Friday, July 12, 2019






Report: Teachers Inserting Climate Change into Curriculum Without Training, Textbooks

Despite the unsettled science and evidence to the contrary, teachers without training or textbooks are giving lessons to U.S. public school students on the threat of manmade climate change.
An article from the Hechinger Report picked up by the Washington Post reports:

Teaching global warming in a charged political climate. … Their training doesn’t cover it and many textbooks don’t touch it but teachers are taking on climate change anyway.

The article focuses on a school in Oklahoma, where many students have parents who have good jobs in the flourishing oil and gas industry in the state, that promotes environmentalists’ belief that fossil fuels are the main culprit causing climate change.

Melissa Lau is a sixth-grade teacher in the classroom profiled in the reporter’s story, which was documented before the start of summer vacation. According to the report:

Ms. Lau, 42, has taught science for seven years at Piedmont Intermediate School, which is housed in an airy, modern building overlooking a wheat field and serves predominantly middle-class families, many of whom work in the oil and gas industry. For much of that time, she has sought to acquaint students with the basics of the planet’s warming.

On this next-to-last week of the school year, she was squeezing in a lesson exploring the link between increased carbon emissions and extreme weather events such as floods and hurricanes.

The article cites the “politics” in “ruby-red Oklahoma” and notes that teachers do get questions and “pushback” from parents over climate change lessons.

And it claims the oil and gas industry funds the promotion of fossil fuels in the schools and accuses lawmakers in the state of introducing legislation that “critics say would encourage teachers to spread misinformation on evolution and climate change.”

“Every year, we have to fight one or two bills,” said Lau, who was wearing a denim jacket and a “I teach climate change” button, according to the article. “I don’t get the resistance I got at the beginning of my career because it’s getting harder and harder to deny.”

On this particular day, the teacher showed the students a video that made an analogy between sports doping and climate change.

“Steroids can make it easier for players to hit home runs,” the video explained. “But it’s impossible to know if any single home run is due to doping.”

“So to assess the effects of the drugs, one has to observe a player’s performance over time. Same with climate change: Some extreme weather events occur regardless of whether humans are pumping extra carbon into the atmosphere.”

“Scientists can determine if these emissions are affecting the climate only by following patterns over time,” the video continued.

The article explains that in 2013, teaching climate change in schools got a “boost” when states could incorporate the Next Generation Science Standards into their curriculum, which includes introducing children to climate change and its human causes, starting in middle school.

“To date, 20 states plus the District of Columbia have adopted the standards, and many other states have embraced a modified version,” the article says.

At least one science education advocate confirms the lack of training teachers have to teach climate change.

“Climate and earth sciences more generally have been historically neglected in American science education,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a group devoted to tracking down “anti-science education legislation.”

“Lots of teachers feel they don’t have the content knowledge or pedagogical know-how to teach climate change effectively,” Branch said in the article.

And while Lau said she wants her students to have “hope” about the future, they sound less than hopeful in the article.

“Now that I know more about the facts of climate change, it’s a little bit easier to believe,” student Jewel Horn said. “It feels like more of a threat.”

“Now, I’m thinking that we’re in a crisis,” Horn’s classmate Dan Nguyen said, adding that he was a “little angry” because people “should be more careful of what they are doing, what they are using.”

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Betsy DeVos Is Right about Gainful Employment

Last Friday, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced she was killing off gainful employment rules governing for-profit colleges. These Obama Administration era regulations deny federal student financial aid to individuals attending institutions considered not having enough attendees “gainfully employed” after attending school.

On the face of it, this seems like reasonable regulation. Let’s direct federal aid to institutions where there are positive vocational outcomes for most students. However, the devil is in the details, and I believe DeVos made the right decision, for two reasons.

First, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York says that, as of March 2019, 41.3% of recent college graduates are “underemployed,” meaning they are working in jobs that are relatively low-skilled and filled usually by those with lesser education, such as high school graduates. The underemployment rate of all college graduates is also a very high 34.1%. Some of these folks are making a pretty good income (as some relatively lowly educated persons get good paying jobs), but most are not.

The supposition that college has or should have a primary purpose of preparing persons for jobs is debatable, and beyond that there are respected economists (e.g, Bryan Caplan at George Mason University) who have argued exhaustively that little of the higher typical earnings of college graduates is actually attributable to employable skills gained while in college. College degrees are screening devices enabling employers to identify the best, brightest, most reliable and productive potential workers from the rest.

Given this, the whole concept of “gainful employment” is flawed. A school taking in high-performing high school graduates will likely have most of them “gainfully employed” a few years later, even if the college itself added little to the individual’s productivity. Moreover, many would argue that the “bottom line” of college is far more than getting good jobs. Good universities teach virtue, civic responsibility, and other things. Moreover, as Mike Rowe (of “Dirty Jobs” TV fame) and others have demonstrated, many persons with not necessarily high-paying blue collar jobs lead very satisfying lives.

