Sunday, July 19, 2020


How school reopenings became political

The President Practically snarled as he made the accusation. “They think it’s going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed,” Donald Trump said in the East Room of the White House on July 7, referring to Democratic governors. “We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools.”

With that, Trump waded into a debate that’s come to the fore of America’s pandemic response. Mere weeks before schools start, a brutal reality has descended on parents: after months of hunkering down with their kids, there may be no end in sight. The coronavirus is still raging, which means the school closures imposed as temporary measures in March will be difficult to reverse. Schools at every level are struggling to figure out when and how to resume in-person instruction. Most have not announced a path forward.

The debate is coming both too late and too soon. Too late because there’s now scant time to devise a plan to fully reopen schools in a safe fashion. And too soon because the pandemic’s jagged advance—and scientists’ evolving understanding— make it impossible to know how things will look by Labor Day. So parents and teachers wait in limbo, anxious and enraged by the looming dilemma and the lack of federal guidance or support.

Trump entered the fray with his usual subtlety.

“SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” he tweeted out of the blue on July 6. The issue came to the President’s attention in part because White House staff were affected by the news that public schools in the D.C. suburbs of Fairfax County, Virginia, would offer just two days per week of in-school instruction, a former White House official told TIME. New York City, the nation’s largest district, announced a similar “hybrid” plan on July 8.

But the alternatives are as unclear as the need is evident. Children have been falling behind in their studies since the abrupt closures. Those in poor and minority communities—the same ones disproportionately ravaged by the virus—have been hardest hit. Many low-income children rely on public schools for food and social services; they are less likely to have parents who can work from home, or computers and wi-fi to connect to the “distance learning” curricula hastily devised in the spring. Meanwhile, millions of parents unexpectedly thrust into improvised day care and homeschooling are desperate for a break, businesses can’t reopen if their workers don’t have a place for their young children to go during the day, and teachers and school staff crave normality—even as they worry they’re the ones most at risk.

Despite the Dismal ratings Trump has received for his handling of the pandemic, the question of how to handle school in the fall presented the President a political opportunity. Public- health experts mostly deplored Trump’s drive to reopen consumer- oriented businesses such as bars and shops. But when it comes to schools, the experts are broadly on his side. The American Academy of Pediatrics “strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.” There is evidence that children— especially young children—are at minimal risk of getting the virus and appear not to spread it efficiently, either. The risk, the academy says, should be weighed against the harm children suffer when they miss out on the educational, social and emotional experiences schools provide.

But experts caution that getting back into classrooms safely is a balancing act. “When you say you’re going to reopen, you can’t just unlock a door,” says Emily Oster, a Brown University economist. Many other countries have reopened schools in recent months without spurring new outbreaks, but they’ve done so with extensive precautions, including protective equipment, reduced and restructured classes, distancing requirements, modified schedules and beefed-up staffing. On July 8, Trump tweeted that he disagreed with his own Administration’s “impractical” public-health guidelines for schools.

These calculations have to be made with an eye to local conditions, everything from climate to density to demographics. “American localism— the fact that we have 14,000 school districts—is a great blessing in a situation like this,” says Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former Education Department official under George W. Bush. “We’re going to see literally thousands of different approaches that hopefully reflect the needs of different communities, not a single national solution.” The federal government should provide information and support, Smarick argues, not dictate or pressure local school boards.

‘We will not be complicit in standing by and letting politicians cavalierly warehouse those kids.’ LILY ESKELSEN GARCÍA, president, NEA teacher union

Parents, teachers and advocates note that Congress was able to rush through multi-trillion-dollar relief packages when small businesses were at risk. Yet the state and local governments that moved quickly to build field hospitals, source protective equipment and put business regulations in place now seem helpless to restore families’ most important government support. “There are 3 million teachers and support staff out there who desperately want to hug their kids,” says Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association teacher union. “But we will not be complicit in standing by and letting politicians cavalierly warehouse those kids without caring about their safety because, oh, we need their moms and dads to go back to work. We could do this in a safe, medically sane way, but it’s going to take money. Why was that not even a question when it was Shake Shack that might have to lay people off and go bankrupt?”

