I remember how it was -- JR
Students being placed into advanced math classes based off standardized test scores, not grades
DALLAS (AP) — When Tha Cung looked over his sixth-grade class schedule, he took notice of the math block. He had been placed in an advanced class.
“I didn’t know ‘honors’ even existed,” he said.
Tha was little when his family immigrated from Myanmar and, for much of his time in Dallas schools, he took courses designed for children who are learning English. In fifth grade, his standardized test scores showed he was a strong math student — someone who should be challenged with honors classes in middle school.
Under the Dallas school system’s policy, Tha’s parents didn’t need to sign him up for advanced math. A teacher or counselor didn’t have to recommend him, either. In many schools, those are the hoops a student must get through to join honors classes. But Tha was automatically placed in the advanced course because of his scores on Texas’ STAAR test.
A version of this approach will soon be replicated statewide as part of an effort to remove barriers that can stand between bright students and rigorous courses. Instead of having families opt in to advanced math, they are instead given the choice to opt out
A new Texas law calls for every student who performs in the top 40% on a fifth-grade math assessment to be enrolled automatically in advanced math for sixth grade.
The rollout could provide lessons for other states. Leaders across the country are confronting the need to prepare a new, diverse generation of workers in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. Heightening the alarm: Students nationally have been struggling to bounce back from widespread learning loss in math.
Before the pandemic, Black and Hispanic students in Texas were routinely left out of advanced classes — even if they earned high test scores, according to research by the E3 Alliance, an Austin-based education collaborative that advocated for the law.
Enrolling in advanced math in sixth grade clears the way for a student to take Algebra I in eighth grade. That leads to courses such as calculus and statistics during high school. And that can set a foundation for a STEM major in college and a high-paying career.
Advocates for the new policy say it’s a workforce issue in addition to an equity issue.
“Especially in today’s rapidly changing and technology-driven economy, math matters more than ever — for individual students and for the larger Texas workforce to remain competitive,” said Jonathan Feinstein, a state director at The Education Trust, a national nonprofit promoting equity.
One recent morning at Sam Tasby Middle School, dozens of students in Room 304 were calculating the area of parallelograms and trapezoids. One of them, Alexis Grant, 11, thinks her year in sixth-grade honors math will pave the way for achieving one of her goals: studying at Harvard.
“I knew it would be challenging,” Alexis said of her math class. “We push each other to get the work done.”
More Dallas students have been enrolling in advanced math, and the classrooms have been more diverse.
In 2018, prior to the opt-out policy, about 17% of Black students in sixth grade and one-third of Hispanic students were in honors math, compared to half of white students. Now, 43% of Black students are in honors math when they enter middle school and nearly six in 10 Hispanic students are. The percentage of white sixth graders in honors math has also gone up, to roughly 82%.
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Student Loan Repayments Begin Again
Student loan deferment has come to an end. The U.S. Supreme Court in late June overturned President Joe Biden’s executive bribe and, as of Sunday, October 1, those who had not been paying their student loans all along need to resume paying their debts.
Many took advantage of the COVID-era deferment that should have ended two and a half years ago when people were able to go back to work. But the freeze on student loan payments continued, and President Biden led people further down the path of financial burden by promising to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of borrowers.
Biden and even then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew that he didn’t have the executive power to forgive that debt, but he tried to do it anyway. Not having to pay student loans during the pandemic acted as a carrot in front of voters who saw loan forgiveness as a way out of a financial hole. Team Biden used those borrowers’ plight to apply pressure on the rest of the government to allow his overreach to stand.
Borrowers got used to not having to account for that student loan deficit in their monthly budgets. They could afford more things and have taken on other debt that they now can’t afford. Adding to the hurt of that renewed financial burden is a terrible economy, bad inflation, and rising interest rates. One does feel sad for them, but at the same time, they made a bet and lost. The twofold bet was that Biden would be able to get away with an unconstitutional act and that the rest of America would be okay with using their tax dollars to cover the cost.
Politically, the blame is thrown at the Republicans’ feet, but as Politico reports, this reversal of student loan forgiveness has been part of the Democrat calculus for a while. As much as Politico tries to paint it as Democrat benevolence in terms of programs to help with repayments, the important political point is buried in the happy talk. Realistically, it’s been a lost revenue stream for the government since the loan repayments stopped. However, the trade-off of that renewed revenue stream will mean a more bearish economy since borrowers are going to have to slow spending on goods and services as a result.
Duping millions of people into going along with their harebrained student loan forgiveness scheme is bad, but it’s only a symptom, and it’s not the actual source of the problem.
