Ten Questions Parents Should Ask Before School Starts

Parents routinely walk out of back-to-school meetings overwhelmed by a flood of impressive-sounding buzzwords. Even simple queries—like, “How are you teaching my kid to read?”—can elicit incomprehensible talk of “decoding,” “social and emotional well-being,” “data-driven instruction,” “personalization,” “spiraled curricula,” “formative assessment,” and much else. The result: It’s easy to walk away unsure if your child is in good hands.

Trying to get helpful answers can be so tough because professionals like their jargon; it makes them sound authoritative, and they know it. Plus, if teachers or principals are good at their job, there really is a wealth of nuance and expertise that’s tough to translate. And, if they’re not, obfuscation is a proven recipe for making inconvenient parents go away.

Put simply, when educators start talking about the ins and outs of instruction, it can be tough to know what to make of the answers. What can you do about that? Instead of asking about instruction, try posing these ten questions. They demand straightforward answers. And it turns out to be pretty easy to tell whether someone has given much thought to these queries—which, frequently, will tell you all you need to know.

* What’s the best thing my child is going to read this year?
* What one value is at the heart of our school’s culture, and how does that show up on a daily basis?
* On a typical day, how much time will be spent on morning announcements, attendance-taking, and standing in lines?
* How will you know if my child is bored to tears and, if that happens, what’s your usual response?
* What’s the one paper, project, or unit that I should really expect my student to come home excited about?
* In the typical month, how many hours will be devoted to tests and test preparation?
* What was the most serious disciplinary issue at school last year, and how was it addressed?
* How frequently should I expect to hear updates about how my child is doing?
* If I email with a question or concern, how quickly should I expect to hear back?
* What’s the most important thing I can do to help my child be academically successful this year?

These questions shed light on school routines, how teachers and principals think about engaging young minds, and whether the school is serious about partnering with parents. They offer some sense as to whether school staff will talk candidly about thorny challenges—and if they’ve got practical thoughts on dealing with them.

If you get sensible, direct answers, it’s a promising sign that you’re in capable hands. If you get blank looks, hollow assurances, or gauzy generalities, that’s a useful caution. Whatever the answers, you’ll have a better sense of what’s ahead.

Good luck, and best wishes on a wonderful year.

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Common Sense in Free Fall on College Campuses

Evidence is mounting that political ideology is corrupting the liberal arts.

According to Campus Reform, in late July, Portland State University accused one of its professors, Peter Boghossian, of “‘questionable ethical behavior’ and banned him from conducting academic research.”

What was the professor’s offense? He successfully convinced several prestigious, peer-reviewed journals to publish articles that were anything but scholarly. In one, he analyzed “dog rape culture,” in another, he republished portions of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” spruced up with academic buzzwords.

This may sound like an off-color prank, but it was a serious effort to expose a grave problem on college campuses. Boghossian’s hypothesis was simple: the leftist fixation on intersectionality and what he termed “grievance studies” have led to a sharp decline in the quality and rigor of scholarship within the discipline.

Boghossian and his two colleagues, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, made headlines in 2018 for completing an investigation into how lax some humanities journals had become.

The trio wrote and submitted 20 “hoax” articles to several prominent academic journals in various academic fields, including gender and queer studies, that the researchers felt were most influenced by progressive ideology rather than objective research.

When seven of their “fake” studies were published after undergoing the purportedly-scrupulous “peer review” process, Boghossian and his team released a report demonstrating how ideologically-driven academia has become.

It brings to mind the “Sokal hoax” of the mid-90s, when a New York University physicist submitted a similarly “fake” study that also ended up being published.

PSU’s Internal Review Board then sanctioned Boghossian for “fabricating data and studying human subjects, specifically the various journal editors, without their consent.”

The Internal Review Board seems to have missed the purpose of the professor’s study.

The censure led directly to the ban Boghossian now faces. The academy seems more interested in making an example of him than acknowledging the concern about a lack of quality control in the field of “grievance studies,” which his efforts unveiled.

It is not as if citizens are unaware of the issues plaguing higher education.

From the oft-referenced replication crisis in the social sciences (wherein academic studies cannot be reproduced by unaffiliated researchers), the insane cost of college, and the liberal bent of a staggering percentage of university professors, many students would do well to reconsider the value of attending college over trade schools or other similar, skill-developing opportunities.

Boghossian’s study revealed the dangerous road that academia is sprinting down. He cited “constructivism”—the idea that truth is temporally and culturally situated—as the main culprit infecting academic research, especially within the humanities.

The research team noted that “radical constructivists tend to believe science and reason must be dismantled to let ‘other ways of knowing’ have equal validation as knowledge-producing enterprises.” This idea could be what is driving many academic journals down the ideological rabbit hole.

As Boghossian and his team stated in their study, “As we progressed, we started to realize that just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of existing literature.”

Scholars across the world agreed with the authors’ motives and conclusions, and wrote to PSU’s vice president for research administration in support of Boghossian. Even Alan Sokal, the NYU scientist who got into hot water for his similar effort in 1996, defended the beleaguered Portland professor, writing:

It seems to me that it would be a grave injustice to punish Professor Boghossian for a violation of the letter of the [Research Misconduct Policy] that did not constitute in any way a violation of that policy’s purpose and which moreover was undertaken with the goal of serving, and which did, in fact, serve the public interest …

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, given the university administration’s reaction, many of Boghossian’s fellow professors at PSU were not as supportive. In an anonymous letter to the editor in the university’s newspaper, the anti-Boghossian group wrote:

[T]he ‘hoaxes’ are simply lies peddled to journals, masquerading as articles. … Chronic and pathological, unscholarly behavior inside an institution of higher education brings negative publicity to the institution as well as the honest scholars who work there. Worse yet, it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued.

Boghossian’s aggrieved colleagues seem to have missed the entire point of his study, and may prefer for their students to learn from such indoctrination. 

Christina Hoff Sommers, noted scholar and critic of modern feminism, described Boghossian’s hoax project as an “eye-opening experiment,” the results of which “raise serious questions about the methods of several seemingly legitimate academic journals.”

She went on, according to Campus Reform, to “address the accusation of improperly studying human subjects, saying ‘This charge is hard to take seriously. By its very nature, the parody rules out the possibility of consent: It is the view of the [Internal Review Board] that academic journals should be shielded from critical or irreverent scrutiny?”

PSU stated in its disciplinary letter that it is willing to give Boghossian another chance to conduct research, if he completes a required “protection of human subjects training” course and otherwise satisfies the university’s administration.

However, for a nontenured professor who himself acknowledges he does not “fit the mold” of the “ideological community” on campus, the odds of him being permitted to resume his research may be slim.

Boghossian’s experiment highlights the problems of groupthink in any environment, especially academia.

If humanities professors are going to be more interested in placating popular opinion rather than exposing shoddy academic practices bordering on charlatanry, then we should stop describing our humanities’ departments as bastions of truth.

Truth is objective, not subject to the prevailing winds of academia and the left at large.

Stifling academic debate, exercising a heckler’s veto over messages that do not fit within an ideology prescribed by liberal academics, and promoting shoddy “research” that supports that ideology, will not advance the search for truth, which should be the ultimate goal of any serious academic institution.

All it will do is perpetuate irrationality and ignorance.

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Universities’ research focus is leaving students unprepared

It’s nearly a year since US online recruiter Glassdoor shocked the global university and tertiary college world by revealing that major US employers no longer require a degree for top new employees.

Google, Apple, IBM, Penguin Random House, Bank of America, Starbucks, Cisco, and Hilton were among the groups that had changed their recruiting policies, partly because too many graduates did not have the skills they required.

Subsequently, at least in Australia, nothing much has happened in the university sector.

But the US-China trade war is suddenly raising alarm bells in our third-largest export industry. Australia’s education sector is in a dangerous position and that danger puts our entire tertiary education sector in jeopardy.

Universities live in an academic world and are rarely looked at from a business point of view. To date, that academic approach has worked. But the post trade war world is likely to be very different.

Basically, in the words of education analyst Kee Wong, universities offer their students the choice of a series of “hampers” covering areas like law, engineering, commerce and arts.

We have all received Christmas hampers and on most occasions we find things in them that we want but many things that are of no use. And so it is with most university degrees. But too many university hampers have not fundamentally changed in 30 years.

I know my university friends will dispute that statement, and I recognise that some universities have become much more flexible and have modernised their subjects. But too many have not and that means too many students are coming out of a tertiary courses totally unprepared for the workplaces of today, let alone the future.

Many students understand this and they scramble to join large organisations (both private and government) that have training courses that will make them “work ready”. Those organisations take the best students available, so the rest go into the workforce unprepared. Many fail and I run into countless medium sized business people who shake their heads when they describe how unprepared most graduates are for the modern world.

So the universities have a product problem. But it gets worse.

Universities are funded by taking in foreign students who pay full fees. Many of these students come from China. Chinese universities have adapted their courses to fit the modern world, with a particular emphasis on databases and artificial intelligence: the area where China seeks superiority over the US.

In other words, in business terms, we face a rival which has updated its product. In the past, Chinese universities have not had the capacity to meet the demand, but they are catching up.

And just to make matters even more dangerous for Australia, relations with China are poor, so returning to China with an Australian degree might not carry the same advantage that existed in previous decades, particularly given the rise in the standard of Chinese universities.

On this front, Australia is helped by the fact that the largest education state, Victoria, was smart enough to join China’s belt and road initiative.

Of course the student market covers many other countries. We must also recognise that a proportion of the total student market has come to Australia seeking long-term residency. If Canberra tightens the visa requirements, it will be a disaster for the education sector because without visa seeking students, the tertiary education sector could not be funded.

In normal businesses, the chief executives know they must adapt their products to meet the market. But in the tertiary sector attracting both local and overseas students currently requires a good ranking.

An important part of securing such a ranking is producing research papers that often have very limited relevance to today’s challenges. So large sums are spent to produce such papers to gain ranking, and therefore more overseas students. In an ideal world that money should be spent improving courses and flexibility to match our rivals in China and elsewhere.

I do not claim to have the answers but Australia’s third largest export industry has not recognised that the game has changed. Nor have the federal and state governments, who blame each other. We have to change the debate or we will lose this industry because if overseas students fall then it will go into a downward spiral. Now is the time to recognise that the new situation and to act. It’s not too late.

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