I remember how it was -- JR
Monday, February 05, 2024
Supreme Court allows West Point to continue using race as a factor in admissions
The Supreme Court is allowing West Point to continue taking race into account in admissions, while a lawsuit over its policies continues.
The justices on Friday rejected an emergency appeal seeking to force a change in the admissions process at West Point. The order, issued without any noted dissents, comes as the military academy is making decisions on whom to admit for its next entering class, the Class of 2028.
The military academy had been explicitly left out of the court’s decision in June that ended affirmative action almost everywhere in college admissions.
The court’s conservative majority said race-conscious admissions plans violate the U.S. Constitution, in cases from Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public colleges, respectively. But the high court made clear that its decision did not cover West Point and the nation’s other service academies, raising the possibility that national security interests could affect the legal analysis.
In their brief unsigned order Friday, the justices cautioned against reading too much into it, noting “this order should not be construed as expressing any view on the merits of the constitutional question.”
Students for Fair Admissions, the group behind the Harvard and North Carolina cases, sued the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in September. It filed a similar suit against the U.S. Naval Academy in October.
Lower courts had declined to block the admissions policies at both schools while the lawsuits are ongoing. Only the West Point ruling has been appealed to the Supreme Court.
“Every day that passes between now and then is one where West Point, employing an illegal race-based admissions process, can end another applicant’s dream of joining the Long Gray Line,” lawyers for Students for Fair Admissions wrote in a court filing.
West Point graduates account make up about 20% of all Army officers and nearly half the Army’s current four-star generals, the Justice Department wrote in its brief asking the court to leave the school’s current policies in place.
In recent years, West Point, located on the west bank of the Hudson River about 40 miles (about 65 kilometers) north of New York City, has taken steps to diversify its ranks by increasing outreach to metropolitan areas including New York, Atlanta and Detroit.
“For more than forty years, our Nation’s military leaders have determined that a diverse Army officer corps is a national-security imperative and that achieving that diversity requires limited consideration of race in selecting those who join the Army as cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point,” wrote Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer.
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Florida University System Removes ‘Left-Wing’ Sociology Course From Core Requirements
The 17-member board of governors of the Florida University System decided Wednesday to eliminate a sociology course from the core requirements to graduate and to replace it with an American history class, according to a press release.
The new class, Introductory Survey to 1877, will introduce students to America’s founding, slavery, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction era and will replace Principles of Sociology as a course requirement, according to a State University System of Florida press release.
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz has previously derided sociology, saying the discipline has been taken over by “left-wing activists,” and Florida University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said the move would have a “positive impact.”
“I am proud of the Board’s decision today and look forward to the positive impact the addition of this course will have on our students’ and their future success. Florida’s students of our State University System will have the opportunity to learn about the creation and development of our nation as part of the core course options,” Rodrigues said in a Wednesday press release.
The American Sociological Association criticized the decision, asserting the move was uninformed.
“The decision seems to be coming not from an informed perspective, but rather from a gross misunderstanding of sociology as an illegitimate discipline driven by ‘radical’ and ‘woke’ ideology,” a statement from the American Sociological Association Wednesday said, according to The New York Times.
The Florida board of education also replaced a sociology requirement with an American history requirement, according to a Jan. 17 press release.
“Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students,” Diaz said in a December statement.
Florida’s university system has over 430,000 students, making it one of the largest public university systems, according to the Times.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made a point of instituting reforms to the university system, alleging it has a left-wing bias, according to the Times. DeSantis appointed six trustees to the New College of Florida board in January 2023 and the college has since eliminated its diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and its gender studies courses.
The UF system did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Charter School Authorizers Need a New Association Focused More on Students, Innovation
Charter schools, which are public schools authorized by state laws, differ from traditional public schools, primarily because they enjoy exemptions from most of the state’s educational bureaucracy and regulations in exchange for accountability to parents and authorizers.
