Monday, July 20, 2020

School-closing costs are crushing children and parents

There are lots of compelling reasons for schools to reopen in the fall. Children need the educational, social and psychological benefits that a normal, five-day school week provides. Working parents need relief. Teachers and school staffers need the work. Here’s another: The global economy will suffer along with the future earnings of today’s students if they don’t.

A consensus estimate among economists is that an additional year of schooling increases wages by around 9%. If last spring and this fall should be written off, then keeping the schools closed may lead to a significant reduction in future earnings for today’s students. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that represents a loss of over $30,000 per decade in earnings for a typical worker who graduated high school but didn’t attend college. The longer schools are closed, the larger the hit future earnings will take.

Of course, this is a simplification. Virtual learning isn’t the same as no learning, and the rate of return on an additional year of schooling will vary a lot from student to student. But the basic point holds: Keeping kids out of school is likely to take a significant sum of money out of their pockets when they get older and go to work.

And because virtual learning is closer to no learning for many lower-income households — due, for example, to less reliable internet access, home environments less conducive to studying, and parents whose jobs make it harder for them to stay at home and monitor schooling activity throughout the day — keeping schools closed this fall would likely reduce the future earnings of today’s poorer kids the most.

The economic damage from so many young people receiving an inadequate education adds up. A World Bank economics working paper notes that in mid-April, 192 countries had closed all schools and universities, affecting 1.5 billion youths, or 90% of the world’s learners. To estimate the global economic effects of the shutdown, the authors assumed a four-month closure and, conservatively, that only 10% of students suffer learning loss from virtual learning. They found that future global output and incomes will be trillions of dollars lower due to the shutdown, with a loss equivalent to 15% of future GDP. If schools are closed for another four months this fall, the losses will grow much larger.

Parents’ economic outcomes will suffer if schools are closed in the fall, as well. If schools don’t reopen, some parents, including many low-income parents, will have to decide between facilitating home learning for their kids and going to work at all. Parents who can continue to work remotely will effectively be on a part-time schedule. Many employers are going to be less and less forgiving of the need to juggle parenting and work.

To some degree, the negative effects of working from home while looking after kids are cumulative. This spring, many parents were in survival mode, doing what needed to be done — and only that — each day. But if four months of virtual working and virtual learning happening under the same roof turns into 10, a cohort of parents of young kids in their prime working years will increasingly miss out on the opportunity do longer-term, deeper, creative work. This will hurt their careers. It will hurt the overall economy as well, as around one-quarter of workers have a child under the age of 13.

The U.S. is stumbling through the pandemic. When it comes to reopening schools, the absence of strategic thinking on a nationwide scale is on stark display. The plan is to have an open economy but return to virtual learning? You can’t have the former if you have the latter. This wishful thinking is destructive.

The U.S. should be prioritizing what is most important to society. At the top of the list should be children’s futures and current livelihoods. Socializing in bars should be at the bottom of the list. And yet the decisions of mayors and governors to allow frivolities means that the U.S. will have to cut back where it hurts the most, not the least.

Measures should be taken to protect teachers and students when schools reopen. But even with those measures, open schools would likely increase the transmission rate of the virus, so other steps should be taken to slow the spread. Washington should be providing leadership and guidance to local schools districts on how to reopen, along with funding to help them do so safely.

Whether schools reopen this fall is a test of the U.S.’s seriousness as a nation. This is one test that children are counting on adults to pass.

SOURCE 




Ignoring Science, Pelosi Dems Fight Reopening Schools

With a record-shattering 7.5 million jobs created in May and June, it’s clear the American people are ready to get back to work and are finding ways to do so safely.

Yet Democrats fight relentlessly against an economic recovery, willing to make children and parents suffer at least through the November elections. They understand that millions of parents depend on their children being in school during work hours.

According to one survey, 60% of parents had no help caring for their children during the shutdowns, and they can’t return to work if schools don’t reopen. That is likely why nearly 60% of parents favor reopening schools, even if 70% of parents acknowledge at least some risk. (Of course there’s risk. There’s risk every time you put your kid in a car, too, but life is about managing risks, not eliminating them entirely.)

President Donald Trump has called for a full reopening of schools in the fall, even going so far as threatening to cut federal education funding for schools that don’t. After all, why should schools get taxpayer funding if they refuse to open?

Speaking of risk, however, Trump’s stance is arguably politically risky, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to exploit and increase that risk. Pelosi accused Trump of “messing with the health of our children,” claiming, “Going back to school presents the biggest risk for the spread of the coronavirus. They ignore science.”

