'Educational Equity' — Fairness to Students or Bureaucracy?

Leftists have coined a new term to justify their federal meddling in public schools.  

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education that the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. It also just wasn’t right. While cultural norms dictate a great deal of accepted behavior and, sadly, the racial divide in America was still accepted until the mid-1950s, race-based policy never has been right under our constitutional law or moral standing. Simply, we’re either created equal as the Bible teaches and as our Founding documents declare or we’re not.

Yet a term that’s emerged in recent years — educational equity — implies that, despite decades of school district configurations and pouring over data to create integrated public schools, neighborhood schools are segregated with a climate that produces inequitable results and an environment of unfairness. Never mind the reality that public schools become a reflection of students within a zone or geographic perimeter, often from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

Students don’t control the professional careers, choices, or educational attainment of their parents. For that matter, neither do teachers, school boards, boards of education, or any other entity of governance.

In Maryland’s Howard County, the efforts to construct educational equity are causing a stir, though not because the individuals opposed are racists, as some might argue. Instead, families want their children to attend a neighborhood school that is within a reasonable distance from home without a great deal of disruption to the daily commute and their peer groups.

Three years ago, Superintendent Michael Martirano offered a plan that would redistrict all 8,000 of the district’s students. But over the last couple of weeks, the Howard County Board of Education voted to approve a redistricting plan for the 2020-2021 school year that will instead reassign about 1,000 of the system’s students.

In response, one parent, Xueying Ni, argued in a WAMU radio interview, “The reason we oppose this is because we are a community-based school. We’re all tied to this school. There is no connection to outside neighbors. All of our daily routines are here.”

That doesn’t sound racist or illogical.

A high-school freshman, Vedant Patel, was quoted in the same piece, “It’s going to increase my commute severely. I’m already having to go around half an hour each day going to school and now it’s going to be at least an hour.”

Again, nothing hateful or racially motivated, right?

But to address overcrowding of some of the 76 schools in the district — where the highest concentration of students who receive free or reduced meals (FARM) are found in 10 schools — a sweeping plan has been presented, debated, and approved by the school board. According to Superintendent Martirano, the new zoning plan is “undoing nearly a decade worth of crowding at many of our schools and advancing socio-economic equity across all schools.”

Fueling the plans proposed as well as the one approved is data illustrating opportunity and performance gaps along with lower graduation rates and poor attendance among Hispanic and black students, in addition to the high rates of FARM entitlements characteristic of the 10 schools. So, the proposed answer is to redistribute students via zoning and busing by demographic data points to equalize, or attempt to standardize, the socioeconomic status of each school.

What has worked before and what exactly is educational equity?

First, the definition. Educational equity implies that fairness will be guaranteed through actions and policies that remove barriers to resources, instruction, and engagement in a school for all children. That sounds terrific and is truly the goal of most school districts, individual schools, teachers, and administrators.

Yet attempts to influence this “fairness” have not fared so well.

Efforts of the Barack Obama administration through the Every Student Succeeds Act increased the access to billions of additional funds and grants designated only for schools where larger numbers of students were underperforming, lagging in their graduation or struggling to keep teachers. Title I funding along with programs like Ladders of Opportunity and Promise Zones were deemed a failure, even by the educational experts.

The move to adopt federal standards, Common Core, was rejected in many states as overreaching and taking away local control of schools. While standards are needed to ensure the value of a student’s diploma from state to state, the idea of a one-size-fits-all approach to education was problematic in light of statements from Obama’s Equity and Excellence Commission.

From its report in February 2013 to then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the commission opined, “Historically, our approach to local control has often made it difficult to achieve funding adequacy and educational equity.” The suggestion? “Develop policies that give states and school districts incentives to pursue legal and feasible means to promote racially and socioeconomically diverse schools. … The federal government should also continue to support racial diversity as part of a broader equity agenda.”

Hmm. Maybe we overlooked the references to being better prepared academically or even equipped to be gainfully employed due to career readiness and critical learning skills. Nope.

