you had this original sin. In this case, I’m white. I need to repent for that sin. . . . I think they were waging a psychological war campaign and they’re trying to break people. And they almost broke me. But they didn’t.”

The U.S. Supreme Court took fifty years to rule against discriminatory, race-based university admissions. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another fifty years to rule against the travesties of racist grading, racist “diversity training,” and allied diversity-equity-inclusion racist policies doublespeakingly designed to mandate racism in the name of antiracism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Destroying (& Saving) Debate

debate judges, clowns, communism, communists

“Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist,” confesses someone now judging high school debates.

Her name is Lila Lavender, and she won the 2019 national high school debate championship. But now she has Authority.

“I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging.”

Start of a resignation letter? 

Not on your life. Ms. Red — excuse me, Ms. Lavender added, “I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments.”

She exalts totalitarianism, instead, and the deaths of over one hundred million people and counting. And feels quite comfortable doing so . . . in this terrible, evil country . . . in which somehow she judges debate.

She’s not exactly an aberration. High school debate has regressed “from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning,” champion debater and coach James Fishbeck writes in The Free Press,“to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.”

He points to a listing of judges run by the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA), where many judges on their individual but public webpages acknowledge deciding winners and losers according to their own personal politics. 

“A black student I coached,” he recalls, “was told by the debate judge that he would have won his round, if he hadn’t condemned Black Lives Matter.”

One judge posted instructions that “if you are white, don’t run arguments with impacts that primarily affect POC [people of color]. These arguments should belong to the communities they affect.”

Another judge said “Referring to immigrants as ‘illegals’” would automatically lose one the debate.

While the NSDA insists that “Judges should decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs,” Fishbeck complains they do nothing about judges who publicize their punishment of students on a political basis.

But James Fishbeck did something. He formed a new debate league, Incubate Debate, which this year has already hosted 18 debate tournaments. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Down-Shifted Demographics

gerontocracy, depression, young people

Until recently, the most obvious demographic trend has been the “squaring of the curve”: more people were hitting an apparently natural limit in their eighties and nineties, rather than dying off in their forties, fifties, and sixties.

Now, however, longevity stats are showing a new feature. A graph in a fascinating article puts it like this: “Americans die earlier than the English across the income distribution, despite typically earning significantly more,” with the article quickly clarifying the specifics: “America’s mortality problem is driven primarily by deaths among the young.”

The most vulnerable members of traditional society are newborns and the aged. But now it’s those reaching their alleged prime: “one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday.”

Is it COVID? No. This trend is older than 2020, and remember, in the recent pandemic it was the aged, not the young, who experienced higher rates of morality.

An article by Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt suggests that the problem may loom beyond America, for their work shows that “The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Is International,” and I don’t think it is at all out of bounds to take higher youth rates of suicidality, desperate recreational drug use, and expressed anxiety and despair — and skyrocketing transgender rates, too — as stressors related to increased death rates. 

It is vital to study these things, for their main conclusion is startling and a general sign of deep cultural decay: “Teen mental health plummeted across the Western world in the early 2010s, particularly for girls and particularly in the most individualistic nations.”

We should ask ourselves: could this be related to the rise of a gerontocracy?

A society run by old people for old people may have nasty inter-generational side effects.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly international affairs

Doctor-to-Be of Theology

Dr. Greta Thurnberg

“The year 2023 is the centenary of the passing of the Freedom of Religion Act in Finland,” writes “conferer” Martti Nissinen, promoting a future ceremony of the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Theology — in which one degree will go to . . . Greta Thunberg.

Much has been made, online, of theologians, of all people, awarding an honorary degree to a young environmental activist demonstrating no academic much less godly accomplishments. The obvious suggestion: “what she’s selling is a religion”! 

But what stands out to me? Mr. Nissinen’s declaration of this year’s ceremonial theme: “Freedom.”

Ms. Thunberg has been pestering and entreating leaders of the world to “do something” to “save the planet” from “climate change.”

What she demands is not freedom, but more

  • taxes
  • mandates
  • prohibitions. 

