Education Pods Threaten School Union Hegemony

No group of Americans is more dedicated to the equal sharing of misery than the progressive Left. And no subset of the progressive Left has demonstrated more effectiveness in achieving it than the Democrat/Education Union Cartel. Thus, despite the science that supports sending children back to school, school unions have made it clear that prospect is a nonstarter. In fact, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is authorizing its members to strike if schools open without what they define as proper safety measures.

Unfortunately for the unions, American parents are responding by doing what Americans in general have done since this country began: Embracing innovation. Faced with the prospect of long-term online learning and extended time off from work to care for their children, they are forming entities known as “education pods” and “micro-schools.” In a Facebook posting that has gone viral, one mom described the phenomenon. “These are clusters of 3-6 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,” she explained. “Sometimes the tutor in question is full time and sometimes part time / outdoor classes, depending on the age of kids and individual circumstances.”

In other words, parents are filling a Cartel-created vacuum — and no one is more upset about it than the Cartel and its useful idiot, media handmaidens. And as one might suspect, race and class are being used as hammers to vilify such efforts. “When parents with privilege open their checkbooks and create private one-room schoolhouses for their children, they follow a long pattern of weakening the public education system they leave behind, especially in districts with predominantly black, Latinx, indigenous and low-income students,” asserts Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss. She also likens the current effort to the “previous patterns of privileged flight” that may engender “potentially disastrous results for communities currently — and perpetually — in the crosshairs of this country’s oppression.”

Clara Totenberg Green, a “social emotional learning specialist” for Atlanta Public Schools, echoes those sentiments. “Based on what I’ve seen online, the learning pod movement appears to be led by families with means, a large portion of whom are white,” she writes. “Paradoxically, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted a national reckoning with white supremacy, white parents are again ignoring racial and class inequality when it comes to educating their children. As a result, they are actively replicating the systems that many of them say they want to dismantle.”

Who’s kidding whom? No one has been more responsible for keeping minority children “perpetually” under-educated than the nation’s two largest school unions, the aforementioned AFT and the National Education Association (NEA), and a Democrat Party that consistently receives more than 90% of their campaign donations. In Democrat-controlled inner city after inner city, their track record of failure is indisputable: After 50 years the achievement gap between white and black students has barely narrowed, something a 2016 report on the subject labeled a “national embarrassment.”

Moreover, it’s beginning to dawn on a lot of American parents that the rank indoctrination of their children with the leftist ideology that spawns assertions about a “national reckoning with white supremacy” is precisely the kind of politically motivated drivel they don’t want force-fed to their children on a daily basis.

Green gives the game away. “Whatever parents ultimately decide, they must understand that every choice they make in their child’s education, even the seemingly benign, has the potential to perpetuate racial inequities rooted in white supremacy,” she adds. “The history of public schooling in this country is one in which white parents have repeatedly abandoned public schools, or resisted integration efforts at every turn. As a result, schools are more segregated today than during the late 1960s.”

Remarkably, no one talks about the blatant racism demonstrated by such assertions, as in the idea that schools lacking a sufficient percentage of Caucasian students are doomed to failure. In New York City, charter schools known as Success Academies, run by Cartel anti-heroine Eva Moskowitz, utterly belie that noxious assertion, as thousands of mostly low-income black and Latino students routinely outperform kids in wealthy, “privileged” suburbs.

Moreover, the notion that any parent wanting what’s best for their child should be deemed racist for refusing to keep that child in a substandard school — to serve the union-defined “greater good,” no less — is utterly preposterous.

So what’s the handwringing about education pods and micro-schools really all about? Money and competition. “As we know from the fight over charter schools and vouchers, a district loses local, state and federal funding for each child who disenrolls from the public system,” Strauss declares. “Combined with budget cuts and teacher hiring freezes, pandemic pods might exacerbate the defunding of traditional public schools.”

Jessica Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington, agrees: “I would urge parents who are considering forming private learning pods to redirect those efforts toward lobbying public officials for more public school funding, instead.”

Both women miss the point. Millions of parents are more than willing to defund “traditional public schools” because the dynamics of them are despicable. First, the primary job of any union is to promote and protect the interest of its members, meaning parents and students are — at best — a secondary consideration. Second, the monopolistic power demonstrated by unions in conjunction with their Democrat Party allies is indisputable in that a child’s future — or complete lack thereof — can literally be determined by that child’s zip code.

