I remember how it was -- JR
Is the ‘Test-Optional’ Racist Scheme Under Threat?
Elite colleges are engaged in a balancing act: They are trying to maintain their reputation for having the best students while also giving an admissions advantage to their preferred races. In recent years, the desire for racial diversity has trumped academic excellence. This reality was clearly demonstrated in the Supreme Court cases Harvard v. Students for Fair Admissions and University of North Carolina v. Students for Fair Admissions. The cases numerically showed the extent to which these universities choose less-qualified black and Hispanic students over better-qualified Asian and white students. At Harvard University, for instance, black applicants in the fourth-lowest decile of academic achievement had a greater chance of admission than Asian students in the top decile of academic achievement.
In reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling that racial preferences in college admissions are illegal under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, many colleges have moved to permanently eliminate standardized testing requirements so as to continue preferring less-qualified black and Hispanic students over better-qualified Asian and white students without getting caught.
Some colleges that have eliminated standardized testing requirements have been quite clear that they intend to surreptitiously continue using race. For example, the president of the University of Louisville, which has gone test-optional, stated in the wake of the Students for Fair Admissions decisions that the university would instead use “experience with race” in admissions decisions. “[W]e’re going to drive a truck through experience with race in terms of our admissions,” said President Kim Schatzel. In addition, the University of California voted in 2020 to totally remove standardized testing from admissions decisions in the name of equity.
While going test-optional gives colleges license to continue racially discriminating without getting caught, it has a negative side effect: It decreases the quality of a college’s student body. This is because standardized testing is the best predictor of academic success and a strong predictor of post-college success. Eliminating this accurate predictor makes it difficult for colleges to choose the best students.
While numerous colleges have opted to forego standardized testing requirements in order to evade allegations of racial discrimination, there is now a small movement among elite universities to reintroduce standardized testing requirements. These schools are recognizing the fact that standardized testing is critical to achieving their goal of building an elite student body. This goal is important to them because the value of the degrees they grant lies in the perception that their students are talented and successful (and less in their ability to actually teach their students).
This week, Brown University announced that it will require students to submit standardized testing scores in the upcoming admissions cycle. In doing so, Brown joins Yale, Dartmouth, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in ditching pandemic-era test-optional policies. In making the announcement, Brown cited the benefit of standardized testing for building an excellent student body: “Our analysis made clear that SAT and ACT scores are among the key indicators that help predict a student’s ability to succeed and thrive in Brown’s demanding academic environment.” When Yale made its announcement that it would restore its testing requirement, it stated that standardized testing is actually the best indicator of academic success at Yale.
Brown also sought to claim that standardized testing is beneficial to its goal of achieving racial diversity. “The committee was concerned that some students from less-advantaged backgrounds are choosing not to submit scores under the test-optional policy, when doing so would actually increase their chances of being admitted,” the university said. Similarly, Dartmouth has claimed that standardized testing is helpful in identifying low-income students who will be successful in college.
Brown’s decision to restore its testing requirement even though doing so will make it accountable for whether it fairly judges students of all races shows that the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion has not totally overtaken the university. It still maintains a drive to produce students who are academically talented, regardless of race. However, while merit has triumphed over racial bias in regard to Brown’s standardized testing policy, this does not mean that the university will not practice racial discrimination in admissions. The school is simply not so wildly ideological as to eliminate the best indicator of merit.
The decisions of these top schools to restore testing requirements could put pressure on other schools to restore their requirements. This is because standardized testing’s ability to most accurately predict student success will mean that schools that require it will be more effective at admitting the best students. In addition, these schools’ standardized testing policies could give them a reputation for admitting the best students, given that it is well-known that standardized testing is highly effective at identifying people who will be successful. Thus, in elite colleges’ race to enroll the best students and better their reputations in comparison to one another, the ones with standardized testing requirements will have an advantage over the ones that do not.
This could mean that more elite schools will shift back toward requiring standardized testing. However, the incentive to compete will also be tempered by college administrations’ preferences for certain races over others, as well as their ideological commitment to equity over merit.