Whatever the actual threat may be, there is no hint of freedom in her agenda. And if you want more of that message, consult the latest alarm from the IPCC.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a bizarre restatement of past pronouncements, warning “that we are almost half way through the ‘last chance decade’ to pull the brakes on climate change.”

“The world is only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels,” explains The Guardian. “On current trends, we will shoot past the target within a decade.” 

Dooming the planet. 

Pushing this fake “global accepted goal” has a historical context. Many similar past warnings that haven’t come true. But, more pressingly, the worldwide panic over a pandemic that even to politicians increasingly appears to be a complete failure of the experts.

Why trust the Expert Climatologists when the Expert Epidemiologists have so disastrously failed us?

Just don’t ask Dr. Greta.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights media and media people

License for Leftists

censorship, education, schools, Marxism

Libertarians should avoid taking sides in left-right antagonisms when promoting a principled third position would make more sense.

Regrettably, in “Christopher Rufo Wants To Shut Down ‘Activist’ Academic Departments. Here’s Why He’s Wrong,” libertarian magazine Reason fails to offer that alternative.

“In an essay published this week in City Journal,” author Emma Camp begins, “conservative activist Christopher Rufo argued that universities — or rather, the state legislatures governing these universities — should shut down ‘activist’ academic departments. But rather than protecting higher education, forcibly shutting down left-wing academic departments would be nothing more than routine censorship.”

Tellingly, she never defines “routine” censorship.

Let me help: routine censorship is the governmental policy of preventing or punishing private speech on private property. 

State colleges and universities are public institutions, politically established and subsidized by taxpayers. With few exceptions, “private colleges” are also routinely tax-funded at the demand end, and are further supported with research contracts.

Getting rid of Marxist professors preaching political revolution is no more anti-free speech than preventing the CDC and Anthony Fauci from conducting gain-of-function virus research within some college laboratory.

Ms. Camp quotes the Supreme Court about the importance of “safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.” Freedom sounds great, but as usual, the Supremes forget that taxpayers have an interest, and that constraints on public schools was once routine.

So how not to “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom”? 

Offer a third position: de-subsidize and dis-establish government “education” by empowering higher education’s customers. Let Marxist professors find payers in the private sector.

Instead, Emma Camp effectively tells conservatives they have no choice but to fund every leftist program that politics and the bureaucracy allow. She could have recognized that “Academic freedom” in the context of tax-subsidized schooling is merely ideological license.

Which is itself a sad alternative to real liberty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Urinals De- and Re-commissioned

unisex bathrooms

Remember when opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment said that we would wind up with unisex bathrooms should the constitutional amendment be ratified? And ERA advocates scoffed?

Well, here we are: no ERA, but unisex bathrooms . . . in public schools.

Or, more precisely, two flavors of unisex bathrooms: one room for girls along with those boys who identify as girls, and another for boys and those girls who identify as boys. 

In early February, New Hampshire’s Milford School District school board voted to cover over boys’ room urinals with garbage bags while members investigated the cost of turning all the restrooms into all-stall accommodations.

Why? A few parents of trans students had complained that urinals made their trans boys uncomfortable — their girls “transitioning” to become boys didn’t . . . well, I’ll let you imagine some of this.

Of course, urinals in boys’ rooms allow for faster turnover of users. Getting rid of them makes boys spend more time in a place they, as often as not, would like to minimize.

But it affects actual girls negatively, too.

“As a female,” one girl told a local TV station, “I don’t think it’s safe to have males in our bathroom.”

The board had also ruled that the number of students in each restroom should be limited to the number of stalls — not an efficient way to serve students’ needs, completely ignoring time spent at the sink in front of a mirror. More bizarrely yet, the board had specified that clothing changes for physical ed. be confined to locker room toilet stalls.

Last Friday, students held a walkout. And the school board backpedaled, unbagging the urinals.

Good. But I don’t think anyone can mistake all this “business” for common sense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling

Problem Student, Problem Admin

school problem, problem student, gun, violence, education

“School downplayed warnings about 6-year-old before teacher’s shooting, staffers say,” The Washington Post headlined its Saturday report.

