Private religious schools more likely than public schools to reopen in fall

Private religious schools are the most likely schools to open in the fall, even as the majority of public schools are considering remaining closed or pushing off their start dates.

In the past week, many Catholic dioceses, which together run a massive network of schools across the country, announced that they intend to bring their students back for in-person classes. Although a majority of people oppose opening schools, private schools have a better shot at doing it safely, chiefly because of their smaller class sizes, according to Myra McGovern, spokeswoman for the National Association of Independent Schools.

But many religious schools planning to reopen in the fall have framed their determination as a decision that factored in not only their health concerns but also a persistent worry that social pressure will prod governments to require their closure. Many churches became embroiled in coronavirus-related religious liberty litigation this spring after governments rolled out far-reaching shutdown plans.

In Minnesota, where in May a coalition of Catholic bishops and Lutheran faith leaders defied Gov. Tim Walz’s shutdown of in-person church services, Minneapolis Archbishop Bernard Hebda announced this week that Catholic schools will open in the fall. Similarly, Bishop James Powers of the Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin, said in a statement to parents that, unless the state offers a compelling reason to remain closed, schools will move forward with in-person learning.

“What we would like to assure you, is that our schools are planning to re-open in the fall in our traditional face-to-face mode, unless legitimate authorities do not allow it,” he wrote.

Catholic schools across the country have released their plans for the fall, with many emphasizing the psychological benefits of in-person learning. Like most dioceses planning to go back in the fall, the Massachusetts Diocese of Fall River is allowing parents to opt their children out of in-person learning, but the diocese hopes children will return.

“We worry, quite frankly, about the mental health impacts,” said Steve Perla, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Diocese of Fall River, near Boston, in a letter to parents last week.

“These kids have been isolated,” he added. “We know they want to see their friends and get back to see their teachers. We think it’s important for their social and mental health that they have an opportunity to go back to school.”

Other private religious schools are using the uncertainty about the fall as a way to recruit parents who otherwise would send their children to public schools. The Diocese of New Hampshire announced in early July that it will offer tuition breaks to people who transfer their children into their schools before Aug. 31.

The diocese is making its pitch as a source of relief to parents overwhelmed by the prospect of potentially homeschooling their children for another semester.

“We want as many young people as possible to join our wonderful communities,” Alison Mueller, the diocese’s director of marketing, told the Union Leader. “We’ll see them in class, in person, this fall.”

Other faith-based groups, as well as non-religious private schools, this month have made similar announcements.

But even as many private schools gear up for a fall semester, public schools reopening is an open question nationally. The Trump administration has pushed hard for all schools to reopen, threatening to withhold federal funding from those who do not comply. President Trump weighed in on the issue as well.

“Now that we have witnessed it on a large scale basis, and firsthand, Virtual Learning has proven to be TERRIBLE compared to In School, or On Campus, Learning,” Trump tweeted. “Not even close! Schools must be open in the Fall. If not open, why would the Federal Government give Funding? It won’t!!!”

At the same time, many leaders in large public school districts, often underfunded or disorganized, have voiced concerns that resuming classes abruptly would be a health disaster. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday said that the Senate is working to secure more funding for schools to go back in the fall.

“I think all the evidence indicates that distance learning for kids is not as good, they’ve already lost part of the last semester, we need to find a way to safely get back to work,” the Kentucky Republican said.

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Misusing Editorial Power to Censor Unpopular Research

Academic freedom is under assault by people who want to control research and speech. One of their strategies exploits the gatekeeping functions of journal editors to censor unpopular ideas.

The leading open-access journal in the field of intelligence research, the Journal of Intelligence, has a policy listed on its website since 2018 that states, “The journal will not publish articles that may lead to or enhance political controversies and the editors will judge whether that is the case.” In other words, the journal’s editors will reject manuscripts that could be politically controversial—regardless of the quality of the science.

On May 15, 2020, two colleagues of mine received a desk rejection from the journal stating:

It is an estimate from my part that your article may lead to or enhance political controversies. I believe that the motivation as described in the introduction of your manuscript and the mixed language (performance, skills, cognitive ability, cognitive competency, IQ) used to refer to the findings may lead to interpretations and conclusions which are politically controversial. This is neither an evaluation of the quality of your work (which would require a scientific review process), nor am I saying that your results should not be communicated in some way. However, in my estimation, the manuscript as submitted does not fit with policy of the journal.

The manuscript reported average cognitive test scores among different ethnic groups in a sample of 83,155 British adults. The authors (Bryan Pesta and John Fuerst) obtained data from six nationally representative samples of native-born British and immigrant examinees to estimate the magnitude of the differences in test performance.