Trump’s demands for reopening have not been accompanied by pledges of more resources. Indeed, the Administration has yet to disburse most of the $13 billion allocated to education in the CARES Act. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives pledged an additional $58 billion to education in the HEROES Act, which passed on a near party-line vote in May, along with billions more in aid to state governments whose budgets have been gutted by pandemic-related revenue declines. But that legislation has gone nowhere in the Republican- controlled Senate.

All this comes against a backdrop of a presidential election in which Trump is trailing in the polls, a deficit largely driven by suburban voters, especially the college- educated suburban women who swung decisively to Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Trump’s campaign sees the school-reopening issue as a way to appeal to those voters, which is why the President and his allies have sought to cast it as a binary question pitting Trump and his concern for kids’ education against the cautious, shut-it-down Democrats.

Yet most governors get far better ratings than the Administration for their handling of the pandemic, and Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, has proposed a detailed school- reopening plan. The upshot is that Trump’s message may not be landing. A USA Today/ Ipsos poll in May found 59% of parents of K-12 students weren’t comfortable sending their children back to school full time. “Parents feel very sympathetic toward what school districts and teachers are dealing with,” says Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. “I find it disgusting to intentionally make students a pawn in all this.”

Trump has squandered an opportunity to tap parents’ frustration, says GOP strategist Liam Donovan. “There’s a nonpolitical sense among working parents of all kinds that they can’t send their kids back to school soon enough,” Donovan says, “but the President has bigfooted it, and not in a thoughtful way.” As usual, Trump has polarized the debate. The result may be angry parents flooding local school-board meetings this fall to yell at one another about mask requirements.


SOURCE 






Online learning hiccups lead to civil liberty threats

In April, Berkeley High School students were shocked when in the middle of their video conference, a man joined the meeting, exposing himself and shouting obscenities. The infiltration was just one of the numerous examples of so-called "Zoom bombing", which occurs when an unwanted or uninvited guest causes a disruption. However, unlike other high profile instances of Zoom bombing, Berkeley High School's example stands out as the organizers of the video conference followed best practices aimed at preventing such an invasion. 

The response was an immediate suspension of video conferencing services. Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Brent Stevens wrote in a districtwide email, "... I've received from many of you that the real-time online interaction between students and teachers has been a valuable relief from the sense of isolation during this Shelter-in-Place order...It is simply unacceptable to ignore the risk of this significance."  

Yet, therein lies an underlying problem, due to shelter-in-place orders, schools and students have been thrust into unfamiliar territory. These disruptions are not merely the latest in school pranks. Students coordinating efforts to Zoom bomb each other's lessons over on the platform Discord might be likened to a high-tech version of typical foolery. But class clowns were not previously able to broadcast pornographic material to kindergarteners as they are now.  

Concerns do not stop with the actions of outsiders alone. Instead, the increased reliance on remote learning services leaves students in a potentially vulnerable position due to the practices of their educational institutions. In the name of repressing the hijinks, there seems to be an unfortunate tendency among administrators to increase their remote monitoring capabilities. Douglas Levin of EdTech Strategies in an SC Magazine article said, "In many cases, school districts are circumventing what privacy and cybersecurity controls they may have implemented in a rush to offer online learning to students who won't be returning to school for weeks or months,"

At the same time, schools are making efforts to monitor students remotely, and these efforts raise serious concerns about loss of privacy. Many schools have issued devices that are pre-installed with spyware -- spyware that can conduct scans of student emails, instant messages, and internet browser history. Roughly one-third of American students use school-issued devices. What is at stake here is not benign supervision by teachers whom parents know, but instead monitoring, tracking, and recording by invisible strangers whose intentions are unknown. Also at stake is possible future harassment of students after they leave the K-12 system, based on stored information.     

Spyware, which would be considered malicious if someone loaded it onto your personal computer, is frequently marketed to educational institutions. Amelia Vance, director of Youth & Education Privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, points out, "These products are not privacy-protective by default, and many likely violate FERPA [the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act]." The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) imposes rules on schools and libraries that receive internet service discounts through the federal e-rate program. While the purported intention was to target pornography, in an effort to comply with CIPA requirements, schools have invested in radically invasive web filters.

