Monday, March 18, 2024



Sydney University will recruit hundreds of new teaching-focused academics in what it says is a bid to improve student experience and place a higher value on teaching in higher education.

This is just more dumbing down of education. Getting research published is the guarantee that the teacher's knowledge is at cutting-edge level. Take that away and a teacher might have no expertise to share. The students might just as well read the latest book on the subject. I did a lot of research in my academic career and I always had a LOT to say in the classroom that was not in the books

Vice chancellor Mark Scott said the roles would carve out a new career path for teaching specialists in academia, allowing them to fill some of the most senior roles at the university.

However, some are unhappy about the plan, suggesting it creates two tiers of academics by removing a focus on research.

The university will on Monday launch an international campaign to recruit more than 150 tenured academics after an initial appointment of internal applicants across 55 new roles.

The teaching-focused positions will be for every career stage, from lecturers to full professors and senior leadership roles across a broad range of disciplines.

Scott said for students the key engagement with the university is around what happens in the classroom, not in the research lab.

“Our most brilliant teachers should be as famous and revered in the institution as our most brilliant researchers are today,” he said.

“I have a view that we owe every student a transformational experience here at the university.

“They’re paying higher fees than students have ever paid in this country.

“So to prioritise appropriately teaching and learning as important as we do research - that’s what we need to do. I think that’s what the great global universities do.”

Teaching-focused academic roles are controversial among many academics who see the roles as career-limiting and involving intense workloads.

The jobs came about as part of protracted EBA negotiations with staff which concluded last year. The university agreed to introduce 330 new permanent academic roles to reduce casualisation of the workforce but 220 of those were to be teaching-only positions.

It contrasts with the existing deal for academics which guarantees they spend 40 per cent of their time on research, 40 per cent on teaching and 20 per cent community engagement.

English and linguistics academic Nick Riemer, the university’s National Tertiary Education Union branch president, said there was a clear effort from senior management to break the teaching and research nexus.

“There should be more academic jobs at the university because at the moment it has an overreliance on casualisation and that just involves outright exploitation,” he said.

“But we are very seriously concerned that university management seems intent on separating teaching and research, which are academic functions which intrinsically belong together.

“If you’re not researching in your fields you’re passing on doctrine.”

Riemer said the education-focused roles that exist at the university were subject to high levels of overwork.

“And there’s every reason to think uni management see teaching focus roles as just a cheap way of getting staff to do a lot of teaching without giving them the time for the research they need to do to stay up to date,” he said.

But Scott said teaching at higher education level had been undervalued, and the roles would create viable career options for teaching specialists.

“We’re creating a career pathway that says to the very top end of the professoriate, people who are teaching experts can have a career pathway to the very top,” he said.

One of the first internal recruits for the roles, Louis Taborda, senior lecturer in project management, said he chose teaching because he saw it as a noble cause.

He began his career as a high-school maths and computer science teacher, then worked as an IT consultant before moving to academia.

“I felt right at the beginning that getting into teaching was something that was noble, pure and unadulterated,” he said.

“It’s absolutely a pleasure to watch students grow.”

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US colleges bring back standardized testing after finding test-optional policies hurt minority students

Testing gives bright kids from poor backgrounds the opportunity to shine -- which is a large part of the reason why they were originally introduced

Universities across the United States are reinstating requirements for undergraduate applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores after previously claiming that standardized tests raised concerns about inequality in higher education.

University of St. Thomas (Houston, Texas) professor and associate dean David D. Schein told Fox News Digital that standardized testing is merely designed to give schools one central index on which to compare students. He said while good grades and extracurricular activities are considered, having a reference source independent of geography is essential.

Schein suggested that competition for students has increased because of the downward birth curve and increasing costs. Therefore, dropping testing requirements may have been viewed as a way to increase the applicant pool.

He also blamed the elimination of standardized testing on a narrative circulating in academia that some minority students do not do as well as White and Asian students because of poor schooling or cultural bias in the test.

"Frankly, I found this narrative racist and offensive on its face," Schein said. "That is because it could be interpreted as ‘certain minorities were too stupid to do well on these demanding standardized tests.’ I have always rejected this narrative. Further, schools should still have the data but can make decisions based on the many factors considered in admissions, not just the SAT."

The University of Texas at Austin announced on Monday they would once again require applicants to submit test scores beginning August 1 and claimed their test-optional approach over the last four years made it difficult to place students in programs they were best suited for.

"We looked at our students and found that, in many ways, they weren't faring as well," U.T. President Dr. Jay Hartzell told The New York Times.

The university added that due to the plethora of 4.0 high school GPAs, the standardized test requirement is a "proven differentiator" that serves the best interests of the applicant and UT.

Many universities dropped the testing requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some prestigious institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown University, reinstated their admissions process requirements.

Schools have said the tests allow them to identify promising students who might otherwise have been overlooked — students from schools that don't offer advanced coursework or extracurriculars and whose teachers may be stretched too thin to write glowing letters of recommendation.

Dartmouth College was the first Ivy League school to reinstate standardized testing requirements in February, writing, "Nearly four years later, having studied the role of testing in our admissions process… we believe a standardized testing requirement will improve — not detract from — our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus."

Christopher Rim, the CEO and founder of Command Education (a private Ivy League and elite college consultancy), told Fox News Digital that many colleges created test-optional policies based on the assumption that standardized testing has historically disadvantaged students of color.

However, a study cited in Dartmouth's reinstatement announcement noted that test scores help admissions departments interpret transcripts from high schools about which Dartmouth has less information and identify high-achieving, less-advantaged students.

"Researchers found that test-optional policies unintentionally created a barrier for less advantaged students due to the fact that such students often opted against submitting their scores, even when those scores would benefit their application and demonstrate their preparedness for Dartmouth's rigorous curriculum," Rim said.

"Additionally, it placed greater emphasis on elements of the application (such as GPA and course rigor) that disadvantaged students may struggle with more due to lack of opportunity or support at underfunded public schools," he added.

Rim said that while there is no "perfectly equitable" way to evaluate all applications, reincorporating standardized testing alongside other factors, such as extracurriculars, honors courses and essays, will pave the way for a "more fair admissions process."

Soon after Dartmouth publicized its decision, Yale University announced it would abandon its test-optional policy for 2025 admissions applicants. The institution said not including the tests shifted attention to other aspects of the application, which disadvantaged certain students.

"Test scores provide one consistent and reliable bit of data among the countless other indicators, factors, and contextual considerations we incorporate into our thoughtful whole-person review process," the school said.

Brown University is the latest Ivy League institution set to return to standardized testing requirements for first-year students. The policy will begin with the class of 2029.

A report from the Brown Ad Hoc Committee on Admissions Policies noted, "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."

Brown determined that higher test scores were correlated with higher grades at the university and suggested there are "unintended adverse outcomes of test-optional policies in the admissions process itself, potentially undermining the goal of increasing access."

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Australia: Home Schooling Must Be Consistent With official Curriculum

The syllabus is so wishy-washy that no problems should arise

The Queensland government has introduced legislation in parliament mandating that home education is consistent with the Australian government’s curriculum.

This comes amid an almost tripling of students who are been homeschooled in the state since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Education Minister Di Farmer introduced the Education (General Provisions) and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 on March 6, which includes amendments related to homeschooling.

Under the proposed changes, students who are schooled at home are required to follow the government’s syllabus for senior subjects.

The minister noted that more than 10,000 students are currently registered for homeschooling in Queensland.

Ms. Farmer said that given these higher numbers, it is “more important than ever” that students are undertaking a high-quality program.

In addition, she highlighted that the legislation provides “safeguards for student wellbeing.”

“The bill requires a summary of the educational program to be provided at the time of application for home education registration to ensure the child or young person has immediate access to a high-quality program and removes the separate time-limited provisional registration application,” Ms. Farmer told parliament.

“This will provide a single and simplified home education registration process with appropriate oversight by the department.

“Further, the bill removes the need for a certificate of registration and associated obligations, to reduce an unnecessary regulatory burden for parents. Instead, parents will continue to receive a written notice, as they do now, setting out evidence of registration and any conditions on registration.”

