I remember how it was -- JR
Black Education Matters
Most Americans would probably be shocked and angry if they knew all the dirty tricks used to sabotage charter schools that are successfully educating low-income minority children.
This is not "systemic racism." It is plain old selfishness on the part of traditional public school officials and teachers unions protecting their own vested interests.
Most of us might see charter schools that succeed where traditional public schools have failed as welcome news, especially in minority communities where there is so much bad news.
But, when there are a million public school students on waiting lists to get into charter schools nationwide, that amounts to many billions of dollars a year that traditional public schools would lose, if all those students could actually transfer. That would represent a lot of jobs lost in traditional public schools. It would also represent a lot of union dues lost, because most charter school teachers do not belong to a union. The success of many charter schools is definitely unwelcome news to both traditional public school officials and teachers unions.
The law gives parents the right to transfer their children from traditional public schools to charter schools. But how many can actually exercise that right depends on how much capacity the charter schools have. All across the country, traditional public school officials and teachers unions do all they can to keep charter schools from expanding their capacity.
In many states, there is simply a law putting an arbitrary numerical limit on how many charter schools will be permitted. It doesn't matter whether the charter schools are good, bad or indifferent. Or whether the traditional public schools are good, bad or indifferent.
In other words, this is not about the quality of education for students. It is about protecting traditional public schools from a mass exodus of the students they have failed to educate.
A numerical limit to the number of charter schools is not enough by itself. After all, existing charter schools could expand their capacity. But, for that, they would need more classrooms -- and classrooms and school buildings are controlled by existing public school officials.
Even in cities where many school buildings have been completely vacant for years, charter schools have been prevented from using those buildings, by various tricks.
Some of these buildings have been sold, with explicit provisos in the deeds that they cannot subsequently be used again as schools, but only for residential or other purposes.
Some school officials have openly admitted that they are trying to keep those buildings from falling into the hands of charter schools. In Milwaukee, this was spelled out officially. In Detroit, a school board member said, "there is no way we should be sustaining our competition."
Similar policies have been followed in Chicago, Washington, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and elsewhere. Some vacant school buildings have simply been demolished, making sure they cannot be used by charter schools.
These are just some of the tactics used against charter schools by traditional public school authorities, who constantly declare their devotion to the students. But actions speak much louder than words.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has denounced and obstructed charter schools repeatedly. Yet, when he ran for mayor in 2013, a poll showed that 96% of black voters favored him.
This is what can happen when the vast majority of black votes automatically go to one party. Under these conditions, neither party has much incentive to serve black interests.
This year, Joe Biden told a black man that, if he didn't vote for him, he wasn't black. How is that for taking the black vote for granted? Both Vice President Biden and Senator Kamala Harris have declared their support for teachers unions.
Teachers unions supply millions of votes and millions of dollars to politicians, mostly Democrats. They don't do that automatically, but require politicians to do something in return.
Unless black voters take the same attitude, their interests -- and the future of their children -- will be sacrificed for the political support of teachers unions.
This year the Republicans are making an effort to get more black votes. Record high average incomes for blacks and record low unemployment rates for blacks are part of this administration's record. But support for charter schools, including awarding more than $9 million to the Success Academy schools in Harlem and other minority communities may be even more important for the future.
Everything depends on how well Republicans inform black voters and how receptive those voters are to breaking their old voting habits.
https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2020/10/30/black-education-matters-n2579068
Joe Biden’s Coming War on Education ChoiceTwo entirely different visions for America are on the ballot this November, espoused by two candidates who share not a single floor tile of common ground on the issues. As President Trump firmly embraces less government activism and a thriving free market, Joe Biden has surrendered to the far left wing of his party after decades as a left-leaning moderate. In this third quest for the presidency, Joe has shown just how malleable his principles have become.
Few issues, however, highlight Biden’s unparalleled duplicity so much as school choice, an idea he once passionately embraced as critical to helping the poor - minorities especially - escape the cycle of poverty and government dependency. In 1997, Biden pleaded from the well of the Senate, “Where the public schools are abysmal or dysfunctional or not working and where most of the children have no way out, it is legitimate to ask what would happen to the public schools with increased competition from private schools. Is it not possible that giving poor kids a way out will force the public schools to improve…”
Today Biden is the Democrat presidential nominee and therefore a loyal puppet of the powerful National Education Association (NEA) teachers union that calls the party’s shots on education. Despite the overwhelming popularity of school choice, including its 78 percent support among black voters, Biden now opposes vouchers, charter schools, or any reform that would give poor kids “a way out.”