Moreover, educational alternatives have sprung up precisely because the Cartel is determined to keep schools closed. Either indefinitely, or as the United Teachers Los reveals, until a wholly non-educational political agenda — as in defunding police, placing a moratorium on charter schools, and enacting Medicare-for-All at the federal level — is realized.

The great irony here? The longer the Cartel keeps schools closed, the more opportunity parents and their children will have to find viable alternatives.

Nonetheless, the Cartel has their champion. “You’ll have an NEA member in the White House,” promised Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, who has received millions of dollar in donations from that union since 2018.

What about minority parents and others who want an alternative to the status quo? “No privately funded, charter school would receive or private choice receive a penny of Federal money. None,” Biden added.

President Trump? “If schools do not reopen, the funding should go to parents to send their child to public, private, charter, religious, or home school of their choice,” he asserted. “The keyword being choice. If the school is closed, the money should follow the student.”

Thus, the 2020 election itself comes down to a choice between educational freedom or the continuing and equal sharing of misery.

Haven’t Americans been miserable long enough?

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UCLA’s Discrimination Office Targeting Professor Threatens Academic Freedom

When a political science lecturer at UCLA read to his class Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and showed clips from a documentary on racism, he found himself in hot water.

The reason: Both the letter and the documentary included the N-word.

Many students complained, which in turn pitted UCLA against the Department of Education. The latter said that targeting the instructor was a direct violation of UCLA’s own policies protecting academic freedom. But, instead of backing the instructor, UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office has launched a review, according to The Wall Street Journal.

This is a rare moment when the Department of Education is right.

Regardless of the final outcome, one would be naïve to believe that academic freedom exists in higher education in this country today. That is particularly the case in California, where the state’s constitution spells out unequivocally that the University of California “shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom.”

If diversity of thought is indeed a goal, then why is William Peris, the political science lecturer (who is white), not being supported? His own department responded that he was wrong because he did not “simply pause and reassess” his teaching pedagogy to meet his students’ needs during this “sensitive time,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

But how can students be expected to develop critical thinking if the material they are exposed to has been bowdlerized? Recognizing this, several states have passed laws requiring public universities to guarantee free speech and intellectual diversity, which they define as a “learning environment that exposes students to and encourages exploration of a variety of ideological and political perspectives,” according to a South Dakota bill signed into law in March.

Let’s not forget that students in colleges and universities are adults. Whatever argument is made to protect them from ideas that make them feel uncomfortable when they were in K-12 fails in higher education. That bodes ill for the future of the country because today’s graduates will likely be tomorrow’s leaders. If they persist in being closed to views at odds with their pre-existing opinions, what hope is there for a productive debate?

If anything, conservative students are the ones who feel most censored. According to a 2017 poll by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, 69 percent of students say that conservatives can “freely and openly express their views” on campus—compared with 92 percent who say that liberals have the same freedom. The free exchange of ideas is heavily tilted in favor of liberal students and their liberal professors. The problem isn’t limited to lecturers at the mercy of their department. The academic environment on many campuses discourages students from stating opinions out of step with the majority (or a loud minority).

It’s little wonder, then, that so many students “are progressing through higher education today without measurable gains in general skills” like critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. Some 45 percent of students showed no significant improvement on the Collegiate Learning Assessment after two years of college, and 36 percent didn’t improve after four years, according to Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their 2011 book Academically Adrift, based on 2,300 undergraduates surveyed at 24 universities.

Whatever they found nine years ago has gotten only worse when race is the subject. It’s the third rail of instruction. Students enter with attitudes and values at odds with academic commitment and leave little changed. How could things be any different if professors feel intimidated by their students and by administrators?

But how can students be expected to develop critical thinking if the material they are exposed to has been bowdlerized?
Mistakes cannot be corrected if they are afraid to speak out. No one is suggesting that slurs, epithets, and the like deserve a forum. But censuring an instructor who quotes directly from original sources—sources opposing racism, no less—just because the words he recites offend some students makes a mockery of real education and academic freedom.

Democracy thrives on debate. Unavoidably, it involves the use of material that for one reason or another offends some students. That’s the price we have to pay.

Academic freedom is supposed to allow substantive arguments about divisive issues. It’s why tenure exists in the first place. The UCLA political science instructor obviously lacks tenure. If he had it, the school’s Discrimination Prevention Office would likely be reluctant to mount a case. But because he is a lecturer, he is on thin ice. Moreover, would students have complained if he were black? And would UCLA have even intervened?