So, the suggestion was to “Establish a process for replacing chronically ineffective school boards with oversight boards or special masters when weak governance is clearly contributing to a district’s persistent underperformance,” ignoring any local elections.

Let’s see, more money poured into education for the last 60 years hasn’t generated a level of greater academic preparation. As a matter of fact, if “equity” of funding was the measured metric, many of these underperforming schools would need to refund the taxpayers for the additional money, resources, and energy allocated to compensate for factors that, in reality, begin in the home.

Suggestions to increase federal control and negate local school districts haven’t been the secret to this fairness, either. But in the WAMU interview, an African-American resident running for the Howard County school board seemed to be onto something. Larry Pretlow noted that students should be able to attend neighborhoods schools of their choosing. “I don’t agree that you should ever make any attempt to balance poverty,” he stated. “[The county] should be working to reduce it.”

What a novel idea! The School Board should focus on the students and schools while the city, county, and state governments should work to improve the infrastructure, get government out of the way of growing jobs and other important aspects of improving a family’s socioeconomic standing.

And, one other parting thought. The same individuals who want socioeconomic equity to ensure educational equity are also the ones who oppose school choice that empowers parents to rescue their kids from underperforming schools.

But, that’s just not fair … to the bureaucracy at expense to the student.

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China exploiting U.S. schools to steal research, Senate report finds

China has built its economy in part on research funded by taxpayers in the U.S., then siphoned across the Pacific Ocean by academics recruited by Beijing to act as double agents, stealing intellectual property from their American universities, a bipartisan Senate report revealed Monday.

The academics signed contracts that in some cases committed them to hiding their dual research status from their U.S. employers while giving China a first look at their work, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations found.

Beijing’s interest in stealing U.S. military and economic secrets has long been known, but the federal government was slow to act, the report says.

“American taxpayers have been unwittingly funding the rise of China’s economy and military over the last two decades,” said Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio Republican and chairman of the investigative subcommittee, adding that “our own federal agencies have done little to stop their actions despite being aware of China’s talent plans.”

One China-backed researcher downloaded more than 30,000 files from an Energy Department lab and then fled back to China. In another instance, the report detailed how a professor at an American university working in a science field with both civilian and military applications found a way to circumvent U.S. export rules and get his findings back to China.

Investigators said he was paid by federal agencies to perform research while running a China-based lab, and he sponsored visiting Chinese students in the U.S. He then used the students to transfer his research back to China without having to travel himself.

The federal agency that investigated the case said many of the visiting students were “directly affiliated with research and development organizations involved in China’s military modernization efforts.”

Senate investigators said China has more than 200 programs to recruit research talent at home and abroad. The Senate report looks at one of them, the Thousand Talents Plan, which is directly run by the Communist Party Central Committee.

Investigators obtained some of the contracts that Thousand Talents Plan recruits sign with China and found researchers were pledging to hide their ties from U.S. institutions, all while promising to share their findings with their Chinese overseers.

One contract urged a researcher to run “shadow labs” in China, and other contracts required researchers to recruit others into the program. One Senate investigator compared it to a pyramid scheme and said it was no wonder the Thousand Talents Plan exceeded Beijing’s goals for growth.

“Chinese talent recruitment plan members misappropriated U.S. government funding, provided early basic research ideas to their Chinese employers, stole intellectual capital from U.S. basic research before it was published, and engaged in intellectual property theft,” the report concluded.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in July told Congress that the bureau is increasingly concerned about China’s talent recruitment strategy and pointed out that the U.S. taxpayer is often providing the money for the research that is advancing China’s “economic dominance over us.”

But the FBI was slow on the draw, the Senate report says.

The bureau had a list of China-backed researchers in 2016 but didn’t share the information for two years.

The senators who ran the investigation said the government needs a better strategy. The State Department could do more to try to screen out potential double-agent researchers applying for visas to visit the U.S., federal law enforcement needs to share more data with universities, and the schools should do more to vet whom they are hiring.