Biden’s lockdown of educational opportunities is a deliberate confrontation with the efforts of President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who have fought to expand school choice through federal grants, scholarship programs, and legislation. DeVos refers to school choice as a “matter of justice” and backs that up by advocating compassionate policies to rescue the victims of the education establishment’s massive failures. It is a position that no fair person could oppose; but no one claims the NEA or Democrats are fair. Biden’s children benefited from attending private schools, underscoring the hypocrisy of his position that willfully condemns poor children stuck in dysfunctional classrooms to a bleak future.
Just as troublesome, Biden has adopted his party’s hostile position on choice in higher education as well. For years Democrats and their allies in the elitist education establishment have attempted to hijack government agencies ranging from the IRS to Veterans Administration (VA) to delegitimize and deny accreditation to hundreds of career-oriented, for-profit and not-for-profit colleges that are helping America fill its deficit of skilled workers. Institutions such as ECPI University, Grand Canyon University, the University of Phoenix, Full Sail University, and many other highly valued and successful institutions would be devastated by the Democrats’ legislative and regulatory assault on colleges that don’t fit the traditional four-year mold.
Active duty military personnel and veterans would see their ability to apply GI Bill tuition assistance to the school of their choice greatly restricted. Biden would alter the 90-10 rule that sets the formula for what percentage of federal student aid career-oriented schools can accept. Curtailing a benefit our veterans have earned is not only an egregious slap at our men and women in uniform, but will likely lead to dozens of schools closing while others will have to raise tuition to make up the difference.
Biden has pledged to fire DeVos “day one” in office and reverse the unprecedented work she has accomplished in expanding education options. He would follow the advice of highly-paid, ultra-left education activists Bob Shireman and David Halperin, former Clinton and Obama advisors, who routinely disparage private college education with jaded "research" that never acknowledges the quality and accomplishments of dozens of career-oriented colleges. Shireman and Halperin happily do the dirty work of the entrenched education establishment to promote policies designed to shut down college options, such as through the Gainful Employment Rule (GER). The GER empowers federal bureaucrats to police school degree programs based on arbitrary salaries its students earn, a rule totally inapplicable at traditional four-year state schools or elite Ivy League universities.
Biden’s education reforms would ignore the numerous problems plaguing traditional four-year colleges and universities, such as student debt, admissions scandals, poor graduation rates and tenure, and instead seek new ways to harass career-oriented universities with oppressive rules and regulatory oversight. A Biden administration will do nothing about campus speech codes, growing levels of ideological intolerance, or lack of due process that has turned what should be a time of open-minded exploration for college students into an exercise in oppressive left-wing indoctrination.
Joe Biden frequently jokes that his wife Jill is a teacher, and that he has to answer to her on education policy. But Biden’s plan to kill school choice from grade school through to college is no joke, and no laughing matter. Biden is the candidate of the NEA and its cohorts in the education establishment that seek a complete government monopoly on policy and iron grip on the distribution of education funding. His goal is to stop choice across the board, and end the innovations that threaten the traditional four-year college model. He will take us backwards, and hurt millions of students at every age level in the bargain.
A while back on our sister site, Townhall, I noted that I’d really rather my son not attend college. I’d actually prefer him to go to trade school or something of that sort. Of course, he went to college. For what he ended up majoring in, accounting, there really isn’t a viable option for him unless he went to college.
However, some people have wondered just what the hell was wrong with me and why so many others on the right are down on colleges.
They don’t seem to understand that colleges have a deep progressive bias. They’re anti-gun and anti-freedom.
Don’t believe me? Well, explain this one, then.
On the school’s website, Brandeis University in Massachusetts highlighted a song inspired by the gun debate.
Written by Professor of Music Eric Chasalow and titled “Ghost of John William, Chasalow explained on the website that he “wrote the song out of a deep sense of frustration and exhaustion.”
“It is crystal clear that gun rights and white supremacy are intertwined,” claimed Chasalow in the description on the school’s website. “The deeply entrenched, well-financed gun-rights movement is, at its core, a fear-driven, reactionary institution for maintaining our racist and classist power-structure.”
Now, understand that Chasalow has a right to believe anything he wants. His academic freedom means that making a song like this shouldn’t impact his job. I’m fine with all that.
My problem is that Brandeis University went beyond permitting this and entered into the realm of glorifying it. It’s a blatantly political message that many of their students and alumni vehemently disagree with, but Brandeis simply doesn’t care.