But there is a second reason why gainful employment rules as constituted during the Obama years were inappropriate. They only applied to for-profit schools. They created an uneven playing field among schools competing for students. Public and not-for-profit private universities, constituting 90% or more of enrollments, were exempt from the regulations. Why? The real reason, I feel sure, is that the gainful employment rules were targeted at putting the for-profit institutions out of business, because of a progressive view that “people should not profit off of learning—education is an ennobling activity that should not be sullied by those with the selfish motive of trying to make a profit.”

To be sure, there were a fair number of “bad actors” in for-profit higher education, delivering little of value to students hoodwinked into enrolling in their programs and mounting sizable federal student loan debts. But the same thing can be said of those attending many public universities. Using U.S. Department of Education data, I quickly found three public universities where fewer than one-third of their students graduate within six years, less than one-third had paid down at least one dollar of their outstanding student debt, and where those attending averaged at least 20% less in annual earnings than what the Census Bureau says is the average of full-time adult high school graduates. If public universities were subjected to the same gainful employment rules, there would be an uproar as taxpayer supported institutions were effectively put out of business by the federal government.

The U.S. Constitution says nothing about education, but proclaims (Tenth Amendment) that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution...are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Constitutionally, the feds should not be regulating universities. The immediate solution, however, is to find new, non-governmental ways of financing college, such as privately funded Income Share Agreements, and/or to make schools accountable for student loan debt defaults (make them have “skin in the game.”) Then there would be little need for gainful employment rules, and a level playing field would be reestablished. Who cares about the profit status of colleges? What is important are results.

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Busing, No; School Choice, Yes

In the first Democratic presidential debates, Sen. Kamala Harris of California defended forced busing back in the 1970s as a civil rights triumph and criticized former Vice President Joe Biden for racial insensitivity for once opposing the policy.

We all want great schools for children of all racial groups and all income levels. But those of us who lived through this era know the reality of forced busing was quite different from the depiction of a civil rights triumph that Harris now says it was.

In the 1970s, this heavy-handed school integration policy — implemented across the country in cities from Boston to Milwaukee — was wildly unpopular with white and black parents. Fewer than 10% of parents of either race supported cramming 7- and 8-year-olds in crowded yellow buses and zigzagging them across cities and suburbs far away from their neighborhood schools.

You can Google busing maps in major cities in this era and you will see that the routes go here, there and everywhere as if they were designed by a drunken Soviet Politburo central planner.

The purpose was to ensure that black children in terrible neighborhoods could sit next to white kids in public schools. But it turned out the white inner-city schools that black children were shipped off to weren't too good either. And white parents were none too happy that the courts were busing their kids out of their neighborhoods as if they were laboratory rats in a social science experiment.

At that time, the social engineers — judges, politicians and political activists — thought that the quality of the school, the level of community involvement and the excellence of the teachers were less important than the racial composition of the classrooms. When you really think about it, that's a pretty racist position in and of itself.

Amazingly, and as is typical with liberal social planning, no one in government ever bothered to ask the families and communities affected what they thought about the policy.

But it soon became abundantly clear what people thought of the idea. This tumultuous era of forced busing caused widespread protests in the streets, a worsening of racial tensions and no improvement in student achievement or inner-city school performance. In my hometown of Chicago, race relations deteriorated, and the issue became a powder keg.

The goal, racial equality in education, was well-meaning, but the real-life policy outcomes were a setback for racial integration.

Today, some 40 years later, we know there is a better way to make schools colorblind — and improve student learning — without forcing kids to attend schools they don't want to. That is to expand parental choice options that include public, private and parochial schools and let the education dollars follow the children. I have visited and seen firsthand school voucher programs in Washington, D.C., and other cities benefit thousands of mostly black and Hispanic children. It is a glorious sight to see happy kids of different races and income groups together in schools that perform.

Sadly, many of the same politicians who still defend mandatory desegregation through busing of children also vehemently oppose allowing kids to get on a bus and attend schools — public or parochial or private — that parents do want for their kids. Isn't voluntary busing superior to forced busing?

Most liberals now oppose school vouchers, tax credit scholarship programs and even charter schools that allow the parents to have far more options in what schools their children attend. The political clout wielded by teachers unions has blocked school choice programs that would let minority parents have the choices that wealthier white parents do.

My former Wall Street Journal colleague Holman Jenkins reminds us in his latest column that during the height of the school busing experiment, rich white liberals pulled their kids out of the public schools entirely to avoid the turmoil that the politicians they voted for caused. Busing was for other parents' kids.

Herein lies the hypocrisy. Liberal politicians keep promising to give voice to the poor, the disadvantaged, the people of color, but they won't trust them to make decisions for themselves. They sing "power to the people" at their rallies, but they resist policies that would empower them. That is the real problem with our school system, and it is so easy to have superior and integrated classrooms if we would just give choice a chance.

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