I remember how it was -- JR
In the name of ‘equity,’ companies are now ignoring educational achievement
By David Christopher Kaufman
Today, at least two-thirds of higher education institutions, including Harvard and Stanford, don’t require the SAT for admission. The American Bar Association recently announced it will drop the LSAT as an admissions requirement for law school. And now, some are calling for the prestigious MCAT to be scrapped as the gold standard for medical school admissions — all in the name of racial equity.
Now, the latest standard on the chopping block are colleges themselves, as a recent job posting for a director position demonstrates.
A LinkedIn posting by HR&A Advisors, the TriBeCa-based real estate consultancy, asked applicants for the $121,668- to $138,432-a-year position to remove “all undergraduate and graduate school name references” from their résumés and only cite the degree itself. A quick spin through a few other HR&A job postings confirmed that this policy extends company-wide as part of their “ongoing work to build a hiring system that is free from bias and based on candidate merit and performance.”
At a time when equity and inclusion policies have become corporate must-haves, efforts to ignore educational bona fides for new hires are hardly surprising. After all, as colleges and even the military (which no longer requires a high school diploma) drop the most basic entry requirements, why shouldn’t the private sector follow suit?
There’s no doubt that access to fancy schools and pricy education has historically shut out racial and economic minorities from many employment arenas — particularly at the highest ends of the earning spectrum. But obscuring education histories won’t solve these inequities. It simply creates new ones.
For one thing, education still matters to companies like HR&A. If it didn’t, they would ask candidates to entirely remove schooling from their CVs, not just school names.
Secondly, education also matters to job applicants. Many have worked hard and taken out loans to acquire college degrees that, they think, mean something to the HR&As of the world. Many have also devoted hours to the college sports teams, academic societies and other extracurricular activities that are both resume-building and deeply rewarding.
I myself attended universities (Brandeis, NYU) that were far above my family’s affordability level precisely because I knew they were investments in my long-term earning potential as well as a way to keep me on the straight and narrow in high school. Sure, as with many Americans — particularly African-Americans like myself — I took on student debt. But the quest for academic success not only helped me avoid (most) teenage troubles, it also helped me secure a career with good pay and a strong sense of self-worth and satisfaction.
Policies like HR&As are not just punitive, they’re downright lazy. Telling young people —particularly the young people-of-color this “school-blind hiring” purports to benefit—that academic prestige doesn’t matter literally reinforces the worst stereotypes of minority cultures. It says academic prestige doesn’t matter to them.
Furthermore, for HR folks and recruiters, ignoring educational bona fides — while appearing benevolent—is a missed opportunity to truly learn, as they say in woke-speak, about the “lived experiences” of the diverse workforce they are so desperate to attract.
Many black students (like my own grandparents, for instance) have attended Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). These are not just places of learning, but integral components of their graduates’ identities. HBCUs mean something: they matter. And yet, these well-intentioned initiatives, led mostly by white liberals, completely erase that meaning.
This is why school-blind hiring feels so frustrating — and phony. In this period of quiet-quitting and mass resignations, it offers already unmotivated workers one less task to tick off while burnishing their anti-bias credentials for literally doing nothing.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that graduates of schools less costly or “lower ranking” than my own should be denied a chance at the American Dream. Rather, hiring teams need to work harder to figure out how to get them there without erasing the educational achievements of others.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/31/in-the-name-of-equity-companies-are-now-ignoring-education/
**************************************************************Federal appeals court backs Florida school district that blocked transgender student from using boys bathroom
A federal appeals court has ruled in favor of a Florida school district’s policy that separates school bathrooms by biological sex.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals announced its 7-4 decision on Friday, ruling that the St. Johns County School Board did not discriminate against transgender students based on sex, or violate federal civil rights law by requiring transgender students to use gender-neutral bathrooms or bathrooms matching their biological sex.
The court’s decision was split down party lines, with seven justices appointed by Republican presidents siding with the school district and four justices appointed by Democratic presidents siding with Drew Adams, a biological female, who sued the district in 2017 after not being allowed to use the boys restroom.
A three-judge panel from the appeals court previously sided with Adams in 2020, but the full appeals court decided to take up the case.
Judge Barbara Lagoa wrote in the majority opinion that the school board policy advances the important governmental objective of protecting students’ privacy in school bathrooms. She said the district’s policy does not violate the law because it’s based on biological sex, not gender identity.
Judge Jill Pryor wrote in a dissenting opinion that the interest of protecting privacy is not absolute and must coexist alongside fundamental principles of equality, specifically where exclusion implies inferiority.
Two other federal appeals courts have ruled that transgender students can use bathrooms that accord with their identities.
Friday's decision increases the likelihood that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the issue.
"This is an aberrant ruling that contradicts the rulings of every other circuit to consider the question across the country," Tara Borelli, a spokesperson for LGBT advocacy group Lambda Legal who provided aid to Adams, told Fox News Digital in a statement. "It is also lengthy. We will be reviewing and evaluating this distressing decision over the weekend and will have a fuller response next week."
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Pandemic learning loss could cost students thousands in income over their lifetime: study
A Stanford University study showed that learning loss suffered by students during pandemic restrictions could result in lower incomes throughout their lifetime.
"The pandemic has had devastating effects in many areas, but none are as potentially severe as those on education," the study's author, Eric A. Hanushek, wrote in its conclusion. "There is overwhelming evidence that students in school during the closure period and during the subsequent adjustments to the pandemic are achieving at significantly lower levels than would have been expected without the pandemic."
The study, entitled "The Economic Cost of the Pandemic," analyzed National Assessment of Educational Progress data and found that between 2019 and 2022, test scores in math and English dropped an average of eight points across the country. The drastic drop came after nearly two decades of progress, the study noted, erasing all the gains in test scores made between 2000 and 2019.
Hanushek notes that while most policymakers and the media have focused solely on the pandemic's impact on test scores, the loss in student achievements could have severe economic repercussions. According to the study, students enrolled in schools during pandemic restrictions will face an average of a two to nine percent drop in lifetime earnings, resulting in states facing a 0.6 to 2.9 percent drop in total GDP.
"At the extreme, California is estimated to have lost $1.3 trillion because of learning losses during the pandemic. These losses are permanent unless a state’s schools can get better than their pre-pandemic levels," the study reads.
Unless schools are able to make up for the declines, students enrolled in schools during the pandemic will enter the workforce with lower cognitive skills needed to succeed in a constantly evolving economy.
"Extensive research demonstrates a simple fact: those with higher achievement and greater cognitive skills earn more," the study reads. "The evidence suggests that the value of higher achievement persists across a student’s entire work life."
The study notes that the "United States rewards skills more than almost all other developed countries," something that will hamper current students' ability to navigate a "technologically driven economy where workers are continually adjusting to new jobs and new ways of doing things."
Hanushek concludes that while the responsibility for the losses does not solely fall on schools, it will be up to them to lead the effort towards recovering lost skills. However, the study warns that efforts so far have been insufficient to make up the gap.
"Efforts to date have not been sufficient to arrest the losses," the study concludes. "If the schools are not made better, there will be continuing economic impacts as individuals and the nation will suffer from a society with lower skills."
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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