Ms. Farmer said the bill establishes a “new guiding principle” emphasising that home education “should be in the best interests of the child or young person.”

“This must take into account the child’s safety, well-being, and access to a high-quality education. This amendment was included in the bill after public consultation on home education amendments was completed,” Ms. Farmer said.

“Using a guiding principle which makes explicit that a child or young person’s best interests must be central to the significant choice of home education is something I am confident Queensland families and home educators will support.”

Home Education Australia spokesperson Samantha Bryan raised concerns with AAP that the mandate may lead to more parents taking home education underground.

Ms. Bryan also told the publication most families registered with the Home Education Unit are succeeding with homeschooling, even if they are not following the national curriculum.

“If children are already receiving a high-quality education, if the system’s not broken, why are we trying to allegedly fix it,” she said.

Ms. Bryan suggested a dual enrolment option allowing families to combine part-time homeschooling with part-time school attendance.

“Families are making great sacrifices because they desperately love and care about the wellbeing of their child,” she said.

“Some of these families would love to put their kids back in school so I think a dual enrolment option—part-time home education, part-time school— would be great.”

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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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Sunday, March 17, 2024



Australia: Authoritarianism lives in the mind of a Leftist teacher

Brendan McDougall (below) teaches in a government school in country Victoria. He realizes that some parents are prepared to make considerable efforts to ensure that their children get a good education while others are prepared simply to accept what the government offers. He deduces rightly that, no matter the system there will always be at least some people who seek privately-funded education in order to give their children more than the government offers. He wants to stop them doing that. He wants to forbid private education altogether. He would approve of the old Soviet system.

That is a distinctly radical proposal from a distinctly radical website and one with no chance of adoption so why does Brendan argue that? His argument is actually realistic in some ways. He thinks that having private schools diverts resources that might otherwise go to government schools and he wants more resources for government schools. Private schools get all the best teachers, for instance.

What he overlooks is that the existing system greatly expands the share of national resouces that goes into education. Private schools attract private money, which adds to what the government spends on education. He is actually advocating for LESS money to be spent on education

He cannot be unaware of that. It is just Leftist envy that is heaving in his breast. He is aware that many private school users "are paying for their children to have access to a more powerful peer group" and he hates it. He just cannot bear the thought of other people doing well for themelves and feeling happy about it. Their happiness makes him unhappy. He must be miserable a lot of the time.

We can be thankful that there are not enough like him to be influential. When Mark Latham was leading the Labour party, he suffered a crashing electoral defeat after just a mild threat to Federal funding to private schools. Around 40% of Australian teenagers go to private schools so that is a huge voting bloc to threaten.

In case it is of any interest, I went to a small country State school in Queensland and sent my son to a regional Catholic school. Both schools were rather good, I think



Australia’s public schools are in crisis.

Teachers nationwide have been shouting about this for more than a decade. There are no teachers. Our students are falling behind internationally. Many kids are depressed and school refusal is through the roof. It’s become so dire that even Education Minister Jason Clare agrees.

Over the past decade, right-wing responses have been to blame the teachers or claim there are too many soft skills being taught. Those advocating in the media for school reform have tended to argue about the funding disparity between public and private schools, and the fact our schools are many percentage points away from meeting the school resourcing standard.

These arguments ignore the reality that our current system values the education of some young Australians more than others — and the numbers obfuscate and distract from the true rot in the sector: class segregation.

We have one of the most robust private education sectors in the world, and it’s hard to argue, especially following a recent Four Corners investigation into allegations of harassment and discrimination at Sydney’s Cranbrook School, that this is doing our society any good.

Private schools don’t need tweaks or reforming; they need to be abolished.

No teachers, no resources

Our teachers are overworked, overwhelmed, burnt out and undervalued — and the numbers often cited are egregious. In New South Wales and Western Australia, shortages of more than 2,000 teachers were reported at the end of 2023. In Victoria, 800 jobs remained unfilled across the state when students returned from the summer (now reduced to 795 at the time of writing, including 14 principals).

This shortage is being felt across the board, but the pain is sharpest at schools in our most vulnerable communities, such as mine, where six teachers have returned from retirement this year and we still have seven unfilled full-time jobs, with no applicants in sight.

In the decade following the 2012 Gonksi review — which assessed school funding and depicted a system characterised by alarmingly declining test scores and increasing educational inequality — funding of private schools has increased at twice the rate of public. Not only did the review’s warnings go unheeded, but successive governments have worked in tandem to accelerate the trend. In Victoria and NSW in 2021, five elite private schools spent more on new facilities than governments spent on 3,372 public schools combined.

These numbers are shameful, but while they liven up discussions in staff rooms, they’re not effective at creating change. There are deeper issues at play. For every cartoonishly posh school in Kew or Bellevue Hill charging well over $30,000 tuition a year, there are five or more smaller, lower-fee private schools that cost $5,000 a year that compete for teachers and students across Australia’s less affluent areas.

These schools are often as materially scruffy as the fee-free public school down the road, with similar performances in metrics like NAPLAN and ATAR. Despite this, parents flock to these independent private schools in droves, with enrolments ticking up 14.1% over the past five years, while enrolments at Catholic private schools increased by 4.8% in the same period. Yet despite recent cost of living pressures, enrolments in public schools only grew by a measly 0.7% over the past five years, well below the average growth for all schools of 3.5%.

Paying for a peer group

We are certainly not getting richer, particularly those of us young enough to have kids starting school for the first time, so why might cash-strapped parents be willing to spend an ever-increasing portion of their disposable income on a product that isn’t measurably “better”?

One reason is that private schools have marketing departments, but a more potent force is that middle-class parents in Australia consider privately educating their children a cultural norm.

Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, and we have one of the highest percentages of private-school-educated young people in the world — 36%, with an increase of 4 percentage points over the past 20 years. In a country like the United States, where there are roiling debates about school choice and rampant social inequality, only 10% of students attended private schools as of 2022-23.

In Australia, enough parents send their kids to private schools that to do otherwise can feel inadequate or negligent. Parents care about their kids and they don’t want them to miss out, so they work two jobs and send their kids to private school so they can relax knowing they did everything they could.

In doing this, however, they inoculate themselves against needing to care about what happens to those who can’t afford what they can. They tap out, and if a third of our families tap out of public education, there becomes little political will left to make our public schools work. This is compounded by the fact that it’s the wealthier, powerful third — the parents who are also doctors and bankers and lawyers and politicians — who leave the public system first.

This means that in Australia we have two education systems — one for everyone, and one for the students whose parents believe that the one for everyone isn’t good enough. These latter children spend their formative years only associating with people like them, with limited mixing across class lines. Parents who send their kids to private schools aren’t necessarily paying for a better education — they are paying for their children to have access to a more powerful peer group.

This has been true for decades. Parents today who attended public schools grew up knowing the state didn’t care about their education, and so it is with today’s young people. They know this in their bones as they walk through the gates. As teachers, we see it in their eyes, but we also see it in our declining PISA scores, our school refusal rates, completion rates, our problems managing behaviour, and the upticks in youth crime statistics. These kids know that their country cares about other children more than them.

Education for all

In a debate about the value of VCE in my Year 12 English class last week, one student asked me if “a 40 here is really worth the same as a 40 at a private school in Melbourne”. The truth is that it’s worth so much more when it’s been fought for so much harder, but there aren’t the structures in place for us to see that.

The rampant, chronic underfunding of our public schools is a blight on our national identity, especially for a country that lionises the idea of a “fair go”. But simply reallocating funding to be more equitable will not address the class segregation corroding Australia’s school system.

So what can we do? Well, we can start by phasing out the federal taxpayer dollars pouring into the coffers of private schools — a minimum of $17.8 billion in 2024. If someone wants to pay for their child to attend a school where they won’t fall in with “the wrong crowd” or the other classist monikers we reserve for poor kids, they can pay for it themselves. We could then invest that money back into our public schools, targeting funding to the communities like mine who need it most.