This, however, isn’t unusual. It’s typical.
Many, if not most, pro-gun students find themselves in a hostile environment. A study released earlier this month notes that 72 percent of conservative college students self-censor themselves out of fear. One of the issues people censor themselves on is their support for gun rights. Colleges and universities are hostile toward even the idea of pro-gun students.
In fact, even the mere photograph of a student holding a firearm has been enough to trigger meltdowns.
Yet they don’t even blink about promoting the opposite side, glorifying it with every fiber of their being. Now, if you can’t see the hypocritical nature of what’s going on, then your head is completely stuck in the sand.
The average American university isn’t nearly as interested in educating our young people on how to think, but what to think. When my son can come home and tell me which teachers are commies or SJWs while taking no classes in politics, there’s a problem. When students can be punished for their lawful actions with firearms away from campus and yet the colleges will celebrate anti-gun efforts, it’s kind of hard to think they’re anything but pushing an agenda.
Remember that David Hogg was turned down at every college he applied to before his activism kicked into gear. Afterward, he got into Harvard. The Ivy League schools pretend they’re the elite, that they only take the best, yet they jumped at the chance to take a state-college reject because he held the right opinions about guns.
Yeah, the reason so many pro-gun folks are down on colleges is an absolute and total mystery, ain’t it?
Australia: In the case of Peter Ridd, we’ll soon learn whether academic freedom matters
Prof. Ridd was critical of alarmist utterances about the Barrier Reef coming from his university colleagues
This week there were whoops of delight from Republicans over the appointment of conservative lawyer Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court. It will, they say, buttress democracy for decades to come. The Democrats were inconsolable, marking the rushed appointment as the end of democracy. The divide is fundamental: is it the role of America’s highest court to interpret law in humble deference to what the law says, or to change the law to suit social engineers who have grown impatient with the democratic process?
Everyone agrees on one thing: judges on the US Supreme Court can alter the country in profound ways.
By the way, two new judges were appointed to Australia’s High Court this week, although few will know their names. For the record, Simon Steward from Melbourne and Jacqueline Gleeson from Sydney, both former Federal Court judges and both in their early 50s, will serve long stints on our most influential court until they reach the mandatory retirement age of 70. Steward will join the court in December, and Gleeson, the daughter of former chief justice Murray Gleeson, will take up her seat in March next year.
Both judges will be watched closely by those who understand that the High Court can fundamentally change the direction of our country, too. Eighty per cent of its cases are mundane, having little impact on the country. The other 20 cent are the Big Bang cases. Through the intersection of law, politics and values, they can cause seismic shifts throughout the country.
Will Steward and Gleeson become roaming judicial adventurers making decisions like philosopher kings rather than humble judges? There are no guarantees. After all, the court’s most recent appointment, and disappointment, is Justice James Edelman. Part of the recent 4-3 majority decision in Love v The Commonwealth, along with fellow justices Michelle Gordon, Geoffrey Nettle and Virginia Bell, Edelman dreamt up a legally bogus racial privilege to exclude two men from the normal application of our non-citizens laws.
Chief Justice Susan Kiefel’s scathing rebuke of the majority should be inscribed somewhere along the hallowed halls of the High Court for the newcomers.
“Implications are not devised by the judiciary,” Kiefel said, because they are “antithetical to the judicial function since they involve an appeal to the personal philosophy or preferences of judges”.
The departure of Nettle and Bell means that, without the support from the new appointees, Edelman and Gordon might be relegated to minority dissents the next time they choose to cook up propositions to suit their preferred outcomes, and pronounce them as the law of the land.
All eyes will be on the newest judges especially if the High Court decides to hear the case involving physics professor Peter Ridd. In August, Ridd lodged a 13-page application for special leave to appeal a 2018 Federal Court decision that upheld his sacking by James Cook University. On Thursday, the High Court agreed to hear oral arguments about special leave in February next year. This is interesting. The vast majority of applications are rejected “on the papers” — in other words without an oral hearing.
Next, the High Court will decide if the Ridd case is sufficiently important to warrant judgment from the nation’s highest court. There is, as former High Court judge Michael Kirby once said, no point pretending that it is a logical or scientific process. In other words, it’s down to whether the court finds a matter interesting. The test is subjective, their decision unappealable.
For the punters, the raw odds are about one in 10: last year, of a total of 445 special leave applications, the court granted leave in 52 cases.