These are the questions that need to be answered frankly. But they won’t in today’s incendiary climate. Racism is too controversial to be examined fairly. Airing inconvenient facts can be a career breaker, particularly when student evaluations are considered in awarding tenure. So we continue to pervert academic values and rationalize doing so as atonement for past injustices.

Seventy-one years ago, the University of California required a loyalty oath that employees were “not a member of the Communist Party.” After 31 faculty were fired for refusing to sign, the requirement was changed to the Standing Order of the Regents 101.1 (d): “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee.” But on eight UC campuses and at many other colleges, this principle is slowly but surely being abandoned. “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” statements that applicants have to sign are the new version of loyalty oaths. Rubrics are now used in place of the judgment of faculty hiring committees at some campuses.

Rather than administrators caving to student demands after offense is taken, they should defend professors who want to educate students and prepare them for life. Considering the debt students amass, they deserve an education that encourages them to think and prepare them for life after campus. Doing so would benefit broader society, as graduates would not expect the world to cater to what offends them. Public universities are charged with developing citizens; those young citizens need better ways to discuss race while respecting academic freedom.

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Fall Uncertainty: College Leaders Have Left Students, Professors in the Dark

Colleges across the country are preparing for potential spikes in coronavirus cases in the fall. As some students return to campus, schools are making plans to protect the health of students, faculty, and campus workers.

Universities want to shorten face-to-face exposure on campus during the fall and winter. By starting the semester early, as many colleges plan to do, they can send students home for an extended winter break by Thanksgiving. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Notre Dame, the University of South Carolina, University of California-San Diego, and the University of Texas-Austin, as well as North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will end their fall semesters early.

Certainty for the fall is not high, however. The New York Times argued that most people haven’t “met minimal criteria” for state lockdowns to end. If colleges aren’t careful, they could set up outbreaks on campus instead of providing a safe zone. If outbreaks happen, the end result may be another hasty switch to online classes, catching universities flat on their feet again.

Professors, just like students, are staring down uncertainty. The first day of fall semester is less than a month away, and many details about class instruction remain unknown. Students don’t know what to expect, and professors can’t plan how they’ll teach or research.

To stop outbreaks, many schools will enforce a mandatory mask rule for anyone on campus. NC State announced its policy that all students, faculty, staff, and visitors must cover their faces at all times when in “NC State buildings and in all university programs held in non-university buildings,” according to a university email. Even when alone, everyone is expected to carry a mask. The university has masks available and will provide them for anyone in need.

This means that even when freshmen students are in dorms with roommates, they will be mandated to wear a mask. The plans for a safe campus reopening, then, depends on how strict students are about wearing masks with their friends and not socializing with other students they haven’t seen for months.

NC State has announced it will convert some double rooms to single rooms, but only for students with pre-existing health conditions. The university stated that it will “reduce occupancy in all residence halls except apartments,” but did not give specifics. Some freshmen will also have the option to live at home—if their parents live within 25 miles of campus.

Other North Carolina schools requiring face masks on campus include UNC-Greensboro, East Carolina University, and UNC-Chapel Hill; students there will have similar guidelines to follow.

When he presented it on 60 Minutes in June, UNC chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz described Chapel Hill’s plan to downsize classes and limit COVID-19’s spread through student socialization. Guskiewiczs revealed that “two dormitories will be set aside to quarantine students in the event of an outbreak.”  However, while classrooms and on-campus areas will be persistently disinfected, it is still not guaranteed that the virus won’t spread. Guisiewicz went on to say that UNC-Chapel Hill “would’ve been challenged financially to not reopen” and they “know that many students would’ve perhaps taken a gap year or to defer their enrollment.”

Reopening campus was an economic choice as much as a health choice.

Students, however, still aren’t clear on what reopening for the fall will look like. NC State chancellor Randy Woodson announced the school would be back in session in the fall, but an official plan for students’ schedules has not been announced. Currently, most classes appear to be online and are marked as “online delivery” with an “internet interactive” instruction mode, meaning students will have to be online for a course at a scheduled time.

Reluctance by college leaders to embrace online classes may mean another subpar online semester for students.
However, Anthony Solari, a political scientist at NC State, advised students not to take NC State’s website too seriously. “The university is still trying to figure out what will be online and what in person,” he noted. “The university is going back and forth on the number of in-person and online classes and which ones will be which.”