We could ban the new construction of private schools that are de facto designed to siphon away from the public sector the families who have the resources to invest in their children’s education, robbing their local school of their assistance. A better-resourced public sector could be designed to provide different educational options for different kids, and we could repurpose some of those three-storey performing arts centres into facilities accessible to everyone.

These solutions aren’t easy — they require long-term thinking, values-based politics and bravery. The issue has been ignored for so long that it is entrenched. Decades of underfunding and neglect have made our public schools less competitive and less attractive to middle-class parents. Decades of conversations during school pick-ups and dinner parties have made parents increasingly anxious that their child might get left behind.

Even if we did manage to abolish the grossly inequitable privatised model we currently have, our schools would still be segregated by postcode; by the capacities of parents to pay “top-up fees” to give their local public school an edge. But unless our leaders dare to acknowledge the injustices baked into the system, more kids will leave the public system, more burnt-out public school teachers will leave the profession, and more of our next generation will leave the education system feeling as though it wasn’t designed for kids like them.

If governments, state and federal, are serious about fixing public education, they must consider the radical choice of abolishing the private education sector. Until they do so, they will never truly ensure that our schools are about every child learning, growing and flourishing.

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California State University’s Mandate of Ethnic, Social Justice Studies Driven by Hatred of America

Pan-African studies are “the intellectual arm of the revolution,” the unrepentant communist Angela Davis triumphantly told students at California State University, Los Angeles, in a candid moment in 2016. Well, that arm got a lot longer this week.

The entire California State University system just announced Thursday that it was making ethnic and social justice studies mandatory for everyone who wants a degree.

Yes, that means that ethnic and social justice studies will now have pride of place along with English and science as subjects that must be mastered by those brandishing a bachelor’s degree from the vast California system.

Not that ethnic or social justice studies will do one iota to help these young Americans master their fields or become future leaders, which used to be one of the aims of what was formerly called higher education.

No, ethnic and social justice studies are political indoctrination.

Critics would say, hang on, wouldn’t ethnic and social justice studies help Americans get along better in a diverse workforce, body politics, classrooms, etc.? Those critics, of course, would have very little understanding of what actually is taught in ethnic studies or social justice studies.

Ethnic studies teach the members of what in today’s lexicon we call “minorities” (really, any American who belongs to a group that the activists have convinced the bureaucracy to officialize as marginalized) that they have a long list of grievances against the United States, and particularly against whites.

To Americans who have been cordoned off into the groups thought of as belonging to the “oppressor” classes, ethnic and social justice studies classes instruct them to forthwith act submissively, assume the burden of collective guilt for sins in which they have taken no part, listen, not talk, etc.

Who are these oppressor people? It used to be only white male Protestants, but we are seeing the anger turned against white women, who are now dismissed and cruelly disparaged as “Karens,” (anti-racist consultant Robin DiAngelo actually devotes an entire chapter of her bestseller “White Fragility” to “White Women’s Tears”), Jews, and, increasingly, Chinese and Indian Americans.

Why? Well because Chinese and Indian Americans have had the temerity to succeed, which destroys the narrative that we have oppressor and oppressed classes, and individuals cannot do anything about it.

So would anyone want to introduce this witches’ brew into the educational system of anything? Because Angela Davis was right: ethnic studies are a political project.

Ethnic and social justice studies are just one more attempt at demolishing the “hegemonic narrative.” The hegemonic narrative of this country, to those not yet indoctrinated, is the American Way of life. It is the American Dream. It is the promise of liberty and prosperity that has attracted more than 100 million immigrants to our shores in over a century and a half.

That attraction continues to this day. There is a very long line out the door of people seeking to come in and there is no line for people waiting to leave.

As I explain at length in my new book, “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free,” to be published this Tuesday, the hard left wants to strangle this goose that laid the golden egg.

To the hard left, this is not a dream, but a dystopian nightmare of an America that is structurally, systemically and institutionally racist. It is also too individualistic (and at the same time too family-centered), profit-driven, male-ist, etc.

To Davis and the others who understand the political value of ethnic studies, this awful American hegemonic narrative must be replaced with a counter-narrative filled with the aggrieved and the aggressors.

That is why every student who will go through the Cal State system will now receive these lessons, and be hugged more tightly by the intellectual arm of the revolution.

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School choice wins in Texas — and shows other states how it’s done

The educational-choice movement is a once-in-a-generation political earthquake in America, and politicians in other states should take notice.

The Texas House failed in November to pass Gov. Greg Abbott’s school-choice legislation.

Twenty-one Republicans joined all Democrats to kill a groundbreaking compromise bill that would have created Texas’ first private school-choice program, sent $7 billion extra to public schools and provided $4,000 raises for public-school teachers and support staff.

But instead of empowering families, defecting Republicans voted against their party platform and their constituents.

It looked like the nation’s largest red state would continue to be a stubborn holdout on education freedom, but Abbott quickly and boldly went on the electoral warpath.

He endorsed primary challengers against those members and ultimately deployed more than $7 million of his own campaign cash to make sure voters knew where they stood.

The results were extraordinary.

Of the 16 anti-school-choice incumbents seeking re-election, a stunning six were defeated outright, and another four were pushed into runoffs.

Meanwhile, all five of the seats vacated by retiring members will be filled by pro-school-choice candidates.

This change in the whip count represents the largest shift toward school choice in Texas political history.

It’s difficult to recall another political event in any other state of this magnitude.

It also settled the score on school choice.

On multiple occasions, anti-choice incumbents claimed their constituents are opposed or indifferent to vouchers.

But their actions betrayed the truth.

Until election week, those incumbents still ran advertisements digging in on their vote against school choice.

Ousted Rep. Glenn Rogers wrote multiple opinion articles arguing school choice “isn’t conservative.”

Rogers lost his seat to a school-choice supporter by a 26-point margin.

As Texas’ most popular political figure, Abbott and his endorsements were hugely important to the electorate.

But the governor wasn’t alone.

In the past three months, our affiliated super PAC, AFC Victory Fund, also spent more than $4 million to make sure voters knew where their representatives stood.

All told, this election will be remembered as one of the most significant events in state-level politics in recent history.

Defeating an incumbent lawmaker is the hardest thing to do in politics.

By defeating six incumbents and pushing four more to runoffs, Abbott and AFC Victory Fund blew expectations out of the water with a resounding 77% success rate.

Coming into this year, no Texas Republican incumbents had lost a March primary re-election bid in the prior two election cycles.

Because of school choice, at least six lost in one night.

Thanks in part to the hard work of the governor and several other crucial state and national allies, parents have become the strongest interest group in town.

Texas will now have its best opportunity to pass school choice for every family, which would be the largest Day 1 school-choice program in history.

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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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Thursday, March 14, 2024


Virginia College Announces Students Can Major in ‘Cannabis Studies’

The sale of marijuana for nonmedical purposes is illegal in Virginia, not to mention at the federal level. But that hasn’t stopped Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, from developing an entire major and minor totally dedicated to training students to participate in the marijuana industry. Students who choose this field of study will graduate with a bachelor of science in cannabis studies. And, no, that’s not a bad joke about students who spend their college years stoned.

When Roanoke College announced the program earlier this year, leaders of the college hailed it for providing education in an area of great need. “I commend the faculty for developing a transdisciplinary academic program that fills a significant educational gap,” said Kathy Wolfe, vice president for academic affairs at Roanoke College.

Students who major in cannabis choose from two tracks. First, they can study the “science” of the marijuana industry, which focuses on the “botany, biology, and chemistry” surrounding growing marijuana. Second, they can explore “the social justice and governmental policy around cannabis legislation.” In other words, they can spend their four years of college either growing marijuana or participating in roundtable discussions about the supposed injustice of the prosecution of marijuana-related crimes. As for the former, the college assures that only hemp varieties with 0.3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), or less, will be used. It claims that these plants will “have no psychoactive effects” so as to comply with federal law. (Students will still, according to the college, be “provide[d] … with the scientific training needed to be successful in the industry.”)

In order to receive a B.S. in cannabis studies, students can take courses such as “Cannabis and It’s Regulation,” organic chemistry, cell biology, “Cannabis and Race,” “Cannabis and Disabilities,” “Cannabis and Pop Culture,” “Insects and Cannabis,” “Ethnobotany,” “Cannabis and Society,” and “Inequality in Criminal Justice.”

