Friday, October 30, 2020



The future of higher education will be determined on Election Day

A Leftist view

Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and their parties, have starkly different visions for colleges and universities, and for students.

Virtually everything that matters seems to be on the ballot this year, from the economy to democracy to “the soul of the nation.” And there’s a real choice, since the two major-party candidates for president have presented two starkly divergent visions for all of those things. But voters are also casting their ballots for another important issue that could shape the country for generations to come: the future of higher education.

“We’re about to see the beginning of a transformation of higher education in America,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, a research professor and director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “COVID is just the kickoff.” Indeed, the current economic and public health crises have caused a great deal of financial strain on many colleges and universities across the country. Some institutions will not survive; others will have to deal with issues that have been brewing below the surface for a while: costs and funding, student loan debt, transparency, and more.

For the many crises colleges and universities are facing, a Biden presidency — and a Democrat-controlled Senate — would be a step in the right direction. The most immediate challenge for institutions of higher learning is making it to the other side of the pandemic. And as colleges face budget cuts from their state governments, Republicans are stalling on a second coronavirus relief package that would send crucial federal aid to states for these institutions. The GOP’s unwillingness to act, and President Trump’s inability to reach a deal, is putting colleges and universities at risk of shutting down.

As for students, if all its elements are passed, Joe Biden’s plan to make colleges more affordable, for example, would increase access to higher learning, ease student loan debt, and help stimulate the economy in the long run by creating a more highly educated workforce. Trump’s plan, on the other hand, would repeal regulations around for-profit colleges, many of which take advantage of poor and vulnerable populations, and make it harder for low-income students to pursue higher education. This editorial board has already endorsed Joe Biden for president; the issue of higher education underscores why.

Trump did sign a bill that cemented funding for historically Black colleges and universities. But while that funding helped alleviate some financial woes for HBCUs, it simply isn’t enough in the long term. (It should also be noted that while Trump often touts his record on HBCUs as evidence that he’s “done more for the Black community than any other president,” annual federal funding for HBCUs actually peaked under the Obama administration.) In contrast, Biden has proposed tuition-free access to HBCUs for families making under $125,000 a year, and forgiving student loan debt to graduates of these institutions.

Biden could push through some of his agenda, even with a Republican-controlled Congress; there is some bipartisan interest in higher-education reform. But it’s clear that he could get far more done if Democrats hold the House in the coming election and win the Senate. Senate Republicans have proposed only $29 billion for colleges and universities to navigate the economic crisis — a figure that advocates have called “woefully inadequate” — while Senate Democrats have proposed $132 billion. That difference in the scale of federal aid would have dramatic consequences for the trajectory of many of these institutions. Control of the Senate could also have implications for undocumented students, who Senate Democrats want to make eligible for emergency grants, a proposal that Republicans have so far rejected.

Many Republicans also believe that the best way to handle the issue of student debt is to let the market take care of it. “What is so awful about that is that it will have predictive effects by class and race,” Carnevale said.

Biden’s student debt plans are far from perfect. While they help ease debt in the long term by making college more affordable, they don’t alleviate the biggest strains on most graduates who already have loans. But a Democratic Congress could push a President Biden further.

Higher education, like so many other industries, is facing a critical moment. Whatever policies will be enacted in the coming years will be consequential for the future of the economy, people’s day-to-day lives, and the pursuit of scholarship for intellectual enrichment. Democrats and Republicans are offering two very different visions, and in the next week, voters will decide which path to take. The choice is clear.

What Happened When a High School Offered a PragerU Video

As far as HuffPost and the rest of the American left are concerned, no non-left-wing idea should be allowed to enter an American school. Not even for five minutes.

This past month, Maumee High School, a high school near Toledo, Ohio, offered its students a way to receive some extracurricular credit. In the words of the Maumee City Schools administration office -- released before the HuffPost-induced uproar:

"Students were offered an extra credit assignment intended to challenge their critical thinking skills ... A second option in the extra credit assignment asked students to view a video from a conservative website, analyze it and explain what they may have learned from it, and how it may have challenged or supported their own beliefs. ...

"We believe that students deserve a balanced presentation of materials and we support our educators in using a variety of instructional tools and materials in their teaching, expecting them to always exercise good judgement."

In an open and liberal society, the stated aims of Maumee High School are not only not controversial but also laudable. They are exactly what good parents and educators would want for students.

So, who finds these aims revolting? Only an anti-liberal ideology. Namely, the left.

It all started with one -- yes, one -- parent. She so objected to a PragerU video being offered as a conservative option that she withdrew her child from the class. And then she contacted HuffPost.

Thus began a national left-wing uproar over students being offered extra credit if they chose to view a five-minute conservative video.

The HuffPost headline: "Videos From Right-Wing Site That Preaches 'The Left Ruins Everything' Assigned In Ohio School."

A few observations about the headline:

First, on the left, everything nonleft is "right-wing." The reason? Because "conservative" is not inflammatory enough.

Second, the video "The Left Ruins Everything" was never "assigned." No specific video was assigned.

Third, the HuffPost writer, Rebecca Klein, chose the most controversial title she could find out of approximately 450 PragerU videos.

Fourth, the video makes clear that it is about leftism, not liberalism.

Fifth, ironically, this whole story validates the video: Look at what the left is doing to schools, to liberal education and to open inquiry.

As the HuffPost itself reported:

"Andrea Cutway, the mother of 16-year-old student Avery Lewis, brought the assignment to the attention of Maumee City Schools administrators and immediately pulled her daughter out of the class. ... Lewis was immediately alarmed when she started her extra credit assignment last week. The assignment asked her to watch PragerU videos and then answer questions about how the videos challenged her beliefs. ... Cutway, Lewis' mother, was similarly shocked when her daughter showed her the assignment. ... 'It's ALT RIGHT propaganda,' Cutway said in the email to the school principal.

"Lewis met with school administrators soon after to discuss the issue. Together, they came up with a solution -- that the student could also include viewpoints from the opposite side, Cutway said.

"For Cutway, though, this ignored the larger issue -- that PragerU videos be assigned at all and that school administrators did not see a problem (italics added) ...

"'When I talked to the principal and vice principal, they acted like this was just another assignment,' said Cutway, who works as a juvenile parole officer for the state. ... 'This really is some scary stuff,' Cutway said of PragerU. 'I do feel like they have found a way to get into the public school system.'"

As a result of the HuffPost article, mainstream media went nuts, contemplating the possibility that American students might watch five minutes of non-left thought.

NBC TV in Toledo tweeted:

"HuffPost reports that a Maumee High School class is offering students extra credit for viewing videos from a right-wing source. Are you a Maumee parent? How would you feel about this?"

ABC TV in Toledo headlined:

"Maumee parent raises concerns over controversial assignment."

And the station broadcast a report on "Maumee High School alumni petition politics in the classroom" about more than 200 alumni objecting to the use of any PragerU video. The broadcast featured a 2001 graduate of the school, Catherine Wood, the organizer of the petition, who told the ABC-TV station, PragerU videos "kind of deny the humanity of many groups of students: people of color, women, LGBTQ members."

Catherine Wood lied. There is nothing in any PragerU video that demeans or in any way "denies the humanity" of people of color, women or LGBTQ members. Not to mention that we have women, people of color and gays presenting videos. Her libel exemplifies something I have said all my life: Truth is not a left-wing value.

But left-wing lies often work. Within days, the inevitable took place. As The Toledo Blade headlined: "Maumee Removes Conservative Content From Class Syllabus."

Amy Coney Barrett's Memphis Liberal Arts College Fostered Diversity in Views

All other eight justices on the court have Ivy League law school degrees on their walls, but Barrett's is from Notre Dame, the current capital of conservative Catholic academia, where she also served as a professor before being tapped for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals by President Donald Trump.

The White House touted Barrett's Notre Dame pedigree in appointing her, but it also bragged about her undergraduate alma mater, Rhodes College, with a verbal faux pas few people likely caught.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called Barrett "a Rhodes scholar," which was inaccurate, as that moniker applies to a select group of students from around the country chosen for post-graduate study at England's Oxford University.

But Barrett's undergraduate connection bears more examination.

A tiny college of about 1,200 people when she attended in the early 1990s, the liberal arts school in midtown Memphis has turned out to be a cradle of sorts for today's political leaders.

For a school that size and of that little renown, merely producing a single Supreme Court justice would be notable, which it did with Justice Abe Fortas, who graduated when it was called Southwestern at Memphis in 1930 and appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965, resigning just four years later amid a scandal.

By reference, only the undergraduate programs of Stanford, Princeton and Cornell have produced women who've sat on the Supreme Court.

But Amy Coney was not the only up-and-comer roaming the quads of Rhodes College. Amber Khan, the current and first ever Muslim chairman of the Interfaith Alliance, was one class ahead of Barrett.

Before Barrett's rise to Trump's shortlist, the most famous Rhodes alumnus in politics was Chris Cox, a member of the class of 1992, who was CEO of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action until 2019 and earned a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in 2016.

The CEO of Planned Parenthood in Tennessee and North Mississippi, Ashley Brian Coffield, a former Clinton administration official, was two classes ahead of Barrett. She ran the political campaign against Tennessee's anti-abortion constitutional amendment in 2014, and her Rhodes class of 1992 peer, Republican ad maker Brad Todd, was the lead strategist for the other side.

Todd, with whom I co-wrote a book about the conservative populist coalition that formed during the 2016 presidential election cycle, is best known for making the ads that supported the defeat of five Senate Democratic incumbents.

In Coney's class, and in the same English department where she starred, was Matt Hardin, president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. There was also Coney classmate Robyn Thiemann, chief of staff of law enforcement at the Department of Justice, as well as Liz Cotham, class of '92, the first of that wave of bright young people to hit it big as then-Vice President Al Gore's scheduler at the White House.

So, what was Rhodes College doing right in the late 1980s and early 1990s?

Wendy Talent Rotter said attracting young, smart people who came from different backgrounds and worldviews was the college's precise aim at that time.

"That was a stated value of the college and Rhodes from 1983 to 1987, it shaped who I am, and I admit, shaped all of us, preparing us with academic rigor, with the express purpose of broadening our worldview," said the 1987 Rhodes graduate. "The purpose of the Rhodes experience was to prepare us to be world citizens, to think critically, to respect and have open dialogue with people of different worldviews, backgrounds, and cultural perspectives. We have a lot to learn from each other. We did then. We grew up together, and moreover, Rhodes ingrained in us this responsibility to serve."

Rotter, who began her post-Rhodes career in nonprofit fundraising, specifically major gift fundraising for Rhodes, now owns one of the largest companies in the southeastern United States providing home care for the elderly.

When magazines began ranking colleges in the 1980s, Rhodes sought to get itself reclassified from consideration as a "regional liberal arts college" to a "national liberal arts college" -- and its means to do so was a broad, merit-based scholarship program designed to lure the South's best and brightest to Memphis instead of better-known universities in the region, such as Vanderbilt and Duke. The private college changed its name in 1984 to escape the preconceived notion that it might be a state school serving a mere region of a state.

Enough teenagers like Barrett, who grew up in the suburbs of New Orleans, took the bait to raise Rhodes' academic admissions profile, and the school is now routinely listed among the 50 or so best national liberal arts colleges in the country.

But some who knew Barrett and her peers think it was the mixing of diverse talents and a commitment to rise that created an environment where high achievers could take off.

Rotter said she has the greatest respect for Barrett's accomplishments: "We may not agree on every single political issue, but she absolutely has the qualifications to serve the highest court in the land and to serve our country. We have a lot to learn from each other."

That, she said, is what Rhodes fostered, and that is what Barrett will carry on.

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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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Thursday, October 29, 2020



Scholastic Mag Smears Trump

If your children have been trudging home lately with a backpack full of animus toward President Donald Trump, it might just be because they’re learning that he’s a racist.

And they’re not just learning this from a couple of woke young teachers unable to separate their political views from their professional duties. No, they’re learning it from Scholastic magazine, the tried-and-true reading companion that has for decades been a fixture in classrooms across the country. “Over 6 million students read Scholastic News every week!” the editors tell us. “See why so many teachers rely on this exceptional magazine to engage their students, build nonfiction-reading skills, and increase content-area knowledge.”

As might be expected, Scholastic has developed a suite of “Election 2020” materials, including candidate profiles of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as well as perspectives on the leading issues of the day: pandemic response, racial justice, economy, healthcare, climate change, education, immigration, and America and the world.

“The long history of unjust treatment of Black people in America is a major focus of this election,” begins the Racial Justice category, which goes on to explain that “in the wake of police killings of Black Americans, huge protests erupted across the country in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.” We then learn that President Trump “has defended law enforcement, opposed protesters’ calls for reforms, and taken an aggressive stance against the [wait for it!] largely peaceful demonstrations. In July, for instance, he sent federal police to Portland, Oregon, to break up rallies there. Local officials say those officers illegally detained protesters and sparked violence.”

To recap: The police were routinely killing blacks, the result of which was an eruption of “protests” and “peaceful demonstrations” and “rallies,” but there was no rioting, no looting, no arson, no defacing or yanking down of statues, no efforts to incinerate cops in their vehicles with Molotov cocktails, no prolonged takeovers of whole sections of our nation’s cities, no attempts to burn down federal courthouses, no assaults, no battery, and no murders. Nothing like that. And it was the president who “sparked violence” in otherwise peaceful Portland.

“Many people see the president’s response to the protests as part of a pattern of racism,” the indoctrinators at Scholastic tell our children. “He has repeatedly made racist statements and at times shown support for people who promote white supremacy. He has also largely refused to acknowledge the role racism plays in America. For example, he has dismissed research showing that Black people are more likely than white people to be stopped, arrested, and killed by the police.”

Not surprisingly, none of Heather Mac Donald’s data-driven research appears to have made its way into Scholastic’s Trump-hating BLM propaganda. Nor was there any mention of the empowering self-help message of, say, Candace Owens. Nor the death of retired police chief David Dorn, a black man far more worthy of martyr status than Michael Brown or George Floyd or Freddie Gray or Rayshard Brooks. No, the sad fact is that not all black lives matter to the Marxists at Black Lives Matter.

You’re encouraged to read the entire Trump profile yourself and compare it to that of Joe Biden, who undergoes his own share of criticism (without Scholastic calling him a racist) but who seems substantially more sympathetic than President Trump, despite his own troubled history on race. Indeed, his Scholastic profile finishes with this: “He has pledged to expand access to high-quality education, business opportunities, health care, and housing for Black Americans. He has also called for the U.S. government to increase investigations into claims bias and brutality against Black people in police departments nationwide, so that patterns of discrimination can be exposed and fixed.”

Translation: Vote for Joe!

And this, of course, is just the section on “racial justice.” We can only imagine how Scholastic contrasts President Trump’s and Joe Biden’s positions on, say, “immigration” or “climate change.”

Why Do Republicans Send Their Kids to College?

Inside Higher Ed recently reported that over five times as much money has been given by higher education donors to Joe Biden than to Donald Trump. Among professors, the ratio exceeds seven to one. Countless surveys show that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the social science and humanities areas of universities is even more lopsided. I once met a Republican sociologist and was so astonished that I asked for his autograph.

This is widely known, even among the general public. I ask myself then: why do middle class folks who have fared relatively well under capitalism in America, people often conservatives or libertarians, send their kids to colleges where they know the instructors predominantly have quite different political orientations, and where the suppression of views antithetical to traditional American values is increasingly commonplace?

Two recent examples: students at Skidmore College are demanding that the school fire an art professor who committed the unpardonable sin of attending a pro-police rally. Second, the University of Chicago English department is only taking doctoral students interested in black studies. Shakespeare and Milton aficionados need not apply. Many middle class parents who know about these things no doubt are asking: do I want to send my child to a school like that? Do I want to send my kid to a place where a significant part of the college community believes it is bad to show support for the police?

The main reason for doing so is that the piece of paper accompanying a college degree historically has had enormous value, with college grads making upwards of double what high school diploma holders earn. A huge percentage of the nation’s most wealthy and politically powerful people not only attended college, but graduated from elite private schools which, ironically, on average are more liberal (based on faculty political orientation) than mid-quality state universities. The “sheepskin effect” is pronounced, and many view a diploma as a prerequisite to a comfortable middle class life.

College presidents need to appease multiple constituencies if they want a long, successful tenure. These constituencies include, typically, a left-oriented faculty and administrative bureaucracy, students who mostly are relatively apolitical but a strident and sometimes large minority of whom often push the same progressive faculty agenda, and alumni of varying persuasions who are on average much more conservative than current campus inhabitants. The students and faculty are on campus and have the capacity to make life miserable for the president; the alumni are distant, disbursed, and less knowledgeable about what is really happening on campus. Thus the administration listens mainly to left-oriented campus denizens, and anyhow most are sympathetic to their perspective.

There are, however, campuses with a much more conservative orientation, and my sense is that these schools on average are doing quite well. In Flyover Country, I think of schools like Hillsdale College, Grove City College, and some Christian schools of diverse denominational perspective, such as Liberty University and Saint Vincent College. The Left Coast has a surprising number of these schools: Pepperdine and Chapman universities and Claremont McKenna College in the Los Angeles area come immediately to mind. And many prominent state schools are also known as not being flamingly liberal—I don’t hear much about radicals rebelling at Texas A and M University, for example.

The politics of all of this are interesting. The Democratic Party leans heavily on the academy for personnel to help run governments they control, provide progressive ideas, and help fund campaigns. Yet some first-rate academicians have also furthered Republican ideals. I think of Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse as a current example. Conservative to middle of the road prominent Black scholars like Tom Sowell, Walter Williams and Glenn Loury are proof that not all African-American intellectuals are reflexively far-left progressives.

On balance, however, campuses are far more left-oriented than the general public, and the disconnect between the Real World and the Ivory Tower has grown pretty large over time, which, on balance, I think is hurting universities and leading to reduced public support. To remain popular on campus, college presidents often praise student protesters, but in so doing annoy some donors and state legislators. Colleges and universities cannot ignore the Real World that funds them.

While Australia's schools coach kids in social activism, literacy takes a back seat

School students are being groomed for social activism while too many are still functionally illiterate as they leave the classroom.

A new OECD report shows that Australia’s school system has an excess focus on students developing “awareness of global issues”.

Little wonder our students’ performance in the OECD-run Program for International Student Assessment has plummeted faster than almost any other country. More than one in five 15-year-olds don’t have the essential literacy and numeracy they will need to be successful in work or further study.

It provides yet further evidence that Australia’s school system has got its priorities upside-down. Of course we should encourage our children to be good global citizens. It’s heartening to know they are inclusive and aware of diversity. They report more positive attitudes about immigrants and embrace the perspectives of others than in most OECD countries.

The problem is that efforts of the school system to engineer ­increased “global competences” comes at a cost — namely the education of our young learners — and for two reasons.

First, there is only so much time in the school day and year. And Australian students already spend more time in the classroom than in most countries. The problem is that this time is not being used well. For decades, teachers and educationalists have warned that the school curriculum has become bloated and overcrowded. Flirting with fashionable but untested teaching trends, entertaining fringe educational issues and bringing woke causes to the classroom are all part of the problem.

Despite this obvious progressive march through the education system, concern over infiltration of those ideas into the curriculum and schools has been routinely dismissed as little more than “conservative hysteria”.

There are now multiple reviews of school curriculums under way across the country, but there is ­little hope the malign and wasteful influences will be struck out.

A central element of the Australian curriculum — which sets the pace for the states and territories — is the focus on so-called “general capabilities”. The competences that are taught and assessed include: personal and social capability; ethical understanding; and intercultural understanding — nice-to-haves, but surely not the centrepiece of schooling.

We need to focus on addressing our students’ literacy and numeracy deficits, with a drive for higher academic standards and expectations from our educators.

The second problem is that, while the curriculum has embraced global issues, it has resisted any effort to reinforce Australian ones. Our students are unfamiliar with our own history, how our democracy works, and have decreasing (or little) national pride.

They’re encouraged to identify as global citizens, rather than as Australians — witness the constant undermining of our national holidays and traditions. Students are often misled to believe our country is racist, sexist, and a selfish polluter. Our school system should educate away foolish misconceptions, rather than promote them in the name of postmodernism and critical theory.

It’s true that the continued pace of globalisation will mean our teenagers need more global awareness than in decades past. But the progressive left has twisted this to mean exclusion of nationhood. We need more, not less, ­emphasis on Australian civics and citizenship — something that successive governments have promised but failed to deliver.

Not only does the education of school students suffer, but so does their wellbeing.

It’s not standardised testing and end-of-school exams that has resulted in the heightened anxiety of our teens but rather the obsessive preaching of celebrity activists, such as Greta Thunberg, who are preoccupied with building students’ political activism.

We must put an end to the needless sacrificing of our young learners’ futures in service of progressive globalism. In its place, we need to remodel a rigorous and ambitious education system that doesn’t continue to ignore national aspirations and needs.

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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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Wednesday, October 28, 2020



In Staying Closed, Schools Ignore Low COVID-19 Rates, Needs of Families

At this point in the pandemic, research demonstrates that schools have not become so-called superspreader sites—not even close.

Two studies profiled on NPR recently found “no consistent relationship between in-person schooling and the spread of coronavirus.”

Local school leaders’ evaluations of the health evidence remain a mystery, and many officials have not met parent and student needs during the pandemic.

At what would normally be the end of the first academic quarter for most K-12 schools, millions of students still have not set foot in a classroom.

Many haven’t done so since March.

Evidence continues to mount that COVID-19 affects children the least, and ad hoc school district e-learning platforms, hastily assembled in the spring, are driving families away from assigned schools.

Some of the largest school districts in the U.S. are still offering only online instruction, despite reports of losing contact with thousands of students, from Philadelphia to Houston to Los Angeles, when districts went online earlier this year.

According to reports, districts have still not been able to reach those students.

School officials have the unenviable task of balancing health and safety concerns with student learning, but those leaders should be considering the research on the spread of COVID-19 and the needs of local families and children in making reopening decisions.

Yet some district leaders are doing neither.

Parents have led protests in favor of reopening schools across the country, from San Diego to Baltimore and places in between.

Furthermore, at this point in the pandemic, research demonstrates that schools have not become so-called superspreader sites—not even close.

The latest figures from Brown University researchers found a confirmed case rate among students of 0.14% in a database of nearly 1,300 schools. As explained in The Wall Street Journal this week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers show hundreds more fatal cases of the flu among school-aged children than COVID-19.

Two studies profiled on NPR recently found “no consistent relationship between in-person schooling and the spread of coronavirus.”

Yet, are these low numbers the result of keeping schools closed? Findings from international studies and the available evidence from K-12 private schools in the U.S. that are open to in-person learning suggest that’s not the case.

The Brown research includes data from private schools. In fact, the case rate for private schools operating in person is still only 0.15%—admittedly with a smaller sample size, but still an encouraging number. The case rates for staff in those schools stands at 0.4%.

Teachers unions in some areas are ignoring those facts.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, where officials are already charging families for the use of school buildings for in-person day care, the union is demanding that public schools stay closed to in-person learning until August 2021.

That announcement followed news from school officials of a phased-in reopening in the coming weeks, a plan that includes basic protocols about maintaining spacing between students and asking parents to keep a student home if he or she shows symptoms.

Despite statements by federal officials last summer about tying federal spending for schools to reopening plans, Washington will not have to withhold spending for schools to feel the effects of frustrated parents.

At the start of the school year, schools in Washington, D.C., were reporting a drop in enrollment of 13%. Houston is reporting 7% fewer students; Orlando, Florida, a decline of 5%; and in Nashville, Tennessee, schools are down nearly 5%.

Meanwhile, private school closures have slowed, and since the middle of the summer, homeschooling numbers have soared.

In Connecticut, homeschool advocates are reporting higher figures than ever before, and interest in homeschooling has “exploded,” according to Minnesota Public Radio. The Texas Homeschool Coalition reports a 400% increase in students compared with last year.

Similar news can be found around the country. Learning pods, where parents bring together small groups of children during the school day to learn, continue to spread, and with each passing day, pods become less of a fad and more of a permanent solution.

Local school leaders’ evaluations of the health evidence remain a mystery, and many officials have not met parent and student needs during the pandemic. Now, families are leaving, reminding everyone that we should make students the priority of policy solutions, not the system.

Federal and state policymakers have used the bully pulpit to implore schools to reopen, but the most effective persuasion will be the kind that assigned district schools like the least—namely, fewer students.

British Mother-of-two, 29, is threatened with prison and a £2,500 fine for refusing to send her children to school over fears she'll 'die from coronavirus'

A clinically vulnerable mother has been threatened with a three-month prison sentence and a £2,500 fine because she refused to send her children back to school amid coronavirus.

Katy Simpson, 29, chose to keep her son Damien and daughter Alisha, both six, at their home in Redcar when schools returned last month.

She told teachers at Galileo Academy Trust in North Yorkshire: 'If I get that virus I will die'.

Ms Simpson has Type 1 diabetes, asthma and an under-active thyroid - which classes her as clinically vulnerable under NHS guidelines.

She has barely left the house since lockdown was first introduced in March, and only to shop for food once a week.

Last week she was visited by an education welfare officer who handed her a court warning letter.

If she does not return her children to school she could be fined £2,500 and sent to jail for up to three months.

Under The Education Act 1996, parents can be ruled to have broken the law if their child fails to regularly attend school and there is no 'reasonable justification'.

But unemployed Ms Simpson said she has no plans to return her son and daughter to school - despite the written warning. Ms Simpson said: 'There's no two ways about it, if I get that virus I will die.

'I'm a single mum and don't have my family around to help out with the kids. I can't take that risk. When there's cold or a flu about I always get it and I'm knocked for six.

'The virus has killed thousands of people and we're all getting locked down again and it looks like it's going to get worse.'

She said staff at her children's school were not listening to her, adding that she was asked to go to meetings to explain why her children had not been sent in.

The letter from the officer, who represents the school, said: 'Missing school damages a pupil's opportunity to achieve a good education. It reduces future life prospects, disrupts school routines and the learning of others.

'It can leave a pupil and the community vulnerable to anti-social behaviour and youth crime.

'I am particularly concerned that despite knowing the seriousness of the situation, you have (not only) failed to secure the regular attendance of your child in school (but you have also failed to attend meetings or engage with the assistance that has been offered to you).

'In light of this, I have no option but to begin prosecution procedures for the more serious offence under the Education Act 1996 contrary to Section 444 (1A). 'This offence means the courts, if they find you guilty, can fine you up to £2,500 and impose a prison sentence of up to three months.'

Australia: Elite $33,000-a-year grammar school enrages parents and students with new ecological uniform design - as it is slammed as being ‘reminiscent of wartime Europe’

image from https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/10/26/04/34840608-8879009-image-a-33_1603687995489.jpg

An elite $33,000-a-year grammar school has come under fire from some parents and students for the 'dowdy' look of its new eco-friendly uniform.

Firbank Grammar School in the affluent bayside Melbourne suburb of Brighton last week unveiled an Eco Uniform designed from fully biodegradable materials like nut corozo buttons in place of plastic and 'upcycled polyester'.

Firbank touted the outfit - made in collaboration with designer Kit Willow - as the world's first sustainable school uniform but the big reveal on its Instagram page attracted criticism.

One unhappy student set up a petition to protest the design, saying the new uniform was 'reminiscent of wartime Europe', 'impractical' and 'unflattering.'

The petition has garnered almost 900 signatures since it was first launched over the weekend.

'I fully support sustainable uniforms, but please listen to the people wearing them to make the uniform appropriate for the 21st century,' one person wrote.

'I graduated 33 years ago and our uniforms were less, dare I say it "dowdy",' another added.

An e-brochure released by Firbank last week showed a complete overhaul to the existing uniform in both the senior and junior school - covering winter and summer - plus student sportswear.

Willow became a household name in Australia in the early 2000s before making a comeback with her KitX label in 2015 - a brand priding itself on sustainable materials.

The school's principal Jenny Williams told parents in an e-mail the school board would meet on Monday to review the feedback to the designs.

'Changing a uniform is one of the most controversial things a school can do,' she said in the email seen by the Leader.

'All I ask is you remember our values and respond in a manner expected from members of our community.'

Firbank is a co-educational school at primary level, and a girls-only school at secondary level.

***********************************

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)

*******************************

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Preacher whose 15-year-old daughter was kicked out of her class for wearing 'homosexuality is a sin' t-shirt sues the school district over 'restricting free speech'

A street preacher from Tennessee is suing a school district that allegedly kicked out his 15-year-old daughter after wearing a shirt that read 'Homosexuality is a sin.'

Richard Penkoski says Overton County Schools violated his daughter's rights to free speech after being kicked out of the class specifically because of the shirt she was wearing at Livingston Academy in August.

It read: 'Homosexuality is a sin - 1 Corinthians 6:9-10,' referring to first Corinthians chapter six in the Bible.

Penkoski's daughter was sent to the principal's office where the teenager was told the shirt broke the school's dress code for being 'sexually connotative.'

The girl protested her case noting that a 'pro-homosexual symbol' was on display inside the classroom referring to a rainbow flag used by the LGBTQ community according to the lawsuit seen by the New York Post and filed in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee last week.

Penkoski runs a ministry called Warriors for Christ and filed the lawsuit earlier this month.

His daughter, who is identified in the lawsuit as 'B.A.P.', explained to administrators that she was unable to cover up her top and ended up texting her parents about the issue.

Her father than called the school principal who explained that the very word 'homosexuality' was a sexual reference because it contained the word 'sex.'

The lawsuit states that the the 15-year-old was forced to choose between 'abandoning her religious beliefs' or 'following her personal convictions' only to be disciplined. She claims that receiving a punishment imposed a 'substantial burden' on her.

Penkoski posted a photo of his daughter wearing the shirt one day after the incident.

'My 15 year old was thrown out of school for the day for wearing this shirt,' he said in a tweet on August 26. '#lgbt wants to trample on your #freespeech rights while they cry for special rights.'

'There are some educated people who support the lgbt!! While some don't agree with the shirt my daughter wore they understand she has a constitutional right to wear it,' he later said in a tweet on September 19. 'Her rights don't end where your feelings begin.'

The lawsuit claims the teenager's First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of religion were violated. The suit states that the incident also violated protections granted by Tennessee's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, according to the Charlotte Observer.

A Modest Proposal: Make Universities Pay for Student Debt Forgiveness

It is no secret that the student debt burden in America, now estimated at a cumulative $1.64 trillion, is one of the greatest scandals of a scandal-debauched age. According to Forbes, it is now the second-highest consumer debt category, higher than both credit card and auto loan debt, and behind only mortgage debt. It represents a crisis of national proportions.

Notwithstanding the rosy assumptions we sometimes come across, refinancing is merely a stopgap measure that only marginally relieves the pressure blighting the lives of graduates. Student loan forgiveness, a more dramatic attempt to deal with the problem, comes in several forms, the most popular of which are Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Teacher Loan Forgiveness. These desultory programs are clearly insufficient to address the magnitude of the predicament in which approximately 45 million graduates find themselves encumbered by oppressive university loans and shadowed by the specter of default. By the same token, such provisions come into effect only after 120 qualifying payments and bristling with qualifying conditions.

The Trump administration has proposed an alternative measure. According to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, “The administration feels that incentivizing one type of work and one type of job over another is not called for. And we have a demand in our over 7 million jobs going unfilled today, and favoring one type of pursuit over another type of pursuit philosophically doesn’t line up with where we are.” The proposed solution is “a single income-driven repayment (IDR) plan,” involving “affordable monthly payments based on… income,” with the balance to be forgiven after 15 years of repayment. While a distinct improvement on current practice, this solution does not go far enough.

Here are the salient facts. Annual tuition fees and assorted costs at the most prestigious colleges and universities range from $70,326 to $75,003. Many students who have paid such prohibitive fees and ancillary expenses for the privilege of graduating into a competitive and remorseless world now find themselves with degrees that may be worth little in the marketplace, stranding them with debt that may never be repaid. How a degree in Gender Studies or Sociology or Critical Race Studies will enable them to make their way in the world and honor their obligations is obviously moot. Others have found paying jobs but are saddled throughout their earning years with crippling liabilities.

At the same time, many of these universities—and in particular the major players in the academic arena—are awash in funds, thanks to federal and state funding for both public and private (for profit) institutions, including the recent upsurge in Pell Grants, amounting to hundreds of billion dollars. Add to this largesse significant alumni donations. Additionally, universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown—among others—profit from hundreds of millions in foreign funding in the form of gifts and contracts flowing mainly from China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. These endowments remain “massively underreported.” The universities are floating on a sea of funds, both disclosed and undisclosed.

The disproportion between the plight of indebted students and the hefty emoluments enjoyed by the universities is staggering. Why, then, should these institutions earmark such financial surplus to overpay their professors, far too many of whom are incompetent scholars, “social justice” warriors, redundant feminists, and leftist hacks? Why should colleges devote their resources to hiring intrusive, noxious, and superfluous diversity officers who do inestimable harm to parietal relations, and to lining the pockets of raptorial administrators who eventually retire into obscene, pension-rich comfort? Meanwhile their graduate cohort labors under a crushing, hope-destroying load of unsustainable debt.

American education is a cultural disaster, a socialist racket, a bureaucratic nightmare, and a fiscal shakedown operation with a predatory lien on the future of its graduate population. Perhaps the only way to prevent the continuation of the vicious cycle is to penalize those universities that “sell” expensive and/or expendable degrees, a product that often harms the buyer, a promissory note without the promise. A way must be found to extricate students from the economic and intellectual travesty the university syndicate has inflicted upon them and that compensates students for the damage from which the universities have profited. Debt must be proportionately forgiven, not merely moderated and deferred. It seems reasonable for federal and selective state governments to arrive at a formula whereby a predetermined portion of student debt—30, 40, 50 per cent?—would be waived and the shortfall recouped from university budgets, endowments, and investments. Federal and state authorities would agree to forfeit a percentage of student debt, the deficit to be made up by a levy upon university surplusage.

This policy would have the added benefit of forcing universities to shed unnecessary fat. Salaries would need to be reduced, tenure rethought, diversity and equity personnel pruned away, and golden handshakes turned into bronze. Tuition fees and costs would also need to become prudential in order to avoid what would amount to a fiscal surcharge on future debt redemption. Moreover, in announcing the intent to undertake a program targeting massive debt relief, the president could tap into the millennial and student vote by docking universities for their wastefulness, avarice, and indifference to the future prospects of their graduates, and so affording students and graduates at least partial deliverance from long-term economic distress.

Obviously, an initiative of this nature would be procedurally daunting and financially complex. Some would consider it unworkable, and I am not so naïve as to believe such long-needed legislation would be readily passed. A counter-argument would entail scrapping federal funding of the collegiate system altogether, compelling universities to become competitive by lowering fees, cutting overhead, laying off drones, hiring real teachers and true scholars, and generally husbanding their resources. But this strategy strikes me as even more unlikely. Nonetheless, the proposal itself of partial debt reclamation by bleeding university reserves would be a welcome start to redressing an ongoing inequity, prompting a young, politically hostile franchise toward a reconsideration of its voting habits, and Making America Good Again.

Australia: High School maths enrolments still low

The number of students taking senior school maths has flatlined over the past 10 years, suggesting mathematics participation has "bottomed out" and universities may need to insist on the subject as a prerequisite to lift enrolments.

About one quarter of year 12 students over the decade did not take any HSC mathematics course, compared to just 6 per cent of students who opted out of maths altogether in 2000, figures provided by the NSW Education Standards Authority show. Of those HSC students who will sit their maths exams this week, more than half (30,757) are taking the standard non-calculus course.

Enrolments in advanced mathematics (16,966) and extension 1 (9060) are lower than they were 10 to 15 years ago despite today's larger overall HSC cohort.

The stagnant interest in HSC maths comes in spite of the NSW government's maths strategy which aims to increase the number of students studying mathematics in their final years of school, as well as the proportion studying higher level HSC mathematics, by 2025.

It also poses difficulties for the federal government's goal of producing more university STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates.

There has been a spike this year in students taking the highest level extension 2 maths HSC exam, making it the largest cohort in eight years (3418), but it is still below the number of students who took extension 2 in 2010 (3529).

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the government was encouraging universities to introduce more prerequisites for their courses. It also made some form of senior school maths compulsory last year, and has hired specialist maths teachers in primary schools to build students' foundations.

"I want to reverse the trend of fewer students studying maths," Ms Mitchell said. "Maths challenges our students' to think critically and creatively, preparing them for whatever career they might choose after school."

Maaike Wienk, a policy officer at the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, said enrolments in maths had not bounced back after sharply declining from 2000 and stabilising in 2010.

"We have basically bottomed out," she said. "But because it's been such a long term decline, I think people forget how it used to be."

In 2000, 94 per cent of HSC students took a maths course. That dropped to 78 per cent of students in 2005, 75 per cent in 2010 and is 76 per cent this year.

***********************************

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)

*******************************

Monday, October 26, 2020



Liberal Totalitarianism Is Dominating College Campuses

American liberals once prided themselves on their fidelity to the First Amendment. Indeed, they had an expansive understanding of it. They defended unpopular speech and even the most provocative examples of “freedom of expression.”

One could question their hesitation to set limits in these areas, but there was something admirable about their principled defense of the free exchange of ideas.

This kind of liberalism, however, is in massive retreat today and is barely present on our college and university campuses. Instead, the forces of ideological correctness demand intellectual and even political conformity and seek out dissenting voices to humiliate and silence.

Two recent examples from Harvard University and Middlebury College illustrate the illiberalism that has become ascendant on many campuses and in many of our cultural institutions. The responses to these incidents, however, provide some grounds for hope.

Last week, Harvard student Joshua M. Conde, an “editorial editor” for The Harvard Crimson, wrote an op-ed demanding that two instructors be fired for offenses against the new racial norms animating the woke left.

The case of one of them, Diana J. Schaub, is best known to me. I have admired her writings and thoughtful presence in the conservative intellectual community going on 35 years now. She is also a friend.

Schaub is a political theorist who has written gracefully and profoundly on the political thought of Montesquieu, the liberal French philosopher who was an inspiration for the federalism and separation of powers championed by the authors of the Federalist Papers. Her work also includes deeply thoughtful expositions of African American political thinkers.

In a number of well-crafted essays and reviews, she has assessed the writings of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X with the sympathy and critical respect they deserve. Schaub sees African American thought as integral to the larger American experience.

This crucial set of voices contributing to the ongoing civic reflection on what it means to be an American is far from monolithic. For example, Douglass provides a model of freedom and character “wrested and won,” in Schaub’s words, not merely received at the sufferance of a dominant white race.

Douglass embodied a self-respect that was as far from grievance as it was from subservience. He famously wrote that “if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”

He was also opposed to excessive race-consciousness, to a false “racial pride,” and, in Schaub’s words from an essay in The Public Interest, he “had faith in the capacity of blacks and whites alike to defeat prejudice, thereby becoming indifferent to the difference of race.”

No one believed more than Douglass in the agency of free men and women, black and white, to make something of themselves in a free political order. This is a model that deserves a hearing today. Neither Douglass nor those who study him should be silenced for expressing such views.

Alas, the censorious new Jacobins castigate Douglass’ position as racist and supportive of white supremacy. Their hubris is appalling.

Schaub’s writings on race and America convey, very much in the spirit of the figures she writes about, a message of hope, responsibility, civic and moral equality, and openness to human excellence in all its forms.

In contrast, the new totalitarians offer resentment, grievance, hate, and the demonization of anyone who might have something to teach them. The difference could not be more striking. One is the path of common humanity and common citizenship, the other of perpetual enmity and denunciation.

So where does Schaub’s fault lie, according to her accuser, government major Joshua Conde? Cherry-picking passages from Schaub’s acute and sensitive analyses and offering them as though they revealed a tainted mind and soul, Conde calls her words “ignorant, and deeply concerning,” if not “outright bigoted.”

His principal “evidence” is a snippet from a splendid article, “America at Bat” from National Affairs (Winter 2010), which in passing laments the decline of black interest and participation in baseball, our once national sport.

Writing from personal as well as common experience, Schaub notes that “the experience of things baseball is a legacy from fathers to sons (and sometimes daughters).”

She then offers, in an admittedly speculative aside, her “strong hunch” that “the declining interest and involvement in baseball is a consequence of the absence of fathers in the black community,” since “80% of African-American children are raised without a father in the home.”

There is nothing intrinsically “ignorant” or racist about this documented fact, nor in bringing it into the discussion, which she does with manifest regret. If it is verboten to mention such disturbing realities, then our civic and intellectual life will suffer terribly.

Ignoring such facts and silencing those who bring them to bear in a relevant manner upon problems of common concern is the antithesis of healthy intellectual and civic life.

Fortunately, Harvard University has made no move to act upon Conde’s demand. Conde, a very young man (class of ’22), further demanded that Harvard abstain from hiring others “with similar unacceptable views.”

This is not the voice of genuine liberalism or the search for truth. It is peremptory, coercive, and committed to closing off discussions before they begin. Conde tells us that he doesn’t want to feel “uncomfortable.”

But the disinterested pursuit of truth, liberal inquiry, and civic debate itself will at times make us feel uncomfortable. That is all to the good.

This incident at Harvard is not the only recent attack on these core liberal values. At Middlebury College, over 600 students signed an “Open Letter” opposing an event sponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Forum in which two distinguished scholars, Leslie Harris and Lucas Morel, were to debate whether slavery was the core of the American founding, as the advocates of The New York Times’ 1619 Project insist.

The protesting students declared that such a question “should not be up for debate,” and Morel, himself a Hispanic of black Dominican descent, was denounced by some as a “white supremacist,” of all things.

This despite an exemplary scholarly record of defending racial justice and the principle of human equality articulated so eloquently by Abraham Lincoln and embedded in the Declaration of Independence, that “great promissory note” of which Martin Luther King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963.

We are in dangerous times when the Great Emancipator is conflated by today’s “know-nothings” with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Fortunately, the debate proceeded as scheduled on Oct. 1, with more than 250 students attending by Zoom (including 40 protesters).

These appalling incidents join many others of the same ilk. Together, they are portents of an illiberal future that will inexorably come if we do nothing to stop it. The results of these two recent cases suggest, however, that the new totalitarianism will abate only when it meets principled and firm resistance.

Disgusting Professorial Teachings

The ugliness that we have recently witnessed including rioting, billions of dollars of property destruction, assaults, murders and grossly stupid claims about our nation has its origins on college campuses. Two websites, College Reform and College Fix, report on the despicable teachings on college campuses across the nation. Let us look at some of it.

In response to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson's tweeting that he supports "citizen soldiers" in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a black professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science declared that "they have deputized all white people to murder us."

Jesse A. Goldberg, professor in the English department at Auburn University who teaches classes in African American literature, American literature and composition wrote a now-deleted post on Twitter, "f--- every cop. Every single one." Goldberg added, "The only ethical choice for any cop to make at this point is to refuse to do their job and quit."

Eddie Glaude Jr., a Princeton University professor and chairman of the Department of African American Studies said that when it comes to policing in America "Black people still live under the slave codes." Glaude's tweet came in response to news that Jacob Blake was handcuffed to his hospital bed after being shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Glaude added:

"Placing shackles around the feet of Jacob Blake amounted to a physical reminder that he was still, no matter the protests, a n----r in the eyes of these policemen."

New School professor Richard Wolff has called for the abolition of grades. He claims they are not only unfair to students, but also that they are a means of propping up capitalism, and as such, academia would be better off doing away with grading entirely. He went on to say: "Grading takes up much of my time that could be better spent on teaching or otherwise directly interacting with students." Administering grades to students has "little educational payoff" and "disrespects (students) as thinking people."

Wichita Falls, Texas, station KFDX-TV reported that Midwestern State University far-left philosophy professor Nathan Jun wrote on Facebook, "I want the entire world to burn until the last cop is strangled with the intestines of the last capitalist, who is strangled in turn with the intestines of the last politician."

Vanderbilt University scientist Heather Caslin Findley says that "white supremacy, racism, and prejudice" are perpetuated by the concept of "academic freedom." She added, "I hope there are a lot of circles in academia having a serious conversation on how 'academic freedom' upholds white supremacy, racism, and prejudice." Findley also addressed past violent riots, writing that she was initially opposed to the 2015 Baltimore riots and was worried for the police officers but changed her mind. She said: "I was scared for the fires, for the rioting, for the storefronts that would need to be rebuilt. That was my 'protest differently,' 'all lives matter,' and 'blue lives matter' moment. I was wrong and I was called out."

In the wake of financial problems, many colleges are crying broke and want government bailouts, but they have enough money to hire costly diversity people. For example, University of Pennsylvania pays its chief diversity officer more than $580,000 a year. University of Michigan pays it vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer $385,000 per year. Other universities around the country pay their chief diversity officers annual salaries of $200,000 and up.

Many university professors do not buy into the gross academic deception that has become part and parcel of today's college education today. They are too busy with their own research to get involved with campus politics. Rather than being on the committees that run the university, they concede the turf to those who are willing to take the time. Often those who are willing to take the time are not necessarily the most talented people but people with a political agenda to change what has been traditional college education. But all is not lost. Taxpayers, parents and donors who foot the bill can have a significant impact if they would stop being lazy and find out what is going on at our colleges. And, if they do not like what they see, they can snap their pocketbooks shut.

In Staying Closed, Schools Ignore Low COVID-19 Rates, Needs of Families

At what would normally be the end of the first academic quarter for most K-12 schools, millions of students still have not set foot in a classroom.

Many haven’t done so since March.

Evidence continues to mount that COVID-19 affects children the least, and ad hoc school district e-learning platforms, hastily assembled in the spring, are driving families away from assigned schools.

Some of the largest school districts in the U.S. are still offering only online instruction, despite reports of losing contact with thousands of students, from Philadelphia to Houston to Los Angeles, when districts went online earlier this year.

According to reports, districts have still not been able to reach those students.

School officials have the unenviable task of balancing health and safety concerns with student learning, but those leaders should be considering the research on the spread of COVID-19 and the needs of local families and children in making reopening decisions.

Yet some district leaders are doing neither.

Parents have led protests in favor of reopening schools across the country, from San Diego to Baltimore and places in between.

Furthermore, at this point in the pandemic, research demonstrates that schools have not become so-called superspreader sites—not even close.

The latest figures from Brown University researchers found a confirmed case rate among students of 0.14% in a database of nearly 1,300 schools. As explained in The Wall Street Journal this week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers show hundreds more fatal cases of the flu among school-aged children than COVID-19.

Two studies profiled on NPR recently found “no consistent relationship between in-person schooling and the spread of coronavirus.”

Yet, are these low numbers the result of keeping schools closed? Findings from international studies and the available evidence from K-12 private schools in the U.S. that are open to in-person learning suggest that’s not the case.

The Brown research includes data from private schools. In fact, the case rate for private schools operating in person is still only 0.15%—admittedly with a smaller sample size, but still an encouraging number. The case rates for staff in those schools stands at 0.4%.

Teachers unions in some areas are ignoring those facts.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, where officials are already charging families for the use of school buildings for in-person day care, the union is demanding that public schools stay closed to in-person learning until August 2021.

That announcement followed news from school officials of a phased-in reopening in the coming weeks, a plan that includes basic protocols about maintaining spacing between students and asking parents to keep a student home if he or she shows symptoms.

Despite statements by federal officials last summer about tying federal spending for schools to reopening plans, Washington will not have to withhold spending for schools to feel the effects of frustrated parents.

At the start of the school year, schools in Washington, D.C., were reporting a drop in enrollment of 13%. Houston is reporting 7% fewer students; Orlando, Florida, a decline of 5%; and in Nashville, Tennessee, schools are down nearly 5%.

Meanwhile, private school closures have slowed, and since the middle of the summer, homeschooling numbers have soared.

In Connecticut, homeschool advocates are reporting higher figures than ever before, and interest in homeschooling has “exploded,” according to Minnesota Public Radio. The Texas Homeschool Coalition reports a 400% increase in students compared with last year.

Similar news can be found around the country. Learning pods, where parents bring together small groups of children during the school day to learn, continue to spread, and with each passing day, pods become less of a fad and more of a permanent solution.

Local school leaders’ evaluations of the health evidence remain a mystery, and many officials have not met parent and student needs during the pandemic. Now, families are leaving, reminding everyone that we should make students the priority of policy solutions, not the system.

Federal and state policymakers have used the bully pulpit to implore schools to reopen, but the most effective persuasion will be the kind that assigned district schools like the least—namely, fewer students

***********************************

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)

*******************************

Liberal Totalitarianism Is Dominating College Campuses

American liberals once prided themselves on their fidelity to the First Amendment. Indeed, they had an expansive understanding of it. They defended unpopular speech and even the most provocative examples of “freedom of expression.”

One could question their hesitation to set limits in these areas, but there was something admirable about their principled defense of the free exchange of ideas.

This kind of liberalism, however, is in massive retreat today and is barely present on our college and university campuses. Instead, the forces of ideological correctness demand intellectual and even political conformity and seek out dissenting voices to humiliate and silence.

Two recent examples from Harvard University and Middlebury College illustrate the illiberalism that has become ascendant on many campuses and in many of our cultural institutions. The responses to these incidents, however, provide some grounds for hope.

Last week, Harvard student Joshua M. Conde, an “editorial editor” for The Harvard Crimson, wrote an op-ed demanding that two instructors be fired for offenses against the new racial norms animating the woke left.

The case of one of them, Diana J. Schaub, is best known to me. I have admired her writings and thoughtful presence in the conservative intellectual community going on 35 years now. She is also a friend.

Schaub is a political theorist who has written gracefully and profoundly on the political thought of Montesquieu, the liberal French philosopher who was an inspiration for the federalism and separation of powers championed by the authors of the Federalist Papers. Her work also includes deeply thoughtful expositions of African American political thinkers.

In a number of well-crafted essays and reviews, she has assessed the writings of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X with the sympathy and critical respect they deserve. Schaub sees African American thought as integral to the larger American experience.

This crucial set of voices contributing to the ongoing civic reflection on what it means to be an American is far from monolithic. For example, Douglass provides a model of freedom and character “wrested and won,” in Schaub’s words, not merely received at the sufferance of a dominant white race.

Douglass embodied a self-respect that was as far from grievance as it was from subservience. He famously wrote that “if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”

He was also opposed to excessive race-consciousness, to a false “racial pride,” and, in Schaub’s words from an essay in The Public Interest, he “had faith in the capacity of blacks and whites alike to defeat prejudice, thereby becoming indifferent to the difference of race.”

No one believed more than Douglass in the agency of free men and women, black and white, to make something of themselves in a free political order. This is a model that deserves a hearing today. Neither Douglass nor those who study him should be silenced for expressing such views.

Alas, the censorious new Jacobins castigate Douglass’ position as racist and supportive of white supremacy. Their hubris is appalling.

Schaub’s writings on race and America convey, very much in the spirit of the figures she writes about, a message of hope, responsibility, civic and moral equality, and openness to human excellence in all its forms.

In contrast, the new totalitarians offer resentment, grievance, hate, and the demonization of anyone who might have something to teach them. The difference could not be more striking. One is the path of common humanity and common citizenship, the other of perpetual enmity and denunciation.

So where does Schaub’s fault lie, according to her accuser, government major Joshua Conde? Cherry-picking passages from Schaub’s acute and sensitive analyses and offering them as though they revealed a tainted mind and soul, Conde calls her words “ignorant, and deeply concerning,” if not “outright bigoted.”

His principal “evidence” is a snippet from a splendid article, “America at Bat” from National Affairs (Winter 2010), which in passing laments the decline of black interest and participation in baseball, our once national sport.

Writing from personal as well as common experience, Schaub notes that “the experience of things baseball is a legacy from fathers to sons (and sometimes daughters).”

She then offers, in an admittedly speculative aside, her “strong hunch” that “the declining interest and involvement in baseball is a consequence of the absence of fathers in the black community,” since “80% of African-American children are raised without a father in the home.”

There is nothing intrinsically “ignorant” or racist about this documented fact, nor in bringing it into the discussion, which she does with manifest regret. If it is verboten to mention such disturbing realities, then our civic and intellectual life will suffer terribly.

Ignoring such facts and silencing those who bring them to bear in a relevant manner upon problems of common concern is the antithesis of healthy intellectual and civic life.

Fortunately, Harvard University has made no move to act upon Conde’s demand. Conde, a very young man (class of ’22), further demanded that Harvard abstain from hiring others “with similar unacceptable views.”

This is not the voice of genuine liberalism or the search for truth. It is peremptory, coercive, and committed to closing off discussions before they begin. Conde tells us that he doesn’t want to feel “uncomfortable.”

But the disinterested pursuit of truth, liberal inquiry, and civic debate itself will at times make us feel uncomfortable. That is all to the good.

This incident at Harvard is not the only recent attack on these core liberal values. At Middlebury College, over 600 students signed an “Open Letter” opposing an event sponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Forum in which two distinguished scholars, Leslie Harris and Lucas Morel, were to debate whether slavery was the core of the American founding, as the advocates of The New York Times’ 1619 Project insist.

The protesting students declared that such a question “should not be up for debate,” and Morel, himself a Hispanic of black Dominican descent, was denounced by some as a “white supremacist,” of all things.

This despite an exemplary scholarly record of defending racial justice and the principle of human equality articulated so eloquently by Abraham Lincoln and embedded in the Declaration of Independence, that “great promissory note” of which Martin Luther King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963.

We are in dangerous times when the Great Emancipator is conflated by today’s “know-nothings” with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Fortunately, the debate proceeded as scheduled on Oct. 1, with more than 250 students attending by Zoom (including 40 protesters).

These appalling incidents join many others of the same ilk. Together, they are portents of an illiberal future that will inexorably come if we do nothing to stop it. The results of these two recent cases suggest, however, that the new totalitarianism will abate only when it meets principled and firm resistance.

Disgusting Professorial Teachings

The ugliness that we have recently witnessed including rioting, billions of dollars of property destruction, assaults, murders and grossly stupid claims about our nation has its origins on college campuses. Two websites, College Reform and College Fix, report on the despicable teachings on college campuses across the nation. Let us look at some of it.

In response to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson's tweeting that he supports "citizen soldiers" in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a black professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science declared that "they have deputized all white people to murder us."

Jesse A. Goldberg, professor in the English department at Auburn University who teaches classes in African American literature, American literature and composition wrote a now-deleted post on Twitter, "f--- every cop. Every single one." Goldberg added, "The only ethical choice for any cop to make at this point is to refuse to do their job and quit."

Eddie Glaude Jr., a Princeton University professor and chairman of the Department of African American Studies said that when it comes to policing in America "Black people still live under the slave codes." Glaude's tweet came in response to news that Jacob Blake was handcuffed to his hospital bed after being shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Glaude added:

"Placing shackles around the feet of Jacob Blake amounted to a physical reminder that he was still, no matter the protests, a n----r in the eyes of these policemen."

New School professor Richard Wolff has called for the abolition of grades. He claims they are not only unfair to students, but also that they are a means of propping up capitalism, and as such, academia would be better off doing away with grading entirely. He went on to say: "Grading takes up much of my time that could be better spent on teaching or otherwise directly interacting with students." Administering grades to students has "little educational payoff" and "disrespects (students) as thinking people."

Wichita Falls, Texas, station KFDX-TV reported that Midwestern State University far-left philosophy professor Nathan Jun wrote on Facebook, "I want the entire world to burn until the last cop is strangled with the intestines of the last capitalist, who is strangled in turn with the intestines of the last politician."

Vanderbilt University scientist Heather Caslin Findley says that "white supremacy, racism, and prejudice" are perpetuated by the concept of "academic freedom." She added, "I hope there are a lot of circles in academia having a serious conversation on how 'academic freedom' upholds white supremacy, racism, and prejudice." Findley also addressed past violent riots, writing that she was initially opposed to the 2015 Baltimore riots and was worried for the police officers but changed her mind. She said: "I was scared for the fires, for the rioting, for the storefronts that would need to be rebuilt. That was my 'protest differently,' 'all lives matter,' and 'blue lives matter' moment. I was wrong and I was called out."

In the wake of financial problems, many colleges are crying broke and want government bailouts, but they have enough money to hire costly diversity people. For example, University of Pennsylvania pays its chief diversity officer more than $580,000 a year. University of Michigan pays it vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer $385,000 per year. Other universities around the country pay their chief diversity officers annual salaries of $200,000 and up.

Many university professors do not buy into the gross academic deception that has become part and parcel of today's college education today. They are too busy with their own research to get involved with campus politics. Rather than being on the committees that run the university, they concede the turf to those who are willing to take the time. Often those who are willing to take the time are not necessarily the most talented people but people with a political agenda to change what has been traditional college education. But all is not lost. Taxpayers, parents and donors who foot the bill can have a significant impact if they would stop being lazy and find out what is going on at our colleges. And, if they do not like what they see, they can snap their pocketbooks shut.

In Staying Closed, Schools Ignore Low COVID-19 Rates, Needs of Families

At what would normally be the end of the first academic quarter for most K-12 schools, millions of students still have not set foot in a classroom.

Many haven’t done so since March.

Evidence continues to mount that COVID-19 affects children the least, and ad hoc school district e-learning platforms, hastily assembled in the spring, are driving families away from assigned schools.

Some of the largest school districts in the U.S. are still offering only online instruction, despite reports of losing contact with thousands of students, from Philadelphia to Houston to Los Angeles, when districts went online earlier this year.

According to reports, districts have still not been able to reach those students.

School officials have the unenviable task of balancing health and safety concerns with student learning, but those leaders should be considering the research on the spread of COVID-19 and the needs of local families and children in making reopening decisions.

Yet some district leaders are doing neither.

Parents have led protests in favor of reopening schools across the country, from San Diego to Baltimore and places in between.

Furthermore, at this point in the pandemic, research demonstrates that schools have not become so-called superspreader sites—not even close.

The latest figures from Brown University researchers found a confirmed case rate among students of 0.14% in a database of nearly 1,300 schools. As explained in The Wall Street Journal this week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers show hundreds more fatal cases of the flu among school-aged children than COVID-19.

Two studies profiled on NPR recently found “no consistent relationship between in-person schooling and the spread of coronavirus.”

Yet, are these low numbers the result of keeping schools closed? Findings from international studies and the available evidence from K-12 private schools in the U.S. that are open to in-person learning suggest that’s not the case.

The Brown research includes data from private schools. In fact, the case rate for private schools operating in person is still only 0.15%—admittedly with a smaller sample size, but still an encouraging number. The case rates for staff in those schools stands at 0.4%.

Teachers unions in some areas are ignoring those facts.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, where officials are already charging families for the use of school buildings for in-person day care, the union is demanding that public schools stay closed to in-person learning until August 2021.

That announcement followed news from school officials of a phased-in reopening in the coming weeks, a plan that includes basic protocols about maintaining spacing between students and asking parents to keep a student home if he or she shows symptoms.

Despite statements by federal officials last summer about tying federal spending for schools to reopening plans, Washington will not have to withhold spending for schools to feel the effects of frustrated parents.

At the start of the school year, schools in Washington, D.C., were reporting a drop in enrollment of 13%. Houston is reporting 7% fewer students; Orlando, Florida, a decline of 5%; and in Nashville, Tennessee, schools are down nearly 5%.

Meanwhile, private school closures have slowed, and since the middle of the summer, homeschooling numbers have soared.

In Connecticut, homeschool advocates are reporting higher figures than ever before, and interest in homeschooling has “exploded,” according to Minnesota Public Radio. The Texas Homeschool Coalition reports a 400% increase in students compared with last year.

Similar news can be found around the country. Learning pods, where parents bring together small groups of children during the school day to learn, continue to spread, and with each passing day, pods become less of a fad and more of a permanent solution.

Local school leaders’ evaluations of the health evidence remain a mystery, and many officials have not met parent and student needs during the pandemic. Now, families are leaving, reminding everyone that we should make students the priority of policy solutions, not the system.

Federal and state policymakers have used the bully pulpit to implore schools to reopen, but the most effective persuasion will be the kind that assigned district schools like the least—namely, fewer students

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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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Sunday, October 25, 2020



Sens. Cotton and Loeffler Ask AG Barr to Investigate 'Apparent Racial Segregation' on College Campuses

GOP Senators Tom Cotton (AR) and Kelly Loeffler (GA) wrote to Attorney General Bill Barr asking for a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into apparent violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on college campuses.

“I write to bring your attention to an alarming trend of apparent racial segregation in schools in the United States,” Cotton and Loeffler wrote. “These cases appear to violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in federally funded programs or activities. I urge the Department of Justice to investigate these and similar cases as part of our nation’s commitment to equality before the law.”

The pair of GOP Senators cited two recent incidents that raise alarms about violations of equality under the law:

“On September 8, the Center for Social Justice and Inclusion at the University of Michigan-Dearborn two virtual 'cafes,' or online discussion groups, that were segregated on the basis of race, with moderators also segregated on the basis of race...the University of Michigan appears to have created 'whites only' and 'non-whites only' events, in a manner reminiscent of the doctrine of racial segregation overturned by Brown v. Board of Education,” they tell AG Barr. “On August 7, the University of Kentucky’s Bias Incident Support Service hosted segregated training sessions for resident assistants, ‘one for RAs who identify as Black, Indigenous, Person of Color and one for RAs who identify as White.’”

Cotton and Loeffler point out that college administrators “rationalize” racial segregation activities “as a tool to further diversity.”

Did You Know? The Ignorance of College Graduates

Students are paying a higher price tag for college, but is the quality of their education also increasing, or at least staying stable? A lot of indicators suggest “no.”

During the George W. Bush administration, the Spellings Commission found evidence that “the quality of student learning at U.S. colleges and universities is inadequate and, in some cases, declining.”

In 2003, the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that only 31 percent of college graduates scored at “the proficient level” of reading. That number was 9 percentage points higher in 1992. Of the 2003 college graduates, 53 percent scored at the “intermediate level” and 14 percent scored at the “basic level.” Three percent of college students scored a “below basic” literacy level.

In 2008, 57 percent of college graduates failed a civic literacy exam put out by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. And a 2013 Gallup and Lumina Foundation poll found that only 11 percent of business leaders believed that college graduates are prepared for the workforce.

According to a 2013 study, fewer than 5 percent of college students knew the following: that Thomas Jefferson’s home is named “Monticello;” the name of the author of Brave New World; and that Madam Curie discovered radium or that Mozart wrote Don Giovanni. Additionally, compared with students in 1980, far fewer students knew that Paris is the capital of France.

Law school graduates also have poorer outcomes. According to the Bar Examiner, between 2007 and 2016, bar exam passing rates declined in most states.

The results of a 2017 Gallup survey show that only 42 percent of college alumni strongly agreed that they were challenged academically in college.

One of the most comprehensive studies on college student learning is detailed in the 2011 book Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. The authors surveyed 3,000 students on 29 campuses.

After analyzing transcripts, surveys, and scores from the standardized test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), the researchers found that 45 percent of students demonstrated “no significant gains in learning” after two years of college. They also found that, compared to students from a few decades ago, today’s college students spend 50 percent less time studying.

The authors note that although students may be familiar with course-specific content and may graduate with a respectable GPA, many are nonetheless “academically adrift” because they are “failing to develop higher-order cognitive skills.”

As the findings of Academically Adrift suggest, students’ dismal learning outcomes may be connected in part to their poor study habits. Federal data show that college students don’t spend enough time studying.

In 2016, the Heritage Foundation analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey from 2003–2014. The analysts found that the “average full-time college student spends only 2.76 hours per day on all education-related activities”—totaling 19.3 hours spent a week.

On a weekly basis, the average full-time student spends only 10.7 hours a week on research and homework—a number that falls far below the recommended number of study hours. It is recommended that students study two to three hours per credit hour per week. Since full-time students must take at least 12 credit hours per semester, they should be studying at least 24 to 36 hours a week.

Unfortunately, colleges are reluctant to track and release information regarding how much students learn in college. Former Stanford Graduate School of Education dean Richard Shavelson said that, for many schools, student learning is “less important than having a winning football team if you want to stay alive, in the scheme of things.”

Free Speech and Liberal Education–Two Endangered Pillars of Society

Fifteen years ago, American higher education was beset with serious problems, especially rising costs, politicization of the curriculum, the mania over diversity, and falling academic standards. At that time, however, few people would have said that among its problems was the threat to freedom of speech on campus.

But one scholar who did see that freedom of speech was coming under attack was University of Wisconsin professor Donald Downs. His book Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus was an alarm bell in the night. He saw that the forces of intolerance and repression were gathering strength.

Downs has now written a new book on this problem entitled Free Speech and Liberal Education: A Plea for Intellectual Diversity and Tolerance. He argues that each college and university ought to be an “intellectual polis” where people can study, teach, and research in an atmosphere of civility and respect. For most of our history, they were—but not so today. Intellectual freedom on our campuses is “embattled,” he writes.

At many institutions, we find “conspicuous displays of intellectual intolerance” by faculty and students. They have been “abetted by an ever-growing campus administrative state” staffed with people who “nourish anti-free speech thinking and activism.”

Among the many pieces of evidence Downs cites is the infamous riot at Middlebury College when political scientist Charles Murray tried to speak. A student mob forced Murray and the faculty member who was to serve as moderator, Allison Stanger, to flee, during which Stanger was injured badly enough to need hospitalization. That part of the Middlebury story is very well known. What is not well known (and equally disturbing) is the aftermath: some faculty members wrote a statement deploring the incident and supporting freedom of speech, but a majority of the faculty refused to accept it.

Another particularly troubling incident involved Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis. She was attacked by her students for having written an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education in which she argued that American campuses were in the grip of “sexual paranoia” and the new Title IX rules imposed by the Obama administration were unfair.

Those were reasonable positions and professor Kipnis supported her argument well. Nevertheless, she was accused by a group of her students of “harassing” them with her writing. The students were women who were so deeply invested in the idea that American campuses were so fraught with peril to females that to dissent at all was the same as “harassment.” And if that weren’t absurd enough, Northwestern’s administration sided with the students and subjected Kipnis to an investigation.

Downs laments that the culture of victimhood has become so deeply entrenched on our campuses that it is now dangerous to speak your mind. Scholars, he observes, are now afraid to publish criticism of ideas or books that might offend groups that have been conditioned to respond not with counter-arguments, but with official complaints, or worse.

Opinion surveys of students and faculty members with regard to free speech issues are also troubling. They show that support for free speech is declining among students and that about one-third of faculty members don’t think there should be any punishment for students who disrupt speakers.

One point that particularly disturbs Downs is the way the “heckler’s veto” has become a tactic that’s used by militant students against speakers who present arguments they dislike. Downs notes that the origin of the heckler’s veto was in the segregationist South; when speakers who advocated civil rights for blacks were harassed and shouted at by white opponents, law enforcement usually stepped in—but to arrest the speaker for “disturbing the peace.” Sadly, that’s how some college officials look at matters today. The problem is the outsiders who need to be suppressed for the “safety” of all.

Similarly, at many schools, officials have designated tiny “free speech zones” where students may speak their minds. Their excuse is that free speech is so troubling to some that it must be restricted, as if, Downs says, free speech were like some “contagious disease.” Of all places, colleges should be the most free from speech restrictions, but instead students and faculty members find themselves in “intellectual straitjackets.”

We have even reached the point where, in law school classes, professors have to refrain from bringing up certain topics (sexual assault, especially) because they might “trigger” sensitive students.

How did we get from robust free speech on campus to having to walk on eggshells lest some hyper-sensitive students complain that their feelings are hurt or that certain ideas make them feel unsafe?

Downs argues that much of the blame should be placed on UC-Berkeley professor Herbert Marcuse, a 1960s radical who maintained that free speech was in fact undesirable because it helped to keep what he regarded as bad ideas (such as private property, capitalism, limited government, etc.) in social dominance. What was necessary for progress, Marcuse said, was for those voices to be suppressed so that the claims of the “marginalized” groups could be heard.

It was a silly theory, but it hit the right notes with faculty and administrators who thought that their foremost task was to promote social justice. A great many of them have allied with “woke” students in trying to silence speech that questions anything about their agenda. Rather than teaching them knowledge and virtue, they pander to student passions.

One of Downs’ most telling arguments is that it takes courage to face challenging ideas. In a fair intellectual battle, you must be prepared to lose if you can’t defend your position, and if so, you need to either strengthen your case or change your mind. (A fascinating instance that our author brings to light is the way Justice Holmes changed his mind with regard to government restrictions on free speech in cases before the Supreme Court following World War I.) Too often, though, our educational leaders allow some students to “win” not through their brains, but through coercion. In that, Downs writes, they “are letting our young people down, as well as our republic.”

So, freedom of speech being “embattled,” what will help it emerge victorious? Downs points to several good tactics.

One of them is the phenomenon of independent centers on campus. They serve the crucial function of sheltering dissent from orthodoxies and widening the scope of the kind of diversity that really ought to matter—diversity of thought.

Downs observes that while you’d think a university’s lawyer would be familiar with First Amendment law, that’s often not the case.
Another tactic is for faculty members, even if greatly outnumbered, to fight against measures that would stifle free speech. Downs gives some inspiring examples. For instance, at Clemson University, a group of three faculty members fought successfully to defeat a draconian speech code that zealous, “social justice warrior” students were pushing. In another case, one of Downs’ former students single-handedly shot down a speech code at Northern Illinois University by pointing out to the university’s general counsel that when challenged in court, the code was sure to lose. Downs observes that while you’d think a university’s lawyer would be familiar with First Amendment law, that’s often not the case.

Most important of all, colleges and universities should teach their students about the importance of free speech and the need to guard it. Downs’ own course on the First Amendment at Wisconsin helped to protect free speech there. I would strongly recommend that other schools look for people (probably practicing or retired lawyers) who could teach that kind of course to their students.

That isn’t possible everywhere, but what is possible everywhere is for the administration to explain to incoming students the rules of academic discourse and the consequences for disregarding them. The University of Chicago has done that, and other schools ought to follow its lead.

And here’s one more good idea—stop force-feeding “diversity” to everyone on campus. Doing so does little or no good and emboldens the forces that want to dictate what others must believe. Downs argues that people will better learn about diversity naturally, from the “bottom-up” rather than pushing it in mandatory “training” sessions.

Free Speech and Liberal Education is a book that every educational leader should read.

What those officials have forgotten (if they ever knew it) was John Stuart Mill’s “human fallibility” argument, namely that because humans can be mistaken, it is imperative to allow all claims about truth and knowledge to be challenged. If they are true, they can only be strengthened by challenges.

Australian University to shift teacher training to postgrad diplomas

Back to the future. No more dummy teachers: Students with poor High School marks no longer admitted

The University of Technology Sydney has abruptly shelved its primary teaching degree, saying it was losing money and struggling to attract students because of government-imposed academic standards for trainee teachers.

The decision – which the university describes as a "pause" – comes as a new federal university funding scheme, beginning next year, reduces fees for education degrees to address a looming teacher shortage.

UTS' BEd (Primary) degree has been removed from the 2021 University Admissions Centre guide. Hundreds of students who listed it as a preference have been individually contacted to be told it is not available, multiple sources told the Herald.

The dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Alan Davison, wrote to the school of education late last month listing the reasons behind the decision.

There was not enough interest in the degree, its ATAR was low compared with competitors, and the school of education was not generating enough high-visibility research, he wrote in an email seen by the Herald.

"There is continued impact on load [student numbers] from increasing federal and state standards requirements, [such as] those wishing to enter a teaching degree require a minimum standard of three Band 5 HSC results," the email said.

Professor Davidson’s email said UTS’s vice-chancellor and provost had asked him to take "prompt action" to pause the degree, and explore the possibility of offering a postgraduate primary education course instead.

"As you are aware, undergraduate teacher education at UTS has been a major loss maker, and that must be addressed with some urgency," he wrote.

Students studying the degree will finish it, and there will be a small first-year cohort next year of deferred and repeating students. The secondary education degree has also been cancelled with UAC, and will be offered as a masters degree.

A spokeswoman for UTS said the pause would allow a review of the course in the first half of next year, "leading to a decision on its ongoing viability," she said.

One in 10 trainee teachers fails required literacy and numeracy tests

The decision was made before the federal government’s changes to student fees passed the Senate on October 8. "The challenges facing the area predate, and are unrelated to, the recent government funding changes," the spokeswoman said.

Under those changes, student fees for education degrees will drop by almost $3000 to encourage more students to study teaching. However, the government will not match the amount of money universities will lose due to the lower fees, so teaching – like nursing and engineering – will attract less total funding per student.

Michael Thomson, the state secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union, said UTS was due to replace its existing primary teaching course with a new one in 2021. Staff had been working on that course for at least a year.

"They were quite shocked when the announcement came that they were putting it on pause," he said. "What does a pause mean? People are concerned that this decision was made a bit ad hoc."

Mr Thomson said staff found out about the change two days before voluntary separation applications closed. "If they’d had this information beforehand, it might have influenced what they did," he said.

Like many universities, UTS’s revenue from international students has been hit hard by border closures related to COVID-19.

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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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