Regardless of what one thinks of this research topic, to summarily reject the manuscript because it might cause controversy is censorious, subjective, and an obstruction to the pursuit of knowledge.

Desk rejections are certainly within the purview of a journal editor’s duties, especially when manuscripts do not meet minimum standards of scholarly quality for the journal (e.g., small sample sizes, invalid measurements). Additionally, some non-scientific considerations (such as page limits, publication budgets, and legitimate limits on a journal’s scope) can influence publication decisions. Those parameters foster scholarly communication by ensuring quality and a match between the journal’s articles and its readers’ interests.

However, when a decision is based on non-scientific considerations that do not foster open scholarly communication, this is censorship.

The editor who rejected Pesta and Fuerst’s manuscript explicitly stated that the rejection came from the decision to avoid political controversy. The censorious nature of this policy and decision is obvious: By prioritizing political tranquility over scientific truth, the editors robbed the scientific community of the opportunity to evaluate the data for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions

Perhaps the editor felt he was doing the scientific community and perhaps the community at large a service by protecting it from this potentially harmful scholarship. But this could also be viewed as a paternalistic abuse of power that lets the editor decide what information other people can handle.

It is acceptable for an editor to desk-reject manuscripts that lack sufficient detail for a study to be replicated, or if the statistical results are mathematically impossible. In these cases, there is no harm to scholarly communication because standards can be applied uniformly and without regard to the manuscript authors’ conclusions.

However, when quality standards are adjusted so that controversial, unorthodox, or disfavored conclusions are held to a higher level of scrutiny than favored ideas, then this becomes a backdoor censorship procedure.

This method of censorship may be tempting to editors because it has the appearance of scientific rigor—and can be easily disguised as such. But having unrealistically high standards of quality for controversial work can produce the same outcome as an outright ban.

Differing standards of quality result in a distorted body of literature where socially favored findings are published more often and in more prestigious journals while controversial or disfavored results are marginalized to low-level journals and non-peer-reviewed outlets, such as blogs and pre-print servers. That biases the literature (and thus perceived empirical truth) to appear more politically palatable than is warranted by actual reality. Moreover, it is possible that a systematically biased science might also create political conflict, making such censorship attempts self-defeating.

Beyond the censorious nature of the policies that prioritize non-scientific considerations when evaluating scholarly manuscripts, such policies are wholly subjective.

What are the standards for whether a manuscript “may lead to or enhance political controversies?” How will the editors—who are human and cannot know the future—make such a determination? Which topics are sufficiently controversial and what is the minimum standard for the level of controversy that warrants censorship? At what point does avoiding controversy become enforcing groupthink?

The desire to avoid controversy is not a valid motive for editors to reject a manuscript—at least not for a scholarly journal that seeks to promote the truth.

Indeed, the Journal of Intelligence’s archives show that the policy has not been applied consistently. A study about score gaps on achievement tests (frequent proxies for intelligence tests) among demographic groups in Brazil was published in February 2019. A study published three months later showed sex differences on various tests and a variability difference favoring males; similar results in other studies have led to controversy at other journals. Another article reported higher test anxiety among Hispanics than whites and examined how test anxiety can have differential effects on these two groups.

It is not clear why those articles were deemed non-controversial and worthy of publication while Pesta and Fuerst’s manuscript was too controversial for peer review—let alone publication.

Finally, a policy that seeks to avoid controversy before publicizing the truth is problematic because it privileges the status quo. If editors avoid publishing about political controversies, it makes a journal complicit in perpetuating poor policies or even an undemocratic dictatorship. Politically inconvenient findings that could function as a catalyst for change and a better society would be suppressed because of the aim to “avoid political controversy.”

Applying the Journal of Intelligence’s policy to a totalitarian country shows the problem clearly. This is not merely a theoretical exercise. The Journal of Intelligence is owned by the publisher MDPI. While the company’s headquarters are in Basel, Switzerland, the publisher has four offices in three Chinese cities. It is legitimate to wonder whether the communist regime in China can pressure MDPI in order to censor dissent under the guise of avoiding controversy.

The desire to avoid controversy is not a valid motive for editors to reject a manuscript—at least not for a scholarly journal that seeks to promote the truth. While there are legitimate non-scientific reasons to reject manuscripts, editors should apply these standards uniformly and ensure that such considerations foster scholarly communication.

But I fear that editors who wish to control the dialogue in their fields will take the wrong lesson from this example. This controversy erupted because the staff at the Journal of Intelligence was forthright about why Fuerst and Pesta’s manuscript was rejected. If the editors had instead claimed that the manuscript was rejected because of a lack of methodological quality, then no one would have ever known about their censorious behavior.

Hopefully, the editors will not decide that the controversy occurred because they “said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet.” If my analysis moves the censorship underground, then scholarly inquiry will be damaged and distorted further.