The college uses the term “cannabis” rather than marijuana at least partially because it claims the word “marijuana” is “a racially charged term with a checkered past.”

The college is quite clear that the major will train students to cash in on the marijuana trade. It advertises to students: “Our program, which is the first of its kind in Virginia, will allow graduates to capitalize on a rapidly growing industry.” Roanoke College receives state funds via the Virginia Tuition Assistance Grant, meaning the state of Virginia will be paying to train Virginia students to participate in business activities that are illegal in Virginia. Yet Roanoke claims that its program will benefit the state: “Roanoke College aims to guide the commonwealth to improve understanding and application of knowledge around cannabis.” The college also plans to use federal funding to train students to grow and sell the Schedule I drug.

Roanoke College claims that marijuana shows “great promise as a medical remedy,” yet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve its use for the treatment of any condition, and a 2022 study showed that marijuana is totally ineffective for the treatment of pain, depression, or anxiety.

Studies have shown that about 30 percent of adults who use marijuana recreationally will develop an addiction to the drug. In addition, 44.7 percent of people who use marijuana move on to other illegal drugs

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Academics Embrace New ‘Deficit Framing’ to Justify Underperforming and Immature Students

It is an open secret among college professors and university administrators that college students aren’t what they used to be.

They struggle with lengthy reading assignments and basic vocabulary. They don’t know rudimentary algebra. They can’t add or subtract fractions. They complain that deadlines, hard exams, and required attendance are impediments to their success.

Yet, although some professors view these deficits as problems to be fixed, many in academia have embraced bits of pedagogical fluff intertwined with fashionable DEI that suggest there is something demotivating if not bigoted about acknowledging deficits as deficits and holding students to basic academic or professional standards, while implying bad grades and a lack of maturity on the part of students are simple quirks educators just need to better accept.

One such fluffy concept is that of “deficit framing,” sometimes referred to as “deficit thinking” or a “deficit model lens.” As defined by education researcher Chelsea Heinbach in a 2021 interview, deficit thinking is “the belief that there is a prescribed ‘correct’ way of being — also known as the norm — and anyone who operates outside of that norm is operating at a deficit.”

These individuals, she said, are perceived by those engaged in deficit thinking as needing to be fixed or having to “‘try harder’ and ultimately conform to the practices of the dominant culture.”

Heinbach went on to advocate for “changing the norm to accommodate others,” suggesting that minority, disabled, first-generation, international, and nontraditional students with responsibilities related to work or family are all harmed by the maintenance of such norms.

In 2023, Aaminah Long, a PhD student in higher education and student affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, echoed similar sentiments on a blog hosted on her university’s website.

Deficit models, she wrote, “are particularly problematic as they subscribe to the notion that students and their environments are responsible for their failures instead of acknowledging the role of dominant power structures in constructing those environments.”

“Instructing from a deficit model lens,” wrote Long, “is especially harmful to marginalized students, overlooking their cultural strengths, diminishing the value of their lived experiences, and invalidating their communities’ sense of agency by assuming that educational institutions are the only ‘valid’ sources of knowledge and rejecting long-standing cultural practices and ways of knowing.”

One of Long’s recommendations for instructors to move away from such deficit models was to embrace another fluffy idea and “[f]oster a growth mindset.”

In its simplest form, the notion of a growth mindset may be innocuous if not beneficial, as it suggests students should view academic challenges as opportunities for growth and see their intelligence and class performance as things that can be improved with effort.

Yet, in practice, some educators who seek to cultivate a growth mindset in students can take the endeavor to rather absurd places.

Stephanie Erickson from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, for example, has decried “[p]olicies such as not accepting late homework, deducting points for late assignments, and not allowing for revisions on large stakes assignments” as these policies “go against a growth mindset” and “implicitly value specific norms surrounding work ethic, time management, and learning approaches.”

In practice, such interpretations of a growth mindset merge with another bit of pedagogical fluff known as ungrading, which holds that grades can be demotivating to students and has spurred some professors to do away with due dates, stop penalizing late work, and start allowing students to self-grade.

Collectively, when these kinds of fluffy ideas are translated into policy at a university, department, or even just a classroom level, they at best provide a pseudo-intellectual justification for taking unprepared, underperforming, or immature students and moving them along without ensuring they develop the basic academic and professional competencies they lack.

At worst, however, the embrace of such pedagogical fluff, given its overlap with DEI, can disincentivize those in academia who notice deficits in their students from acknowledging the problem publicly and penalize those that do thus ensuring obvious deficits in student ability and character remain.

For example, in a recent incident at my own academic institution, Northern Illinois University, when philosophy Professor Alicia Finch stated at a faculty senate meeting, “I’m just not convinced they [intro students] know how to do college. And I sometimes think, well, maybe we need a coordinated effort to teach them,” she was inevitably and publicly dressed down by our Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Carol Sumner, for her “deficit framing” of students.

“We just had a conversation yesterday at looking at how we’re student-centered and what are we doing for student success,” stated Sumner prior to reading a quote on her phone from a source she didn’t bother to name.

“It says,” she began, “‘Using an asset-based approach to student success requires more than the institution simply identifying that the students are having challenges, but explores the ways to which structural and systemic issues impair and derail student success. It does not position the issues or challenges being due to deficits within the individual students.’”

Sumner suggested “practices, policies and pedagogies” that focus on fixing student deficits, actually “reinforce colonialism, subjugation and the inferiority of minoritized students.”

She then went on to “reposition” Finch’s question as “How are we as institutions identifying the challenges and structures that we put in place where students are not successful.”

In other words, there isn’t a problem with students entering college grossly unprepared. The problem is college is too challenging. Those that say otherwise are colonizing subjugators.

Anyone who seriously might want to address student deficits should think twice. And the students that enter college unable to handle lengthy texts, basic vocabulary, or rudimentary algebra may very well graduate that way.

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Why abolishing boys schools is an act of woke madness

Greg Sheridan

The campaign to abolish single-sex schools, especially boys schools, is a sign of the madness of ideology and the badness of groupthink.

It reflects the dreary, dull, lifeless, joyless, small “S” Stalinist bureaucratic conformity that progressive ideology routinely attempts to impose. It’s a rush to insanity, where pressure will come on every successful boys school to become coeducational.

Let’s state the obvious. Boys schools, girls schools and co-ed schools can all be extremely good, mediocre or terrible. It’s a good thing for our educational environment, and for countless families and students, that different types of schools flourish.

Gender Equality Advocate Michelle May says. “The argument is that currently it is not done on merit,” Ms May said. “It’s still very much a boys club. “As long as we’ve got More
It seems a pity that some boys schools with long, good traditions now feel obliged to go co-ed. They may be feeling cultural pressure.

Let me confess. I spent the majority of my schooling at a Christian Brothers school in Sydney that was for boys only. It was a great school, with wide socio-economic and racial diversity, and certainly taught its students respect for women and girls, and respect for everyone.

It wasn’t an exclusively male environment. There were female teachers, librarians, admin staff, mothers in the tuck shop. To be rude, much less sexist, towards any of these would have been unthinkable and would have earned draconian punishment.

The contemporary debate is too ideological. If a particular school has a behaviour problem, that needs to be fixed. Abolishing boys schools generally would be wretched iconoclastic vandalism.

In the Financial Review last week an anonymous business executive called for ending single-sex schools and said boys schools should stop trying to make “men” out of their students.

How weird is this? What is it that boys are supposed to become if not men? Giraffes? Oranges?

The piece reflects the confused and counter-productive campaign against masculinity. Men, like women, can do terrible things. Men are responsible for much more violence than women. I agree we’re living through a plague of domestic violence that we must stop. But you won’t make men decent, respectful and successful by telling them masculinity itself is bad.

Seventeen years ago, in central Melbourne, about 7.30am, a biker, who had been on an all-night binge, was beating up his girlfriend. Two men came to her aid. One was killed in the process. In giving his life to the instinct to protect a woman under assault, that man was displaying masculinity, and it wasn’t toxic.

