University of California Suicide Watch

It seems determined to end the university’s preeminence.

Californians have long prided themselves on having one of the world’s premier public universities, in addition to great private schools like Stanford and Cal Tech. Forbes ranks the University of California at Berkeley as the best college in America and places three other UC schools (UCLA, San Diego, and Davis) among the top 20. U.S. News & World Report ranks the UC schools a bit lower, but both UCLA and Berkeley are in its top 25—ahead of the State University of New York (SUNY), the University of Texas, and all other state universities.

UC and state officials now seem determined to end the university’s preeminence by declaring war on academic excellence. Great universities like Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford have one overriding goal: to maximize the quantity and quality of the knowledge they create and disseminate. Great schools strive for the best, brightest, and most diligent students and faculty, allowing them to achieve superior outcomes.

For several years, however, the UC system—whose 10 campuses enrolled nearly 295,000 students this past fall—has been backing away from its commitment to excellence. In 2020, for example, the UC Board of Regents voted to drop the required SAT or ACT admissions test, despite a faculty committee’s recommendation to continue requiring it for undergraduate admission because it provides valuable information that enables UC to select highly qualified students. While many schools dropped the college readiness tests during the COVID pandemic, top schools, such as MIT and Georgia Tech—seeking to attract future science and technology leaders—have started reinstating them. As MIT’s admissions dean explained, “our ability to accurately predict student academic success ... is significantly improved by considering standardized testing.” Because of grade inflation and the abysmal quality of some high schools, grades alone are often a woefully inadequate predictor of collegiate success.

An even greater threat to UC’s academic integrity comes from the current attempt to require freshman applicants to complete an “ethnic studies” course in high school—though many high schools don’t offer such courses. Proposed guidelines for the ethnic studies classes suggested they “should create and honor anti-colonial and liberatory movements that struggle for social justice on global and local levels.” They argue students should learn about “systems of power and oppression,” such as “white supremacy” and “anti-Blackness.” In short, if you want to attend the University of California you must be indoctrinated in a racialist ideology that many—I dare say most—Americans believe is fundamentally wrong. As a letter signed by more than 100 UC faculty put it, “The university should never be in the position of forcing a particular political agenda upon its own students—let alone UC applicants across the state and the nation.”

A larger group of nearly 2,000 UC faculty, students, and community members also condemned the proposal, saying it would “incite bigotry and hatred in California classrooms, particularly against Jewish ... students,” pointing to the anti-Israel and anti-Zionism comments of some of the proposal’s advocates.

Perhaps more outrageous in a democracy is the fact that a small group of individuals associated with the University of California is trying to force its ideology on high schools, whose curriculum is normally, and properly, set by state and local school boards.

It is arguably appropriate for governmental authorities to mandate that graduates of publicly supported high schools study, for example, algebra; geometry; English, American, and world history; and some science before receiving their diplomas. Such requirements can help ensure that high school graduates are at least minimally knowledgeable about important things all adults should know. But imposing an ideology that deliberately denigrates Americans of European descent, and the extraordinary accomplishments of our nation, is not only wrong but despicable.

As someone who for years ranked colleges for a major magazine, I confidently predict that if the University of California continues its denigration of academic standards and its mandatory woke indoctrination of students, it will soon fall from its academic perch, and California high schoolers who can’t get into, or afford, one of the Golden State’s leading private schools will look to attend college at out-of-state institutions where traditional standards still apply.

The net result will be an acceleration of the already worrisome out-migration from California.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14161

***************************************************

Australia: Struggling school students to be blocked from teaching degrees

As 15,000 angry NSW teachers marched in the streets demanding pay rises of up to 7.5 per cent on Wednesday, the federal government announced $40m in extra funding to recruit hundreds more engineers, lawyers, tech experts and tradies into classrooms.

Acting federal Education Minister Stuart Robert said 700 more mid-career professionals would be retrained through the Teach for Australia program, to enter classrooms next year and in 2024 if the Coalition were re-elected.

He said he was concerned that at least a quarter of maths teachers in Australia were not qualified to teach the subject, and that one in 10 university graduates in education courses were failing the literacy and numeracy test that was required to graduate.

Mr Robert said his 12-year-old son had been able to answer some of the maths questions that 10 per cent of university graduates got wrong. “I was reading out example questions to our sons at the weekend and my boys were answering them,’’ he said.

“The test is designed for the top 30 per cent of (school leavers) and we can’t have the people looking to teach our students failing it.’’

Sample questions include: “This year a teacher spent $383.30 on stationery. Last year the teacher spent $257.85 on stationery. How much more did the teacher spend this year than last year?’’

Many of the literacy questions are multiple choice, to check comprehension and identify spelling errors.

Mr Robert said a re-elected Morrison government would seek consensus from the states and ­territories to mandate that students pass the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) as a condition of starting their university degree.

Under existing arrangements, undergraduate teachers can sit the test at any time during their ­degree, but cannot graduate until they pass. But Mr Robert said university education faculties should only enrol students who had ­already passed the test.

“Ten per cent of our teaching graduates are failing on basic literacy and numeracy,’’ he said. “Ten per cent (of those) are failing it not once, not twice, but three times.’’

Mr Robert also announced $13.4m to change teacher accreditation standards, to halve the time it takes mid-career professionals with a university degree to retrain as school teachers.

The federal government would need state and territory approval to change the graduate diploma of education from two years to one.

Mr Robert said two years of retraining was a barrier for workers wanting to switch careers into teaching.

“One year to learn the pedagogy of teaching at university is enough,’’ he said. “You could get a whole bunch of older tradies who aren’t on the tools anymore to do a one-year graduate diploma and teach industrial art (in schools).’’

A re-elected Morrison government would also fund 60 workers to retrain as teachers through La Trobe University’s Nexus program, which combines a Master of Teaching with part-time work as “paraprofessional teachers’’ in hard-to-staff schools in Victoria.

And $10.8m would be spent to develop new micro-credentials to upskill existing teachers in teaching reading through phonics, ­explicit teaching methods, and managing disruptive students.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/struggling-school-students-to-be-blocked-from-teaching-degrees/news-story/726bcd0ae1f415af0e9d6daa57466e88

***********************************

My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

*******************************