Insiders give Ridd a 50-50 chance of making it over the next hurdle. The case, after all, is not just about the “substantial injustice” of JCU’s termination of Ridd’s career, claiming he acted in an uncollegial manner in breach of the university’s vaguely drafted code of conduct when he raised questions about the quality of climate research at JCU.
If the High Court grants Ridd special leave to appeal, the court’s final determination is likely to reverberate across the country. Many universities have intellectual freedom clauses in their enterprise agreements with academics. And most universities have ambiguously drafted codes of conduct that could be used to restrict these same intellectual freedom clauses. Where does that leave academic freedom in this country?
Ridd’s case is being led by Melbourne QC Stuart Wood, while JCU has Bret Walker SC in its corner. Ridd’s claim for special leave to appeal includes a powerful observation from legal scholar Ronald Dworkin that “any invasion of academic freedom is not only harmful in itself, but also makes future invasions more likely”.
There is another harm to society. If JCU’s infringement of academic freedom is allowed to stand, it will have a chilling effect on other academics. We will never know what research escapes rigorous testing by academics who do not want to jeopardise their jobs.
The High Court is being asked to rule on the core mission of a university: is it, first and foremost, to defend academic freedom and further research, to seek the truth by challenging orthodoxies that can become dangerously inaccurate over time?
If, on the other hand, universities are allowed to sack academics in circumstances similar to Ridd, with obvious impacts for the quality of research and learning, then Australians are entitled to confirmation of this dystopian brave new world at Australian universities from our highest court.
And dystopian it certainly is. Along with making 17 findings against Ridd, two speech directions and five confidentiality directions (even prohibiting him at one stage from speaking with his wife about the matter), JCU also issued a “no satire” direction against Ridd demanding he not make fun of the disciplinary proceedings.
No satire? It’s hard not to make fun of a taxpayer-funded university that censures, then sacks, a respected professor of physics, and employee of 27 years, a man ranked in the top 5 per cent of researchers globally for raising questions about the quality of climate science research at the Great Barrier Reef.
Only this week, this report slipped under the ABC News’s Armageddon radar: “Researchers have found a new reef that is as tall as a skyscraper in the waters off Cape York in north Queensland.” As Ridd told Inquirer this week, “we are constantly learning new, and incredible things about the reef”.
The shoddy, disproportionate treatment of the physics professor by JCU has become the centrifugal force to better protect academic freedom at universities, not just via the courts, but by parliament too.
Ridd’s sacking led Education Minister Dan Tehan to initiate a review into free speech and academic freedom at Australian universities in 2019 by Robert French. Nothing had been done prior to Tehan taking the portfolio. This week, Tehan tabled the Higher Education Support Amendment (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2020, which gives effect to legislative changes suggested by the former chief justice. The bill requires that universities commit to “academic freedom” — as defined by French — in return for getting registration, and taxpayer funds.
These are indeed interesting times for academic freedom, with a review under way by Professor Sally Walker into the implementation by universities of the model code on academic freedom also recommended by French.
The model code is intended to operate as an umbrella-like standard to fall over all university policies, codes, pronouncements, etc. If a particular enterprise agreement has a broader definition of academic freedom, that is great for academics at that university. If an EA offers less protection than French’s model code, then that model code will lift the standard of academic freedom protections. That will be a terrific boost for academic freedom across the country because, as experts who have trawled through EAs of Australian universities told Inquirer this week, none of the EAs offer more protection than French’s model code.
When Walker’s review is completed late next month, we will discover which vice-chancellors have dragged the chain, more cowardly corporatist controllers than defenders of robust intellectual excellence.
Their incalcitrant approach to academic freedom should firm up the minister’s resolve to stop the rot. Tehan’s next move might be to legislate that every university implement the full French model code as a requirement of university registration. Even if not legislated, the minister has a backdoor way to secure the same outcome. Under section 136 of Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act, Tehan can direct the university regulator to use the model code when enforcing the educational standards to Australian universities. With oversight from Senate Estimates, this could well transform TESQA, known as a wet-lettuce regulator, into a genuine guardian of university excellence acting in the best interest of academics, students, taxpayers and the country.
In other words, with the model code in place, either by law or ministerial directive, what happened to Ridd can never happen again. That, of course, will not help the unassuming, but determined, professor. His final appeal for justice, and common sense, rests with the High Court next year, when at least one new judge, maybe two, will be on the bench. No wonder we will be watching closely.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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