The report also suggested that the administration slap restrictions on research funded by American taxpayers.

After public scrutiny last year, China moved to delete references to the Thousand Talents Plan, investigators said. A list of participating scientists was scrubbed from the internet, and a Chinese news outlet reported that a directive came from on high ordering media to suspend reporting on the program out of concern for researchers’ safety.

Mr. Portman’s subcommittee will draw even more scrutiny Tuesday with a hearing on the report.

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Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably

During World War I, seven of the medical schools attached to the University of London decided to start admitting female students, as did Oxford and Edinburgh University. But by 1928, five of these London colleges had decided to stop admitting women, with the other two heavily restricting female numbers. Oxford voted for a ratio of no more than one female for every six males. Male academics and students were concerned that the presence of female students, let alone staff, would “alter the character of the teaching” and lead to “feminine government” of universities [Discussed in Education, by Carol Dyhouse, in Women in Twentieth Century Britain, 2014.]

In other words, the “masculine” dimension to academia—rigorously, unemotionally and coldly examining facts and arguments—would be wrecked by the increasing presence of emotional and over-empathetic girls. As females increasingly take over Western universities, now constituting the majority of students in the USA [Why Do Women Outnumber Men in College?, NBER Working Paper No. 12139, January 2007 ], it is becoming clear that these skeptics were right.

A recent column by Christopher DeGroot looked how feminization is destroying academia. [The University of Narcissism, October 25, 2019] A recent video by British independent scientist “The Jolly Heretic”—Dr Edward Dutton—has gone even further, claiming that female dominance of universities is destroying the “genius” type that is critical to the generation of original ideas (This idea is developed further in The Genius Famine, by Edward Dutton & Bruce Charlton).

DeGroot highlighted the appalling case of Eric Thompson of Moreno Valley College in California, who was ultimately fired for being what, in less female-dominated times, would have been described as good academic. Three complaints were made against Thompson by his, naturally Woke and mainly female, students. Each was upheld.

In 2014, Thompson was naïve enough to chair a seminar on the “Nature vs Nurture” debate with regard to same-sex attraction. This is indeed very much a “debate,” because 60% of the variance in male sexuality is to do with environment, in contrast to 80% of the variance in female sexuality [The evolution of human female sexual orientation, by A. Jeffrey et al., Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2019]. But Thompson’s presenting both sides of the argument mortified some of his students, who hold to the Politically Correct dogma that everything is caused by environment except sexual orientation, which is supposedly 100% genetic.

In 2015, DeGroot reports, Thompson, still foolishly believing he should teach students to explore the evidence, chaired a seminar on the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, again presenting both sides of the argument. In this case, the complainant maintained that, simply by presenting the other side of the argument, Thompson was effectively “targeting” LGBTQ students and even “placing them at risk” of abuse or psychological damage. Their “precious feelings,” to quote de Groot, far outweighed students’ rights to have an in-depth understanding of an important debate.

Finally, Thompson gave a D-grade to lesbian. She complained that he’d done this because she was a lesbian. He emailed her, explaining the situation calmly, after she’d complained. But in doing so, he violated a bureaucratic “no contact order,” reached his “third strike” and was dismissed.(This was so obviously unjust that he has actually been reinstated by a court (twice) but the college is still appealing the reinstatement—College furious after non-woke professor reinstated, by Bob Kellogg, OneNewsNow, August 6, 2019.

DeGroot presents a reasonable argument about how this fundamental change in the university environment—from a place where all ideas are freely debated, to a “safe space” for the feelings of irrational people—occurred. In order to calmly debate all ideas, you need to put emotion aside. But females are simply less able to do that than males because they are higher in Neuroticism—feeling negative feelings strongly. Thus, they more easily become overwhelmed by negative feelings, precluding them from logical thought. (Data on personality traits is drawn from Personality, By Daniel Nettle, 2007).