Brown’s decision to restore its standardized testing requirement gives hope that merit will still be valued in higher education. However, it remains uncertain whether this is a minor gesture by a school seeking to increase its competitiveness or a genuine progression toward the prioritization of merit over equity.
https://spectator.org/is-the-test-optional-racist-scheme-under-threat-admissions/
*****************************************************When Classical Learning Meets Public Education, the Dialogue Isn't Always Socratic
The future of the controversial classical education movement will be showcased later this month when Columbia University senior lecturer Roosevelt Montás is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at a national symposium hosted by Great Hearts, the biggest classical charter network.
The views of Montás, author of the widely praised memoir "Rescuing Socrates," are well to the left of many in the classical charter movement, which is rooted in Christian conservatism. What makes Montás’ upcoming speech so notable, then, is the signal it sends about the movement’s effort to diversify its brand and project a welcoming attitude as it seeks to expand beyond conservative strongholds and suburbs where it began.
But not everyone is enamored of the effort, neither educational conservatives nor local school officials, unions, and progressive advocates. The latter liken classical charters to a Trojan Horse, sneaking quasi-Christian right-wing dogma into public education under the cover of liberal arts.
That makes classical education perhaps the biggest culture-war flashpoint in the current disruption of traditional public education prompted by the historic exodus of students during the pandemic – even though the movement's numbers are small.
In all, there are about 250 classical charters today, according to one study, making them a small niche within the broader charter sector of 8,000 schools and campuses focused on everything from STEM subjects to art to special needs. They have produced both notable successes and scandalous failures in bringing innovation to public education.
Classical education, whose name gained traction in the 1980s to evoke the movement's focus on liberal arts and the Western canon, is struggling to overcome local political opposition and open schools in lower-income communities where most students reside. By making common cause with a range of prominent black and Latino thinkers and educators like Montás, classical charter leaders hope to show that their style of moral education is valuable to students from all backgrounds and beliefs.
“Our experience has been that the bar for opening a classical charter school that serves disadvantaged students is much higher, and that the process gets extremely political early on,” said Kathleen O’Toole, who heads the K-12 program at Hillsdale College, a Christian school at the center of the wrangling. “The opposition paints us as if we're trying to do political things with children, which we are not.”
Some of the movement’s top leaders are outspoken Republicans and have Ph.D.s from the conservative Claremont Graduate University. And some classical charters convey a patriotic zeal in their marketing as a counterpoint to the social justice zeal found in some traditional public schools.
But classical leaders reject the accusation that they are running a partisan enterprise, saying they aim for something higher, in line with Aristotle’s teaching – to nurture in students a desire to find their own answers to the big question of what constitutes the good life.
“We base ourselves in the West, in the culture of freedom that produced the Magna Carta, the founding documents of this country, and the civil rights movement,” said Dan Scoggin, co-founder of Great Hearts and a Claremont alum. “We read Marx, Rousseau – writers who push back on the Christian tradition, but it’s also a big part of Western culture. To those who try to pigeonhole classical charters as pseudo-Christian, no, we are not.”
Robert Jackson, who arranged for Montás to address the symposium in Phoenix, is at the center of the effort to mainstream classical education. After teaching at a Christian college and working at Great Hearts, Jackson started Classical Commons, a new platform to unite educators from different political and religious camps and support the recruitment and training of classical teachers – a key to expansion.
“There is an impulse among the classical leaders that this time-tested education should also be available to students from disadvantaged backgrounds who haven’t had the opportunity,” said Albert Cheng, who runs a classical education research lab at the University of Arkansas. “There’s a social justice vibe to it. Everyone isn’t marching lockstep to a conservative ideology.”
To enlarge the tent of classical education, scholars like Cornel West, the progressive independent presidential aspirant, are giving talks at events and making podcasts about the liberating power of classical education for all students. Classical Academic Press, run by white Christian writer Christopher Perrin, published “The Black Intellectual Tradition,” highlighting how the classics inspired leaders from Anna Julia Cooper to Martin Luther King in the quest for justice.
Change is also coming to the classrooms. Professor Anika Prather, a co-author of “The Black Intellectual Tradition” and founder of the Living Water Christian school, has made many presentations to teachers at classical charters. Leaders are also debating whether to add more diverse authors to their Great Books reading lists after the Classical Learning Test, an assessment group, did so. (Related article here.)
But reappraising the Western canon doesn’t sit well with hardline conservatives in the movement like David Goodwin, president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. He has issued several warnings, in his writings and to RealClear, about the dangerous waters classical charters are entering.
Goodwin says it was bad enough that charters removed the moorings of Christian truth from education. Now they are succumbing to the intense pressures for diversity, which he calls antithetical to the mission of classical education – the Platonic pursuit of “truth, goodness and beauty in a meritorious way.”
Josh Herring, a professor who helped run the Thales network of private classical academies, adds that the movement’s attempt to find a middle ground that no longer exists in America will fail. Instead, he says, it should embrace its fundamental conservatism and accept the fact that all education is inescapably political. “For classical education to continue to thrive, it has to know its own essence and defend that essence,” he says.
Squeezed from both the left and right, classical charters are nonetheless charging ahead in their effort to grow. Their biggest assets are families that form long waiting lists to enroll at the many high-performing classical charters. Some parents are attracted by their conservative reputation, but mostly it’s their rigorous curriculum that focuses on core academic subjects in the tradition of liberal arts, according to a study by Arkansas’ Cheng.
Classical education, a term the movement adopted to suggest its ancient lineage, reemerged first with private Christian schools in the 1980s. They provided the inspiration and part of the curriculum for the first classical charter, Tempe Prep, in Arizona in 1996.
Scoggin, a Christian like most of the charter movement leaders, worked as head of school at Tempe before setting up Great Hearts. He capitalized on Arizona’s school choice law, which made it possible to bring the classical model into public education and reach more families that couldn’t afford private tuition. Starting in 2003, Great Hearts now has 44 academies in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana and expects to get to 70 in five years.
Classical charters are not as antiquarian as the name implies. College prep courses and state test scores still matter, but they also focus to varying degrees on canonical literature, ancient history, philosophy, religious texts, and Latin and Greek. A few schools, like St. Croix Prep outside of Minneapolis, have even resurrected a medieval form of teaching called the trivium that breaks up every subject in three stages over 12 years – facts first, then argument, and finally persuasion.
Put simply, the charters want students to grapple with what it means to be human before they create their LinkedIn page.
Many add a modern touch. Washington Latin, one of a handful of urban classical schools, mixes Latin and student-led Socratic seminars in every subject with a modern twist to the reading list. Students read ancient and contemporary books on similar themes, such as Plato’s “Symposium” and the black scholar bell hooks’ seminal 2000 feminist work, “All About Love,” to create a dialog between the two worlds, says Diana Smith, the charter’s chief of classical education.
“We have a long waiting list to enroll because of our willingness to talk about the true, the good and the beautiful that goes beyond what came from Western Greece and Rome,” Smith said.
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Universality and the university
More selectivity needed for admissions, not less
Recently, the Australian University Accord met to discuss the manifest failings of our tertiary education system. The result has been a predictable raft of recommendations, couched in the langue de bois of our modern class: equity, innovation, agility, et al. In other words, all the things that got us into this mess to start with. These are words that, once they start tumbling from someone’s mouth, indemnify them against the risk of being identified as a genuine mind.
Established by the Labor Party, we should expect the Australian University Accord’s report would reflect Labor values. Those Labor values now apparently include the annihilation of the working man, with the recommendation that 80 per cent of Australians should pass through the hallowed doors of the university system. They, like everything else in a society driven by data-as-God, mistake quantity for quality.
In one respect, they are addressing a genuine problem. As a nation we are perhaps stupider than ever; PISA results continue to decline, and our primary and secondary education systems are mutual reflections of our tertiary system. Literary references, a command of basic mathematics, a sense of history, and the ability to write coherently: these all seem blue remembered hills.
However, furthering universal education is unlikely to fix the problems the proliferation of universal education created. For reasons entirely predictable, education proved vulnerable to the law of diminishing returns. An elite education cannot be made available to everybody; it is far easier to ensure that nobody receives an elite education. This is the cost of equity-above-all-else as a governing principle. People are not equal, and cannot be made equal. People cannot even be made to regard one another as equal. Equality, along with our obsession with data, is another false god of our age.
The problem with the university system is not one of scarcity, but one of inflation. We bend every possible requirement to allow people the opportunity to enter university, and do everything possible to prevent them failing once they’re there. We’re one step from conscripting the population into tertiary education, and the credentials required for entry-level jobs have changed to reflect this. This is to say nothing of adolescence extended, family delayed, and earning prospects limited for several years of study. A bachelor’s degree today is the equivalent of the school leaver certificate of yesterday; people collect master’s degrees today like they collected Pokémon as children. Credentialism for most of the population represents a ticket to the middle class and social respectability, as much as potential earning power in the future. These are powerful incentives, which explain why 60 per cent of the population has been pressed into the ivory tower at some point in their lives. Yet careerism is not the only purpose the university is supposed to serve.
Among those giving, everything produced by the university sector – certainly in the non-empirical world – has been through a peer-reviewed strainer to prevent anything original or novel emerging. They reference one another like incestuous monks and write in a bizarre argot to demonstrate their membership. Some faculties, and some universities, are worse than others. They bring to mind the scholasticism of earlier centuries, but without the rigour. And, as was the case in the Reformation, genuinely new ideas will emerge from outside the walls of what we consider epistemologically established. Many academics are reincarnations of apocryphal medieval theologians arguing about the quantity of angels that can fit on a pinhead. It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for your average academic to produce something interesting.
On the receiving end, the university system is no better. Every second person has a Mickey-Mouse degree from a Mickey-Mouse university, and few of them could hold an intelligent conversation with a secondary school graduate from half a century ago. Whatever the university is producing, it is not minds. But I’ve long held the suspicion that this is exactly the point. The last thing the postmodern West is interested in is a population with minds, and for most people what passes for wisdom today is browsing Wikipedia and calling out logical fallacies on Reddit. The snarky intellect of the educated Millennial or Zoomer, like a shallow and unbearably noisy stream, lacks blue water. We produce sophistry among those who should be passing on the knowledge of our civilisation, and encourage cynicism among those who receive it.
Aside from the turgid careerism of academics and the acquisitiveness of students – perhaps sellers and buyers of indulgences is a better term – there are two obvious reasons why The Powers That Be encourage this. The first is for financial reasons. Education is big business in Australia. Only mining has a larger output share. The university system doubles as a means of laundering citizenship and immigration, and siphoning money from overseas elites adds to the cash paid over the span of their working lives by native-born graduates. The government collects more revenue from HECS than it does from the petroleum resource rent tax. No government that values its bottom line is going to advocate for less tertiary education.
The second reason is an ideological one. The universities are captured institutions: an American report estimated that the ratio of conservative to liberal professors shifted 350 per cent in the latter direction since 1984. Even if you enter to study STEM or something vocational, they’ll still get you with the mandatory modules on diversity and Indigenous perspectives and all the rest of the postmodern religiosity we now accept as normal. The result is a braindead middle class composed of eunuchs and temple priestesses. If this sounds hyperbolic, remember how the university sector responded to the Western Civilisation courses offered by the Ramsay Centre. You’d think they’d like more money and more students, but to give them credit, occasionally their principles get in the way. Both ANU and the University of Sydney weren’t interested. They value the message above the money. Today’s liberal-Marxist elite, who live in constant terror afraid of their own shadows, will broker no competition in the world of ideas. They know it was thanks to that they got their stranglehold to begin with. They also suspect, in their heart of hearts, that their cherished ideas are terrible, anti-natural, and essentially anti-human.
The postmodern university is a house of cards. It would be too much to expect the Australian Universities Accord to admit as much.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/universality-and-the-university/
******************************************************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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