Tuesday, September 01, 2020


Chaos coast to coast as a school year like no other launches

It’s going to be screen time all the time for kindergartners and graduate students alike. Teachers are threatening strikes. And students are already coming home infected with the coronavirus, which has upended American education.

The 2020-21 school year has dawned, and it's more chaotic than any before it.

Plans are changing so fast that students and parents can hardly keep up. Districts that spent all summer planning hybrid systems, in which children would be in school part of the week, ditched them as coronavirus cases surged. Universities changed their teaching models, their start dates and their rules for housing, all with scant notice.

And many districts and colleges have yet to make final decisions, even now, with the fall term already underway in some of the country.

"Plans are changing right up till the moment that schools open," said Michael Casserly, executive director of Great City Schools, a lobbying group for large districts.

Chicago Public Schools announced last week that, after planning a hybrid system, its classes would begin the year online. Districts across the country have pushed back their opening dates. Last week, the first week of school in Georgia's Cherokee County School District, administrators sent 14 letters to parents, each disclosing new cases of the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19. They included 13 students ranging from first to 12th grades, and a few teachers. More than 300 students who had been in contact with them were directed to quarantine for 14 days.

"Our parents wanted a choice for their children, and we delivered - it is not perfect, and we all know that, but perfection is not possible in a pandemic," Superintendent Brian Hightower said Friday in a message to the community.

Another Georgia high school, in Paulding County, drew national attention after students posted pictures and video of their peers walking without masks in tightly packed hallways. Now, six students and three staff members there have tested positive for the virus, according to a letter sent to parents over the weekend.

Last week, Johns Hopkins University changed its mind and said classes would be fully online, discouraging even those who had signed leases from returning to Baltimore. Students at Washington University in St. Louis faced the opposite problem when the school said on July 31 that all dorm rooms would be converted to singles, leaving juniors and seniors scrambling to find housing at the last minute.

In Congress, talks over a pandemic relief package collapsed last week, leaving no clear path to providing schools with funding lawmakers in both major political parties agree is urgently needed.

"We knew how to close schools," said Annette Anderson, an assistant professor of education and deputy director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools at Johns Hopkins University. "But we have no idea how to properly reopen schools."

The result of this chaos is uncertainty for students and their parents, with profound ramifications for health, learning, emotional development and economics in schools that open and those that do not.

Of the 20 largest K-12 districts, 17 now plan to begin the year fully remote. The big outlier is New York City, by far the nation's largest district, which plans a hybrid system and so far has withstood intense pressure from teachers and others to reverse course.

On Friday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, gave the state's 732 school districts the go ahead and open in person if they like, as long as the state's coronavirus infection rates stay low.

Across the country, districts have wildly different plans based on their geography, infection rates and partisanship.

About 4% of rural districts and 21% of suburban districts have announced fully remote plans, compared with 55% of urban systems, according to a study of 477 districts chosen as a representative national sample by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington at Bothell.

Robin Lake, the center's director, also reviewed parent surveys from districts across the country and was struck by how divergent views are.

"Some are saying they are terrified," she said. "Others are saying, 'I think this whole covid thing is a farce.' "

Like so much in America, decisions appear to be falling along partisan lines, with schools in Republicans areas far more likely to open than those in Democratic communities.

Polling shows Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say going back into school buildings is safe. And an examination of district plans compiled by Education Week suggests that campuses are more likely to be open in conservative communities than in liberal ones.

Ed Week's database includes 153 districts in states won by Hillary Clinton in 2016. Of them, 67% plan fully remote learning this fall.

Of the 307 districts in states won by Donald Trump in 2016, 58% plan to hold fully or partly in-person classes.

Some of the divide may trace to fact that rural areas are more Republican and in some cases have fewer covid-19 cases. But the overall trend worries Daniel Domenech, executive director of AASA, which represents school superintendents.

"It's a very dangerous and explosive situation, and unfortunately people are more inclined to follow their political bent than to do what is safe for their own families and their own children," he said.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly pushed districts to open, noting the importance of in-person education for students' academic and social emotional growth, as well as for parents' ability to work. Some administrators, and the parents they serve, seem to be listening.

In Washington County, Utah, for instance, schools were accommodating the desires of a very conservative community when they opted to open for full-time, in-person school. Classes begin there this week.

"As restrictions lifted, we felt - and the community felt - that would be in the best interest of students to get them back on as normal a schedule as possible," said Steven Dunham, director of communications for the district.