At the school I attended more than 50 years ago, the brothers, and all the teachers, stressed that men had certain obligations to women – politeness, consideration, respect, courtesy.

The brothers taught that when walking down the street with a girl the bloke should try to walk between the girl and the road. That’s so any danger coming from the road, such as a car crashing off the street, hits the bloke first.

That may all seem hopelessly outdated. But men and women are still different. Completely equal but different. The idea that the differences are mainly the result of socialisation is contemporary ideology waging war against human nature.

Almost no one really lives their life according to the new ideology. Is there a household in Australia where, if a married couple hears a strange noise in the middle of the night, the husband turns to the wife and says: “Now, darling, why don’t you go and see if that noise is a burglar. I’ll stay here by the phone. I would go myself but I don’t want us to be trapped in gender stereotypes.”

It’s good that women’s sport is increasingly seen as the equal of men’s sport. But it’s still different. No one argues that men and women should play rugby league together. The army for a long time included boxing in its training. It’s a tough sport. Maybe its concussion risks render it no longer fit for such training. But you can see it helped soldiers cope psychologically with experiencing a physical blow but carrying on. It has never been the case that men and women enter the same boxing ring and box against each other.

The variety of human experience is vast but boys and girls are different. Co-ed can work superbly, but so can schools that focus only on boys, or only girls. Boys and girls do tend, within all kinds of statistical variation, to learn a bit differently, so boys schools can focus on the way boys learn.

Girls tend to mature earlier than boys and in that early adolescent period a single-sex school allows a boy to remain a boy for as long as necessary. And then become a man.

Cardinal George Pell once remarked that “self-confidence, directness and an instinct for struggle and competition” characterised Christian Brothers schools. That’s pretty accurate.

But boys schools also offer boys a distinctive diversity. At a boys school, if there’s going to be a choir it has to be the boys singing.

The school I went to was exceptionally strong in sports. My one season as a junior rugby league player led to a broken shoulder; my parents decided I’d dispense with footy. I wasn’t very good at sport anyway but the school offered multitudes of other activities. I was always in the debating team, the chess club, sometimes the drama performances, sometimes music groups, briefly in the science club, in Christian youth groups and a million other things.

Even though I didn’t play football or cricket, and hardly excelled at the sports I did participate in, I never felt out of place. Books, learning, contention, energy, purpose, competition – it was a pro-life environment.

The teachers occasionally gave us the strap for our malefactions. Some of life’s antipathies are irrational. I greatly disliked one teacher, who warmly returned my sentiments. No doubt unfairly, I thought him a dogmatic smart alec. Perhaps we were too much alike.

I persecuted him with many pedantic questions and points of order while staying well within the rules and norms. One day, nonetheless, he sort of gave in and gave me the strap. I went home that afternoon immensely chuffed, feeling I’d won a moral victory.

There were times, of course, when we were louts and hooligans, and needed strong direction. The school was pretty strict. Sensibly so. And it had a great tradition. Wearing its uniform meant something. We cared about it. No doubt it struck other kids entirely differently.

But it gave me wonderful treasures. In its library, in primary school, I met PG Wodehouse, my lifelong companion.

We moved house and I finished at a co-ed school. It was good, too. Diversity is good. The urge of ideological censors to hammer everything into a single monotonous conformity is as misbegotten as their demonisation of masculinity, and of the need to turn good boys, indeed, into good men.

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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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Wednesday, March 13, 2024


House Education Committee Demands Documents Related to Elite University’s Handling of Antisemitism

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is demanding documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology related to the school’s handling of antisemitism on campus, according to a Friday letter.

The House committee is requesting all reports of antisemitic and discriminatory acts at the university since Jan. 1, 2021; documents outlining the school’s processes to respond to “allegations of hate crimes, discrimination, bias, or harassment”; and documents related to the outcome of disciplinary processes, among others, according to the letter addressed to MIT President Sally Kornbluth and MIT Corp. Chair Mark Gorenberg.

The committee is investigating several elite universities after their presidents testified in December and refused to say if calling for the genocide of Jews violated the schools’ codes of conduct.

“The Committee on Education and the Workforce (the Committee) is investigating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT or the Institute) response to antisemitism and its failure to protect Jewish students. We have grave concerns regarding the inadequacy of MIT’s response to antisemitism on campus,” the letter reads.

The committee alleges that the university has ignored antisemitism on its campus since Oct. 7 and cited several incidents, including a pro-Palestinian activist group disrupting classes and allegedly harassing students. Kornbluth is also alleged to have told MIT Israel Alliance President Talia Khan that the school could not evenly apply the code of conduct due to fear of “losing faculty support.”

“MIT has cited its supposed commitment to free speech as limiting its ability to take action against antisemitism on campus. However, the Institute has demonstrated a clear double standard in how it has tolerated antisemitic harassment and intimidation by acting to suppress and penalize expression it deemed problematic. In October 2021, MIT’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department canceled University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot’s planned John Carlson lecture over Abbot’s views on diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the letter reads.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is also demanding documents related to the amount of foreign donations to MIT, as well as donations to MIT from Qatari sources, including the Qatar Foundation, since Jan. 1, 2021, according to the letter.

Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania are also under investigation by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Harvard President Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned from their roles after the Dec. 5 hearing on antisemitism on college campuses.

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At the CREATE Conservatory, an Alternative to Public Schools

Nikki Duslak says she never fit in as a public school teacher. “I have a background in theater—a bachelor’s degree in fine art and musical theater—and I always carried that love with me in the classroom. I was constantly doing crazy, off‐​the‐​wall things and other teachers would look at me like I had six heads,” she explains. “I had always had that passion to integrate art into my classroom, and I saw firsthand what it could do for students.”

She remembers sitting in the teachers’ room at lunch hearing people complain about the state of things. “If I was a school principal, I wouldn’t do things this way,” she thought. So, she went back to school and got her masters in educational leadership and policy studies. “I became a school principal, and I constantly found myself saying, ‘Gosh, this is awful. Someday I’m going to open my own school, and I’m going to do things differently.’”

But a “someday” dream doesn’t always become reality. “It was very challenging to even think about because there were so many loose ends. There is no handbook or guidebook; it’s different depending on what state you’re in. And it was just a very overwhelming thought,” Nikki says.

Eventually, it was her own child’s needs that gave Nikki the push she needed. Her son was reading at a third‐​grade level and solving Algebra problems at age three, so she knew it was going to be tough to find the right school for him. After trying a few options—including having him in classes with 13‐​year‐​olds when he was five—Nikki realized it was time to start a new kind of school. The result is CREATE Conservatory, which opened in Florida in 2020.

“People think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I found a book called Nonprofits for Dummies, and I sat down with the book and a bottle of wine. I thought, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to do it,’” she recalls. “I decided that the fear of what would happen if I tried to open the school was less than the fear of what was going to happen to him if I didn’t.”

Nikki’s public school career gave her a realization that the public system is about mass producing. “If you’re a mass production kind of student, then that might work great for you. If you’re the kind of student who can sit down and be quiet and listen—and you can show what you’ve learned through a very specific methodology—that system might work for you. But it doesn’t work for so many of our children,” she says.

What I was really trying to create was an environment where students were able to show what they know as opposed to being caught with what they don’t know. And an opportunity to teach children how to think; I believe so much of the modern education system has removed opportunities for children to think. We’re asking them to memorize information. We’re asking them to spit it back at us. But we’re not teaching them how to be critical thinkers. We’re not teaching them how to solve problems, especially how to solve problems creatively, which I believe is a massive part of your eventual success, whether it’s college or career or the workforce or military. Being able to look at a problem and solve it in a creative way is just something that doesn’t exist in the system right now. So for me that became, ‘How do I do that?’ I was immediately drawn back to all those times in a classroom where I saw arts integration be so wildly successful. And that was with students that you’d never think. I was teaching in a very rural, very low income school, and I was using arts integration.