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post’s ostensibly “conservative” columnist, went a step further, accusing President Trump of wanting to “kill your kids.”

It can’t ever be a mere policy disagreement; it must be an existential battle between good and evil. Then again, it seems a tad disingenuous for Democrats, who openly support murdering millions of preborn children, to pretend to care if a few kids get sick.

In reality, it is Rubin and the Pelosi/Schumer Democrats who are ignoring the science. We now have ample data showing school-age children are by far the least susceptible to infection by the COVID-19 virus. In the U.S., children represent 22% of the population but only 1.7% of all COVID-19 infections. According to the CDC, only 30 children under age 15 have died from COVID-19 — less than one-sixth the number that die each year from the flu.

In other words, the chances of children under 18 contracting COVID-19 is exceedingly small, and the chances of them dying from it is almost nonexistent.

But wait! These kids may not get sick from the virus, but Democrats and their teachers-union accomplices insist they are veritable germ factories who will spread the virus to their teachers and administrators and bring it back home to mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa!

Is that true? A study from the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment finds that, after reopening schools in early May, there has not been a single report of an employee infected by a child. A French study found that “despite three introductions of the virus into three primary schools, there appears to have been no further transmission of the virus to other pupils or teaching and non-teaching staff of the schools.”

Furthermore, schools in Germany, Singapore, Norway, Denmark, and Finland reopened months ago and haven’t experienced outbreaks, or even a significant rise in cases.

As it turns out, despite Pelosi’s ludicrous, fear-mongering claims, the science shows the far greater danger for children is in not returning to school. The 67,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics “strongly advocates” that every public policy for the upcoming year “start with a goal of having students physically present in school.”

The APA explains why: “The importance of in-person learning is well-documented, and there is already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of school closures in the spring of 2020. Lengthy time away from school and associated interruption of supportive services often results in social isolation, making it difficult for schools to identify and address important learning deficits as well as child and adolescent physical or sexual abuse, substance use, depression, and suicidal ideation. This, in turn, places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality. Beyond the educational impact and social impact of school closures, there has been substantial impact on food security and physical activity for children and families.”

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos supports President Trump’s decision to push schools to reopen in the fall under CDC guidelines. “There will be exceptions to the rule, but the rule should be kids go back to school this fall,” DeVos said. “And where there are little flare-ups or hot spots, that can be dealt with school by school or a case-by-case basis. There’s ample opportunity to have kids in school.”

But Democrats and teachers unions continue to vigorously fight a return to school. One of the nation’s largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers, claims an additional $116 billion in federal funding is needed to safely reopen. That would be more than it cost the U.S. to rebuild Europe after WWII under the Marshall Plan. That’s a lot of Lysol!

Proving the entirely political objections to reopening, the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) demands a shutdown of charter schools and a defunding of the police before returning to work.

Keri Rodrigues, a former teachers-union organizer-turned-National Parents Union founder, is highly critical of teachers unions’ objections. She blames unions for fighting against accountability and innovation and wanting only to maintain the status quo, even to the detriment of our children, who are already falling far behind academically. Many children receive an hour or less of instruction per day.

For all these reasons and more, the truth is obvious. We must reopen the schools this fall.

SOURCE 






Despicable Behavior of Today's Academicians
  
The Michigan State University administration pressured professor Stephen Hsu to resign from his position as vice president of research and innovation because he touted research that found police are not more likely to shoot black Americans. The study found: “The race of a police officer did not predict the race of the citizen shot. In other words, black officers were just as likely to shoot black citizens as white officers were.” For political reasons, the authors of the study sought its retraction.

The U.S. Department of Education warned UCLA that it may impose fines for improperly and abusively targeting white professor Lt. Col. W. Ajax Peris for disciplinary action over his use of the n-word while reading to his class Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that contained the expressions “when your first name becomes "n—r,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are). Referring to white civil rights activists King wrote, “They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as 'dirty n—r-lovers.’”

Boston University is considering changing the name of its mascot Rhett because of his link to “Gone with the Wind.” Almost 4,000 Rutgers University students signed a petition to rename campus buildings Hardenbergh Hall, Frelinghuysen Hall and Milledoler Hall because these men were slave owners. University of Arkansas students petitioned to remove a statue of J. William Fulbright because he was a segregationist who opposed the Brown v. Board of Education that ruled against school segregation.

