Amid a national reckoning on race, college students lead a push for change on campus

When the student leaders of an antiracism club at Boston College discovered recently that the official Boston College Instagram account had followed their page, it seemed almost metaphorical.

For months the students had been posting information to fellow students about how to be antiracist, but suddenly it seemed the university was listening.

Leaders of the group, the FACES Council, said for years their organization has filled a void by providing workshops and events about diversity, inclusion, and antiracism, and their work has only ramped up in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. Now FACES is planning a training for professors, too, after a surprising number of faculty asked the group for guidance on how to be antiracist in the classroom.

“It’s this weird total power shift, but it’s also kind of welcome,” said Alyssa Iferenta, a codirector of FACES.

Amid the nation’s reckoning on race, students at universities across the city find themselves leading the way on efforts to confront systemic racism on their campuses. Some of these campaigns are not new, but students hope the unprecedented national spotlight in this moment will finally spark long-needed change.

Efforts are underway at schools including Suffolk University, Emerson College, Northeastern University, Boston University, the New England Conservatory, Tufts University, and Bentley University. Some campaigns center around defunding campus police, but others are about change that goes much deeper, from hiring more faculty of color to revamping curriculums that focus heavily on white perspectives.

College students have always played a pivotal role in movements such as the one underway now, said Quito Swan, an Africana studies professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture.

“Student energy, student voices, the sense of ‘we have nothing to lose’ matters, and it has always mattered in these kind of moments,” he said. “What is particularly striking is the level of intensity.”

He compared students’ efforts now to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its central role during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and said some members of that movement have sought out today’s student leaders to share their wisdom.

The challenge with student movements, he said, is that students graduate and move on, but in some instances, the change they produce is lasting, like the formation of degree programs or community housing. A lot of college Africana studies programs are the result of student organizers in the 1960s, he said.

In recent weeks, some students have caught the attention of campus presidents after criticizing the leaders’ public statements about Floyd’s murder, prompting the presidents to issue new statements and announce actions to accompany their words.

“This time there’s definitely going to be a change in how the administration responds to us pushing them,” said Madeline Bockus, another codirector of the FACES group at BC.

At Boston University, a group of students in the School of Theatre has developed a list of demands they delivered to the school’s new director, with the goal of broad and deep reform of the program. The requests focus in part on the types of plays that are taught and who is cast in what roles in productions.

“As a Black student, I don’t really get to see myself in the things that we are taught in class,” said Angela Dogani, a rising senior studying stage management.

At Northeastern, activism has focused largely on campus police. Sade Adewunmi, 21, the first executive director of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the student government, penned “In Pain and Enraged” and posted it on the student government website, calling for Northeastern to look more closely at its own policies and policing practices. The column went viral within the university community and attracted the attention of the university’s president.

Adewunmi said that although Northeastern president Joseph Aoun wrote two statements addressing the protests and the killings, he had said little about how the university would address its own racial inequities. For example, campus events sponsored by Black students, such as the annual Black Market, a vendor fair, always have a bigger police presence than sorority events which draw many more students, Adewunmi said.

The share of Black students at the university has also decreased over the years, Adewunmi said. In 2018, 4 percent of Northeastern’s undergraduates were Black, compared to nearly 6 percent about 15 years before, according to the US Education Department.

“Why does being a Black student at Northeastern feel like it’s the 1980s?” Adewunmi said. “Being Black on this campus is not as easy as people believe.”

Adewunmi was among a group of Black student leaders that Aoun spoke with recently before he released a statement outlining steps the university will take to address racial equity on campus. Aoun said Northeastern will aim to increase Black student enrollment, hire more diverse faculty, establish a community advisory board for the police department, and elevate the associate dean of cultural and spiritual life to a cabinet position.

“A message I have heard repeatedly in recent weeks is that our Black students, in particular, need to receive better student support. They must feel valued, included, and safe at their university,” Aoun wrote.

In other parts of the city, alumni are also engaged. A group of graduates of the New England Conservatory recently sent an open letter to the school’s president to push for a host of changes, including a curriculum less focused on European music and composers.

At Suffolk University, the Black Student Union has become a hub for activism. The group cohosted a workshop on the realities of police brutality with the college’s Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion this month, and union members attended another college discussion about student solidarity. The union plans to work with the university to create more on-campus mental health resources that can address the emotional impact of police violence and inequity in the Black community.

At Emerson College, which like many colleges in Boston is a majority-white school, student government leaders are urging the college’s senior officials to reevaluate the diversity of professors, few of whom are people of color, and encourage the termination of faculty who have frequently popped up in students’ complaints about racism and insensitivity.

“Sensitivity training isn’t going to do anything if some professors just don’t listen,” said student government president Claire Rodenbush. “So they really need to just fire some professors.”