Weeks ago, elementary school teacher Abigail Zwerner was shot by a first grader in their Newport News, Virginia, classroom. Authorities are not sure of the precise motive but have called the attack “intentional.”

Zwerner remains hospitalized in stable condition, while her child assailant is in emergency custody undergoing “court-ordered mental health treatment.”*

School officials received a tip that the boy had brought a gun to school but did not find the weapon in their search.

More disturbing, The Post interviewed “educators claiming that Zwerner raised alarms . . . and sought assistance” but “that school administrators waved away grave concerns about the 6-year-old’s conduct.” The lad reportedly “threw furniture and other items in class,” once “barricaded the doors to a classroom, preventing a teacher and students from leaving,” and “was known campuswide for disruptive and violent behavior.”

One educator revealed that “the boy wrote a note telling a teacher he hated her and wanted to light her on fire and watch her die.” When brought “to the attention of Richneck administrators,” however, the teacher “was told to drop the matter.

“Several teachers said they received no support when they faced violence in the classroom or attacks from students,” the article informed. “Some speakers claimed the district is more interested in keeping discipline statistics low than in taking meaningful action to address students’ problems.”

The Post’s story was hampered by numerous school personnel refusing to talk citing their fear of reprisals from school authorities. 

While mental health help must be addressed, there is no solution to problems if administrators act like crooked politicians, simply sweeping aside serious issues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In Virginia, a person must be seven years of age to be charged with a crime, so the first grader will not be prosecuted.

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education and schooling government transparency paternalism

Motown Bully

School Board, parents, government

Is the republican form of government unnatural?

People in government tend to balk at republican imperatives, anyway. You know, like transparency. Citizen control sure seems unnatural to politicians.

Case in point: Detroit.

“The Rochester Community School district is determined to keep the sun from shining on its operations,” writes Kaitlyn Buss in The Detroit News.

At issue is a new school board member, Andrew Weaver. He had campaigned on issues like “transparency, accountability and communication between the district and parents.” Well, Superintendent Robert Shaner does not like this agenda. He “sent a letter to the board president and vice president in late December targeting [the] newly elected board member” and threatening “legal action if Weaver is too forceful in challenging the way schools are being run.”

This is awfully brazen, and it should alarm parents in the Rochester Community School District. For it is not coming from some obscure bureaucrat: “Shaner was selected as Superintendent of the Year in 2020 and is one of the longest tenured and highest paid school leaders in the state.”

He epitomizes government, at least in the “education” wing of Michigan government.

Bullying is how he rolls.

Mr. Weaver explains it this way: “I sat there as a private citizen and wondered why our board didn’t do anything. Well, we found the answer. Because they’re all scared of getting one of those [letters].”

But perhaps Weaver’s prepared for the battle. Even as a parent he’d received two cease-and-desist actions from Shaner, who objected to his online attacks.

Politicians think they are kings. Above citizen criticism.

Which is why citizen control must be forced upon them. 

Over their objections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom

Federally Funded Racism

race quota, science

Can one cosponsor a racially discriminatory program without having any idea of its nature, even if this is implied by the program’s very name?

The University of Oklahoma and other universities are cosponsors of the Oklahoma Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, a program funded by the National Science Foundation that requires beneficiaries be members of certain minority groups: “African American, Hispanic, Native American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.”

The Alliance’s goal is to “increase recruitment, enrollment, and retention of minority students in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] programs.”

Because of the program’s discriminatory criteria, the group Do No Harm has filed civil rights complaints against a dozen Oklahoma universities. Its leader, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, points out that the terms of the federally funded program “specifically exclude white students, students from middle eastern countries, and Asian students. . . . [B]ut it is illegal to engage in such discrimination based on race.”

When first asked about the complaint, the University of Oklahoma declined comment. But after The College Fix site reported on the matter, OU spokesman Jacob Guthrie said that the university’s site had been amended to reflect the fact that any student may apply, insisting also that the program “has never been restricted by race.”

It sure looks to me as if OU officials, like those of Ithaca College (subject to a similar federal complaint in October), are now suddenly worried about legal consequences. 

Anyway, Do No Harm’s filing is already doing good, helping to re-establish that old liberal idea that governments must not discriminate on grounds of race.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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