Not only are filters poor when it comes to preventing illicit content, but they also over block content with educational value, including websites that cover important issues such as religious and 2nd Amendment topics. Accompanying monitoring software can track student browsing habits and generate detailed reports for administrators.

Unfortunately, this issue has come up before. In 2009 the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania had installed spyware on school-issued laptops, which also gave the ability to activate webcams. School personnel spied on their students while the students were in the comforts of their homes — the school district ended up paying out a settlement of $610,000. 

Many schools have no specific privacy policies like data retention limits to protect their students. Notably, the Vermont Superintendent Association publication took the prudent step of recommending that parents be able to decide if their student was recorded. But others have been slow to adopt.

With schools and universities holding exams online, test proctoring software has been a popular tool for instructors trying to dissuade would-be cheaters. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, the faculty association in a letter, went to bat for students and expressed professors' concerns over the remote monitoring software ProctorU.

The UC Santa Barbara Faculty Association wrote:

Majority opposes Trump administration demand that schools reopen: poll
Adviser says Kanye West no longer trying to run for president: 'He's...
 "...this service also mines the data of our students, making them available to unspecified third parties, and therefore violates our students' rights to privacy, and potentially implicates the university into becoming a surveillance tool. [We fear this] may incur not only in very significant and unbudgeted expenses but also in serious violations of constitutional rights by partnering with private enterprises like ProctorU." 

With the mass use of online learning services, now is the opportune time to reconsider the government requirement for the "Orwellian" monitoring of school-issued devices such as Chromebooks.

SOURCE 






College for cops? Studies show it helps their behavior, stress levels

Despite research that demonstrates police officers with at least two years of college education are much less likely to be the subject of misconduct complaints, and less likely to use force as their first option to gain compliance, many police and sheriff’s departments still hire recruits with only a high school diploma. In my own village and county in Chicago’s western suburbs, neither the village police department nor the county sheriff’s department require any college credits. 

This is unfortunate. As John L. Hudgkins has noted in The Baltimore Sun, “There are serious questions as to whether a modern democracy can survive without better prepared law enforcement officials able to handle the stresses of the job without overreacting.” In a study of disciplinary cases against Florida officers, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) noted that, “Officers with only high school educations were the subjects of 75 percent of all disciplinary actions. Officers with four-year degrees accounted for 11 percent of such actions.” Since approximately 30 percent of officers have achieved four-year college degrees, the results of the Florida study appear to provide strong evidence that higher education correlates with good behavior. A separate study found that officers with undergraduate degrees performed on par with officers who had 10 years of additional experience.

With such obvious benefits, both to the police and the communities they serve, advocates for police reform would do well to press local agencies to require a minimum of two years of college, including specific coursework in psychology and sociology. Many community colleges and career schools offer associate degrees in criminal justice or police science, with such coursework embedded in the curriculum. McHenry College in Northern Illinois is a good example. Its associate of applied science degree in criminal justice requires coursework in written composition, speech, history, humanities, math or science, psychology and sociology. Coursework in the law enforcement option includes courses in interpersonal communication and the sociology of race and ethnicity. 

A national survey of 958 police agencies, published in 2017, found that 30.2 percent of police officers had four-year college degrees, 51.8 percent had two-year degrees, and 5.4 percent had graduate degrees. Higher levels of education were concentrated in the Northeast and in wealthier communities. Poorer neighborhoods had a higher proportion of less-educated police. Moreover, this survey covered all police officers, including those who acquired college degrees after joining their departments, typically in order to qualify for promotions. 

The true percentage of recruits with fewer than 60 college semester credits is higher than this survey would suggest. Hudgkins references a Bureau of Justice Statistics study in 2003 that found that 83 percent of all U.S. police agencies require a high school diploma, but only 8 percent require some college. Understandably, this study needs to be updated, but it is unlikely that college for cops is now required by the majority of police agencies.