If NC State does have in-person lectures, professors will stand behind a “plexiglass barrier.” Classes will also be recorded so that students can watch if they can’t come to class. Some classes will be hybrid classes, meaning some students will come in-person some days and others will interact online. That may encourage students to skip class, though.

NC State sent out an email in early July to “clarify” things for the upcoming semester, but its vagueness wasn’t very helpful. The email stated that the class schedule available currently “may not be final” and the university “is still working to evaluate individual class needs and make decisions daily.” While the vague responses from universities across the country are understandable, they don’t help students who live far from campus and need to make housing arrangements. Many students have assumed that classes will be online and the university is just pushing off announcing it, so they made plans to live at home to save money. Regardless of in-person or online classes, students will pay the same tuition.

Students won’t be happy about paying in-person tuition for online-class quality, but if a coronavirus outbreak takes off on their campus, it may be less of a concern than their health.

The bigger concern for many students is how college leaders have failed to prepare a plan for online learning. COVID-19 has shut down the American economy since March, but most colleges have been reluctant to embrace an online semester after being forced to transition in the spring. While the California State University system announced in May that their fall semester would be online, most colleges talked of reopening campus in the fall or doing a “hybrid” semester. Reluctance by college leaders to embrace online classes may mean another subpar online semester for students.

Colleges have the resources to make sustainable versions of online classes that can actually benefit students. They only need to look on campus. For example, a summer project for film students could have been to create eye-catching videos for professors to use in online classes. Students would engage with it more than a monotonous 50-minute lecture posted by their professor.

That style of teaching would be mutually beneficial for students and professors alike. Instead, the situation today is one of colleges scrambling in uncertainty before the semester starts.

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Is coaching for exams beneficial?

The Australian writer below is broadly right. There is no substitute for inborn IQ.  The results one gets from IQ can however be influenced to some extent by the child's environment. Families who send their kids to coaching probably already provide a good opportinity for intellectual development, however

The revamping of the selective high school entry examination will inevitably be viewed as an attempt to make the test less coachable. But why do we have such a problem with coaching?

When it comes to academic performance, Australian culture places a premium on natural ability. Yet in other endeavours, such as sport, we have no problem with systematic training. Few look at a star football player and remark bitterly: “Well, his mother was taking him to training since he was four.” Likewise, the ballerina who practises diligently 12 hours a week is a source of admiration for her dedication.

Even children feel the stigma, with many gifted students underplaying their amount of study in the belief that you are not really smart if you have to put in effort. Academic success that appears to come easily is more highly valued than that which is the result of hard work.

There is a perception among many that undeserving children who have been coached from an early age are stealing places at selective high schools from naturally bright students. Often coupled with racist undertones, this argument in part stems from a certain streak in mainstream Anglo-Australian culture which hates a “try hard”.

Coaching, many feel, confers an unfair advantage. This is certainly true from an economic perspective. Students whose parents can afford years of tutoring may gain an edge over an equally bright child whose parents lack the means for extracurricular support. Yet this applies to most fields of endeavour. Our footy star and ballerina also need parents who are able to pay for coaching.

So there’s a certain hypocrisy at play when parents are criticised for providing academic coaching but admired for supporting their child’s dream with other forms of coaching.

But before you rush out and enrol your child in the closest coaching college to get that “academic advantage”, consider the following. What can coaching focused exclusively on test preparation really do for your child?

Research tells us it can reduce test anxiety. If you have never sat a test before, then you are probably going to be nervous, especially if your parents and peers have whipped you into a frenzied belief that this is the most important exam of your life.

Most Year 4 students sitting the Opportunity Class exams have only had one experience of a formal assessment, NAPLAN, so the experience of going to a large hall at a different school can itself be overwhelming.

If you have sat tests before, then you know what to do and what to expect. You know how to manage your time and not spend too long on one question. You know that tests start with easy questions and that the harder questions are at the end. You know that you should read the whole question before answering. You know that with one minute to go, you should fill in “C” for any multiple choice you have not answered.

These are techniques that coaching colleges are adept at drilling and as the government's selective high school review confirmed in 2018, they could make the few marks’ difference between getting a place or not. However, they are also techniques you can learn by practising with a $15 book from your local newsagent.

I am yet to see any research that shows that coaching of any description can turn a child of average ability into a gifted child. Nor is there any evidence that children who have been coached wouldn’t have got into selective high schools on their own merits – and saved their parents a great deal of money in the process.

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