"We are trying to put into place every safety precaution we can," Dunham said. "We are also trying to fulfill the requests of the parents in this community."

The district is requiring students and staff members to wear masks, as ordered by Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican. But Dunham said "a significant number of parents" have asked the school board to defy the order, something the board has declined to do.

The pressures in more liberal communities often cut the other way, with teachers unions saying it is not safe to reopen campuses.

The American Federation of Teachers passed a resolution endorsing actions including strikes to protest any orders to return to classrooms, and teachers in New York City have threatened to walk out over the issue. The newly installed president of the National Education Association said she, too, supports strikes if needed to get the attention of decision makers.

"Our members are looking at every option that they have in their toolbox to get those in charge to listen to them when they say their schools are not safe," NEA President Becky Pringle said in an interview. In her inaugural speech, she promised financial help to any affiliate that concludes its reopening plan is not safe for teachers.

Pressure to keep schools open has been intense in Texas and Florida, two states where Republican governors ordered them open and then backed off, as infections continued to climb.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in July that all schools must reopen. Then he said districts could operate remotely for the first three weeks. Then he extended that for several more weeks. Local health departments stepped in to bar some districts from opening. A few days ago, Abbott said the decision was up to local school officials.

John Kuhn, superintendent of the 3,300-student Mineral Wells Independent School District, said he's trying to follow the state's orders.

"But it's not easy," he said. "It keeps changing."

Kuhn said he's decided to open schools for students who want to come, but he is encouraging parents to keep their children home so there will be fewer in the classroom and social distancing will be easier. School starts there next week.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also ordered all districts to open, then retreated, saying remote learning would be all right where coronavirus rates are highest. On Friday, he made clear that not all districts would receive that dispensation, telling Orlando's News 6 that he was concerned that Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, plans to use remote education.

"The law requires you to offer certain amount of in-person instruction," DeSantis said, referring to his executive order. "I'm concerned about it."

Angela Skilling, a teacher in Arizona's tiny Hayden Winkelman Unified School District, is terrified of going back. Over the summer, she and two other teachers taught a remote class from the same classroom. One of the teachers died. Seven staff members, out of 60 in the district, contracted covid-19.

"We are not ready to lose another staff member," she told a congressional committee at a hearing on schools last week. "We can recover a child's lost education, but we cannot recover a life."

For colleges and universities, the tumult of campus closures in March gave way to the chaos of planning for reopening under volatile and unprecedented conditions. Some are bringing most of their students back. Others are bringing only certain groups - freshmen, for instance. Still others are telling students it's best to stay away for the fall. Many international students cannot get visas to travel to the United States, and others who are here are dependent on colleges for emergency housing.

No matter where they are living, students are resigned to a course catalog with a heavy dose of online learning. Classes might be fully online or "hybrid," using limited face-to-face contact with faculty members.

Dorm rooms, by default, will become classrooms. Harvard University is inviting freshmen and select others to live on campus, but all of its undergraduate teaching will be conducted online.

Like their K-12 counterparts, many colleges face pressure from their faculties to shift to remote learning. More than 350 faculty members at the University of Iowa signed a petition demanding that all classes be held online. There was similar resistance from faculty members at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

As of last week, nearly 30% of 3,000 institutions planned to teach fully or primarily online, and about 24% were fully or mostly in person, according to an examination by the Chronicle of Higher Education and Davidson College.

The review found that 16% planned a mix of approaches and that 26% had not yet decided.

Much remains in flux. The University of Virginia had announced in June that students would be invited to campus for classes starting Aug. 25. They would live in residence halls under a strict public health regimen that includes assigned sinks and showers. Now U-Va. says that the undergraduate arrival will be delayed due to the surging virus, and that face-to-face teaching will not start until after Labor Day.

Some plans fell apart weeks after they were announced. The University of Southern California in July reversed course on an aggressive reopening, and then last week ratcheted plans back again to almost entirely remote instruction. Georgetown, George Washington and American universities, all in the nation's capital, took similar zigzag paths toward remote openings.

At American, a private university with about 14,000 students, officials had painstakingly pieced together a plan to house about 2,300 students on campus in single dorm rooms and teach through a blend of in-person and online methods. The school calculated the socially distant capacity of classrooms, depending on whether seats were fixed or mobile. It tracked how many faculty members had health concerns and who could teach in person and when. Assembling the course schedule, said AU President Sylvia Burwell, was like solving a Rubik's Cube.