One might well reckon that educational gaps can be made up in the specific training that recruits receive in police academies, which are almost universally a requirement for new officers to receive their commissions. An investigation of the content of academy training reveals that it focuses mainly on criminal law and procedures, handgun training, report writing, department policies, and other specific job duties.

Shockingly, police academy training in most states is less intensive than training required for hair stylists and interior decorators. CNN reported in 2016, “Many trade jobs require more hours of training time to get a license than it takes to get a police badge.” The report noted that police officers in California receive 664 hours of training, while cosmetologists are required to have 1,600 hours of training. In Florida, police receive 770 training hours, but interior designers must take 1,760 hours of training after completing five years of college.

The IACP has called for “increased educational standards” for hiring new officers. With such support from within the law enforcement community, Black Lives Matter and other advocates for law enforcement and criminal justice reform would do well to add to their reform agenda a requirement that new law enforcement officers have a minimum of two years of college — preferably an earned associate’s degree in criminal justice or related field. Existing officers lacking such credentials should be given a fixed time, and support, to earn them.


SOURCE 







A Critique of Ron Unz’s Article “The Myth of American Meritocracy”

Nurit Baytch thinks Harvard isn't so biased after all

In “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” Ron Unz, the former publisher of The American Conservative, claimed that Harvard discriminates against non-Jewish white and Asian students in favor of Jewish students. I shall demonstrate that Unz's conclusion that Jews are over-admitted to Harvard was erroneous, as he relied on faulty assumptions and spurious data: Unz substantially overestimated the percentage of Jews at Harvard while grossly underestimating the percentage of Jews among high academic achievers, when, in fact, there is no discrepancy, as my analysis will show. In addition, Unz's arguments have proven to be untenable in light of a recent survey of incoming Harvard freshmen conducted by The Harvard Crimson, which found that students who identified as Jewish reported a mean SAT score of 2289, 56 points higher than the average SAT score of white respondents.[1]

Unz reached his conclusion that Jews are overrepresented at Harvard in relation to their academic merit by comparing the undergraduate Jewish enrollment reported by the Harvard Hillel (~25%) to his estimates of the percentage of Jews among high-performing students.  Unz’s analysis of Jewish academic achievement is predicated on his ability to identify Jews on the basis of their names, which proved spectacularly wrong for the one data set on which there exists confirmed, peer-reviewed data about the ethnic background of the students: US International Math Olympiad (IMO) team members since 2000, among whom Unz underestimated the percentage of Jewish students by a factor of 5+, as shown by Prof. Janet Mertz.[2]  This finding was not anomalous, as Unz tried to suggest, for I’ve been able to confirm that Unz also grossly undercounted the number of Jewish students in other data sets of high academic achievers, such as the Intel Science Talent Search winners.[3]

The only objective methodology that Unz employed to identify Jewish students was Weyl Analysis, which gives an estimate of the percentage of Jews in a large data set (in this case, the names of National Merit Scholarship [NMS] semifinalists) based on the frequency with which specific distinctive Jewish surnames appear.  Weyl Analysis yielded the estimate that 6-7% of NMS semifinalists are Jewish and also happened to produce results within 0.1 percentage point of Unz’s own subjective name inspection method.[4]  Unz then concluded that Jews are over-admitted to Harvard since Harvard Hillel reports that Jews comprise 25% of Harvard undergrads. 

However, performing Weyl Analysis on the current Harvard College directory, which is publicly available, yields the estimate that 5-6% of current Harvard undergraduates are Jewish.[5]  (Please note that I am not claiming that Harvard College is only 5-6% Jewish, but rather that Jews constitute a similar percentage of both Harvard College students and NMS semifinalists; that is, Unz underestimated the latter and used Hillel’s overestimate for the former.)  Thus, when one uses the same objective and reproducible methodology (once clearly defined) on both data sets, the discrepancy disappears, invalidating Unz’s claims regarding the overrepresentation of Jews in comparison to their academic merit.