The BC students plan to hold their faculty training this summer via Zoom. One simple tip, the students said, is that professors should make sure they know the names of students of color and pronounce them correctly.

Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn said there is already a host of programs on campus to help faculty with antiracism, diversity, and inclusion, including an annual Diversity and Inclusion Summit for all faculty and staff. He did not otherwise comment on the student efforts.

Iferenta, the FACES codirector, said although the dynamic of students teaching faculty is bizarre, it is a reminder that learning is a life-long process. She doesn’t fault professors for needing training or asking for help. Any fault, she said, lies with the institution.

“They have either failed to recognize that there’s sort of like this lack of knowledge on race and racism in America and by Boston College, or they recognized it and they failed to do anything about it,” she said.

SOURCE 






The Latest Strategy To Deceive Parents

Supporters who want to keep Common Core’s failed standards in place have come up with a new twist for deceiving unhappy parents. First, they point explicitly to Common Core as a failed strategy to increase the academic achievement of low achievers in order to alert parents to what has happened.

They do what seems at first confusing because it is widely known that most parents and teachers (if they felt free to speak their minds) detest Common Core’s standards, tests, and aligned textbooks or readings.  All Common Core’s failings and limitations are real. While the many articles on the decline in student achievement in a Common Core-aligned educational environment tell the truth, there is malice in the schadenfreude expressed about the many disadvantaged kids who have been deprived of the educational equity that Common Core was initially touted as creating.

The strong possibility of public deception is suggested by two phenomena.  First, there has been no media clamor in reports of Common Core’s failures for stronger standards and curriculum materials.

Second, Common Core’s major supporters — the bureaucracy at the U.S. Department of Education, most if not all state departments of education (such as the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education), and the Gates Foundation — have kept their financial and political commitment to the failed strategy. Not one major foundation has advocated that Common Core’s materials and approach be replaced with more effective materials and approaches despite the failure of Common Core. Neither has any decision maker for the U.S. Department of Education. Neither has a single National Assessment of Educational Progress educator.

The problems, they and many others claim, lie with the mandated tests — and lack of federal money.  Explicitly, they don’t like “standardized” tests but think “performance-based assessments” would do the trick, even though they are costly, time-consuming, and unreliable.

Strange.  State commissioners and departments of education have long known that in order to get rid of Common Core-based tests and replace them with tests that are actually different they must get rid of Common Core’s standards.  The problem starts with the standards, not with the tests based on the Common Core standards.

They also know that Common Core-aligned standards and textbooks are in each state’s four-year state education plan — all approved by the U.S. Department of Education bureaucracy in 2016 or 2017 — and that these Common Core-aligned standards MUST be used until 2020.  That’s why the strategy of public deception is taking place this year.

Some states may seem to be changing their K-12 math and English Language Arts standards right now. But check the details.

In every case, the state plan the U.S. Department of Education bureaucracy approved in 2016 or 2017 is in control. That plan conforms with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is the title of the Obama administration’s revision of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, performed under the secretary of education at the time, Arne Duncan, who pushed Common Core on all 50 states.

In other words:  Even relatively new state tests (under the Every Student Succeeds Act) are compatible with Common Core’s original standards.

Every state department of education knows that, even if the public still doesn’t know who wrote the Every Student Succeeds Act and who paid for it.

But ways to strengthen the K-12 curriculum are available. Most of the old pre-Common Core standards (meaning pre-2009) are still available even if archived away.  (One example is  Massachusetts’s original pre-2009 standards.)

Or states could do what many countries like Finland have always done at the high school level:  (1) create syllabi (course outlines showing content and readings to be taught) for all the courses that students are required to take in high school for their particular curriculum program (in Finland, there may be over seven to choose from) and (2) also require all students who want to go on to a four-year college to take a “matriculation” test.

If states like Massachusetts do this, the governor or secretary of education has to ensure that the committees creating syllabi for high school courses consist of experts in both pedagogy and content, such as classroom teachers in grades 11/12 and college professors who teach math and science to freshmen in engineering schools.

If high school syllabi (or standards) are created by school administrators or teachers for learning disabled or low-achieving students below grade 11, they are useless and invalid. They will be Common Core standards warmed over. (On that point, see here, here, and here.)

In the meantime, the Heritage Foundation seems to think that removing cabinet-level status from the U.S. Department of Education will cure the ailments to public education inflicted on public education by the Gates Foundation. Making the federal education department a lower-level agency, it claims, will enable parents to regain control of the local K-12 curriculum.

How this miracle would remove the damage the Common Core project has imposed on public education is anyone’s guess. But if both “conservatives” and “liberals” support the idea, like the “lockdown,” it will happen and in another decade we will all wonder why this country chose to shoot itself in the foot.

SOURCE 






Making sense of the Australian government's war on humanities degrees

It's pretty cheeky for Leftists to expect a conservative government to keep funding attacks on it

Let’s face it: the federal government’s overhaul of university fees in the humanities, widely interpreted as a swipe against what it sees as pesky leftists, is pretty stinging.

As a Gen X’er, I was primed for the possibility – even the desirability – of winding up behind the desk at the local video library where my high-honours paper on “reading ideology and desire in Ferris Bueller's Day Off” would come in handy.

Still, federal minister Dan Tehan’s announcement comes at a time when humanities graduates have been forced into an existential reckoning about our relative uselessness in a national crisis. We analysed and interpreted and poeticised our strange new world to death, but the pandemic brought into sharp relief our non-essentialness against cleaners, truck drivers and supermarket workers, let alone teachers, farmers, nurses, doctors and the scientists beavering away for a COVID-19 vaccine.

If this doesn’t ring true for you, brilliant. But the idea that a mere arts degree is a dead end runs so deep that Tehan’s policy feels almost like a parental rebuke – if it wasn’t smothered in disingenuousness.

In the same way a crusader for sexual morality is obsessed with sex, the Coalition’s culture warriors display niche preoccupations with culture. Don’t “silo” your degree, Tehan says. If you choose philosophy, study IT as well. I’m attracted to the folksy commonsense in that statement, but the government isn’t just making subjects in IT or agriculture cheaper – it’s doubling the cost of philosophy et-al, which actively discourages mixing and matching. It appears punitive.

Want to tease out the political and philosophical subtext to the conservatives’ decades-long antipathy towards the higher-education sector? Well, it’ll cost you – about $45,000. Roughly double what an arts degree costs now, bringing the humanities into the same price band as commerce and law.

Which, as others have argued, paradoxically raises the courses’ perceived value. And that’s only one example of how the overhaul is unlikely to achieve the stated aims of steering young people away from the queer, black-armband, coal-hating humanities and towards “job ready” degrees.

As higher education expert Andrew Norton says: “You’re not going to do something that will bore you for three years and bore you for another 40 simply because the course is cheaper.” Unless, to begin with, you’re poorer than most.

When in 2014 the Abbott government sought to slash public funding of universities by 20 per cent and de-regulate fees, Labor roared about the prospect of “$100,000 degrees” and Senate crossbencher Jacqui Lambie saw a plot to keep the battlers in their place. The plan failed to pass. Since then, the conservatives have avoided the appearance of undermining equal opportunity to higher education.

And in the context of the Coalition’s broader ideological war, deterring low-income students from arts courses didn’t make much sense to me, at least initially.

Back in 1970, when only 7 per cent of 15-to-64 year-olds had bachelor degrees, political affiliation tended to be dictated by income. These days, the tertiary educated are a reliable constituency for Labor – and its social democratic counterparts in the US and UK – with sections of what we loosely call “the working class” increasingly up for grabs.

The conservatives argue they’re the real materialists: emphasising Jobson Growth while progressives talk about shutting down coal and micro-aggressions. I found myself idly theorising that low-income students might be more inclined to bring a pragmatic perspective to the humanities, the kind the government professes to want.

“I’m pretty sure most Australian taxpayers preferred their funding to be used for research other than spending $223,000 on projects like ‘Post orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar',” tweeted then Education Minister Simon Birmingham in 2018, when he spectacularly vetoed $4.2 million in recommended university research grants.

(Though I still don’t understand why he binned “Beauty and Ugliness as Persuasive Tools in Changing China’s Gender Norms” – a subject I would have thought useful in China’s new masculinist ethos under strongman Xi Jinping.)

But then my arts training (and a few extra hours of sleep) awakened me to the flaw in my reasoning about low-income students; once they make it to uni, and certainly after graduation, they’ve shifted into the tertiary-educated demographic that skews left, bringing a critical eye to the status quo.

That’s because conservative narratives have become taboo in the humanities, the hard-core warriors say – with some justification, I suspect, though that’s a subject for a thesis. While the government-commissioned inquiry into free speech on Australian campuses found no evidence of a “systemic” crisis of free speech on Australian campuses, former High Court judge Robert French left enough wriggle room for columnists in The Australian to warn about a potential, pretty much already realised, free speech crisis on Australian campuses.

I should disclose: while The Australian’s weekly takedowns of the ABC overwhelmingly leave me baffled, I’m occasionally amused at the reporting on totalitarian groupthink in humanities departments. Like the yarn about the history student reportedly instructed to use the adjective “enslaved” befor­e a noun such as African, in place of the noun “slave”, because, her guide said, “people weren’t slaves; they were enslaved”.

I’m fairly certain graduates of history, or sociology or political science come away with more than tactical skills in avoiding linguistic landmines. Gaining a thread of understanding about slavery, however we talk about it, or Western civilisation or the Spanish Flu pandemic or the Great Depression might just be worth the time.

SOURCE