The authorizers negotiate the charter contract, under which the school promises to operate in certain ways, and those authorizers can withdraw the contract under certain circumstances.
Authorizers also can help charter schools innovate and learn from one another.
But what if the national association of authorizers, as it develops “best practices,” encourages members to replace one bureaucracy with another? Or issues ideological pressure? Or uses its assessment of the regulatory regime as its test of quality, rather than innovation or the number of charter schools in a state or actual student outcomes?
That’s the situation we are in today under the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA). Authorizers need a new association, one focused on innovation and student outcomes.
As Heritage Foundation research fellow Jason Bedrick has demonstrated, NACSA has pushed “diversity, equity and inclusion,” substituting its own ideological judgment for that of state and local authorizers and parents themselves. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Meanwhile, NACSA’s push for a laundry list of authorization requirements has, perversely, made it harder for minority identity groups to succeed.
Bedrick notes academic research supporting that conclusion:
NACSA’s policy recommendations disproportionately prevent black aspiring school leaders from receiving authorization to operate charter schools. The recommendations also disproportionately result in the closure of charter schools that serve a higher proportion of black students.
Furthermore, NACSA ranks states’ regulatory regimes more in terms of bureaucratic hurdles than in terms of quality or quantity of outcomes.
As another Heritage Foundation research fellow, Jay P. Greene, noted in 2021:
NACSA rankings seem to prefer approaches that lead to few or no charter schools actually opening. And those NACSA rankings bear no relationship to test-score measures of school performance or later life outcomes. This approach to ranking simply does not make sense.
Rankings can inspire states to compete and do better, so some good news is that the Education Freedom Institute has offered an outcomes-oriented approach to replace NACSA’s.
But that still leaves NACSA as an authorizer association focused on the wrong things. Instead, this being National School Choice Week 2024, we propose a new association of charter school authorizers that focuses on best practices for innovation and student-centered outcomes.
Here are some principles and ideas that the new association would promote:
An authorizer should interpret ambiguities in state law liberally—on the side of permission and innovation.
The role of an authorizer is to be ideologically neutral. An authorizer should not pressure schools, their governing boards, or itself to create identity-group “diversity.” At the same time, an authorizer should not pressure schools or governing boards that choose liberal policies (or any other ideology) to change its values or policies.
An authorizer should strive to enforce no more and no less than the state law describes. An authorizer should stay in its lane and leave rulemaking up to the legislature.
An authorizer should work to protect charter schools from state agencies that seek to interfere with the schools’ autonomy. For example, in West Virginia, a charter school was told by one agency that its after-school programs had to be regulated like a day care site. In response, the state authorizer successfully advocated for a change in state law to make it clear that a charter school is not subject to the dozens (if not hundreds) of pages of rules that this agency was saying were required.
Parents tend to be the best source of accountability for charter schools (while, of course, an authorizer also considers financial audits and other technicalities that parents often cannot access). Parents often see a charter school as the best option compared with the alternatives, so they enroll their children there and decide whether to keep them there. Parents who like or dislike standardized tests can use test scores or ignore them as they make their choices. Parents who prefer workforce or college-going outcomes or a variety of other values also make their own choices.
Ultimately, while a school should adhere to any outcome metrics it has promised in its contract, enrollment and retention are excellent proxies for the relative quality of a school.
The new association also should provide guidance on evaluating applications; on how to help struggling schools; on which policies and provisions of law can increase innovation and student service, and on which provisions unduly interfere; on where to find government funding; on how to help schools find and engage private donors; on how to promote funding equity between charter schools and non-charter public schools; and on how to assess whether it’s time to withdraw a charter.
NACSA’s analysis shows there are about 20 states with independent authorizing boards, whether governmental or nonprofit. These are the authorizers most likely to want to join the new association. (Where a state department of education is the authorizer, we are not optimistic that most departments can see the value of a minimalist regulatory approach.)
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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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