The advocates for student loan forgiveness, though wrong on just about every point, are right about a college education being too expensive for the average American. Why do colleges and universities charge so much for higher education? Our Nate Jackson has written about this at length, but between government subsidies, too much unnecessary staff (read: DEI diversity hires), and imprudent spending, the price of a college education is unsustainable. Many people who aren’t of the elite class are going to choose other options than college.
Part of the impetus that spurred on the whole student loan forgiveness scheme came from the ideologically driven premise that college debt hurts students of color more than other students. However, this premise is part of the problem. Racism is not to blame for college debt; rather, it’s the pushing of the need for college diversity on students who can’t achieve academically and yet have incurred college debt.
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh recently did an interview with Heather Mac Donald, academic and author of When Race Trumps Merit. Mac Donald addresses the inherent problems with identity politics in college. When merit is replaced by an oppression hierarchy, people who aren’t ready or aren’t able to handle the academic rigor of becoming a doctor or engineer are then funneled into programs that are a waste of their time and money, such as gender or racial studies, which are not exactly financially responsible paths for future careers. Even overpaid DEI professors are culled once their positions fall out of favor.
Democrats have used COVID, systemic racism, and the economy as an excuse to lure borrowers into a false sense of financial security. They will try to spin it as the Republicans’ fault, but the reality is that the Democrats placed power, ideology, and potential votes over the financial well-being of their constituents. It won’t end until feckless spenders are booted out of office and the American public becomes financially literate and perhaps even opts out of the college racket.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/100922-student-loan-repayments-begin-again-2023-10-03
*************************************************Johnny Can’t Spell G-A-Y
You just thought you could get away from Pride Month, which was back in June. The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald laments that leftists just won’t quit.
It has been almost 90 days since Gay Pride month. According to the Los Angeles Unified School District, that is too long a hiatus from the imperative of immersing young children in the arcana of gay and trans identity. So throughout the week of October 9, many elementary school classrooms in Los Angeles will celebrate “National Coming Out Day,” which falls on October 11.
October is itself LGBTQ+ History Month, the Los Angeles Unified School District bureaucracy has reminded what it calls the district’s “fabulous educators.” Other LGBTQ+ programming will take place throughout October, picking up where Gay Pride month left off. The goals for the so-called Week of Action are ambitious: to turn six-year-olds into budding gender and critical race theorists.
Mac Donald goes on to detail various indoctrination lessons — everything from rainbow colors all over the place to more insidious things like an “Identity Map” for kids to chart their experiences and learning The Narrative about Jazz Jennings, the gender confused boy whose mother is exploiting him for her own gain. Mac Donald highlights plenty more outrageous grooming, but she adds this context:
In 2022, 61 percent of third-graders in the Los Angeles Unified School District did not meet California’s watered-down, equity-driven standard for English. Children not reading by third grade will fall further and further behind in school, since they will be ill-prepared to absorb ever more complex academic content across a range of fields.
In 2022, 59 percent of third-graders failed to meet the state’s already-low standard for math competency. Over 76 percent of LAUSD eighth-graders did not meet math standards. Eighth-grade math is a make-or-break point, after which poorly performing students become ever less likely to master the skills necessary for STEM careers or admission to selective schools.
On top of that, she says, the learning loss during COVID was appalling.
But even if fluency in LGBTQ-speak is a school’s primary concern, how will third-graders parse the words “gender expression” and “sex assigned at birth,” much less fathom their meanings, if they can’t do basic third-grade reading? How will third-graders perform the arithmetical calculations necessary to track the ever-increasing number of LGBTQ categories served up by the LAUSD, without third-grade math skills?
Remedying Los Angeles’s ongoing educational failure should be the district’s sole focus. There is barely enough time in the school year to make up for the home deficits that the majority of students bring to school. The district should excise from the curriculum everything not related to academic knowledge and core academic skills.
Regarding the grooming culture, she concludes:
Advocates justify premature gay and trans indoctrination on the ground that it is necessary to prevent harm to trans youth. Their ultimate blackmail is the threat that without such indoctrination (and without “gender affirming care”) trans adolescents will commit suicide. But if “trans” adolescents have higher rates of claimed mental illness and distress, that distress is more likely the cause of their trans and nonbinary identities than the result of the social rejection of those alleged identities.
The number of trans-identifying students is rising exponentially, leading to majorities in the student bodies of the most progressive schools. This rise is without any historical precedent. It is proof of social contagion, not of a preexisting biological reality. …
Los Angeles’s kindergartners know nothing about sex, much less about its recent artificial mutations, other than what the activists are cramming down their throats. If this is not grooming, it is hard to know what is.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/100909-in-brief-johnny-cant-spell-g-a-y-2023-10-03
******************************************************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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