State Department to require Chinese Confucius Institutes to register as foreign agents

The U.S. State Department could move as early as Thursday to announce that Chinese “Confucius institutes” will be required to register as foreign agents, Bloomberg reported.

Confucius institutes are Chinese government-funded centers on college campuses in the U.S. and throughout the world, whose stated aim is to promote knowledge of Chinese language and culture. However, U.S. agencies and elected officials have warned that the institutes serve as propaganda centers used by China to project soft power abroad.

The State Department’s reported decision would label the institutes as “substantially owned or effectively controlled” by a foreign entity. Earlier this year, the State Department applied the same designation to various Chinese state media outlets, including the People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and China Global Television Network.

There are roughly 100 Confucius institutes currently operating in the U.S., some of which have closed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The national leadership of U.S. college Republicans and Democrats have called for all such institutes to be closed, citing the Chinese government’s human rights abuses.

The institutes are one aspect of what U.S. officials see as a Chinese campaign of influence at American universities. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee in May launched a probe of foreign funding at American universities, with ranking member Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) saying “We cannot allow a dangerous communist regime to buy access to our institutions of higher education, plain and simple.” A separate probe by the Department of Education has uncovered at least $6 billion in unreported donations to various universities from foreign governments.

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University of Pittsburgh students required to take "Anti-Black Racism: History, Ideology, and Resistance"

First-year Pitt students will be required to take an anti-racism course starting this fall.

The one-credit online course — Anti-Black Racism: History, Ideology, and Resistance — was created in the wake of the police killings and Black Lives Matter protests.

In a letter, Chancellor Patrick Gallagher says Pitt offers “tangible benefits to the places we call home,” but “not all of our neighbors have benefited equally from our success.”

“In Pittsburgh, large racial and ethnic disparities persist in terms of family wealth, health and education. These divides are particularly daunting in the city’s historically Black neighborhoods. As an anchor institution, we have a commitment to connecting all of our neighbors—including those within our university’s shadow—to these opportunities,” he writes.

He says the university is taking steps towards creating a more inclusive campus environment, and creating the anti-racism course is one of those actions.

It will be mandatory for full-time first-year students. You can learn more about the course on Pitt’s website.

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Homeschooling rate doubles as school satisfaction plummets (Foundation for Economic Education)

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Restorative Justice Is Unfair to Students Who Want to Learn

Andrew Pollack, a parent whose daughter was shot in the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School attack in Florida, spoke to the Republican National Convention on August 24 about the role that restorative justice played in causing local school leaders to ignore the frequent threats from the gunman. Pollack pointed to the fact that the Biden-Harris team promises in its pact with the Sanders group in the Democratic party to bring back restorative justice as a federally promoted practice.

This practice began in the criminal justice sector during the 1970s and emphasized reconciliation between victims and nonviolent offenders instead of punishment. The Obama administration started pushing for restorative justice practices in schools a decade ago in response to statistics showing that African-American and Hispanic students were suspended and expelled at higher rates than other students.

Rather than investigate specific school districts, the U.S. Department of Education concluded in 2011 that “statistically disparate results create a presumption of discrimination.” In a subsequent “Dear Colleague Letter,” the department discouraged school districts from “relying on suspensions and expulsions” to maintain safe school environments and urged them to develop “alternative disciplinary approaches such as restorative justice.”

This policy effectively institutionalized the notion that schools must sacrifice security to achieve equity, endangering students and teachers alike. St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) is a case in point.

SPPS began limiting suspensions and expulsions and focused instead on what it considered teachers’ “inherent bias” in 2011. In collaboration with the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers (SPFT), the district began using restorative justice practices in 2016 and expanded them two years later. One integral practice is the use of restorative “circles,” which are teacher-led meetings where students discuss how a student’s misbehavior has affected them and how to rectify it.

Over the next several years, violent incidents at SPPS made headlines, including brutal attacks on teachers, who feared retribution if they criticized the new discipline policies.