I call on the editors at the Journal of Intelligence—and all scholarly journals—to disregard any potential for controversy when evaluating work submitted to their journals. Controversy is often the price for scholarly knowledge.

Moreover, controversial topics may be the ones most in need of scholarly examination so that controversies can be put to rest, and societies can progress and develop empirically based policies. As Tong and von Hippel (2020) stated, “…The history of discovery is also the history of the world becoming safer, healthier, and richer…There is no reason to believe that we are at a unique discontinuity in human history, whereby future discoveries will have more cost than benefit.”

While the desire to avoid controversy is understandable, it is a goal that can hinder discovery and withhold or delay the benefits of scientific knowledge from those very societies that editors believe they are trying to help.

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The Future of the Humanities Is Not one of Decline

Rumors of the humanities’ decline have been greatly exaggerated, a new report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences says.

While the popularity of specific majors has changed, overall, the humanities as a whole are still attracting a strong number of students. Most importantly, the study didn’t find any evidence for a decline in the number of tenure-track positions or a replacement of full-time faculty with adjunct faculty.

The number of faculty per department varied from about four in folklore studies to 23 in English departments, but a full 77 percent of humanities faculty were employed full-time, and 62 percent of all humanities faculty were tenure-track.

The humanities have many problems, but a mass student exodus or the “adjunctification of the humanities” are not existential threats.

In general, the number of tenure-track positions was flat during the 2017-2018 period surveyed by the report, with linguistics departments reporting slight increases in tenure-track faculty and combined linguistics and literature departments seeing a slight decrease. Communications and non-English languages and literature had the fewest tenure-track faculty in their departments.

According to Steven Mintz of Inside Higher Ed, about half of humanities faculty were women, though the numbers varied among disciplines. According to the study, almost 90 percent of women and gender studies faculty were women, while less than 30 percent of philosophy faculty were.

Inside Higher Ed also reported that the number of humanities degrees has fallen, although students taking humanities classes held steady at 6 million. The top departments were history, English, and anthropology, with about 1,000 undergraduates annually. The bottom departments were musicology, race and ethnic studies, classical studies, folklore, art history, history of science, women and gender studies, and American studies, with 400-500 students in their classes over the course of the academic year. Frustratingly, the AAAS declined to publish the numbers they were using to compare enrollment and degrees.

Writing in The Atlantic, Benjamin Schmidt argued that the humanities were declining because students prefer to study subjects that they think will lead to better job prospects.

Similarly, Mintz also noted that humanities departments were mostly experiencing growth in non-traditional disciplines like communications, linguistics, and other majors instead of traditional ones such as history, English, or philosophy. In some ways, the growing disciplines are more “vocational” than “scholarly,” reflecting Schmidt’s idea. Students aren’t uninterested in the humanities, but they are more aware of the cost of college and want a degree that gives them a start on a good career.

Jason Brennan, a philosophy and business professor at Georgetown University and co-author of Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, said that there were two possibilities for why people believe the humanities are in trouble.

“You work at a university and see that a lot of classes are now taught by adjuncts, and it’s true that the job market is bad,” Brennan said in a Martin Center interview. “The more cynical version is that newspapers like Inside Higher Education and The Chronicle of Higher Education have an advocacy mission.”

Brennan said that it’s true that more classes are now being taught by adjuncts, but emphasized that those classes are usually ones that full-time faculty don’t want to teach, such as composition classes or extension classes for the general public. He said that one possibility for the seeming proliferation of adjuncts is that there are far more humanities PhD students and doctoral programs than in other disciplines, leading to a glut of young people with doctorates competing for entry-level academic jobs. He said that schools were expanding doctoral programs as a way to get more funding, making the school more expensive and prestigious.

There is some evidence for that. The AAAS study found that there were at least 124,000 graduate students in the fall of 2017. About 73 percent of departments offered research funding, and many subjects saw statistically significant increases in the number of departments supporting researchers—however, far fewer departments offered research funding to part-time, non-tenure-track faculty. While information regarding the numbers of doctoral programs was hard to come by, American universities are still churning out more PhDs than the market can absorb, according to Brookings.

Brennan added that for-profit universities also like to employ adjuncts over other forms of faculty. While non-humanities graduate students might earn their PhD and go into the private sector or other ventures, humanities graduates teed to stick around academia. Thus, their voices may be amplified when universities have a shortage of good, long-term job positions.

Brennan added that the reason the humanities job market seems bad is partially because academic jobs are advertised differently, and partially because humanities departments produce more PhDs than they do jobs.

The demographics of college students have changed over the years, Brennan noted. He said that in the 1960s, students tended to come from wealthier and better-connected backgrounds, so they could study things for fun without compromising their job prospects.