Unz erroneously concluded on the basis of his NMS semifinalist data that non-Jewish whites are the most underrepresented group at Harvard in comparison to their academic merit, as he based this claim on the invalid assumption that non-Jewish whites constitute only 19% of Harvard undergrads.  Unz obtained this substantially underestimated figure for the % of non-Jewish whites at Harvard by subtracting Hillel’s 25% Jewish enrollment [over]estimate from enrollment data indicating that 44% of Harvard undergrads identified as white, ignoring the fact that 12% of Harvard undergrads did not disclose their race, among whom one would expect to find both Jewish and non-Jewish white students. Indeed, Unz's assumptions have proven to be unfounded in light of The Harvard Crimson's Class of 2017 Freshman Survey: 46% of whites identify as Christian, while only 15% of whites identify as Jewish (9.5% of freshmen overall identify as Jewish); Unz's calculations assumed that Jews constitute the majority of white students at Harvard, while non-Jewish whites comprise only 19% of Harvard undergrads.

I shall also demonstrate that the demographics of the national set of NMS semifinalists do not mirror the racial/ethnic composition of high-ability students, the underlying premise of Unz’s assertions regarding the overrepresentation of Jews and underrepresentation of non-Jewish whites at Harvard. 

Approximately 16,000 NMS semifinalists are selected from ~1.5 million juniors who took the PSAT/NMSQT, a standardized test similar to the SAT with 3 sections: a math, verbal/critical reading, and writing section (the highest score one can obtain on each section is 80 vs 800 on the SAT).  But these 16,000 NMS semifinalists are not simply the top 1% of PSAT scorers in the US – they are the top scorers per state, and the total number of NMS semifinalists designated per state is proportional to each state’s share of graduating high school seniors.[6]  NMS qualifying scores vary considerably by state, ranging from 201 (which is merely the 96th percentile and corresponds to a SAT score of 2010) in Wyoming to 221 in Massachusetts, which corresponds to a 200 point difference in SAT scores.[7]

I calculated that the correlation between a state’s NMS qualifying score and its % of non-Jewish whites is negative, while the correlation between a state’s NMS qualifying score and its % of Jews is positive (which is also the case for Asians).  Roughly speaking, this means that in general, the more non-Jewish whites in a given state, the lower the NMS qualifying score for that state, while the more Jews and/or Asians in a state, the higher the NMS qualifying score.[8]  That is, non-Jewish white NMS semifinalists are disproportionately from states with low NMS qualifying scores, while Asian and Jewish NMS semifinalists are disproportionately from states with high NMS qualifying scores. This finding suggests that the average non-Jewish white NMS semifinalist likely has a lower PSAT score than the average Jewish or Asian NMS semifinalist and that if a uniform higher national qualifying score were used, the range of [P]SAT scores among NMS semifinalists would more closely approximate that of Harvard students, and the percentages of both Asian and Jewish NMS semifinalists would likely be higher.[9]

The greatly varying NMS qualifying scores by state render the set of NMS semifinalists a flawed proxy for the pool of Harvard applicants, especially in light of the negative correlation between a state’s NMS qualifying score and its % of non-Jewish whites.  Hence, the demographics of the national set of NMS semifinalists cannot be used to predict the expected ethnic/racial composition of Harvard.  I will also discuss other respects in which comparing the demographics of NMS semifinalists to that of Harvard undergraduates is a flawed methodology to deduce bias: the average NMS semifinalist likely has a lower [P]SAT score than the average Harvard undergraduate;[10] the distribution of intended majors among National Merit Scholars is weighted more heavily toward science and engineering than among incoming Harvard freshmen; Harvard College students are disproportionately drawn from Harvard’s geographical region, the Northeast (which is considerably more Jewish than the US in general), just as Stanford and Caltech undergraduates are disproportionately drawn from the West Coast (which is disproportionately Asian). The Weyl Analysis results from Stanford’s public directory yielded the estimate that 3-5% of Stanford undergrads are Jewish, which no more proves that Stanford discriminates against Jews than the higher percentage of Jews at the Ivies proves that they discriminate in favor of Jews, as asserted by Unz.

For the casual reader, this summary of my critique of Unz’s article may be sufficient, but for those interested, below I provide detailed data to support my arguments and also engage more carefully with other claims and data from Unz’s article.

SOURCE 

No comments: