I remember how it was -- JR
My Family Has School Choice. So Should Yours
Some families, including mine, have always had school choice. But until the pandemic, I hadn't had much occasion to think about what that really means.
After a disastrous spring of two kids doing spotty online learning through their Washington, D.C., public school, we knew we needed a change: We were contemplating a move to the suburbs, an in-person micro-school run by some friends, and an expensive traditional private school with the sort of fancy testing and hygiene plan that the public system could never manage.
We even briefly considered starting a compound in West Virginia with some pals.
We were anxious and confused, but had the means to rebuild a proxy of a service that the government collects money for, and promises to provide.
We ended up organizing a pod of six kids from three families in a neighborhood full of overeducated, annoyingly high-functioning D.C. people. It worked out great, and the "governess" we hired—as he calls himself—is adored by our kids.
For us, the city's faltering efforts to reopen became just a mildly stressful inconvenience. But what about people who can't afford these options and are already grappling with massive uncertainties and a sense of powerlessness in their lives, such as parents who are out of work, homeless, or struggling with substance abuse?
A recent ProPublica investigation told the story of a gifted 12-year-old named Shemar attending a fully remote East Baltimore public school. His family's effort to access the free Wi-Fi provided by Comcast "foundered quickly in a bureaucratic dead end."
"No one made sure that Shemar logged on to his daily class or completed the assignments that were piling up in his Google Classroom account." His grandmother was on the scene, but she "attended little school while growing up in a sharecropping family…His great-uncle, who also lived in the house, had dropped out of school in South Carolina around the age of 8 and was illiterate."
In Baltimore, "[c]itywide, about 80% of students had logged on," ProPublica reported, "but only 65% were reliably present, according to the district. Before the pandemic, the attendance rate was 87%."
In Los Angeles, kindergarten enrollment was down by about 14 percent; in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by 17 percent. And the prospects for kids who did enroll weren't great. According to one study, only one in three school districts required teachers to deliver instruction during the spring part of the lockdown.
There is money to give kids like Shemar the sort of choices that my family has. Inflation-adjusted per-student spending has risen 280 percent since 1960, and the U.S. currently spends over $15,000 per child each year. Yet when COVID-19 struck, for most families, there was no mechanism that would allow them to use that money to better serve their particular needs.
District schools with massive technology budgets struggled to get laptops, tablets, or hotspots to kids in need. School libraries full of books sat silent and unused. Playgrounds were roped off.
Students lost the equivalent of three months of learning in mathematics and one and a half months of learning in reading, according to a McKinsey study. Schools that predominantly serve students of color were most impacted.
Meanwhile, we learned that opening schools for young children isn't a major risk. Brown University economist Emily Oster worked with a team to create a dashboard that tracks COVID-19 cases in schools. She says, "This summer there was this idea that we're going to open schools and that's going to be the thing that destroys everything. That does not seem to be true. We're not seeing schools as the locus of large amounts of spread. The rates are actually quite low."
Schools were imposing tremendous costs on families for very little benefit in controlling the spread of COVID-19.
But even worse is the sense of powerlessness for too many families. Their lives had been disrupted, and despite the huge amount of resources in the system, they were being told that they had no alternatives.
We always knew that when local governments negotiate with teachers unions, the needs of students and their parents are the first to get traded away. During the pandemic, that dynamic has meant that attending in-person school is a privilege afforded to the children of the rich.
Families like mine already have choices. The horrors of the last year have laid bare the fundamental inequality of denying the same power over their children's education to everyone else.
https://reason.com/video/2021/01/28/my-family-has-school-choice-so-should-yours/
*************************************What’s in a Syllabus? The Keys to Undoing Academic Freedom, If We’re Not Careful
The syllabus is such a basic document that most of us tend not to think much about what goes into making one. What are its necessary ingredients? A listing of the required study and reading materials, obviously. Dates of important milestones, like term papers and exams, as well. Lecture schedules, weekly assignments, and a rubric on how the assignments and exams factor into overall grades.
Oh, and an acknowledgment—mandated by the institution—that your campus was built on land stolen from Indigenous peoples, and that your being there contributes to an ongoing intergenerational trauma.
Wait, what?
That particular hypothetical isn’t a hypothetical: It was considered for adoption by the University of Maryland’s (UMD’s) School of Public Policy as part of a broader statement on “Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging in the School of Public Policy.”
The proposed “Land Acknowledgement” stated:
We acknowledge that we are gathered on the stolen land of the Piscataway Conoy people and were founded upon the erasures and exploitation of many non-European peoples.
The proposed statement further invited students to avail themselves of university resources that can provide “a richer understanding of generations of racialized trauma rooted in the institution.”
To its credit, UMD has clarified that the School of Public Policy is not requiring faculty to use or affirm the Land Acknowledgement statement. Rather than dismiss it as a curiosity, however, it’s worth unpacking further, as we’re bound to see other statements like it.
Law professor Eugene Volokh, in a piece calling attention to the proposed UMD policy, ran down the various issues, including the legal issues, involved with such compelled statements:
What if a faculty member doesn’t endorse the land acknowledgment statement, perhaps because he takes the view that conquest of land and the displacement of peoples is the norm in human history…and not something that he thinks merits particular condemnation or explicit attention? Or what if he’s skeptical of claims of “generations of racialized trauma rooted in the institution?” The school may have its own view of the matter, but one principle of academic freedom is that faculty need not endorse all the views that the school endorses, and cannot be compelled to publicly make such an endorsement.
Indeed, to Volokh’s last point, the United States Supreme Court’s doctrine against compelled speech is a hallowed one in our First Amendment tradition, stretching back to its ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. In that decision, the Court famously held:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
Let’s also not forget the stain left by higher education’s enforcement of anti-communist loyalty oaths in the 20th century, the signing of which was a condition of employment at institutions across the country.
The Supreme Court ruled against those in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, pronouncing academic freedom as “a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom[.]”
That we’re in the position of reminding institutions of the Supreme Court’s scorn for compelled speech shows the work we have ahead of us.
This isn’t the first time the college syllabus has been a front for larger cultural battles. In recent years we’ve had debates over trigger warnings, which can to a degree be instructive. Separate from the question of whether trigger warnings are effective (and there is some research suggesting they have a negative effect on resilience) was the question of who should make the call on using them.
My organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, viewed the matter significantly as one of individual academic freedom. If a professor decided they were worth employing, that’s their right―as is the right to decline using them. Forcing faculty to use them against their own judgment violates academic freedom―as does prohibiting their use by faculty who believe they serve a helpful purpose.
That approach can lend some perspective to this matter. First Amendment and academic freedom considerations should weigh heavily against universities either compelling or prohibiting faculty from including things like UMD’s Land Acknowledgement statement on their syllabi.
This doesn’t end the discussion, however.
For one, saying these matters are best left to a professor’s own judgment is not the same as saying professors have carte blanche to set whatever rules they please without violating students’ rights. Take the case of a professor at Iowa State University whose syllabus flatly prohibited “any instances of othering” (a term that’s a bit hard to nail down) and prohibited arguments against abortion, same-sex marriage, and the Black Lives Matter movement. (The professor, fortunately, later modified the syllabus to better align it with students’ First Amendment rights.)
There’s a lot more to this matter than a simple statement about stolen land. That provision is part of a larger statement much likelier to be representative of shifts underway at campuses around the country, which have implications for the rights of students and faculty alike. Alongside the Land Acknowledgement, UMD also considered a “Commitment to an Inclusive Classroom,” whose language read in part:
Materials, discussions, and activities will respect all forms of diversity. All students are expected to promote this aim through their words, actions, and suggestions. If something is said or done in this course, either by myself, students, or guests, that is troubling or causes offense, please let me know right away.
Again, fortunately, UMD has clarified that this language will not be compulsory. A good thing, as this would have risked subjecting whole classrooms to a vague, subjective speech code that begs students to shy away from venturing any potentially controversial opinions in the classroom, lest they find themselves investigated or sanctioned for “caus[ing] offense.”
In this setting, what does it mean to have to “respect all forms of diversity?” Can the honest expression of opinion on hot-button issues avoid sanction? And what of the professors, especially those whose teaching confronts challenging issues, who risk being caught under the glare of such a policy, whether through offering their opinions or overseeing the exchange of those opinions between their students?
These aren’t idle questions, and they get to problems that have been brewing in higher education for some time.
In recent years, FIRE has often seen administrators rush to protect students from offense and discomfort rather than protect professors’ academic freedom. References to racial and ethnic slurs even in pedagogically relevant contexts have become particularly fraught, as professors have found themselves removed from teaching and subject to interrogation simply for, for instance, quoting accurately from literary icon James Baldwin or discussing legal cases concerning racial discrimination, as though mentioning such terms in an educational context were no different from using them as a slur.
Higher education was struggling enough with this tension before it was hyper-charged in 2020 by the upheavals George Floyd’s death triggered. Numerous faculty were caught in this crossfire and faced campaigns aimed at getting them terminated from their professorships even for inadvertently upsetting campus sensitivities.
Gordon Klein was suspended at the University of California, Los Angeles for declining (in accordance with UCLA policy) to change exam and grading procedures for black students. At St. John’s University, Richard Taylor was removed from teaching after students denounced an academic exercise evaluating the “Columbian Exchange” as tantamount to forcing them to defend slavery. And at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, Gary Shank was terminated for using the n-word while leading a class discussion about why the term is so problematic.
All the while, universities have been under pressure to reframe their educational models through the lens of antiracism. A simple Google search shows the extent to which universities are prioritizing this, and the University of Maryland is no different. Its public policy school is working from a larger framework of “Nine Antiracist Actions” including “prioritizing more antiracism content across courses.”
Mandatory syllabus statements are the tip of the iceberg. Such statements may seem insubstantial in themselves, but they’re the result of a rethinking of the academic enterprise in ways that reach deep into the classroom.
Universities aren’t without rights here. By tradition, the university has a strong hand in broad curricular decision-making. Further, it’s important to protect the rights of faculty to choose to approach their material through an antiracist lens.
But administrators mustn’t chill student and faculty expression with vague and uncertain requirements. Nor can a public university violate clearly established First Amendment rights in asserting its role.
There are few environments better situated for a wide-open discussion of antiracism and its related issues than the university. But universities are also troublingly susceptible to demands for orthodoxy and the squelching of dissent, perhaps never more so than in moments of national reckoning.
Such moments are the perfect time for the rigorous discussion of the issues. They’re also a time to take a step back and remember that no cause is well served by compelling individuals to express their solidarity with it. UMD seems to understand this. Will others?
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UK: Winchester College to review sex education lessons amid row with parents
Winchester College has said that its sex education lessons are now under “review” amid a row with parents over whether the content was age-appropriate.
The £41,700-a-year boarding school defended its decision to enlist the organisation It Happens to deliver sex education classes to pupils, as it wrote to families to give them “necessary reassurance” over its approach.
But Nicholas Wilks, the school’s second Master, told parents that: “We will of course review this, as every other area, of our provision.”
Winchester College has been accused of “indoctrinating” its pupils after 14-year-old boys were told that they will not be prosecuted for having “consensual” intercourse.
Some parents at the 640-year-old boarding school are furious that their sons were told that the age of consent “is not there to punish young people for having consensual sex”.
Students in Year Nine and Year Ten at the elite public school were given a virtual lesson on relationships, sex and health education earlier this week by Dr Eleanor Draeger from the organisation It Happens.
Dr Draeger, who describes herself as a a sex education trainer and medical writer, told boys aged 13 and 14 that in a “happy, healthy relationship” where “you both want to have sex and you both have sex, you are unlikely to be prosecuted from that because its not in the public interest”.
She went on: “It’s just two 14 year olds who want to have sex with eachother who are consensually having sex.”
In his letter to parents, Mr Wilks said that schools have a statutory obligation to deliver relationship, sex and health education, adding that: “It Happens exists to deliver accurate information so that young people can make properly informed choices”.
A spokesman for It Happens said the comments have been taken out of context.
They added that they have had an "enormous" amount of positive feedback from teachers, pupils and parents who attended their sessions on Wednesday.
Relationship, sex and health education is a "sensitive subject and we understand that we touch upon topics that parents may find new and thought-provoking", the spokesman added.
"Eleanor is a hugely experienced NHS doctor who has been working in Sexual Health for 16 years and has extensive experience delivering Sex Education training to teachers and talks for pupils in school for many years".
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Harvard University did little to address allegations of sexual harassment by ex- Vice Provost Jorge Dominguez
Harvard University did little to address multiple allegations of sexual harassment against a powerful professor over four decades - and instead promoted him to a top administrative post, an external review found this week.
Professor Jorge Dominguez, who worked in the Ivy League school's Latin American Studies department before being appointed vice provost, is believed to have harassed at least 18 women dating back to 1979, when a woman first reported him.
After a year of investigation, an external panel published a 26-page report on Thursday that said the college has a 'permissive' culture when it comes to sexual harassment.
The report attributed the lack of action over the years to a 'high-ranking power' imbalance, senior staff 'protecting' each other, the demotion of junior staff who complained as 'trouble-makers' and a chronic lack of female faculty and students.
Harvard President Lawrence Bacow also apologized to Stanford Professor Terry Karl, 73, who was allegedly assaulted by the now 76-year-old Professor Jorge Dominguez in 1983 when she was an assistant professor at Harvard. She said the assault included kissing, groping and once Dominguez saying, 'This would be a nice place for a rape'.
Karl had reported Dominguez to Harvard at the time, and the school found her allegations to be 'factually accurate,' according to the recent report. A 'letter was placed in his file' and he was relieved of administrative duties for three years and forbidden, the school says, from participating in any of Karl's future promotions.
He took a leave of absence in 1984 when 'news spread' of the unpublicized sanctions, but returned to his position in 1985. Harvard said its secrecy was compliant with policy at the time.
Karl later left for Stanford University, citing concerns of working alongside him.
Bacow said: 'Harvard failed her. She deserved better.'
In the report from Thursday, multiple current and former students and staff said Dominguez's behavior was an 'open secret', with women frequently warned not to be alone with him.
But the report also found Dominguez was far from alone - with multiple reports made against other, unnamed male faculty members over the years, also not acted upon.
Dominguez stepped down in 2018 after The Chronicle of Higher Education published multiple exposes on the allegations, that caused a total of 18 women to come forward, including Karl.
In May 2019 an investigation under Title IX — the federal law outlawing sex discrimination in education — found Dominguez 'engaged in unwelcome sexual conduct toward several individuals, on multiple occasions over a period spanning nearly four decades.'
He was later stripped by Harvard of his title of professor emeritus and banned from campus.
That same month, DailyMail.com found Dominguez at a home in New Hampshire, but he refused to come to the door, sending his wife instead. 'I'm going to say he doesn't wish to speak,' Dominguez's wife, Mary, said in 2019. 'No comment is all you are going to get.'
The external panel was appointed by Harvard in September 2019 to investigate why victims did not come forward, why staff did not address the claims and what could be done to protect staff and students in the future.
The committee, headed by former MIT President Susan Hockfield, recommended close to a dozen changes for Harvard, including greater transparency when faculty are sanctioned for sexual harassment, centralizing personnel records, strengthening the vetting process for promotions, improving the faculty gender balance, and monitoring employees with past violations.
'Cultures that are permissive of sexual harassment are characterized by members feeling that it would be too risky to report their experience of sexual harassment, that their complaint would not be taken seriously, and that no corrective action would be taken in response to their complaint,' according to the report.
Over more than a year the panel interviewed four of the women who came forward to the Chronicle, as well as multiple current and former students, staff, faculty, administrators. They also combed the university's archives.
The panel found that: 'Domínguez’s harassment was a matter of common knowledge among some members of the Government Department. However, many who suffered from or knew of Domínguez’s misconduct did not report it.'
The report highlighted that 'the pronounced power hierarchy' at Harvard stopped many women coming forward with allegations against the 'powerful administrator' Dominguez and other accused staff, as well as senior staff closing ranks and being 'highly collegial among themselves and protective of each other'.
It said: 'The close ties among the senior faculty left students—and even junior faculty—feeling uncertain of their status and rights. In this culture, junior members feared their careers could be derailed or destroyed if they triggered the displeasure of a senior member. Even in the absence of direct retaliation, students worried about being branded as 'troublemakers' by powerful members of the community.'
The panel said one individual did not report Dominguez's harassment for fear that her mentor, who was untenured, would lose his job.
Another student described a departmental forum [in 2018] at which a senior faculty member began the proceedings by describing Domínguez as a 'friend', which inhibited students from speaking openly about him.
The allegations started in 1983 when former assistant professor at Harvard Terry Kay made a formal complaint against Dominguez who she claimed kissed her, and put his hand up her skirt, telling her he was going to be the next head of department and he would be the one who would decide her future advancement.
It wasn't Karl's only example. She said: 'He always touched me. He repeatedly tried to kiss me. All this was found to be true by Harvard. He was found responsible but still they gave him higher positions.'
Another night they were walking on campus when he turned to her and allegedly said: 'This would be a nice place for a rape.' 'It was totally creepy', she said. 'Any time I exerted my own judgment he threatened me.'
But although Dominguez was initially reprimanded, he soon returned and began to 'rebuild his career', the report found.
Karl, on the other hand, departed for Stanford shortly after the Dominguez returned to campus in the mid 1980s, citing the difficulty of carrying on working with him.
Over four decades, even while women on three occasions reported inappropriate behavior by Dominguez, no action was taken against him, the panel said.
Despite these allegations, and many more unreported ones, Dominguez was promoted, pointing to significant problems in Harvard’s culture and shortcomings in its sexual harassment reporting procedures, the report said.
But after the 2018 investigation in The Chronicle was published, even more women came forward - eventually with a total of 18 women having made claims that Dominguez harassed them over the past 40 years.
Cleveland lawyer Charna Sherman, 64, said she reported the professor in 1979, when 'he got up from his desk, came across the room and kissed me full on the lips'.
University of Baltimore law professor Nienke Grossman, 44, said she was a senior in 1998 when Dominguez allegedly touched her, first on her back and arm, eventually grabbing her thigh.
Karl told The Boston Globe she hasn’t had a chance to read the entire report, but appreciates the apology, which comes about 40 years after the harassment began. 'Apologies mean such a great deal when an institution, a university department, and a predator try to take away your dignity and your future,' Karl said.
But most women who are sexually harassed don’t get apologies from their institutions, she said.
Sophie Hill, a fifth-year doctoral student in Harvard’s government department who pushed the university to conduct an outside review including inviting Professor Karl to campus in February 2020 to talk about the allegations, said the results show the extent of the problem at the university.
'It’s such a case study of how many people looking the other way can accumulate to this gross injustice,' Hill said. 'It’s not about Dominguez but the frailty of our institutions.'
Meanwhile, according to the Globe, Harvard has several open investigations into sexual harassment by faculty.
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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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