Tag: education

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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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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Bad Math Baltimore

Baltimore, schools, education, school choice, mathematics

You may have thought it couldn’t get this bad. 

“Not one student at 13 high schools in Baltimore City, Maryland, achieved proficiency in math,” informs the city’s Fox 45 News, “as indicated by state math exams.”

That’s 40 percent of the city’s high schools and we’re talking not a single soul managed to come in at “proficiency.” Not mastery, mind you. 

“Among those 13 high schools,” the report continued, “a total of 1,736 students participated in the test with 74.5% of them achieving the lowest possible score of one out of four.”

Okay, okay, but what about the city’s best schools?

Well, a Fox 45 News follow-​up found that only “11.4% of students” even at “Baltimore’s five top-​performing high schools” are “proficient in math.” 

Adding, “In fact, not one high school student in the entire city, last school year, achieved a top level of math proficiency.”

Jason Rodriguez, with People Empowered by the Struggle, an edgily named Baltimore nonprofit, calls it “educational homicide.”

“It’s not a funding issue,” says Rodriguez. “We’re getting plenty of funding.” He thinks “accountability is the issue” and has “been calling for the resignation of the school CEO.”

Young people in Baltimore can learn mathematics just as well as young people anywhere. That we know. But they also need functional families as well as functional schools. The government, plausibly the chief cause of the dysfunction of both, has only official responsibility for the latter.

Sure, it sounds like time to lop off the top brass. But also past time to give every parent of a school-​age child in Baltimore (and everywhere) a choice about where to go to school — purchased with the tax dollars that taxpayers are already providing.

Currently, to no avail. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

Campus Critic Defended

censorship, free speech, education, university, college

In an interim victory for freedom of speech that may lead to an important precedent, a court has refused to dismiss a lawsuit against the University of Texas.

According to Richard Lowery’s complaint, filed in February 2023, university officials threatened his “job, pay, institute affiliation, research opportunities, [and] academic freedom” as part of a campaign to stop him from criticizing various stupid and/​or horrific policies of the school.

An example of Lowery’s language that has the school’s administrators gunning for him is a College Fix piece, “At UT-​Austin, teaching white 4‑year-​olds that they’re racist is funded by taxpayer dollars.”

Administrators repeatedly pressed a superior of Lowery, Carlos Carvalho, to “do something about Richard.” When Carvalho resisted, Dean Lillian Mills threatened to oust Carvalho as executive director of a Center at the school.

Officials also “allowed, or at least did not retract, a UT employee’s request that police surveil Lowery’s speech, because he might contact politicians or other influential people.”

Professor Lowery is represented by attorneys at the Institute for Free Speech, whose senior attorney Del Kolde stresses what should be obvious to the administrators: “Professors at public universities have the right to criticize administrators and speak to elected officials. The First Amendment protects such speech and, in a free society, DEI programs and UT’s president are not above public criticism.”

The goal of the lawsuit is, in part, to enjoin University of Texas officials from further threatening Lowery’s liberty to speak … and from acting on their previous threats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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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