Nikki and her team write the curriculum themselves. “I think part of why we don’t see arts integration as a more widespread methodology is because it is incredibly hard,” she says. “You have to have a really deep understanding of the arts. You have to have a very deep understanding of curriculum, curriculum writing, and scope and sequence. And you also have to have an incredible knowledge of your students who are in front of you. Because if you don’t have all three of those things, it’s not going to work.” Nikki uses Florida state standards as the basis and then finds ways to incorporate the arts into various topics.

“We don’t have textbooks here. We learn everything through videos or articles I find online,” Nikki says. “If we want to study the solar system, if we want to learn about space, why am I going to use a 10‐​year‐​old textbook when I can go to NASA’s website right now and we can talk about the comet they discovered this morning? We can pull it up on the screen and read the website right now. The kids feel like they’re cutting edge because they’re learning about it, and it just happened yesterday. And they’re excited about it.”

After the struggles of Nikki’s own gifted children trying to fit in a standard classroom, differentiation is a key aspect of CREATE. “The way that we differentiate here is either through content, product, or process,” she explains. She currently has 4th grade through 9th grade in one classroom, and she acknowledges that’s a challenge. She’ll do a group lesson on a subject and then break them into smaller groups to work on specific aspects at more individualized levels. This allows students to work on mastery at their ability level rather than an arbitrary metric based on their age.

Nikki has been approached about creating a curriculum that can be replicated in other schools, but she hasn’t figured out a way due to the creativity and personalization she incorporates throughout all of her classes. “I find that the curriculum piece is becoming that someday dream of mine. Someday when I have time, I’m going to sit down and flesh this out a bit because I do think it’s something that we need,” she says. Considering her last “someday” dream became a flourishing microschool that was a semifinalist for the Yass Prize, it’s probably safe to keep an eye out for her curriculum in the future.

When she first started planning CREATE, Nikki was a school choice skeptic because she saw the state as part of the problem when it came to public schools. But then she realized she would retain autonomy with Florida’s scholarship programs, so she now happily participates to ensure students in her rural, low‐​income area can attend CREATE Conservatory.

“As adults, it’s rare that we have the opportunity to sit back and reflect on a decision that we made and be able to say I’m very proud of myself. But I do with this because I really was very opposed to it at the beginning. Then the more I sat down and read, the more I looked into it, and the more I talked to people, I thought, ‘Well, I think I was wrong about this. And I think if the school’s going to survive, we have to go this route.’ And so every day I’m thankful I was smart enough to realize that I didn’t know what I didn’t know and to change my opinion about it all,” she says. “I couldn’t be more thankful for Step Up and for AAA and for all the things that they do because we wouldn’t exist at this point without them.”

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Australia:Christian schools under fire from official body

Tax deductibility for Greenie bodies is OK but not for Christian ones.

The insidious influence of Catholic schools was a matter of no small concern to the colonial establishment in the late 19th century, not least because of their devilish power to corrupt the youth.

“Large numbers of children are perverted to Popery before their parents are aware of the true character of the teaching,” The Protestant Weekly reported in 1886, arguing that Catholic schools should be barred from government funding. Romanist education was “a false mean deceit” propagating “a religion degrading to the intellect and the heart as its design was simply to extract money”.

Such narrow sectarian prejudice would be deemed inappropriate in the 21st century by the guardians of diversity and inclusion, whose job is to make everybody feel comfortable.

Today, their intolerance extends to all forms of Christian education and, indeed, to any private school that undermines the monopoly of the state system. The Productivity Commission fired a particularly nasty salvo against religious schools, out of character for an organisation that once anchored its findings in data rather than the fashionable preconceptions of the intelligentsia.

In November, the Commission published a draft report recommending that donations to Christian school building funds should no longer be tax-deductible. The draft argued that the Deductible Gift Recipient status granted by the Australian Taxation Office to a wide range of registered charities was inappropriate since religious education had limited claim to a broader public purpose.

The PC argues that DGR donations require co-investment from taxpayers since a $100 donation from someone in the top income bracket saved them $35 in tax. This, the PC argues, is unfair since the priorities for public investment in schools should be decided by the government, not God-bothering tax dodgers.

They were not the exact words the PC used, but how else should we read a passage like this? “The Commission does not see a case for additional government support for the practice of religion through the DGR system.”

Or this? “Providing indirect government support through school building funds means government funding is not prioritised according to a systemic assessment of the infrastructure needs of different schools.”

The naive proposition that the government knows better where to spend public money than the public themselves sits awkwardly with the lessons from the Rudd government’s Building the Education Revolution program, a $16.2bn splurge on school infrastructure projects to stave off the recession that never was. The official report into the implementation of the BER by Brad Orgill found public schools in Queensland, NSW and Victoria paid 25 per cent more than Catholic schools and 55 per cent more than independent schools for near identical projects.

Yet the Commission doggedly insists that tax deductibility for donations to school building projects is unfair. It bolsters its argument with a peculiarly perverse interpretation of what constitutes private benefit. Potential donors are most likely to be people directly involved with the school, it claims, and are likely to reap the fruits of their donations as the parents of students or as alumni.

The Commission does not oppose tax-deductible donations per se. Indeed, it argues that they should be extended to a broader range of charities. Nor is it opposed to charities that want to build things, just those who like to build buildings that could be used for religious purposes.

It declares the building of social capital to be a worthy charitable ambition. Ditto is the building of bonds between individuals and communities, however loose that goal might be defined. Capacity-building activities for organisations and individuals get a tick, particularly the building of empowerment and self-determination by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations. Indeed, the Commission recommends the establishment of an independent philanthropic foundation controlled by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for that very purpose.

It is religion to which the Commission seems to object. Not all of the 5000 school building funds that are currently endorsed are religious. Some three-quarters are for charities, and a quarter for government entities, such as public schools.

Yet the Commission wears its prejudices on its sleeve by mounting arguments exclusively against Christian schools rather than private schools. The concerns about tax-deductible proselytising do not extend to the 148 environmental charities with tax-deductible status.

The Commission does not question the broader public purpose of Boundless Earth Limited, which attracted $30.6m in revenue in its most recent annual report lodged with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.

Boundless Earth gained its tax-deductible concession in 2021, stating its purpose is ”to accelerate climate solutions at the scale and speed required for Australia to do its fair share to avert the climate crisis”. Boundless Earth’s registered address is 13 Trelawney Street, Woollahra, the site of the former German consulate now owned by Mike Cannon-Brookes.

The Commission makes no recommendation that the projects and organisations Boundless Earth funds should be put on the public record, or suggest that Boundless should be declared an associated entity by the Australian Electoral Commission under the disclosure rules for political donations. And this would not be an unreasonable recommendation since Cannon-Brookes has made no secret of his financial support for the teal campaign at the last federal election.

The granting of DGR status to Boundless, Greenpeace, Lock The Gate, the Australian Solar Energy Society (which operates as the Smart Energy Council) the Climate Council, Farmers for Climate Action, Veterinarians for Climate Action and other members of the renewable energy cheer squad reinforces the growing concern that privileges of charitable status should be reviewed.

The Albanese government has prudently distanced itself from the Commission’s recommendations. “It’s not something we’re considering,” Assistant Education Minister Anthony Chisholm told a Senate committee last month.

The Commission is right to complain that the DGR system is poorly designed. It is piecemeal, overly complex and lacks a coherent policy rationale. It is responsible for inefficient, inconsistent and unfair outcomes for charities, donors and the community. It is badly in need of review.

Yet the draft report of the philanthropy inquiry is a small-minded, mean-spirited document unworthy of an organisation with a reputation for forensic and impartial examination of public policy. For the sake of their own reputation, the commissioners should find the courage to send the report back to its authors and ask them to start again.

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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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Tuesday, March 12, 2024



A Fraudulent Attack on Education Choice

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has indicted former government employees hired by a fellow Democrat, then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, for defrauding the government. Now she’s desperately trying to use the story as a cudgel against families benefitting from the state’s popular Empowerment Scholarship Account policy.

On Thursday, Mayes’ office announced the indictment of five people, including three former Arizona Department of Education employees, for “allegedly engaging in fraud, conspiracy, computer tampering, illegally conducting an enterprise, money laundering and forgery” related to the ESA.