Similarly, new ideas, or being contradicted, will likely upset some people. But, in the pursuit of academic debate, you have to ignore this and calmly present both sides. However, this is more difficult for females, because they are more sympathetic, meaning that “not hurting people’s feelings” can become their highest ideal. Higher in Conscientiousness (“rule-following”) and lower in intellectual curiosity than males, females are also more conformist. This means they are less able to understand that, in academia, the truth is ever more closely reached by being non-conformist—by questioning the current “truth.”

Thus, argues DeGroot, female domination of academia will seriously damage academia as a place where ideas can be seriously debated.

Ed Dutton, in a video entitled “Do Female Reduce Male Per Capita Genius?” takes this critique of feminism even further. He argues that geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness. This means they are clever enough to solve a difficult problem, but being low in rule-following, can also “think outside the box,”. And, being low in Agreeableness, they don’t care about offending people, which original ideas always do.

An aspect of Agreeableness is empathy—being concerned with the feelings of others and being able to guess what they might be. Dutton shows that people who are high in “systematizing” (which males typically are compared to females, with systematizing being vital to problem solving) tend to be low in empathy. Thus, Dutton argues, you don’t get many women geniuses because their IQ range is more bunched towards the mean; and also because they are too high in Agreeableness and Consciousness.

Universities, traditionally dominated by males, have in essence been about giving geniuses a place in which they can attempt to solve their problems, working at their chosen problems for years on end. But Dutton argues that female academics tend to be the “Head Girl Type” (chief prefect at all-girls schools in the UK) with “normal range” high IQ and high in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness—the exact opposite of a typical genius. Accordingly, once you allow females into academia, they will be promoted over genius males because they come across as better people to work with—more conscientious, easier to be around and more socially skilled. But this will tend to deny geniuses the place of nurture they need.

As females come to dominate, the culture of academia will feminize. High in Conscientiousness, women will create a rule-governed bureaucracy where research occurs through incremental steps and a certain number of publications must be presented every few years, rather than through genius breakthroughs. But geniuses typically work on huge problems for years. So this bureaucracy will make it impossible for them to do this and keep their jobs.

Women will also create a culture of co-operative “research groups,” anathema to the kind of anti-social loners who tend towards genius. And females will, of course, tend to create an atmosphere of emotion and empathy, the enemy of the unemotional, coldly systematic style of the genius—and, traditionally, of academia.

In this atmosphere, “not causing offence” will become much more important. But genius breakthroughs are only made, ultimately, by causing offence.

Dutton argues that universities began as religious institutions and geniuses believed that their aim was to uncover the nature of God’s creation. To lie was, therefore, “blasphemy” and nothing was more important than “Truth.”

This focus on “Truth” carried over into the twentieth century, consistent with the male focus on “systematizing” which research by Simon Baron-Cohen has highlighted [The extreme male brain theory of autism, by Simon Baron-Cohen. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 2002]. But the female focus on “empathy over truth” has subverted this.

Dutton argues that feminization will drive genius-types out of universities, perhaps taking us back to the situation in the early nineteenth century, when such people were often independent scholars who had patrons or who were independently wealthy.

Actually Ultimately, Dutton concludes, there should be far fewer women at universities, though he suggests that “religious women”—who will believe that lying about God’s creation is blasphemy—should be permitted in small numbers to carry out the kind of incremental science in which those who are high in Conscientiousness excel.

In other words, just as Oxford University decreed in 1927, females should be a select minority of students.

I have written previously of the possibility of the higher education bubble bursting—indirectly because of the increasing “Wokeness,” and thus practical uselessness, of universities Female dominance is part of the reason for this possibility.

Perhaps we need separate universities for males and females. They could socialize on campus, but they shouldn’t be the same seminars or even academic departments. Of course, this was actually the case in the nineteenth century, with Harvard and Radcliffe and Columbia and Barnard College.

This divide is currently enforced—without the socializing—in some Islamic countries.

Could be that, even when it comes to academia, “Islam is right about women”?

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