Despite such results, the union demanded continued expansion of restorative justice practices, including the hiring of a “a full-time circle keeper.” Yet it dropped the requirement that schools “identify an evidence-informed and/or research-based restorative practice model”—perhaps because such models are almost nonexistent.

Not only does none of SPPS’s annual restorative justice reports provide objective quantitative data to evaluate its programs’ effects on school safety, but such evaluations are rare for any school-district program. U.S. civil rights commissioner Michael Yaki admitted as much during the Obama administration. While he noted that “culture-specific interventions” such as restorative justice might very well help reduce racially disparate discipline rates, Yaki cautioned that “there is little evidence-based research today on how” to do so and that “the research is still too thin.”

There is still little evidence that restorative justice has mitigated racially disparate discipline rates, and the preponderance of credible research finds negative effects. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Max Eden has summarized the data from several large districts throughout the country showing that student achievement declines, teachers are discontented, and students feel unsafe at school.

Lenient interventions such as restorative justice circles may help improve behavior for some first-time, nonviolent students, but leniency toward repeated violent behavior puts everyone at risk. Just ask Pollack, who spoke at the Republican convention and is the co-author with Eden of Why Meadow Died. Pollack in the book blames not only the shooter, but also the Broward County school district’s restorative justice program and what he calls a “culture of pathological unaccountability.” Behavior “doesn’t magically get better,” Pollack points out, when you decide to “not punish mischief.” What happens is that matters “get worse for students and teachers” but “look better on paper for bureaucrats and activists.” This, in turn, leads to “a thousand tragedies a day” that we never learn of. And it means that troubled children just “slip through the cracks.”

In a perverse irony, many of the minority students whom restorative justice practices were supposed to help are actually at greater risk. Classrooms are more chaotic, and schools are more dangerous because students realize that teachers are virtually powerless to impose discipline. When students feel unsafe, they may shut down or act out—making a bad situation even worse.

Scary schools devoid of serious penalties for violent behavior are neither what students need nor what parents want for their children—no matter how many “healing circles” schools hold.

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The university degrees that almost guarantee you a job, and the ones where you're wasting your fees

It may not be among the most prominent of our tertiary institutions - but Australian Catholic University has come out top in a new survey measuring how readily graduates find jobs.

The 2020 Graduate Outcomes Survey assessed students who finished their studies in 2017 from 79 different institutions.

The survey, which this year had the highest participation rate since it started in 2016, measures not only which institutions did best, but which degrees.

'Three years after graduation, there has been substantial improvement in full-time employment rates across universities so that all universities have full-time employment rates for undergraduates above 81 per cent,' the study said.

Twelve of the universities full-time employment rates increased by 20 per cent over the three-year period.

The courses with the highest employment rates mid-term are:

Medicine - 97.3 per cent
Engineering - 95.4 per cent
Computing and information systems - 92.9 per cent

The courses with the lowest employment rates short-term are:

Science and mathematics -  61.6 per cent
Agriculture and environment studies - 69.2 per cent
Health services and support - 73 per cent

The Australian Catholic University (ACU) has the best employment rate for undergraduates three years after they finish university with 95.5 per cent of students now in full-time jobs.

Next came Australian National University and the nearby University of Canberra.

As well as graduates, ACU also took out the top spot for those who completed their postgraduate studies in 2017.

On the postgraduate score, ACU was top, followed by Federation University Australia and The University of Notre Dame Australia.

In terms of fields of study, medicine graduates performed best, with 97.3 of those with a medical degree being employed three years after completing their course.

Engineering fared almost as well at 96.3 per cent, while mathematics was the third best degree in terms of medium-term employability.

But it was not all good news for STEM graduates, with short-term employability - classed as those in work a year after graduation - being lowest for biology, science technology and general science and mathematics.

The survey found average pay for graduates had risen only marginally when accounting for inflation, from $67,000 in 2016 to $75,000 in 2020.

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