“My overarching concern here is this is a program that is easy to target for fraud,” Mayes claimed.

But these were no ordinary scammers. This was an inside job.

According to the grand jury indictment, the three former ADE employees, “admitted minor students, real and fictitious into the ESA Program by using false, forged, or fraudulent documentation,” including falsified special-education evaluations from public schools, and “awarded said student funds from the ESA Program, and approved expenses for reimbursement or funds for distribution of behalf of said students for their own benefit.”

Had the scammers not been working at the Department of Education, this would not have been possible. As ESA director John Ward explained to the Arizona Capitol Times, the ESA program already has proper guardrails in place: “ADE employees are trained to review birth certificates and look for anything ‘strange’ or ‘unusual’ in assessing authenticity of disability evaluations.”

Unlike the Arizona’s Health Care Cost Containment System scandal—which has seen dozens of scammers indicted for stealing more than a billion dollars from the state’s Medicaid system—ordinary scammers could not have gotten away with this without help from inside.

Moreover, the scammers were caught. Contrary to Mayes’s telling, the Arizona Education Department was investigating its own employees before the AG’s office got involved. “The Attorney General is not telling the truth when she states that the alleged criminal activities of former ADE employees did not raise flags in the department,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne clarified in a press release. “In fact, the opposite is true. Our office did alert the Attorney General’s Office to concerns we discovered regarding” the former employees.

Mayes’s attempt to smear the ESA program as having a “lack of controls and regulations” is belied by the facts. The most recent review by the ESA by the Arizona Auditor General found an improper payment rate of nearly zero. During their “review of all 168,020 approved transactions identified in the Department’s Program account transaction data” over the prior fiscal year, they “found only 1 successful transaction at an unapproved merchant totaling $30.”

In other words, the rate of improper payments to unapproved merchants was only 0.001 percent.

That’s far better than other government programs. According to a 2021 analysis by the federal Office of Management and Budget, the improper payment rate across federal agencies is 7.2 percent. Some of the worst offenders are the federal school meals programs. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “the school meals programs have reported high improper payment error rates, as high as almost 16 percent for the National School Lunch Program and almost 23 percent for the School Breakfast Program over the past 4 years.”

Opponents of school choice like Mayes and Save Our Schools Arizona are predictably using the indictments to attack the popular ESA program. But anyone who is really concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse should start in the district school system.

As the Goldwater Institute documented, “just 10 percent of Arizona’s school districts have managed to accumulate almost $26 million in documented fraud” over two decades. If the attorney general is really concerned about fraud, perhaps she should investigate the 13 school districts that the Arizona Auditor General has reprimanded for failing to comply with the state’s financial reporting requirements.

The district schools aren’t immune from hiring people who commit fraud either. In just the last two years, employees at school districts in Glendale, Hyder, and Wilson have been indicted for theft, fraud, forgery, and misuse of public funds, while an Eloy School District employee pled guilty to theft and forgery.

Any fraud or theft should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But no one has proposed eliminating AHCCCS or the district schools over the financial misconduct of external or internal swindlers.

Politicians and special interests are exploiting the ESA indictments to push an agenda that would cheat children out of a quality education and punish parents for the misdeeds of bamboozling bureaucrats. The public should recognize their fraudulent smears for what they are.

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Embattled Ivy League Professor Amy Wax Alleges School is Attempting to ‘Punish’ Her for Conservative Speech

She's a hero of straight talk

University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) law professor Amy Wax alleged that the university does not adhere to free speech standards and is targeting the scholar because of her conservative beliefs.

Wax, who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation, has made several controversial statements outside of the classroom, and the university has claimed that her speech created “a hostile campus environment.” Former UPenn President Liz Magill signed off on sanctions against Wax, which Wax said was an attempt to sanction her for extramural speech, which is speech outside the classroom, and said that the school is “flagrantly in violation of the principles of academic freedom.”

“Penn has zero interest in developing and adhering to principles of a consistent position on free expression, zero interest. They can protect the people they basically agree with or favor, like the pro-Palestinians, anti-Israeli, antisemitic, and they can punish people like me. They have never articulated a consistent position,” Wax told the DCNF.

“Everybody says after October 7, universities are on the run, they’re going to change the way they do things or after the affirmative action case, they’re going to change the way they do things. I don’t see any evidence of that. I hear people doubling down on their conviction that everything they’re doing is right and good,” Wax continued.

Universities are dominated by left-wing professors, with one 2018 review of over 60 top colleges in the U.S. revealing that the professoriate is over ten to one Democratic to Republican. Wax pointed to the left-wing dominance of the universities as a reason she was being targeted for her more conservative speech, while radical left-wing speech had largely gone unquestioned.

As recently as 2015, UPenn awarded Wax with the school’s top teaching prize, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, according to a UPenn news article. “Cancel culture really started accelerating around, I think, around 2015, 2016,” Wax told the DCNF.

The Penn Law Council of Student Representatives held a student body meeting with then-UPenn Law School Dean Theodore Ruger in September 2019 to discuss “issues regarding Professor Amy Wax,” according to an email obtained by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech legal organization.

“The objections to me had nothing really to do with the quality of my teaching. It had to do with my openly expressing views and opinions and discussing facts that were forbidden and deviated from this very narrow catechism,” Wax told the DCNF. Wax said that many of the ideas and thoughts she had expressed were discussed in mainstream conservative circles but are forbidden at universities.

Wax previously made controversial statements, including saying that America should let fewer Asians immigrate to the country due to their “indifference to liberty,” and that different racial “groups have different levels of ability” and that unequal outcomes are “not due to racism,” according to a June 2023 UPenn memo obtained by The Washington Free Beacon. She also said that diversity, equity and inclusion officers “couldn’t be scholars if their life depended on it,” and that they are “true believer bureaucrats.”

“People are afraid now to express a lot of this stuff in public because they will be censured or even lose their job or their livelihood,” Wax told the DCNF. “There is a myth, a fairy tale in the universities that all people are equal in their latent ability, whatever that means, and their achievement, and that is just completely contrary to fact.”

Wax said allegations that she made students uncomfortable in the classroom were unfounded and that Ruger targeted her for extramural speech. She pointed out that the recently leaked memo of the faculty senate didn’t list any speech in the classroom.

The memo recommends that Wax receive a public reprimand from university leadership, a loss of her named chair and a requirement to note when she publicly speaks, she is not speaking for the university. It also recommends a one-year suspension at half pay and a loss of summer pay in perpetuity. The memo claims that Wax’s speech should be treated as “major infractions of University behavioral standards.”

Magill, who signed off on the recommendation to sanction Wax in the leaked memo, argued at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing that the university had been lenient on antisemitic speech due to the school’s adherence to free speech principles. Magill also defended the Palestine Writes Festival at the school, which involved one speaker who likened Zionism to Nazism and one who said “most Jews” are “evil.”

“Liz Magill lied to Congress because it has never adhered to First Amendment standards,” Wax told the DCNF. “But the fact that they’re bringing this case against me is directly contrary to First Amendment standards.”

Free speech issues on college campuses have been a source of fierce debate since the Oct.7 terrorist attacks against Israel. Former Harvard President Claudine Gay wrote that students “had a right to speak” after over 30 student groups signed a letter blaming the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and also alluded to free speech at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing on antisemitism.

Harvard University previously rescinded an offer to a student in 2019 for alleged racist comments made when he was 16 years old, and disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from campus in 2022 because of her views on trans issues.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth allegedly told MIT Israel Alliance President Talia Khan that the university could not evenly apply the code of conduct due to fear of possibly “losing faculty support.” MIT previously disinvited speaker Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, due to his criticism of affirmative action.

“The far left holds power in the universities, and they are not about to relinquish it,” Wax told the DCNF.

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Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin Signs Bill Banning Legacy Admissions

This will put a few noses out of joint

Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill Friday banning legacy admissions at public colleges in the state.

Several states have moved to eliminate legacy admissions, which are admissions based on prior familial attendance to a school, after the fall of race-based admissions at the Supreme Court in June 2023. The bill passed the Virginia Senate with bipartisan support, 39-0, and passed the state’s House of Delegates 99-0, and has now been signed by Youngkin.

“Governor Youngkin has consistently advocated for merit-based admissions to Virginia’s colleges and universities. In Virginia, students can be encouraged to know their hard work and academic career will be recognized on its merit,” a spokesperson for Youngkin told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“No public institution of higher education shall provide any manner of preferential treatment in the admissions decision to any student applicant on the basis of such student’s legacy status or such student’s familial relationship to any donor to such institution,” the bill reads.

“It’s about fairness. It’s about higher ed being available to everybody,” Virginia Democratic state Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, the bill’s sponsor, said in an interview before the Senate vote, according to The Associated Press.

The Connecticut legislature’s education committee said it plans to look into legacy admissions during this upcoming legislative session, according to the Connecticut Mirror. Federal legislation was also introduced in November to eliminate legacy admissions in Congress by Indiana Republican Sen. Todd Young and Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine.

Nearly 56% of the top 250 colleges and universities in the U.S. used legacy admissions in the enrollment process.

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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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Monday, March 11, 2024


Outrage grows after Nevada college oversight leader asked if state's universities have any men 'masquerading as women' on sports teams and hurting girls

A Nevada college oversight leader is facing calls to resign after referring to trans athletes as 'men masquerading as women.'

Patrick Boylan has been slammed for making the comments during a meeting of the Nevada System of Higher Education's Board of Regents on Friday.

He said he had 'one simple question' for the athletic directors who were presenting to the board before asking, 'Do we have any men masquerading as women playing in any of our teams and hurting any of the women?'

The question was shut down by board attorney Michael Wixom, who advised it was against federal privacy laws to collate and disclose that information. He cautioned the directors not to respond and said any question would need to be brought on a separate agenda.

Boylan's remarks were also blasted by The Nevada Faculty Alliance which said it was, 'deeply angered by repeated anti-transgender comments.'

The alliance said it was 'especially appalled' by the regent's 'aggressive response' to a student leader who upbraided his remarks in the public comment portion of the meeting.

In the public comment section Kevin Osorio-Hernández, president of the Nevada State Student Alliance, told Boylan he was disappointed by the rhetoric and that he hopes he can 'expand and change your paradigm'.

Boylan told the student he had freedom of speech and continued to make inflammatory remarks.

'If he has not had his "you know what" cut off or anything, he's still a man,' Boylan said.

But Boylan has stood by his position and confirmed to the Las Vegas Review that he has no plans to step down.

He asserted that 'safety and freedom of speech' are more important than the feelings of the faculty alliance headed by Jim New, which he said had 'totally misconstrued' his comments.

Boylan insisted he was doing the right thing by talking about women's safety in sport and claimed to have been confused about the proper way to refer to trans people.

The regent defended his position and maintains he was just trying to speak up for women in sport. 'If I used the wrong terms, then OK,' he said, adding he had received emails of support since the meeting.

'They're tired of all of this woke nonsense,' he said. Boylan also told the outlet he believes trans athletes should get to compete in their own separate category.

He admitted during the Friday meeting his comments came on the heels of high-profile incidents across the nation of trans athletes competing against women and leading to injuries of the girls. One recent incident happened in Massachusetts when a trans athlete competed in a high school basketball game.

The faculty alliance argues that Boylan's conduct goes against the board's anti-discrimination policy.

'In the March 1 meeting, Regent Boylan also questioned the qualifications of students from underrepresented minority groups,' their statement added.

'These are not isolated incidents. Regent Boylan has a history of racist and discriminatory remarks that have been condemned by a number of Nevada System of Higher Education students, including the Senate of the Associated Students of the University of Nevada.'

However, not everyone is supportive of the calls for his resignation.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Victor Joecks came to Boylan's defense, saying he was being asked to step down, 'for stating that a man is a man.'

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Classroom Warfare

While COVID-related school violence may have subsided, too many teachers and students are still not safe in the classroom.

About 857,500 violent incidents and 479,500 nonviolent incidents were recorded by public schools in 2021-22, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. (Nonviolent incidents include theft, vandalism, drug possession, etc.) About 67% of public schools reported having at least one violent incident.

Hence, it’s hardly surprising that almost half of all teachers reported they “desire or plan to quit or transfer their jobs due to concerns about school climate and school safety,” per a 2022 study by the American Psychological Association,

The ongoing question is what to do about this egregious problem. The National Education Association claims that to deal with it, we must hire more counselors and interventionists.

While additional counselors who can reason with youthful offenders may help in some cases, it is not a fix that will always work.

Corporal punishment?

While there may be something to be said for the “spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child mentality” (18 states still permit corporal punishment), this approach is fraught with problems. Schools benefit from a school-wide discipline program, and not all teachers are comfortable whacking kids. I know that when I taught a middle school, it would be unthinkable for me to paddle a 13-year-old, especially a girl. Also, many parents might not want to send their kids to a school with a designated flogger.

Cops

Having a campus cop is helpful. A law enforcement officer surely is a deterrent to some miscreants. It’s important to note that while many teacher union leaders want to defund the cops, many boots-on-the-ground teachers disagree. A 2021 Heritage Foundation survey asked if defunding school resource officers will make schools safer and just 7% of teachers responded affirmatively. Additionally, an Ed Week Research Center poll from 2020 showed that, when asked if armed police officers should be eliminated from our nation’s schools, only 20% of teachers, principals, and district leaders completely or partly agreed.

But the racially obsessed equity crowd maintains that a cop’s presence “increases the number of students facing suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, particularly if they are black.” The same bunch, howeve

The race hustlers in the Windy City are acting on the issue. The Chicago Board of Education has just voted to approve a resolution to remove police officers from its schools by the beginning of next school year.

Restorative justice

Promoted by the teachers’ unions and other leftwing education establishmentarians,this touchy-feely new-age malarkey is dangerous. It emphasizes “making the victim and offender whole” and involves “an open discussion of feelings.” Restorative justice came into being because blacks are far more likely to be suspended than other ethnic groups. The suggestion here, of course, is that white teachers and administrators tend to be racist. But the bean counters never get around to explaining why the racial disparity exists even in schools where black principals and staff predominate.

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Forget the school bus — these kids are flying first class

A private tutor to the ultra rich and famous — including the Jenners and Dr. Dre — is lifting the lid on what its like to work with their kids and how some parents fork out as much as $32,000 a month in fees.

Celebrity tutor Tiffany Sorya — who once dissected Catcher in the Rye with Kylie Jenner as she had her makeup applied — told The Post homeschooling demand soared during the pandemic and has now entrenched itself as an increasingly appealing path.

“This started in LA,” said the founder of Novel Education Group. “Families of a certain type — celebrities, high profile CEOS who were traveling a lot — they needed something that fits their lifestyle.”

The richest families find private tutors are much more flexible than traditional schooling options, and for the right price elite educators can be at their beck and call around the clock as they jet set around the world.

Others harbor security and privacy concerns for their children at regular campuses — no matter how exclusive or expensive.

“The idea of being locked into one location for ten months out of the year is not going to work for them,” Sorya said.

The private educator was tasked with supervising the homeschooling of Dr. Dre’s daughter, Truly, whose creative pursuits made a traditional education unappealing and largely unfeasible.

“The parents still want standards, they want structure,” she said. “But they also want to have the ability to nurture their kids’ interests outside the classroom. They aren’t so interested in the prom and football games. They’re busy making albums.”

Demand for high-end homeschooling has become so intense that some of Sorya’s clients are withdrawing their children from some of New York and Los Angeles’ most prestigious private schools to pivot to remote education.

The costs of top-tier homeschooling, Sorya said, have rocketed accordingly.

While her packages vary, a full-time tutor costs roughly $16,000 a month. Those instructors are available at all times and will jump on a plane to meet with their students as needed.

Some clients, Sorya said, hire two such tutors to work with their children at a cost of $32,000 a month.

Typically, clients have their assigned in-home teacher sign airtight non-disclosure agreements to guard against leaks and loose lips.

Other especially demanding clients have asked Sorya to find them tutors without any personal attachments so they can focus solely on their children.

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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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