By the end of July, that plan went out the window.

"I'm disappointed," Burwell said. "We're all disappointed."

Burwell, who was health and human services secretary during the Obama administration, said the trajectory of the pandemic now dictates caution. She said she spent weeks gathering facts and enduring many sleepless nights before deciding to shift course. Now she's pledging to make it work.

In California, the leader of the largest public university system in the country saw this moment coming months ago. Timothy White, chancellor of the 482,000-student California State University system, had announced on May 12 that most instruction on its 23 campuses would be remote this fall. It was at the time a shocking statement of higher education's vulnerability to the virus.

Now White says he is glad he staked out a radical position. It gave his faculty ample time to prepare and freedom to innovate. “It allowed a different mind-set,” he said. The attitude: “Now, let’s get to work and figure out how to do it great.”

SOURCE






Conforming to a Race Lie

Our colleges are all in against systemic racism — but what if that's not the problem?

In September 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and called in the 101st Airborne Division to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in accordance with the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. The rest is history.

One wonders, though, what Eisenhower would make of our schools today — especially our colleges and universities, whose race-obsessed Red Guards have weaponized terms such as “white privilege” and “systemic racism” and who’ve made a mockery of our nation’s steady and monumental progress on civil rights.

When he left office in January 1961, Ike warned us about “the military-industrial complex,” saying that the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Had he a crystal ball, however, he might’ve warned us instead about the rise of the racial-industrial complex. Because no issue has been more viciously wielded nor more shamelessly monetized than race — and nowhere is this more apparent than in higher education.

For example: Bureaucrats at Cornell University are encouraging the entire Big Red community to read racism scholar Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist.

And what, exactly, is antiracism? As author and columnist Christopher Caldwell explains, “It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, ‘cancelings,’ Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement. Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.”

Kendi, it should be noted, recently proposed a constitutional amendment holding that any racial inequality is, by definition, the result of racism. And, by golly, after securing a two-thirds supermajority vote in both the House and Senate, and then securing passage by three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures, he’d create a Department of Antiracism to enforce our 28th Amendment.

Good luck with that.

Cornell’s case isn’t an outlier, though. As author and researcher Heather Mac Donald lays out in a recent essay, academia’s all-in embrace of systemic racism threatens not only our institutions but also our foundational principles. And this obsession with race has only increased since the wrongful May 25 death of career criminal George Floyd while in police custody.

“Colleges and universities,” she writes, “also promised increased diversity spending, though in amounts dwarfed by those corporate outpourings. Nevertheless, the academic response to Floyd’s death and the ensuing violence will have the greatest impact on the nation’s future. Academia was the ideological seedbed for that violence and for its elite justifications; it will prove just as critical in the accelerated transformation of the country.”

“The American Mathematical Society,” Mac Donald continues, “declared that ‘equity, diversity, and inclusion’ are fundamental to its mission. Mathematicians had an ‘obligation’ to ‘help create fundamental change,’ according to the AMS. The American Astronomical Society held color-coded Zoom meetings, one for white astronomers to ‘discuss direct actions to support Black astronomers,’ one for black astronomers to ‘talk, vent, connect, and hold space for each other,’ and one for ‘non-Black people of color to discuss direct actions to support Black astronomers.’”

“Harrumph,” they all harrumphed.

Then there’s the chairman of the earth and planetary sciences department at Cal-Davis, who announced an “anti-racist reading group” for faculty and students to help confront the “structural racism that pervades” the field of geology.

Mac Donald cites numerous examples like this from institutions large and small, and she finishes by asking the question few dare pose: “What if the racism explanation for ongoing disparities is wrong? What if racial economic and incarceration gaps cannot close without addressing personal responsibility and family culture — without a sea change in the attitudes that many inner-city black children bring with them to school regarding studying, paying attention in class, and respecting teachers, for example? What if the breakdown of the family is producing children with too little capacity to control their impulses and defer gratification?”

Answer: “The graduates of these ideologically monolithic universities will proceed further to dismantle our civilization in conformity to a lie.”

SOURCE






The Roots of America's Education Decline

The stage for today’s low-achievement, politically radicalized education system was set decades ago. It will take a long time to reverse the damage.

As somebody who is right in the middle of the “boomer” generation, I often hear or read my peers lamenting the good old days in education, before the radicalization of the late 1960s and 1970s ushered in disastrous changes.

What they fail to realize is that the K-12 education we received in the post-World War II era was not only already severely degraded, but it paved the way for the radicalization they decry. Here’s how it happened.

The founders of our country recognized that, for an electoral-based government to work, the voters had to be knowledgeable and capable of ethical reasoning. At first, voting was restricted to those citizens most likely to be educated: prosperous farmers, skilled craftsmen, professionals, and merchants.[1]

As the voting franchise spread to the lower classes, so did education. By the late 1800s, roughly 95 percent of American children either attended school or were privately tutored for at least a few months a year.[2]

The education they received was surprisingly standardized, given the huge geographic area and relatively slow communications in those days. This was because textbook publishers reprinted what had been previously successful.[3]. Plus, the goals of education were the same throughout the country: to prepare children for participation in democracy and the free-market economy as rapidly as possible.

This education emphasized basic numeracy and literacy and rote skills such as reciting and performing mental calculations. Instilling discipline and character were important. As one U.S. Commissioner of Education said, education was to elevate, not just train for employment. [4]

Reading textbooks were the main vehicles for this “elevation.” McGuffey’s Reader series was the best-known of these texts. Students using the texts read quality material from the start: Greek and Roman myths, Anderson’s and Grimm’s fairy tales, Bible passages, original source materials from the nation’s founding, and even Shakespeare. Not only did such texts encourage reading—after all, the material was interesting—but they helped to solidify a diverse and disparate people into a common nation with a common culture.

The system, though far from perfect, worked remarkably well. Though many students had only a few years of formal schooling, literacy spread, culture advanced, and the nation became a world leader in technical innovation.

But then the education schools appeared. In 1890, the first school of education at a major university was established at New York University. [5] Others soon followed, the most important being Columbia Teachers College. Previously, K-12 teachers had been given a couple of years of college at the so-called “normal schools” to make sure they knew the material they were going to teach and were then thrown into a classroom to learn how to teach on the fly. [6]

Teaching the “how” was the focus of these new education schools, and they developed theories that would supposedly make education more scientific and pragmatic. [7] Instead, during the first decades of the twentieth century, they initiated three waves of change that transformed the nation’s educational practices—and American education suffered.

Natural learning. The first was “natural learning” of the sort first proposed by French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 book Emile, or On Education.[8] Man was considered naturally good; society’s constraints inhibited a child’s natural curiosity and creativity; therefore it was considered best that the child be allowed to learn naturally according to his or her own interests. Education theorists tinkered with the concept throughout the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, education theorists such as John Dewey promoted “child-centered learning,” in which children directed their own educational paths. In addition, theorists advocated “constructivism,” which focused on complex internal mental processes instead of rote learning and results. Both of those theories can work, experts say, but they require an impractical amount of adult attention to be fostered on each child.[9] Without a very low (and very expensive) teacher-pupil ratio, the result is often pedagogical chaos.

Social Efficiency. The next wave came after World War I and was directed toward “social efficiency.”[10] It was intended to help students blend seamlessly into the new, industrialized America. Greater emphasis was placed on vocational training and “life skills.”

Educators assumed that only a small number of students could advance very far academically, so students were divided into tracks based on aptitude or socioeconomic backgrounds. Students were incorrectly assumed to be interested only in their own lives and neighborhoods, rather than in far-away places and previous eras. Elementary education was dumbed down; instead of the inspiring McGuffey’s Readers, reading was taught using simplistic texts such as the Elson Readers (“See Dick run. Run, Dick, run”). [11]

Collectivism. The third wave was collectivist; it arose during the Great Depression. Many of the leading educators of the time, such as Dewey, Harold Rugg, and George Counts (all of Columbia Teachers College), were openly socialists; many took tours of educational facilities in the Soviet Union and came away impressed with what they saw.[12]

These influential educators sought not to improve education but to effect a complete transformation of society. They envisioned a “Great Technology” in which social engineers would design a new society, with educators producing the mass understanding needed to make the endeavor successful.[13] During the 1930s, educators sought ways to shift the American mindset from one of individual responsibility to one of collectivism and to insert them into the curriculum.

The excesses of the educational theorists and social engineers—and the patriotism stoked by World War II and concerns over communism—brought on a backlash. One of the leading opponents to the collectivists was the Progressive Education Association, which wanted to return to the first wave of Progressive reforms, the child-centered education championed by Dewey. [14]

By the end of the Second World War, the extreme innovation of the first half of the 20th century ended, and American education reached a relatively stable consensus.

The consensus, however, had made elementary education less interesting and more confined. Conformity, rather than individualism, was emphasized. It was instrumentalist rather than educational in the fuller sense: it dismissed cultural knowledge while focusing on the acquisition of skills.

Traditional moral education gradually disappeared: teaching from the Bible in public schools was phased out. The curriculum placed the United States at the center of the universe, rather than as part of the continuum of Western civilization. The Greeks, Romans, and Middle Ages were largely gone from the elementary curriculum, replaced by a new emphasis on colonial America, Native Americans, and the founding of the nation.

That was the education that many Boomers recall fondly. Perhaps its major legacy is that its moral and cultural emptiness created a vacuum into which new mischief hatched by the schools of education would rush. Today, many of our public schools mix skill-building with political indoctrination and “safe spaces” patronizing, resulting in technically proficient but “woke” generations that favor socialism over capitalism, narcissism over decorum, and nihilism over reasoned discussion.

SOURCE




A Back-to-School Guide for Conservatives

Parents, legislators, taxpayers, and others footing the bill for college education might be interested in just what is in store for the upcoming academic year.

Since many college classes will be online, there is a chance to witness professors indoctrinating their students in real time. So, there’s a chance that some college faculty might change their behavior. To see recent examples of campus nonsense and indoctrination, visit the Campus Reform and College Fix websites.

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, warned congressional lawmakers “that Antifa is ‘winning’ and that much of academia, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is complicit in its success,” reported Campus Reform.

In his testimony before Congress Turley said:

To Antifa, people like me are the personification of the classical liberal view of free speech that perpetuates a system of oppression and abuse. I wish I could say that my view remains strongly implanted in our higher educational institutions. However, you are more likely to find public supporters for restricting free speech than you are to find defenders of free speech principles on many campuses.

The leftist bias at our colleges and universities has many harmful effects. A mathematics professor at University of California, Davis, faced considerable backlash over her opposition to the requirement for “diversity statements” from potential faculty.

Those seeking employment at the University of California, San Diego, are required to admit that “barriers” prevent women and minorities from full participation in campus life.

At American University, a history professor wrote a book calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment. A Rutgers University professor said: “Watching the Iowa Caucus is a sickening display of the overrepresentation of whiteness.”

A Williams College professor has advocated the inclusion of social justice in math textbooks. Students at Wayne State University are no longer required to take a single math course to graduate; however, they may soon be required to take a diversity course.

Maybe some students will be forced into sharing the vision of Laurie Rubel, a math education professor at Brooklyn College. She says the idea of cultural neutrality in math is a “myth,” and that asking whether 2 plus 2 equals 4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.”

Rubel tweeted: “Y’all must know that the idea that math is objective or neutral IS A MYTH.”

Math professors and academics at other universities, including Harvard and the University of Illinois, discussed the “Eurocentric” roots of American mathematics. As for me, I would like to see the proof, in any culture, that 2 plus 2 is something other than 4.

Rutgers University’s English department chairwoman, Rebecca Walkowitz, announced changes to the department’s graduate writing program emphasizing “social justice” and “critical grammar.”

Leonydus Johnson, a speech-language pathologist and libertarian activist, says Walkowitz’s changes make the assumption that minorities cannot understand traditional and grammatically correct English speech and writing, which is “insulting, patronizing, and in itself, extremely racist.”

Then there is the nonsense taught on college campuses about white privilege. The idea of white privilege doesn’t explain why several historically marginalized groups outperform whites today.

For example, Japanese Americans suffered under the Alien Land Law of 1913 and other racist, exclusionary laws legally preventing them from owning land and property in more than a dozen American states until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

During World War II, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned. However, by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans had almost disappeared.

Today, Japanese Americans outperform white Americans by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, and test scores, and have much lower incarceration rates.

According to Rav Arora, writing for the New York Post, several black immigrant groups such as Nigerians, Trinidadians, Tobagonians, Barbadians, and Ghanaians all “have a median household income well above the American average.”

We are left with the question whether the people handing out “white privilege” made a mistake. The other alternative is that Japanese Americans, Nigerians, Barbadians, Ghanaians, Trinidadians, and Tobagonians are really white Americans.

The bottom line is that more Americans need to pay attention to the miseducation of our youth and that miseducation is not limited to higher education.

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