The suppression of free speech and ideas by the elite is nothing new. It has a long ugly history. Galileo Galilei was a 17th-century Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes called “father of modern physics.” The Catholic Church and other scientists of his day believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Galileo offered evidence that the Earth traveled around the sun — heliocentrism. That made him “vehemently suspect of heresy” and was forced to recant and sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition and was later commuted to house arrest for the rest of his life.

Much of today’s totalitarianism, promotion of hate and not to mention outright stupidity, has its roots on college campuses. Sources that report on some of the more egregious forms of the abandonment of free inquiry, hate and stupidity at our colleges are: College Reform and College Fix.

Prof. William S. Penn, who was a Distinguished Faculty Award recipient at Michigan State University in 2003, and a two-time winner of the prestigious Stephen Crane Prize for Fiction, explained to his students, “This country still is full of closet racists.” He said: “Republicans are not a majority in this country anymore. They are a bunch of dead white people. Or dying white people.”

The public has recently been treated to the term — white privilege. Colleges have long held courses and seminars on “whiteness.” One college even has a course titled “Abolition of Whiteness.” According to some academic intellectuals, whites enjoy advantages that nonwhites do not. They earn higher income and reside in better housing, and their children go to better schools and achieve more. Based on that idea, Asian Americans have more white privilege than white people. And, on a personal note, my daughter has more white privilege than probably 95% of white Americans.

Evidence of how stupid college ideas find their way into the public arena can be seen on our daily news. Don Lemon, a CNN anchorman, said, “We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them.” Steven Clifford, former King Broadcasting CEO, said, “I will be leading a great movement to prohibit straight white males, who I believe supported Donald Trump by about 85 percent, from exercising the franchise (to vote), and I think that will save our democracy.”

As George Orwell said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” If the stupid ideas of academic intellectuals remained on college campuses and did not infect the rest of society, they might be a source of entertainment — much like a circus.

SOURCE 




BLM's 'Anti-Racism' Curriculum in Classrooms

Even private schools are being pressured to propagate the Left's racial cult.

The neo-Marxist anti-racism cult better known as Black Lives Matter has seen tremendous success in the weeks following the unjust death of George Floyd in convincing swaths of the American public that the U.S. is a country rife with “systemic racism.” Bowing to social media pressure campaigns launched by an online army of “social justice” agitators, many American businesses have dutifully signaled their “woke” virtue, hoping to avoid becoming the next target of the cancel-culture mob.

In this intolerant, impatient, and illiberal environment, it comes as little surprise that many of America’s private schools, ironically often the source of this “woke” ideology, are now finding themselves pressured to go even farther down the rabbit hole and become full-fledged indoctrination centers for the anti-racism cult. Of course, the “woke” cult defines “racist” as any unapproved political perspective or opinion.

“Swaths of private secondary schools have since pronounced support for Black Lives Matter, or at least its principles,” reports the Washington Examiner. “Many came out with ‘anti-racism’ statements last month, following accusations from some alumni of color on 'Blackat[name of school]‘ Instagram accounts, claiming they experienced instances of racism during their time as students at the institutions. Schools then apologized to black former or current students who experienced 'systemic racism’ and described actions to eliminate ‘white supremacy.’ All the while expanding initiatives related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and promoting ‘social justice.’”

One example of this growing effort to indoctrinate students comes from George Washington University, where students read Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same as part of the school’s “Solidarity Resource Syllabus.” The book states, “Conservatism as a philosophy and ideology … is and always has been hostile to the aspirations of Africans in America, incompatible with the struggle for freedom and equality.” The author of the book, San Fransisco State University professor Robert Smith, writes, “Repeatedly I was asked, ‘Are you saying that conservatism is racism, that all conservatives are racist? Aren’t there black conservatives? Are they racists?’ … My answer to most of these questions was a qualified ‘yes.’” In other words, “wrong” political opinions now equate to “racism.”

Fortunately, some colleges are resisting. Michigan’s Hillsdale College is a great example of a principled stand. Others should follow this example.

By painting as “racist” all ideologies that don’t conform to a Marxist vision of equity and justice — insinuating that free thinkers, and not the mass-murderous tyrants of communism, are immoral — the Left hopes to end all debate and critical questioning of its agenda. This explains why so many universities are fast devolving into centers of leftist indoctrination rather than places of genuine free thought, inquiry, and education. America is not reckoning with racism; America is being hoodwinked by Marxist revolutionaries.

SOURCE 

No comments: