Sunday, January 28, 2018







To celebrate school choice, expand federal support for charter schools

This week is National School Choice Week, a time to celebrate the importance of giving parents the freedom to select a school that meets their child’s needs. A new poll from the American Federation for Children shows that school choice is highly prized by parents and voters. Fully 63 percent of likely voters support school choice, including a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.

Support for public charter schools is even higher, at 72 percent.

Few ideas in American life enjoy such wide-ranging support, and it didn’t develop by accident. Policymakers in both parties have consistently championed choice and worked to make more choices available to parents everywhere. At an event held last week at the American Enterprise Institute, veterans of the Bush and Obama administrations joined scholars and policy experts to discuss the legacy of the past 16 years of federal education policy, during which school choice thrived thanks to pushing and prodding from Washington.

Since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 and worked with both Democratic lions (Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts) and heartland Republicans (Rep. John Boehner of Ohio) to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government has aggressively worked to shine a light on achievement gaps and cajole states into developing plans to eliminate them. President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program, launched in 2009, doubled down on the federal government’s role in promoting educational accountability among states. These laws also bolstered investments in public school choice, magnet schools, and charter schools. The result has been a proliferation of school choices since 2001, particularly public charter schools.

Reform-minded Democrats, including many urban leaders of color, have courageously embraced charter schools against the wishes of the union-dominated education establishment. Republican reformers, meanwhile, have overcome their suspicion of federal intervention to accept the critical role the federal government plays in fueling charter school growth and giving parents more options about where their children attend school.

While President Bill Clinton provided early and essential support to charter schools, it was during the Bush and Obama administrations that growth really took off – from about 2,300 schools serving 600,000 students in 2001 to 6,800 schools serving more 3.1 million students last year. In more than 200 school districts across America, at least 10 percent of public school students are enrolled in charter schools. And in some cities, the share is much larger – more than 90 percent in New Orleans, around 50 percent in Washington, D.C., and about one-third in Indianapolis and Newark, N.J..

The past 16 years also spurred the growth of national charter school management organizations such as KIPP, Green Dot, and Rocketship Public Schools. Major regional charter networks have taken root as well: IDEA Public Schools consistently achieves a 100 percent college-acceptance rate among students in Texas’s economically disadvantaged Rio Grande Valley, and Success Academy has propelled low-income students from Harlem and the Bronx into the top echelons of student achievement in New York. California-based Summit Public Schools, through its partnership with Facebook, is the national leader in developing software to help students become more self-directed, independent learners.

Many single-site charter schools are providing vital options for students whose district-run schools simply haven’t worked for them. Local philanthropy has played a role in this process, but the federal government has been a driving force, making $3 billion of investments through the Charter Schools Program created in the late 1990s. Schools like Crossroads Academy of Kansas City, Mo., and Harding Fine Arts Academy in Oklahoma City relied on CSP funding to get started. Both schools diversified the learning models available to local students and have been recognized for academic achievement.

Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which has conducted the most extensive studies of charter schools, finds that students – especially disadvantaged students – often gain the equivalent of weeks of extra learning by attending charter schools. This can be the result of innovative approaches to teaching and learning, or simply of giving students an environment in which learning is celebrated and they are encouraged to believe in their own abilities.

While the Bush and Obama administrations actively encouraged charter school growth and achievement – in conjunction with visionary school leaders, dedicated teachers, never-quit parents, generous philanthropists, and supportive state and local elected officials – the trend is poised to continue in the Trump administration.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos spoke at last week’s AEI event. She recalled her own work as a charter school and choice advocate in Michigan and reiterated her commitment to fostering educational innovation by giving states and local communities more latitude to take the lead in promoting a variety of choices for students and families.

The current administration is less interested than its predecessors in using federal levers to prod states into action, but it is firmly committed to the idea that students benefit when the adults in their lives can make a choice about their education. We hope the administration will continue to show a real commitment to choice by fighting for more funds for the federal Charter Schools Program. The CSP has amply demonstrated its effectiveness in making high-quality options available to the majority of parents who want to be able to choose their child’s school.

SOURCE





Taming the Tuition Tiger

You can’t put a price on education, the saying goes, but if you did, it would be very high. And the cost falls on everyone.

Indeed, our economy is hampered by a two-pronged higher education problem: Collectively, Americans have racked up some $1.4 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. At the same time, that debt has been amassed by those who drop out before earning a degree and by those earning degrees with limited utility in the market.

Yet, despite growing evidence that generous federal subsidies have driven tuition increases, policymakers continue to subsidize increases in college costs, instead of tackling the drivers of student debt. Easy access to federal student aid has enabled colleges to raise tuition profligately over the past several decades. When combined with generous loan forgiveness policies, which must be paid for by taxpayers, the result has been a three-fold increase in the cost of college since the mid-1980s.

Economist Richard Vedder found that, had tuition and fees at colleges and universities grown at a rate similar to the growth prior to 1978 — before there was significant federal subsidization of tuition — college costs at state universities would be closer to just $5,000 today.

The Higher Education Act (HEA), first passed in 1965, is the trough at which universities feed. The HEA authorizes multiple federal student loan programs, as well as the federal Pell Grant Program and the federal work study program.

The HEA isn’t a safety net of last resort for students who cannot afford college; it is a luxurious hammock in which students can repose, accessing subsidized student loans with few if any credit checks or examination of their ability to repay. The federal government originates and services 90 percent of all student loans, crowding out the private lending market and placing taxpayers on the hook for student loan defaults and loan forgiveness policies.

This vicious lending-and-spending cycle serves no one well — save university administrators. The federal government makes loans available to anyone, universities raise tuition fully aware of the ease with which the federal government provides the loans — and students borrow more and more to finance college.

The best way we could begin lowering college costs would be to dramatically curtail federal student loans. Although the PROSPER Act now before Congress doesn’t fully achieve this goal, it does begin reforming the HEA in a way that will lower costs for students and unburden taxpayers.

The bill would create a single loan option for borrowers, simplifying the current nine convoluted repayment options into just two: a standard 10-year repayment plan and an income-based repayment option. Perhaps most significantly, the proposal would eliminate loan forgiveness programs. Today, students can have their loans forgiven after 20 years — a figure which drops to just 10 years if a student enters government or nonprofit work after college.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that American taxpayers are set to lose $108 billion over the next decade due to loan forgiveness policies. Loan forgiveness unfairly shifts the burden of paying for college from the student to the taxpayer, more than two-thirds of whom do not hold bachelor’s degrees themselves. At the same time, such practices enable universities to raise tuition, knowing that students will have their loans forgiven in due time.

Importantly, in addition to ending generous loan forgiveness policies, PROPSPER would also eliminate the in-school interest subsidy, which costs taxpayers nearly $8 billion per year, and isn’t well-targeted to low-income students.

Although there is more work to be done to really cut college costs, consolidating student loans, eliminating loan forgiveness, and eliminating in-school interest subsidies provides a long-overdue step toward resetting college pricing. Encouraging private lending to re-emerge would also help.

Additional reforms to accrediting processes that include alternative education opportunities, without expanding arbitrary power to executive branch officials, are among PROSPER’s further moves in the right direction.

However well-meaning federal policy on education, it’s clearly making the problem worse. It’s time for lawmakers to show that they’ve learned this very expensive lesson — and help make college more available and more affordable once again.

SOURCE





Meet the Anti-PC Professor

Political correctness has overtaken the higher education system — but as left wing lunacy infects campus after campus, more students and faculty are willing to stand up to the social justice mob once and for all.

One example of this is New York University's own "deplorable professor" who finally said enough was enough.

"In the fall of 2016," New York University professor Michael Rectenwald recently told The Daily Caller, "I was noting an increase of this social justice ideology on campuses, and it started to really alarm me. I saw it coming home to roost here at NYU, with the creation of the bias reporting hotline, and with the cancellation of the Milo Yiannopoulos talk because someone might walk past it and hear something which might 'trigger' them."

Rectenwald, himself a leftist, created an initially anonymous Twitter account, @antipcnyuprof, to speak out against that ideology and the "absolutely anti-education and anti-intellectual" classroom indoctrination he was witnessing, as well as the collectivist surveillance state that the campus was becoming, as students were urged to report each other for the sin of committing microaggressions.

In October of that year, he outed himself as the man behind the controversial Twitter account, and "all hell broke loose." He swiftly found himself the target of shunning and harassment from his colleagues and the NYU administration. In true Cultural Revolution fashion, several colleagues in his department in the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group published an open letter declaring him guilty of incorrect thinking. "The thing that is interesting here is that they were saying that because I don't think like them, I am sick and mentally ill," Rectenwald said to the Daily Caller.

Instead of kowtowing to the campus totalitarians, Rectenwald declared himself done with the Left in a February 2017 tweet ("The Left has utterly and completely lost its way and I no longer want anything to do with it.") and has gone on to become an even more fervent defender of free speech and academic freedom. He has appeared often in conservative media to discuss those issues and the harassment he has received from the Left.

Recently Rectenwald even filed a lawsuit against NYU and four of his colleagues for defamation. He consented to answering some questions for FrontPage Mag about his conflict with the NYU ideologues.

Mark Tapson: A year ago on Twitter you wrote, "Goodbye to the Left, goodbye." Can you describe your intellectual journey from "left-liberal activist" to outspoken "deplorable" and what drove that seemingly sudden transition?

Michael Rectenwald: In hindsight, I think that the transition was less sudden than it might have appeared. I had gone from a left-liberal activist to a left communist before I became "deplorable." I narrate the history of the transition in my book, discussed below. But I'll tell something of the transition here.

My public criticisms of "social justice" ideology and politically correct authoritarianism resonated with large swaths of the political right. I gained a sizeable new audience and support network — through Twitter, Facebook and via hundreds of supportive emails. I also drew backing from "cultural libertarians," as Paul Joseph Watson dubbed this newly-emergent "counterculture." It should come as no surprise that many Trumpists backed me, especially given Trump's regular (although non-specific) criticisms of political correctness.

Criticism of political correctness was supposed to be the exclusive province of the rightwing. For most observers, it was almost inconceivable that an anti-P.C. critic could come from another political quarter. Unsurprisingly, then, the majority of people who discovered my case, including some reporters, simply assumed that I was a conservative. As one Twitter troll put it: "You're anti-P.C.? You must be a rightwing nut-job." But as I explained in numerous interviews and essays, I was not a Trump supporter; I was never a right-winger, or an alt-right-winger; I was never a conservative of any variety. I wasn't even a classical John Stuart Mill liberal.

In fact, for several years, I had identified as a left or libertarian communist. My politics were to the left (and considerably critical of the authoritarianism) of Bolshevism! I published essays in socialist journals on several topics, including a Marxist critique of postmodern theory, analyses of identity politics and intersectionality theory (here and here), analyses of political economy (here and here), and an examination of the prospects for socialism in the context of transhumanism. I became a respected Marxist thinker and essayist. I had flirted with a Trotskyist sect, and later became affiliated with a loosely organized left or libertarian communist group.

It wasn't only strangers who mistook me for rightwing or conservative. So too did many who knew better. An anti-Trump mania and reactionary fervor now gripped liberals and leftists of nearly all stripes. Previously unaffiliated and warring left and liberal factions consolidated and circled the wagons. Anyone who failed to signal complete fidelity to "the resistance" risked being savaged.

After my appearance on Fox Business News, such rabid ideologues ambushed me. The social-justice-sympathetic members of the left communist group to which I belonged denounced me in a series of group emails. Several members conducted a preposterous cyber show-trial, bringing charges against me and calling for votes on a number of alleged transgressions. From what I could tell, my worst offences included appearing on Fox News, sounding remotely like a member of an opposing political tribe, receiving positive coverage in right-leaning media, and criticizing leftist milieus just as Trump became President.

I denied that these self-appointed judges held any moral authority over me and declared their arbitrations null and void. Meanwhile, the elders of the group (one a supposed friend of mine) had remained silent, allowing the abuse to go on unabated for a day. When the elders finally chimed in, they called for my official expulsion. I told them not to bother as I wanted nothing further to do with them; I quit.

In their collectivist zeal, they later stripped my name from three essays that I'd written for publication on their website, and assigned their authorship to someone else entirely. Upon discovering this fraudulence, I publicly berated them for plagiarism. A prominent member of the American Association of University Professors noticed my complaint and investigated the alleged breach of intellectual integrity. Verifying my authorship of the essays, he condemned the group's actions in a popular blog. Only then did the benevolent dictators return my name to the essays' mastheads.

Friends and acquaintances from other communities also turned on me with a vengeance, joining in the groupthink repudiation. After my appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News, the Twitter attack was so fierce, vitriolic, and sustained that my associate Lori Price and I spent a whole night blocking and muting tweeters.

But the worst banishment came from the NYU Liberal Studies community — to which I had contributed a great deal, and of which I had striven for years to be a well-regarded member. Soon after the open letter appeared, I recognized a virtual universal shunning by my faculty colleagues. One after another, colleagues unfriended and blocked me on Facebook. The few that didn't simply avoided me entirely, until I saved them the trouble and unfriended them. Most stinging were the betrayals of those who once relied on my generosity, some whose careers I had supported and considerably advanced.

Despite the harsh treatment doled out to me by the social justice left and the warm reception I received from the right, I did not become a right-winger, or a conservative. But after the social-justice-infiltrated left showed me its gnarly fangs and drove me out, I could no longer identify as a leftist.

MT: As a staunch First Amendment defender, do you think it is possible to reverse the culture of politically correct totalitarianism that seems to be dominating academia today, and how can we do that?

MR: It is possible but reversing a forty-year trend that has finally resulted in what we have today — the complete takeover of academic pedagogy, philosophy, and policy by "social justice" ideology — will take a long, sustained effort, and the support of elements of the culture outside of academe, including media pundits, writers, independent scholars, public intellectuals, and a growing body of disaffected and vocal academic apostates and other renegades willing to take risks — as Bret Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and others, including myself, have done.

The way will be treacherous because the "social justice" left controls academic departments and administrations almost entirely, and everyone else within academia has been cowed into submission for fear of being "called out" as well. We are dealing with a Maoist-like Red Guard as we undergo a soft cultural revolution of our own. David Horowitz has been right all this time about the communists lurking in academia. Their impact has now been manifested through the "social justice" movement.

I put "social justice" in scare quotes because this term is a misnomer if there ever was one. Although the movement trades on a euphemistic name and the good will that movements that have gone by the same name have earned, including the Civil Rights movement, contemporary "social justice" has nothing to do with justice and is anything but benevolent.

It is a movement based on postmodernist theoretical notions and as I have pointed out (here and here), the postmodern adoption of Stalinist and Maoist disciplinary mechanisms, such as "autocritique" and "struggle sessions." It is totalitarian through and through. We must learn from and employ the tactics that served to defeat totalitarian leftism in the past.

MT: Apart from personal vindication, of course, is there some larger objective you are hoping to accomplish through this defamation lawsuit against NYU?

MR: I want to make clear that social justice activists cannot get away with replacing the First Amendment with their own speech codes. They are not the official arbiters of acceptable speech, despite their self-arrogation as such.

The First Amendment does not protect all speech. It does not, for example, protect speech that leads to illegal activity and/or imminent violence. It does not protect defamation, slander, or libel. The First Amendment does not protect speakers from liability for the foreseeable consequences of their speech.

The "social justice" leftists are now claiming that I am a hypocrite because I am suing over insults, and that I am seeking a safe space of my own. But they apparently do not understand the difference between an incidental differing of opinion, an insult, and the real damages of defamation. I never claimed to be a free speech absolutist. And my own exercise of free speech and so-called academic freedom amounted to criticism of the "social justice" ideology and the mechanisms prevalent in academia and beyond. I never once mentioned any individuals by name. I never once engaged in ad hominem argumentation.

My attackers, however, showed no such restraint. In fact, they maliciously and mendaciously attacked me using official university email list servs, with the explicit aim of damaging my professional reputation and destroying my career.

Meanwhile, irony, contradiction, and hypocrisy are all on their side. Based on the postmodern theoretical notion of "social and linguistic constructivism," the "social justice" left deems language use a material act. Thus, they excuse shutting down speech they disapprove of, "by any means necessary." Yet "social justice" leftists actually have no problem with truly damaging language use — as long as it's being undertaken by them, that is.

While Antifa, the "social justice" extracurricular infantry, burns down campuses to prevent the airing of "dangerous" speech, the "social justice" leftists seek safe spaces — not as protection from the violence of their compeers, but from the so-called "discursive violence" of non-PC-left speakers. Yet "social justice" ideologues undertake the most virulent forms of libel and defamation when dealing with speakers who express views at variance with their own.

Ironically, precisely while calling me a "racist," "sexist," "bully," and "Satan," I was bullied, abused and pelted with racist, sexist and other remarks that denigrated me on the basis of my race and sex or gender. The irony, double standard and hypocrisy are astounding. If the reverse had been the case, all hell would have broken loose. The defendants apparently thought that individual rights are not real and that because I am of a certain category they could make such statements with impunity. But the law doesn't agree.

So, while this suit is not merely symbolic — I have actually suffered from defamation, from malicious and mendacious speech intended to destroy me professionally and otherwise — it is also meant as a symbolic case in point, as an example to demonstrate the intent and scope of the First Amendment, which differs markedly from "social justice" speech rules. The main "social justice" speech rule is this: "social justice" leftists can say (and do) whatever they want to say (and do). And they can shut down whatever they don't want said (or done) — "by any means possible." The only problem is that they are legally wrong.

MT: You have a new book in the works about the postmodern roots of social justice ideology. Can you tell us a little about that and when we can expect it?

MR: The book is a memoir whose central argument is that the contemporary "social justice" creed and movement is the child of postmodern theory, while also incorporating some of the methods of Stalinism and Maoism. Just as postmodern theory lay dying in the academy, it gave birth to a child: "social justice" ideology.

I demonstrate the genealogy of "social justice" by recalling and retracing my own graduate education in Critical Theory (The Frankfurt School) and postmodern theory (deconstruction, poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, third-wave feminist theory, Science Studies, gender and transgender theory, and so on). The book explains just how social justice derives from postmodern theoretical notions and how and why these notions are not only philosophically wrong but also extremely pernicious. I recall my own indoctrination into these schools of thought, as well my emergence from them. The book is 95% complete, so hopefully it will appear in matter of a few months. The tentative (and hopefully final) title is Springtime for Snowflakes: 'Social Justice' and Its Postmodern Parent. (I am currently on the market for a new publisher.)

MT: With a title like Springtime for Snowflakes, it's bound to be a great read. Thanks, Professor Rectenwald, and congratulations on your escape from the dark side into the light!

Via email



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