“Universities have been doing the same thing since 1066,” Brennan said.

The world has changed since then. The glut of humanities graduates struggling for jobs make each year seem like a disaster during hiring season. Students taking a few humanities courses, or majoring in the field with an eye toward a non-academic job, are less disturbed. The future of humanities higher ed isn’t a field of adjuncts, but the job market of 50 years ago isn’t the job market today. So far, schools haven’t adjusted.

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‘Pandemic Pods’ Are Fundamentally Reshaping K-12 Education

The practice of organizing “pandemic pods,” in which parents team up with other families in their neighborhoods or social circles to hire teachers for their children, is getting more and more popular by the minute.

With many school districts around the country planning not to reopen classrooms this fall—or, at best, planning to offer some combination of virtual and in-class instruction—families are clamoring to secure education consistency for their children as the school year quickly approaches.

So what, exactly, do these pods look like?

Families work together to recruit teachers that they pay out-of-pocket to teach small groups—“pods”—of children. It’s a way for clusters of students to receive professional instruction for several hours each day.

Some parents are using their pod arrangements to hire teachers who will supplement the online classes being provided by their school districts.

As Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson of The Washington Post observe, pandemic pods are “a 2020 version of the one-room schoolhouse, privately funded.”

In the case of one northern Virginia family that Meckler and Natanson profiled, the parents pay around $500 per month to get in on an arrangement with other families in their neighborhood to share a teacher they are hiring for their pod of children.

As one mother named J Li wrote in a viral Facebook post last week, thousands of parents are “scrambling” to form pods through “an absolute explosion of Facebook groups, matchups, spreadsheets, etc.”

J Li describes the pod phenomenon as “clusters of three to six families with similar aged (and sometimes same-school) children co-quarantined with each other, who hire one tutor for in-person support for their kids.” The tutor may serve as a full-time teacher for the pod of students, or may only teach on a part-time basis or outdoor classes.

“Suddenly teachers who are able to co-quarantine with a pod are in incredible demand,” J Li said.

One pod tutor interview by Meckler and Natanson, Christy Kian from Broward County, Florida, formerly a private-school teacher, said she will earn more this year teaching two families (with four total children) than she did in her prior teaching position.

She said as soon as she had set up the arrangement with those two families, she was immediately contacted by five others.

As noted by J Li:

This is maybe the fastest and most intense, purely grassroots [sic], economic hard pivot I’ve seen, including the rise of the masking industry a few months ago. Startups have nothing compared to thousands of moms on Facebook trying to arrange for their kids’ education in a crisis with zero school-district support.

I swear that in a decade they are going to study this… trends that would typically take months or years to form are developing on the literal scale of hours.

The pods approach is analogous to microschooling, which only recently, through providers like Prenda, had started to take root. Similar to homeschooling co-ops, microschools allow small groups of students to work together in flexible learning environments alongside older and younger students, sharing resources and teachers.

The pandemic pod is catapulting microschooling to the forefront of education provision during quarantine. As Meckler and Natanson write:

Alexandra Marshak, who lives in Manhattan with her husband and two young sons, is exploring a learning pod with three other families. The original idea was that parents would take turns teaching, rotating hosting duties. But then one parent suggested they rent a studio apartment for the venture. They are also now considering hiring a professional to do the teaching. Marshak, who is out of work, said she’s concerned about spiraling costs. But at this point, she said, ‘Everything is on the table.’

Podding is also similar to the “cottage school” concept. As the hosts of CottageSchoolLife.com explain,

Our cottage school is made up of four families with 16 kids between us all! We meet once a week for about 24 weeks of the school year to learn together.

One aspect that makes a cottage school different from other homeschool co-ops is its size. It’s purposefully small—cottage-like! It allows us to have encouragement and support from each other as we teach our kids.

Paradoxically, the teachers unions may be enabling this free-market, parent-driven reform of K-12 education to unfold.

The Los Angeles teachers unions, for example, released a list of demands last week that they want to see fulfilled before blessing the school reopening of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the country. Those demands included everything from raising taxes and “Medicare for All” to eliminating charter schools and defunding the police.

While union policy demands are leading district schools to remain closed, podding is reinforcing the old adage that the market finds a way.

Understandably, equity and access concerns have arisen as quickly as podding itself.

For parents who cannot afford to pay out of pocket to contribute to a neighborhood pod, providing resources through education savings accounts will be a crucial support moving forward.

Several states across the country have provided, or are considering providing, emergency education savings accounts to families, allowing them to take a portion of their child’s public education funds to private tutoring or online options of choice. Freeing up those dollars is the policy reform needed to make access to pods, microschools, and cottage classes in reach for all families. 

It’s time for policy to catch up with families.

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