I remember how it was -- JR
Racial-Justice War on Merit-Based Schools: It’s an Injustice Against Excellence, Critics Say
At a virtual town hall in Brooklyn about how the COVID-19 pandemic will change admissions to high-performing selective schools, New York City officials got a lecture – on systemic racism.
“Racism is foundational in all of our institutions, in our government, our economy, our health-care system, our legal system and our education system,” Ayanna Behin, president of a school district council, said at the June meeting. “It’s our recommendation that we prioritize the end of racial segregation in our schools.”
Behin’s comments reflect a racially charged debate in New York and across the country, invoking Jim Crow-era language to describe an education flashpoint more recent than old-fashioned enforced segregation. The conflict – influenced by critical race theory, the idea that racism is embedded in the structures of society – is over disparate racial and ethnic admissions, which critics deem so pernicious that even seemingly neutral yardsticks like grades and test scores reinforce them. These critics aim to integrate elite schools by removing the performance barriers that many white and Asian parents defend as objective measures of achievement.
In one recent conflict, the school superintendent in Fairfax County, Va., is pushing through changes to the competitive admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the nation’s top-ranked high school, over protests from Asian parents who say their kids are being penalized for working hard. At Lowell High School in San Francisco, a plan to drop merit-based admissions for next year created an uproar among parents who want to protect the school’s reputation for rigor.
In New York City, advocates are demanding more sweeping changes in the nation’s largest school district. They are calling for the end to admissions screening for almost 200 selective middle schools, or more than a third of the total. And a mayoral advisory panel has also urged the city to rid elementary schools of gifted and talented programs and erase the “gifted and talented” wording from the system.
In this polarizing battle, parents who support screening for accelerated education are tarred as racists on social media. Even moderate proposals to expand gifted and talented programs and make them more diverse face strong opposition.
“Our culture and economy thrive on excellence. When I think of New York, I think of artistic and intellectual excellence,” says Jonathan Plucker, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who focuses on making accelerated education more accessible to disadvantaged students. “And now, particularly in urban districts we are seeing a backlash, where the ideology is turning against excellence. We are institutionalizing anti-intellectualism, and that has long-term implications for us.”
With 1.1 million students, New York City has one of the nation’s most segregated school systems, a result of entrenched housing patterns and the proliferation of selective schools. Today Blacks and Latinos make up about two-thirds of public school students. But in more than half of city schools, they comprise over 80% of the students and sometimes beyond 90%.
In this system, achievement gaps have remained remarkably wide. In 2019, only about a third of Black and Latino students reached proficiency on math and English state tests for grades 3 through 8. That compares with roughly two-thirds for white and Asian kids. But the question of how to improve academic achievement for Blacks and Latinos defies easy answers.
Advocates say greater diversity is the remedy. They are pushing the city to replace test, grade and attendance-based admissions with a system designed to mix students of all backgrounds and academic abilities together. In such integrated schools, low achievers rise partly because of the influence of high achievers, who don’t regress academically, says Halley Potter, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who researches education policy. What’s more, students from different racial and ethnic groups build bonds at a time when America’s social fabric is fraying.
Parents fighting to keep selective schools in New York City reject the everybody-wins narrative as naive. Yiatin Chu, co-founder of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education (PLACE), says students have a wide range of abilities and lumping them together in classrooms makes it impossible for teachers to challenge all of them at once. A 2013 study, published in Gifted Child Quarterly, of five diverse elementary schools in several states found reading levels in classrooms ranging from about two years below grade level to about six years above it.
“I see a huge disparity in terms of abilities, and is it reasonable to expect our teachers in big classrooms to differentiate the teaching to really meet the needs of all students in that class?” says Chu, who has a child in public school. “The truth is no, they cannot.”
While advocates say academic research overwhelmingly shows the benefits of integrated schools, significant disagreement exists among scholars. Their findings vary widely because of the difficulty of isolating the effects of peers and schools on performance from other powerful influences like family and its socioeconomic status, says Eric Hanushek of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
David Armor of George Mason University carefully controlled for students’ backgrounds in a robust 2018 study. He found that the socioeconomic composition of schools had a negligible impact on results in math and reading tests in grades 3 through 8 across three states and over multiple years.
“New York City would be making a very big mistake by getting rid of its selective schools,” Armor says. “It will probably lose another chunk of its middle-class population. If they would just look at the data.”
The great schools betrayal
The Welsh government's cancellation of exams is another blow against education.
The decision by the Welsh Assembly to cancel GCSE and A-level exams next summer puts the future of the entire examination system in jeopardy. This is why the assembly’s decision must be strongly resisted by the other educational establishments across the UK.
As a result of the Covid lockdown, Scotland had already cancelled next year’s National 5 exams (equivalent to GCSEs) before the Welsh announcement. Scotland is currently still intending to run its Higher exams. GCSEs and A levels are also scheduled to run in England and Northern Ireland, though with a delayed start.
Boris Johnson’s official spokesman responded to the Welsh decision by stating Downing Street’s intention to press ahead with exams. In the new normal of lockdown Britain, however, the government has found it difficult to keep promises, and has been prone to embarrassing reversals.
At the start of the first lockdown in March, it was Scotland’s cancelling of this summer’s exams that pushed the English education secretary Gavin Williamson to follow suit, leading to the results debacle over what Johnson called a ‘mutant algorithm’.
Announcing the 2021 cancellations, Welsh education minister Kirsty Williams said it was impossible to guarantee a level playing field for exams due to the impact of Covid. She forgot to mention that it was not the virus that had caused the problem, but her own government’s decision to shut down national life in response to it.
Full details of the alternative to exams are yet to emerge, but Williams said some assessments will be externally set and marked, but not carried out under exam conditions. Instead they would be completed in the classroom under the supervision of the teacher, at a time of the school’s choosing.
In other words, they will be like old-style coursework, which was discredited in most subjects because it became a byword for wide-scale interference and manipulation of the system by teachers and schools.
These kinds of measures do nothing to alleviate the inequalities between individual students or between one school and another. Those disparities are caused by insufficient face-to-face contact with subject-specialist teachers, and a lack of educational expertise and IT resources in the home. The problem lies in the conditions in which pupils are educated during lockdowns, not the manner in which they are assessed.
Reducing the equality of assessment, by permitting an ill-defined level of unofficial assistance for pupils, won’t make the playing field more level. It will only make it even more unbalanced, patchy and chaotic than if exams were in place. Indeed, the new measures could well be interpreted by some teachers as a green light to intervene in certain pupils’ assessments on the grounds that this would be helping to redress inequity.
Certainly, the Welsh education minister seems to think so, given she dressed her exam-cancellation announcement in the language of student wellbeing. But does Williams really think that robbing students of exam certificates and a sense of achievement is going to improve their wellbeing? What will student morale and self-confidence be like at college or university, or in the job market and later in life, after continually having to compete against people who are judged differently because they have been through the refining fire of examinations?
Moreover, universities, such as Swansea, have issued statements indicating that prospective students should not feel disadvantaged by the Covid crisis. This raises the question as to why exams needed to be scrapped in the first place, if a general dip in results can be accounted for in flexible admissions procedures.
Meanwhile, there is now plenty of evidence indicating the disastrous effect of lockdown on education. As researcher Pedro de Bruyckere reports here and here, across the Western world, children lose around six months of education during a lockdown – longer than the length of a lockdown itself.
Separately, Ofsted has issued a report showing that children’s basic learning and development has regressed across a range of measures, as a result of lockdown. Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman has expressed fears that pupils will not return to school if they lose the structure of exams.
Yet despite the deleterious effect lockdowns have already had on children’s lives, and despite the Department for Education reporting a boost in pupil attendance after the half-term break, the teaching unions are stepping up their calls for the closure of schools. So the National Education Union (NEU) executive is considering a motion put forward by the union’s Greenwich branch for a national ballot on strike action if schools continue to remain open. And a petition on the parliament website calling for schools to be closed is heading for 500,000 signatories.
This is all taking place as evidence continues to mount that there is little to no transmission between children and their teachers, while the risk to ordinarily reasonably healthy working teachers is negligible anyway.
This calamitous state of affairs for education is why the Welsh government’s decision to cancel next year’s exams is so important. It goes beyond the technical issue of how pupil achievement and learning is to be measured. It is now about the very importance and meaning we as a society assign to education itself.
If the rest of the UK decides to follow Wales, there is a serious risk that exams may never return. This is already the desire of a host of educational bigwigs, including university vice-chancellors. The campaign group Rethinking Assessment has been lobbying for months to abolish exams and has received a sympathetic reception from the Chartered College of Teaching.
The closing of schools and the scrapping of exams, in the face of evidence both of the relative safety of schools and the devastating effect on young people’s education, sends a powerful signal that the very institutions and people supposed to lead education are not doing so. Instead of defending it, they are giving up on it.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/13/the-great-schools-betrayal/
Berkeley Professor Urges Followers To Steal, Burn Book On Trans ‘Craze Seducing Our Daughters’A transgender professor at the University of California, Berkeley, urged followers Saturday to steal and burn a book detailing an investigation into transgenderism trends.
Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” has sparked controversy and gained the attention of media pundits such as Joe Rogan since it was published in June.
As recently as Friday, Target apologized for removing the book from its shelves after a Twitter user complained that the book was “transphobic.”
A transgender professor at the University of California at Berkeley urged followers Saturday to steal and burn a book detailing an investigation into transgenderism trends.
“Since some ppl have misunderstood my tone, and censorship is an important matter and as a public educator I have a duty to be precise, let me clarify,” Berkeley associate professor Grace Lavery tweeted Saturday. “I do NOT advocate defacing library books. I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.”
“Plz make sure you use a safe pyre, and that you have an extinguisher to hand,” Lavery continued. “Be safe, when you are burning books. Remember: all you’re doing is removing a commodity from circulation—much as one might destroy a contaminated crop, or take action if a distributor failed to do so.”
Lavery said in a later tweet that the tweets were jokes but added that “the sort of moral panic that book burning elicits, despite never happening, is weird.”
“I don’t think books are a special type of commodity,” Lavery added. “For example: the idea of burning a laptop doesn’t seem to elicit the same moral horror. but it’s the same principle—disposing of a copy, not the original. The horror seems to derive from the idea that a book represents unalienated labor—but of course, it doesn’t.”
In response to a request for comment, the associate professor referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to a tweet thread explaining the book burning comments.
“If you think I was sincerely encouraging people to burn books, I suggest you look around and see how many books were actually burned,” one of Lavery’s tweets said. “Either my words weren’t taken seriously bc I was misunderstood, or they were meant not to be taken seriously. You can figure this out yourselves.”
The associate professor also called the title of Shrier’s book “fascist,” and said that “the burning of the official texts of the ruling class might well be considered an act of popular liberation.”
https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/15/berkeley-professor-burn-book-trans-abigail-shrier/
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
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http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
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http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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